Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

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Cake day: Jul 12, 2023

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Read “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, it’s free online.

He lays out a brutal critique of the modern mathematical curriculum in the Unites States but in summary:

We teach mathematics to children as a huge set of rules to memorize and use to get good scores on standardized tests so that they can “get into good colleges.”

We don’t treat mathematics with any reverence or care, like we do with the arts. Math is taught as a bunch of arbitrary brute facts that old wise men came up with centuries ago and we spend all of elementary and high school relentlessly drilling them into students heads no matter how much pain and suffering it causes.

There is no actual exploration of mathematical beauty, or mystery. There isn’t any discussion of the underlying philosophy of mathematics, or how any of the rich and fascinating history of its development as a field. It’s like if we taught music as just a way to write notes on a page in certain time signatures and keys, but never actually let students listen to a piece of music or discuss the great composers or cultural movements of music through the ages.

Of course that seems ridiculous to people, but for some reason when we do that exact same thing with mathematics, nobody bats an eye. In fact, people think it would be strange to do it any other way.



Holy crap…you literally just unlocked that same memory for me. Idk what episode it was either, but I totally remember that part.

Edit: Found it! It’s the episode “Gary Takes a Bath” Season 2 Episode 13.

At one point, Spongebob attempts to hypnotize Gary into taking a bath, and one of the telepathic images is that weird hillbilly girl laughing.

The clip from that episode


Fair, however a balanced vegetarian diet is as cheap or cheaper than a cheap meat centric diet, and certainly healthier.

A can of beans is about a dollar, less depending on where you shop. Potatoes are a few dollars a bag, and for most people, a bag of large russets would last them several days if not a week. Same for leafy greens, frozen fruit and veggies, bags of rice, etc.

I agree that there can be other factors, but impoverished communities around the world for centuries have lived on staple foods like those.

I think some personal responsibility is necessary still. Sure the megacorps are the ones doing the most harm and push people to be more consumerist, but that doesn’t absolve people of all their personal autonomy, otherwise you justify all kinds of “just following orders” arguments.

We ought to still resist the corpos and try to live our lives in ways that are better for the world as a whole. Sure, me recycling cans and trying to buy local isn’t going to save the planet, but that doesn’t mean I should just throw litter around in the street and buy everything from Amazon and Walmart.


Large amounts of the population starving is not the morally correct option. Eating meat is many times more inefficient for resources used than eating plants. The infrastructure needed to sustainably mass farm vegetables for the whole world would be far less resource intensive than our current omnivorous factory farming system.

Your personal anecdote, assuming it’s true is completely included in my original critique. I specified factory farmed meat as the problem. I am fine with sustainable hunting if that’s your only option, because it requires genuine effort by the hunter, and it provides a generally less painful death for the animal vs what they would experience out in nature from any other predator. Also, there are some people who have medical situations where eating zero meat does cause them some issues. That being said, it’s a very small percentage of the population, and I suspect many folks (not necessarily you) are lying or mistaken that their health suffered when they gave up meat. Most of the time, it’s because they simply weren’t eating a balanced diet.

Eating less meat is better than eating more meat. Something is better than nothing, it’s good to cut down on meat consumption, even if you aren’t cutting it out completely.

Nothing we do is perfect, even the most hardcore vegan has slapped a mosquito or patronized a business that uses fossil fuels, etc. But it’s about trying to be better. Trying to equate the harms of the meat industry to harms that vegetarians/vegans cause is like trying to equate Ted Bundy with a kid who cheated on their math homework. Sure both did something bad, but one of those bad things is far more severe.

And as my personal anecdote: I am not vegan, I’m vegetarian. I get attacked by more hardcore vegans for eating honey and eggs. I have cut down my consumption of both, I drink almost exclusively non-dairy milk, and I bike and use public transport when I am able. But I’m not perfect, not possible to be.


If you eat factory meat, you’re doing something morally wrong that can’t be justified.

And the vast majority of people who get defensive about that, deep down know what they are doing is morally dubious at best, but they can’t/won’t admit it, so they lash out at vegans/vegetarians instead.


Not really a young child, but in my late teens my parents told me I had no curfew.

Their only rule was, lock the front door when you get back, and let one of them know I was home, even really late.

I would leave at 8pm in my truck, drive to pick up my friends, then hit various late night stops like Dairy Queen, Subway, Denny’s, etc. My friends and I would spend like an hour or two at each place, chilling, playing cards, eating snacks, chatting, and then go hit the next place.

Often we would all find some random parking lot and just chill there chatting and listening to music. I would frequently get back at 2-3am.

Many gen-Z kids don’t even drive. My spouse’s youngest sister is 20 and doesn’t have a drivers license. She hardly hangs out with her friends in person at all, same with most of them. They all just game together on Discord. I was a pretty mild mannered kid when I was that age, but they make me seem like a wild west bandit lol.

Also sleepovers apparently aren’t a thing any more?? A ton of parents are totally against them. I guess I kind of get it. Idk, I used to have sleepovers all the time with my friends. Pretty much everybody’s birthday party was a sleepover from age 13-17. I remember staying up super late, playing GameCube/XBox, playing truth or dare, and stuffing ourselves with candy and soda, super fun memories.



