This is me too. All the same t-shirts, pants, shoes (four pairs go to the cobbler for repair while one remains in use), socks, underwear. Getting dressed in the morning is zero-thought and always comfortable. My daily kit always fits on my person and I never have to fumble for anything. Pants repairs are consistent since they all wear out exactly the same way. The cobbler loves my repairs because it’s the same patterns for four left and four right shoes (just one pattern flipped).
I am a founding board member and the treasurer for my regional timebank. I also have done custom software development and IT work for my county and city food bank. In the past, I was a founding board member and technology specialist for the local food co-op. I also used to own and operate a community bike shop where I performed free repairs for anyone who said they couldn’t afford it.
I prefer volunteer work that directly shores up my communities, promotes food security and social equity, connects local food producers to consumers as directly as possible, and empowers non-monetary exchange of labor and skills. For me, timebanks are the sweet spot for these goals. Everyone’s time is valued equally, and everyone has something to offer their communities on an as-able basis. More than that, a timebank promotes members to see all in their community as peers and neighbors despite any superficial differences.
For the horror readers, it’s in “Books of Blood, Volume 2.”
Every Paolo Baciagalupi novel and the first two acts of almost every Cory Doctorow novel. “The Water Knife” by Baciagalupi is fictional near-future extrapolation on the excellent non-fiction “Cadillac Desert.” “Walkaway” and the Little Brother books by Doctorow cast a stark light on the nature of power, surveillance, and authoritarianism in Western society. It doesn’t take a lot of social imagination to see that’s exactly where we’re going.
Alec’s call to action was refreshing amid so many other outlets smoothing over current events.
The first section though… I’m all in on renewable energy and have been for 15 years. What blew me away was how much I internalized the “challenges” to solar. Propaganda is a hell of a drug. Even as aware and informed as I like to think I am, I still managed to drink the wrong Kool-Aid. The numbers in favor of solar were surprising, even for this true believer.
Your list of ingredients there quite carefully left out the entire ladle full of cane sugar. By volume it’s about one third of the sauce by way of how every takeaway place I’ve ever seen prepares it.
0_0 Yowza… even if it’s “just” a #1 ladle, that’s a shit-ton of the white stuff. The place where I worked used ~1.5tbsp of white sugar per pound of chicken thigh. I… almost want to try one of these recipes you mentioned just so that I can get dessert and dinner in one container. :D
This might be true for the shittiest of Chinese-American recipes. Just like OP, I don’t know where you’re getting your sesame chicken, but I suggest you stop going there.
Now, regarding the bases being mostly sugar, if you’re talking chemically, your statement is true: starches are just chains of sugar. But if your GTC and SC only differ by crushed red, you’re getting robbed.
Source: worked pantry/prep in the most popular Chinese take-out-only joint in Albany NY while in college. GTC was by far the most popular dish, averaging ~700 orders per night, pre Internet.
Granted, Chinese-American recipes are chaos. In my experience though, the best GTC recipes use whole japones chiles which are toasted in oil to make them more fragrant and a much more attractive presentation. Rice wine vinegar, garlic, ginger, and oyster sauce are the other primary notes. The balance of these notes IMO are what define the signature of the best GTC for any given restaurant, and everyone is just bringing their own spin to that mix.
Some of the comments here and some of the “Best GTC/SC Recipe EVAARRR!” that I see on the interwebz… Holy hell, y’all. I want to come cook for you, because… DAMN. There’s some genuinely so-shitty-it’s-hilarious-yet-tragic C-A recipes out there.
I don’t know where you’re getting General Tso’s chicken, but may I suggest not going there anymore? :D
Holy hell, I feel this viscerally. I recently inherited an enterprise codebase with a new job and that pic is exactly how I imagine the consulting company reacted after hand-off. The code is actually quite clean and mostly makes sense, but it’s completely undocumented (including a lack of specs and XML comments for endpoints). By and large, it’s mostly SOLID, but there are abstractions on abstractions, handlers for handlers for handlers. Configuring to run locally or against the dev environment is a huge rigamarole that I’m trying to simplify before trying to bring on any more SWEs. The bright spot here is that I’ve been given a long runway to come up to speed.
I love reading how people use their Steam Deck for things other than gaming.
I recently had to travel for family obligations and had to work during the 3-week trip. Rather than carry both my work and personal laptops, I used the Steam Deck + slim Bluetooth keyboard + a travel mouse as my personal laptop. I travel with a second 4K portable monitor for work anyway, so the increase in bulk was minimal. I also always carry my Deck for flights and other travel more than 1 hour. The Deck has been such an additive bit of gear, and not just for portable gaming. I’d go so far as to say it’s more than additive; it’s transformative.
Government will always be abused and turned against the people so its power should be limited
Fully agreed. This is the nature of power. It is a problem as old as humanity, and there have been loads of attempted solutions to that end. Probably the oldest known is the Insulting the Meat Ritual in hunter-gatherer tribes to prevent hunters from becoming egotistical. Given the rarity of remaining hunter-gatherers, we can guess how that worked out.
