In defense of gluten-free-bread producers… the thing that makes bread good is gluten. it’s the glue that holds all the bread together, hence the name.

Gluten-free bread is just individual carbohydrates that are close enough together to be called a dough, but don’t actually like each other and will peace out given the smallest chance.

I’m sure there is some chemical or product that will stick these things together enough to be bread-like, and also not trigger side effects for gluten-sensitive folks, but it probably causes cancer or something worse.

Side note: my wife likes UDI’s ancient grain gluten free bread, which is stored frozen. It makes the fucking best croutons you’ve ever had: let it warm up, spread to go ‘stale’ and then chop, season and toast. heavenly. The croutons “melt”, likely the lack of gluten, but still have a crunch before they get wet in your mouth.

I’m SO mad at this story. There is no reason to charge the parents. As others have stated, helicoptering kiddos is detrimental, and they need to be allowed to roam their environment – That can come at the cost of danger, but we cannot be expected to grow with 0 risk.

Sure, as a parent, you can state: ‘don’t go there’, and ‘always look both ways’, but kids are kids and there’s only so much you can enforce without being overbearing. In this scenario, without video evidence, there’s no clear conclusion about fault for either the driver or the child.

I’m okay with letting the driver off (criminally, let insurance pay the family but don’t put the driver in jail) and acknowledging this as an accidental death, especially since he stuck around and is complying. Charging the parents for negligence, though, is just fucking brutal when they are suffering the loss of a child, not to mention the impact on the older son, who probably is feeling an unreasonable amount unreasonable of guilt: “I could have held his hand; I could have reminded him of the road…” (not his quotes, my presumed internal dialog). Again, as others have stated, this is a city planning problem, not a parental one: If there was a way to walk to a grocery store that didn’t cross a 4-lane road, that’d be a better option, but there are plenty of places where that is not possible.

These parents do NOT need the extra burden of being held legally liable for an accident and anyone blaming them for this without knowing them personally and being able to describe other aspects of their parent as negligent is just an asshole.

My problem with threads like this is that I only have 24 hours a day, and I’ve accumulated a critical mass of content creators to the point where I cannot keep up.

Which of these awesome people do I ignore?! What information do I leave behind!? How am I supposed to get anything useful done with my life?!?

Also, check out Chris Boden if you want to see something cool!

I’m no longer at my computer where typing is easy. I thank all of you for responding in good faith, and I’ll be reading the various links. Thanks for engaging with me.

Okay. My method doesn’t work. We can’t reform the system from within.

What does?

What’s your perfect solution? How do we get there?

I’m honestly curious. I’m pissed at the status quo, and don’t know how to make things better with my limited personal power.

I’m now mobile, so my formatting will suffer.

Capitalism = bad. I’m fully behind that, and see it as the root of the problem. What I don’t see is a path forward that doesn’t involve incremental progress, even if not all demographics are served. At least not without violence that will be disrupt even more.

I think this is where we disagree, but I might still be missing something.

You (assorted folks responding to me) want an epoch change where we rise up and take back the power we have. We have it right now, but the price to pay to enforce that is too high for me.

I want a progression where we work towards owning that power. We had it partially when unions were still strong, but it was undermined. In my mind, the solution is education, but I have no power to enact that directly. My ability to influence is limited to my local org and voting.

A green party, socialist party, etc, will never win an election in our current environment. Votes there are literally useless, if not spoiling a candidate that has at least some if your views. The system is rigged, sure, but you can’t flip this table and walk away.

Can we separate this discussion into talking about politics and elections and eliminate Israel/Palestine? I’m a-religious, pro Palestine, pro humanitarian, but having that angle seems to quickly degenerate every conversation into ‘both sides are genocide’ and avoid the’how do we move forward’ question. I think these can be separated, but maybe that is also a place we disagree.

I feel we’re playing different games, or using different terms.

Help me understand.

Firstly. Let’s define words: I’m assuming/using my view of a US-centric Liberal vs Conservative.

Liberal: Democratic party, wants to make life better for the larger segment of the population.

Conservative: Republican party, wants to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few.

That’s my personal and biased broad-strokes view of the political landscape.

Conservatives have managed to gather enough popular support that people will vote against their best interest for either perceived economic gain or for ‘hurt the other people more.’

Stepping back even further, what is your end-goal? How do you respect the desires of millions of people without some sort of representation, and if you have such, how do you ensure that the representative aligns with the goals of their constituents?

Sadly, I’m offline for the day, but I’d be happy to continue this conversation.

In this post: not realizing that the ideal solution is not a single step away, but rather multiple steps – and they will not be simple to sell to a general populace.

I’ll admit I’m not familiar with the term. ‘Electorialism’ seems to be, according to Wikipedia, a ‘half-way step’ between Authoritarianism and Democracy.

