newport
14d ago
I have sampled a lot of them and I generally agree. The walmart sam's choice brand ones were mostly edible, the great value brand ones less so. Unfortunately I think they discontinued the former. Red baron is okay if you're already tipsy when you start eating it, which has usually been the case when I've had it. Digiorno was forgettable and not worth the expense over the cheaper ones. Some of the expensive ones can be pretty solid, but at that point you aren't really saving money over getting takeout and they only make sense as something to bring to a remote and isolated vacation rental or something like that.
The last one I had that I actually kinda liked was one of the latter, a $12(!) california pizza kitchen-branded frozen pepperoni and honey thing. Tasted pretty good but absolutely not worth $12 when I could pick up a substantially larger hot and freshly made one from $mid_tier_national_chain or a similarly sized hot and freshly made one from $local_good_pizzeria for the same price.
newport
14d ago
I was waiting for someone to bring up the fact that, outside of Buncombe and Watauga* counties, the affected areas are deep red, very very white, and very very poor.
*it's only blue because of the university located there, which is also the main economic driver in the county
newport
15d ago
In the case of Helene, it got all the way into parts of western North Carolina that haven't had flooding of this magnitude since 1916 and absolutely do not routinely experience this type of disaster. I believe they have a lot more experience with snowstorms.
If we were talking about the eastern half of the state this would be very different.
newport
15d ago
Depending on local policy (and the mood of the cop) you might get forced to show up in court over that. At least I know that's theoretically supposed to happen where I live (but probably rarely gets applied unless you're violating some other law simultaneously since it's a huge waste of time both for you and for the government).
newport
20d ago
Modafinil and armodafinil are both scheduled, but enforcement is practically nonexistant for quantities below a kilogram. See gwern's modafinil explainer for details.
If I were buying I'd stick to unscheduled adrafinil to be on the safe side but risk is probably minimal either way. Absolute worst case scenario you get a letter from customs telling you to stop importing unapproved drugs.
newport
25d ago
Also, who can't eat in front of people?
A surprisingly large proportion of women in my experience. Not a ton of them, but enough for me to categorize it as A Thing.
newport
1mo ago
I increasingly suspect that google's image search is artificially handicapped less for political reasons and more for copyright lobby reasons. Reverse image search barely works as originally conceived and the ability to find alternative crops and resolutions for an image you already have is long gone. I don't have much of a reason to believe this other than the fact that these two features seem like they'd attract a lot of ire from stock photo publishers and media publishers in general, and these two features are also the most conspicuously broken/absent.
Yandex notably still has perfectly functional versions of both features.
newport
1mo ago
I haven't seen one myself, but my parents actually did a month or two ago while walking their dog at night. They hate elon for all the same reasons reddit hates him these days (and mumbled something about space junk), but they still thought it was a neat sight.
newport
1mo ago
I think this line of argument gets into the issue that a lot of people driving cars in cities (probably the vast majority) do so because they are employed in the city yet live in the suburbs dozens of miles away. Which is kind of an intractable problem unless capping the density of commercial real estate (or ratio of commercial to residential) is on the table.
newport
1mo ago
My wife really wants to make one with inane or insane things on it
newport
1mo ago
Paradoxically, nicotine products designed for quitting nicotine are often significantly more expensive than regular nicotine products unless your insurance or employer or whoever is subsidizing them. I assume this has to do with FDA approval overhead.
newport
1mo ago
"Section 174"
newport
1mo ago
That's the only one that I've actually heard of an irl woman in my irl social circles actively using and reading routinely, but there are presumably others. Makeup subs and subs for certain varieties of reality TV are probably also big ones.
And then based on what's been happening over at rdrama lately, the redscarepod subs are at least somewhat comprised of women (female).
newport
1mo ago
A cursory Google search suggests that 15 to 20 percent is the standard range
That's the commonly held definition by most people, but there has been a noticeable push towards making 20% the new standard. 20% is usually the default suggested amount on POS systems when I use them, and in some cases it's the lowest option displayed aside from "no tip". This is probably favored by both tipped staff and management, because it leads to larger tips and it reduces pressure for management to raise wages.
This is dumb for all kinds of reasons, chiefly that percentage-based tips are inherently indexed to inflation. And "muh inflation" is the most commonly employed defense of this movement by advocates.
I remember when a flat 15% was standard and 20% was reserved for exceptional service. It wasn't even that long ago. Bah humbug.
newport
1mo ago
People who made $10 an hour pre-COVID now make $25
This is a nitpick but it was more like going from $8 to $13 outside of HCOL areas and/or areas with obscenely high minimum wages. I don't think this has much bearing on your point however, given how these things scale.
newport
1mo ago
The big obvious one is boosting or restricting federal funding for related (or unrelated for that matter) stuff, which is how they went about sidestepping the 21st amendment and forcing every individual state to raise their minimum alcohol purchase age to 21.
