charlesf
18d ago
I can't take credit for the following idea, but I don't remember where I stole it from either.
Trying to talk to women about the actual mechanics of sexual/romantic relationships is like trying to talk to a restaurant critic about the intricacies of cooking a difficult dish. They can't. They know what they like, they have some idea of the different techniques that produce the food they review, but they aren't in the business of producing meals for others to eat. Women have this same relationship to romance. They're very interested in it, but they never actually produce it.
All they do is consume and judge.
They want quality final products. No counterfeits, no bait and switch. They don't care how its made. How hard could it be?
charlesf
28d ago
This is true of almost all true berries, to an extent. There is an ideal size for everything, bigger is usually not better.
(bannanas are berries. as are tomatos and peppers and grapes. True Berries, botanically speaking.)
charlesf
28d ago
Apples are just better now actually. People eat them and give them to their kids. They're very convenient for all parties involved. If stored correctly some varieties will keep for 18 months. You could be buying an apple today that was picked in the late fall of 2024 and its mostly fine. They'll get turned into something else if they get to old and arent Fancy any more. Several terrible varieties of apple have more of less vanished as Americans started to eat more apples in the 90s, red delicious at the top of the chopping block. Apples have trends too, which lets them charge more for some of them desipte idential costs when they're 'hot'. Good margins generally in a space not really known for them. Low spoilage. Great crop overall thoughout American history.
charlesf
28d ago
I can't really help with the meat, but I was a produce manager in a previous life. I'll address the object level points first.
-the strawberries are supposed to be like this. It's intentional. The entire relationship of the strawberries to their producer, transporter, and retailer is as something you will give them money for. Once you've bought it their relationship to that item is over. As long as no other retailer defects from this scheme this is how it will remain. They are selected for shelf life and appearance to drive sales. No one cares if they're consumed. This is the ultimate fate of a great deal of products in capitalism if people don't actively work against it with a priority other than raw exploitation and profit. (im a capitalist myself, i just acknowledge its failure modes exist) Strawberries are easy to grow btw.
-bananas were never meant to leave the tropics. they actually have -terrible- shelf lives if picked anywhere even close to ripe. Bannanas are shipped rock hard and dark green. When kept in a 0 oxygen cooler they'll stay this way for 2-3 months. The retailer or distributer can then plan for how many they need to 'be ripe' at what times to meet demand but not over-shoot. You then gas the absolute shit out of them with ethylene. You can still sometimes see the condensed ethylene on the outside of the peel when they're trying to ripen them fast. Its a natural outgas of the plant to time the ripening of all its fruits together in the wild. The commercial operations are safe to eat; this actually happens to most tropical fruit. Without ethylene gas chambers most of us who've lived in the temperate climes would likely have never had a bananna in our lives. With it they are 49¢/lb at Kroger. The reason they are green and rotten is a combination of being in storage for too long then gassed too hard so they'll look sellable (remeber our first entry on the list) long enough to move. The people who profit off the bananna probably don't mind these rotting in your home. Bannanas are cheap after all: just buy more. You'd likely need to move to Puerto Rico at the closest to grow your own bannanas, and I'm told even with a good climate they're a pain.
-Kiwis that are partially rock-hard and partially mush - the bannana process above is used on kiwis. the defects are the results of the same process descibed above. Again, that piece of fruit was a success as it was purchased.
-Potatoes that wrinkle in a couple day(s). Different beast with this one. These were likely already on the way out when purchased. A good potato will last months in the dry and dark. Pull off the bottom in the store. Break a few of them open. Turn the bags over if they're in bags. Light damage appears as a green stain just under the peel. The stores will flip them over to hide it. Look for dates, the larger bags are the only ones that usually have them, like the big case pack sacks the individual 5lb bags come in. Yellow potatos are harder to pass off as good in the store, the light damage is more obvious. Many stores will also create a disorienting lighting situation near the potatos so they are hard to judge. We did.
In general, most but not all produce items can be learned about and judged more or less accurately in the store. There are some that are hard though, like a watermelon. You can tell when one is obviously bad, but a nice juicy sweet one and one that is solid white on the inside can be identical on the outside. A good store will always cut a few open for sale. If they haven't done this, but usually do, its for a reason. Berries should not be too big or too dark in color, signs of too much or too little water. Apples should have a tight skin around the stem. Stone fruit (peaches, plums etc) and tomatos are harmed by refidgeration, go as fresh as possible on these at all times. I'll tear a peach in half in the store to test them. Any air gap between the stone and the inside of the fruit is a rejection of the whole lot, thats refridgeration damage.
