Today is your lucky day: Old Man Links.
Much going on here in Glibs Gulch, but I’m saving those tales for the weekend. Weekdays are serious. Just the news. Because I’m a serious guy.
And speaking of luck, people lucky enough to be born on this date include a fellow who admitted everything; a fat chick who enjoyed the theater; a conscientious killing machine; a shitty SecTreas who was actually a pretty good SecState; a guy best known for being petriefied; a peddler of shitty pizza and shittier slogans; a guitarist who is more than a bit defensive; a guitarist who is more than a bit offensive; a guy who was King of the Bail Outs; a guy who memorably wouldn’t shut the fuck up; a guy who put the “foot” in “football”; and the very worst part of contemporary football.
Let’s do Links before our luck runs out.
The “Inflation Recovery Act” was totally not a grift.
“You can do it two state, but there are numerous ways it can be done.” Clearly he’s a monster.
To be fair, what the judge was convicted of was absolutely consistent with Kamala’s record in California. So no surprise here.
“We have always been at war with Eastasia.” Of course, they’re all getting in line.
Sorry for the Twatter link but this is getting zero coverage in the mainstream press.
Another example of why Trump is just one more swamp creature.
OK, this is an interesting twist.
“Put me in, Coach, I’m ready to play, today.” Or maybe not.
SP and I had an absolute favorite to see live And every time I hear him, I can remember all of those enchanted evenings listening to his poetic stories with a hard edge to them. As terrific as he is in the studio, live is still his forte.
Maybe just me, but I’ve been having a lot of issue trying to access those “archive” links the last few days.
Unfortunately, “works for me” is the best I can reply. Annoyingly unhelpful, but data points matter in debugging — so there ya go.
WebDom is working on getting the front page straightened out.
In between bouts of nausea?
psst…
I think he was referring to the links in your post that go to archive.fo.
Ahh, gotcha. I was trying to bypass paywalls.
:blinks:
:blinks again:
I don’t often ask it… but I think we need Swiss’s gaze here!
That got a *golf clap* from me.
Agreed. Took me a second and I think it’s clever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA50HBHIcjA
Dangnabbit… was sure that was going to be Happy Birthday, Bill Saluga. Maybe he just annoys the crap out of me with that bit.
Ha, thanks for jogging my memory, I remember his schtick but not his name.
I was hoping it would be Sloper.
😂
Wait, you’re serious?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Why so serious?
(Off topic — but my favorite gag from that movie remains the slightly subtle but pretty obvious “fire truck”).
WRT unions….
Trump was always going to disappoint in some manner or another.
He is just going to change the glideslope, a little a lot? Who knows.
Still better than the alternative
I’m thankful the Censorship Brigade gets no more traction at worst and is disassembled / prosecuted at best (given how many of his current circle and the House GOP are both victims of the prior “disinformation” usage and making the right noises about smiting it with fervor).
Everything else is relative gravy — though I do (as mentioned) allow myself moments of hope for more than just that.
Union members were big backers of his candidacy, seems to reason he would go to bat for them.
isn’t this classic handwaving? hasn’t the same excuse been made for Mao, Stalin, and Castro?
I recommend we strongly condemn bad thinking on the merits everywhere we see it
profoundly inept quotation attempt
** goes back to playing with his sliderule **
The longshoremen should all be laid off and the ports made completely robotic.
Yeah….the issue is how long it would take to do that – 1 port at a time or something similar. Also, ensuring we have non-CCP tech – even if it costs more in the short term would be a lot better in the long term.
Not sure if the Rotterdam mega-port in Europe uses their own equipment or if Japan/Korea have good alternate stuff – can’t imagine they’ve all been relying on CCP tech the past few decades.
Think of the opportunities to increase onshore production if it’s required to be US-made tech.
The laid off longshoremen can look for jobs in the automation factories.
I’m thinking more of the opportunities for graft and crony paybacks…
25k – not 10k – my mistake.
https://x.com/scottlincicome/status/1843612982070153379?t=ufLLb0SjX_H1BVV5YLeS1Q&s=19
The problem is the path from here to there.
The longshoremen will surely shut down all the ports, but beyond that, the teamsters will surely support them. That shuts everything down.
Both are going the way of the buggy whip.
But the path is not clear.
Probably have to automate away the teamsters first.
But Uncivil…who will make the buggy whips?
They will be. They can throw all of the clogs they want, they can’t stop it.
Either that or remove anything that might cause them to have hired fewer people. Forklifts, pallet jacks, cranes…
How many people does it take to hand lift a fully loaded 20 foot container from a ship and move it onto a truck?
1) It isn’t like we hadn’t seen the Obama Staff Crew (that did seem to be directing the policies and admin actions to me at least) do the “redirect slops to our favored pigs” before (*cough* Solyndra *cough*).
2) Hey — give them some credit… 93 trucks! That’s what.. 91 more than the electric chargers? At least these folks delivered something eventually — they weren’t total crooks! 😉
(hums “Who let the doges out…” quietly to himself as he allows himself a few moments of hope…)
If a company like Oshkosh took the IRA money and built a great reliable EV mail truck that postal workers love and stayed on the road for 20 years, I could hold my nose and say at least we got something for that waste of taxpayers’ money.
Instead we get crooks:
– “This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck,” said one person involved in production.
We’ll make those trucks, b’gosh. Hey anyone know how to make a truck?
They only know how to make children’s outerwear…?
They are competent overall.
a few moments of hope
OK, time’s up.
Help us, The Postal Service!!
You can’t even parody these guys.
Okay.
https://youtu.be/xUIBnmdJJ50?si=NBvDgI9q53svb9yM
Not the song I was expecting, but 👍
There it is.
HTF is that song 21 years old?
It’s insane how music from the early 2000s still somehow seems new and fresh.
