I didn’t mention Cleveland, but those ads are hilarious. At first I thought, because I was talking up Oregon, you were linking to one of these Oregon travel ads:

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Southern Florida? Like the man said: Florida: the more North you go, the more South it gets. Orlando seems mostly OK. Big city, opportunities, and there’s a NASA space center and launch facility not too far.

My mom lives there, and that’s about the limit of my knowledge. I will personally never again willingly live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Oh, I hear that if you stay out of the little handle at the bottom, Missouri is nice. A friend from there once told me that if they’d cut off that handle and give it to Arkansas, it’d raise the average IQ of both states. Never been there, myself.

Lots of places in Oregon and Washington are great; large swaths are not, but if you’re not prone to SAD, there are great towns in the Willamette Valley: Corvallis, Eugene, and Ashville down on the California border. Also, California is enormous. N California is very different from S California, and the coast is enormously different from the interior. It’s a huge state, and painting it with a single brush is like saying Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania are all the same. It’s seriously about the same area as all those put together, lengthwise, at least. The greater LA/San Diego area alone is almost as big as your entire state. But the Pacific Northeast is wet if you live in the Valley, and there isn’t much in the way of big cities east of the Cascades.

How about Boise, ID? Good size college city, lots of microbreweries, lots of outdoor recreation, pretty great weather if you like hot, but you get snow in the winter, too. Plus nearly half the state is national park; fantastic backpacking.

Most of these places I mentioned specifically lean liberal, although when you venture into rural areas it gets red pretty quickly, like anywhere. An exception is Orange County in CA, which is full of really crazy red-hatters. But it sound like you’ve already ruled out at least part of CA, and “insufferable” makes me think you’re thinking specifically of S Cal.

Eugene is, or used to be, fantastic. Extremely liberal, and not trust-fund hippie style. Decent sized to be entertaining. You just have to put up with the weather and hippies, or whatever hippies have mutated into with successive generations. Pot’s legal in OR, too, if that’s your bag.

Bend, OR is one of the best places in the planet if you’re sporty. It’s high desert, but smack up against the mountains. In the summer, people rock climb and bike. In the winter, they ski Mt Bachelor. There’s fishing and camping, and at one point it had more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. There’s no humidity. At all. Very pretty town. A 4 hour drive north, and you’re in Portland, OR, which isn’t what it used to be and has been having problems, but is still a large metro area with lots to do and a fantastic science center. 2 hrs West through the mountains is Salem, the capital, which frankly sucks; or or 3+ hours SW is the aforementioned Eugene. A couple hours south is Crater Lake. A couple three more hours and you’re in the N California Redwood forest. Oh, and if you do speed through So-Lame (Salem), another 1.5 hours and you’re on the Oregon coast, so 3-4 hours from Bend to the coast, mostly through a fantastic, amazing mountain range (and then the Valley and then the smaller coastal range).

If you want to stay on the E coast, I recommend the greater Philadelphia area. From there, NYC is a 3hr drive. The Jersey shore is a 3 hr drive. Washington DC is a 3 hr drive. Gettysburg is a 3 hr drive. Williamsburg, VA - possibly my favorite place in the US - is a 4-ish hour drive (depending on DC traffic). Plus, you can get to almost any of the coast cities from Philly by train, if you’re willing to sacrifice a couple more hours. Pennsylvania wasn’t my favorite place to live, but if you can stand living in S Carolina I’m sure it’d be fine for you.

Honestly, you might consider Minneapolis. It does get cold in the winter (-50F is the coldest I’ve experienced), but The Cities are fantastic, full of Art Deco architecture, and end-summer temps can hit the 100’s. In September, any of the literally over 10,000 lakes are bath-water warm. And we don’t have copperheads. The great lakes are close; we’re practically in the center of the country, so flying anywhere in the continental US is a 4-hour flight or less. The Cities are very progressive - again, you drive an hour outside and it’s Trump signs everywhere - par for the course - but within The Cities it’s quite nice. And the bike paths are incredible; miles and miles, and much of it completely off-road - at some point they took all the old industry rail lines and turned them into maintained bike and foot paths. It’s really quite remarkable. And the metro system isn’t half bad, for a US city. The humidity gets oppressive, but, again, you’re surviving S Carolina so I don’t think that’d be a problem for you.

This is my favorite, mainly because it’s been well argued by some respectable scientists.

Another is that we’re in a simulation, and aliens aren’t part of it. There are also some very good statistics pointing to the simulation theory, from just sheer scale.

Of course not. Aliens don’t use slavery.

To paraphrase The San Saba Songbird, cats are excluded from the statutes of man, and many of the laws of the Almighty as well.

When I was in the Army, shaving was the bane of my existence. Well, shaving in the field was; I hated it so much. Never enough water, more shit to carry, winters are the worst because getting hot water is hard enough, and shaving with cold water sucks.

So, like OP, I found hair remover for men, and I’m like, “WTH why do men shave when we have this??”

The answer is: because these are all noxious chemicals, they feel like noxious chemicals, they smell like noxious chemicals, and they leave your skin raw and red. They really are only useful for guys for whom normal shaving is even worse, usually because of a tendency to ingrown hair problems from shaving. Or maybe there are guys with sandpaper skin; I don’t know. But there’s a reason why men (at least) still shave.

Someday maybe there will be a depilatory that’s as gentle as it is in sci-fi, but right now it’s just a caustic, irritating hot mess.

