I think it was just offered as an illustration of the concept, not as tax advice.

I had to explain to my kids the other day how you don’t ever wish death on anyone. I was just going to ask if OP lives somewhere dry, because that would explain why they’re seeing this with so many foods.

People might be wondering wtf there’s no moisture in dry pasta. But there is: it will absorb moisture content from the surrounding atmosphere.

I had to learn about this effect because of woodworking. Wood absorbs enough moisture to appreciably change in size over the seasons, to the point where your whole table can crack in half if it’s built the wrong way.

ORLY? Poland? A NATO ally, who fought with the US in Iraq? Please try it.

Yes there’s a long list of country flags and currency symbols and other shit in there too but lets not pretend like adding all that crap changed the fact that these are commonly used for expression. Does a cup of coffee have an emotion? Actually it kinda can, yeah, in the right situation. Let’s not even get into what people make of eggplants and popcorn tubs.

Yeah I’m disagreeing that it can “be bad.”

This is a reproductive technology. I’m not going to sit here and judge women for how they use it. I’ve witnessed pregnancies all the way through and I’M. NOT. JUDGING. PERIOD.

You know what it’s like? To sit here and fie upon slovenly rich bitches who use this reproductive technology for their own comfort because they’re lazy and immoral? It’s about a hair’s breadth away from the way people demonize women who avail themselves of abortions for being “sluts who don’t want to deal with the consequences of their actions.”

I won’t go anywhere near that shit.

As far as I can see, I’m the only one here who knows anyone who’s used surrogacy, and it was for a legit health reason. I have ZERO patience to listen to anyone’s internet armchair judgery, while they even remotely entertain the idea that we should take this reproductive technology away because of how we think people are using it.

Nope. Nope to the nope. Fuck ALL of that.

You’ve already ignored everything I’ve done to enlighten you on this topic. I’m not going to keep trying. Your attitudes about having children are simplistic and ignorant. These aren’t insults. An insult would be that you’re ugly too.

I also did not attack you, I just pointed out the emptiness of your argument.

I mean it is a fact that Hamas has a lot of support at home. They have won elections. This is because they build schools and deliver services at home, and take a defiant stand against Israel. However this all gets collapsed to “Palestinians support terrorism” by the disingenuous, trusting everyone in Gaza with terrorism. I’m NOT saying this is valid - just pointing out how it comes about.

Oh so your examples are how it “started” and mine are “exceptions” therefore you win. Whatever.

They are using it as an opportunity to carry out the pogrom they always wanted to. It’s clear now that the Hamas attack is exactly what Israel wanted.

About 1500 people were killed or taken hostage by Hamas. That attack was horrific and wrong, and sadly Israel has done their best to ensure that their response is equally horrific and wrong. Because their idea of morality is to be equivalent to Hamas, while telling you Hamas is evil. Their thinking is so far up their own asses on this.

Have you ever considered that the high expense of paying someone to be pregnant on your behalf pays a great deal of cash to potentially poor women? Just because rich people are the ones paying for it doesn’t mean they are the only ones that benefit from it. I’d like to imagine a public healthcare system that will pay for the procedure if you can convince a friend or relative to carry the baby for you. That’s conceivable to me. But being pregnant is 9 months of hard work and has health risks. Even if we can imagine making surrogacy available to all, it’s hard to imagine making surrogates easily available to all. I say if you have the wealth to make this a job for someone, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of women in the world who have very healthy bodies and can tolerate a pregnancy well who don’t have high paying professional skills.

So while we wait for the perfect egalitarian world to arrive where wealth has no meaning and everything is equally available to all, should we ban this? That’s the only question, really.

Wow so incredibly judgy.

Like a lot of people who know nothing about the issue, you assume that adoption is easily available without limit and the reality is more complex. Unless you are taking special needs children into your home to care for them, don’t go around telling people they have an obligation to adopt.

I know a couple who used surrogacy because she had a health issue that would make pregnancy high risk for her. If you want to get in her face and say she is not allowed to use technology to make a decision that everyone else gets to make, and she’s a bad person unless she adopts, that’s your fever dream to enjoy on your own.

Banning the technology outright because of what a Russian oligarch does with it? Insane.

We don’t ban things because they’re not affordable enough. We would ban quite a lot of medicine if that were so. This is religious horseshit trying to sweeten itself with a populist angle.

“Commercializing pregnancy”

Yeah, allowing my friend living with lupus to have a healthy biological child. They treated the surrogate as a member of the family, even long after the birth. Fuck you, pope.

Recorded history = a period of 12 years in this case? The phrasing is confusing to me.

Of course this isn’t comparable - hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.

But the post is funny and it hints at something important. Expressions to co vey emotion are incredibly important to human beings. It’s a language that our bodies are physically built for: our faces are far more changeable and expressive than other animals, and this supported the social bonds and cooperation that put us on top of the world. I’m not saying that across all cultures, one given facial expression means the same thing, but certainly all cultures have a vivid, silent language of facial expressions that is so deeply rooted, we barely think about it.

And what was “that one thing” for the Egyptians?

I know right? 124 hours is 5 days! I’ve always heard that 3 is just about the limit.

The internet probably offers more opportunity to a small solo operator than ever before. I’m not sure what your memories of the early 90s were but it was not easy to set up a website and forget about an online store. Nowadays there are incredible tools for this and a million flowers are blossoming. The fact that corporations also profit from this doesn’t negate it.

I grew up in a time when 3 companies controlled virtually all the news media. The fact that a tweet can now sweep the world literally IS the “democratized” future we always dreamed about.