During the 90s, when we heard 20 year old music, we knew it. It sounded old. I can play 20 year old music now that sounds like it could have been made this year.
Good music this morning OM.
Long? Has it even been 20 years? Before that we theorized they were displaced, out-competed, pushed into irrelevance and then demise.
People have long known lots of stuff.
Right up until they act as if it doesn’t exist. Like natural immunity, that virus vaccines are not a thing, or that the world goes around on poon tang.
(From the New Republic “Trump and Two State Solution” link) — 1) International law isn’t worth the paper it is written on as any observation of it over the centuries makes it clear that it boils down to “What nations can get away with / what they can force on others”.
2) It may well be simply gut reaction and not paying attention to every iota — but frankly, it still seems to me that we have expected over the decades a level of restraint that no other nation on Earth has ever exercised from Israel, and quite honestly I have zero problems with them annexing all the territory that they took in wars where they were not the aggressor (which is most — I think there was one where they did a preemptive strike, right?). And honestly at this point in my life — I think that has a better chance of peace that a two state solution where a) Their ancient and historic capital is either owned by or shared with their avowed suicidal enemies and b) the rest of their territory is fairly gerrymandered in layout. The question solely becomes — can they integrate the former Palestinians who are actually willing to move towards participation in society as they have their other non-Jewish Israeli citizens as I understand things and can then force out (forcing one of the Islamic puppeteers who have been happily fomenting and funding the terrorists all these years to actually take these people) those who won’t. I honestly don’t see anything else working long term that is morally acceptable (because
CarthagePalestine delenda est is of course always one option.. but I wouldn’t want that).Anyway — long rant/ramble over.
Getting rid of the UN (especially the odious UNRWA) was a good first step toward weaning the Palestinian Arabs off the dependency teat and reducing the generational anti-Jew indoctrination in the UN-funded schools. Unfortunately, it may take another generation for that salutary step to show the desired effects. It takes time for the poison to work its way out.
I saw at least one headline that was talking about how Hamas is now isolated and trapped.
I see that as a good thing.
Saw this via Hillel Neuer on twitter. The first EU country to defund UNRWA.
https://www.jns.org/dutch-parliament-trims-funding-to-unrwa-over-terror-ties/
Charming.
The EU mantra is Millions for tribute, but not one dime for defense.
“Getting rid of the UN (especially the odious UNRWA) was a good first step”
Did we finally kick them off US soil and pull out of that shit show? That’s the best future for that criminal entity.
blatant violation of international law
Can’t wait to hear what they call the PRC invasion of Taiwan.
Unification under International Law?
I want a funny reversal where Taiwan invades the mainland and takes over as the CCP crumbles like a house of cards.
Probably eventually. It is one of those weird things you can almost see happening on some scenarios.
Taiwan isn’t a real country.
/UN membership committee
Bzzt – neither is Palestine.
But Israel isn’t a permanent member of the Security Council.
The Palestinian “cause” has been a left-wing shibboleth for as long as Hitler has been underground.
When you believe success is the highest sign of evil, while often pure evil is labeled as oppression, this shit happens.
Another outfit I couldn’t parody if I tried.
Anyway, I agree that a “two state solution” will never result in peace.
The Druze, Alawites, and especially the Christians in Syria better get their shit together quickly or they are going to get exterminated. If we are redrawing the earlier arbitrary borders, maybe they can join Lebanon.
Maybe a three state solution?
To the three body problem?
When created, Lebanon was intended to be a Christian state.
It got overrun by non-Christians.
Like Europe and the U.S.
When a leftist preaches the wonders of “multiculturalism” I always think of Lebanon and Syria. Either a failed state (Lebanon) or a dictatorship to keep the factions from going to war (Syria). Those are the choices.
Wait… I’ve seen this episode!
More seriously — this is probably one of the “easier” forms of corruption, forced labor having a long history with humanity and all.
nonviolent offenders “who were sentenced under outdated laws, policies, and practices.”
Selling kids is non-violent if you get the police to do the collecting for you, and laws against selling kids are so 1865.
Sory, but I hate MST3K/Rifftrax/etc. I’d rather watch a movie and draw my own conclusions instead of watching people talk over the movie.
And yes, there’s a qualitative difference between that and more traditional reviews.
I’m glad they’re getting out, because I hope one or more of the kids he enslaved tracks him down and tortures him to death VERY slowly. What he did IMO is beyond Epstein level grooming and abuse.
This guy needed to die in a cell. There were many young lives ruined by him and his partners.
Dude has been out of a cell since 2020. Covid house arrest release. They never put any of them back in prison
Unfortunately, that is the lesson Silicon Valley took from the Microsoft monopoly stuff back in the day. “We can not care about politics — but politics damned well cares about us, so we’d better be in there with better bribes than our competitors!”
Second verse… same as the first.
Oh, ffs… yeah maybe that’s true for the employers of the dockworkers themselves (I doubt it… but okay, maybe).
But what about the cost to the economy with increased shipping times reducing productivity, loss of use of US ports versus foreign ports because we’re so damned slow, the increase in Chinese influence because *they will* build modern ports to compete with us, getting them belt-and-road footholds in other countries, etc.? Every other part of the economy competition and efficiency are good — but in the Longshoreman’s Buggy Whip League… we don’t care?
I’m not a fan of humanity being pushed out of labor any more than anyone else — and AI is knocking at the door of my field to some extent (I haven’t been impressed by it for anything beyond the most trivial crap personally… but I’m an old (ish… I know I’m still a whippersnapper to most of y’all!) fogey and set in my ways probably…. but at some point you have to do what makes sense. And if the rest of the world is doing it much better and faster — that’s going to kill our sector eventually. Ah well… I’m sure in trying to read the links and respond I’m missing that y’all have already commented on this (sorry), so I’ll shut up and move on.
