the_gastropod

Where do those animals get their B12 from, do you think? (Hint: they don't synthesize it either, they get it from their diet)

Today, because our food / water are so sterilized (good thing!), we don't typically get much bacterial B12 from unclean root vegetables, drinking from streams, etc. So yes, we need to supplement today. Because of advances in cleanliness.

Yes that is true. But, e.g., a restaurant that sells you a bowl of cereal would not be allowed to do this.

In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to.

AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.

Vending machines kill (and hurt) people, just like guns.

I don’t know if I just got lucky or what. But my AirPods Pro (1st gen) just finally crapped out last week. And the batteries are mostly fine: the speaker blew out in the right one, and it now sounds awful. But that’s ~6-7 good years that I got out of ‘em.

I was responding to the claim that many models had predicted catastrophe. An Inconvenient Truth is a movie made by a politician. It, of course, chose to depict the more extreme ends of probabilities. And despite that, I think it stands up pretty well, all things considered.

Mind sharing some? I often hear people believe climate scientists frequently overstate things, and I can’t recall seeing good examples of this.

What party did Bernie Sanders run for president under, again?

- A Bernie voter

(just popped open your comment history to see your other latest comment complaining about vegans, identity politics, doing the "not all men!", "not all white people" thing... You are a parody of a parody of a clown. I'm beyond finished here.)

Your response is all fluff. Yes. Raising union membership is not fluff. Actually forgiving student loans of 800k Americans, after the Supreme Court partisanly blocked your efforts to forgive them for 5M is not fluff either.

Lots of union members, like you, lack the ability to tell shit from Shinola. That’s a huge problem, and one I have no clue how to solve. Con men are, sadly, effective despite being, y’know, con men.

You seem to be a perfect encapsulation of the "both-sides" mindset. Blissfully unaware of what's happening around you. But that has 0 impact on your confidence in being right that nothing matters, both sides are the same. The vibes are negative no matter who's president, so everyone should just stop caring about what is or isn't "better". If it's still imperfect, it sucks, bro! Hear that guy over there complaining? Checkmate, libtard!

Behold! A both-sides guy who’s completely unaware of actual real world events!

Student loan forgiveness: blocked by the Supreme Court along partisan lines: Biden v. Nebraska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_v._Nebraska)

Union support is so absurdly widespread, I don’t even know what to reference. E.g., on his 3rd day in office, Biden signed an executive order to empower government employees to join unions. This resulted in about a 20% increase in unionized federal employees. He was also the first sitting president to ever attend a picket line on the side of the workers. His Department of Labor and NLRB appointees were longtime unionized labor advocates, who through regulations lowered barriers to joining unions and hammered anti-union behaviors by companies like Starbucks.

I know you’re going to get downvoted to hell, but you’re pretty much spot on. There’s something strangely desirable about being seen as the edgy contrarian “not left, not right” person. But 9 times out of 10, that person has approximately the same incoherent worldview most Trumpists have.

Nooo. I just asked Claude (Sonnet 5 Medium) how many I's are in assassin, and it said 2. Granted, it got several words correct before this. But no, they still aren't great at this letter-counting thing.

I'm far too dumb to understand the intricacies of such technology, but the continued research into Lithium-air batteries seems incredibly inspiring. If we can figure that technology out, seems like it'd unlock a whole host of battery-powered transportation options.

Here, boss, maybe read up on what ethnic cleansing is, then feel free to join the conversation with a less silly comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

Also worth pointing out, apparently, “lawful” does not mean ethical. Owning slaves was lawful during much of U.S. history. Gassing Jews was lawful in Nazi Germany. The President, after spending years demonizing and lying about Haitians going on to unilaterally terminate Haitians’ legal standing in the country in order to “legally” deport them to their home country—a country we fully acknowledge is completely unsafe—is unjustifiable on any level. Do better.

I think that’s some pretty thin gruel. The Democratic Party is hardly perfect. But that’s true of every political party on the planet. There are some grifters, some incompetent, and some corrupt Democrats. But by and large, Democratic politicians do seem to genuinely try to do their jobs. They seem to be at least somewhat receptive, as well. And crucially, they hold their own to account. Get caught with gold bars in your suitcase? Bye. Have women with credible accusations of sexual misconduct against you? Sayonara. There also are many very competent democratic politicians doing solid jobs across the country: Senator Van Hollen, Senator Ossoff, AOC, James McGovern, Baltimore’s mayor Brandon Scott, etc. I see no reason to pretend they’re unworkable. And to suggest “eh, both sides suck” has always felt incredibly lazy and nihilistic to me.

Care about third party options? There are current Democrats advocating for ranked choice voting. The RNC rejects ranked choice. And there are many GOP states that have outright banned ranked choice voting. There’s a party that’s clearly better for your interests.

A both-sides guy! How original!

Choose the worst Democratic politician currently in office and please explain what they’ve done or said that is in any way comparable to what the Republican Party is doing.

No. I believe, for example, that singling out legal immigrants from Haiti, revoking their legal status, and deporting them back to Haiti, where the current state department's website says of Haiti: "Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care" [1], is an example of ethnic cleansing. To suggest this is just good ol' fashioned law enforcement is absurd.

[1] https://travel.state.gov/en/international-travel/travel-advi...

Respectfully, maybe spend 5 minutes reading about it from the horse’s mouth. The Mamdani admin has done a pretty good job, imo, of laying out the case, and explaining the plan for these 5 grocery stores.

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani...

I have my suspicions about what’s going to happen. I worry the demand is going to be too high to realistically deal with. But dammit am I excited to see someone try something a bit different to address a very obvious need.

State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.

Go on, dawg! Be specific!

DHH has repeatedly advocated for remigration. Wikipedia defines remigration as: a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.

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

Yea, what a great point! It's totalitarian for a bunch of individuals to call out someone for their bad ideas. And it's definitely not totalitarian for someone to encourage governments to carry out textbook ethnic cleansing. You're a true thought-leader!

What are you even talking about? Trans folks didn’t suddenly pop into existence in 2014 or whatever, and force conservatives to recognize them. There’ve been trans people since the beginning of human civilization. As with so many of these culture war topics, this outrage was just pulled from nowhere one day to rile up Fox News viewers after they’d adequately calmed down about Obama’s tan suit.

Suddenly, not wanting trans folks to participate in civilization, Conservatives have gone all in on the transvestigation bullshit that includes genital inspections, accusing conventionally less feminine-looking cis women of being men, etc.

These people are just bigots.

What are some of these unpopular policies that “they” refuse to back down from?

Straight arms (no curve around the ear), 95% chance the wearer is a Trumper.

Your obvious use of an LLM to write this comment isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring that it’s helpful for learning to do things on your own. Seems like it’s evidence that LLM’s quickly become a crutch for even trivial efforts like posting internet comments.

Which is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right?

No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.

I'm an admitted Elon hater, so maybe that clouds my judgement. But I rented a Tesla 3 a few years back to try an EV before deciding to buy one. I ultimately went with a Chevy Bolt, and find the Apple Carplay to be far better than Tesla's proprietary system. The only thing I recall that Tesla did better was pre-conditioning the battery before planned charging--something Apple Carplay (at least its current version) lacks the API to handle.

As far as charging, I think that was the case even as recently as ~2 years ago. But today, the charging game is pretty decent for CCS cars. You can even charge at Tesla stations using an adapter.

I’ve been feeling gaslit about this too. Getting major “we’re still early!” crypto bro vibes from this constant goalpost moving.

It does. Swiftfin: https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin