Please explain this article from 2018 .

Wales is to become the first country in the UK to ban smoking in outdoor school spaces, playgrounds and hospital grounds.

Yes, most UK hospitals do ban smoking on their grounds, but not all, and the ban is by the hospital, not at the country level.

No matter how much time passes, my grandmother will never have been born after 2008 [edit: and so will be allowed to buy cigarettes].

I’m not sure about banning smoking outside of hospitals. The hospital near me doesn’t allow smoking by the entrances but has a designated smoking zone.

I’m not a smoker, but I’m thinking of when my grandma was dealing with my grandpa in the intensive care unit. She was already stressed to the gills with family and husband stress. I wouldn’t want her to have to deal with nicotine withdrawal, too (or finding alternative methods of nicotine use).

On the other hand, there was an asshole smoking right at the hospital entrance last time I was there. Screw that guy.

Grandpa was in the hospital for emphysema due to a lifetime of smoking. He left the hospital and quit smoking. I don’t think Grandma ever quit, even with full-on dementia. So, mixed feelings about old folks smoking near hospitals.

I grew up in a poor rural area of the cultural south, scored very well on the ASVAB test (armed services vocational aptitude test), which was administered during school hours to all students. The recruitment drive was heavy. Maybe you grew up somewhere young people had more options.

I had those neighbors growing up. Loud parties until 1 am on school nights, constantly revving their motorcycle. They also parked a boom lift in their driveway and I’d routinely wake up to their teen son looking in my second floor bedroom window.

Surprise, talking with them didn’t help anything. My dad helped by getting me earplugs. My mom told me to stop bothering her by having needs.

Last time I used Nair was over a decade ago and it was impressively, dreadfully smelly. Like burning hair, but more chemically. Just be prepared.

They might not even be pervs, maybe they’re autistic and feet are their special interest.

Also autistic. Seconding that this is hilarious. I’m with the reporter, the prisoner makes prison sound like a good place to be.

I stacked paperback books as a toddler, straight in a line. My dad taught me to do them in a brick pattern for stability.

Vivaldi also has tab groups.

you have to sneak up on the box

Plenty of kids go to the library. When I worked in a public library, it’d be fun to check in books and find a stack of 20 toddler books on, say, “dinosaurs” or “dump trucks”. You could tell when someone’s kid went through a phase.

I can’t guarantee an online researcher/visitor has anything other than a browser and I sure as heck don’t want to walk them through installing something on whatever machine they’re using. I do enough tech support as it is.

Current plan is to have the web server do it, it’s just another thing on my plate that I need to figure out how to do.

We use it at my library/archive to convert EADs (XML finding aids) into something we can present to a human.

This change breaks something that’s been working for us without issue for over a decade, and it’s personally a PITA because I’m the only dev-adjacent person in the library and fixing this takes me away from other stuff. (I’m spread thin and we’ve been in a hiring freeze for 5 years. I love my coworkers but there’s so much work stuff I have to deprioritoze in order to do the important stuff, it feels unfair when a big corporation decides to break something on me.)

Yesterday’s technology today at tomorrow’s prices?

I’m a big fan of textured vegetable protein (TVP). It gives a ground beef texture but is vegetarian and shelf stable. It looks expensive per pound, but it’s dehydrated so you’re not paying for water.

Original recipe has fish in it (sardines iirc), so might be ok for pescetarians.

They have a “sensitive marinara” that doesn’t trigger my partner’s IBS. The “sensitive” part is that it lacks garlic and onion. (Partner loves garlic but it doesn’t love him back.)

The only other pasta sauce we’ve found that works for him is from Fody and is more expensive. Luckily, pasta is cheap so it kind of balances out. And I can still have my garlicy oniony goodness by using my own sauce.

I often demand an olfactory component to my calming shelters. The smell of rotting bananas in particular reminds me of my first college advisor’s comfy, crowded office.

One of the underrated benefits of dating someone who is dating someone else is that, when my boyfriend does something silly, I get to tattle to his girlfriend.

“Your boyfriend did blah.”

And then we get to giggle about how cute he is.

Plus you get a window seat.

tbh, I don’t know who most of those people are. I’m just going by “yay, window seat”