It’s not even that many jobs because the union is gatekeeping to hold the jobs for friends/families (ie. putting their kids on the rolls so they’re senior members by the time they’re old enough to actually vote). I think it’s something like 10,000 combined for the entire East and Gulf coasts, but I could be wrong.
Plenty of high paying shipyard jobs in the Norfolk area as well – all the companies are hiring (short handed) as well as NAVSEA and other facilities on base.
Company I work for is giving us all
AILLM “assistants” for our tickets. Thebeta testersearly access users have warned everyone else to not let it send customer communications, as it apparently mangles the details and sends incoherent updates (simmer down all of you who say this is no different than a usual help desk update). There was one use case that was praised though, getting summary of all the tickets on an account you generally don’t work with. That seems some pretty thin gruel to me.Yeah — I think bug summaries and automated Python (don’t try this with C kernel code, kids!) unit testing for simple “Class has these methods with these exceptions, generate tests where you mock inputs to force the exception cases and validate” is in the current “AI” wheelhouse from what I’ve seen. Asking it for much more is unimpressive. Even documenting functions errs on the side of “well that was bloody obvious and adds no value” from what I’ve seen.
LLMs in practice remind me of people looking for animal intelligence. So many are willing to overlook all the signs of it not working for those times when it shits out something that can be misinterpreted as being close.
Even documenting functions errs on the side of “well that was bloody obvious and adds no value” from what I’ve seen.
Them: We have wonderful documentation! It has all these web pages, everything is online and hyperlinked! The best documentation.
Me: Great! I’ll start writing my code!
Me: Huh, I need to use toplevel.segment2.substep1.conf that implements the configuration of this relatively complex task… Let me click on this hyper link on this extensive web documentation infrastructure they’ve so helpfully and auotmagically set up!
Them: “class toplevel.segment2.substep1.conf – configuration parameters for toplevel.segment2.substep1”
Me: ….. FUCK YOU.
Me: 10 minutes later realizing nothing of use is going to come of this. Guess, I’ll just go read the code like you always have to do anyway.
Made me glad I’m WfH right now, PM… if I were in an office I would have seriously disturbed my coworkers laughing there. Too true.
PutridMeat….
Made me belly laugh.
We all have code stories that go like “variable named var3…. thank you so much”
But the flashback your hyperlink rich story gave me was a banking integration with the helpful documentation.
This was in the era when XML transfers were the new hot thing, so obviously banks didn’t do that.
So we have this ixed length defined field format they give us to send. But it has a couple of test fields that are variable length. And they have different character delimiters for each of those. And those have forbidden characters.
None of which is documented anywhere that anyone can find.
And nobody on their end has access to the code (huge multinational).
So we have to keep sending test messages back and forth to define the rules.
Simultaneously, I am working with the boss over there to move them to XML. After a year, that was approved. It took us 1 day to implement.
Gaauuughkkkkkk!!!!!!
From what I have heard other countries’ ports are already way ahead of us. Trump is obviously pandering here.
5 years old. May be Euro tech vice CCP in this case. Fearmongering is what keeps the unions alive.
https://www.wired.com/story/rotterdam-port-ships-automation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzXdLii5h0E
Those robots sure as hell don’t maintain themselves.
I’m sure the robot operators and maintenance teams are like crane operators today. There are less crane operators than longshoremen who loaded by hand a century ago, but they make a lot more money.
To be fair, what the judge was convicted of was absolutely consistent with Kamala’s record in California.
1-8-7-7 Kids for cash,
K-I-D-S kids for cash….
Garfield 1 2323
That has nothing to do with lasagna?
Not Adahn:
It does not. But that ad (and others liked it) ran frequently enough that the jingle is embedded in the mind of anyone who grew up in the Cleveland are of a certain age. Just saying Garfield 1 will generally get the response back.
Tangentally, I was blessed housing-wise growing up in a state where the primary resource was clay. Siding wasn’t a thing.
Every time that commercial comes on the radio, I want to go to the studio with a semiautomatic and a bump stock. Sooooo fucking annoying.
That’s just because they won’t hire you as a delivery van, OMWC.
He was fine on the pick up side of the delivery, it was the drop off part he struggled with.
I’m glad I was able to give everyone a pleasant earworm for the day.
There it is.
“There has been a lot of discussion having to do with ‘automation’ on United States docks. I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen,” Trump wrote in the post.
Translation: Fuck consumers.
Crystal Mangum confesses
Former stripper and convicted murderer Crystal Mangum admitted Thursday that she lied and “made up a story” that three Duke University lacrosse players raped her at a team party in 2006.
“They trusted me that I wouldn’t betray their trust, and I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” Magnum told the independent media outlet Let’s Talk With Kat at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.
“[I] made up a story that wasn’t true.”
When the lacrosse team was exonerated, there was a group of (22 IIRC) faculty that refused to withdraw their demand for expulsion. I doubt anyone will be asking them if they will admit they’re wrong now.
That’s a stripper name.
That was an astonishing time. And it was shocking to me that the administration backed the false accusers supporters. They had iron-clad alabais.
That particular moral panic isn’t being covered anymore (mattress girl, UVA, etc.), but I wonder if it has subsided?
Campuses are far more radical than they were 20 years ago.
ibn Fadlan went up the Volga river in the 10th century. He saw at least one living Neanderthal. Yes, humans and neanderthals were fucking then and I bet they are still at it today.
We Neanderthals never went away.
The problem is the “classic neanderthal” appearance was actually a late development and many of the remains who show it also show signs of inbreeding. So people have an image that is less than accurate from the fringe populations cut off from the main group.
The portrayal of neanderthals in The 13th Warrior was probably accurateish for physical appearance. If a pure neanderthal walked up to you today you probably wouldn’t notice.