Decentralization (why we’re here in the Fediverse, right?), social ownership of the economy, revocation of corporate privileges… all excellent goals to which we can aspire. It’s a bit hackneyed but the truism applies: think globally, act locally. On social ownership of the economy, may I suggest looking into timebanks? Join your local timebank if it exists; start one if it doesn’t. A lot of what timebanks (can) accomplish represents most of these ideals. Disclosure: I’m a founding board member and the treasurer of my local timebank, so I have a lot of bias for timebanks as one potential arrow in the quiver of effecting social change.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, thank you for the elaboration! I agree with your points regarding the police state. May I suggest Behind the Bastards’ 3-part on the history of policing (~2020 Jun 16)?The US has been a police state for more of its history than not. And the series underscores the Socialist tenets in your explanation: unions absolutely work. The police union in the US is ridiculously effective at protecting those “workers.” Too bad that union is protecting workers who stomp on the citizenry.
I will add that direct democracy prima facie sounds great, and I used to also hold this belief. We absolutely have the technology for a full direct democracy. The problems with direct democracy are legion, some of which we are seeing right now in the US with low-information voters. Now scale that up. The enormous volume of legislation and policy research on any single issue would stop most citizens dead in their tracks. Take international trade policy for example. My employer paid for me to study international trade compliance for five years. Ain’t nobody got time for that, and international trade policy hits all of us in the wallet, waistline, daily interactions, and health/wellness measures. We hoi-polloi still need to work, get dinner on the table, and do laundry. Voters should understand all of relevant issues at least at a cursory level, but wish in one hand, shit in the other… Hell, how many voters actually read the voter guides and research their local candidates? How many attend city council meetings?
If you want as direct a democracy as possible, focus your efforts at your local and state level. Small changes in your community have ripple effects. Get your neighbors and local social circle to educate themselves and attend. Connect with your local council and governing boards.
As @zxqwas@lemmy.world pointed out: don’t sweat the labels; choose the policies that appeal to your sensibilities. The labels and affiliations will shake out from there.
You keep repeating this, without going into any detail on what any of this means to you. How do you square economic equality with limited government? The former requires extremely strong and well-considered regulation with well-funded government agencies to stick it to corps and billionaires. Edit to add: also requires a strong, stiff-spined Legislative Branch, divorced from lobbying, divested from capital markets, with strict campaign finance reform. More regulation and agencies.
When someone says “I’m Libertarian,” the implicit translation is:
Libertarianism is an extremely naive political platform. Most people who subscribe to its ideals fail to investigate the history of Libertarian ideals in action. Speaking as a former, briefly Libertarian-voting individual, after diving into the planks of the platform, it quickly became clear that Libertarianism is antithetical to a functioning society.
Like the ones embedded in the sink perimeter? If so, those always tasted terrible to me; descaling them is a pain. I can’t bring it over to my brewing setup. All the ones I used had a fixed temperature that was too hot for delicate teas and too cold for light roast beans. Also, for making a proper pour over coffee, you need a scale to precisely gauge how much water you’re putting through the beans.
their systems are straight garbage
Unequivocally complete and utter garbage. I led an engineering team at a multinational energy efficiency company. My team built an extremely performant upstream and downstream intervention solution for US utilities, completely in ASP.NET and SQL Server. It was broadly used, on-prem, maintainable, extendable, and more importantly cheap to run. Single proc at every tier.
A new VP came on and had some wiry hair up his sandy ass about doing everything in Force. He refused to listen to anyone on my team about how this was a bad idea. So we built a POC and gave us 4 weeks to go live. The new solution was glacial in its performance, brittle, and expensive. I forget the numbers, but I recall that our cloud spend that first month of deployment would have bought us four more clusters of hardware and MS licenses. His response? Moar Force! You’re doing it wrong.
All of us who could jump ship were gone before the second month on the new solution. He somehow survived another 3 months before he got fired, but the damage was done. Oh well. Salesforce, not even once.
We lack the will.
Kinda, although I fully agree with everything else you said. Collective action is really difficult even when the government isn’t running COINTELPRO-like operations on anyone who tries to organize anything like a mass protest. For an example of the challenge of collective action, think about how hard it is to get your group of close friends to agree on which restaurant to go to and when. And that’s when everyone wants to hang out together, with nobody intentionally mucking up the works.
If we can overcome the “internal” hurdles to collective action, we can take back the country.
Repeatedly using a blatantly false assertion is called the Big Lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie). The derailing/zone flooding aspect, as @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world stated, is a Gish Gallop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop). There might be a term for using these together, but I am not aware of of what it might be.
I still want to visit the alternate timeline where Lucas didn’t cave to fan pressure. And the big reveal in Ep 3 is that Jar Jar is revealed to be the Sith Lord. Could Lucas have pulled off a Shyamalan-level surprise? We’ll never know.
Can you name any other character in Pitch Black besides Riddick?
You mean like Jack (both actresses), the Imam (Keith David!), Radha Mitchell, and Claudia Black? I’m generally bad at character names, but can recall the actors.
My mother thinks US workers still get pensions if they stay at a company long enough. She also thinks that staying at one employer for decades is the key to higher pay, better benefits, and promotions. This is a constant, exhaustingly repetitive conversation with her every time I get recruited and poached by a company.