giardia

pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch

That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.

I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.

Oops, mixed up coal and total fossil fuel for energy generation which is a big difference.

I'll be honest, I haven't bothered to double check it, but it may be that coal is just that dirty.

The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal. [edit: 60% is fossil fuel generated, ~20% is coal]

Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.

People have been having a lot less sex for a while now. I think technology is largely to blame, too. We're so accustomed to things being served up for us that the ability to function outside that specific setting has atrophied.

We've become more connected than ever, but we're more singular and selfish than ever. This is worse with generations that have had an internet-connected computer in from of them their whole life, especially in the social media era (studies show). I expect people to be getting more and more neurotic and weird.

I think also that the effects of internet porn really can't be underestimated. There's something emasculating about one of humanity's ultimate drives being sated with a couple of mouse clicks. Then look at what is delivered: it's not sex, it's not even a depiction of sex, it's a depiction of a simulacra of sex. Generally speaking, porn divorces us from our own sexuality. Instead of exploring and developing our own sexuality with others, we're served the depiction of others performing for the camera and we get that in our heads. If you think that doesn't impact your sex life or sexuality I don't know what to say.

Thank you, I hadn't heard about this.

I've always done 20% because it's easy to do in my head. Nowadays it's a low tip for those tip prompts and I punch it in manually if I tip at all.

When I delivered food my tip spread was funny. Many people wouldn't tip at all, many would just let you keep the change or give you a token amount (~5-10%), and a few people would give you over 50% tips. Not many gave me 15-25%.

Too bad I can't pick up any silphium or liquamen at the grocery store. Silphium is thought to be extinct and the exact taste and method for producing liquamen is still debated -- though we know it was some sort of fish sauce.

Oh god this gives me flashbacks. I never knew how bad corruption was on home computers until I started using git annex on a multi-terabyte file collection. No matter which computer or disk I used, it would inevitably happen. Then I started to wonder how much corruption had crept in before I was using git annex and never noticed it.

I've basically given up on maintaining large digital media collections for long term purposes. It puts my OCD in overdrive.

Steinbeck too (Travels With Charley).

Interest rates go up, money is harder to come by, people are building less since they can't get a loan, contractors find other work until construction picks back up.

The pink palace! I miss it.

I'm not a fan of animations myself, though I think it could be somewhat useful with a tiling WM to help maintain (for lack if a better word) your orientation. Sometimes a new window will open and move the other windows around and get resized unexpectedly, or you'll move a window and lose track for a split second. Animation would show you where everything gets put so you don't have to reorient yourself. Not a very common issue, but I could see animation helping there.

There are quite a few places in densely forested areas. But it's not just a matter of uptime (which is an issue), but of capacity. If you live 50-100 miles out of town in a small community, the community can't afford to upgrade those lines. The county won't pay for it, and neither will the state or feds. That kind of range also means you need to charge fairly often.

A blind tax on ICE would be regressive as hell.

You'll be punishing people who can't afford an electric or hybrid which would in turn reduce their employment opportunities, either by taxing the fuel at a higher rate or by making their vehicle more expensive upfront (so they either don't want to put miles on it or they're forced to get a cheaper vehicle which is more prone to issues) -- and let's be honest, public transport outside the major city centers is a joke in America and probably always will be because of how spread out we are.

Rural residents (frequently low income) often don't have a stable enough grid to charge electric vehicles reliably either.

Don't get me wrong, I think we need to make the shift but there are still a lot of unresolved practical issues. I expect there's a lot more room for technological improvements in the next 5-10 years which will drive the cost so low that people won't even want an ICE unless it's really necessary for something. Honestly, there's bigger fish to fry with carbon emissions anyway.

I kind of figured it was the other way around.

Thank you. My local practioners are terrible and border on being unethical.

concierge doc

Can you please elaborate? I need something like this and I'm willing and able to pay for it.

How would I get started finding one?

That would work great in the summer if the community has space and exposure. Winter in a mountain valley, not so much.

I probably didn't use the best technique for melting tbh, it was filling a stock pot and popping it on the stove, then adding more snow as it melted.

I must be mistaken, I swore I heard about this getting passed on OPB about 6 months ago to phase them out in the next decade.

I agree, but it's a thorny political problem. Nobody wants to pay for burying the lines, even after above ground lines caused one of the biggest fires in state history. Rural communities can't afford it, and the county or state won't pay for it.

edit: I was mistaken, OR still hasn't done this, but there's been a big push for it in the past year or two and it's still a dumb idea.

They've done this in Oregon to keep carbon emissions down which is a huge mistake IMO. Many rural communities do not have a very reliable grid (I'm in one of them), and the state has done nothing to improve it (this is going to be a big issue when everyone is driving an electric vehicle). This is especially concerning during winter storms when you really need to be able to heat something up.

The winter storm of 2019 for instance had me stuck at home for at least two weeks in 3-4 feet of snow. All electrical was down the entire time, pipes were frozen solid despite leaving taps running, and I had to melt snow for drinking water. Most people don't understand just how much energy melting snow consumes until they've done it themselves -- my stove was going all day long, nonstop. Had I had an electric stove, I would have had to rely on my wood stove but many people don't have that option. The only other realistic option would be to rely on a generator, but for an electric range you're going to both need a big ginny and a lot of fuel on hand for it.

A better approach IMO would be to legislate better kitchen hoods and ventilation, and to focus on educating people of the hazards of using gas. Also funding a more resilient grid.

I see, misunderstood you.

Yeah but not everybody at Woodstock was recording everything that they and everyone around them did.

Almost every single citizen is now equipped with a surveillance device at all hours of their life, and they have incentive to use them and share the data they collect. This is little to no recourse for you if you don't want to be recorded. At least in the 60s it was a handful of news casters with huge equipment you could steer clear of.

A slight tangent, but it's funny how everyday people are on the hook for legal consequences, even when legal professionals can't agree which laws apply, or even what they mean.

This post got me wondering, and I hope somebody in here can inform me. Wasn't Zen one of the only schools that wasn't wiped out in Japan because they didn't place so much emphasis on the warrior priest? I seem to recall some shogun or another felt threatened and purged almost all of the Buddhist monasteries at the time.

Seems like the Zen school wouldn't be such a threat if they just sat inside all day working on their posture.

If you read the wiki of the Carrington event, telegraph operators were getting electrocuted and the pylons were throwing sparks because of the EM induction. I could be wrong, but this doesn't sound like an event the grid or consumer electronics are designed to handle.

Some people today estimate that you really only need to take down around a dozen key power stations to essentially take down the whole grid in the lower 48. If the Carrington event was indeed worldwide, we wouldn't be able to get back to where we were for a while. We're talking little or no electricity, little or no radio, etc.

Again, the question really comes down to "What are the odds?" The CE seems to be very, very unlikely. If there were a handful of historical accounts of aurora in equatorial regions worldwide I think we'd be much more proactive about it.

Another Carrington event would likely be catastrophic. Telegraph operators were talking to each other with the power sources disconnected. Everyone over the world experienced it. Can you imagine what would happen to our very delicate and unshielded electronics today?

The question is how common a Carrington event really is. You could start to find out by looking for historical accounts of aurora in equatorial regions that coincide with aurora in other parts of the world.

The implication of your comment is that Bitcoin is developed in part by someone who acts like an idiot.