The DNA studies showing Mr. Soandso has X% neanderthal genes….how much DNA did humans and neanderthals already have in common? I think that percentage only refers to the DNA pure humans dont have.
Also, the terms Human, Neanderthal, Denisovan, Cro-magnon are a bit fuzzy. They all are included in what I consider ‘human’. They all fall pretty close on the same spectrum, about as close as the ethnic populations we see today.
This is interesting: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/a-40000-year-old-bracelet-discovered-in-siberia-may-have-been-crafted-by-an-extinct-human-species
Very finely made.
‘Humans’ have been around about 300,000 years or so? We are just now finding shit-tons of lost cities in the Amazon basin. What gets me are all of the people who imagine ‘lost cities/lost knowledge/long gone golden ages’. It is all nonsense. History is just one unending soap opera of people doing people things – the same shit we are doing today.
The Amazonian cities aren’t that old. They were spotted by a few Spanish wanderers who got lost along the Amazon before the major colonization of the region took place. They vanished by the time European settlement in the area was seriously attempted – likely to disease.
*The Columbian exchange was downright apocalyptic to the Americas in terms of the diseases ripping through populations lacking in any type of resistances. If you just look at the Spanish censuses in Hispanola and Cuba, you get some sense of how quickly the natives died off from the exposure. We don’t have accurate data for the more distant parts of the continent, but it is why large swathes were effectively empty when later settlers arrived. This is why I don’t buy the “we were always here” claim from the modern tribes. I doubt many of the tribes existed in anything resembling their colonial incarnations before the arrival of the pandemics.
One has to wonder if the strange lack of widespread use of the wheel and/or use of large cartage animals is behind the disparity in pandemic impact (Europe did get syphilis as I recall.. so there was some impact on the other side).
Did the increased mobility in Africa and then Europe, the Middle East and Asia just provide enough mixing to encourage viral evolution? Because it seems that the tropical climes are excellent for starting all kinds of nasty bugs either way — so one would have expected the Amazonian region to produce something to rival malaria, etc.
Or maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy given one of the main killers was *-pox variants? Because of the more widespread use of large domesticated animals, more cowpox–>smallpox vectors… so more immunity for Europe and transmissions when they came to the New World?
Just pondering since you brought up the Columbian exchange… I’m sure if I cared to look there are probably only 4000+ PhD theses on this stuff….
It seems to me, in my entirely uninformed and illogical brain, that northern climes would be better for killing untoward critters because of the cold (like the mosquito killing season), and that tropical climes are too humid to do anything but let things grow and fester.
The new world lacked many animals that were candidates for domestication as beasts of burden. The llama is small as these go, and the only one successfully domesticated. Cervines and Bison lack the temperament and other traits which would lend themselves to the role.
And the tendency of the old world to live cheek and jowl with thes large reservoir species certainly did contribute to a selection towards resistances and immunities to the pox.
Despite the lack of a wheel, long range commerce was a common feature of the new world. Most of it was done by boat.
Rudolph says no reindeer games for UCS!
Mojeaux: Mosquito borne deadly diseases were, up until the 20th century, a serious problem in all climes. Before DDT we used to dump kerosene/diesel etc into swamps by the millions of gallons. DDT came along and we essentially eradicated most of that.
Yellow fever made a comeback in the early nineties in Puerto Rico. The govt hired a bug guy to go solve the problem. He had a hell of a time of it. When he announced on teevee that everyone should dump out their flower pots and any standing water they could find the Puerto Ricans scoffed at him. Everybody know the evil spirits had been unleashed on them cuz the neighbor did something evil. Witches and such.
The main thing to take from this: we cant completely eradicate any bug. We can bring cases down to ~ zero but if we let our guard down (I am looking at you open borders) they will come roaring back.
Plague style diseases are a cultural phenomena.
What wiped out pre-columbian Americans? Disease is the most likely cause. All societies in all places have experienced collapse from plagues at one time or other.
My vague impression is that then, as now, most pandemics originated in East Asia. Why that would be, I don’t know.
And Africa had its own reservoir of diseases that killed Europeans in droves, and the European diseases didn’t seem to hit the Africans particularly hard. One of the reasons African slaves were preferred in the New World was their disease resistance.
RC: “most pandemics originated in East Asia”
Again, plagues are a cultural phenomena. If you eat toad assholes, bat wings, pangolin peckers then fuck a monkey and think that disease has a magical origin you are going to catch some nasty bugs. In today’s very mobile world those bugs are going to get around.
I forgot to include poor hygiene regarding human corpses.
Oh, Suthen, that’s just the start.
Don’t look up gutter oil.
Or the sanitary standards of any place that handles food in that country.
Ben Stiller and his wife come to mind.
Should I feel guilty for laughing at Cocaine Mitch’s new look?
https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1867319498249744648
Why? His old look was funny enough.
I guess the cocaine ran out.
The turtle moves
Hey, you need to credit Twofinger when you quote him!
Is that an eagle I see above?
Om, maybe?
Who or what is Mitch mixed up with that he keeps getting his ass kicked?
The first rule of Senate Fight Club is you don’t talk about Senate Fight Club!
Anyone keeping eyes on Brooks?
He needs to take a marker to that headband like so: https://www.gq.com/story/jim-mcmahon-super-bowl-weekend-chicago-bears-1985
Re: banging neanderthals,
What genre is the Earth’s Children series? Historical porn? Is it still being written?
Caesar’s original quote was not “Veni, Vidi, Vinci.”, but “We came, we saw, and we banged!”, but that was not considered PG-13.
I would have expected “We saw, we banged, we came!” from those wacky Romans….
GET FIRST ONE OUT OF WAY, MAKE RAPE LAST LONGER!
Well, I see Biden just let a bunch of people, including a lot of PRC operatives, out of jail. I’m betting that somebody reminded him that Hunter got more payoffs from the PRC than anyone else, and they have the receipts?
