Oh dang. I haven’t actually used the app in a while. It seems like the monetization of core features is a new thing?

It’s such a simple and good idea at its core, so it seems really stupid to muck it up. I guess I will just have to go back to using decimal lat/longs. At least mapping applications seem to be able to interpret those better now. For the longest time, even Google maps would just give you no results if you typed in what was obviously lat/long if you didn’t have the ° symbol and minutes/seconds.

It’s good to see that there are sane comments here.

It’s crazy to me when people go through a 10 step logical progression to justify how not voting is somehow the moral thing to do.

It is essentially a trolley problem, and maybe my personal philosophy is too utilitarian, but it’s an easy choice for me to throw the switch that causes the least harm rather than sitting by for maximum harm.

Also, there are a lot of non-voting actions you can do that improve things, but voting doesnt prevent any of those. Anyone who says they do direct action instead is full of crap: do both.

Despite all the attacks on voting rights, voting is still one of the easiest actions to take.

Idk about merlin, but with iNaturalist, the purpose was logging sightings and locations of plants/animals/fungi/etc, and letting people double check your ID so it can be used in research.

This built a massive database of images, locations, times, etc, which is a really good training set for image (or sound) recognition. Now the app is really good at automatically recognizing stuff from pictures, so people just use it for that. The app actually started to try to penalize you for using it for identification without actually logging stuff.

The best analogy for anything in the fediverse is “it’s like email where you dont need to have an account with the same company as someone to talk to them”.

For Mastodon specifically, it’s just the Twitter equivalent of that.

There was buycott. I dont think it’s been developed for 10 years now.

In America (and i fear this has spread to other countries), people like Mary Pride have pushed for homeschooling in addition to basically starting the quiverful movement.

The idea is, you keep kids out of school so they are only allowed to learn your far right views, and you have as many kids as possible so you can 1) force the woman to stay at home and 2) have older kids forced to parent and teach younger kids.

You then involve the kids in politics as early as possible so by the time they are adults, they have already made inroads to working with far right politicians.

Some of those kids end up a certain version of smart, but the priorities are different. They might heavily focus on speech debate, both from a religious and a political point of view. On the “good” end of the spectrum, the kids end up truly charismatic and persuasive, and on the “bad” end, it’s basically tiny ben shapiros who just gish gallop you at any chance they get.

Often, but not always, girls are completely neglected since “they only need to learn how to run a home”. Oftentimes kids are abused, and homeschooling is a way to hide that from authorities.

To contrast with all of this, I think there situations where we should be more flexible with homeschooling. If a parent has expertise in a topic, they should be able to cover like a couple classes or something. I knew homeschooling kids who came to public school for a class or two, but I didn’t know any kids who were homeschooling for a class or two.

People in this thread are saying it’s dumb to think you can teach better than a teacher, but if it’s between 1:1 tutoring and being in a class of 30, you have a big step up.

Personally, I found math classes trivially easy basically up until i was like 17. Math classes till then mostly just focused on teaching how to accurately and repeatably do all the things that calculators do perfectly. I could rant about how math is taught a lot, but I won’t. If I had 1 on 1 teaching on a more diverse range of math topics, I could have learned way more. We should be helping parents/kids do that if they can.

Organizations like the homeschool legal defense association basically exist to protect child abusers.

A whole article about right wingers being obsessed with having kids, and no mention of the quiverfull movement?

If you listen to what he says, the FBI redacted all the files before passing them to the DOJ. The DOJ was only able to release the versions of what they actually had.

Ro went to the FBI to see the originals, but it’s not like he could comprehensively hunt through the 3 million files. It sounds like he just pulled out names of people that he found that were mentioned in particularly damaging documents that were redacted only to keep their own names clean.

It’ll take a much larger effort to comprehensively go through with proper redactions of victim info, without hiding perps.

I used to hate mushrooms until I started foraging. It turns out I’m just not a big fan of Agaricus bisporus, and it turns out that’s the absolute lions share of mushroom consumption in the western world in various forms with various names.

Foraging though, it’s all so good.

The problem is that French food in the Anglosphere has literally been the fancy food since 1066. That’s why English has 2 words for every meat: the germanic peasant word and the french nobleman’s culinary word (cow-beef, chicken-poultry, deer-venison, sheep-mutton, swine-pork, etc).

Being the default “fancy” food is going to do damage to any cuisine as the purpose becomes more about fanciness than tasting good or being what people from the place actually eat.

For another example, look at American Italian food. In a lot of small towns, Italian restaurants are the de facto fancy restaurant . It’s basically made it so that Italian restaurants in much of the US are either way too expensive and fancy or they’ve gone the opposite route and just overcharge for really basic pasta with sauce (olive garden).

If you don’t like truffle oil, you probably just don’t like truffle, and that’s fine. Like the other commenter said, it’s literally just the same compound that’s been synthesized.

2,4-Dithiapentane

Real truffles obviously have some other flavoring compounds in there, but like vanilla vs vanilin, you’d probably have a hard time distinguishing between them in a dish in a blind taste test.

I have eaten shaved truffles, and even that’s really a gamble. The problem is that they aren’t really good until they are “ripe”, but once you dig them up, i don’t think they ripen any more. There’s also a big counterfeit problem since many species look similar. I’ve had good truffles, and I’ve had truffles that literally just taste like nothing.

salami

Tampan detected. I love a Cuban sandwich, but I’ve never had one from Tampa, so maybe yours are worse, lol.