You will probably never get a good tomato at a grocery store. Its not impossible, but there are very few incentives for a store to go through the trouble, and all the incentives to sell beautiful but entirely tasteless tomatos. The ones with a bit of the stem attached are sometimes better. In general anything with the stem still attached it either a flex or a mistake. It super easy to judge the freshness when you can examine a good length of the stem for moisture and dessication. A wet, green center of the stem is in indication that its been off the plant a single digit number of days and almost never seen in a conventional store. Farmers markets and home gardens are the place to get tomatos. Also the Amish if you live near them can hook you up with a lot of this stuff.
Organic is often a scam. It wasn't always this way. You have to research heavily in this space to avoid paying more for shriveled crap.
I can probably give specific guidance for various produce items, though I've been out of the business for 20 years now.
charlesf
1mo ago
I did this. FAANG job, live in Appalachia. Living at work isn't all its cracked up to be but I like it now.
charlesf
1mo ago
I took a good amount of formal music lessons as a kid and young adult. Much of the syllabus of instruction back in the 80s/90s for this was classical, marches, and jazz. Acedemic Jazz is a thing, and when its all you have experienced you have to take other people's word for it that jazz is cool, or maybe that it used to be cool? Then one day when I was 18 I got hired by a friend of my father's to take over for their recently departed drummer, mostly jazz standards and Great American Songbook stuff. Still pretty 'square', but some of these guys played in other jazz groups too, who performed at bars, who had drug and alcohol problems. Real Musicians. Thats when I learned that Jazz is a conversation. It has a huge history with a smaller present day, but the conversation has never stopped. An improvisational jazz performance, if the musicians are good enough and know about the history of the conversation, about the muscial past and present of jazz, is itself a small new addition and a reflection on that shared past. There are inside jokes, touching tributes to passed away friends, challenges and submissions, all expressed entirely through their instrument, wordlessly. There's an entire other world in there, as wide as it is deep, if you can speak the language.
charlesf
1mo ago
most of modern India's problems could be fixed by getting rid of special treatment for the lower castes and making Brahmins truly the top dogs again.
I've worked with many Indians in corporate America. I've even been sent to Hyderabad and Delhi a few times over the years. Its takes a while for Indian coworkers to open up to you about this stuff, if they ever do, but opinions in the same general neighborhood as this are incredibly common, though not necessarily the part about Brahmins being in control, the bits about special treatment of the scheduled castes seems universally unpopular amoung people who don't receive the treatment, and even some that did. Of note, Indians that work in corporate America in the US is a powerful filter on who you hear from.
charlesf
1mo ago
There's a whole type of content creator that basically makes videos answering very commonly asked questions on the internet, or with very short walkthoughs for commonly researched tasks, that puts most of their effort into stretching their video (that might even be answering a yes/no question) out to at least 10 minutes long with the actual answer appearing after two ads, then using SEO tricks, imitating the name and appearance of channels with better reputations, and other non-value add techniques to get views, that has been suddenly decapitated by AI, almost overnight. The channels that actually care about thier subject matter aren't doing much better if its not something nuanced or likely to be hallucinated about by AI. The stretching out of the videos to absurd durations is still about chasing as much add revenue as possible before the viewer closes the video. So not only does it take waaaay to long, it always seems like they are just about to answer the actual question in the name of the video, but they aren't. If you're lucky someone will timestamp it in the comments and the channel owner hasn't removed it yet.
charlesf
1mo ago
their civilization makes Israelis and Zionists uncomfortable and envious.
Is there anything in particular about modern Iran toward which Israelis/Zionists are envious? I'm not trying to make a point here; I ask out of genuine curiosity. There is much in the very long history of Persian culture to be proud of. I ask because I hear things like this from time to time from very, very anti-Velayat-e Faqih Iranian exiles but there's never any follow up. Modern Isreal seems to have little to envy modern Iran about, with the giga-caveat that much of this is Isreal's doing I suppose. Perhaps its that Isreal is driven to harm Iran out of theoretical envy at what Iran might have become in a counterfactual recent history where there is no Isreal to have prevented their greatness?
charlesf
1mo ago
The ultimate “replayability” is not to be found in any game where the story and drama are largely driven by the non-player controlled characters and environment, which is most games. Player vs Environment is much more popular as a core game type than Player vs Player, yet its only in the games where the drama is overwhelming driven by player actions creating constantly emerging content where true replayability can be found in my opinion.