The real winner of the 2020 election was always Xi.
Heh.
“Taking the assignment, number one, because you have to know what you’re good at.” — Donald Trump, when asked by Time magazine what he thought Kamala’s biggest mistake was
Says the guy who thinks he knows more about port automation than anyone else.
He knows it is bad for longshoreman and that he’s played his labor support for all he can.
Senate can do their advise and consent and reject his DoL pick. Also push back on stupidity like this – even if Vance is also in favor.
Yeah this is a purely political move. It’s stupid, but shrewd at the same time; he’s trying to solidify the GOP rebrand as “the working man’s party”.
Union Thuggery != The Working Class.
@UCS: Agreed, but it’s politics.
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 12/13:
*23/23 words (+16 bonus words)
📖 In the top 1% by bonus words
I played https://squaredle.com 12/13:
*56/56 words (+28 bonus words)
📖 In the top 1% by bonus words
🔥 Solve streak: 745
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gPJQr3Q7fc
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 12/13:
*23/23 words
🎯 Perfect accuracy
I played https://squaredle.com 12/13:
*56/56 words (+7 bonus words)
🎯 In the top 5% by accuracy
🔥 Solve streak: 640
Accuracy must be pretty good across the player base — I swear I only messed up once (too many gaming sessions, I was hoping “re-up” would be a bonus word).
I played https://squaredle.com 12/13:
*56/56 words (+10 bonus words)
🎯 In the top 26% by accuracy
🔥 Solve streak: 104
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 12/13:
*23/23 words (+6 bonus words)
📖 In the top 14% by bonus words
“Extreme case of beer goggles”
I don’t know about the Neanderthals, but male Homo sapiens will fuck just about anything.
https://archive.is/blXso
Friday Funbags.
Pedantically, it was probably not beer. Beer is a product of a grain surplus. I do wonder if we had other things to ferment and no evidence survived because it was stored in stuff like animal stomach pouches which decay.
Of course we had other things to ferment. Mead predates beer by quite a long time, and nearly any fruit juice will ferment on its own from natural yeast. Hell, grape juice wasn’t a thing until Welch’s started pasteurizing it.
But who’s saving fruit squeezings?
Crapri Sun has a warning on the side of it’s packaging not to consume if punctured due to fermentation occurring. The horrors!
UCS:
You don’t even need fruit juice, quite a few fruits will ferment naturally by themselves. Considering that other mammals are routinely scavenging for those fruits, pretty sure humans were too.
Yes. Videos showing elk (what we call moose) eating fermented apples in Scandinavia are hilarious. If moose can figure it out, so did we.
I donno, humans are dumber than a box of ox.
+1 Jean Auel
One of my local breweries just announced a cask beer fest. I may go just for the name alone.
Well done.
I hope there are no clashes at the fest.
Stay away from the area between the minarets
The sheriff won’t like it.
https://sightmark.com/blogs/field-guide/michigan-bill-to-ban-all-colored-guns
WTF Michigan?
So… guns of color is now the preferred nomenclature?
Competition shooters hardest hit.
Don’t forget the guys with camo shotguns.
Wow, Trump wins and all the white supremacists really do crawl out of the woodwork.
My WAG is this is so they aren’t mistaken as toy guns.
It is, of course, ridiculous.
Brightly colored gunz is how Big Gun gets kids interested gunz and creates a new generation of addicts!
Also, gun addiction is a government-recognized thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQnWZ6uSK20
I got nuthin’.
https://x.com/OntWtf/status/1867382201354269109
WTF???
…ummm…wow…just wow.
Genius material right there.
I will assume the guy is Arab. Any Gulf / WOT Vet who spent time around their armed forces probably witnessed their casual attitude towards safety in general, particularly with guns.
Re: illo at the top,
I had never seen an actual image of T.S. Eliot’s “rabbinical cats” before.
https://youtu.be/bq2UAL7rvZU?t=276
What true evil looks like…
This is almost the same as Pie and his tankie trolling.
Oh boy…. Stellantis summed up in a car. I actually like the shape and that it is a coupe. Otherwise the software is half baked and it appears that it is made of lead even compared to other EVs.
2025 Dodge Charger Scat Pack Review // One Big Problem
This comment is perfect:
@jamesonkorb758
I look forward to not buying one of these used for $12,000 in two years.
No, the best comment was…
I’m going to queue the video up for later viewing.
I view that thing as an abomination like the Ford Mach-E. That’s not a Charger, and the Mach-E is not a Mustang.
I’m heading out to the gym at my lunch hour. I’m going to take my Hemi V8 powered manual transmission Challenger.
Hemi V8 powered manual transmission Challenger
Sure to increase in value the longer Dodge pushes the EVs.
The delays put Biden’s climate goals at risk.
And that’s all anybody cares about.
I don’t know if this guy did anything else, and I don’t care please get rid of the mail-order ban.
Well, per Bruen, the history actually supports mail order guns without an FFL since that practice was basically unencumbered until the 1960s.
+1 – RFK2 (used by CIA to frame LHO for killing my uncle!)
Stellantis summed up
I couldn’t make it through the intro.
I look forward to not buying one of these used for $12,000 in two years.
Excellent.
Let it burn
Surprisingly, there’s a correct answer here. And it comes, of all places, from the field of addiction recovery.
For the last two years, Democrats have thought they were acting in the country’s best interests by helping Republicans govern. They have not been. They meant well, but they have actually been protecting voters from the consequences of Republican dysfunction and enabling bad Republican behavior.
Republican politicians are now addicted to drama, outrage and “owning the libs.” When you shield addicts from the consequences of their actions, you’re not doing them any favors. All you are doing is enabling their addiction.