An unorganized pile or collection of unrelated items.

“The top drawer of the desk was a shlarmle of buttons, marbles, pens, and rubber bands.”



Big Soylent fan here, firstly, Soylent isn’t designed as a 100% meal replacement, or at least it isn’t approved as such.

That being said, the inventor claimed in an interview that he had gone for a month on pure Soylent, and there have been many people who make similar claims.

Stay hydrated, Soylent does make you poop, it’s just delayed because of the high fiber. Trust me, try it for a few days straight, you’re colon will get cleaned out lol.

Make sure you drink lots of water, that goes for any diet, (lots of people are mildly dehydrated without realizing it.)


Dude, if you wanna believe in ghosts and aliens, just say you think they are real because vibes.

Don’t try to justify it with a clunky, misunderstood, and incorrect usage of “statistics.”


The issue is structural, there are no “good cops” in the same way there are no “good pimps” or “good slave owners.”

There were some slave owners who were kind to their slaves, taught them to read, allowed them to have some free time and make a small amount of money.

That doesn’t mean that what they were doing was morally acceptable. They still were buying and selling human beings like property.

Policing, especially in the USA is rotten to the core. There are absolutely some cops who are kind people, who become police officers out of a naive belief that they can do good for society as a whole in that profession.

But those people don’t usually last long. They either leave after seeing the ugly underbelly, or they become corrupted by the system. The police will always act in the interest of the rich and powerful, or else they get fired. If they are told to break up a protests, they will always comply. If they are told to block a corporate skyscraper so that protesters cannot get into it to stage a sit-in, they will do it, even as ultra wealthy oligarchs stream safely past them to conduct horrifically corrupt dealings that hurt and kill millions of people across the world.

The cop’s job is also to go around trying to bust people for crimes. If a cop comes up to you out of the blue and starts up a conversation, 99% of the time they are fishing for information, trying to sus something out. They aren’t just trying to be friendly, they are doing their job. In the US at least, the cops are allowed to lie to you in an investigation in order to try to get you to admit guilt. They are allowed and trained to do it, to use all kinds of trickery to manipulate you into a confession, or to get Intel that helps them.

In addition, the examples people frequently cite as good things the cops do would be better done by non-cops. First aid? Suicide intervention? Disaster relief? Theft deterrence? Wellness checks? Those are all things that would be better done by non-cops if we funded and grew those kinds of organizations instead of further militarizing the police.

ACAB has never meant that all cops are evil people, it means that no matter how good of a person a cop is, they will always be empowering a corrupt and evil system.

Why don’t we see the same sentiment about paramedics, firefighters, and heck, even soldiers? Because the systems that those folks are a part of don’t have the same corrupting effect. Even soldiers are generally looked on much more favorably than cops, even though politically and socially, there is a large amount of overlap. Part of this is propaganda, but another factor is the standards soldiers are held to in the US. They are expected to carry themselves extremely well, and can be severely punished, even jailed for misconduct.

As a personal anecdote, I grew up in both worlds. My dad and several members of my family were both in the military and were cops. I was around both cultures a ton. I’ve had many bad encounters with police officers over the years, and that’s with me knowing all the classic, “always keep your hands visible and comply” stuff that my dad and his cop friends told me.

I’ve never had a single negative encounter with an on-duty soldier. They’ve always been extremely respectful and grounded. Like I said, just an anecdote, but interesting to think about. If cops could be fired or even jailed for relatively minor infractions, even have their lives destroyed like soldiers who are dishonorably discharged, ACAB would probably never have became a thing.


After about an hour of using the mouse or controller gaming, I have to take a few seconds to massage my hand because it gets sore and stiff.

Didn’t happen until I got into my 30’s 😔


Oh yeah, it’s real. For instance, I constantly have to use black magick as a sys-admin to get my company’s printers to work.


Been a Bitwarden user for several years now, both personal and deployed at multiple small businesses.

It has been fantastic the whole time. Pricing is great, open source, runs on basically everything, and easy to use.

KeypassXC if you’re uber-paranoid or a hardcore Stallmanite, otherwise, Bitwarden all day 100%


Right on. Yeah, Timeshift isn’t a backup solution, you still need 3-2-1 for your data, but it’s great for as a system-wide Ctrl+Z for mistakes or broken updates.


Use Timeshift! Saved me several times after experimenting a little too much with Debian.


The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you’re trying to treat lol.


So amazing, the amount of incredible science we’ve been able to do with the Voyager program.


What Cars do You Swear By?
Just found out that my current car will die any day now due to a known defect. It's out of warranty and I have no money to replace it right now. I've been cursed with car problems my whole life, no matter how well I take care of them, I keep getting screwed. All of the cars have been Fords because I always heard they were generally dependable and cheap to repair/upkeep, but so far they have all failed me. What cars do y'all recommend? What cars do you have that just won't give up the ghost no matter how old/beat up they get? If your life depended on your car lasting as long as possible, what car would you drive? I want whatever car I get next to last me 10-20 years. I want to be that person posting a picture of the odometer hitting 300k miles. I also don't care much about features, reliability is key.
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