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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Growing up, we had a front door that we never used, so we left it locked, and the side door was always unlocked unless we were going on vacation or something.

    My friends parents locked their door when they werent home, but they always left the windows next to the door unlocked, so they or I or anyone could just climb in if we needed to.

    I dont know if people locked doors at night, but we didn’t. Definitely no one ever locked the door during the day when they were home. The first time I experienced someone doing that, I was so confused. If a thief is willing to go into an occupied house, they’ll be willing to break a window.

    I would never leave keys in a car, partly because of where I live now, but also because cars are deadly weapons, and you shouldn’t leave those around where kids could get hurt.



  • Yeah, I definitely dont think any country has a monopoly on big meals.

    I think it also might be that the cost of ingredients likely makes up a smaller proportion of the cost of a meal in an American restaurant than a restaurant in many other countries. You then end up with restaurants trying to distinguish themselves by giving you a bigger portion size than the competition. You then end up with a situation where there’s an expectation in America that if you order a single item off the menu of a restaurant, you should never leave hungry, no matter what. This means that most people end up with more than they need, so you either take it home, share with someone, or overeat.

    I will say that’s all only true for certain types of restaurants. A lot of “nice” restaurants have moved away from the “each person gets a big course and a drink, and maybe you split an appetizer” -style. There’s a lot more family-style than there used to be. There’s a lot more restaurants where a waiter will say something like “for a table of 2, I’d order 4-5 items if you feel normal, 6-7 if you feel really hungry”, and they actually make recommendations on portion size based on what you order. Even fancy places seem to be really encouraging people to share.






  • Soup is about just throwing in whatever you have. Generally, if there’s some kind of a meat/bones, gelatin will give the broth body. If it’s more of a bean or potato situation, you may need to pull a portion out, mash it up, and add it back in to give body. You could also temper some eggs and add them in.

    If you dont have gelatin or something starchy, you can add a cornstarch slurry to thicken it. If you have a really thin broth, it won’t taste right even if it would otherwise be really tasty. Taste is an amalgamation of senses, and texture is part of that.

    Acidity definitely helps soups. Brothy beans are great with a little vinegar, some soups are good with lemon, etc.



  • For context, angel’s landing is one of probably the top 5 most famous hikes in the country. It’s so popular that they have timed entry, and you have to book a time well in advance. It would be very, very, very hard to get lost, you can see the spot you started from pretty much the whole way, you are part of a steady stream of people, and there’s cell service. There is no “alone” on that hike.

    People have died on that hike, but if you exclude suicide and people who were intentionally going off trail to get pictures closer to cliff edges, it’s very unlikely. You are probably safer getting dumped there than at a restaurant in a part of town you aren’t familiar with.

    I would not put that anywhere near the same category as guy who left his girlfriend on a mountaineering expedition.


  • 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.




  • Strongly agree. Everyone has a perspective, and even exclusively presenting objective facts will still be biased due to what is included and what is excluded.

    As an example of someone who handles this well, I’d recommend Layne Norton. He’s a fitness/physiology/diet communicator. He has a PhD in it (which by itself doesnt prove much), but he is very careful in every video to only make supported claims, and he clearly states when he is only giving opinion.

    For example, he will point that understanding a single mechanism doesnt tell you the whole story, so you need randomized, doubled blind, placebo controlled human trials (and preferably many), to really understand something.

    That’s something that so many influencers in that field get wrong. They’ll talk about a single study that looked at the effects of a plant on a certain metabolic pathway in a petri dish, and use that to recommend people take it as a supplement. This ignores the obvious possibility that in vivo results wouldn’t match in vitro, and that the pathway they discovered isnt completely overshadowed by a different pathway with the opposite effect.

    He has a few biases/conflicts of interest, which are explicitly mentioned in pretty much every video: he sells supplements, he invests in a protein bar company, and his PhD research was funded by the beef and dairy industries.


  • Yeah, this is really the answer. Over and over and over again, it’s clear that the policy of his regime has always been to “flood the zone”.

    Every single week, they do something unique and so heinous that it would have ended any prior administration. They can keep things from sticking by just continuing to do stuff like that and get popular focus on a new thing. The people that should be able to keep them accountable legally are similarly overwhelmed.

    Greenland was probably never a serious thing for the regime, it just had to serve a purpose of keeping their opponents busy. It’s the political equivalent of a gish gallop.





  • 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).