It’s a hard choice between D and G for me. G gets all of the southern US cuisine that Europeans are always blown away by, along with texmex, traditional Mexican, street tacos, Louisiana seafood, Cali and Florida seafood, etc… But D gets India, the Mediterranean (maybe even Italy? I can’t quite tell on this map), Korean, Japanese, etc…

If I wanted to commit to consistently good food, I’d go with G. But if I wanted a wider variety with a broader spice palette, I’d go with D.

Welcome to the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”, where accusations levied by newspapers are considered libel unless those accusations have been proven in court.

For instance, what if they get some of the charges dropped, and have another reduced? Now the newspaper has printed a criminal accusation that wasn’t proven in court, and is in hot water for exaggerating things to intentionally ruin the attacker’s image.

If you’re using Linux for gaming, why not try Bazzite? It’s immutable, which is… Contentious. But it’s one of the best plug-and-play distros for gaming, with Nvidia support right out of the box.

Plenty, and that’s actually part of the problem. The tech industry has used “there are no local workers so we need H1B’s” as an excuse to keep wages artificially lowered and working conditions in the fucking toilet. There are plenty of skilled tech workers in America… They just don’t want to put up with the bad pay and 80 hour crunch weeks that the industry is demanding.

The H1B system has been a conduit for worker abuse for a long time, because it ties the worker’s legal status to their job. So they’ll be willing to put up with awful working conditions, because quitting means they’ll be facing deportation. The same way that the agriculture industry relies on illegal immigrants to cheaply harvest crops, the tech industry relies on H1B workers to keep wage expectations suppressed.

Honestly, this feels a little like a “broken clock is right twice a day” moment. Trump is doing this for all the wrong reasons, (he’s probably trying to recoup a portion of the massive tax cuts he gave to the rich, and have some leverage to use against the tech industry to get them to fall into line with the regime), but I do think it’ll be a net benefit for American tech workers. I foresee it hurting the smaller startup companies the most… But that’s because Trump is likely going to go “if you agree to fall in line, I’ll waive the fees.” But that will only apply to the big companies that Trump actually cares about.

The bigger concern is actually academia. There are a lot of H1B visas in universities, and those visas are largely earned. These are well respected researchers and professors who are the best at what they do, and deserve those visas because the university can make a genuine “this talent isn’t available in our country” argument. And Trump almost certainly won’t offer any kinds of waivers to the universities, because conservatives hate higher education. These tech industry will shift towards outsourcing, (which is already extremely common), but academia won’t be able to do that.

Whenever my wife says anything along the lines of “I’ve been thinking”, my go-to response is always “do I need to call the church?”

I’ve used email addresses as an example. You can have an @gmail address, and an @yahoo address. They can both send and receive emails from each other, despite running on different email servers, because the communication protocol between them is standardized.

Late fees have largely been abandoned, yes. But lost book fees are still widely in use. They’ll just lock your account until you either return the book or pay for a replacement.

Eerily enough, I would have checked six of these off the list in the past day alone… I banged my wife, cut some fresh chives from our balcony garden for our omelettes, made some pu’erh tea with breakfast, then got a slushie on my way into work at the opera, where I wore my favorite shoes.

That was probably because it was prescribed to you. For people without ADHD, it’s like capsulized motivation, combined with the best caffeine buzz they’ve ever had.

It’s a scheduled drug specifically because the neurotypicals treat it like cocaine’s little brother. People with ADHD go through hell to get their meds because the neurotypicals just can’t fucking help themselves.

It’s not even the addiction that gets you; It’s the withdrawal symptoms after you quit.

Mine was, oddly enough, LSD. It’s not even physically addictive. I didn’t even particularly enjoyed tripping, but in my day-to-day life I have aphantasia; I can’t visualize anything.

If I asked you to close your eyes and picture an apple, then rate 1-5 how realistic you could make it look, most people would probably land somewhere around a 3 or a 4. Not photorealistic, but it would at least be recognizable as an apple and convey the important parts. A few artists or particularly visual people may land on a photorealistic 5. The people who are more biased towards speech (like an internal monologue) may land closer to a 2, like a rushed sketch, or even a 1 where it’s just a coarse outline and some color.

I land on a 0. I just see the backs of my eyelids. I can describe an apple to you. I can tell you what it smells like, what it tastes like, what color I would want it to be, how big it is, how heavy it is, what it feels like to crunch into it and get a little bit of the peel stuck between your teeth, et cetera… But I can’t visualize it.

