I think this is the right take. At the end of the day you just can’t change some people’s minds.

Arguably, you can’t change anyone’s minds, they have to change them themselves. You can try to lay the groundwork for them to make that change, but we all know what they say about leading a horse to water.

Like OP’s example of the uncle with lung cancer. The dude already has lung cancer, and is continuing to smoke, what more could you really say or do to convince him to stop? They’re already facing probably one of the biggest possible consequences of their actions and they’re still not stopping.

Sure, you could focus all of your energy into trying to browbeat them into stopping, but do you really think that’s going to get anywhere? Your time and energy are probably better spent convincing someone else to quit or not to start instead.

In the US at least it’s sort of a legal grey area

We of course have our usual patchwork of different local and state laws, and I believe it is outright banned in some parts of the country

But overall, federally, I believe it’s more of an issue that there’s so little demand for it that no slaughterhouse for horses has bothered to open and go through the necessary USDA inspections and such to process horses for human consumption.

I believe, if you really wanted to, you could go slaughter a horse yourself and feed it to your friends and family and be totally in the clear, but if you try to sell that horse meat anywhere you’d have the USDA beating down your door (not a lawyer, don’t go feeding your friends horse based on my understanding of the issue)

As for the cultural reasons that Americans don’t want to eat horses and why it is outright banned in some parts of the country, I can’t really comment on that. I’d eat a horse and wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.

In a weird way this is almost refreshing

It kind of shows that your mom actually put a little thought into the meaning of the word “woke” instead of just using it to mean “liberal stuff I don’t like”

It’s supposed to mean that you’re aware of the various problems in the world, that you’re “awake” and paying attention as opposed to “asleep” and blissfully unaware while it all goes down around you

Of course she’s dead-wrong about what’s going on, the world she thinks exists around her in just a weird fever dream and she is absolutely not woke

But even that tiny bit of being able to think about the words you’re saying and not just spewing some 1984 duckspeak is so rare among conservatives that it almost feels like it should be celebrated in some small way.

And as luck would have it, I actually was just talking to another friend about this and he turned up a gnome extension that looks like it does exactly what I need, so it may become a Linux machine yet.

I do still want to do some upgrades and I kind of got to like the server idea though so perhaps I’ll be building a new Linux PC and also recycling the old parts into a server

Like a lot of people I have one or two things keeping me tied to windows for now

The main one for me is a little goofy, but my computer is hooked up to my TV and it’s synced up to my Philips hue lights.

My other consoles and such work fine through the hue sync box but for some reason the PC does not, so I have to rely on the hue desktop app to get the PC synced to the lights

And of course they don’t support Linux, and from what I’ve seen online WINE and the other usual workarounds don’t do the trick either

There’s a couple of people out there who have cobbled together alternatives, but none of them are quite where I want them to be yet.

I’ve been with my wife for around 10 years now. When we started dating she had a PC that wasn’t exactly top of the line, and it was already a couple years old, but was still pretty beefy for its time. She did a couple upgrades over the years, more RAM, SSD, etc. but most of the components were the same ones she originally bought probably around 2013-ish

About a year ago she decided it was time for a major upgrade and built a whole new computer.

I took all of her old components and stuck them in a new case. I of course had to buy a hard drive, power supply, some fans, etc. and it wasn’t maxing out the graphics on the latest AAA games like her new rig can, but it still managed to run pretty much everything I threw at it.

After a couple months I did scrounge up a newer graphics card from a friend doing some upgrades of his own, which was a nice upgrade, but not totally necessary.

I am now running into an issue with some newer games not liking the old processor even though it technically has the required specs (and it’s not windows 11 compatible) so I’m likely going to be doing some major overhauls of my own soon, and I think I’ll probably recycle these components into a home server or something, so I wouldn’t really be surprised if this PC of theseus remains in service in some capacity for a full 20+ years.

Michelin Stars started out as a travel guide brochure for the best restaurants in France as a sort of advertisement for Michelin branded tyres

It was really more of a way to get people to drive more and so have to buy more tires (hopefully Michelin)

The original guide had things like maps, tire shops, gas stations, and tire repair instructions. Back then, cars were still new to a lot of people, and Michelin figured that a lot of people probably wouldn’t know where they could go get gas or new tires or whatever, but if they had that information people might be inclined to drive more. If you didn’t know where you could get gas along your trip you may not want to take that drive after all.

