One time I went to this Afghani (Hazaragi) restaurant with friends in another city. Most of us were vegetarian, and they had heard this place had good vegetarian food, so that’s what we ordered.

There was this simple garlic dal that I still think about. It was so perfectly flavored and balanced and seasoned, with a depth of flavour that surprised the hell out of me. I suspect the vegetable stock they used was cooked long and slow for a very long time, but I’ll never know its secrets for sure.

Everything else we ordered was tasty enough, but this was next level. And it wasn’t just me, everyone at the table agreed. And it was just a bowl of lentils! It’s not like we hadn’t had dal before.

They’ve since changed chefs/owners. The closest sounding recipe I’ve found is this one from a thankfully decent UX site (ignore the coconut milk in the url, there is none) but using stock instead of water and probably much less ginger. I still mean to try this recipe but with more fried garlic… perhaps I have underestimated the masala.

I’m also a huge butter chicken fan. Friends laugh at me for ordering the stereotypical foreigner dish, but it’s just too fucking tasty. It has no right to be so good, especially with a fresh naan straight from the tandoor.

Well, we’re talking about home ownership here. If you’re renting then…

Yes, even as a mere renter myself I am extremely familiar with the workings of home ownership in my area and the legal rights and responsibilities of each. I just didn’t feel it necessary to elaborate on how I know. It didn’t seem relevant.

I am stating a fact, that in the US, HOAs started as way to enforce gentrification. There were actual racist deed agreements and binding covenants. This isn’t an opinion or speculation.

Yes, I am aware many home owners organisations were begun in the US out of xenophobic backlash after slavery was partially abolished. However, the concept of groups of owner-occupiers and investors/developers governing their community is not a uniquely US thing, and likely existed in practise before the term “Home Owners Association” was coined. I could have been clearer that i was speaking more globally and generally, but this is why I used the non-US-specific term “local governing bodies” which could cover everything from favella gang leaders to democraticly dlrected government councils.

OK but that’s not everyone’s opinion. My neighbors and I get along fine without an HOA,

Yes, most owner occupiers where I live also luve without being under an HOA, but they are still also subject to the laws and regulations of their local councils, state governments, federal governments, strata bodies and everyone else in between. Renters like me, or owner occupiers too are able to seek legal recourse through those courts. Depending on the value in dispute, they are able to do it without lawyers. In other communities, such as small towns where the sheriff is the mayor and the local judge was elected with no legal experience… this would be a much bigger problem for the person with little cash.

I wouldn’t even want to live again in a building where the majority vote on repairs was held by non-occupying investors. It leads to stupid amounts of decay.

So better minimum wage laws also encourage businesses to make their user experience less hostile to users? Nice.

Remember DoorDash’s decision to change their interface to stop asking users for more money, when they inevitably point to their riders and say minimum wage laws have reduced their income. They knew the riders in the areas affected by better minimum wage would benefit greatly if they left the experience as it is, and they don’t want that used as evidence in other states for their own minimum wage laws. This us why they haven’t changed the interface for other states, where their riders are still living on as little as DoorDash can legally get away with paying.

I rent in a medium-high-density non-US housing complex. It’s obviously necessary after you live like this for a few years that there needs to be an organisational body to deal with building and land issues, especially when there are hundreds of people who occupy a shared structure that needs to be maintained and repaired. For example, if the water goes out for me, it could also be out for hundreds of other people, which makes it a more expensive and higher stakes problem than a single detached house with one family, and more than one person will need to make the decision on how it is repaired and by whom.

Local governing bodies are not necessarily based in racism or hyper-control motives either, even if American (and other country) housing organisations regularly use it for those purposes even today. These organisations are borne from the complex needs of living in a peaceful community of different people with different desires and needs.

But experience has also told me that this works better when the overarching legal systems are more accessible and corruption-resistant. The biggest problem is that it is very difficult to evaluate what patch of land (or walls and floor) has the best longitude and latitude to provide a decent probability of not being exploited for someone else’s gain or suffering from someone else’s bad decisions. It’s a constant global issue, and the consistent theme is that most places favour the wealthiest human in housing or other legal disputes.

I’d die pretty quickly without modern medicine, so I might choose the era with the easiest access to strong opiates to make the process less painful.

I used to see stories in the legaladvice subreddit regularly about Housing Owner Associations putting legitimate liens on properties for not following the rules. Even when the rules were as ridiculous as “air-conditioning unit can’t be visible from the street” or “only these specific plants can be grown and your lawn cannot exceed a few inches in height and must always be green” or “internal curtains must be pink or white”.

For a culture that prides itself on its freedoms, the miniature authoritarian regimes that HOAs embody are a great example of the evidence not matching the story.

He is just the cutest little thing. <3

That sentiment is ableist as fuck.