In that case they withheld federal highway improvement funding on the order of dozens of millions of dollars per state until the state raised their purchase age to 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act
This is easier to apply to state level than local level obviously, but there are still plenty of federal dollars going to programs carried out at municipal levels. In fact such programs are probably concentrated in the unaffordable cities.
newport
2mo ago
The phenomenon of information that should be hosted on a wiki or forum ending up locked behind a groomercord discord login wall is frequently complained about on rdrama, of all places. They even have a rule (inconsistently enforced) against mentioning personal use of discord in order to prevent the site from turning into nothing but discord in-jokes. I've observed it countless times myself mostly in the sphere of video game mods, where you have to join a discord to view any documentation or instructions related to a mod.
This is stupid and a downgrade in standard of living compared to the information being on the (googleable) public internet. Alas, as the internet becomes more normiefied, it seems the median internet user is more inclined towards consuming information in a conversation format rather than article format (see also popularity of ChatGPT). So this will probably just get worse.
newport
2mo ago
I wish I had advice to give, but I don't. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to expand on part of your post. I largely feel the same way about drug laws, though not with as much conviction as I used to. Over the last several years we have seen some huge strides in drug policy liberalization. Oregon is probably the largest and most notable. Initially, these decriminalization measures seemed really promising! We were finally going to run a proper experiment on this!
Except that's not what happened. At the same time that the drug laws were loosened, enforcement of all manner of public nuisance laws and public intoxication laws fell off a cliff. The same jurisdictions that decriminalized various drugs have adopted catch-and-release policies for all but the most violent of people that are on drugs in public, and now these places are practically held hostage by huge numbers of dangerous drug-addled vagrants.
It didn't have to be this way! We could have decriminalized possession without simultaneously legalizing being a menace to the public! What the hell happened? So, now, the experiment will ultimately be called a failure and we'll have to start the prohibition cycle all over again. I don't have much hope for us getting it right on the next go-around either.
newport
2mo ago
I am admittedly in a bit of a filter bubble with regard to this, but all of the irl men I can discuss politics with agree that nuclear is a very attractive solution to the problem. On both sides of the aisle.
The irl women I have broached the subject with, however... /images/17223237173445024.webp
Which kinda goes back to the point OP raised.
newport
2mo ago
I think a lot of it is the silo'ing of users into algorithm-mediated feeds on the small handful of social media websites that make up 80% of internet traffic. People are segregated (both by choice and by force via algorithm) into bubbles that don't overlap much.
Plus it seems like most of the new slang and acronyms are generated on X.com these days, which you miss if you don't have an account you actively use there. I don't have one and so I have to absorb these new phrases second-hand through the motte, rdrama, and irl friends that send me twitter links and screenshots.
newport
2mo ago
I think we're actually in agreement about all of this; the deaf ears belonged to the unprincipled blue-tinted cancellation mobs which, as you point out, had no central authority to push in any particular direction.
I'm mostly just riffing on the futility of appealing to reason, compassion, or MAD here, when the unprincipled red-tinted would-be cancellation mobs have been watching this play out for a decade and know that the strategy is very effective. I don't think this is a solvable problem in the short term either.
newport
2mo ago
These are the exact arguments that were trotted out in defense of people like the okay sign guy that got fired, and they fell on deaf ears. For 10 years.
Why should these arguments be seriously considered now that the shoe is on the other foot?
I agree that cancelling random people is really, really bad for society. But it seems insane to me to expect the side that's been on the receiving end for a decade to listen to these arguments.
newport
2mo ago
I think almost all of us, here, would. But I don't see how we go from the current situation to that norm coming out of a decade of opposite-valence random cancellations, and immediate calls for a detente come off as absurdly out-of-touch with ground reality to me in that context.
To me, it seems like there has to be some kind of intermediate step. I don't know what that would look like.
If only it were that simple
(pdf warning) https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wakegov.com.if-us-west-1/s3fs-public/documents/2024-09/November%205th%20General_SampleBallots_Guide_0.pdf
See the 181(!) ballot styles for Wake County NC (home of the state capital, Raleigh, and one of the state's 100 counties) starting on page 11. Your ballot depends on exactly which districts you live in for various things, which usually don't line up. These ballots this year are actually on the small side IME; it's usually 3-4 pages rather than 2.
More options
Context Copy link