You’re probably affected by this even if you didn’t participate.

The thing about genetics is you can make reasonable predictions about individuals if you have data on their relatives. Heck, you can reasonably make regional predictions with genetic data that will be fairly accurate.

If any of your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc took this test, then you are now at least a little exposed.

I literally had an econ professor years ago who directly told us “do not take a genetics test”. This was before the ACA

The reason was simple. It’s information that once a private company gets a hold of it, they will use it to hurt you. Whether it’s a drug company that learns you’re predisposed to addiction, so better to give you it people around you nice temporary discounts on addictive meds, or an insurance company that learns you’re predisposed to cancer, so better to look for ways to deny or drop coverage.

Once these companies know a little bit about your nature, they’ll exploit any aspect possible to increase profits.

This was not a progressive/socialist econ professor. Just someone who knows how capitalism works.

Some stuff has to be consumed, like food. And that’s a major problem with plastic. Plastic is being used to protect and preserve foods, but it’s also being used as a cheap binding for shipments.

The right solution introduces an added logistic hurdle to send back packaging for reuse and to reprocess/clean that packaging.

There is actually a way out of this, but marketers hate it. It’s standardized reusable containers and outlawing or severely limiting the use of plastic and inks for product distribution.

Sure, it’d turn our grocery stores into a warehouse-like feel, but it would also make it easy and possible for reuse and recycle centers to process and redistribute packaging with very minimal waste.

It’d also make it a lot harder for companies to play the shrinkflation game.

Standardization like this does wonders.

usr does mean user. It was the place for user managed stuff originally. The home directory used to be a sub directory of the usr directory.

The meaning and purpose of unix directories has very organically evolved. Heck, it’s still evolving. For example, the new .config directory in the home directory.

2 tips.

1. Negative air pressure is your friend. If you open the windows upstairs and down and blow air out of the house it’ll suck air from the downstairs to the upstairs cooling the entire house.

2. Bernoulli’s principle is your friend. Rather than having fans right next to the windows you’ll move more air if you back the fans a meter or so from the window. https://youtu.be/BhWhTbins_A?si=9LGd0_EmfPFBNnDJ

other toxins

The vast majority of plastic is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen chains. You can burn those completely such that the only thing released is CO2 and water vapor (just need a hot enough temperature). A scrubber can easily catch anything that breaks that assumption.

If you do an incinerator and don’t harvest the power, you can even turn it into just a carbon block by filling the chamber with nitrogen and pumping the temp up to 500C. That’ll leave you with carbon blocks and water vapor.

not to create more co2

Plastic decomposes in weird ways that leaving it in the environment is worse than taking it out all together. The reason microplastic is everywhere isn’t because we have been burning plastics, it’s because we’ve been (improperly) burying it. I worry a lot more about a leaky landfill letting it’s pollutants seep into local water systems.

Further, part of plastic degradation is into those more toxic carbon chains and methane. It’s frankly better to just bite the bullet and turn it into CO2.

The sad fact is the best use of used plastic is probably burning it to create electricity.

It likely won’t be recycled or reused and even if it is, it’s likely that will only happen once (as recycled plastic is low quality).

So the option is bury it so it can outlast humanity underground or burn it to free up the carbon for hopefully regular consumption in the carbon cycle.

The only way plastic makes sense, then, is if we start using Carbon extracted from CO2 to create plastic.

Yes and no.

Some salts are easier to work with than others. Kosher salt, in particular, is fairly hard to over season with because you can visually see just how much you’ve thrown onto a steak or such. Fine salt, on the other hand, is a lot easier to over season with.

But then it also depends a lot on the dish. Sauces are really hard to over season. The sea of fluid can absorb a fair amount of salt before it’s noticeable. Meats are similar. A steak can have a snow covering of kosher salt and it won’t really taste super salty.

Bread, on the other hand, will be noticeably worse if you throw in a tbs of salt instead a tsp.

But salt wasn’t specifically what I was thinking when I wrote that. Herbal seasoning garlic, rosemary, thyme, sage, etc, generally won’t overpower a dish if you have too much of them. Especially if you aren’t working with the powdered form. (Definitely possible to over season something with garlic salt/powder).

I’m pretty much the same way, though I do throw in a bit of fine salt on occasion for the iodine content. I don’t eat a ton of seafood which makes getting the rda of iodine difficult.

