Also because several ballot drop boxes in liberal areas have been set on fire.

You will notice that it is usually Democrats who have no qualms with cutting ties with their families over trivial ideological differences.

Because the “trivial” ideological differences aren’t a two-way street. Democrats want people to be able to live as they want. Republicans are working to exterminate certain groups. As a conservative-passing liberal, (I’m pale enough to pass for white, and work in a conservative-biased industry), it’s really really hard to stay friends with conservatives; They’ll inevitably get too comfortable and drop an N-word because they think I’m safe. Or they’ll call one of our mutual BIPOC friends “one of the good ones” like it’s supposed to be a compliment.

In short, liberals aren’t an existential threat to conservatives. Liberals may have an issue with some of conservatives’ choices, but “owning guns” isn’t something inherent to your personhood. You aren’t born with a gun in your hand, and you won’t immediately die without a gun. On the other hand, conservatives are an existential threat to liberals, because they take issue with innate traits, rather than their individual choices. You can’t choose to be black, but conservatives will judge you for it regardless.

One side is saying “I’d like people to exist without judgement” and the other is saying “you don’t have the basic human right to exist.” And then the latter makes fun of the former when the former cuts ties.

Removed by mod

I’d argue that what she’s doing is even more admirable, simply because it’s super fucking easy to fall into the “my parents voted this way so I do too” mindset. Pretty much every small town in America is full of people who were steeped in hate while growing up, have never known anything else, and fully plan on continuing the family tradition when they have kids of their own. It would be easy for her to just keep her head down and coast along on her father’s coattails. But she has actively refused to do so.

Yeah, they’ll still collect your data and happily sell it as soon as your subscription ends. Also, this subscription would likely only cover first-party tracking. It wouldn’t cover things like a Facebook Like button being embedded in the site, which allows Facebook to track you.

I first heard about it due to my buddy (a high school English teacher) complaining about how his incoming students were incredibly far behind in basic reading comprehension skills. We ended up having a pretty long talk about it, and he mentioned that all of his colleagues have noticed the same thing.

I did some digging, and discovered that language teachers everywhere have basically been lamenting the fact that the upcoming generation just straight up doesn’t know how to interpret media when it falls outside of their personal algorithms. I ended up talking with another buddy of mine (a writer for a magazine) and he mentioned that they have started needing to change the way they write, because people have simply lost the ability to comprehend what they read. Skimming the first one or two paragraphs is the new norm, even for in-depth news articles. So they have to load as much content into the early paragraphs as possible.

I tend to front-load my comments as much as possible, to try and avoid just that. Make the main point ASAP. But even then, there’s only so much you can do without sounding messy.

For instance, I front-loaded the part about reader comprehension. All of the “why” is in later paragraphs. But even if they only read the first few sentences, they’ll at least get my overall point.

It does make nuanced discussion impossible though. I work in a pretty specialized field (professional audio) with lots of snake oil myths about what will or won’t make your system sound better. There have been several times that I have seen people parroting this snake oil type stuff as if it is genuine advice. And often, this advice happens because the person only has a surface-level understanding of how audio works. Something sounds plausible, (and they don’t understand the underlying principles that would disprove it,) so they end up perpetuating the myth. So a lot of discussions boil down to “well kind of but not really” and people won’t bother reading anything past the “well kind of” part.

Ding ding ding. I actively refuse to do homework from randos on the internet.

This is also due to a distinct drop in reader comprehension. One of the largest parts of reading comprehension is being able to infer the intended audience for a particular piece of work. You should be able to read a news article, see a commercial, read a comment, etc and infer who it is aimed at. And the answer is usually not “me”.

People have become accustomed to having an algorithm that is laser focused to their specific preferences. So when they see something that’s not aimed at them it is jarring, and they tend to get upset. Instead of going “oh this clearly isn’t aimed at me, but I can infer who the intended audience is. I’ll move on.” Now they tend to jump on the creator with whataboutisms and imagined offense.

Maybe you make a post about the proper way to throw a football. You’ll inevitably get a few “bUT wHaT abOUt WhEElcHaiR uSerS, I hAvE a baD ShoUlDer aNd cAn’T thROW SO wHaT abOUt me, I haTE FoOtbAll wHY aRe yOU SHowiNG tHIs to Me, etc” types of comments. It’s because those users have lost the ability to infer an intended audience. They automatically assume everything they see is aimed at them, and get offended when it isn’t.

