merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Asking for a chocaholic friend 1 day ago:
I think you can combine the two. It’s basically places where anybody capable can easily become a grad student and have enough spending money as a grad student to buy chocolate whenever they want.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 1 week ago:
That only works if people use it.
For some reason, people have stuck with Twitter. But, the users of TikTok are not the same as the users of Twitter, so who knows, maybe they won’t stick with it.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 1 week ago:
the media just repeats it
The media reports on it, attempting to do so from a neutral point of view.
I actually appreciate that the professional media is still attempting to stick to a neutral point of view. If they abandon that, you get media like MSNBC and Fox News where every single news story is discussed from a certain political point of view. That just sorts people into camps that listen to the news source that agrees with their perceived notions, which then radicalizes them even more.
If people can’t agree on a basic set of facts, then there’s no point to having a democracy. A media that covers the facts with as little bias as possible is essential to that working.
That isn’t to say that I think the media is doing a great job. The big media companies that are owned by the oligarchs are doing especially badly. When Trump does something like this, responsible media that’s attempting to be unbiased should at least connect historical dots, like other times that presidents have threatened the media, and what the results of that have been.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 1 week ago:
So, Trump effectively nationalized TikTok, valued at $300b. He sells it to friendly oligarchs for $15b. So far, this is basically the post-USSR playbook, and how Roman Abravmovich, Alisher Usmanov, Vladimir Lisin, etc. got so rich.
But it might piss off his oligarch buddies if he drives all the users off TikTok making what seemed like a steal into something worthless instead.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 1 week ago:
Teen Vogue is killing it right now. For example How ICE Raids Are Making It Easier for Civilian Men to Assault Immigrant Women
- Comment on save the planet 🌎 1 week ago:
And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
live air traffic showing the thousands of planes currently in the air over the US
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 1 week ago:
90% of the time I’m using garlic I mince it. The other 10% it’s thinly sliced or just crushed.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 1 week ago:
I’d be interested to see what that is. It seems like it would be hard to make that work because securely gripping the thing you’re chopping is an important part of using a mandoline.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’ve used a mandoline to do it before. Frankly, that’s really the only way I’d do it these days. But, even then, it’s a lot of work and it’s hard on the eyeballs. Plus, mandolines are scary. I know what not to do when using one, but it’s like a fear of heights. Even if you know you’re doing it safely, it’s still nerve wracking. Maybe if I had a chain-mail glove I could do it without fear, but I don’t have one.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 1 week ago:
they don’t like the taste of onions, they like the flavor.
I don’t think the distinction between “taste” and “flavour” is the right way to frame it. Raw onion on its own can be overwhelming. If you eat a hamburger with raw onion on it, the amount of raw onion per bite will be pretty small, and it will be one taste in a whole bunch of other tastes. Your kids probably wouldn’t like eating pure salt, or pure pepper either. But, food with some salt tastes great.
Having said that, fried onions are a whole different game. After 5 minutes the onion loses a lot of its potency and gets a bit sweet. After 30 minutes it’s basically a very slightly pungent candy. For a French Onion Soup, you can cook them for up to 2 hours before they’re ready. A pot that’s full to the brim of raw onions reduces down to a thin layer at the bottom, and they taste more like gummy worms than onions at that point.
Onions raw to fully cooked for a french onion soup.
I love French Onion Soup, and occasionally make it. I’d make it more, it’s just that slicing up more than a kilogram of onions is a whole process. It’s so difficult it makes me cry every time I do it.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 1 week ago:
There’s a common joke about that. It goes something like: “A [Ukrainian] starts frying onion and garlic in a pan and only then starts thinking about what they want to make.”
[Ukrainian] can be substituted for most other countries, to be honest.
But, to be real, garlic shouldn’t be fried for that long IMO, so I’d only put in the garlic about 30s before I was ready to start adding all the other ingredients. But, with the onions, I’ve actually started onions more than 30 minutes before figuring out what else I wanted to make. That way they have a chance to get good and caramelized. That doesn’t work for every recipe, but it works for a lot of them.
- Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books 1 week ago:
I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!
Probably the opposite. They’re confident they won’t lose sales over this because they’re too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they’re not going to face any pushback from the FTC.
- Comment on This is art 1 week ago:
It’s great when art is so bad that it’s hard to tell if the artist is trolling or just terrible.
