Loquat
10mo ago
Related anecdote:
My husband's employer provides various services to other companies, with different departments providing different types of services. They recently had a situation in which $Big_Client had contracts with multiple departments: dept. A's contract was making a ton of money, while dept. B's had over time become unprofitable in ways they were unable to remedy. The guys in A thought it was in the company's overall interest for B's contract to keep going, because A's profit was far larger than B's loss and they thought B continuing to provide their service helped keep $Big_Client well-disposed towards the company overall.
Top management, however, saw only that dept. B was not as profitable as they would have liked, and so that contract has recently been terminated. Only time will tell if this winds up harming dept. A's profits from that client.
Loquat
10mo ago
I wanted to chime in but realized that even though my kids are still under 10 my memories of their infancy are super vague. Must be the sleep deprivation, lol. Anyway, I'm pretty sure both learned quickly and without too much trouble. The only problem I recall is that the first one had a tendency at first to get a nipple at just slightly the wrong angle, so she'd get milk but would give me a blister in the process. But once I figured out how to correct that I think it went smoothly.
Loquat
10mo ago
The one from Serious Eats seems good: https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-spicy-chili-crisp
This one from the Mala Market also goes into quite a bit of detail, plus they sell ingredients for it: https://blog.themalamarket.com/aromatic-sichuan-chili-oil-xiangla-hongyou/
Loquat
10mo ago
We put up a deer fence, which purported to also keep out smaller critters by having narrower mesh at the bottom, but after it was up we learned that it wasn't actually narrow enough to keep out young rabbits, so we attached a layer of chicken wire around the perimeter. Squirrels and birds still get in, though; there's no keeping them out.
On the gardening subreddits people also recommend wire wastebaskets from the dollar store, turned upside down, to protect smaller plants. It's a decent solution for those who don't want to deal with actual fencing.
Loquat
10mo ago
Have you read Cannibalism with Chinese Characteristics ?
Loquat
10mo ago
If undercover cops started hanging around outside your house, following you to work, etc, but never arrested or otherwise interfered with you, would that be fine? Nobody else in your town should have a problem with that, when it comes to light?
And if you happen to be a well-known and outspoken critic of your town's mayor, and you find out that other critics of the mayor are being followed by undercover police too, everything's still fine and nobody else should be upset?
Loquat
10mo ago
I just read that story, too; since mods are asking for context, let me help out with that.
"Quiet skies" is a TSA program that's basically the kinder, gentler version of the Bush-era no-fly list. Instead of outright stopping suspected terrorists from getting on airplanes, now they send plainclothes air marshals to ride along and keep an eye on things, possibly with the aid of bomb-sniffing dogs, keeping all of this hidden from the suspect and other passengers. Here is a post from the official TSA blog from 2018 explaining it, and comparing it to the practice of having police officers hang around crime hotspots to cool things down: https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2018/08/22/facts-about-quiet-skies
Recently, some employees of this program have come forward with claims that Trump supporters, including but not limited to Tulsi Gabbard, were put on this list and monitored whenever they flew, for political reasons. This has not yet been reported in any mainstream publication as far as I can tell; all the Google results I got were from small-time independent sources and Twitter posts. It's also unclear exactly what criteria were used - it seems the list also included individuals who went to Washington on Jan 6 but were never charged with any crime.
Loquat
10mo ago
some botched case from a decade ago.
More than botched, Ellen Rae Greenberg's death is just a hair less egregious than "suicide by two bullets to the back of the head". When a woman dies with 20 stab wounds, several of which were to the back of her neck and head, and it's ruled a suicide, and the state continues to this day to fight her parents' attempts to get it reclassified and investigated as a homicide, people do tend to raise an eyebrow.
Loquat
10mo ago
I can easily imagine a marketing guy suggesting it deliberately, to make hip young customers feel like buying this candy is mildly naughty and transgressive.
Loquat
10mo ago
I do find the crows mildly uncomfortable to watch, I think because they're basically a group of poorly-educated black men, probably unemployed since they have nothing better to do with their morning than hang around making fun of the hung-over white guys who passed out drunk in their neighborhood the previous night.
Loquat
10mo ago
Note, however, that the most dangerous sorts of street people may feel affronted by such a dog and initiate lethal violence against it, as in the case that inspired this classic Freddie deBoer article:
To be sure, Jessica Chrustic's golden retriever was not a trained personal-defense dog, but according to her testimony in other articles the dog did indeed attempt to defend her from the homeless man who was menacing her (and then beat the dog to death).
Loquat
10mo ago
A telescoping spear seems quite feasible to make, but in a country that bans guns I'd expect the law to take an extremely dim view of such a thing.
Loquat
11mo ago
Organized by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group with about 10 million members, the video call included activists, podcasters, the singer Pink and regular voters, several who said they regretted not doing enough before the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. [...] On Thursday's call for white women, participants discussed strategies, including reaching out to friend groups, fundraising and countering misinformation.
