Thoughts from advice columns

My husband and I are preparing our wills. We have two adult children: a daughter who is more successful than we are, and a son, who has been down on his luck for years. He also has three young children to educate. Everyone, including our lawyer and close friends, tells us that we should leave our money to them in equal shares to avoid hurt feelings. But that doesn’t seem right. Our son needs the money. Still, we don’t want to hurt our daughter. What would you do?

An option would be to leave everything to your grandchildren, perhaps in trust for their education if you should pass away when they're still underage.  This would be perfectly just, it would (if you die relatively soon) spare your son the expense of educating his children, and it would help mitigate any negative impact for the children of having a father who is down on his luck. If the daughter should have children, they'd inherit too, but if she doesn't I can't imagine a more-successful-than-her-parents childless auntie begrudging her nieces and nephews an inheritance from their less-successful-than-her grandparents, unless she's the sort of person to begrudge anything and everything, in which case you're no worse off.

Dear Miss Information,

I dated a guy about two years ago pretty seriously, and at the time we were on track to be engaged. Blah blah blah, it ended really badly. We haven't spoken since, even though I found out through mutual friends that he has been asking about me for months if not years. Finally, that has died down, and we've both moved on with our lives, I think. Here's the problem: I'm now dating a woman (oh, I'm a girl, if that wasn't already clear.) She and I are really happy together. I guess I've always identified as "bi," but it never came up when I was dating the guy. So this isn't that surprising to me, but apparently it is to him. I think one of our mutual friends told him I'm with Anna now, and supposedly he's been really freaked out about it.

A very close mutual friend is getting married in about a month, and my girlfriend is coming as my plus-one. I know he will be there with his new girlfriend (The friends who told me he was freaked out also filled me in that he's dating someone from his work), and I want to avoid hurting him further. How do you tell someone, "I'm gay now, but I wasn't when I was with you"? And really, we haven't spoken in about two years, so how much responsibility do I even need to take for "letting him down gently"? I'm just really, really, REALLY dreading this wedding because of having to see this ex. What do I do?

 (This letter is from the Miss Information column in Nerve.  The column itself is fine, but Nerve sometimes has NSFWish ads and pictures around the column text.  You can see the original here, or see a fully SFW version in CF Abby here.)

Anyway, as to the actual question, I think if I were in the guy's position, I'd find it something of a relief if it turned out the person I love who left me did so because they had come to the realization that they wanted a same-sex relationship.  That would make me confident, more than anything else I could possibly imagine, that it wasn't anything I did wrong and that there wasn't any diligence on my side that could have saved the relationship.

Individuals can face criminal charges when they pose as nurses or policemen. But what about people posing as meteorologists? A B.S. in meteorology is a science degree. But many broadcast meteorologists are not meteorologists at all; they hold a mail-order certificate offered by some schools instead. Is it ethical for TV stations to give just anyone the title “meteorologist”? NAME WITHHELD

Before we even get into the question of whether a certificate from an education institution should be completely disregarded as credientials, I don't think anyone is actually under the impression that the people on TV are actually doing the forecasting.  Weather forecasts are made using data from Environment Canada (or, since this is a US column, whatever the US equivalent is), and then they either reiterate the Environment Canada forecast or input the data into their own computer model that they bought from somewhere.  The people on TV are just reading the forecast, and I don't think anyone thinks otherwise.