There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them

It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s

Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.

It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.

There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.

In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.

Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.

They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.

At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.

I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.

There’s a large park in my area that has a lot of deer. There used to be no hunting of any kind allowed in the park. You pretty much can’t drive through any area of the park without seeing a few dozen deer.

The result was, predictably, since we have no real predators left in this area, that the deer population exploded. The deer ate a lot of vegetation, there were a lot of car accidents involving deer, and it even got to the point that a lot of the deer just were not even very healthy because there was too much competition for food and numbers of other animals also took a dive.

Maybe 10 or 20 years ago they implemented some deer culling programs to thin the deer population, and so within my lifetime I’ve seen biodiversity explode in the park, I’m seeing lots of different plants and animals that I don’t remember seeing as a kid, the deer are healthier, car accidents are down, basically all of the issues have improved dramatically.

And probably the craziest thing to me is that around 100 years ago or so, give or take a couple decades, deer in my state were in really sad shape from overhunting and deforestation. There was even one hunter who believed that he may have shot the last deer in the state (he probably didn’t, but the fact that he believed that was the case speaks volumes about how few deer were left)

The state of course put a lot of programs into place to rebuild the deer population, hunting licenses, tags, seasons, limits, and other restrictions and various other conservation programs, and the deer pretty quickly rebounded, so well in fact that the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the other direction and we now have too many deer in parts of the state (personally I think it’s a bit odd if I see less than about 6 deer on any given day, and mostly all I do is drive 20 minutes to and from work, and walk around my neighborhood)

And circling back to dogs, until very recently because of those restrictions put into place, you could not use dogs in any capacity to hunt deer in this state. A lot of the damage done to the deer population a century ago was by commercial hunters who would often use dogs to help drive large numbers of deer. A couple years ago they did finally change the law to allow dogs to assist in tracking wounded deer.

I also strongly support reintroducing predators, however in my area, it probably won’t be feasible without some major un-development, deer may only need a home range of about a mile or so, so they can carve out a decent life in isolated pockets of woods and fields scattered around suburbia, many larger predators like wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. on the other hand may need a range of tens or sometimes even hundreds of miles, so it would be hard to get them established here (although our coyote population has been growing and adapting well, so they may be able to start filling some of that role)

I feel like there’s some room for nuance here. I don’t like using dogs to hunt down live uninjured game in general, flushing, chasing, treeing, etc. that just seems like unnecessary stress for the animals which should be avoided.

But I have no issue using tracking dogs to follow a blood trail and find a wounded animal after it has been shot, which could mean the animal can be humanely dispatched more quickly, or to retrieve dead game, like with waterfowl hunting since ducks and such are often shot over the water making them difficult to retrieve.

There can be some narrow exceptions for people who are actually subsistence hunters and rely on hunting for a significant amount of their food needs

There’s also cases like feral swine that are often hunted with dogs, they’re invasive and can be very damaging to the environment, can be aggressive towards humans and can present a health hazard for domestic pigs in nearby farms, so it’s often important to keep their numbers in check, so it might sense to allow dogs for that purpose if it makes the hunters more effective.

FYI, there’s a little debate over this in the English language, but many would say that the proper demonyms are Afghan for the Pashtun ethnic group, and Afghanistani (or rarely Afghanese) for people from Afghanistan regardless of ethnicity.

Afghani is their currency.

I believe it comes from a discrepancy between the Persian and Pashto languages. Afghani being the correct term in Persian, and Afghan being the term in Pashto.

Afghani is pretty widely used in English, and even appears in some dictionaries, but many argue that it’s not correct.

So a person is an Afghan, they eat Afghan food, wear Afghan clothing, have Afghan customs, and their currency is the Afghan Afghani (in case some other country ever adopts a currency called the Afghani and you need to differentiate between them)

One of my favorite scary facts about the moonies that I don’t see talked about much is that a couple of the founders sons had a falling out with the church, and went and started their own, even crazier church. They made the news a few years back doing some rifle blessings and some kind of mass wedding ceremony (also with rifles)

Not for nothing, they also own kahr firearms

I’ve seen a couple places offering what they’ll call something like “enhanced ebooks”

I admit that I haven’t given any of them a try, but the gist is that they’re an ebook with some extra multimedia content. It kind of looks like some places that do them do the absolute bare minimum to slap the “enhanced” label on them and just add some extra pictures and maps and such, and others go whole hog with added video, the full audio drama treatment with sound effects, different actors for the various characters, narration, etc. so some of them may potentially fill the role you’re looking for

Charcoal isn’t the same thing as regular coal

Smallpox eradication comes to mind, same with the ongoing efforts to eradicate Polio (we very well may see it by the end of the decade)

A humans life is not worth more than anything else on the planet, no more, no less

So it’s an equal trade, a pig life for an equally valued human life. One of them is going to die regardless.

