exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 6 hours ago:
On July 1, 2024, the census estimates of the number of each generation of drinking age, if I’m reading this Excel spreadsheet correctly:
Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012, but as of 2024 the only legal drinking age was those born between 1997 and 2003): 31.3 million
Millennial (born between 1981 and 1996): 74.1 million
Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980): 65.6 million
Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964): 66.9 million
So assuming that 20-somethings have less money to spend on expensive alcohol, and recognizing that Gen Z has less than half the drinking age population as the other generations, it’s not surprising for that generation to spend less on alcohol, even if their habits weren’t different than the older generations.
Now, their habits actually are different, so that might stretch things further. But a better way to present the data would be adjusted per capita. And maybe looking at historical data about when prior generations were the same age.
- Comment on Teach me 6 days ago:
- Comment on Too late 1 week ago:
I think you’re describing beer.
- Comment on Why are they different shapes? 1 week ago:
Whoops, didn’t realize you were talking about industrial scale. I guess that makes sense, and I would have no idea which type of bread uses cheaper equipment.
- Comment on Why are they different shapes? 1 week ago:
Making bread on a flat surface allows you to minimize costs of entry (not only don’t you need the forms which are relatively cheap, you can go with simpler/cheaper ovens), and this kind of bread has a more pronounced crust, which many people like.
Crusts like this generally require a lot of steam in the oven, and steam ovens are usually much more expensive than non-steam ovens.
If you want a homemade loaf that can actually produce the type of bubbly crust you expect in certain types of European style breads, you’ll have to trap a lot of steam where you’re baking it, often by containing it in a Dutch oven.
And shaping/forming a loaf that stays tall when being baked on a flat surface takes skill, lots of practice and experience.
- Comment on How the regime in Iran jams Starlink and what people could do 1 week ago:
You’d never get Kessler syndrome at Starlink altitudes.
Starlink satellites orbit at around 550km, and get dragged by the little bit of atmosphere that is at that altitude. Each collision might make more debris, but the conservation of momentum means that any debris that gets kicked to a lower orbit will probably burn up on the atmosphere while any debris that gets kicked to a higher altitude will be smaller mass and therefore cause less damage on the next collision after that.
Collisions can still happen, but the runaway conditions where debris begets debris won’t happen at those orbital velocities and altitude.
- Comment on What do I do? 2 weeks ago:
- Don’t feed wild animals. For this rule, the particular type of food doesn’t matter. Wild animals are harmed from human feeding, even if the food is nutritionally beneficial to them.
- Bread spoils fast, and spoiled foods in the environment can make a lot of animals sick.
- Bread doesn’t contain the nutrients that many birds need, so birds (especially young birds) that eat too much bread at the expense of not eating other foods might become unhealthy from deficiencies on other fronts.
I point out these three distinct reasons because the overall points being made don’t make it OK to feed wild ducks peas or whatever else. For farmed animals, though, farmers will want the overall nutritional profile to meet some standard, at which point old bread and other scraps could very well be part of a broader diet, in a way that manages household waste.
- Comment on I can't be the only one who learned this the hard way 2 weeks ago:
I can believe that Korean food has gotten spicier in the last 30 years, but I think it’s worth noting that Korean food was already plenty spicy before any of those financial crises, much more so than Japanese food, and all but a few specific Chinese regions.
- Comment on MFW I wake up to find Lemmy feeds full of USA stuff 2 weeks ago:
You misunderstand, riding trains increases the amount of shitposting capacity one has.
- Comment on The boy who was relentlessly bullied by his uncle 3 weeks ago:
It was a funny joke, a fun juxtaposition of the child’s book already under discussion, and a contentious and violent period in recent UK history.
- Comment on genius 3 weeks ago:
The etymology of helicopter is actually a compound word divided in an unexpected place:
- “Helico” means rotating or spiral.
- “Pter” means wing, as in the word “pterodactyl.”
So if we’re gonna bring that into another compound word, we should probably chop it in the right place: pterlord.
- Comment on Get on that grindset 3 weeks ago:
No, it’s a guy who edited the genes of some embryos in the hopes that a particular gene mutation would give resistance to HIV.
Only: the gene editing didn’t actually give the specific version of the gene studied to have an effect on HIV susceptibility, the gene is also associated with memory and other brain function, and the gene was incompletely edited so that there are multiple versions of the genes in both kids, when the studied mutation needed to be present in both chromosomes of the chromosome pair in order to show some kind of effect on HIV.
Even if you believe that the evidence is strong enough to support the idea that a mutation in this gene can give HIV resistance, this guy didn’t actually do it in a way that was scientifically sound, and now two real human beings have to live their lives with the effects, including any off target effects, whatever they might be.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Only works if your sexual partner is non exclusive.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Clean jar, water+salt (look up how much), you’re good.
There are known food safety principles in fermentation, and it’s not an “anything goes” kind of practice.
It’s not just about the cleanliness of the jar, especially when you’re putting in vegetables that will carry their own microbes and spores on their surface or in the accompanying soil/dirt.