The problem with this is that 99% of obligate PvP games are short iteration, high twitch reaction, high skill: 1st person shooters. FPS have a strong filter for a certain player type and have very few opportunities for the players to drive the content. Other games have excellent PvP systems but it’s a sideshow that is entirely avoidable if you aren’t interested in it, like Guild Wars, or never re-iterate, like Eve online. The trick is medium term iteration (a single “match” takes anywhere from a week to a month to finish), slower pacing, still obligate PvP, but much of the competition between the players takes place outside of direct face to face combat in gathering and refining resources and producing weapons and building fortresses that take 20 people multiple days to finish constructing. A thousand people on both sides, or more. Imagine an RTS type game, except all the pawns are players. 0 bots. And the match takes two weeks to a month with the medium term pacing. Only a handful of games have tried this and they’ve all eventually failed. The only game out there right now that gets close is called Foxhole, a war simulator with two factions that are permanent enemies, every weapon and bullet are made by players sans a small amount of starting weapons, almost every defense structure is player built, complex industrial chains are needed for advanced items, massive amounts of resources requiring dozens of people working together for days to make 1 battleship/super tank. A month long RTS with no bots or AI NPCs. 1-3k players online together in a single game world. It’s almost the same map every war, the developers make gradual adjustments over time. It has a level of genuine risk of losing all your efforts and hours invested in any particular war while you’re asleep that few games are comfortable with. For me the extremity of negative experience you can have in Foxhole, thousands of manhours of work lost to an ambush or nighttime raid, is a huge part of the draw. Very few major studios will ever publish something that they know has common content interactions that can drive the players into a berserk rage (souls types excluded, this is their thing too). I get bored very fast with any multiplayer game with training wheels rules to protect the slow and soft. And no loss is ever for very long: the next war is never more than a month away and you get to try again with grand plans and a lot of “this time we’re doing it differently” planning with your friends. Fully 60% of people who try Foxhole hate it immediately, another 30% grow to hate it in one war. The remainder become obsessed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=YE5bPhKpoWU
charlesf
3mo ago
I generally have an extremely good memory that I've been semi-coasting on most of my life. It made tests in school trivial but also drove a lot of boredom as I'd read the entire book for class immediately then get bored a couple weeks later.
Anyway, I can potentially have an issue with any piece of information if I initially learn it wrong. The factually incorrect memory sticks just as strongly as the accurate memory. I have to "patch" over the bad memory with a new, disctinct "correcting" memory. Forever. The best example of this: I learned east & west backwards when I was 6 years old. I realized around 9 or 10 I'd done this; they painted a giant map on the school playground with the directions labeled. 43 years later west and east are still backwards, but I have a second memory that overrides the first one: "you learned this wrong, you have them reversed". There are probably 10-15 things like this. I've got Slovenia and Slovakia locations switched (I grew up around both groups of immigrants and have some Slovak ancestors, it wasn't just trivia).
I also can't remember names. They're too arbitrary; a series of mouth sounds/written symbols that represent a person with no real connection to the person. People's names might as well be 4 digit numbers for all the connection they have to the person and my ability to remember them. I have to make flashcards when I move teams at work or there are new people I've met that it is important I remember them. I have spent probably 50+ hours of my life over the last 40 years intentionally drilling myself to remember important names. I can also learn these wrong like in the first example; I try to just stop using the names of these people if I can. I also have trouble telling people apart. Its not full blown prosopagnosia, I can tell different people apart generally ok. But if they are the same age, gender, race, and culture I will struggle. I actually do worse with members of my own race/culture. I also tend to find the overwelming majority of people to be rather interchangable, non-unique, and frankly boring at a personal level, which doesn't help.
On a side note, if someone's name is in a song, I can relibably get that song to start playing in my head when I see them. Infinitely easier than remembering their name.
charlesf
4mo ago
I was speaking with a senior dev at AWS earlier today about AI and coding. Amazon has its own tools for both devs and corp staff and doesn't allow outside tools for anything but simple questions who's output will never be in a work product. He said that one of the bigger surprises for him was how many devs, especially the more junior ones, have adopted using AI for a lot of their coding questions and drastically reduced or stopped using the popular developer forums like StackOverflow for research. He asked a few of them what the main appeal of asking the AI was and they said, even though the AI is often wrong and you have to double check all its answers, it never insults you for knowing less than it does or mocks you for trying to learn something, which was an extrememly common experience on the forums. My own work involves some AI interaction intent-verification where my teams review AI-human interactions for new products to judge how well it captures the person's intentions and the quality of responses. From my POV one of the best things about these AI bot tools it they can't (deliberately) lie, automatically making them better than I'd estimate 75% of the people they will likely replace, who lie constantly.
charlesf
4mo ago
Depends on the state and how old the kids are. Depends on the community too I imagine. When it happened to me (in Ohio in the 80s/90s), they asked if we had any relatives, we told them about our grandparents, police and a social worker drove us there and spoke with my grandfather for a few minutes, dropped of some papers, and left. My mom bailed out a couple days later and we went back a week or so after that. We spent most weekends there anyway so it really wasn't a huge change for us, though going to school from there was weird at first. If there was no one to take the kids, as happened to some of my friends, they went to the youth detention center while awaiting a temp foster situation. If the "kids" are over 16, and its a repeat issue like it was for me, then they may discuss minor emancipation with you. This was the route I ultimately took.
All countries are different. Within the Philippines there are even significant regional differences in culture and religeon. I've spent time for work in Manilla and Cebu and most of the people I met there seemed like genuinely good folks and were I not already hapily married could easily see enjoying a relationship with a Tagalog or Visaya for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread. I doubt I'd say this about many of the other places I've been for work like Singapore, Malaysia, or especially India. There's just something different. Maybe it b/c I was raised Catholic.
edit - banana ketchup is gross
charlesf
4mo ago
I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.
charlesf
4mo ago
The story of the establishment of the Space Force before Trump was ever involved is long and fascinating. The key proponent that actually got it done was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Raymond . The short version is that there had been elements within the USAF, NASA, and congress that have been arguing for a separate military branch for outerspace operations since the 60s. The space stuff actually started in the Army, though it transistioned to the Air Force by the 60s. In the early 80s they finally made a separate Space Command org within the USAF, but this is when the case for a separate force really started to gain momentum, though it would be a long time with an abortive attempt until it actually happened. The argument hasn't really changed in nature at all over time, just relevence, as the circumstances have changed around that Air Force: the subject matter expertise, experience, and career paths for the space related operations has become too complex and specialized to remain in the USAF, just like the Air Force itself emerged from the Army for largely similar reasons. General Raymond spoke many times about his own path through the ranks, mirrored by many of his peers, where he'd be productivly commanding a org within the Space Command of the USAF, get promoted and transferred out of SC back to the general aviation Air Force, and everything he was working on back in Space Command fell apart. Yanking the COs and NCOs back and forth, in and out of Space Command produced worse officers/nco performance in both orgs, chaotic career paths, and hastened retirements of COs to fled to the private sector to continue to follow their passion for space. Essentially that we would be unable to field a competent space command as long as the career people with the expertise could be yanked out of the org at any time without recourse. The Air Force had been promising increased autonomy and specialization to the existing space command, stating they'd stop jerking the career people around and allow them to specialize but never made any real moves to implement it. I think, in my very amateur observations since then, these arguments have been borne out by the record of the USSF, which is operating quite effectively according to everything I've seen and read, especially compared to the other branches. (particularly the Navy which is a mess).
charlesf
4mo ago
People on the internet love to roleplay the epic things they totally would do in any given situation
Something I was discussing previous on a different board, and that is a larger issue beyond this event, is that the majority of people have effectively 0 experience making important, possibley life or death decisions, when their body is absolutely flooded with adrenaline. In our prehistorical past, this prepared us for violence. This response is, in the modern day, often an evolutionary trap. My father was a career NCO in the USMC and he occasionally spoke about training people to manage, and if possible prevent, adrenal responses to the events around them. Even people that are aware of the issue, who've had training and exposure to stimuli to try to assuage it, still don't ever really know what their response is going to be when it happens. The fight/flight/freeze response really doesn't understand modern society very well.
charlesf
4mo ago
A decent % of gay men aren't into the party scene at all and want the same sort of long term relationships that hetro men and women generally have.
