solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7d ago
Yes, cooking for one, maybe a few times a month. For context, I don't eat breakfast and get free lunch a lot at work, so often dinner is a snack. I consider myself a mid-tier cook that make a few things well if prone to certain culinary sins (oversalting my food!), but my friends and family tend to like what I cook. As for boring, I get just as bored with the restaurants in my area and have the same ability to eat pretty much the same thing or at least same theme if prompted. I cook because I'm a cheapskate and like to make an at least nominal effort to eat healthy.
The crock pot and freezer are my best friend, as can be the oven (Oven roasted chicken and vegetables doesn't take much skill and in my experience usually turns out good.). If I like something I cooked (Usually, what I cook turns out decent Sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's mediocre, but it's rarely bad enough that I don't like it.), I have no problem eating the same thing multiple times a week, supplementing with eating out or frozen convenience food for the sake of variety. I gravitate toward soups and stews and usually don't care for pasta. I tend to stick to a set of recipes and techniques that I've been using for years and with experience one gets an intuitive grasp of "this can be substituted for that". Some things just aren't hard, and some convenience foods aren't that bad. Mashed potatoes are not challenging to make from scratch. On the other hand, "just add water" sausage gravy is good enough that I've never felt compelled to learn to make it from scratch.
I also like to meal-prep multiple entrees to help with variety. In my freezer I have 15 bean soup (This recipe checks all the boxes. It's idiot-proof, cheap per serving, nutritious, and tasty. I like to add spinach and okra for some greens, and maybe carrots.), Brunswick Stew (My latest batch turned out over-seasoned because I didn't account for using pre-cooked barbecue pork instead of raw, but it isn't bad.) and a chicken and lentil curry abomination (I wouldn't serve it to guests, and it turned out spicier than I intended, but I like it.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
Err, not really. The California State Assembly has been controlled by the Democrats since 1970, barring '94-96, and the same has been true of the California State Senate without interruption since 1973. The GOP was competitive in California in a way that it wasn't in much of the US at the time, but I'd hardly have called it a "solid red state".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
12d ago
I was in grade school, in rural Alabama. We were put in the library and then a TV was wheeled in and turned on, showing the two towers burning. I was good friends with a pair of twin boys. I don't remember which was in the room with me, but he was crying. Both brothers wound up doing tours in Afghanistan 10+ years later. I could talk about how insane the Courtesy of the Red White and Blue era was, from 9/11 to invading Iraq, but when I think of 9/11 I think of the veterans.
Mercifully, most of the guys I know who spent time in the sandbox made it out more or less alright. But then there was Zach. Zach was a coworker of mine at a pizza place circa 2010. I didn't know him super well, only knew that he'd had a five alarm meltdown over a minor fender bender on the job and that was the last I saw of him. Another driver I was closer with explained: They'd grown up together, done Boy Scouts together, and so on. Apparently he'd done two tours in Iraq. The first was a cakewalk. The second was Fallujah, and he'd survived in body but not in spirit, lost his best friend in rather graphic fashion (The driver who told me this, an Air Force brat who'd been kept out of the service by a bad back, used to drive me nuts in how he'd get guys fired up to tell their war stories but not really listen to them.).
The last I heard Zach was on drugs and in and out of jail. I have no idea what happened to him. I hope that he's found peace, in this life or the next.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15d ago
What interests me about this is that for all of the retrospective mocking of Paul krugman's comparison of the internet to a fax machine, in terms of economic growth it didn't really change much.
For all the promise of computers, the internet, smartphones, etc. first world economic growth has been stagnant since the 2000s. Even for the US, a relative success story, real GDP per capita growth has been slower in the last 25 years then it was from 1950 to 75 or 1975 to 2000.
What do we do if AI changes much of our lives, but doesn't produce anywhere near the promised economic growth?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
27d ago
IMO it's classic Trumpian style over substance bullshit that makes me loathe the man.
Setting aside the fact that starting a trade war with Canada was a stupid idea that nobody asked for (see also: Greenland, "51st state", etc.), renaming a body of water accomplishes nothing.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
29d ago
Short term: Nothingburger.
Long term: War, or to quote Victoria Nuland, "Fuck the EU." Let us not forget that it was turning down a trade agreement with the EU that set off Yanukovych's downfall in Ukraine.
It's not a perfectly clean comparison (Canada is a lot more united, and the US less so, compared to Ukraine and Russia respectively circa 2013.) but I don't see any future US administration being overly tolerant if Canada seriously orients itself to the EU (because military alliances follow economic ones) or China, and "fighting for sovereignty" can be used to excuse any number of bad outcomes of antagonism with the US for Canadian politicians.
To be clear, I do not advocate this. I doubt anyone in Russia or Ukraine expected to be in a shooting war back in '04 either, though.
IMO the war was never winnable for the South. Yes, they had favorable terrain in the east and the Army of Northern Virginia did a respectable job of operating in that theater, but the western theater was a wide open disaster and it's hard to think up a counterfactual in which Grant and Sherman wouldn't be able to break it open sooner or later with superior manpower and materiel, not to mention near total naval supremacy.
More to the point, even if the South were to "win" in some fashion, what's to stop the north from licking their wounds and gearing up for another invasion in a few years? The US was never going to tolerate a competing power on the continent if it didn't have to and I seriously doubt a European power would've been willing to spend the resources required to credibly defend the Confederacy given their other global commitments.
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