One convenience of gendered nouns is that you can use shortened pronouns and the listener immediately knows what you are talking about. “Sit on him!” means sit on the chair and not the sofa, for example, because the sofa is neuter. So it’s not a matter of chair being more “masculine” so much as having three different forms of “it” pronoun. Still not enough convenience to make it worth it to learn from scratch, IMO.

My nemesis are the words “chose/choose lose/loose”. I always have to go through a quick tonguetwister in my head whenever I have to write one down to make sure I pick the correct one.

The line is complicated and blurry and changes for each person even. The only semi-consistent rule I can find, is that as soon as a company is involved and it becomes a “product”, it seems to get bad.

That was my conclusion as well. I am not against science, I love science and industrial manufacturing, I was even willing to drink soylents! But even if you wave away the constantly changing food science health recommendations as normal churn of ever-improving scientific understanding, the interests of industrial food manufacturers are never aligned with my own. “We replaced butter with palm oil in our recipe because it is cheaper!” - well ok, good for you - “…AND it is also healthier for you! ;)” - I don’t believe it! I’ll check in back in another 50 years to see all the metastudies of the metastudies of palm oil consumption studies, but in the meantime the only rule of thumb that has survived every dietary recommendation change is to stick to whole foods.

You misunderstand the idea of cost per calorie. The expectation is that you start with something nutritionally-complete, like these soylents, the frozen rice+vegs+chicken dinners, or even the frozen apple pies (how ever nonconventional these may be), or if that is not possible then a combination of several foods in a ratio that makes them nutritionally complete, and then scale up to hit that 1500cals/day target. A single item or known ratio of items so I don’t have to think about this ever again. If I didn’t care about nutrition I’d just be chugging high fructose corn syrup (<$1/day) which you never saw me say. My daily meal ends up being rice and beans drenched in olive oil with some raw vegetables-of-the-day on the side, since I can’t afford the soylents.

I’d love these! I’m the target audience but they cost even more per calorie than microwaveable frozen meals do.

I hate the amount of time it takes to cook and eat things every day. 😆 The microwavable frozen foods section would have been my first choice, there is usually enough selection to find something suitable, but the dollars-per-calorie cost is way too high, on order of $20-$30 per day. This pie is $15 and has enough calories for 2 days and takes zero work. Sugar and fat are already two of the three main ingredients I need. Also protein, but the wheat in the crust has some. Apples are a fruit, they have vitamins and shit. Looks good to me!

The authors do not note any conflicts of interest

The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It’s like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the environment than electric cars written by an American.

They themselves admit in the opening abstract that “Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil.” I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.

Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It’s the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.

Thankfully I always check ingredients before purchase. Haven’t had my fill of apple pie in months. 😭

this company is owned by the dickhead maga mayor in my state

The plot thickens!

You overlooked the hundred trillion dollar coin inside the […].

No, money at rest does not create inflation. It is the consumption of goods and services through use of money that does. Trump could mint a one hundred trillion dollar coin and put it on display in the White House, and this would have no effect on prices, even though he is now richer than all Americans put together… as long as the coin stays on display. But the moment he tries to deposit the coin at a bank and start spending its value to pay for goods and services, all prices will skyrocket, because now there are more dollars competing to buy the same amount of food, the same number of houses, the same number of services, that existed/was being produced before, the same that you are trying to buy.

Remember those news articles last year how the wealthiest 10% of Americans drive 50% of consumer spending? That’s how the rich influence prices. Not hoarding - consumption. The poorest 90% (those earning less than $250k/year, namely you) only have access to 50% of food and consumer goods and such. One person from top 10% consumes 9x more than one person from bottom 90%. If wealth inequality did not exist and the 10% consumed as much per person as the 90%, then you would literally be able to buy 1.8x as much stuff as you can now, with no other changes in productivity required.