Most lacto fermented pickle recipes will follow guidelines for keeping things safe and for keeping things tasty (some bad ferments aren’t actually dangerous but just don’t taste as good), and there are a lot of helpful guidelines out there that depend a bit on the vegetable itself (which might have different water content, pH, commonly associated microbes or pathogens).
You don’t need to be able to submit a certified HACCP plan for your process, but for anyone who isn’t already familiar with the risks and best practices should stick with established recipes from reputable sources.
Some people talk about botulism risk, but the reality is that almost no botulism cases come from home pickling, and very few come from home canning. C. botulinum cells and spores don’t like acid and don’t like salt, so most pickling recipes will easily prevent that problem in almost any home environment.
All that is to say: it’s not exactly a high risk activity, but stick with established recipes from reputable sources unless and until you know what you’re doing with pathogenic risks.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Yogurt is interesting because it’s already acidic, and dairy contains proteins, salts, and acids that buffer pH. So the microbes that thrive in that environment are already able to handle more acidic environments generally, and then might not experience as acidic of an environment in the human stomach compared to some other foods.
A lot of probiotic foods don’t actually have more microbes in them, but have certain microbes that tend to be found in human guts. I wonder if there’s some kind of filter effect where only certain types of microbes are more likely to survive the stomach, and therefore our guts tend to consist of microbes that are hardy against those conditions.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
- “germans”, “french”, “danes” weren’t a thing. up until recently. they are genetically diverse groups.
I was under the impression that the DNA kits described actual ethnic groups and showed a map of the distribution of those groups overlaid on modern political borders or region names. Here’s the page on 23 and Me’s reports, which have a lot more granular detail, mapped onto modern political borders for reference, but where any listed nation or territory may have up to dozens of different sub-groups listed.
- Comment on Y’all ain’t ready for this 3 weeks ago:
Sharp knees, 2/10 would not bang
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
I wanted to avoid overexplaining the joke, but it’s also worth pointing out that the slight shifts in federal law this year is only a part of a broader push around state laws and American gun culture more broadly (and I’d expect them to keep lobbying for more federal deregulation after this year too), to where it’s now more economically viable to manufacture, distribute, and sell suppressors. According to this source’s analysis of ATF stats, we went from less than a million lawfully registered suppressors in 2016 to 1.5 million in 2018 to 2.6 million on 2021 to 4.9 million in 2024.
There’s a broader shift underway, and I was just making a joke about it.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
I’ve always understood it to be a remnant of a culture that de-emphasized genealogy and family pedigree, and had a lot more cultural and ethnic mixing in marriages at an earlier era. In Europe, it seems like there are a lot more family crests and aristocratic titles, from centuries of families maneuvering for political power through strategic marriages and what not, and stronger cultural taboos against marrying and having children outside of one’s ethnic group (and religion), at least up until maybe World War II.
So if there’s just less to learn from DNA testing (a person who happens to already have records of all 16 of their great-great-grandparents, who all lived in the same geographical area), I’d expect there not to be much demand for that kind of analysis.
Or maybe I’m wrong to focus on the gentry and aristocratic families, and have a misplaced view of how long that kind of stuff culturally persisted in Europe.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
If we’re talking table manners and conventions, at this point I’m on board with combining three principles, two from the West and one from the East, for making dining more convenient and more pleasant:
- (From Western restaurant norms): Every item on the plate or in the bowl should be intended to be eaten. The kitchen should remove bones and inedible seeds, and all garnishes should be edible.
- (From Western fine dining): Food should be properly seasoned when served. There’s no need for salt or pepper to be available at the table.
- (From Asian dining culture): Knives at the table are barbaric, and everything on a plate or bowl should already be cut into appropriate sizes for one handed eating.
That would also take care of the American versus English etiquette (and whatever countries fall on either side of that convention) on how to use knives at the table.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
It’s only quietly annoying because we legalized fun silencers this year!
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
I feel like brand obsession, where the brand itself is a status symbol, is more of a European thing, especially the brands owned by LVMH (which they’ve successfully exported everywhere, including the Americas and Asia).
There’s still a time and a place for brand/manufacturer as an indicator of quality or even corporate policy (cars, bicycles, certain electronics, certain functional apparel/shoes/equipment/tools), but those are the types of things where I’d still consider the brand even if it’s nowhere to be seen on the finished product.
- Comment on The Wagon 3 weeks ago:
Whoa hold on I’m not sure that’s allowed
- Comment on I love science 4 weeks ago:
At a certain point my pattern recognition skills reached their limit to where learning each new concept was still the same, but I had a lot more trouble organically seeing and identifying when a particular technique was useful for a particular type of problem. Which is something that happens to a lot of different people at different stages of their math education, just happens to different people at different points.
And maybe I could’ve stuck with it, or used it enough to where I eventually got it easily the way I had done with all math topics before that, but I ended up steering the rest of my engineering education into topics that weren’t as heavy on that type of math. More programming and logic and microcontrollers, less electromagnetics and radio signals.
