No, you’re not a bad person for this reason, not at all.

Are there challenges or downsides? Yep. Are you prepared to face them? Sounds like it!

My dad was 44 when I was born; my mum 41. So while that’s not quite as old as you are, I still want to share some of my perspective.

The bad: I’m in my 30s and it’s hard watching them age. I find myself frequently connecting with coworkers 10 years my senior as we bond over the realities of caring for aging parents. I also lost all my grandparents mentally by my mid-20s and physically when I was 30. Given my dad’s current health, my nephew (as I won’t have children myself) will never know what my dad was like with all his faculties and may not really remember him much at all depending on how much longer my dad is able to stick around. (P.S., please make good choices about your health. As a parent these choices don’t only affect you.)

The neutral: My partner is 11.5 years older than I am, yet my parents are older than his (barely, but technically true). Did they have less energy to play with me as a kid? Maybe? I can’t say and honestly it never felt like something they lacked.

The good: And yet I also have parents I know wanted me and were mentally prepared to have me. I have always credited their age and maturity when I was born to a lot of my own maturity, including why I so easily get along with people of any age. I have said hundreds of times throughout my life that I’m grateful my parents waited until they were ready to have me, and I stand by it. They have been amazing parents and even if I have fewer years with them given the timing, I will cherish it all because they were much better than average at raising me.

The one concern you didn’t mention is that higher paternal age is associated with an increased risk of a number of negative outcomes, including things such as premature birth, chromosomal abnormalities, and autism. You didn’t name this as a concern but I think it’s worth being aware of, but I don’t think this should change your mind given how much you want a child. If you were on the edge or weren’t certain if you could care for a kid who has a slightly higher than average risk of having special needs, then I think this is worth factoring into your decision.

Hopefully none of this has scared you off because you’re already showing the maturity, consideration, and love needed to be an amazing dad. Good luck, and congratulations!

I appreciate your thoughtful response and consideration of how you phrased this originally. I know you are making the point with the best of intentions in trying to ensure that the word “rape” isn’t diluted down.

I struggled for many years to move beyond my experiences of being raped. I’m in a good place now, but it took time. I generally wouldn’t say I’m suffering from it any more (even if there may be moments where I’m triggered), so I think the comment here just hit me hard.

I also know there are other victims who have gone through weird levels of guilt and self-doubt because they haven’t felt the level of suffering that’s “expected.”

We both have the same desire here, but slightly different stances on where that line should be drawn and that’s ok.

I’m responding a second time because I think this is an important point to make as a top-level response.

the suffering of a living victim is an essential part of what makes rape rape.

This is a fucked up take. This says that a rape victim must suffer, and if they aren’t suffering, then it wasn’t rape. Just, no. People process things differently. Some will be more and some will be less traumatized by being raped.

Forcing a particular experience onto a victim, saying they must feel a certain way, is just so incredibly problematic. A victim can feel whatever they feel and process a crime against them however they want. And the way they do so doesn’t change whether a crime was committed against them.

From the details given, it’s not clear if the person was dead or only unconscious at the time of the assault and it’s not clear whether the attacker knew either.

I’m not clear on your second point; you say that it doesn’t seem right that defendant knowledge matters in one case and not the other. So if:

1. Defendant commits arson not knowing they kill someone in the building > call it murder
2. Defendant sexually violates a body not knowing if they are dead > don’t call it rape?

It seems like not calling it rape is what would apply a double standard here based on defendant knowledge.

Our society treats bodies as an extension of a person; for example, we do not harvest organs from a body if the person didn’t consent to be an organ donor while they were alive.

Your focus on the victim’s suffering as what determines the severity of the crime seems problematic to me. If a victim doesn’t let being raped destroy their life, do we not punish the rapist as severely? We distinguish between manslaughter and murder based on pre-meditation and intent, even though the victim is still dead in both cases, and similarly I think that focusing on the attacker’s actions and intent should be the key factor in calling their actions rape.

If the defendant were going to a morgue or funeral home and defiling bodies, I may feel differently but given the timing here it feels way too grey to not treat it as rape.

FWIW, I’m coming at this conversation as a rape survivor myself. I know the level of mental devastation it can cause. And personally, I don’t think that treating the sexual assault of someone who may or may not have been dead yet (and if they were dead, had been so for no more than 30 minutes) as rape takes anything away from the severity of the crime or my experience as a victim of it.

And anyway from a semantic perspective, according to the article it is being charged only as attempted rape.

My parents briefly hired a private chef. She used (frozen) okra in ways I never expected and it’s what made me always keep a bag on hand.

The best was oven-roasted veggies with beets and asparagus (fresh) plus okra and fire-roasted corn (frozen). Nothing else, not even seasoning, and it was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

She also used it in salads! I questioned it until I tried it, and then I was sold.

Frozen veggies so I feel like it’s a real meal.

Fire-roasted corn is a fave, then usually peas and carrots, and the weird one I found: frozen okra. It seemed wrong but I had some on hand and figured why not? Turns out I like it a lot! It also thickens the broth just a bit in a good way.

I mean, the dead can’t consent.

Also the article says “unresponsive passenger.” We know now the person was dead, but that doesn’t mean the rapist was clear on that fact at the time.

