After sitting outside for a few days getting a little bit shriveled I think they look even better. This pic is actually from almost a week ago when they were freshly -carved, if I remember I’ll snap a new pic of them later on

But yeah, I think they just generally have a lot more character than pumpkins, and you can usually get a couple turnips for the price of one decent carving pumpkin

The trick or treaters in my neighborhood always seem to appreciate them too, even if half of them don’t seem to know what a turnip is (a disappointing amount both of kids and parents call them onions)

I just use a forstner bit in a cordless drill to do most of the work, so not really.

It would probably be a bit of a pain if you were to do it all by hand

A few previous year’s turnips

Around 10-15 years ago I worked in a pizzeria with a little sports bar. We had more than a couple people who were there almost every day.

I still stop by there once in a while, and without fail I run into at least one of those old regulars every time.

I would hope that like damn-near every other electronic device, it would include at least a thermal cutoff to kill the power before it got hot enough to start a fire.

Seriously, they’re in pretty much everything, any sort of tool or appliance with a motor probably has one, of course anything that generates heat like a hair dryer or space heater, I’ve seen them in lamps, they’re everywhere. They’re also a pretty common point of failure, so if you’re a little handy with a soldering iron, for any random device that suddenly stops working, there’s a pretty good chance that the culprit is a brown thermal fuse and can be repaired for just a few cents and a few minutes of mumbling curses to yourself while you try to get the damn thing open.

I think the bigger issue with this is probably people with mobility issues, who I imagine are a pretty big part of the target market for a bed like this, if they have trouble getting out of bed to adjust the heat or whatever, a bed like this is probably pretty attractive. But if they get stuck in bed with the heat stuck on high, that could be a pretty big medical problem.

I have a friend who is unapologetically a weirdo (really that describes most of my friends and myself I suppose, but this story is about one of them in particular)

We’re at a bar for his birthday. This place was formerly a real dump of a dive/biker bar but has cleaned itself up a bit. Still kind of a dive, but it’s a nice dive. It’s located practically right on the border of a really shitty town and one that’s generally pretty nice, so it gets an interesting selection of patrons there.

He’s a regular there, he actually lived in a small motel attached to the bar for a bit while his house needed some major repairs.

Again, he’s a bit of a weirdo, it’s his birthday, he’s been drinking, and he wants to listen to some Disney song (I’m pretty sure it was “part of your world” from the little mermaid) so he goes and queues it up on the jukebox

And the song never plays

So he does it again. And again it never plays.

Eventually he figures out that the bartender (what was new and didn’t really recognize him as a regular) was skipping it when it came up.

We ask her to just let it play for him for his birthday, she refused

So he queues it up about 10 times in a row, she can’t skip them all fast enough, it finally starts playing, she’s getting mad at us,some asshole dudebros in the bar are getting annoyed that this song is now playing twice, and we’re all politely yet firmly asked to leave.

So we fuck off to another bar owned by the same person, we’re welcomed in, they let us play the damn song, they mention to to the owner who apparently told the bartender who was giving us issues to chill and there hasn’t been any issue since.

Freeze drying is actually pretty neat

The first step is indeed freezing, basically the same as you would in a regular freezer

But then you take that frozen food, keeping it frozen, and put it in a vacuum chamber.

You might remember from sciences classes in school that different atmospheric temperatures result in water (and other things) freezing or boiling at different temperatures. It’s why water boils faster at a higher altitude (and why some packaged foods and recipes have different instructions if you’re more than X feet/meters above sea level, the air pressure is lower and so water boils at a lower temperature.

You may also have heard the term sublimation, where a solid turns into a gas without melting into a liquid in-between, like dry ice does, which is solid carbon dioxide, and why it’s “dry”

Under a vacuum, ice does the same thing, it turns right into water vapor without melting into water in between.

It actually does this under normal pressure too, but much more slowly. That’s actually a lot of what freezer burn is-the water in your food sublimating away into water vapor. And if you’ve ever left some ice cubes in a freezer for a really long time you might notice they sometimes kind of shrink and get misshapen even though the temperature never got above freezing.

Side note- water actually does kind of a lot of weird stuff when it comes to freezing and melting, in like how given the right conditions, even at normal atmospheric pressure, it can melt or stay liquid well below its freezing temperature, and of course the fact that it expands when frozen.

So the end result is a totally dry, usually pretty shelf-stable product. Because it was frozen, it can retain a lot of it’s flavor that might have been cooked off or evaporated with other drying processes.

Some things also take on an interesting texture from the process because all of space in the food that used to be full of water is now full of air. Freeze dried fruits, for example, tend to be really crisp and crumbly sort of like a chip or a cracker, where dehydrated fruit often can be sort of leathery.

And the vacuum process also has effects on some foods besides just drying them out. Skittles, for example, are sort of sealed by their candy shell, so they expand and pop, sort of like popcorn, due to the water inside of them sublimating and expanding until the shell cracks.

If memory serves me, the marshmallows in lucky charms are freeze-dried, which is why their texture is dry and crunchy instead of gooey and fluffy.

It’s not what you want to hear, but I am pretty sure that as far as added flavorings go, for your bog-standard marshmallow, you’re pretty much just looking at vanilla.

Not that it’s the only thing you’re tasting, there’s sugar of course, and that’s sugar has been cooked to a certain temperature which changes some of its properties, there’s gelatine which has a bit of flavor on its own, there’s air mixed into it which affects the both feel which can change how you perceived the flavor, etc. so they’re kind of a gestalt flavor experience where the whole thing comes together as more than just the taste of whatever flavor you added to it.