As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US. We are more likely to be headed in the opposite way from Electorialism; where we are transitioning from what is a democratic process to one where oligarchs have consolidated enough power and influence that they can just say, ‘fuck it, we win.’ In that case, yes, I do want to make a case against Electorialism.

In Electorialism, the dominant party, presumably the authoritarian one, conducts elections that allow their opponents a stage and promises to be free and fair while still controlling the levers of power. What we have seen in the last 8 years is a party, republicans, that are throwing every possible strategy at the wall in the effort to undermine and discredit elections with the end result that if they win, the election will be seen as fair and, if they lose, the election will be seen as unfair.

All concepts of what are optimal democratic processes are going to be just that: concepts. We live in the real world. There are millions of people you have to convince to move to your desired method of representation. I think we agree on the end-goal, I just disagree on how to get there and think we can’t jump from a Trump presidency directly to a worker-owned utopia.

Help me out. What’s our next step?

Mine is to help elect people to local, state and federal offices that want to make life for everyone better.

My comment was removed by the mods… probably because I let my rage show. Though the mod log shows rule 2 instead of rule 1 :P

Here’s a longer and nicer version:

I’m a (US) liberal, and I don’t approve of any of the views described by kittenzrulz123. Lumping half the country into a single bucket is not going to give you a good overview of the myriad ideals we might have individually.

You have a choice. You can look at the political landscape at the moment of the election and choose one of four options:

1. vote for the guy who will absolutely fuck over everyone he can for his own profit. We knew what he was back in 2016 and he isn’t going to change.
2. vote for the lady who has a chance to win, is probably still crappy for some demographics, but is miles better than #1 and not likely to declare war on a random country because she’s hungry.
3. vote for someone who has a 0% chance of winning, effectively throwing the vote to the rest of the population.
4. abstain, also throwing the vote to the rest of the population.

At this time, our election system really only works for two parties. Any third-party vote is useless, if not counterproductive. If you can’t understand how that math works, let me know and I’ll break it down for you. I’d love to change that, but the process is by using our ability during primaries to put forward more liberal candidates that support election reforms, not by putting our heads in the sand and voting 3rd party hoping that we will make people notice… hint: they will not.

If you don’t like your choices when you go to the voting booth in November, the solution is to get involved in late November and make things better next time. Join a local democratic organization and become part of the solution. Complaining online about how your choices suck is something we can fix if we all jump in. If you’re not doing that, then you are abdicating your responsibility and allowing others to make the choice of who represents us instead. If you choose not to be part of the selection process, the very least you can do is vote for the ‘lesser evil’ and not make things worse.

Side note: the Primary election is the end of that selection process, not the start. Putting your values on the primary ballot is where you should spend your energy if you’re mad at the status quo.

I will admit that I’m angry that we didn’t get a Democratic primary and that Harris was ordained as Biden’s successor without any popular input. The DNC is to blame for that fuck-up. It’s irrefutable, though, that Harris would have been better for Palestine, the US economy, US healthcare, foreign relations, and dozens of other topics than trump is.

Would Claudia de la Cruz have been better? Sure. Her platform looks awesome. Did she have even a chance of winning? no.

Removed by mod

While I would hate to lose actual trees, I’m medium on the idea of this on it’s own. People need lots of things and space, which causes the removal of trees. If we can replicate some of their functions, such as CO2 absorption with this tech, then that seems good. If upkeep is the same as a tree, I don’t see a downside to the overall concept.

My thought would be that this shows up on top of the buildings instead of at ground level, though… Plant real trees and put these on the roof. The real loss would be if we stop making green spaces because these things meet the need for O2. Green spaces in cities do way more than just clean the air, though, so I’m not sure we’re that dystopian yet.

The photo looks like it doubles as a bench too, so maybe that helps justify its footprint. Make them a mini-light show with varied colors and it can become a functional art installation. How long until it has spikes to prevent someone from taking a nap on it, though?

I used to operate a dashboard on a wall-monitor in an IT ops center. For Halloween, I wrote a script that very briefly played a video of a creepy set of eyes that opened, looked around the room, focused on something/glared, then closed, all over around like 2 seconds, but ran 1-3 times an hour. It was funny the first few times it happened and I got told to turn it off.

Instead I changed it to run 1-3 times a year.

My manager thought that that was absolutely hilarious without being too disruptive and let me keep it. We had enough turnover that there was always a newbie in the pool and every now and then, someone would say ‘what the fuck was that!?’ and we’d get a good laugh.

You are fucking devious. Mouse sensitivity/acceleration curve is my largest ‘minor annoyance’ between various machines/operating systems. Having that change on me randomly without changing systems would really mess with me.