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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • People are generally worse at doing arithmetic in their heads after accepting calculators.

    Where did you get this idea from? Your teachers? Parents? It’s absolutely false. Sure lazy people are generally bad at skills they don’t both practicing themselves, like arithmetic and critical thinking. Those of us that actually use arithmetic and calculators regularly, from retail cashiers to engineers, know that it’s easy to not recognize a wrong answer without ingrained basic arithmetic skills. So much so that one could argue that you should only be using a calculator if you can already roughly intuit the answer a d use the calculator to make precise answers more quickly.


  • In spirit I totally agree with you, but that kind of strategy just doesn’t work anymore. Boycotting Apple is relatively easy. Boycotting Disney is a little harder, unless you’re already a pirate, but not impossible. Then there’s companies like Nestle, arguably worse than any of them. Companies like Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi are so diversified, with so many subsidiaries and shell companies spread the world over. It is damn near impossible for the average person to boycott Nestle in any meaningful way.

    Network graph of major subsidiaries or global food and drug corporations.

    Go ahead and try to boycott just one or two of the corporations in this image. Boycotts may still impact specific brands at a local level, but they have become pretty ineffective against corporations.

    All of the boycotts in the world can’t beat the apathy rotting away the foundation of democracy. Boycott one company or brand and another will step in to fill the political void. Apathy keeps young voters out of the voting booths in local elections. These companies have a vested interest in convincing you that your vote doesn’t matter and that government regulation is ineffective. It’s a lie to keep you apathetic and disinterested in politics because your vote is the only part of the system they can’t directly influence.





  • You’re not really making your own bread unless you grow and harvest the ingredients yourself. What do you mean you don’t mill your own grains? Refine your own sugar?Can’t really even call yourself a baker unless you build your own oven. /s

    Cooking and baking are basically ALL prep work and cleanup. The actual cooking and baking is overall a pretty small fraction of the overall effort that goes into making dinner or a loaf of bread. Go ahead and feel proud of yourself if you take on more of those preparatory tasks, IF it makes for a better end result. But that doesn’t mean you get to act superior to somebody else on a different path of their own personal cooking journey. Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “this is cooking, but that is not” is kind of like drawing a line between blue and indigo on a rainbow. It’s arbitrary and adds little to good the discussion.

    Go ahead and cheat on those components where it works. Not everybody has the time, space, energy, or skill to make every bread, sauce, or spice blend from scratch. If you can make something better by getting back to the basics and fundamental ingredients, go for it! But let’s be honest when it’s more about pride than the final product, enjoyment of the meal.

    Personally, the biggest reason I prefer to avoid pre-prepared foods that only require heating is so that I can avoid certain common ingredients that are often pumped into those things in insane proportions, particularly salt and sugar. It’s not so that I can feel proud of an arbitrary label.






  • If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.

    • When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
    • When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
    • They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
    • Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.







  • Thanks, although I was able to infer some of the significance from the name, I was confused about how kids were actually dying because something like this has been around for a long time. At least 30 years ago kids this age were making themselves blackout by holding their hands tightly against their necks. Even then, before the age of always on internet, most of the other kids rightly called those kids out as idiots. Adding mechanical devices is just next level evil? Next Level Stupid? I don’t know. I guess that’s what the lawsuit is trying to determine. I can guarantee that it will be used to further erode our privacy rights online as more and more kinds sites are forced to verify their users with government issued identification.