this is the stupidest shit I have ever seen. thanks, I’m sending it to everyone.

3 weeks is pretty rough. sometimes I can go 3-4 weeks without needing to take out the bin, but not if I’m doing any kind of project around the house. there have been times when I was work limited by the volume of materials going out. right now I’ve down stepped my trash/recycle pickup to every other week to save a few bucks and see if I can make better lifestyle choices re:garbage.

but fuck all that anyway. how the shit does furloughing the labor force for a vital logistical civic service make any goddamn sense? you just gutted the income of a bunch of people in every community for a service everybody uses and expects.

and when they do go around, every bin is gonna be overloaded so every shift will be mother fucked, people will walk and there will be garbage piling up everywhere.

even if I was the biggest shit weasel on earth garbage services would be among the last things I dick around with.

nicely done. I do something similar with dumplings. it’s so easy to steam them with rice in a rice cooker, but they don’t have the excitement of fried, the texture, etc.

so I steam them and when they’re done, I dump them in a pan with just a bit of coconut oil on medium-high for maybe a minute or so, until they brown, then transfer them to a plate to pat any oil off and let them sit for another minute or so.

zero guesswork, minimal effort, pan full of “fries” dumplings.

I think of air dryers as mini convection ovens. they just call them dryers because Burger brains like fried food so much. with convection, it’s the same principle, faster consistent baking due to air movement homogenizing the air temps. and I want to say the rule of thumb for convection vs conventional bake times is like 25% reduced for convection.

I don’t really have tips for crisping the outside of boiled potatoes. I would imagine short duration at very high temp, because as you heat the potatoes, the moisture inside is escaping outward and preventing it from drying. so it’s more like you are trying to sear the outside, like they do with meat on a grille… very short, localized heat at very high temp.

or like the last 5 minutes of baking a bread loaf with a thick crust, where you crank the already high temp up 20-50% to get the browning aka “maillard” effect you are looking for with a thick crust.

I’ve never tried what you are doing but I bet it can be done and will be well worth it.

this thought just occurred to me, so I haven’t really considered it, but does it seem to anyone else that Trump’s picks are consistently the most provocative candidates. basically the assholes in the room that have a lot of enemies. the sort of people that more normal leaders might generally sideline to avoid headaches.

it occurs to me that aside from jacking up his base, it would also be a strategy for loyalty among your hand selected team. it’s not like these people would rise to this level otherwise. the popular kid might turn against you because they have their own friends and plans. puppy killer ain’t going anywhere without daddy.

as a man, I would never engage in idle gossip. I only do work at the Rumor Mill, doing all the heavy lifting it takes to get the word out there that the car dealership owner effs the dog in his commercials. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week: I get it done.

Obama apparently tried to do this and had to walk it back due to a supreme Court ruling.

however, the giant institution I worked for at the time was already too far into their transition plan to accommodate the new rule, so they raised up all qualifying* positions.

a key feature of that transition plan was based around the exception to overtime protections for 3 professions: doctors, lawyers and teachers*.

(one of these things is not like the others!)

yes, my former employer reclassified a metric shitload of consultant/community organizer positions into “teachers” and launched a big campaign to “recognize” the important educational value of their work pretending this campaign had nothing to do with the minimum salaried worker rule change.

anyway, just a little context to this.

the only mechanism is by charging exorbitant premiums for those that have federal flood insurance in higher risk areas. when the FEMA flood plain maps are redrawn, eventually that makes it way to the federal flood insurance program for underwriting. and when you tell someone that federal flood insurance for their property is not $400 a year anymore, but $4,000 a year, that’s a pretty strong message.

of course, flood maps should all be more accessible with completely transparent rates so when people are looking at homes to buy / places to live, it isn’t a surprise within a mystery. and there should be a federal buyout program for people to sell off and relocate with a complementary federal housing development program to build new homes, shift zoning restrictions, and improve civic infrastructure for flood resilience whenever possible. all of these things would imply central planning and regulatory oversight rather than letting “markets”, which are notorious for being captured and cornered by capitalists doing speculation and arbitrage based on asymmetrical information access.

