exasperation

Dude don't you have a department of health and human services to run?

The proper way to use it in a sentence is "stigma dick in your mouth." Trust me, I've got a really good vocabulary.

I’m just gonna eat this burrito though.

But pray tell doth the burrito qualify as a sandwich

But most people who are invested in small talk will be giving the signals they think the other person wants, making it less useful than not talking at all.

I don't think this is true. When I engage in small talk, I don't see it as me bending flexibly to the conversation partner's wants. I'm testing to see if there are common overlaps that we can talk about, and talking for the sake of being entertained. If the other person turns out not to be a good conversation partner for me in that moment, I don't think anything of just moving on. I'm not trying to please them, I'm trying to enjoy myself.

I can't imagine I'm in the minority here.

Yes, it's true.

If you have wrinkles at 40 you need to wear more sunscreen and drink more water.

But also even if you don't have wrinkles you should wear sunscreen and probably drink more water anyway.

why a train journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles has to be 12 hours long

That's its own saga, with a bunch of factors specific to California politics (and national politics with funding and permitting California projects). The California High Speed Rail project intends to connect SF to LA in less than 3 hours (and the original 2008 plan aimed for a 2020 operational start date), but we'll see if that ever comes to fruition.

Also, I guess you guys do not regularly travel from New York to Los Angeles for a weekend trip, just as we Europeans don't usually do that with Stockholm and Barcelona (which is a distance the average European would also travel by plane).

One wrinkle in comparing things is that the US's cultural affinity is less tied to geographical proximity than in Europe. Obviously European villages and cities and major population centers were established long before rail, much less before automobile highways and commercial air travel (or even before global television broadcasts), so each local region will have its own culture and language.

In the U.S., with the population centers built up much more recently, cultural affinity between cities or regions is distinct from geographical proximity. So for many, a weekend getaway or a one-week vacation will tend to look to other similarly sized cities. One joke in the TV show 30 Rock was the idea that someone from New York would want to move to, or even visit, Cleveland. This is especially true for those who aren't straight white Christians, where much of the geographical footprint of the United States represents urban islands where you might feel like you belong, and where you'd want to hop from island to island rather than explore the vast areas geographically nearby.

So I had my dick out, which was the style at the time. "Dicks out for Harambe," you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, I had my dick out, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any zippers then, because of the tariffs. The only thing you could get were those shitty button fly pants.

Not all kids are "climb into an animal enclosure at the zoo" dumb. That's a special kind of dumb.

Have you ever had to care for 3-year-olds? I'd argue that probably more than 80% of 3 year olds are "climb into an animal enclosure at the zoo" dumb. And honestly, for the 20% you don't have to worry about, it's not intelligence that keeps them out, it's other personality traits or physical abilities.

Human life absolutely factors into predicted lawsuit losses. Wrongful death lawsuits are expensive.

You're right about all that, but it's worth noting that U.S. population centers tend to be coastal. New York to Chicago is one of the closer city pairs between the 10 largest cities in the U.S. Here's the driving distance from New York to each of the other 9:

Los Angeles: 2800 miles (4500 km)
Chicago: 800 miles (1300 km)
Dallas: 1600 miles (2500 km)
Houston: 1600 miles (2600 km)
Miami: 1300 miles (2100 km)
Washington: 230 miles (370 km)
Atlanta: 900 miles (1400 km)
Philadelphia: 100 miles (160 km)
Phoenix: 2400 miles (3900 km)

Dallas and Houston are close to each other. New York, Philadelphia, and DC are close (and are already connected by the most popular passenger rail line in the US). But the others are all pretty spread out.

So the type of travel people might imagjne doing in the U.S. tends to be weighted towards pretty far distances.

There's definitely room for more happy people in the mix. I try my best to inject humor and whimsy here and there, while above all else trying to stay engaged with the types of topics I'm interested in (explaining things I know, asking about things I don't know, and generally keeping topics alive if they're good topics I want to continue).

I generally delete my draft comments that come off as rude, before posting them, because I'm not sure this place needs more negativity.