Some people will say that it tastes like marsh mallow (the plant)

Traditionally they would have been made with marshmallow root, almost no one has done it that way in a long time and the marshmallows you’re buying at a grocery store almost certainly contain no marshmallow root. I’ve had some things made with the root, there’s not much flavor there, maybe a bit of earthiness, the main point of it was as sort of a thickener, which is the role filled by gelatin in modern marshmallows.

Almost 2 decades ago I paid close to that for a 50" plasma TV as one of my first big purchases after I got my first job.

Of course this isn’t a direct 1:1 comparison, they’re different display technologies, TVs these days have a 4k if not 8k resolution when that one I bought was 720p, there’s been almost 20 years of advancement driving costs down, and 20 years of inflation driving them up, etc.

So I don’t even know where to begin trying to fairly compare the relative costs of those 2 TVs

But back then tv manufacturers also weren’t getting paid to include apps, and put a button on their remotes to launch Amazon prime, or show me ads, or anything of the sort. Their only revenue stream was me buying the tv.

Slight counterpoint

I have 2 TVs in my house. A 70" Vizio as my main TV and a 40-ish inch Samsung fame in the bedroom

Haven’t used the TVs smart features in years, everything I watch is run through a game console or dedicated streaming device (currently a 4k Chromecast)

Their software is kind of dogshit, but I never interact with it except once in a blue moon after a power outage or something when it defaults back to that. I otherwise find it to be a perfectly fine TV for the price I paid for it.

However, as bad as the software is on the Vizio, the Samsung is 10x worse. And unfortunately as bad as it is, that’s what we use because it was hard enough trying to hide the box the TV came with (the way they get the frame TV’s so light and thin is by moving all of the electronics into a separate box, I installed a cabinet in the wall behind the TV to hide it) let alone trying to hide a separate streaming stick/box along with it. I also feel like using one of those may not play as well with the art mode as the built-in software, which is kind of the whole point.

Most bullet casings are brass, which is a fairly soft metal, you could probably scratch some words into it with a pocket knife, sewing needle, pretty much any pointy steel object

Just kind of thinking out loud

All of those people who were brought into ERs from ground zero and the people, vehicles, etc. that brought them there would have been covered in that same dust that’s causing health issues for first responders, that means doctors and nurses probably also received some level of exposure to that dust because I doubt all of those people showered on the way.

I don’t know how their exposure level stacks up against the people who were on-scene, I’m sure it’s an order of magnitude less, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still significant enough to cause some health problems. IBM pretty sure I’ve seen some evidence of people who live with firefighters developing health issues from secondhand exposure like that.

On top of that, there’s also the psychological burden that always gets overlooked. I’m sure that took a hell of a toll on healthcare workers.

And there’s a recognition aspect, because for all of the people who died, there were also many more who were injured, and more than a few of them owe their lives to the doctors and nurses who treated them just as much as to the first responders who got them to the hospital.

Well at the end of it, you can see he actually starts leaning pretty far to the left

Not a Doctor, take this for what it’s worth

But my understanding is that, depending on the type of seizure disorder and a whole host of other factors, there’s a lot of things that can potentially trigger seizures

Flashing lights are a classic example, but also smells, temperature, stress, diet, hormones, drug/alcohol use or withdrawal, fever, lack of sleep, etc.

Also you said that you gradually halved your dose since then, that might also be a factor. Lets say you were on 100mg before and 50 now. When your body was acclimated to 100mg, it was probably a bigger shock to your system to go without than it is now that your body is only used to 50, obviously 0 to 100 is a bigger difference than 0 to 50.

The us has always been anti illegal immigration

The US actually made it almost the first hundred years of its history without many meaningful immigration laws

I’m sure someone will argue otherwise, but one thing commonly cited as the first US immigration law was the steerage act of 1819, which was pretty much just “you can’t overcrowd your ships, you have to have enough food and water for everyone, you have to have a list of your passengers and account for anyone who died on the way”

So not really limiting immigration, more making sure that the ships bringing immigrants here were providing at least basic livable conditions for the trip.

Immigration overland was totally unregulated.

And with some minor alterations here and there, that was pretty much the state of things until the 1870s and 80s with the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Until then there really wasn’t such a thing as “illegal immigration” and borders were pretty much wide-open.

To be thorough, between 1776 and the Page Act, we did have the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies acts to allow the US to deport non-citizen immigrants under certain circumstances, and we took a few steps forwards and backwards at times regarding the naturalization process, but we also had the 14th amendment and “An Act to Encourage Immigration” in there as well.

And of course after that, shit went downhill pretty damn quickly.

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but again for almost half of US history there really wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” immigration for anyone to be against (general anti-immigrant sentiments are another story)

A sound question.

Ok, where do you get those 50 people?

Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?

Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there’s probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.

Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they’re actually going to show up.

We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?

Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable. Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use? Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans? Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)

I work in 911 dispatch, so my job kind of falls into some weird exceptions as an essential public safety thing.

Technically I’m considered salaried somehow, but in practice my pay is hourly.

I work 12 hour shifts, and my paycheck reflects how many hours I worked (and however much PTO I used) during that pay period.

Technically, if shit really hits the fan my supervisor could come running into the lunch room and say they need all hands on deck, no more breaks today, and they’ve eased up on it a bit but for a long time we weren’t even supposed to leave campus at all on our breaks so that we’d be available if we were needed, so I guess that’s at least part of the reason my breaks are paid.

Generally I agree, but I do carve out a narrow exemption for that particular hourly job, it was in a warehouse so pretty physical, I was on my feet all day, carrying around heavy boxes and such, and with the specific job I had I was often the first one there in the morning and basically always the last to leave, so I really wanted that nap in the middle of the day

I didn’t like my old job, but the one thing I really miss was having a full hour for lunch and being located directly next door to a park

I’d go hang my hammock up between a couple trees and set an alarm on my phone to take a nap, it was pretty damn great.