If someone takes hormone blockers for several years before deciding to stop, does puberty proceed the same as in a younger person?
Pretty much, yeah. There's legitimate concern regarding bone growth (height, density) but it's usually fine and nothing compared to the known problems with being forced to live in dysphoria.
I was pretty ambivalent about my genderGender kind of partly feels like a process you go through vs an identity.
Gender is a lot of things and different for everyone. I remain very ambivalent about my gender as a man in my 30s. It's probably most accurate to call myself agendered but biologically and socially I'm male so I don't think it's worth the fuss. It strains my imagination to contemplate "feeling masculine/feminine". The point is that you can't necessarily apply your (perfectly valid) experience to others and making trans people go through natural puberty dooms them to irreversible changes that can cause severe psychological distress.
Disposable plastic. It should never have been a thing, but by now it really shouldn't be a thing. No plastic food containers, no plastic textiles, damn near everything should be in cotton bags or paper boxes or glass jars or unlined metal cans but we're so damn accustomed to convenience that the permanent externality is seen as necessary. I'm willing to make allowances for safety and medicine but even there the focus should be developing good biodegradable plastic.
The essence is that one entity is dealing with payments for hospitals, doctors, specialists, etc. The "single payer" would be an organ of the federal government that collects a portion of tax revenue and is billed for services. The term implies that the government is not itself providing any services.
The local environmental impacts are horrific, we really shouldn't build more hydroelectric dams if at all possible. (And should be actively transitioning away from and dismantling old ones, but that comes with lots of new problems) Yes it's great having consistent, reliable renewable energy but we're putting everything that relies on healthy salmon populations in danger of extinction.
Looking at the Pinball Map there isn't a listed Whirlwind table within 3 hours of me but I'll keep my eyes peeled. The spinning board elements look familiar but it's possible I played something else with that gimmick. Taxi has somehow evaded me despite being somewhat common. Pin-bot I know well (Bride of Pin-bot too!) it's a solid mid-80s table that's always worth a few rounds.
I'm pretty blind to the scores other than as a free game goal, I'm in it purely for the experience.
sending these people to college is a waste of time
I'm with you up to this point. There's more to college than degree tracks and academic excellence, it's an important opportunity to experience a wide array of topic and interact with all sorts of different people. And below-average intelligence does not necessarily mean bad-at-every-subject just as the inverse is true. The problem is expecting very college experience to be the traditional 4 year degree. The financial barrier is also unacceptable.
the west was too modern, scientific, and secular to fall prey to this stuff.
Anyone who grew up openly atheistic could have told you this was bullshit the entire time, at least in the US. The normalization of Christian lunacy did not start with 9/11.
There was a while when the US was on top, revolutionizing automotive manufacturing. Ford's Model T and later Model A sold like crazy.