I really feel for OP. :-(

Thank you.

Well, shit. I never thought I’d see the day something like this made progress in a 1st world (economically; I know there are connotations, but I don’t know a better, more PC term) country.

Go (South) Australia!

Scurvy?

Cottage cheese is not a significant source of vitamin C, and scurvy symptoms begin to appear between 1-3 months of vitamin C deficiency.

If there were a God, I’m convinced he doesn’t have a plan for each of us. “A plan” directly contradicts free will, which is absolutely confirmed in all versions of the Bible and necessary for Faith.

So: the plan would have been: set up the initial conditions, ensure uncertainty and randomness, and let the simulation run. Omniscience can be constrained to awareness of the current state of everything (although, even God would be constrained by Heisenberg’s principle), yet still not know the future. And the ability to knowing the state of everything still doesn’t imply the intelligence and ability to calculate, simulate, and project the future state of anything - which, with randomness, becomes increasingly difficult with each second into the future you project, even if you have a good clipping algorithm to ignore things unlikely to impact Nick.

No, God would merely be a voyeur. Since he’s omnipotent, he can affect change, so he could help Nick… but that would violate Nick’s free will and the premise on which Faith depends. And the Christian God is strangely dependent on Faith; Faith is given an unreasonably high importance.

In any case, there’s no plan other than maybe some tweaks here or there to nudge things in a certain direction. They’re all macro changes, too. Not something as trivial or personal as preventing the soccer mom from running over 6 y/o Luna’s beloved cat that Luna grew up with. With chaos and entropy given free reign, Luna could develop a brain tumor in the next couple of years and die young; why bother save her from the trauma. If she’s been good enough, she’s just going to end up in heaven, lobotomized and permanently blissed out, and forced to spend the rest of eternity singing praises to God, anyway.

According to the Bible. If you’re a practicing Christian, feel free to explain where I’m wrong about any of this. Extra points if you can avoid resorting to the fundamental inscrutability of God’s purpose.

No.

I went outside yesterday and the mosquitoes almost carried me off - and it’s not even full summer yet.

Stupid warm winter. Stupid global warming.

This. The League of Women Voters is really good at doing summaries about candidate positions. And while they obviously have an agenda, they tend to be pretty level-headed about their analyses, and avoid rhetoric.

Oh yeah. We are super sensitive about our subs.

I once worked for a compny that subcontracted out to the government and to comanies contracting with the government. We were bidding on a job working with some company who was making sonar systems for the nuclear subs, and I was brought along to basically represent the dev team to work on the (a?) software component. I had to get a secret security clearance, which - if you haven’t been through this - is a dozen or so pages of the last decade of everything about your life: every address you’ve lived at; a list of people and contact information who’ve known you for that entire time and who will vouch for you; every job you’ve held and contact info for the companies… everything except an actual anal probe. And remember, I had to do this just to get into the building to talk to these people. I mean, maybe not normally, but they weren’t going to waste their time talking to me if I didn’t have the clearance. Then when I got there, it had the craziest security I’d ever seen: an outside badge door, so you had to call someone to get you, a little room with a security guard station, then another secure door the security guys had to open. And then there were badge doors in the building for different sections.

The job sounded fun: I was told one phase of testing required the developers to go on a test cruise, to answer questions and debug while underway; getting to ride in a nuclear sub (without having to join the Navy) might have been worth suffering my claustrophobia and massive distrust of submarines in general. But we didn’t win the bid, and I never got to use that security clearance that was such a massive PITA to get.

Anyway, it made me very conscious of just how serious the US takes submarine security. This guy, I expect, will disappear into an oubliette and never be heard from again.

So the answer to OP’s question is: it’s random, I assume with some filter for incompatibility.

Basic K12 biology didn’t go into deep details; OP is asking, I think, what decides which genes are combined. You can only get at most half of each from the parents - you don’t get all of each - so what exactly selects which genes from each are combined?

So, what: each individual sperm has half the father’s genes? Does each sperm have a different set, or are they all the same? What process in the father decides which genes make it into the half that goes into the sperm?

If the same process is happening in the egg, then same questions.

I didn’t realize I have the same question as OP, and I don’t think you answered it. The question is: how do the gene selections happen? What process decides?

Not every combination is being tried in the egg during fertilization, right? You describe the outcome, but not how the gene combination selection process happens, and what decides which genes are used.

Snot on a finger? Ew.

And all of those things are then analyzed and verified before anything is done with them. No reputable scientist is taking those results and dumping it straight into a paper; the deep learning engines are pointing scientists in the right direction; they’re taking the haystack and making it a handful. Protein folding is a little different because the results can be directly verified programmatically (I think; I’m not an organic chemist, or biologist, or whoever is doing this research).

The output of LLMs can be great outlines. They can also be wildly, and confidently, wrong.

Oh, believe me, I don’t. At all. I’ve been working in the software engineering sector since the mid 90’s; I’m quite aware of the rapid pace of change in this sector. I was briefly considering a focus on AI when getting my degree, back in the early 90’s.

But this specifically mentions LLMs, and the fundamental way LLMs function is not going to lead to self-aware AI, or any sort of system that is going to be able to self-evaluate for accuracy or “truthiness.” It’s going to take an advance in neural net science; maybe in combination with LLM - but LLMs by themselves will only ever be dumb machines that generate predictive text based on - I don’t know, Bayesian probabilities, or whatever.