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Why no fruits? I eat oatmeal with milk, an apple and some flaxseed each morning. I don't care about the taste but I add the apple because of vitamins. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

"Oatmeal" is a very confusing word to me because it's not actually "meal" (meaning "flour" in this case). There is actually a flour made out of oats, but it's not what you would make porridge out of.

Flour as you know it is not quite the same thing as meal milled at the time when the words were being invented. Wheatmeal is still a thing, look up images of it and the resemblance to oatmeal should be a lot more apparent!

I would class porridge oats as what might be called 'rolled oats' if you were buying animal feed. They are not ground, but crushed under a rolling stone. I guess they have different terms for different markets. Never seen rolled wheat, but I have seen rolled barley and oats.. they looks like porridge oats. Or is it an Atlantic divide, but with the US foodie term crossing back in the food market

Originally, "meal" was the generic word for milled grains.

Already the Mycenaean Greeks, 3500 years ago, used a cognate word with the same meaning: "meleuro-".

"Flour", which comes from "flower", originally meant the finest grade of meal, which was considered the best.

Nowadays the usage of these words is not always consistent with their original meanings.


But it's often the first meal of the day. :)

Bravo.

It's not often I find myself quoting Gwar, but this reminds me of "Bone meal! Better than no meal at all!"


Would you prefer taxes go up instead

Yes.


100% yes. My father is 67, and to be honest, he really shouldn't be working anymore. Both physically and mentally. And he is not very sick or disabled in any way. He just doesn't have the same capacity as he had in his 50s so after a 9-5 he was just recovering and going to sleep for the last few years. Terrible.

He retired last year. He didn't have an easy life. Very few jobs would benefit from his work and continuing working would have a great toll on him.


You can raise you personal "taxes" and provide for you father if you so desire.


That’s not even close to the same thing, and you know it.


It's the same if you sum it up across the population: all the benefits that elderly consume without producing are subtracted from what young people produce without consuming.

If you want your parents to retire earlier than the population-averaged system can allow, you're free to do it a non-averaged way.


What if my father didn't have kids?


Then, as a matter of fact, he'll have to rely on someone else's kids to feed him, whether directly or through taxes.

If he voluntarily chose not to raise kids, not even adopted ones, then he placed himself at the mercy of strangers. This may or may not end well, depending on how much spare resources they have.


so this: "You can raise you personal "taxes" and provide for you father if you so desire." was just a non sequitur


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