I have even noticed this started to affect the way media is written. Creators tend to make it a point to outright state their intended audience, just to avoid the negative comments.

The chocolate thing is because American chocolate manufacturers use butyric acid to preserve the milk. Basically, using fresh milk in chocolate is expensive, because you need to get it shipped directly and be located near enough to the dairy farm. So they intentionally spoil the milk in a controlled manner. This allows them to preserve the milk (as opposed to having it spoil naturally and go completely rancid,) which allows them a much more relaxed manufacturing process. This controlled spoiling method produces butyric acid in the milk.

The issue is that butyric acid tastes like vomit. Americans are used to the sour taste and don’t even really recognize that it’s not what chocolate is supposed to taste like. To them, that sour note is just part of chocolate. But Europeans come to America (and are used to fresh milk in their chocolate), and they are horribly disgusted when they taste American chocolate for the first time. Because Europeans aren’t used to having that sour note in their chocolate.

This is also why so many Americans fawn over foreign chocolate. It is seen as more luxurious, but most Americans can’t really place why it tastes so much better. The reason is the lack of butyric acid.

it’s far easier to start a business than to get a job

Also why so many Koreans run donut shops or nail salons, and why 7-11’s are almost universally franchised by Indians. They’re all relatively easy businesses to start, can be run out of any strip mall near a neighborhood, and all have the potential to hire and train your family members. And if your cousin owns a donut shop (and you’ve worked there enough to know how it works,) you can go open your own across town. Because if you come in on a work visa, your ability to stay in the country is held hostage by your employer. But if you start your own business, that’s not an issue.

a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

Ironically, the lump might have been what gets him into trouble. If he’s concealing a firearm without a permit, it can land him with some pretty hefty penalties. And if he has a permit but is printing (meaning the concealed weapon is visible through his clothes, like a lump) then it can also land him with some penalties.

It’s dependent on where you were, as each state has their own concealed carry laws. But in general, you’re not allowed to conceal a firearm without a permit. And if you do have a permit, you’re not allowed to have that concealed firearm be visible (even indirectly, like printing.)

Plus if you’re open carrying, Walmart internally bans them anyways. They’re a private business, and have the authority to dictate what people are or are not allowed to do while in their stores. The company has a blanket policy against open carrying, and (assuming they’re not barred from doing so by state law) the dude should have been told to leave his guns outside (like in his car) or be trespassed.

Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.

All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.

You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)

Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.

Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).

Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.

For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.

As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.

Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.

And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.

And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.

Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.

If you’re referring to the wavy pattern along the cutting edge, that’s not from the folding process. The hamon is added to the blade during the quenching process, by adding clay to the steel. The clay causes the covered steel to heat differently than the uncovered steel. That differential heating is what is visible as the hamon.

It’s largely decorative, but does have function as it determines what part of the blade can be sharpened to an edge.

Yeah, Japanese steel wasn’t great, but they were working with what they had available at the time. Katanas were basically made out of iron dust, which had been melted into slag by filtering through charcoal. The resulting chunks of steel were basically straight up slag, not nice even ingots. So the steel they got was actually extremely high carbon in places, but that also meant it was brittle as hell, because those carbon pockets were prone to shattering.

So the folding was invented, to even out the steel’s carbon content (just like how a Damascus steel blade has visible stripes, Japanese steel had invisible stripes of high and low carbon steel) and to lower the carbon content overall; Every time you heat for another fold, you’re evaporating some carbon. So the folding process took the steel from extremely high carbon pockets to a more evenly distributed carbon content.

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition. There’s no need to fold modern steel ingots because they’re already homogenous and can be produced at whatever carbon level you want.

Yeah, something like that. Dump five gallons of apple juice and two pounds of glucose into a carboy. Add champagne yeast, cap with an airlock full of vodka, and let sit for a few months.

The result is an extremely dry apple wine that’ll kick your ass. If you’re not a fan of dry wines, just add a splash of sprite or 7-up to the glass to back sweeten it.

If your drink has more than one type of alcohol in it, you need to go to the ER. Methanol is horribly poisonous, and it is not a pleasant death.

Alternatively, I have had several injuries that should have gotten stitches, but have never been in the ER. Growing up poor in the US means you end up rawdogging your injuries.