Learn what you need to do to follow recipes, and then you’ll learn the rest over time. Cook things you like to eat.

Don’t get a bunch of junk for your kitchen. You only need basic things and can buy them as you go.

• Knives - you only need a chef’s knife (8" or 10") for most kitchen tasks and a paring knife for small things. Optional: bread knife (i just use a chef’s knife), filet knife, boning knife, cleaver.

• Pots and Pans - get all stainless steel and/or cast iron/enameled cast iron. Don’t buy aluminum or nonstick. Frying pan. Saucepan. Big pot and/or Dutch oven (can use as a soup pot on the stove or in the oven for other things, enameled recommended). Baking sheet (and a silicone matt for nonstick).

• Other: peeler, box grater, garlic press (way easier than mincing garlic), citrus juicer, steamer insert for a pot, measuring cups and spoons, cutting board (plastic is OK - bamboo is another good budget option, one for meat and one for plants recommended)

• Know what it means to steam, boil, simmer, sautee, bake.

• Keep your knives sharp.

• Learn the basic cuts (dice = .5 - 2cm cubes, mince = very tiny little pieces, julienne/batonnet/chiffonade - strips of stuff of various sizes).

• The key to cutting anything is to break it down into manageable, regular pieces that you can easily turn into cubes or rectangles.

Since you have difficulty tasting:

• Don’t over-salt. You can always add more, but you can’t remove it.

• Acidity and fat are important to make food taste good. Vinegar is often a hack to make food taste better.

• Adding MSG to your food is also a great way to make it taste better.

• Learn what herbs and spices belong in different kinds of food. Some can go in a lot of different cuisines and dishes - like salt, pepper, garlic, onion, parsley, and chives. But others have more niche uses, and some combinations are very typical of specific cuisines. Buy individual spices, not spice mixes. Dry spices are stronger than fresh spices, so if substituting dried for fresh, you will use less than you would use if they were fresh.

The head chef of Alethea (3 star michelin restaurant) totally lost his sense of taste for years and still ran one of the best restaurants in the world.

That’s the one book on basic economics they might actually read though. Fuck thomas sowell

Basically it is a “technical analysis” thing. Which basically means divination based on “shapes stonk line make”.

Death cross scary shape when stonk line cross other line

Was travelling with some friends in Istanbul. They were pretty inexperienced abroad, so I figured out public transit there, told them what tickets to buy, and we all walked to the ticket machine. There was a big line/crowd, and a guy up front was taking cash and giving people tickets, which he got by scanning a card at the machine. I went first hoping to show my friends what to do - bought my ticket for like €5 or so and ignored the scammer. They all gave the scammer guy like €20 for him to scan his pass and buy them a €5 ticket. Their reasons were “he seemed official” and “I knew it was a scam, but I figured it was just easier to go along with it”.

I did fall for a taxi scam in Peru though and ended up staying at a hotel run by some mafia types. They were cool, though, so it turned out OK - just cost me a little extra money for an interesting story.

This won’t stop the cops from hacking into your phone with celebrite, but android has a feature called lockdown mode that will disable facial recognition, fingerprints, and voice ID until your phone is unlocked via PIN. I need to unlock my phone quickly throughout the day, so I use fingerprint - but I use lockdown if I get pulled over or am going through security, etc. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better (for me) than having to enter a long PIN every time I need to unlock my phone.

Once you enable it in settings, you can take your phone to the power off/restart menu and enable lockdown.

Using Tasker, you could probably disable quick unlock when outside of your house, etc.

Not with that attitude, they’re not. Back in my day we had good old-fashioned corn dogs made of every kind of dog you can imagine. German Shepherds. Dachshunds. Labrador Retrievers. Irish Wolfhounds. Greyhounds. Golden Retrievers. Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers. Border Collies. Normal Collies. Bull Dogs. Giant Schnauzers. Miniature Schnauzers. Corgis. Poodles. Airedale Terriers. Lhasa Apsos. Shihtzus. Chihuahuas. Xoloitzcuintles. But that was back when men were men and dogs were corn dogs.

Well of course I haven’t read Marx. Communism’s evil, duh.

Voting is an important tool to help contain fascism in liberal democracies while building serious social movements. (Socialist - but hopefully this isn’t actually unpopular with most socialists).

That Southern US usage dates back to at least the US civil war in the 1860s.

But yankee was used to refer to at least some people in what is now the US as early as the 1660s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee

Things won’t get to that point, most likely. Things can get really bad and still recover. If it’s an apocalyptic scenario, better invest in a stock of bullets and a bunker.

Finance-wise, have an emergency fund and well-diversified portfolio. This is not financial advice, and I’m not a professional, but this is what I’d do with retirement funds and personal stock accounts:

Emergency fund: if you already have this handled, then look at your investments. If you dont have an emergency fund, do everything you can to save up at least 3-6months of living expenses - ideally in a high-yield savings account to protect your money from inflation.

