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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • One of my favorite songs from Jim Croce, Rapid Roy the Stock Car Boy, has a whole verse on this!

    Rapid Roy, that stock car boy, He’s the best driver in the land He says that he learned to race a stock car By runnin’ shine outta Alabam’ Oh the demolition derby and the figure 8 Is easy money in the bank Compared to runnin’ from the man In Oklahoma City With a 500 gallon tank


  • We would need to expand the cropland growing food for humans, yes. But there is a lot of cropland currently growing types of corn and hay that we as humans can’t eat, just so we can feed animals and get a less than 20% return on calories from the ‘food’ we get when we eat animal muscle and organs.

    Which is why our total crop land use would go down if we didn’t eat animals: we need less space to grow calories and nutrients for us that we do to feed the animals we eat. So much gets wasted with the current process that it is unsustainable, and we need to start shifting this now to avoid running into severe land and water deficiencies with the changing climate.






  • They limited it to that because, at the time, there was only one way to make a lightbulb and they wanted a consistent brightness. The easiest way to do that was to make a standard filament, and the easiest way to measure that was to test how long on average it lasted.

    It is like saying a bread cartel was made by saying a loaf of bread has to be a standard weight and anyone selling a different weight was fined. Making an industry standard that is arguably for the benefit of the customer is not the same as planned obsolescence. Especially when you consider the fact that the 1000 standard wasn’t followed when they started making different kinds of lightbulbs that didn’t use filament.


  • It is that channel, yes!

    And here is the relevant link to the specific video he did on lightbulbs and why they aren’t an example of planned obsolescence: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY

    The TL;DW is this: no matter what method you use, the process of converting electricity into visible light is going to generate heat. With old filament bulbs, they had to balance the intensity of the light with the rate at which the filament would burn. Those older bulbs that lasted ages gave off so little light that they weren’t practical because you would need several times as many lightbulbs. Turning up the amount of light meant the filament would not last as long, but you needed fewer of them. With newer models, we still have to play that balancing act, just with different electrical components, because making them brighter still means making them hotter and potentially frying the components inside.




  • Dude, vegans can and do eat fruits. For people who can’t afford seasonal fresh fruit, we have fortified foods like bread, pasta, rice, and cereals, most of which are also vegan. I specified rice and beans (and everything else you conveniently ignored, lol) because they make a complete protein, which is usually the only thing you need to monitor closely if you are vegan on a budget. Anything else and you are best off getting a multivitamin for best bang for your buck.

    Also, you saying none of us have been hungry and then lecturing us about not getting both fruits AND vegetables when fresh fruit is one of the most expensive things in a grocery store, outside of meat that is? You clearly have never been poor enough that you have been needing to have your ‘fruit’ be the cheapest jar of grape jelly you can find, or the cans of frozen ‘orange drink concentrate’.


  • Fruits are also available but usually tend to be more expensive and are usually considered a treat for people on limited budgets. Me not listing them was part of keeping to the usual budget shopping lists recommend for people with limited income. Unless you are further being a pedant and insisting that tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables.

    And while I am fortunate enough to live in the continental US, I mostly buy what is in season and local and therefore on sale for relatively cheap. And anywhere where that isn’t available, frozen veggies are available, often for even cheaper and with no difference in nutritional value or content. If you don’t have a fridge/freezer, dried veggies are also available in most markets (dried peppers especially) and canned goods are far better for you now than they ever have been, with only marginal decreases in nutritional value.

    Where do you live that absolutely no vegetables are available in any form for a dollar a can or five dollars for a family pack that would make a couple dozen meals for a family of four?

    (Edit: Or, if not in the US, where you can’t even buy local produce, unless you are in an area where there is famine. In which case you may object to the fact that almost half our farmable land is used to grow crops to feed to animals instead of being used to grow more food for humans.)



  • Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

    A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

    There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.





  • Obviously this is a joke, but there used to be an important reason we kept the flags wrinkled like that: it meant that you never knew who had bought a flag at a Pride event and who brought one they owned.

    This meant that people who were ‘caught’ at an event by friends or family they weren’t out to, they could say they just bought the flag to support the cause. It also meant there was no way to tell who had been there longer than others.