You can revel in your superiority when you’re tracking individual animals on your 3 day long persistence hunting trips and foraging your own berries. Agriculture and technology are entirely unnecessary, for prime specimens of humans like you.

That’s caused by intentionally breeding cartilage deficiency genes that cause arthritis and joint pain as the gene effects more cartilage than just in the ears.

Selective breeding for variants like stunted legs will also cause a whole bunch of joint pain and arthritis. Especially with legs, which are taking the entire force of a regularly leaping creature on a small surface area, unlike other body parts which have the full impact cushioned by the lower body muscles and joints.

Skeletons just aren’t made to be fucked with by anything except evolution and maybe a skilled surgeon. Even then there are no guarantees it’s a good mutation or a good surgery.

Complain that they asked a question? Do you usually do that? I only ask because I save complaints for deliberately shitty service.

Are humans performing labor allowed to ask a question? Yes. Especially when they are performing dangerous work, which it legitimately is where I am. I have no desire to fuck with low earning people in dangerous jobs, so I wait outside for them when I see they’re pretty close on the GPS.

When I had covid I put “have covid, knock and leave at apartment door” as the delivery note. It worked pretty flawlessly. My normal delivery message is “will meet you out front, do not call unless necessary”, which works about 90% of the time.

The delivery people who actually piss me off are the ones who call/text “I’ve arrived” when I’m waiting outside and I can see they’re still 3 blocks away on the GPS. Don’t lie to me, even though i understand you’re trying to reduce your wait time, and some people make them wait for 15+ mins.

The other ones who piss me off are the ones who take a 30min detour with my food because they’re juggling apps and two different services have told them to go in opposite directions. Special shout out to the dude who literally rode past me while I was waiting for him outside, so that he could pick up an order for a different app instead of giving me my order. Thanks for chilling half my hot food too with what I assume was a cold drinks order, asshole.

I think this one is a regular cat who is still crouched down from sniffing its stylish accessory. It just looks like it’s a fully standing Munchkin because of the perspective, diffuse lighting and floof ruffles on the shoulderblades that are very slightly out of frame. The curve top right looks like it might be its left hip.

Also wishful thinking. I hope the lizard went on to lead a long and fulfilling life too, for what it’s worth.

A lot of accounts are interacting (voting, posting, etc.) on lemmy-visible activitypub services within a 6 month timespan, but most accounts are not active users interacting every month.

It’s actually a very positive graph. Many of the new accounts would be spammers, bots, throwaway accounts, alts of banned users, users making account on multiple instances because of downtime, etc. So it’s normal to see growth over longer spans of time that aren’t completely reflected in monthly active user statistics.

The current plateau is probably for the best, it gives developers time to catch up somewhat with the last growth spurt. There will be other social media platform clusterfucks in the future that will kick off future growth spurts.

I love how completely cool and casual the cat is about the entire situation. Like it’s just up to date with the latest lizard-tongue-piercing trend, and it’s a little thing called fashion, you wouldn’t understand.

Huh, I’ve never experienced that. And I take a lot of pills. They might have really bad binders or compression at the factory where they’re making yours? But that does sound very irritating, I’m annoyed enough when I cut pills in half and it breaks into not-halves.

I have, however, cut myself on the foil a few times. And that stuff is sharp. Not sharp enough to get through the shitty seal in my first pic, but enough to really slice fingers if you’re not looking.

I would be fine with mediocre or even shitty adhesive properties here. It’s protected and pressure is maintained using a solid HDPE capped jar with perforations, which is already a tamper-evident seal. I don’t need a padlock on it either. Or even a disability-proof cap (the manufacturers prefer the name “child-proof” though). And there are multiple adhesives which don’t impart odor or flavor. Even superglue wouldn’t do it, given you need less than a tiny smear. What an odd false dichotomy you have given me.

Behold, could this be the best of both worlds? (image description: glass bottle with half-peeled seal. The separation is clean and easy and lacks flavor.)

I’ve got a couple of things that I buy which have the best ziploc seals I’ve ever seen, and I wish I could reuse the bags for other things, except they’re opaque and printed. But I have definitely met my fair share of terrible ziplocs too. Nothing like spending 10mins struggling with a shitty ziploc seal when you were just trying to put some food in the freezer.

It looks like Goo Gone has some in it, but it’s mostly petroleum based. D-limonene is a nifty (refined) by-product of citrus agriculture, it’s essentially just the oil from the peels. I use a product that’s basically half D-Limonene, half anionic and non-ionic surfactants (which is somewhat the equivalent of shampoo and sugar alcohol).

I’m not who you were replying to, but I just want to wish you the absolute best of luck in your health battle. Empathy is in short supply at the best of times, but showing empathy when you’re in the middle of something so hard is next level. I bet you also make an excellent pizza, even if that’s not where you expected to be working.

I’ll have my fingers crossed for you, friend. Fuck cancer and everything that it entails.