community relocation doesn’t have to be as destructive as we seem to prefer to do it in the US, and letting it just sort of “happen” under the current system over decades seems to be the way to maximize the human suffering and extract the most value for the worst people.

tom sexton said this thing once–which i think he attributed to someone else–that when it comes to politicking it doesn’t matter what you say. it doesn’t even matter how you say it. what matters is what people felt when they heard you say it.

i think about that shit a lot and i’ll be goddamned if it doesn’t ring more and more true every year.

i slept at a primitive camp site one night up on a forested mountain on an island. like 3/4s of the island is some UNESCO world heritage site and supposedly there are monkeys on it. never saw one, but the forest was so dense i could have spent a year there and not even found my own ass. my local language skills were bullshit, so i could only see signs with illustrations. nobody who hikes up into the mountains camps at the primitive sites anymore, because they are like rich and stay at nice places with like hot baths and meals and shit. but me and my pal were on a shoestring, so when it got dark we got set up in this little hut out of the drizzle deep in the mountains. we both slept on top of our bags which had our water and some bananas in them (lol) just in case. all i heard about monkeys is that they enjoy taking food, shenanigans, and tomfoolery and they aren’t to be underestimated to these ends. like raccoons but somehow more sneaky and interested in amusing themselves and investigating curiosities.

in the middle of the night, it’s pitch black, i’m under dense tree canopy, inside a small open structure so there was no shot at my eyes adjusting, but i swear to god i felt something nearby. i opened my eyes and i could swear i caught a glipse of a shape like monkey’s face quietly inspecting me from above. it could have been a dream or a hallucination in the dark. i just sort of stirred and adjusted my jacket/blanket and strained to hear anything in the dark. i was exhausted, so i promptly fell back asleep. in the morning, my bag was undisturbed and all bananas were accounted for.

I liked Into Darkness. the whole bent arc of Nemo’s attack jump starting Section 31 and of course it immediately inducing them to have the worst strategic plan, the worst idea to execute it, getting most of starfleet leadership killed, and almost destroying the federation. in retrospect, they speedran Operation Cyclone and hit 9/11 in the first 20 minutes. and then, to try and clean it up fast and on the hush, tried to do an Operation Northwoods in the next 30. that’s great popcorn eating for me. I like my movie assholes to be redlining it the whole time, tyvm.

I guess that makes me King of the Assholes.

incredible. i thought it would at least take until the administration started for them to start taking screws out of the imperial machine. i hope everyday up to inauguration they signal their desire to undermine nato.

there is a massive difference in transporting rice and transporting fresh produce, like say a specific fruit that has specific temperature and humidity requirements and cannot exist in the same transportion space as other fruits which will release ethylene leading to overripening. which doesn’t even touch the angle of lack of transparency for environmental practices and workers conditions in lengthy supply chains.

america does a shitload of agriculture wrong and wasteful compared to the developing world because we have an entire finance and credit system that encourages production systems which use luxury amounts of resources and fossil fuels that would be reduced under an agricultural system no longer organized to turn growers into customers of chemical companies.

the entire “but it’s cheaper/easier/more economical to import from the developing world than grow it here” is one of those ag 101 talking points that has been around since colonialism and is used to divert attention from resistance to anti-globalization movements, indigenous food sovereignty movements and the constant stream of data showing that most people on the planet eat most efficiently from smaller diversified farms near them. the anomaly is the western model of conquering faraway places and turning these communities into vast plantations for export. that is what is environmentally unsound and decouples communities from their lands and their culture/foodways, introducing malnutrition, poverty, metabolic disorders, etc.

but the indoctrination machine loves to say “you grow butter better than me and I make guns better than you, so we all benefit by you selling me your butter for my guns”. they often lean heavily on comparisons that are completely inappropriate. like rice in Vietnam and apples in the US. or cashews in Ghana and almonds in California. or lobster in Maine and everything everyone is eating in Las Vegas.