Salt :D

Lots of home cooks are shy with seasoning in general (but especially salt). While not impossible, it’s fairly hard to over season stuff.

That’s why if you ever look at “miracle season alls” the first ingredients are usually something like “Salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder”.

If you want to be amused, look at these ingredients lists. Often the only difference is what food coloring is used.

For example.

https://www.heb.com/product-detail/tony-chachere-s-original-creole-seasoning/172479

You can eventually trademark once you get big enough. As with all things law it’s a bit tricky. However, the default is that geographic locations aren’t trademarkable.

For further reading on when you can trademark.

https://www.yospinlaw.com/2016/06/15/trademark-on-a-geographical-location

It’s even neater. The name of towns/cites cannot be trademarked. The safest thing you can do when naming a project is naming it after a town so you don’t run into legal troubles in the future.

I wasn’t fully aware of NVK and where it’s at. It’s actually pretty exciting. I wouldn’t mind dropping my current nvidia binary blob for fully open source drivers.

Not as bad as you might think. The nouveau drivers have come a long way for maxwell. You should give it a shot if you haven’t. But, unfortunately, if you are using anything new then nouveau sucks. It’s a fun game where you get to wait until nvidia no longer wants to support your GPU and hope by that point that nouveau has progressed far enough that you won’t be looking at noman’s land.

Graphics drivers are what matters. Your orange pi uses a mali GPU which is well supported by Linux (thanks ARM).

nVidia is just barely at the point where their most recent gpu drivers aren’t terrible under Wayland. It’s taken a while to get there.

GPUs with good open source drivers will fare fine.

Not just as easy. There’s a lot of room for someone to say “this was actually just metaphor” or even “these are just stories to convey values”.

Take the tower of Babel, for example, we know it never happened. However, a more progressive Christian or Jewish tradition can use the story to talk about how sometimes cultural differences are simply surface level, we are all ultimately the same people. Mormons aren’t so lucky because the book of Mormon was pitched as a literal history and part of the book has literal refugees from the tower of Babel.

Unlike the Bible, we have the author of the religion who very well documented how literal everything is. We don’t even know who authored nearly any book in the Bible or their motivations.

I’m not arguing for a god, I’m an atheist exmo. However, there’s a pretty big difference between a bunch of old stories compiled together into a book and a book of fiction that the author went out of his way to claim was “the most correct book ever written”.

It’s harder to believe because it’s easily disproven. Turns out Joseph’s “translation” of ancient Egyptian wasn’t inspired.

Is there even a non-capitalist government in existence? Even the communist nations generally have a currency and tiered income based on position.

Let us now double down. Previously (Block 2005; 2013) wrote that slavery, in the absence of violence, compulsion, NAP violation was ―not so bad.‖ That was a poor choice of words. It was an inaccurate understatement. The truth of the matter is that under these conditions ―slavery‖ would be a positive good. There, I said it. I will say it again: ―Slavery‖ would be a positive good, under these conditions. Make of that what you will, New York Times and other enemies of freedom and logic. But note that when I assert that ―slavery‖ would be a benefit, two things occurred. First, I placed quote marks (―‖) around the word ―slavery‖ and second I mentioned that under these conditions it would be beneficial. I did not say, and I entirely reject the notion that slavery as actually practiced was anything other than a disgrace, a stark horrid evil. It is my view that the movies ―Django Unchained,‖ ―Twelve Years a Slave,‖ and the television series ―Roots‖ are roughly accurate depictions of this monstrous practice

We currently have a set of laws that’s like twenty feet long when you print it out, bind it, and put it on the shelves.

Turns out, life is complex. It’s either this or you end up having “rules for me but not for thee”.

But to this point, what would you have your central government in charge of? I’m certainly for axing parts of the central gov and expanding others (For example, I’d nationalize healthcare and drug production and abolish ICE and the DEA). That is, I’d push for a government more concerned with taking care of citizens and less concerned with penalizing inconsequential things like not being born here.

The reason for the miles long laws is because when you don’t have them, a capitalist society will work around them. A recent behind the bastards episode on the hawks nest tunnel ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-the-deadliest-workplace-disaster-in-u-s-history/id1373812661?i=1000632417312 ) is a perfect example of how these sorts of regulations get created and grow.