memfree

me too

Look at it like this: motors are a recent invention. It used to be if some group was big enough to have a city, they had slaves or slave-like laborers that were looked down on and generally abused. Everywhere. Including European serfs. Even Vikings made slaves out of Englishmen. Everything from reaping wheat to making nails was the result of physical labor so an underclass was necessary once you were bigger than a village/town.

For a bunch of reasons, Europeans developed better ships sooner and so had the opportunity to exploit the labor of other peoples as well as their own countrymen. That set up a cascade of development. The French revolution happened early enough that it served as a warning to other governments to spend some resources pacifying the masses at home. The masses were never in a position to know what was going on beyond their own borders, so the people in control – the people gaining all the rewards – had a psychological reason to mentally frame the people of their conquered colonies as inferiors. To be fair, almost every country has considered themself to be a better people than all others. Everyone thinks they do things the best way.

I feel pretty sure that if the Chinese of Japanese had come to Europe in, say, 1200 A.D. with ships and guns, Europe would have been colonized. The same goes for any other power. Sigh I sometimes wish Carthage had defeated Rome.

The point about a 4 year old is a rhetorical device. No answer is expected. I constructed it to illustrate on the biological reality that you are not grown at 4, just as you are not grown at 16.

We agree that helicopter parents are bad, and we agree that parents should prepare their offspring for life, then let them fly free. Our only disagreement is on how much freedom should occur at what age. I ask you to do some research and cite some sources before opining as if your random thoughts should get the same weight as documentation from people who devoted years of study to the subject.

Would you let a 4 year old live alone or would you call that abuse? At 16 we might survive, but are more likely to flourish and less likely to die when under the care of a guardian. At 16, we want independence, but make bad choices. We can not help it. A guardian can structure increasing independence by first assigning life-tasks under supervision: check the adolescent’s study habits and school work, allow the teen to cook, clean, shop, and budget – but be there to help and advise if/when needed.

There are cases where the parent or guardian is so selfish, awful, or abusive that a teen is better off without the damage caused by their home situation, but in general, these are dangerous years to be unsupervised and countless studies prove it.

Do not do this. His brain is not fully developed and does not process risk/reward as it will. This is a dangerous age that highly benefits from immediate adult feedback to help mitigate… let’s just say ‘bad ideas’ before they fester or are acted upon.

The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions. source

Risk-taking declines between adolescence and adulthood because of changes in the brain’s cognitive control system – changes which improve individuals’ capacity for self-regulation. These changes occur across adolescence and young adulthood and are seen in structural and functional changes within the prefrontal cortex and its connections to other brain regions. The differing timetables of these changes make mid-adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability to risky and reckless behavior. source | more | more

Regular store bread has lots of preservatives. I do not think you want that. Many small bakeries make good basic breads without preservatives, but they are usually expensive. If you can afford that price, buy it! Making bread takes a lot of time, but it is cheap, If you can afford that time, make it! Personally, I like whole-grain flavors for almost everything from sandwich bread to fried rice … but not for the rice in sushi.

Just about anything can be made with or without questionable additives. What sorts of things do you want to eat?

You can buy bread with preservatives that stays ‘fresh’ for weeks, but bread made with just water, flour, yeast and salt generally starts getting hard the next day and moldy in around a week (depending on climate +/-). Whole grain bread is dense, more flavorful, and will not rise as much as white bread because the bran and the nutrient rich wheat germ break up the long-chain gluten structure.

So do you pick a bread that lasts or one that molds? Do you pick white bread because it is fluffy or whole wheat because it has more vitamins?

Maybe you don’t eat bread. Well, the same applies to rice. Most white rices are fortified to make up for the vitamins lost in milling, but whole-grain (brown) rice is tougher, has a stronger flavor, and is less fluffy. Which would you prefer?

Know Your Meme credits the movie Baseketball.

The first known instance of the word “derp” comes from the 1998 comedy film Baseketball by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. During a scene where they are caught smelling underwear taken from a woman’s private drawer, Matt runs out of the room and says “Derp.”

Before security cameras were everywhere, things felt ‘normal’. There have been security cameras in store for a looong time before everyone had them – so common even the culture touchstone movie Terminator (1984) showed their use and they were common well before that.

Unlike most folks, it took me over a decade to come to grips with the loss of anonymity. Once the internet existed, I never entered my actual name into anything online, wouldn’t join facebook, and wouldn’t let anyone take my picture lest they attach my name to it. Eventually, I realized that even if I didn’t put my name online, everyone with my phone number put me in THEIR address books and anonymity was simply a lost cause.

At the same time, I’ve noticed that news/tv no longer show faces in their generic street-scene footage about anything that might be damaging (like ‘How fat is our town?’) and instead just show people waist-down, blurred, or very distant. That also happens a lot for less embarrassing content, and there’s generally less footage of generic local people.