And from certain points of view, since that pig would not have been born if it weren’t for this, that is one more life created in this process. It may have been a short life, it may not have been the highest quality, but if we’re valuing all lives equally and believe that life is a good thing, the fact that that pig existed at all, regardless of the circumstances of its birth, life, and death, is something to be happy about.

On the other hand, they also believe that we were created in his image, so perhaps he created atoms because he himself is made of atoms.

I don’t know how common they actually are, but I see car window breaker & seatbelt cutter gizmos being sold all over the place. I know I keep one in my car where I can easily get to it, though my car emergency kit is probably better stocked than most people’s, and most first responders also have them in their kit.

Also an automatic center punch will usually do the trick as well, it’s a fairly common tool, though in an emergency it may not be practical to go rooting through your toolbox to find one.

For a while, there was a meme on Reddit that went “This is bullshit - you’re oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of no longer adding anything useful to the discussion.”

It was somebody’s answer to an askreddit post asking “If you could only post the same one sentence to everything you wanted to reply to on reddit, what would your sentence be?”

People like you are the reason that answer resonated with enough people to become a meme.

The US is not blameless for what is going on.

However, ultimately Israel is the country that is carrying this out, if people like Netanyahu and his cohorts weren’t pushing for this, it wouldn’t matter how much money, weapons, and other support the US gave them, this wouldn’t be happening.

If the US pulled all support, Israel could and almost definitely would press on with it, probably not as efficiently as they are currently, but still the war would continue. Maybe the US pulling support would lead to a quicker end, maybe it would just drag things out, maybe it would lead to extreme escalation with a desperate Israel choosing to use their nuclear weapons either against Hamas or against other Middle Eastern nations that choose to get involved without the US acting as a deterrent.

The US helped create the circumstances that allowed this to happen, but the fact that it is actually happening is on Israel.

mental health checkups for repeat offenders

This one, I think, is particularly huge.

I work in 911 dispatch in the US, we have a lot of repeat callers, and it’s probably no surprise that a lot of them have drug, alcohol, or other mental health issues.

It happens a lot that one of them will finally do something that gets them hauled off to jail or to a psych hospital or whatever, they get out, do ok for a little while, then relapse, or stop taking their meds, or otherwise fall back into their old patterns and they’re back to causing issues for another few months, years, etc. until they again do something they can be brought in for and start the cycle again.

Making sure, in some way, that they’re following up on whatever treatment, counseling, etc. they need after they get released could be huge for a lot of them. There are some programs in place, but it can be hard to ensure they’re actually sticking to them, and of course there are usually money, time, and transportation issues they often need to overcome to stick with them as well.

I usually have to stop and think about it, not recalculate it but it takes a few seconds for the query to run.

I’m not big on celebrating my birthday, I just kind of check off some milestones

Old enough to drive, vote, drink, rent a car, run for president (not quite there yet, look for me on the 2028 ballot though) get an AARP membership, retire, and then that’s pretty much it, then I’ll coast the last couple of decades of my life no longer needing to know how old I am.

If your wife is the type who would want to wear a sleep mask, you could put your lights on a timer to make you up, if you have smart lights a lot of them have a feature to turn the brightness up slowly to wake you up more gently. She wouldn’t be bothered by them if she’s wearing a mask but they’d get you up.

So this is far from scientific, but I was at a shopping center I used to go to a lot as a kid recently and I noticed that the sidewalks were free of gum. As a kid I remember it always being covered in discharged gum, i used to talk about it with my mom, the sidewalk was practically polka-dotted back then.

Of course there’s a lot of possible explanations besides people just not chewing gum anymore. Could be that people have gotten better about disposing of gum properly, newer gum formulations could be easier to clean up, or we’ve gotten better at it how we clean it, or there’s the fact that teenagers used to just kind of hang around outside of stores and don’t/can’t really do that so much anymore so there’s less people loitering around and spitting their gum out.

Litter is usually reserved for animals that typically have more than one child at a time, it’s normal for a dog, cat, mouse, etc. to have multiple babies at once, whereas with animals like humans, pandas, etc. it’s a somewhat unusual occurrence so we call it something different

I think there’s a little more to it than that.

Yes, there’s the fact that American culture is very dominant in pop culture and we’ve exported our culture around the world. As the Rammstein song goes, “We’re all living in America”

But there’s also the fact that we’re a melting pot and we’ve happily appropriated bits and pieces of culture from everywhere else and integrated them into our own, and the lines get murky about where those other cultures end our our own begins.

And there’s not really one American culture, we’re rugged cowboys, and we’re Hollywood movie stars, we’re fat assholes and we’re health conscious hippies, we live in modern cities, suburban sprawl, rural farmland, mountains, forests, frozen hellscapes, wide open plains, deserts, we’re gun nuts, and we’re pacifist vegans, jocks and nerds, some of the richest people on earth, and homeless on the streets and everything in between, and every part of the country does things just a little differently, so it can be hard to pick out things that are truly emblematic of Americans as a whole.