The same goes for their voters. Many are hooked on the political performance and continue to elect unserious, bomb-throwing zealots who pander on social media for the clicks and the television appearances. But Congress is not a reality television show. In real life, dysfunction has consequences.
The country won’t be on the road to recovery until it is allowed to experience those consequences. If that means giving free rein to the collection of clowns with flamethrowers that now passes for the Republican Party, so be it. Democrats should resist the urge to intervene when the inevitable happens and they set themselves on fire.
More high minded political analysis from the left. Everything they do is thoughtful, rational and strictly in the nation’s best interest. Republicans are like destructive children who only want to break the lovely toys they have been given. They should be spanked and sent to bed without supper.
All projection, all the time.
Yep. When you want to know what the left is actively doing, look at what they’re accusing the right of doing. It’s like an iron law by now.
Example 1: “Many are hooked on the political performance and continue to elect unserious, bomb-throwing zealots…”
Yeah. I mean, fucking RepublicanS AUTHORIZING MISSILE STRIKES FROM UKRAINE INTO RUSSIA. You mean THAT kind of bomb throwing? Or words on Twitter?
Cool. Do the same with all federal assistance of all kinds to the blue cities.
Everyone both left and right says they want a civil war let’s just push faster towards it.
Wait… are they saying that they should support the Republicans as a way to “own the MAGAts”?
…served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008
Maverick? You worked for Maverick and you complain about the dysfunction in the Republican Party? Mr. Gang of Eight because I’d really rather be a Democrat (but at that time they just didn’t have enough war-boner)?
Believe all Women!!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/crystal-mangum-accused-three-duke-130832824.html
Just because one woman lied…
https://bucks.crimewatchpa.com/da/29567/post/woman-charged-lying-about-attempted-rape-and-kidnapping-middletown
Look, just because TWO women lied…
From time to time, I regard it as a good idea to reflect on something that worked out properly.
As I may have mentioned (or those who’ve met me have seen) I am a fat bastard who doesn’t want to remain that way. Breaking habits is hard to do, so I’ve been targetting them one by one to get on the right trajectory. Getting to a good number only to have it all fall apart isn’t a win, fixing my behavior so that it arrives organically is.
So, the most recent habit I’ve been trying to crack is the temptation for ordering out. Food delivery is too easy, godawful in terms of maintaining a proper diet, and expensive. But there are times when I’m really not able to muster the motivation to cook. Even if I have the food in the house. So I need something to fill the gap.
While evaluating that problem, I had a second issue also related to diet. If I didn’t have lunch at the office, I would all too often crash in the afternoon. This would spiral into the “I don’t want to cook” crisis in the evening on the regular, so I needed to address it if I had any hope of dealing with the ordering out.
Ironically, the short-term fix has been food delivery. Let me explain. On looking at options to have food at work and something readily at hand when motivation was lacking, I knew I needed something other than an ad hoc day to day plan. I looked at the various companies offering regular food deliveries and concluded that meal kits wouldn’t work given the two problems I needed to deal with in the here and now. I saw that Factor_ (yes the underscore is part of their name) sold pre-cooked non-frozen meals which included keto and low carb options. And the price tag was less than what I’d spend on regular delivery over a similar time frame. So I decided to try it out.
First annoyance – your only delivery option is Monday, even if another day of the week would work better. And the FedEx guy never gets it to my house before 5pm, despite that being after the delivery window. But at least the ice packs inside the insulation keep it to a safe temperature.
Second annoyance – dealing with the packaging. The ice packs and insulation the boxes contain are bulky and the ice packs are heavy. I wanted to drain the liquid from the packs down the sink, but they contain the same absorbant material as disposable diapers, so putting it down the drain is a recipie for clogged pipes. From an engineering standpoint it makes sense, gelled up water would leak slower from a pinprick leak, and not cause as many issues.
Third annoyance – the do not adequitely salt the food. The first meal I tried was Indian Butter Chicken, and it seemed to be utterly lacking until I realized what the problem was. Now I make it a point to salt them meals before eating and the problem has gone away. But that first impression has made me avoid the otherwise acceptable butter chicken meals.
In all, the food is fine. The logistics of getting it to you impose some limitations that will be unavoidable, but it is no more difficult to get ready than a TV dinner, so I can have lunch at work and avoid the temptation of ordering out at home. So it does what I need it to do.
Factor_ is owned by Hello Fresh, which has recently been accused of hiring illegal alien children at one of its US plants. Caveat regarding accusations and all that, but even if true, the utility in dealing with the dietary problems I was trying to address while I address the permanant habit problems is significant. Maybe we can deport the illegals and they can hire domestic child labor.
Sorry about the wall of text.
I’ve had the same issues when I was single. Do I cook for myself and eat one big pot of stuff every day, or do I just stop at the Taqueria or a million other places on my way home. I usually chose the worst option for my waistline. It’s bad when the clerks at Churches Fried Chicken know you by name.
I now do something l like to call the school cafeteria method of cooking for lunch.
On Sunday or Sat, go to the store with a plan for the week. “I’m going to need 4 lunches and 5 dinners.”
Buy and make one or two large base proteins that can be used for multiple meals and a few sides. For example:
Dinner: Buy a six or eight pack of chicken thighs, marinate or spice 2-3 ways with different flavors and bake, grill or sauté the proteins. Make a pile of rice or another starch with similar or complimentary flavors to the proteins. Vegetables can be a simple frozen bag or even easier and more variety is a salad. Cook it all on Sunday and reheat or for dinner cook the starch and veg and reheat the protein.
Make yourself a sandwich every day.
Too many carbs, and much boredom.
Don’t blame the mirror if the face is crooked.
Found a fortune cookie?
Not speaking to food delivery. I tried that with Weight Watchers, and while it worked, it was out of my budget long-term. Moving on…
When I was hard-core low-carbing, I had the lunch problem (it was 20 years ago, so delivery wasn’t really an option and I was a temp admin worker and usually not in the vicinity of a McDonald’s). I mean, yeah, steaks and eggs at home, no problem. Lunch…problem.