• Fear of not having enough money to make it.
• Discomfort in seeing balances drop after years of saving; a lot of FIRE (Financial Independence/Retiring Early) folks get so into accumulating wealth that the transition into actually depleting that money can be terrifying.
• Identity tied up in work (as another commenter said). Not knowing what to do with your time once you retire. Not having hobbies or a social life outside of work.
• Having high ongoing expenses, like children in college.
• Inability to retire; not having enough. This is obviously the most common scenario. Most people (at least speaking from a US-centric view) are in this boat. Depending on source, I’m seeing median bank account balances of $5-20k for people in the 50–65 range, and median retirement balances around $100k in the 50–59 age range. That’s not enough for anyone to comfortably retire, and pensions or other sources of income are becoming exceedingly rare.

I agree with most of what you said, but you are severely overestimating the cost of t-shirts at Walmart. They start at $4 for plain or $7 for graphic tees from what I can tell. Even band tees and things like Mickey Mouse are in the $9–14 range based on a cursory glance on their site.

Everyone who uses it will contribute to the dilution. It’s not like 1:1000 dilution from a single person’s shower becomes 1:100 if 10 people use it or 1:1 for a thousand. No, they each will use large amounts of water that dilute it down.

People don’t pour their soap down the sink (at least not for any normal uses); they use a small amount which gets washed away with a lot more water.

I’d suggest finding what concentration things are dangerous at and whether they break down organically or not. Then you can aim to keep your product below that concentration if you can so even if someone did pour it down the drain it wouldn’t be harmful. And if you confirm it will break down, you know you aren’t contributing to long-term build up either.

Yeah, that’s on OP. The article is actually titled, “Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligence Using Differential Privacy.”

Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

The entire thing is explaining how they are upholding privacy to do this training.

1. It’s opt-in only (if you don’t choose to share analytics, nothing is collected).
2. They use differential privacy (adding noise so they get trends, not individual data).
3. They developed a new method to train on text patterns without collecting actual messages or emails from devices. (link to research on arXiv)

The problem is with receipts on thermal paper, not those printed with normal ink, so many receipts are not an issue any more.

If you want to tell the difference, you could try applying heat (like a hair dryer or iron) over the receipts and see which ones change color (usually turning grey or black where heated).

Once you find a few, you’ll likely get a feel for which ones are likely to be thermal paper just by looking and you can practice extra care with those. (Tip: they are usually the ones that appear a bit glossy.)

I have a friend with one but haven’t talked with her about it much.

I think a strong use case you may not have considered is women’s tiny or nonexistent pockets. Having a phone small enough to securely fit in a pocket while still having a large screen phone definitely has its appeal.

The idea that vaccines cause autism and therefore we shouldn’t give vaccines inherently implies that autism is a worse scenario than any of the diseases vaccines protect against. We have a measles epidemic killing children, and people would still prefer to not vaccinate because of a fear of autism.

If people think having a dead child is better than having an autistic child, that doesn’t bode well for autistic folks.

This is always how I’ve framed it. Either it will recover or we’re dealing with societal collapse–level problems. In the former, great, wait it out. In the latter, good luck no matter how much you had.

So there’s a lot of research suggesting neurodivergence has strong correlation with LGBT+ and there’s some indicating the BDSM correlation (not saying they are the same/related, but people who are in touch with themselves enough to identify as LGBT+ are more likely to be open about sexuality in general in my experience). It’s so present in my various social circles that I’ve connected nerd & neurodivergent and thought of those as the common factor.

But I realize there’s another commonality I hadn’t considered: they’re very community-oriented and attend community gatherings. There are three groups I’m thinking of: one has a ton of burners (not actually Burning Man, but smaller local variants), another are Quakers (and more specifically those who attend large regional/national gatherings), and the last are people who religiously attend DragonCon.

Maybe that has more to do with the sex-positivity and openness than the nerd piece? I don’t know. I just know I’m surrounded by it somehow, lol.

Sex. Neurodivergent/nerd social circles often have a lot of kink/BDSM and otherwise sex positive people, so my friends group is pretty open about sex.

I’m on the asexual spectrum and would rather forget that sex is a thing, but I love my friends and as long as everyone is consenting and safe, I’m happy for them. I sometimes get awkward when sex convos happen around me, but hey, I get awkward with many other convos too.

FMLA does cover leave for fathers, and in 2020 the DOL said 56% of US workers were covered by FMLA. That’s still a lot of people who don’t have those protections, but it’s still demonstrably incorrect to say there isn’t “any legal right [for fathers] to take time off from work.”

My company offers parental leave (generic, not gender-specific, and applies to adoptions as well as giving birth). Everyone I work with expects people—men included—to take it.

A guy on my team took his a couple years ago and now with his second child recently born, he is applying his lesson learned. Instead of taking the time as soon as his kid is born, overlapping time off with his wife, he’s letting his wife take her full time then he’s taking his. That way they stagger the full-time care of the newborn for about 6 months straight, after which his wife will be done teaching for the summer, meaning more like 8 months straight.

Another coworker (Director level) had his latest kid December before last. Our busy time is January to April, so he delayed and took his time off in May or June.

Fuck companies that don’t support it and the small-minded people who think men shouldn’t take it. I can understand how challenging it can be for a small business to support that kind of leave, but as humans we should care more about supporting the next generation than a couple hits to productivity at work for 2-3 months. (I write as a permanently child-free person.)

What you’re missing is that the people you work with are stuck in the mindset from 2 generations ago. Don’t buy in. Taking your leave IS supporting your family; you’re doing it right.