MisterBastahrd

What's the minimum material density necessary for a collapse such as this? Is it possible to have a planet with a core of solid oxygen, for example?

Your best bet for duck related products in the US is probably either an upscale grocery store or an Asian grocer like HMart. They tend to carry a lot of meat and offal products that most groceries in the US don't normally carry.

Yes, exactly. Because when I want to talk about food issues, I "boast" by talking about the scarcity of what is perceived to be a lower quality cut of meat near my location, and how I'm driving to find a shop in a poorer neighborhood to meet my food demands. You nailed it, champ.

Yeah, that's a 7 steak. I guess most people sorta see it as a trash cut, but it's got enough fat in the spaces between muscles that it ends up being a nice gravy. Collards and turkey necks are not hard to find out here. Just don't ever expect to find any good hoghead cheese. I tried some Boar's Head recently and that reminded me of the 1970s era images of stuff suspended in aspic.

Reminds me of the story of the VERY early German settlers in Louisiana. They didn't have work animals such as horses or food / sustenance animals such as cows for the first decade of their time settling here (and to be clear, cows were used ONLY for milk... killing cows was a crime in early colonial Louisiana). Clearing the land for farming? The Company des Indes gave them each a pickaxe, a hoe, and a spade.

The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St. Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale.

One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat and taught the children how to hunt, too.

Yep. For example, one staple dish of Cajuns is called "rice and gravy." Essentially, you sear thinly cut 7-steaks, remove them, cook down some trinity, then add the steaks back with some water or broth and seasonings. That's it. The steaks simmer in the broth for hours and create their own gravy. We serve it over rice, usually accompanied by some roux peas (tres petit pois cooked in a roux with onions and bacon) and cornbread. Simple, easy, flavorful.

But I live in Texas now, home of all the cattle, if you believe the marketing. And I can't find 7-steaks unless I go to a Mexican meat market, because the DFW area is so bourgeois nowadays that the steaks simply don't pass muster for the local market. Hell, I'm more likely than not to end up in a Mexican market simply because the produce is better and cheaper.

Same with beef shank. Osso bucco is traditionally made with veal shank, and oxtails are all the rage, but I can't find beef shank unless I go to an HEB. Most places don't carry the cut. And if I couldn't find beef shank, I could always go with beef neckbones, but uh... HEB is the only place around me that sells that either.

Historically, every time the state doesn't get involved, people die from poverty, neglect, and abuse. The free market is bullshit here because it has a profit motive, not a care or a duty motive. People don't just stop living or are worthy of care and respect simply because they can no longer provide cash to the money gods.

Prioritising business just concentrates money in the hands of people who already have money while nothing to address the day to day concerns of actual people.

So I looked at Amazon for products. There's an ultrasonic brewer that is used for both cold brew coffee and also for rapid infusion of spirits with charred barrel staves. There's also a stir plate / french press combo for sale that apparently does fine cold brew in 20 minutes.

One of the problem with a lot of schools is their layout. Yes, they have libraries. But many students have no way to access those libraries during lunch hours except by way of special passes. All school libraries should, by default, be necessarily directly adjacent to the common area so kids can browse during recess in the same way that they are adjacent to school cafeterias.

Meanwhile, we refuse to house our homeless but will give $6.5B to Samsung to build a chip plant.

Books like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, 1984, Animal House, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, etc. made much more sense to me than any of the Judy Bloom style books that are so prevalent. The last of those books I enjoyed was "How to Eat Fried Worms," and then, that only resonated with me because we were forced to participate in a school book dressup day and I realized I could coat crunchy chinese noodles with chocolate and bring them to class.

I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.

I can only speak to my own personal experience, but I was a voracious reader as a child and then sorta just... stopped. The longer life went on, the more I was instructed to ignore or hide my personal feelings and so I just didn't find the characters in the books for my age group, who were largely written by women, to be relatable. There was as large a stretch between the main characters' behavior and what I was taught to do as there was between the real world and Mount Doom. I devoured the entire non-fiction section at my library in the historical and scientific sections by the time I was 10, and then just stopped going because there wasn't a point. None of the books were for me.

I've made attempts to get back into reading from time to time, but I always go into the more rigorous non-fiction areas. I picked up a Brandon Sanderson book and wanted to throw the damned thing against a wall because of how juvenile the narration was. It felt like a very poor apeing of HHTG or Discworld narration without any of the wit.

Anyone ever tried dumping coffee grinds and water into an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner?

If students uttered a DEI statement every morning in their homeroom classes over the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag, we'd all be in a much better place culturally.

Remember the phrase "HR is not your friend?"

HR is also a hilariously complex set of rules and bullshit that isn't that easy to manage in large organizations. Separating out DEI specifically from HR allows companies and organizations the ability to have employees ensure that the obligations of companies regarding their legal obligation towards discrimination laws are met without interfering with core HR functions. Companies haven't been adopting DEI out of the goodness of their hearts. There's a direct financial advantage when you can prove to a court that you have provided direction on issues regarding diversity. It's just a collection of CYA, and their DEI statements are an extension of that.