Are you a member in good standing of any well-connected Democrat activist groups? These calls are for loyal foot soldiers, not the general public.
Loquat
11mo ago
I honestly don't know how seriously to take this; I saw the Reuters article about the "White women for Kamala" call linked on /r/stupidpol and it included the following paragraph:
Hours after the announcement, more than 40,000 people joined a Zoom call for Black women supporters. One for Black men on Monday drew over 50,000 people and there have been separate calls for South Asian women, LGBTQ allies, and white men.
Are we really at the point as a society where we actually prefer having race- and gender-segregated meetings for a topic that's supposed to have broad-spectrum appeal? Or is this something everyone involved will look back on in embarrassment a year later?
Loquat
11mo ago
What do the agents do when they see a guy carrying a big tool bag up a ladder onto the roof? Shoot?
Surely it wouldn't be too much trouble to send an agent over to ask the guy who he is and what he is doing? Maybe check out the tool bag to verify that it does in fact contain tools and not a gun?
Loquat
11mo ago
Just finished Nothing to Envy, about life in North Korea as told by defectors. It's remarkable how the Kim dynasty managed to keep things going despite such drastic mismanagement. The craziest example, I think, when it became necessary to use human feces as farm fertilizer - you're probably assuming they just had the sewage treatment plants compost it, or had feces composted wherever it was being collected previously, or something else sane and reasonable, but no! That is not the North Korean way! Instead, citizens were commanded to bring feces in themselves, with not only a quota to fill but an unreasonably high quota at that, such that feces-theft became an actual thing.
Loquat
11mo ago
My favorite is Ronald Gene Barbour in 1994. He was driving to commit suicide at a particular destination, but missed his exit and decided he might as well continue on the highway all the way to Washington DC and shoot Bill Clinton. As it happened, Clinton was overseas at the time, so Barbour gave up, went home, and wound up telling a friend (and the friend's tape recorder) all about it.
Loquat
11mo ago
If I'm a dictator who wants to reduce obesity, a better approach would be to ban sugary drinks and junk-food vending machines, ban food advertising, and heavily (har har) regulate all types of prepared food. It's a whole lot easier to stay slim when you're not constantly bombarded with temptations to overeat.
Loquat
11mo ago
My husband is having success with Ozempic, after many years of being varying levels of obese. For our first several years together, he was convinced that all diets were either "woo" (ineffective) or "starve yourself" (intolerable). Eventually he decided to try keeping track of his caloric intake and realized that he could lose weight if he kept his daily average to 3000 and exercised vigorously every day, though having a demanding desk job tended to interfere with the latter goal. Cutting the daily intake down below 2500 calories was apparently not feasible until Ozempic chemically altered his appetite.
Loquat
11mo ago
Okra varieties can be really different on size and edibility - I once planted seeds of one called, IIRC, Milsap White, and those pods were still good even at 8 inches long. Alas, the vendor I got it from no longer sells that variety, though I did get a different one this year that claims similar performance. I may or may not be able to verify that this year; my four-year-old likes to pick and eat raw pods when they're still quite small.
Loquat
11mo ago
Yeah, I was expecting it to go more like this:
Low: wants Biden replaced, not knowing the rules prevent it
Mid: must support Biden because the rules prevent replacing him
High: wants Biden replaced, because rules are made by man and can be changed if extreme circumstances require it
Loquat
11mo ago
No direct impact, sure, but if some higher-ups in the party wanted a non-Biden scapegoat to punish then a convention challenger would be the obvious choice.
Loquat
11mo ago
I'm sure mod behavior is part of it; they've really narrowed the sub's boundaries to avoid becoming the new /r/fatpeoplehate and they're not shy about deleting posts that fall outside the lines.
I also feel like there's a certain inherent tension that causes a chilling effect. Is fat-activism a logical extension of the modern leftism, that calls the whole victimology apparatus into question, or is it a vile heresy that can and should be stamped out without harming the rest of the good and necessary structure? Only the latter is acceptable to say out loud over there, but there's a good chunk of the user base that leans towards the former, and mostly knows they have to bite their tongues on the subject.
Loquat
11mo ago
Well, /r/fatlogic is still alive and kicking, though it's mods tend to be cautious lest the admins nuke the place. About the spiciest type of comment you can get away with is remarking on the irony of various super-morbidly obese persons who advocated for fat rights and then died in their 40's.
"Isn't too bad" by Baltimore standards, I guess - we took the kids to Baltimore to see the aquarium not that long ago, which I see is inside the L, and we still got hassled by a homeless guy for money, literally inside the crowded fast-food place where we were eating lunch. I guess he figured the staff would be too busy with the lunch rush to notice him and throw him out, and a place so close to the aquarium would have plenty of affluent tourists.
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