Then after a while they started including things like restaurants to give people more of a reason to go driving around.

How did the Michelin stars become so sought after by top restaurants and chefs?

It’s advertising. If you make it into the guide, more people are going to hear about and want to come to your restaurant. And since the guide has such a good reputation, it’s seen as a badge of honor that this restaurant/chef is good enough to be recognized with a star.

Was the head of the Michelin tyre company also a renowned food connoisseur or something?

No, they were renowned tire manufacturers. But they were French and that probably didn’t hurt the branding since French food has such a good reputation. I’m sure subconsciously on some level a lot of people are going to give a bit more weight to a French company rating restaurants than, for example, an American one.

What about other tyre companiee, why didn’t they do something similar?

Why bother when Michelin was already doing it? You don’t need to buy Michelin tires to eat at a Michelin-Stared restaurant. Regardless of where the guide came from it got people driving around more and needing new tires.

There’s other travel guides out there, some focus more on other things besides restaurants, some focus on areas not covered by Michelin, some overlap or compete with Michelin or position themselves as sort of an anti-Michelin because they disagree with the criteria Michelin rates restaurants on.

And I’m sure some of them are or have been in the past published or sponsored by tire companies. But Michelin managed to get into the game early enough and did it well enough that they just became sort of the restaurant guide.

And other tire companies have taken other advertising routes that are maybe a little less obvious. Let’s consider the Goodyear blimp flying over sporting events. I’m sure there’s a small element of “you should drive to sporting events to see our blimp ~and also wear down your tires a bit in the process~” at play there.

Are Michelin Stars still given by the tyre company, or has it been spun off into its own thing?

Yes it’s still the Michelin tire company. I don’t have any real insight into their corporate affairs, so I don’t know how much crosstalk there is between the tire-manufacturing and the guide-writing parts of their business these days, but it is still the same company.

1. A “truckers” (CB) radio is exactly what I was suggesting FRS radios as an alternative to.

2. I suggested them because they are much simpler to use. With a mobile base station you need to figure out where to mount it in your car, where to mount an antenna, tune that antenna, how to hard-wire it into your car’s power (or splice an adapter onto it to power it from the cigarette lighter), whereas with a walkie talkie you just need to turn it on, put it on the right channel and push a button.

(Handheld CBs do exist. I’ve very rarely seen them for sale in a brick and mortar store)

3. It’s probably gonna depend on where in the country you are, but CB radio equipment is in fact not commonly available at gas stations and truck stops around me. It’s something I actually actively look for and take notice of because I’m a bit of a radio geek. In fact, if I needed to tell someone where to get a CB locally, their best bet for that would probably also be the-store-whose-name-you-seem-too-think-that-no-one-should-say-like-its-fucking-voldemort-or-something, and even that would be hit or miss, some TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOSes don’t actually seem to carry them, but every TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOS I’ve ever been in absolutely has at least one set of FRS radios for sale.

Because they’re fucking everywhere, something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of one.

It’s basically shorthand for “this is a common and readily available thing that you can acquire anywhere in the country for cheap even if megacorps have driven all of the local specialty retailers out of business in your areas”

As opposed to something like a HF ham radio which is a specialty item that no big retailers like walmart, to the best of my knowledge, carry, and so you’re probably not going to be able to find it locally.

I keep a CB radio in my car, and have a few friends with them

It is actually really handy when you’re road tripping together in different cars to be able to just grab the mic and say something to the other vehicle when you need to stop for a bathroom break or you’re having an issue with your car or want to give them a heads-up about whatever.

If you’re fairly close together a set of cheap FRS walkie-talkies from Walmart does the job just as well. Probably worth stepping up to CB if you expect to lose sight of the other vehicle though, range is usually a bit better.

It’s especially handy if, like me, you go camping and such in rural areas with unreliable cell coverage.

You do occasionally also get helpful heads-ups from truckers if you’re listening to channel 19 about road conditions, police activity, traffic, etc. but mostly it’s just idiots babbling about conspiracy theories and immature bullshit.

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.