I always thought the “picture yourself doing/going/working/etc {x}” types of things were just a figure of speech. Like if I was in elementary school and an art teacher said to picture a thing then draw it, I would just skip the first part. I’d still use my imagination before putting anything on paper, but it wouldn’t be visual.

But with LSD, that’s different. I can actually visualize things. Not particularly well, because everything is wobbling around like it’s made of tiny ocean waves… But I can do it. I quickly found that creative outlets were much easier when I could actually plan things out visually before putting them on paper. It was like I had been stuck using black and white paints my entire life, and then someone handed me some red, green, and blue for the first time. I also quickly realized how boring life was when I couldn’t just conjure images out of the ether at will.

Sadly, shrooms (which is commonly compared to “like doing LSD then smoking a blunt” in terms of feeling) doesn’t do it for me. I guess it doesn’t activate the same parts of my brain. But for whatever reason, LSD specifically allows me to overcome my aphantasia. I haven’t done it in years now, but I occasionally get the whim to try it again. Not enough to actually bother tracking down a new plug, but enough to muse about it while I type out shit like this.

Nah, Russia actually respects force because it’s one of the few languages they truly do understand. Putin flexes his power to see how much he can get away with, and only really backs down when others start flexing too. Turkey unflinchingly shot down two Russian fighter jets that entered their airspace. That was a decade ago, and Turkey hasn’t had an issue with them since.

I should get a moka pot…

So will LGBTQ+ people. Especially trans people.

Similar to how they’re working on porn bans while simultaneously saying that being trans is just a weird sex thing. The end goal is to ban these minority groups from public, and give authorities carte blanche to harass them simply for existing.

Know what can be automated a lot easier than cars or planes, and can carry orders of magnitude more people with much less fuel usage? Fucking trains.

I mean, if time is stopped then everything would technically have an infinite amount of inertia.

That’s a common myth. There are laws in place that exempt stores from liability in this exact scenario. No, the real reason they do it is to enforce artificial scarcity. They can’t donate to a food bank, because then people might get it for free instead of paying the store for it.

Yup, stores realized they could make more money while simultaneously dealing with less overhead.

Eggs are a great example. Let’s compare a $2/dozen vs $6/dozen difference. With $2 per dozen, you need to sell 50 cartons to make $100. Consider that you also paid for each carton, had to ship them into the store, pay people to stock the shelves, pay rent for the store, pay to keep the store lit and cooled, unsold product spoils, etc… And your margin probably isn’t that great on that $100. Let’s say your overhead expenses are ~$1.80 per carton. You probably spent ~$90 in overhead, so you only actually netted ~$10 in profit.

Now let’s do the same math with a $6 carton. You only need to sell ~17 cartons to make the same $100. And since you’re selling fewer cartons, your overhead expenses have dropped; Some of the expenses (like rent and utilities) haven’t changed, but you’re not paying as much in shipping, there’s less waste from spoilage due to smaller back-stock, etc… Let’s say that all combines to reduce your overhead per carton by 5¢. So now you’re paying ~$1.75 per carton. That 17 cartons would have only cost you ~$29.75 in expenses. So now you have made over $70, instead of only $10. All while comfortably selling less.

And of course, there are two big losers in this scenario. The first is the producer. The egg farmers. Suddenly, their demand has dried up. Not completely, because food is a fairly inflexible demand… But people are increasingly avoiding them if they can find cheaper alternatives. And that’s exactly what we have seen; Farms are almost universally in the red right now, and Trump just followed that up with a one-two punch. First, he removed a lot of their cheap labor (immigrants) and then he killed a bunch of subsidies that would have kept those farms afloat. But hey, they got what they voted for, right?

The other big loser is the consumer, who is suddenly struggling to feed themselves and their family. And it’ll likely only continue to get worse.

But let’s be honest, we all know we would behave like the aliens from Independence Day - mercilessly conquering and harvesting alien worlds and spreading destruction across the universe.

This would be true, except that Star Trek assumes a truly post-scarcity world where nobody needs to harvest alien worlds. Hell, the capitalists (Ferengi) are depicted as ruthless and conniving (oftentimes outright cartoonish) villains most of the time.

Yeah, I started with TNG a year or two ago. I’m now halfway through season 4 of Voyager, just from watching an episode every few days whenever I have time. Eventually I’ll move on to DS9, before digging into the movies (which I have simultaneously heard are incredible and hot garbage, depending on the individual user’s preferences) and the newer stuff.