With a large enough backyard there's hardly a need for a gun range

Tastes like it needs more cumin

I like to view America less as a melting pot and more as a big stew. Sure, the flavors are blending together, but every now and again you find a stubborn kale cluster that just won't spread around and keeps to itself.

It seems like the delta in lifestyle differences gets larger and larger as time goes on. The life lived by someone in the middle of Europe in 700s is probably not that much different than in the 1000s. The difference between the 1500s and 1800s was probably more noticeable. The different between the 1800s and 2000s is probably staggering to anyone from the first group.

I wonder how that will play out as we hit a point where the rate of change in things we'd all agree matters starts to get smaller than one generation. We are probably either right at that point or very close to that point right now. The potential for "generational politics", where your age (as opposed to an ideology or geography or occupational predictor) becomes a good proxy for your political leanings is either interesting or scary.

Children who pretend that they are other children

I hope that someday in the future our court system employs people with a job title like "Auto-correction forensics expert". These would be people who are uniquely qualified (somehow) to tell the public and legal system what the intention of someone sending a text message had been, before it was auto-corrected to something else. Maybe the original text would exonerate (or incriminate!) the defendant, so the stakes are high here.

Once this existed, someone would write software to try to automate the interpretation of what the pre-corrected text had been by using a large database of common mistakes. We'd have a real John Henry situation on our hands as the humans and robots battled each other for employment.

The people who think they can taste different grinds of coffee

Here's something that might be funny but I'm not going to do -- start a change dot org petition which claims that the root word of "caucus" (a political caucus to select a nominee for something, which as it turns out because I just now looked this up comes from an Algonquin word for "advisor") is derived from the same root as "caucasian" (a bunch of mountains between Europe and Asia where apparently all white people came from), and that the wording was chosen at a time when only white people were allowed to vote.

The petition would claim that the continued use of the word was an ugly mark from a time we're not proud of, and ask for signatures to rename that particular political event to something less racially charged.

I'm pretty sure that if you could word this the right way, you could dupe a bunch of people.

Ignorance is it's own reward?

It would be hard to compile a thorough list of all my skills, capabilities, talents, natural abilities, and so on. The list is just too big. One of these that I think is quite important though, is my willingness to do things which I have no idea how to do, in realms that I barely understand, and to just assume I'll be able to figure it out.

This is actually a horrible idea for most people most of the time, but I'm convinced that a lot of progress comes from small groups of people who really have no business doing whatever the thing is going ahead and doing it anyway.

Thus, I find myself in an awkward position when people ask for help or have questions about how to do something. On the one hand, I respect their own courage in admitting they don't know everything and asking for help. This saves us the wasted time that would have elapsed while they pretended they could do the thing and then ultimately didn't do it. On the other hand, as someone who does things I can't actually do, it's sort of maddening to encounter what I see as timidness in others who are unwilling to do the same.

That one guy on the other team at trivia night who keeps doing that thing

Here's a free terrorism idea that would inflict serious psychological harm, be hard to recover from, require only a small team of people - but also minimize loss of life!

Find a small town somewhere in the US that has a decent sized public park somewhere in it's downtown. Ideally there are lots of "old growth" trees down there. Trees that might be 150 feet high and that are present in every picture of that downtown going back many generations. Assemble a small team of people, and get a bunch of chainsaws. The night of your attack, you have a guy in a van and a bunch of guys with chainsaws, and at like 3AM you hit the park and cut down as many trees as you can reasonably cut down before anyone notices or law enforcement responds.

The next day, all the townspeople wake up and they are just freaked right the hell out. There's no more shade in the park! The pictures which seemed boring are now reminders of a simpler time. You can't just rebuild a tree, and you can't transplant trees that old from somewhere else. It will take decades for this town to replace what you destroyed in a single night.