It's almost as if you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

Keystone was about pumping oil straight from Canada to the Gulf Coast for the export market, crossing key aquifers to get there. It literally never mattered with respect to US gas prices and never will regardless of what occurs in the future.

The US literally produces more oil today than any country has in the history of the world. One of the main reasons its doing so is because oil prices are high enough to sustain production. Making oil cheaper REDUCES production. Wells become unprofitable to pump and maintain. When Trump negotiated a deal to crash the oil market, thousands of people in the industry lost their jobs.

We're not talking about historical crime rates. We're talking about recent ones. Yes, crime rates became lower than women stopped having unwanted children, but that has nothing to do with the recent decrease in violent crimes.

Sure, that makes more sense than the fact that most people who are at the age where one would normally conduct criminal mischief are now glued to their phones. Murder and violent crimes are both dropping year over year, too. Not sure how you wave away murder rates because people have given up on police.

These are normal semi-competent doctors who hate their day jobs.

There is definitely a market for this in the same realm as MMOs. Provide children educational problems to solve and then reward them with items that allow them to increase their ability to interact or decorate the world around them. Let the parent company guide the actual curriculum and allow kids to become creators ala Roblox to increase the number of assets available to them. They end up wanting to learn in order to get the shiny thing, and the company who puts it out gets a motivated audience.

> Look up the comment tree to the original question you responded to. Teaching kids gradeschool-level math/science is not the same thing as helping with homework

Your reading comprehension is as poor as your communication skills. Teaching them things they don't know to shore up what they learned in class is EXACTLY what helping them with their homework is about.

Child: "I don't understand X."

Parent: "Well, let's go over your materials to help you understand what X is."

This is NORMAL. It is also TEACHING.

> There's far more consternation about "discovery-based learning" curriculums and disruption in classrooms.

I can tell you've never been a parent or spoken to parents.

> This was also pulled out of thin air

LOL.

Please enumerate the Supreme Court justices that Democrats refused to seat during Trump's term.

To be blunt, I never conflated a fucking thing. Kids bring homework home. They don't understand something. They ask a parent for help. The parent explains it to them, and at the very least, shows the child how to solve the problem the way that they learned it. It's why there's so much consternation about common core and "new math," because parents feel helpless when it comes to solving problems with their children since they aren't taught to solve these equations the same way that the parents were.

When it comes to reading in particular, this is normally done at home and there is a direct correlation between how much time a parent spends with their child teaching them to read and providing them with additional reading materials and how well they end up being able to read when they're an adult. And given that all students interface with study materials by reading, then it follows that a child with an involved parent regarding homework in general and reading in particular will have better academic outcomes.

We've got 60 years of popular culture that has actively ridiculed parents who DON'T help their kids with their studies.

I really don't give a shit about how well educated your parents were. If anything, your anecdote shores up the point you think you're degrading.

You can do almost the same thing by only allowing charter schools to accept vouchers if the vouchers cover the entirety of the education costs. The first thing that happens when you introduce vouchers at the cost of a charter schools' tuition is that they raise the price of education so that there is a nominal financial barrier to overcome that poor parents can't afford.

Reality. Unless you have some sort of magical thinking where you actually believe that parents helping their children with homework and assignments is some sort of new expectation.

Uh... always?

Child goes home, does homework, doesn't understand something. Child asks parent. Parent helps child understand.

Even more with reading, most parents flat out don't read to their kids anymore, and don't help them with their reading assignments. So you end up with a worst case scenario where kids can't fucking read and can't spell either because they communicate with each other through slang while texting online.

An education system where parents are disengaged is an education system doomed to failure. Teachers do not have enough time in the day to adequately fill the gaps.

Education?

Try parenting.

The average parent nowadays is a sycophant for their children. They expect teachers to do ALL of the education work, they don't want their kids to have any homework, and they don't expect educators to discipline unruly kids who have been raised by their cell phones and tablets in a Lord of the Flies online social setting.

People who didn't get anything and everything they wanted from their parents when they were growing up have decided to try to be friends with their kids instead of teaching them how to behave in public or sit down with them to teach them how to freaking read. IQs are going down because Millennials and Zoomers are collectively irresponsible as parents and will attack educators instead of taking responsibility for their childrens' educational welfare. They treat teachers like garbage and their kids follow suit.

And what can they POSSIBLY point to? New Math? Gay people exist and you shouldn't treat them with hatred? LOL, please.

Meanwhile, I would never dream of ordering groceries outside of specialty items through Amazon. They are prohibitively expensive on most food items that have any sort of weight compared to Walmart and Instacart. Granted, I don't have a Whole Foods nearby.

There was never a snowball's chance in hell that once Ford and GMC got involved in the EV truck market that Tesla would be anything but an afterthought.