- Comment on I love science 4 weeks ago:
For me, the leap to multivariate calculus gave me a lot of trouble.
Differential equations was doable but no longer fun for me, either.
It was a combination of multivariate calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations where I just wasn’t having fun with math anymore. Those subjects represented the end of pure math education for me, and later engineering classes requiring knowledge in those were also not a ton of fun. Went from a self-described math and science guy to just…not describing myself in that way anymore.
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 4 weeks ago:
Thats good! I wish I could be more minimalist but im not. Im a maximalist for sure lol.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. Mine isn’t minimalism. I’m not denying myself anything that I want. Or even owning less stuff or spending less money. Mine is just steering things into what I like rather than what I don’t care all that much about.
And for my preferences, that maximum for my own happiness is going to come from living in a dense city with a lot going on.
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 4 weeks ago:
own a couple acres and a few cars
On the flip side, plenty of us don’t want to own acres or cars. None of that sounds appealing to me.
We should all figure out what is actually important to us, and where that stuff tends to be cheaper, relative to what we can earn in that place.
I like a variety of nice restaurants, a good butcher shop, good bakeries, a good coffee shop/roaster, farmers markets, and other specialty food sellers within walking (or at least biking) distance of my home. I like the option of seeing live music and standup comedians, preferably also within walking distance of my home. I like having multiple playgrounds and parks and libraries and even museums within walking distance of my home. I like that my kids can walk to and from most of these places, too.
So I pay a shitload to live in a place like that. It comes with tradeoffs: it costs more, we have less space, we can only have one car in our household. But that stuff isn’t important to me (we have money to spare, we don’t like too much space, we hate driving).
Most importantly, though, the thing I like about living in a high salary, high cost of living city is that when set aside 10% of your income for savings and 10% of your income for travel, those are types of things where a dollar is a dollar, so that 10% of a larger number goes further. Someone who lives in a big house on a big plot of land in the Midwest still has to pay the exact same amount that I would when they’re getting a hotel room in London or an Airbnb at a ski town in Colorado.
- Comment on Daily Affirmation 4 weeks ago:
Nope, I reject the idea that only emotionally supportive people are deserving of love. These aren’t binary traits, and many of aren’t as good at providing comfort in emotional situations for our own reasons:
- People who are themselves easily affected emotionally may not have it in themselves to step up right in the moments where someone else might need it.
- People who struggle a bit to respond with the same emotions as others might tend to be less able to provide emotional support for someone experiencing a thing they can’t relate with.
- To borrow from the love languages concept, some people provide support in ways that aren’t easily understood as such by the recipient. Perhaps more importantly, not everyone who gives love in a particular way prefers to receive love in that particular way.
I know I’m good at providing encouragement when things are going well (gunning for a promotion, trying to win a sporting competition, trying out stand up comedy for the first time), while being less able to provide emotional support when things are sad for other people (death of loved one, illness, other loss, plain old anxiety or depression). I’ll try to make it up with the other stuff (mostly doing things for people, sometimes just being present), but I’m not going to pretend that I’m actually a shoulder that anyone would choose to cry on. And yet I have enriching and fulfilling relationships with plenty of friends, family, and a wife who doesn’t actually ask that of me, who knew this about me long before we got married, and occasionally joked about my robotic ways. Our kids go to her when they want to cry about something, and they come to me when they want me to take some action that would alleviate the issue that made them sad in the first place (first aid, fixing broken shit, simply being hungry). I’d go as far as to say we make a great team and family unit.
I am who I am, and I still deserve (and receive) love. I think the way you look at things is too narrow and would condemn like the 75% of people who are bad at this stuff to a life forever alone, which is not very reasonable or empathetic of you.
- Comment on Daily Affirmation 4 weeks ago:
There are qualities about myself that I really like to be present in the people in my life (including my wife, and previous partners I’ve had): smart, empathetic, funny, fun, interesting, charismatic, confident.
There are also qualities in myself that I need to actively rely on others in my life to help me mitigate, and that I don’t like to bring into my own life: disorganized, absent minded, easily distracted. I like for the people in my life to be the opposite. Also in terms of physical attraction I am a man who is attracted to women, so I want the “opposite” of myself in that respect, too.
And there are qualities that I don’t have, that I really like for my partner to have: kind, emotionally supportive, spontaneous.
There are qualities about myself that I don’t much care one way or another whether my partners or my friends have: extroverted, athletic, technically minded.
And when talking about actual interests and hobbies and background and experience and knowledge, there’s a lot that I like to see that are true of myself, and a lot that I like to see that aren’t true of myself.
Ultimately, a partner is going to have some overlapping things with yourself, some differences, and the question you have to ask yourself is whether you’re a good fit for each other. That answer is going to depend a lot on different things.
- Comment on Daily Affirmation 4 weeks ago:
Be someone you want to date.
Got myself some big floppy boobs, now what
