Don’t tempt me with a good time!

Nah, I go through the self checkout even with the one-year-old in tow, and 15-20 items.

Crayolas in, crayolas out

I feel like just the graphical style and colors of the poster scream UK (and I’ve never even been there, just pay attention)

They may be telling on themselves with the headline

Imagine being so rich that this is what your rock bottom looks like

The idea is to place an upper limit on corps for the definition of a full time work week. If you want to work more, go ahead, but your employer shouldn’t be able to compel you to work past that max number of hours in return for benefits. It’s tricky because there’s a legal component and a cultural component to it. Also some businesses will push back (especially service industry) because they will need to change their whole hiring and scheduling.

and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My peanits.

Man, imagine being cucked by the actual GOD himself, like, the holy father?!

I’m honestly surprised that all the incel NEETs haven’t formed a religion around that, I mean come on! At least that would be sociologically interesting. But no, we just get that Andrew Taint fellow instead.

I was working phone support a few years back when I asked this one lady what her email address was, and she seemed confused by that question. I started running out of ways to ask something so simple when finally, all exasperated, she said (and I shit you not): “but I don’t have e-mail, I have G-mail!”

So yeah, I get what you’re saying, people’s brains do be rotted these days, sometimes I just forget.

I’ve never understood this argument. You pick an instance you like, make an account, log in, join the comms that interest you, comment on things, make posts, etc.

This is all very normal internetty type shit that anyone who’s created an account somewhere should be able to do very easily. You don’t need to know anything about federation or how that all works. You don’t need to spin up your own self-hosted instance (but you can if you want).

Am I missing something? It’s really not rocket science here. IMHO, the “fediverse is too hard” sentiment is missing the actually difficult bit, which is getting people away from the ingrained habits formed after years of only using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al.

Computer think, therefore… Computer

I’ve duckduckgone

Maybe they’re trying to offload their entire supply to boomers before they croak? For real though, I don’t know anyone under 50 who drinks this, Folgers etc and actually likes it enough to buy a year’s worth.

But the fetus is my favorite part! Tender and juicy, like filet mignon. Religious extremists ruin everything good

Yeah I’d crush that with the bread toasted and some grainy mustard

That’s not far from how the wealthy actually operate.

They also use life insurance products in unique ways. Normies buy regular term or whole life insurance and pay out the ass in premiums, whoever sold it gets a big cut. The whole focus is on the death benefit for family in case you die, no benefits in life.

Wealthy buy specially designed whole life policies and don’t care about the death benefit. They will max out their contributions and paid-up additions, then just open more policies to dump more money in. They can borrow against their contributions at a low interest rate, say 5%, for as long as they want. At the same time (and this is key) all their contributions are earning a higher interest rate plus dividends (say 6-8%) uninterrupted even if they borrow from it. Compound interest does its thing after a few years.

This is like if you had a savings account at a bank that you have full control over, earning higher interest than anywhere else. You can make a “clone” of your money at any time and use it for as long as you want at a low cost and do whatever with it. Put that cash to work in investments, buy real estate or cars and boats, start a business, pay employees, anything. While you’re doing that, the “original” sum in your savings account is working away earning interest the whole time. As long as the “clone” of your money plus interest makes it back into the account (paying yourself back) you can do it all over again and continue piling it up. An infinite money machine.

If an LLC owns this vessel where all your wealth is, and an LLC formed in, say, Wyoming – a state which allows registrant anonymity – owns that LLC and you have everything under a living trust, now you have governance over it, can create rules for how it operates, draw up contracts governing who can use it and stipulations for that access, avoid it going through court after you die, etc. You’re now shielded from personal liability and no one can figure out who owns the assets underneath that umbrella trust entity without a court order. On paper, you own nothing and control everything, you’re nearly impossible to prosecute, you have 0 income that has to be reported to the IRS. You have all the power and control and reap all the upside, while suffering none of the usual downsides or responsibilities written in the social contract the rest of us follow.