US stocks: Don’t be over-exposed to US stocks, especially riskier ones. Historically, bonds and foreign stocks have been recommended to balance your portfolio, but many people have ignored that in recent years due to the dominance of US large-cap stocks, especially the tech sector. Ensure you’re diversified in accordance with your risk tolerance/retirement time-horizon.

Non-US Stocks: It would be good to have a non-US ETF or index fund with developing and emerging markets. It may not perform as well, but can potentially hedge against US market volatility. The counterpoint here is that US stocks are globally interconnected enough that getting non-US stocks would overexpose you to that part of the market. Caveat emptor, do research.

Bonds: bond ETFs/funds, I-bonds (inflation protected securities, you can buy $10k per year), and automated bond ladders can give you steady returns. Remember buying bonds directly is fairly illiquid - your money will be stuck in the bond for the duration of the bond’s term.

Cash: Inflation isn’t crazy right now. Probably wouldn’t be bad to have more cash than normal sitting in high-yield accounts (earning around 4% APY right now) since the market is likely to dip. Maybe consider liquidating some investments that are riskier than you’d like. I wouldn’t really advocate trying to time the market, but also it doesn’t seem like a bad time to be a little heavier on cash imo.

Check out Boglehead 3 fund portfolios and their variations. Imo it is time to be safe and boring. If you have a long time until retirement, don’t panic - ride it out and consider rebalancing your portfolio to the standard, oft-recommended asset mixes. If your retirement timeline is short, make sure that you aren’t over-exposed to risky investments like stocks.

I feel like apps could probably aggregate posts with the same links somehow and allow users to flip between comment threads; but I have no idea how to make that work on the backend.

Explaining chinese memes to help me learn chinese:

我的父母

Wŏ de fùmŭ

My parents

你以后不生孩子，

Nî yîhòu bù shēng háizi

(You later not birth kids) - the characters in yîhòu literally mean “at [later time/future/after]”

等你老了

Děng nî lăo le

(When you old) - le indicates that an action has completed, so this means “when you get/are/have become old”

谁照顾你？

shéi zhàogu nî?

(Who [take care/attend to/look after] you?) - zhàogu has several meanings including to “take into consideration” and also to take care of.

The woke mind virus is coming from INSIDE the house

puts on little round glasses, does a bump of cocaine, and pulls out therapy notes. Says, in an Austrian accent:

Vell you see. OP vas not ze one touched by der Santa Clauz, no. In die zong, eine voman zings zeductively - offering herzelf to Herr Santa. OP’s irrational anger upon merely hearing Santa Baby surely relates to zer own zexual unfufilment. OP is angry because he vas not touched by Herr Santa… or by anyvon.

Thank you so much for the reply! That is extremely helpful.

What rifle and in what caliber do you most recommend for home defense and cheap, relatively plentiful ammo that is shortage-resistant?

I am considering a cheap Palmetto State Armory AR kit chambered for 5.56 NATO rounds so I could also fire .223s. Is brand particularly important, or are most ARs on the market good enough for practice and emergency use?

I don’t think it’s possible to abolish prisons for all crimes. But why does a thief or a drug dealer (or worse, just a drug user) need to be in prison? What about the nature of their crimes necessitates imprisonment as a reasonable method of corrections?

If the point is stopping people from reoffending, prisons don’t do that. Like objectively. Recidivism in the US is super high, and going to prison predicts increases in the severity of crimes people commit.

So, what reduces recidivism? Eliminating the factors that drove them to crime in the first place. So, you monitor them closely - house arrest, assigned social/case workers, etc. Like a more robust parole system for nonviolent offenders. With enough surveillance, you can reduce the likelihood of reoffence by making the chances of getting caught much higher. This enhanced monitoring would be temporary.

For violent offenders and more serious criminals, maybe prisons are still necessary. But they don’t have to be dehumanizing and can provide necessary health/psychiatric, educational, social, and job skills training.

You could make the corrections system more effective by making society easier for criminals to reintegrate into. If you’re a felon and you can’t find work because you’re a felon - how are you going to afford to live within the confines of the law? Step 1) jobs programs for felons with a path to eliminating non-violent offenses from your record as it relates to work with exceptions as necessary. Step 2) improve the education system to prevent people from turning to crime and to help give former criminals relevant job skills to earn an honest living. Step 3) provide healthcare to people - having access to healthcare for mental and addiction-related conditions is super important to reduce crime.

Basically - prison abolition isn’t about just letting rapists and murderers go free with no consequences. Instead, people in favor of prison abolition are typically in favor of reducing the societal pressures to commit crimes and preventing reoffense.

We kind of did create israel in utah. But for people who thought Jesus came over to America with the pilgrims and that they have magic underwear that will shield them from harm rather than for the people who thought that their God told them to cut part of their kids’ penises off, they couldn’t eat shellfish, and used to commit genocides on the reg but has inexplicably stopped for the last couple thousand years or so.

Having potentially thousands of years of embarassing moments of social awkwardness to think about. And, over the aeons, being relieved when the people you know and love die because they won’t remember the things you’re so ashamed of.