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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • He’s not combing through the cutting room floor, looking for the shot that perfectly advances his agenda

    That’s literally his thumbnail. He literally combed through all the footage and picked the most provocative scene as the opening shot. AND cut off the end of it on a cliffhanger. “Oh no! Is he about to fall under that speeding truck?!” Nah, watch the clip again at the end of the video to see he was actually always perfectly safe, riding on the sidewalk. This is not simply picking a couple of random well-focused shots for a travelogue. You have to be more critical with the media you see! I make bicycling videos, they are pretty boring though because nothing happens. This is an opinion piece, which is why we are on c/fuckcars.


  • One convenience of gendered nouns is that you can use shortened pronouns and the listener immediately knows what you are talking about. “Sit on him!” means sit on the chair and not the sofa, for example, because the sofa is neuter. So it’s not a matter of chair being more “masculine” so much as having three different forms of “it” pronoun. Still not enough convenience to make it worth it to learn from scratch, IMO.

    My nemesis are the words “chose/choose lose/loose”. I always have to go through a quick tonguetwister in my head whenever I have to write one down to make sure I pick the correct one.


  • He does exaggerate that particular turn for dramatic effect though. This is the approach to US 46 bridge over Hackensack River. https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=40.850593&mlon=-74.026362#map=18%2F40.850593%2F-74.026362 Bicycling on the sidewalk in New Jersey is not generally prohibited but discouraged (https://www.nj.gov/transportation/commuter/bike/pdf/bicyclingmanual.pdf -> “don’t ride on the sidewalks!”) However on that bridge you have to already know to mount onto the sidewalk (as he apparently knew). Trying to cross that bridge by bicycle in the vehicle lane is suicide, because there is no shoulder and the lane is not wide enough to fit a truck and a bicycle side by side. With the packed 55mph traffic with no follow distance, even if you “properly” turn at the stop sign, you either get creamed by the next truck that is unable to switch lanes due to traffic or slow down, or get creamed by the car tailgating behind that one because they had no visibility on you. The only way to cross is to mount the sidewalk at this corner, but there is no sign or indication to do so. I only knew that bridge was crossable at all because I noticed the annotation on openstreetmap when I was looking for a way through.

    That’s the problem with biking in New Jersey Bergen County. There are all these rivers and wetlands that are only crossed by motor vehicle highways. There are no normal streets between the individual city neighborhoods. Most of the bridges don’t even have sidewalks, let alone bike lanes! The challenge of biking to the Meadowlands is to plan this circuitous route linking up the few of these barely-traversable bridges that do exist, sometimes going miles out of your way, and you have to use a map search because none of this is marked.

    In the video instead of showing “Whoa! Big truck! Almost killed me! I am so small and shaky, barely dodged out of the way! Heehee, just kidding.” he could’ve said “at this gas station take a turn onto the sidewalk to cross the US 46 bridge, the only bridge across the Hackensack river with a sidewalk for the next 15 miles!” Different goals.

    In the good news, I’m excited about this new greenway under construction! https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/13433606#layers=C https://dep.nj.gov/parksandforests/urban-state-parks-initiatives/greenway/ It will reuse several abandoned railroad bridges to create a much needed bicycle/pedestrian exclusive crossing through the wetlands.





  • The line is complicated and blurry and changes for each person even. The only semi-consistent rule I can find, is that as soon as a company is involved and it becomes a “product”, it seems to get bad.

    That was my conclusion as well. I am not against science, I love science and industrial manufacturing, I was even willing to drink soylents! But even if you wave away the constantly changing food science health recommendations as normal churn of ever-improving scientific understanding, the interests of industrial food manufacturers are never aligned with my own. “We replaced butter with palm oil in our recipe because it is cheaper!” - well ok, good for you - “…AND it is also healthier for you! ;)” - I don’t believe it! I’ll check in back in another 50 years to see all the metastudies of the metastudies of palm oil consumption studies, but in the meantime the only rule of thumb that has survived every dietary recommendation change is to stick to whole foods.


  • You misunderstand the idea of cost per calorie. The expectation is that you start with something nutritionally-complete, like these soylents, the frozen rice+vegs+chicken dinners, or even the frozen apple pies (how ever nonconventional these may be), or if that is not possible then a combination of several foods in a ratio that makes them nutritionally complete, and then scale up to hit that 1500cals/day target. A single item or known ratio of items so I don’t have to think about this ever again. If I didn’t care about nutrition I’d just be chugging high fructose corn syrup (<$1/day) which you never saw me say. My daily meal ends up being rice and beans drenched in olive oil with some raw vegetables-of-the-day on the side, since I can’t afford the soylents.



  • I hate the amount of time it takes to cook and eat things every day. 😆 The microwavable frozen foods section would have been my first choice, there is usually enough selection to find something suitable, but the dollars-per-calorie cost is way too high, on order of $20-$30 per day. This pie is $15 and has enough calories for 2 days and takes zero work. Sugar and fat are already two of the three main ingredients I need. Also protein, but the wheat in the crust has some. Apples are a fruit, they have vitamins and shit. Looks good to me!


  • The authors do not note any conflicts of interest

    The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It’s like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the environment than electric cars written by an American.

    They themselves admit in the opening abstract that “Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil.” I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.

    Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It’s the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.




  • An aged account is not even a panacea. I had a reddit account of many years that I haven’t logged into for the last two. I check online, it still exists, in good standing. I login one time, post one helpful comment (through a VPN of course, same as I always did), try to log in the next day to check replies - login error. Check through a third party - account page no longer even exists. All comments completely wiped. Thanks reddit! Saved me the trouble of deleting my account manually.