- Comment on This is art 1 week ago:
I love that story so much. Normally artists who work in bronze know what they’re doing. It’s much less forgiving than say clay. So, you’d think just by the fact it’s a bronze statue it’s going to be pretty good. Then, throw in that the model for the art is incredibly good looking. This isn’t a case where an artist has to decide whether to portray an ugly person accurately, or to make them better looking. Ronaldo already looks like a statue come to life. And yet…
- Comment on Steady 1 week ago:
Yes, if the heart rate were 60, that would be a lot more suspicious. Even if the procedure hasn’t started yet, I’d expect the subject to be fucking scared. I don’t know if the O2 saturation makes sense for what’s happening, but it might. If your entire body is being taken over by a symbiote, any readings might be possible.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 1 week ago:
Whichever version you use, it doesn’t really make sense. The para part, sure. But “cetamol”? I guess you can can smush two of the words together and go from “para-acet” to “paracet”. But, the “amol” ending? It seems to be borrowing the “am” from amino, and the “ol” from the end. But, that’s a weird set of letters to borrow, and weird to not borrow the full “amin” from amino and not borrow the full “enol” from phenol.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 1 week ago:
Both are slightly less clunky words created from the corpse of “N-acetyl-para-aminophenol”
“Acetaminophen” takes the “acet” from “acetyl” and “aminophen” from “aminophenol”.
“Paracetamol” takes the “para” part, and then a few other random letters that don’t really make sence. “cet” from “acetyl”, and maybe “am” from the start of “amphenol” with the “ol” ending from the same word, ignoring that it ends in “nol”?
- Comment on proof of wormholes 1 week ago:
I knew someone who lived in Switzerland. Switzerland isn’t part of the EU, Sweden is. That meant that a lot of online shopping sites for EU residents would ship to Sweden but not Switzerland. So, he would ship to his address, but in Sweden. The nice folks in Sweden would say “gosh, another person once again confused Sweden and Switzerland” and forward the shipment to Switzerland, and he’d get his stuff.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 1 week ago:
Meanwhile pregnant women might avoid the safest pain reliever available
More importantly, the safest fever-reducer available. Fevers are actually known to be damaging to fetuses, unlike acetaminophen.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
Back then, an internet (lower case “i”) was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
That’s what I was told too, but I never once encountered anybody who used the small-i “internet” term. I heard “network”, or “intranet” or often topology-related things like “the token-ring network”. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect that small-i “internet” was never really a term that was widely used, if at all.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
IMO, that site needs more cold war propaganda myths.
For example:
Myth: The US won WWII
Truth: The biggest battles of the last few years of WWII were between Germany and the USSR, and the USSR won, pushing the German army back to Berlin.
–
Myth: Unions are communism, and therefore bad.
Truth: It is thanks to Unions that we work 8 hour days instead of 12 hour days, and that we have a 2 day weekend. They’re an essential part of balancing the power of the rich against the power of the workers.
–
Myth: Unions hold back the most skilled, so if you’re skilled or smart you shouldn’t be in a union.
Truth: The best actors in the world are members of SAG-AFTRA. They negotiate deals where they make tens of millions per movie. The union doesn’t hold them back. It just means that when the film studios try to screw over the less powerful actors and the union votes to strike, the rich and powerful actors need to do their part to help the less powerful actors out.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
A bigger deal to them is the theme parks and cruises.
Not only are those big money makers, they’re also easier for news crews to see and report on.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
www.cartoonbrew.com/…/everythingdisneyowns_b.jpg
(As of 2019)
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
You could care less? You mean, you care, possibly a lot?
- Comment on Amen 2 weeks ago:
It isn’t wings.
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 2 weeks ago:
I wonder about things like Canada’s Nunavut, the North West Territories, Finnmark in Norway, etc.
Those are places where I wouldn’t be surprised if every rural household had a gun, either for hunting or for protection from bears. But, they’re also relatively poor, so there probably aren’t a lot of houses with multiple guns. But, it’s possible that there’s one with Falkland Islands levels of gun ownership, maybe even US gun ownership per person, just with far fewer people.
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 2 weeks ago:
I can imagine why that might be. But, the Falkland Islands aren’t a country. I would guess that if you go province by province, state by state, territory by territory, you can probably find others with very high gun ownership rates.
- Comment on Friends are a bloatware. 3 weeks ago:
Not yet, but there don’t need to be. As I said, Whatsapp is owned by Meta which is part of a duopoly (along with Google) that controls virtually all ads on the Internet. They slurp all your private data in Whatsapp and use it to target ads to you on every other internet site and every other app where they power the ads. In addition, since Whatsapp has all your contacts, they use that data too. Using what they know about you as part of the ad profile for your mom, your sister, your boyfriend, etc.
- Comment on Friends are a bloatware. 3 weeks ago:
IMO the issue with WhatsApp isn’t that it’s proprietary. The issue is that it’s owned by Meta and it’s only free because they slurp down all your private data to target you for ads.
