quicklime

I think “vast” majority is an overstatement. I realize the vote skewed in his direction among the older generation, but a majority is not a vast majority.

Not too sure America ever had a Justice system, only a money and power driven legal system which in some of its finer moments managed to approximate justice.

I’ve never married, but I’ve always had housemates in shared rentals. What this (humorous but with a definite core of reality) piece points out is exactly why I tend to highlight the simplicity and durability of cast iron instead of making it out to be some kind of finicky diva. The cleaning is so easy and quick, you don’t have to worry about scratching it or overheating it, yadda yadda.

I honestly think the bad taste left over from some people being all hyper protective or finicky about their cast iron is just an unfortunate result of poor seasoning. I too was overprotective for the few early years when I thought I knew how to achieve a good coating but actually didn’t yet. And all that, in turn, is just an unfortunate downstream effect of the fact that cast iron skipped a generation or two in so many families, so much knowledge and practice was lost and had to be restarted by word of mouth and the Internet. Alas.

A new housemate moves in, sees the several cast iron items, and typically says something like “ooh, I’ll leave those alone, I wouldn’t want to mess up your special wares.” – because of the many pansplainers they’ve already encountered before. I tell them “no, seriously, you can play rough with these pans, it’s fine. All I ask is that you not leave them sitting in water overnight.” There really isn’t that much they could do to harm them.

I expect it to be (more or less) permanent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Regan

Why were they making a movie about Donald Regan?

Thing is, yeah they’re fucking stupid but they’re also voters who the Dems could have persuaded and hardly tried. Repeatedly spamming “vote for us or you get Trumped again” doesn’t count as persuasion.

it’s not even remotely close to half of the city burning down. But given the damage estimates are running somewhere around $150 billion, it’s bad enough

I can’t help feeling that the real bad news is not that online platforms have been ruined, but that people have been and remain dependent on them.

something something Melon Husk and Rare-Earth Mining

Yes – surely the eligible pool is tiny at best. And the pull to use skills of deception for profit instead is widespread.

We / our society need many more like that guy, but I wouldn’t wish that level of stress on anyone. I’ll bet he gave two years off his eventual lifespan for every year undercover. On the other hand, lifespan would be worth so little in a white-supremacist christofascism.

Gladly, but more like r/collapse 😐

Mind if I just jump in here and praise your username?

And yeah, I wonder if that medication is from Europe, thinking the word may not have the same cultural baggage in many countries there and might only refer to the original meaning of the action of slowing or moderating.

They work for anyone who can ensure their sky-high wages and benefits and near-immunity from prosecution or firing. But yeah, that would be the billionaires who fund the predictable media drumbeat/circlejerk on “law and order” (read: prosecution for the poor, total invisibility for most “white collar” crime), who thereby are effectively the prime supporters of the police state. The billionaires hardly give a shit personally about policing or justice, beyond the basic level of “I just want clean streets and a safe home and car”, but they use the law-n-order schtick as an obvious yet unbeatable tactic to buy almost any political outcome they desire.

Let’s be really honest and clear about this, unless it’s actually in question: If Uber and Lyft had to pay a living wage, including proper healthcare and taking care of the costs of vehicle ownership and maintenance, they would not be in business. They would not exist. The difference between that world and the one we’re in is all in corporate profit. Their business model requires massive wage theft to be profitable.

Indeed there are cold stews.

In thirty years we will have neither, and the surviving humans will be living at a mostly pre-industrial level of technology, unable to repair or rebuild most of what exists today.

Pee isn’t stored in the balls. (couldn’t resist)

I wish I could just press “fast forward” and skip the years this society is wasting on AI, just the latest (cough… very profitable for the elite few) distraction from facing the rapidly looming polycrisis more directly.