That said, I’m really glad everyone has a cell phone with camera to catch bad police behavior. Lots of people used to dismiss such reports as people with a grudge making stuff up, but now there’s too much evidence to hide it.

My parent’s generation all had pensions. You didn’t have to worry about it unless the accountants cooked the books and didn’t manage it honestly. I was too young to know all the details, but I gather that system got upended by two things: 1) several pension funds that went bust and 2) shift from people working at one place forever to job-swapping which made pensions basically impossible (before computers).

For album art (by H.R. Gieger), Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. An almost monochrome skull folded out to reveal a monochrome woman, it included notes, band pics, and even the LP label had art.

More complete details can be seen in these seller posts:

• ebay
• sorctheshop
• vinylbazar
• rootsvinylguide

Old person here.

before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Books! and People! And while they wouldn’t give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.

was a constraint lifted

Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you’d never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn’t available. The ingredients weren’t available, either, so you weren’t going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s – like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello ‘salads’.

Was life more simple

Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. “No one was ever fired for buying IBM.” – because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I’m pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can’t trust that online reviews aren’t paid advertising.

We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who’d had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than ‘healthy living’. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.

Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no “Sgt. Pepper’s” without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.

All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for ‘raising ducks’ generally doesn’t mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn’t bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.

To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.

I expected “transit” to refer to non-car public transit, but I’m not the OP. That is: the more people on trains, buses, and such, the more routes and times. The route with 5 riders per day gets cut as too costly.

No one has mentioned the financial manipulation? I’ve heard policy wonks rant about it for decades. From Bloomberg:

Starting in the mid-1990s, China spent a decade regularly intervening in the foreign-exchange market to keep the yuan at a pegged rate to the dollar. Policymakers were essentially maintaining an undervalued exchange rate to help exporters and further the process of industrialization.

From a library of congress snippet about China/U.S. trade:

China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB), had been undervalued for many years with Chinese government’s continual intervention in setting a target rate for currency exchange. Undervaluing their currency made Chinese exports more competitive, attracted foreign investment, and made imports less competitive.

Try weisswurst & sauerkraut paired with a Hefeweizen (mild white sausage and wheat beer).

You could say it started with Eisenhower lying about a U2 spyplane being a normal weather flight, then Khrushchev producing the pilot and exposing the truth of the espionage campaign. Supposedly, the U.S. more or less trusted its government up to that point, but that big lie started deflating the post-WWII belief in an honest democracy.

If you watch old movies from the 1940s and even into the 1950s, you will find a substantial number where “Rule of Law” and general ethics were central and critical parts of the story. The populace expected liars, cheats, and scoundrels would be outed, convicted where there was crime and ostracized where there was not. Of course there have always been greedy bosses, but the U.S. has vacillated between imposing extreme taxes and regulations to doing nothing at all about social imbalance.

Most recently, everything got disrupted by Citizens United wherein the Supreme Court ruled that money is speech. Money is the opposite of speech. Money is power. The point of Constitutional ‘free speech’ was that speech be allowed despite a lack of power and influence – not because of it.

In the aftermath of Citizens United, the ultra-rich have swayed the elections of judges and politicians with special attention to given to writing policies and eliminating restrictions. This was made easier by earlier elimination of the fairness doctrine and the 1996 Telcom Act that loosened limits on how many news outlets an entity could own. (extra info)

– But no, it was NOT naive way back when. The U.S. used to be a country that would (generally) hold bad actors to account. Nixon resigned when impeached because he understood that he could not lead after being caught. Trump knew he could lead despite his crimes. Perhaps we’d have been better off in Nixon had remained president such that the country would have been forced to take action back then.

The absence of sex is part of the definition for platonic (unless you’re referencing how Plato himself had sex which would have to be Platonic, but it’s a different word when capitalized).

platonic: Neither sexual nor romantic in nature; being or exhibiting platonic love.

platonic love: Intimate but non-sexual affection.

Attested 1636 in Platonic Lovers by William Davenant. Earlier coined in Latin in the 15th century as amor platonicus by Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (originally in 1476 letter to Alamanno Donati, later expounded in De amore (1484)), based on his interpretation of the Symposium by Plato, specifically the speech by Socrates, relating the thoughts of Diotima of Mantinea.

Why didn’t Republicans under Trump’s first term release them? See reply by @Nollij@sopuli.xyz

Sample coverage from back then: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/trump-not-a-fan-of-jeffrey-epstein-accused-sex-trafficker.html

If you like tuna casserole, it is basically the same thing with different noodles. I would add an extra can of tuna. Sample recipe: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/cheesy-tuna-lasagna/#RecipeCard

Looks like this guy couldn’t get financed to make something similar: https://www.homecrux.com/solarbrella-turns-beach-umbrella-charging-dock-phone/74666/

– but my search did turn up alibaba results for similar stuff, so they probably just stole the idea from him.

Nitpick: You want a parasol or sunshade, not an umbrella. Umbrellas are for rain (latin origins aside). It is cloudy when it rains.