It was boring. Low-carb is pretty boring if you don’t like to cook and don’t care about variety. I just cubed up ham and cheese and grazed on it all day.
Yeah, when I was doing Atkins induction phase & still in an office 5 days a week, I’d end up ordering sandwiches and just eating the filling with a fork.
Working from home, it’d be so much easier these days.
*looks down*
In fact, I probably should be a bit more disciplined and get back to avoiding carbs.
*guiltily shoves cookie wrapper in trash*
At least a couple of the sandwich chains (Jimmy Johns and Jersey Mikes come to mind) are now offering low carb options (Jimmy Johns does a lettuce wrap, Jersey Mikes does it like a salad in a tub).
I always tell people Dr. Atkins saved my life (as in, helped with my mental illness), and I still reap the benefits to this day.
Anyway, I was on induction for 2 years. Didn’t go above 20g a day. I had designated cheat days: birthday, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve. I woke up after those days so miserable I thought I’d die.
The extra-meat Greek gyros at Arby’s is good for picking the meat out of the sandwich. I love that stuff and wish I could replicate it, but recipes for it are all over the place with regard to which spices are used.
This was about 25 years ago(!) when I did Atkins (when it was still widely mocked as Fat-kins). I know there are lots more options now, if only because those options often cover my wife’s gluten-free needs.
Undersalting is endemic for… $reasons, I guess.
At least it’s easily fixable.
For home stuff, have you looked at sous vide? I’ve done bigger batches on the weekend, throw the bag into an ice bath when it’s at temp, then into the freezer.
To reheat, back into the water bath later in the week. Super easy meal.
It works great, though I’d recommend an actual vacuum sealer vs. just ziplock bags if you go that route.
I have a vacuum sealer and an immersion circulator.
I just can’t seem to get anything to cook properly when I use that method. It’s a skill issue. And if I dislike how the food comes out, I’m not going to be inclined to eat it, which gets me back where I started.
My aunt had a stroke some years ago. They told her to lay off the salt and fat, so she does. My mother and I just look at each other and roll our eyes. Mom: “I would rather die of a heart attack than go without salt.” And so, some time after that, my mom lands in the hospital for some ortho-related thing. She told me they wouldn’t let her have salt. So, like a dutiful daughter, I went and got her some because dammit, she’s 81. She can eat what she damned well pleases.
UnCiv, I will _strongly_ recommend a good sous vide cookbook, especially when starting out.
I’m partial to ATK, in general.
https://www.americastestkitchen.com/books?r%5Bsearch_cookbook_collection_titles%5D%5B0%5D=Sous%20Vide%20for%20Everybody
It was the Sous Vide Shredded Chicken Tacos I was talking about, above.
When Dad was in rehab in 2022, he had my sister smuggle in soft-serve ice cream.
I wrote something up a couple years ago on how I/we tackle this. I premade my lunches to take to work on the weekend (still do, even though I’m not working now). Mrs. Dean usually makes a couple of stews/soups/whatever that are good for a couple dinners each on the weekends as well, so a good chunk of our dinners are “leftovers”/heat and serve.
My issue with that approach is one of discipline. I would overeat on the prep days and then no want to eat the leftovers on the weekdays. I might do better if I tried it now, but by biggest all time problem is getting bored. I would look at my options and go “not in the mood” because it was too much like what I’d been having.
This is what we do. Meal prep on the weekends to cruise through the week.
My issue with that approach is one of discipline.
Not to be an asshole… (proceeds to be an asshole)
All methods to address what you see as your problem will require discipline, if only to break the habits and/or mental and physical addictions with respect to eating food. There is no magic bullet – that’s not to say that there are not ‘magic bullets’ or more properly sound metabolic practices – that will definitely lead to you losing weight and being more healthy, if you do not change your habits and that only really happens via discipline. Perhaps there are steps – and people have laid some of them out above – that can get you partially there over time, requiring smaller increments of ‘discipline’. Of course the danger with those sorts of approaches is that is trivially easy to backslide into habits developed over a lifetime.
I don’t claim to have solved my problems with weight, still not there, but I’ve made it a good way there. And there was no magic bullet other than saying “I’m doing this, period”. I know it’s not terribly helpful, but I don’t know how else to approach it – you have to have the discipline to stick with an approach long enough in the face of major challenges and temptations so as to see those temptations and challenges recede into being less and less of a temptation until it’s: “I can’t believe I used to be tempted by that!”
Atomic Habits was good. It talked about micro-habits. All the things you do leading up to the big decision you must discipline yourself to make the right one, if you’ve developed good micro-habits, the big thing becomes easier to conquer.
Putrid – Step one to solving a problem is identifying the problem.
Meal delivery was identified as a stopgap – I needed to halt the excesses of failure I had been committing by addressing the biggest points of difficulty. Now I have the breathing room to plan.
But my biggest problem has always been boredom. So the weekend batch cooking is a trap, since I’d fall into the habit of making too much of the same thing.
In thinking of my current approach, my idea is to add more cooking nights back into the rotation so I can reduce the number of delivered meals I’m relying on. Maybe along the lines of “If I’m working from home, I’m cooking tonight”. Maybe extend that to “And I cook something else to bring in for lunch at the office tomorrow” as the next step.
Yes, incrementalism risks backsliding, but I’ve found that the dramatic shift approach leads to just abandoning it entirely. I’d rather risk two steps forward, one step back, as long as I don’t end up back where I started.
Dead threading…
In thinking of my current approach, my idea is to add more cooking nights back into the rotation so I can reduce the number of delivered meals I’m relying on.
