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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • It’s bending the rules, since it’s a camping meal, but I have made it at home, too, since it makes a great depression meal. I got it from backpackers, who I’m pretty sure got it from prison inmates:

    The Ramen Bomb.

    Cook a crushed up packet of instant ramen noodles, maybe with a little more water than usual. Add like half a packet of instant mashed potatoes. You can also add a protein, like… chopped up Spam. Maybe some hot sauce or other fixings if you’re feeling fancy.

    I hated how much I enjoyed it. Granted, that was when I was really tired and hungry, but that hit the spot.

    Also, I’ve heard meals like the ones in this thread affectionately referred to as “glop,” by a fellow glop-enjoyer.




  • Oh, another one: anti-vaccination was pushed by health insurance companies to dampen public perception of government-run healthcare.

    Vaccine development and implementation fucking worked. If people were happy with the results, they might end up swayed towards publicly-funded healthcare. So… put a lid on that by whipping up a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Some folks will no longer see the vaccination programs as successful efforts to protect public health, but as a conspiracy to… do something. And instead of pointing to it as an example of a public healthcare program, you’ve first got to spend time defending evidence-based medicine, which takes up so much fucking time and energy, and ultimately won’t convince people who bored too deeply into that alternate-reality tunnel.

    It turned a public health initiative into a fucking tar pit, and now the once-free vaccinations cost over a hundred bucks if you don’t have insurance.


  • Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

    Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It’s almost a meme that they’re being singled out like they’re the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

    On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I’ve used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

    So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It’s a small thing, but it’s just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn’t cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.



  • If you’re going to make simple syrup, use a stick blender.

    Firstly, it’s easier and faster than heating the sugar and water in a pot, which is the most popular method.

    Secondly, you don’t lose any significant amount of water to evaporation. That’s not a big deal if you make 1:1 simple syrup, but if you’re going 2:1 (which I prefer), you’re already very close to the maximum solubility of sugar in water at room temperature. Losing a few grams of water can make it supersaturated, which leads to sugar crystals falling out of solution over time. Not a big deal, but a little annoying.

    If you give it a try, bear in mind that you’re going to get a cloudy syrup at first. That’s totally normal, and it’s not undissolved sugar, it’s just air bubbles. They’ll float out over time.


  • This is especially true with generic medicines.

    The cheapest I can get Claritin in my nearest supermarket is 50¢—$1.12/pill.

    The store brand can be as low as 7¢—37¢/pill.)

    The CostCo version is 2 or 3¢/pill.

    All of them are the same. 10mg of loratadine, highly regulated by the FDA.

    They can differ with inactive ingredients, so maybe you’d like a syrup or something from a name brand. But it legally has to be the same active ingredients, in the same amounts, in the same forms.





  • A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.

    In a capitalist framework, there’s private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it’s owned by the government.

    In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker’s ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn’t exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.

    Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.

    Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with “libertarian socialism.” Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.