It sounds to good to be true, but the wealthy and powerful have been following this playbook for centuries, almost as long as insurance has been a concept. If that doesn’t describe a sovereign citizen, I don’t know what does! The stereotype of the methed up poor white guy who drives around baiting cops and argues baseless logic in court that they got from some other methed up poor white guy they met in some godforsaken chat room that is Totally Not a Honeypot Run by Feds is a red herring imo.

I would support anyone making that choice. But there’s no way around the fact that some people are going to want to eat meat, and I think that’s fine. Good luck trying to change other people based around your own personal dogma - especially when it’s around what people eat, they don’t like it and they might think you’re an ass. Along with wanting to eat meat, most people don’t like to be told what to do. In fact they often do the opposite. So no. In the same vein, please don’t take the following as an attempt to persuade you or anyone to change your eating habits. It’s simply a window into my thoughts on the matter.

It’s the level of consumption, amount of waste and all the harmful externalities that I’m not ok with.

The fact is that meat farming, at a small enough scale in a closed loop system can improve the land instead of destroying it. It can also be net-zero or even provide net-negative emissions. That’s not to say there are no emissions. We’ll likely never see a cow that doesn’t burp or fart. Cows expel quite a lot, I’m certain you know, mostly methane. There are ways to reduce it somewhat. The goal is take the harmful stuff we don’t want and either harness it as an input for something else down the line, or offset it somewhere. This is difficult, it requires hella discipline and commitment, but we’ve learned quite a lot about how to do it. That’s not to say there are one-size-fits-all systems or methods. Beef cattle need water and a lot of it. They need space and a lot of it. Grass. They produce waste and a lot of it. If you can’t provide the proper inputs or reduce the outputs enough to reach net-zero (or my favorite cop-out: “net-zero… someday”) is not going to happen. If you choose to do it anyway and profit from that, then you’re a real piece of shit IMHO. Do something else.

If meat farming in a regenerative system is done correctly (which is going to look a bit different on every farm), meat animals are not mistreated and live the life they’re meant to live, they’re providing outputs for other parts of the system, customers get their (appropriate and healthy amount of) meat locally, the farmer gets a decent livelihood and can leave behind a legacy of land that’s been improved, and community is built through interacting with that food system.

Meat eaters don’t have any connection with the animals they consume and that’s a real tragedy right now. Mass-produced meat as a concept is completely abstracted away. You grab that Styrofoam tray of chicken or whatever and that’s the extent of it. Most brands greenwash the shit out of their meat, and the propaganda works.

If you’re a Person Who Cares™️, maybe you spend the extra $2 on the “organic” line or you only buy “cage-free” eggs that come with a cute little booklet an unpaid intern made 10 years ago. Maybe you allow yourself to imagine happy animals peacefully grazing away in some pastoral scene replete with red wooden barns and shit. People really think like that!

But it would do some good to actually restore some connection to the animals we depend on. Go to the farm, go on tours and events. Hang out with the animals. Volunteer to help out with the baby sheep/goats/cows when they come. And speak up if something can be improved or doesn’t seem ok. Form a bond with your food that actually starts at the beginning and not the end. Hunting is another (but very different) way to access that connection. As a bonus, hunters are helping with management and learning useful skills. It’s not for everyone obviously, and that’s ok. I’m not saying you should have to personally kill your meat or even watch that happen. It takes a certain type of person to safely carry that kind of burden. I’m not saying everyone who hasn’t done this today is somehow bad. It’s not the average person’s fault we have such a shitty, rickety, exploitative food system (at least in the US where I’m at).

But if the idea of “meeting your meat”, and taking part in its life while it’s actually alive makes you uncomfortable, queasy or you’d just rather remain ignorant, yeah, you might want to take a deep look and examine whether you should be eating it at all. You (the person I’m replying to) have simply made that choice ahead of time, which is totally cool. I don’t presently care about your reason for it, nor do I need to know, but you’re welcome to share. What you don’t have is the right to make that choice for others.

I’m under no delusion that we should replace all beef with grazing cattle at current levels of consumption. It should be what the land can support, ideally. If they’re part of a closed regenerative system, net-zero emissions and even net climate benefits can be possible. Cattle aren’t going away anytime soon, why not bring responsible stewardship mainstream?