Anyone replying “stretching” is basing their response on grade school gym class, not science.

Studies have not shown that stretching has a positive impact on injury prevention, and this has been widely known in the literature for over 20 years. Stretching can improve performance in some sports like gymnastics where increased flexibility is needed, but that is unrelated to injury.

Stretching has a negative effect on performance in other cases because it actually decreases muscle force generation.

Think about it, would you think that loosening all the belts on a machine would automatically make it less likely to break down?

So what does prevent injury?

• Good warm-ups. Walk before you jog before you run. Lift an unloaded barbell before a loaded one, etc.
• Strength. A joint surrounded by muscle is a stable joint. That means doing exercises that strengthen all the muscles, including minor ones. It’s part of why most people who know what they are talking about will try to get you to do compound lifts with free weights over single joint exercises on machines.
• periodization/progressive overload. Basically slowly building intensity and then backing off to recuperate.

I’ve never been someone who can eat the same thing multiple days in a row, so i can’t do the “standard” approach of making proportioned meals. I also can’t just eat food I’ve heated back up in the microwave for every meal.

In a perfect week, I’ll make some bread, some rice, a soup/stew, a sauce of some sort, etc. I also make a lot of yogurt and ricotta-type cheese (from milk, not whey), because milk is heavily subsidized where I live.

I basically just try to have different things I can combine in different orders, and typically I’m leaving some part of the process to still be done each night (roasting veggies, boiling pasta, stir frying something, etc).

Roads.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm

Roads have an unbelievable cost when you really start to put the numbers together. A lane mile of a new interstate on rolling terrain costs 6.2 million in 2025 $. Keep in mind that is only a lane mile, so for 2 lanes in each direction, it’s $25 million per mile. Multiply that by the 49k miles of interstate, and you have a (super rough) estimate cost of 1.2 trillion to construct it today. Even resurfacing those roads is ~1/10 the cost, which is still a lot of money.

Ignoring interstates and looking at really run of the mill arterial is still staggering.

Picking a random square farming county, McPherson county, KS is an easy example. It is 30 miles by 30 miles, with a paved arterial every mile (ignoring towns). Thats 3600 lane miles. At $3.6 million per lane mile, that’s ~$13 billion to costruct the roads in a county with a population of 30,000, or $432,000 per person.

That’s really a feature to them, not a bug.

I, personally, have grown muscle tissue in a laboratory environment, so I know what it takes to actually grow muscle tissue. What I’m not familiar with is what the lab-grown meat industry practices are, but I just looked into it briefly.

There are 2 companies currently with approval to sell a lab-grown meat product in the US: Upside Foods and Good Meat.

Both sell chicken. Upside Food’s process is outlined in their FDA submission. They specifically state: “several media protein components (e.g., bovine serum albumin, growth factors) are required for sustaining cell viability and growth during the culture process” i.e., they rely on albumin from cattle like I suspected.

Unfortunately, since the “creation of chicken cells” is FDA regulated, but “production of chicken meat” is USDA regulated, that document doesn’t actually go into detail on how the cells are turned into the final product. This Wired article, however, says that they are basically just laying out sheets of the cells, and then manually stacking them to give some structure, which is not a scalable solution. Also, it seems like they are somewhat falling apart as a company not that they are running out of VC money. It looks like they are also trying to pivot into producing some sort of primarily plant based sausage with a little chicken cells thrown in. I’m assuming that’s a last gasp to produce something profitable.

Good Meats, on the other hand, I can’t find as much information on. The equivalent FDA document is on the other side of a link that seems broken. According to what they publish on their site, they are essentially vat growing cells, straining them off, and then extruding them into a shape.

In both cases, I don’t think it’s accurate to call the product “meat” since the cells will not have the structure of muscle cells (long strands), and there isn’t any tissue organization or adhesion to an extracellular matrix. It’s more of a pate even though they called a fillet.

The ecological footprint of both of the companies is greater than just conventional chicken production. I know this because both websites try really carefully to make it seem like they are better, but they can’t say that they are.

Upside foods phrases all of their claims as “what if we could do x, y, and z?” Rather than saying that they can do it. Good Meats similarly has an FAQ of “is it better than conventional?” and their response is “we believe it will be”.

In addition to selective breeding like others have mentioned, supply chain logistics have gotten much more advanced over the years. You can get many fruits right at the peak of ripeness year round due to sourcing and better storage methodologies.

Science has also gotten better at giving plants what they need to grow successfully, so almost all agricultural products are much larger than they would have been 50 years ago. If you take an apple tree from an orchard, and stick it in a random person’s back yard and neglect it, it will have way smaller fruit. Irrigation, fertilization, etc, allow things to grow bigger, but the parts needed for the actual reproduction don’t really grow much, so that extra energy just ends up producing fruit that’s more “watered down”.

In a grain, for example, theres 3 parts: germ, bran, and endosperm. The germ is the little start of the seedlings, and it contains protein, minerals, and fats. The bran is the other coating that has fiber, protein, and minerals. The endosperm is mostly just carbs. In modern grain, the endosperm takes up a much larger percentage of the grain than in older varieties (and non-fertilized/irrigated/weeded/pest controlled fields)

And poison ivy more powerful