I find this very helpful. I essentially cook every night, even if cooking is just re-heating that piece of steak or putting the soup back on the stove. I know people claim it’s too much work to cook every day, but if you factor the deviation to the drive through, or drive to the restaurant, wait for you food, get out of the parking lot, it’s generally actually quicker. And more satisfying – you being a creative type (and procedural), prepping meals would seem to be a comfort zone for you?
I was never much in on the ‘delivered meal’ thing, but again, it seems easier to just throw a steak on the grill or stove, than lookup some delivery joint, figure out what you want, wait for them to show up, unpack (or horror of horrors, interact with the delivery person); the ease of delivery/takeout/restaurant just doesn’t really seem to pan out, at least for a no-kids situation.
Boredom – that’s a tough one. I find when I’m bored, it’s very easy to graze. One way to solve that is not have anything in the house that, if I fail and graze, will drop me back into bad habits. No fresh bread (or any bread) in the house. No sugar or pre-packaged sugary food. If I graze, it’s going to be on beef jerky (home made to avoid the sugars in most commercial ones) or cheese (which can be a problem just from a pure calorie perspective) and those tend to sate you more effectively and self-terminate the graze. You also seem to have lots of hobbies – can you just transfer that boredom into jumping into some activity and/or just reading about the activity? I find that can rather quickly make forget about boredom and the drive to graze.
I’ve been using CookUnity for a while while I re-teach myself to do meal prep. I’ve been pretty happy with the results. Same problem with the packaging, but the meals are adequately seasoned and they will deliver on any day of the week.
More recently I’ve been doing all my cooking Sunday evening. A dozen sausage+egg+mushroom muffins for breakfast, yogurt chicken or tuna salad with veggies for lunch, and a pot of chili and a big stri-fry for dinner. That, plus a lot of Tupperware, will get me through the week.
That’s almost exactly what we do, right down to my batch of breakfast “muffins” – mine are scrambled eggs with cheese and broccoli or corn baked in a muffin tin. Bonus – I have very few carbs during the day, freeing them up for cocktail “hour”.
“why do men cheat on gorgeous and successful women?”
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/real-life/men-risk-relationships-gorgeous-women-34260703
See my comment about male Homo sapiens fucking just about anything. The “gorgeous and successful” is beside the point; even if you have filet mignon at home, sometimes you want to go out for a burger.
Also, “gorgeous and successful” does not exactly preclude a personality that will wear your ass out at home.
This.
Peace over beauty.
Which are you prepared to give up permanently?
President Jungle Fever’s enduring legacy
As President Joe Biden makes a final push to confirm judicial nominees before his term in office ends, he is on track to have appointed more federal judges of color than any president before him.
On Monday, the Senate confirmed Biden’s judicial nominee for the Northern District of Georgia, Tiffany Johnson, making her the 40th Black woman he has appointed to lifetime federal judgeships — more than any president in a single term.
The content of their character is inseparable from the color of their skin.
Well, the country is in shambles. We have tens of trillions in debt, are being flooded by illegals, families can barely afford food, but goddammit, our leader appointed 40 black women to be federal judges, so everything is A-Okay.
Might want to rethink usage of the word “straight”.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/one-five-straight-men-dont-34251393
White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in an emailed statement that Biden is “proud to have strengthened the judiciary by making it more representative of the country as a whole and that legacy will have an impact for decades to come.”
“Even before taking office, President Biden signaled to the Senate that he wanted to make sure that people who had been historically excluded from our judiciary” are included, said Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program and an adviser at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Who cares if they believe in the rule of law? The Constitution is just a fucking piece of paper.
Yes. We have a fucking idiot on the bench.
Yes, your boss is a proud racist. Congratulations.
After Stellantis this is Boeing summed up in a single airplane.
President-elect Donald Trump didn’t get to fly on a new Air Force One during his first term. He likely won’t get to fly on a new presidential plane in his second term, either.
Boeing has booked more than $2 billion of charges tied to the fixed-price contract…
So who is at fault for all of the changes? Boeing?
The dark blue of Trump’s paint scheme would generate added heat that could affect sensitive electronics in the aircraft, potentially adding more costs and delays to their development, people familiar with the program said. The added heat was one of the factors that contributed to the Biden administration’s decision to ditch Trump’s colors.
LMFAO – that’s pure bullshit on a plane operating at an ambient air temperature of -40 to -70 degrees.
Air New Zealand must have a hell of a time, becuase their planes are black.
Sorry, Some of them are, but the point stands.
SR-71 and U-2 both laugh and laugh
JFC.
Conagra Brands adding ‘GLP-1 friendly’ to packaging on Healthy Choice frozen meals to woo users of weight-loss drugs
After Stellantis this is Boeing summed up in a single airplane.
Boeing should merge with Oshkosh.
I have a non-stop ticket to Hell for laughing at this…
Also this.
I’m in the seat right behind you, apparently.
Heheh, my family is getting told that one at Christmas. I’ll only substitute the proper “feckin” for the “fucking”.
Fookin’
All projection, all the time.
We are ruled by a rabble of petulant children.
“The research shows that when you have more judges that have different perspectives because they’ve worked on different types of issues or they come from different communities, it improves the decision-making and it certainly improves the trust that communities might have in these institutions. So making sure we have fair-minded judges at all levels is really important.”
Predictable and consistent application of the law be damned.
Wait.
If we’ve always had a dearth of minority federal judges, research of what?
This shit is so fucking tiresome. Stop with the fucking grandstanding. This administration has been nothing short of disastrous, and his anointed successor just took an absolute beating in the polls. The entire platform has been repudiated. Stop with the fucking “legacy” bullshit.
How research can show improved judicial decision making, I have no clue.
“they’ve worked on different types of issues or they come from different communities”
Atlas himself couldn’t do the heavy lifting of that “or”.
Shinzo Abe was 5-9