  • Yes, the water perfectly removes everything and does not splash. I refused to believe it myself. TMI warning: for the first year in my disbelief I would test it personally, for science, by sticking a finger in for “first-hand” comparison. When using paper, no matter how much you wipe, afterwards, even if the finger looks clean, it still has a whiff of ass. Only a full shower after use would remove the whiff entirely. But after using the bidet, the finger looks clean and smells clean, so much so as if there isn’t even a need to wash the finger afterwards (though of course I did anyway). In summary: paper = never fully clean, bidet = fully clean.

    I think the difference in our bidet experiences is the water pressure. Mine is plugged directly into the water supply, and I have good water pressure, so the pressurized stream coming out is tight and powerful like a water pik. It took some getting used to. But it’s easy now and it scours everything. I fear a gabo-style bidet that pours instead of powerwashes (or a spraybottle like the one linked in this thread) would not be as thorough and might indeed require a follow-up wipe. But mine doesn’t.



  • No, money at rest does not create inflation. It is the consumption of goods and services through use of money that does. Trump could mint a one hundred trillion dollar coin and put it on display in the White House, and this would have no effect on prices, even though he is now richer than all Americans put together… as long as the coin stays on display. But the moment he tries to deposit the coin at a bank and start spending its value to pay for goods and services, all prices will skyrocket, because now there are more dollars competing to buy the same amount of food, the same number of houses, the same number of services, that existed/was being produced before, the same that you are trying to buy.

    Remember those news articles last year how the wealthiest 10% of Americans drive 50% of consumer spending? That’s how the rich influence prices. Not hoarding - consumption. The poorest 90% (those earning less than $250k/year, namely you) only have access to 50% of food and consumer goods and such. One person from top 10% consumes 9x more than one person from bottom 90%. If wealth inequality did not exist and the 10% consumed as much per person as the 90%, then you would literally be able to buy 1.8x as much stuff as you can now, with no other changes in productivity required.




  • Unpopular opinion: yes, you do. 2nd-hand markets contribute to the value of the original item even for things like clothing. When you buy a 2-year old car with intention to sell at 4 years, the price you are willing to pay includes the resale value you expect to get later. Which in turn influences the price of the new car that the original buyer is willing to pay. Another commenter mentioned cell phones having a chain of resales too.

    But even for cheaper items that are donated instead of resold, the 2nd-hand use of the item has a non-zero effect on the original production and sale of it, because the act of donation itself is a notable event. You give away an item for free instead of throwing it in the trash because you think the item still has some value and you want someone else to enjoy that value. This works whether you give it directly for free to a person, or donate to a charity shop that then resells it. A charity donation is also recorded as tax-deductible.

    The act of donation frees you from guilt/responsibility for throwing the item away without using up its full value. You are then free to buy more of the same item new. Faster than you would have otherwise, had the charity shop not existed. You also value it more, knowing that someone else can use it after you.

    So here is a practical scenario for how this effect works. Imagine what would happen if instead of buying problematic child-labor fast fashion clothing from a 2nd-hand charity shop, you refuse! You keep wearing the clothing you have, or buy some non-problematic boring 2nd-hand clothing instead. And I do too. And every other charity store shopper stops buying them as well. Then the charity shop will refuse to take donations of those fast-fashion clothing, right? Just as they would refuse if you brought them a box of VHS tapes today. When the people would bring boxes of their mildly-used fast-fashion clothing for donation, they would be turned away - “nobody wants to buy those!”

    Those people might not believe in their responsibility to eliminate child labor, but they still thought of themselves as good people, because they wanted to donate the remaining value for free, but now they can’t. They have to either keep wearing those clothes themselves, or throw them in the trash without feeling good about it. They end up buying fast-fashion clothes less frequently, or buying other clothes instead. Either way, the value of new fast-fashion clothes goes down and less of them are produced, and fewer children are employed to make them. All because of 2nd-hand.

    IMO, the only way to consume the remaining value of a 2nd-hand item without having an influence on its original production, is to literally pull it out of the trash. And you have to do it in a way that the original owner isn’t aware of it. Because if they knew, they might feel good about it. Like a baker who makes extra bread knowing that most of it will be unsold and go in the trash at the end of the day, because they have seen people rummaging in the trash bin for food at night (not saying that’s bad, just pointing out the chain of influence).


  • Last time I considered this it was $10M, though I might need to update it for inflation now.

    That is irrelevant here though, because a robbery is considered a life-or-death situation in law not because of the monetary amount, but because of the everpresent threat of bodily harm. Whether explicit, with a pointed gun, or implicit. “Give me your money!” … or else… is implied. If the criminal could reach into your pocket and take your money without use of force, without you even knowing, it would not be a robbery but a pickpocket larceny and precisely not covered by deadly force. But a criminal ordering you to give your money is a deadly situation, even if you only got $0.10 in your pocket.

    You are implying we should value human life and just hand over the money, but that’s not the issue here. There is no guarantee that you would not be harmed even if you cooperate. A fast food place in my city got robbed, the cashier handed over all the money but the robber got mad there was only $100 in the register, and shot dead the cashier and the customers. The criminal has already demonstrated reckless abandon by engaging you in a robbery, there is no longer any expectation (as would be with any normal stranger) that physical harm would not imminently follow. Next to a literal attempted murder, a robbery is the most dangerous confrontation you could ever find yourself in. I am glad that the law of my state treats it as serious as that.

    If you are in a robbery and you are absolutely sure that no harm would come to you if only you cooperate, that is nice, and you can graciously demonstrate your value of human life by handing over your $100, or $12k, or $0.10 or whatever, but such security is not a privilege everyone shares.