I think it helped shape me into a an adventurous, curious person, because that was what motivated me as a kid. Other Free Range kids might have gone out to play sports, or to look for trouble, etc., but i was just exploring.

There was another direct influence on my life: Once, i headed to a nearby “woods,” to watch animals, and bumped into some friends. One jumped over a small creek to greet me, and stepped right onto an underground bee hive. They all poured out of that hive like water, and came directly for me. The first stung my lip, then neary eye. They got in my hair, up my t-shirt, stuck in my socks etc.

I jumped on my bike and started racing toward home, hoping to outrun them, but they were the kind of bees that don’t lose their stingers, so the ones stuck in my clothes kept stinging me. By the time i got home i had at least 30 stings.

I’m okay now, but i was really afraid of bees for many years. Gardening helped me learn to lose my fear.

Overall, i think it made me a person who isn’t afraid of the world, and i know i can navigate any situation that comes up.

Back in the 60s, i was a Free-Range kid. On on a nice non-school day, I would go out after breakfast on my bike, and be gone all day, without any money, a watch, ID, cell phone (didn’t exist back then), anything, and I’d be gone all day. The only rule was to be home by 5 pm.

Nobody knew where I was, who I was speaking to, or anything. If i bumped into friends, I’d hang out for a while, but if I needed to know the time, I’d ask some stranger. If I was thirsty, I’d knock on a random door and ask for a glass of water. Once, I stopped at the end of a driveway to watch some guy doing woodworking in his open garage. He saw me watching and this stranger invited me into garage, and showed me his tools, and what he was building. Turned out he was a decent guy, and I probably reminded him of his grandson, but what if he wasn’t? My primary fear was running into the Robolotto boys, but as long as I didn’t see one of them, I was happy.

This was routine for years, and it was the same for my friends. I started doing this when I was about 7 years old.

Record companies are just big corporate conflomerates, who dont want to make waves, and they control the artists’ output.

Any Resistance Music is going to come from truly independent artists, and we should do everything we can to promote them.

Generally, my tactic is to not engage directly, but address the rest of the audience, essentially pointing at the subject and mocking him (“Can you believe this MAGA Traitor?..”). When he tries to respond, again ignore him, and just point and laugh.

They get really frustrated being made fun of, without having the satisfaction of creating liberal outrage.

One way to fight the corporations is to stop worshipping at the altar of blind consumerism, and embrace the concept of “Reuse, Repair, Recycle.”

Stop buying stuff you dont need. Keep using what you have, sell/buy used items, repair things, and if it cant be fixed or repurposed, then recycle it.

Repairing things is a big one. Often repairs are remarkably easy. My wife has been ready to replace numerous appliances over the years, and I figured it was worth taking a shot at fixing it, if I can save a few hundred bucks, and successfully extended the life by years.

Very satisfying, and it forces your wife to rethink her conclusion that you are an incompetent dolt.

Just being “alive.” We become alive, some sort of “spark of life” pulses through us, and at some point, that “spark” leaves us, and we are nothing more than a rock. What is that “spark?”

Everything is either animate of inanimate, so how did things become animate? At some point, something had to get that “spark,” and become alive, then spread that life around. How did/does that happen?

Is this “spark” unique to Earth, or is is possible to exist elsewhere? Did some nearly impossible combination of factors all happen to line up and cause “life” to emerge, like a room full of monkeys randomly typing Hamlet, or do those factors exist in other places?

Of course, many people would assign a religious explanation to that “spark,” our Soul or whatever, but that’s just making up a silly story to explain something we don’t understand.

12 years, 900K+ karma, Permabanned soon after the inauguration for repeating a statement I’d made many times before.

Came to Lemmy and found lots of recently banned veterans. Many of us were high volume posters for over a decade, and never got banned, then suddenly we all turned into monsters that had to be permabanned in the same month.

I prefer Lemmy in many ways - no puns, fewer trolls, no bots, no Russian propaganda farmers, etc., but some of my favorite subjects are badly lacking. Reddit has several very large and active guitar subs, for instance, while Lemmy’s guitar forums are small and barely used.

On the other hand, the political subs are far more radical, and allow real discussion of political options more than Reddit. They are not doing themselves a service by suppressing radical speech over there, they are only driving it underground, where it will become even more radical. When it happens they’ll be surprised because they buried it instead of addressing it.

Booker’s speech was an audition for Schumer’s job. He laid out his vision of the Democratic agenda, and showed strength doing it, contrasting with that craven, corrupt, simpering, weak, vile, weenie Schumer.

Schumer is in the way, and needs to retire immediately, and make way for AOC to take his seat.

If Schumer leaves, Booker become Minority leader, and AOC goes to the Senate, that speech will have acvomplished a lot.

Half of America are horrified by it, and the other half think it’s something to be proud of, because they’re ignorant neanderthals.

Good to know. Next time I have a medical issue, I’ll ask my bus driver for a diagnosis. What are your thoughts on subway drivers or Uber drivers?

A lot of times its too much trouble to fiddle with the highlighting to catch the right spaces, and then drop it in the right spot. Its easier to just grab it, drop it, then edit the spaces.

That was the perfect opportunity to teach the first step of The Scientific Method. The next step was the Hypothesis - what do you think will happen, based on the scientific knowledge you already have?

Then you have to Plan The Experiment, which in this case, would probably really energize the students’ brain power. They’ll LOVE figuring out this experiment. I would bet that EVERY student would be engaged in this one.

It’s the Doing The Experiment that might be problematic, and end up with the teacher explaining themselves to the School Board: “All I can say is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess you had to be there.”