it’s like buying a benz luxury sedan. it’s an overpriced fashion accessory where function and value proposition are subservient to brand and form. it says, “i don’t know what i’m doing, but i’m paid so i am doing it correctly.” the idea that, when the warranty expires, it will be wildly expensive if not artificially impossible to service for basic issues does not enter into the equation. KBB estimates the cost for an oil change on a Mercedes-Benz GLE 350 to be over $200 and to change the oil and do basic checks of fluid levels and replace air filters they charge $450. unique/specialized tools and equipiment, absurd design requiring lots of labor time, ultra expensive material costs. it’s a design philosophy of perceived prestige and price signaling.

apparently on AppleTV+ the native advertising rules for scripts require baddies to not be shown using apple products. they have to use android stuff, PCs and flip-phones. that’s how you know the sham is as fragile as it’s ludicrous defenders.

ignoring advisors and data, talk about deranged leadership. kinda sounds like maybe trump really was the harm reduction candidate, because who knows how dark and cruel “I’m speaking!” could get under the cover of a fawning mediasphere that would gleefully silence any criticism. trump’s gonna be a piece of shit and inspire a lot of violence, but they hate him so the victims of that barbarism won’t be easily, smugly framed as terrorists and bigots by all of the talking heads.

i went through a apple phase. great morning food, all the chewing wakes your face up, lots of plant fiber, kinda sweet/kinda tart, exciting. filling. just don’t get golden delicious, it’s sawdust. i like honeycrisp when i can find it, fiji and granny smith.

but i would go with whatever is in season around you. support those people who are stewarding perennials around you now so that there may be local perennials in the future. also it takes a lot of fossil fuels to get non-local produce to be even in the same ballpark of fresh as nearby. keeps way longer in the fridge or on the shelf too and maybe you’ll find somebody growing some cultivar that is unique to your place.

i think it depends how much of a shitshow the next 4 years is, especially in terms of imperial aggression. probably trumps greatest sin was having an administration that could not prosecute empire effectively. failed coups in latam, the afghanistan drawdown, inconsistent saber rattling towards eastern powers (Russia) and states DPRK belligerent to our proxies (SK). not to mention, he kept threatening the western NATO agreement. i think all of that combined set off alarms and caused capital formations to step in and commit to the rhetorical delegitimization of trump as a political actor across all media and the elevation of biden (a war hawk for his entire life) as the tonic to cure america.

the vaguely center-left was removed from the playing field in possibly an ever bigger rat fuck than 2016, despite winning the first 3 primaries and many voters just wanted the weariness of the trump era to end. we talk about it as “brunch is back” and its true it is a lot about vibes, but i do remember the constant drum banging about whatever fresh new corrupted horror was happening in the whitehouse. like every day there was something new that was fucked, and rather than obscure it like the media does for other presidents, they showed us all of it in full horror. a lot of apolitical people just wanted that to stop so they could go back the world before.

of course, the liberals took that mandate and libbed it up real good so america is still fucked and full of people looking down the barrel of a future with somehow less material security and, for those looking close enough, all the features of trump are still here: the carceral state, the war mongering, the no-healthcare-for-you, the murder cops continuing to do all the murders, etc. and jesus christ, biden’s brain was fucking gone on live TV. so the biden coalition collapsed abruptly. kamala’s political machine tried to pop the clutch near the finish line and go from zero to 100 but instead tore its drivetrain apart and rolled into a ditch, because it was a completely frame rusted 1995 Chevy Blazer with a really slick paint job being operated by committee of hand selected idiots with only one message for the natsec state: the wars will continue!

so now we get another trump term. and frankly, i think what happens inside the core is going to be second place to how he upholds or undermines the western-backed mission to maintain a unipolar world, especially in terms of the Far East and MENA. if he lays back and lets the administrative state run it, we might get another anointed republican who can play ball with the natsec state. but if he gets hands on, acts mercurial with allies, puts his own incompetent weirdos in charge and seeks to use his influence to control the selection of a successor, i think capital will shut it down and cram another neolib on us.

well some guy named ned finds something nobody said beneath contempt. i’ll make sure to tell my cat about it when he gets up from his 8th nap.

how did he manage to say all that with the microphone in his gob?

if these historians were any good at historying, they would be billionaires that owned history apps and history factories with thousands of employees and then the Democrats would have rightfully listened to them.