As a statistician, gay men are pretty much the only demo that are honest-ish on surveys about sex and relationships. It makes comparison data even more alarming to look at if you aren't ready for it. While on average a gay man in the US has about 7x more unique partners than a straight man, there are a large fraction of gay men that aren't actually into the casual sex/hook up gay culture at all really, or aren't attactive enough to participate even if they want to. If you only look at the numbers of the top 25% or people that have had more than 4 lifetime partners, its starts looking like someone made a calculation error. Epidemiological data in college comparing gay men to straight men and all women was how I learned what an axis break was as a freshman.
edit vv - yes, only self identified are considered gay. the other group are 'men who have sex with men' (MSM) a unique demo that is somehow often 100% straight. researchers generally focus on behavior and not labels/identity here as the MSM demo esentially cannot be intereacted with in a cooperative way if treat them like they are "gay".
charlesf
4mo ago
It'll be 26 years in a couple of months, I've been there for 24. It still my most used website, but I can't imagine a new user would get much out of it. We've all known each for a couple of decades now and its a lot of very old inside humor. One thing I really do enjoy is that most Goons are over 40 now and a lot of us are in some fairly important roles in society, particularly tech. I've had connections on SA help me out with things I'd never have known someone IRL who could. People in gov't, upper management of FANG companies, etc. Its like the Internet Freemasons. I can join pretty much any semi-popular online videogame and there will be a Goon group waiting to teach you the game and give you stuff to get started.
I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office yesterday and my wife noticed a number of....spicy? (I think was the term) books on the bookshelf. None of the current monster/dark fantasy stuff thats all the rage right now, but absolutely text based pornograrphy for women. About a dozen of them. The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible. This was an office in a Catholic hospital.
... and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.
Its impolite because its only men that seem to take issue, and its inappropriate for men to criticize women. Full stop.
I've left out the absolute best part imo. The overwelming majority of these books are written in a non-omniscient* first-person, producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose. They can't keep track of who is doing what; literally can't tell who the subject/object of the sentence is and get so confused they give up on the book. The meme is "3rd person is immediate DNF" (did not finish).
*non-omniscient in that the main PoV character often lacks the knowledge of what the main PoV character is thinking or planning.
https://tiktok.com/discover/i-cant-read-third-person
https://old.reddit.com/r/Barnesandnoble/comments/1lhiwrs/third_person_difficulties/
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4854296-struggle-reading-books-in-third-person
charlesf
4mo ago
-There isn't nothing.
-Don't make the cars behind you have to slow down. This starts with knowing there are cars behind you in the first place. This extends to far more than traffic.
charlesf
5mo ago
I've found often that two people can sometimes agree strongly on, to use a turn of phrase, the diagnosis while differing quite a bit on the course of treatment, as it were. It can be refreshing to be around someone that sees the world the same way you do, even if their idea of what should be done about it is questionable.
charlesf
5mo ago
My experience has been that people in Spain react pretty well to being addressed in (competent) Spanish by visitors. In fact this has been my experience in every Spanish speaking country. Especially since English isn't anywhere near as common in Spain (and Italy) as Germany or the Nordics (I suspect France as well, but they'll never admit it). Depending on how you learned Spanish, you might want to brush up on some of the word useage and phrases common to European Spanish. I've found the Madrileños fairly easy to understand once you get used to the seseo. You can watch Spanish news broadcasts to get an idea. Other parts of Spain I've not done as well understanding them, mostly Andalucia, despite it being my favorite part. Most educated Andalucians can switch to Castillian without issue though.
If there were a noticible portion of the population who were even capable of this, the world would probably have a lot fewer topics for this thread, and fewer problems at all. It requires a focus on something other than the Self that is rarely seen, and not particularly valued in our society. I've felt this way about things that really matter to me. Letting down the people I love. And then only sometimes; I quickly return to Me.
Assuming there are at least some people who accept personal responisibility with this depth regularly, they'd never be allowed anywhere near the reigns of power.
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