Unpopular opinion: yes, you do. 2nd-hand markets contribute to the value of the original item even for things like clothing. When you buy a 2-year old car with intention to sell at 4 years, the price you are willing to pay includes the resale value you expect to get later. Which in turn influences the price of the new car that the original buyer is willing to pay. Another commenter mentioned cell phones having a chain of resales too.

But even for cheaper items that are donated instead of resold, the 2nd-hand use of the item has a non-zero effect on the original production and sale of it, because the act of donation itself is a notable event. You give away an item for free instead of throwing it in the trash because you think the item still has some value and you want someone else to enjoy that value. This works whether you give it directly for free to a person, or donate to a charity shop that then resells it. A charity donation is also recorded as tax-deductible.

The act of donation frees you from guilt/responsibility for throwing the item away without using up its full value. You are then free to buy more of the same item new. Faster than you would have otherwise, had the charity shop not existed. You also value it more, knowing that someone else can use it after you.

So here is a practical scenario for how this effect works. Imagine what would happen if instead of buying problematic child-labor fast fashion clothing from a 2nd-hand charity shop, you refuse! You keep wearing the clothing you have, or buy some non-problematic boring 2nd-hand clothing instead. And I do too. And every other charity store shopper stops buying them as well. Then the charity shop will refuse to take donations of those fast-fashion clothing, right? Just as they would refuse if you brought them a box of VHS tapes today. When the people would bring boxes of their mildly-used fast-fashion clothing for donation, they would be turned away - “nobody wants to buy those!”

Those people might not believe in their responsibility to eliminate child labor, but they still thought of themselves as good people, because they wanted to donate the remaining value for free, but now they can’t. They have to either keep wearing those clothes themselves, or throw them in the trash without feeling good about it. They end up buying fast-fashion clothes less frequently, or buying other clothes instead. Either way, the value of new fast-fashion clothes goes down and less of them are produced, and fewer children are employed to make them. All because of 2nd-hand.

IMO, the only way to consume the remaining value of a 2nd-hand item without having an influence on its original production, is to literally pull it out of the trash. And you have to do it in a way that the original owner isn’t aware of it. Because if they knew, they might feel good about it. Like a baker who makes extra bread knowing that most of it will be unsold and go in the trash at the end of the day, because they have seen people rummaging in the trash bin for food at night (not saying that’s bad, just pointing out the chain of influence).

In practice, PGP signatures/keys usually work using the “trust on first use” model. The web-of-trust/physical verification of ID documents is a fun idea, but I’ve never met anyone who has used that method in the wild.

The difference between publishing hashes and signatures/keys vs. publishing hashes-only, is that you only need to trust the published keys the first time. They don’t change from year to year. If one year someone hacks ubuntu.com and changes the image files and hashes AND uploads fake keys with signatures, you will notice that the signatures fail to match your saved keys and suspect something fishy.

This will not save you if this is your first time visiting ubuntu.com that happens to be the same day that it has been hacked, but it will protect everyone who has ever visited before and saved the keys. But if the releases were published with hashes-only, every year would be a new hash and a hack would easier slip through.

You can also try to verify the Ubuntu key out-of-band in places other than ubuntu.com, such as in blog posts, old forum/twitter/reddit posts, etc. In principle, hashes could be published on 3rd-party blog posts too, but again they change every year so not as interesting and you won’t find them in as many random places as the pubkeys.

First thought was ISP intermittent packet loss, but

Ping is unaffected
no packet loss or jitter
Speedtests of any kind always return when problem is occurring / when problem is not occurring

Suggests otherwise. My second thought was DNS crashing, but

DNS seems irrelevant

You already got it covered.

Some websites like Facebook and Google work
VOIP does not seem to be affected

Really weird situation! Try using wireshark to listen on the interface and observe what’s happening. Are packets going out but none returning? Are they returning with errors? Retransmissions? Are some destinations fine but others get no reply?

Could you geographically locate the IPs that work vs. the IPs that don’t? My next suspicion is that there is some upstream backbone link that cuts out, so stuff with local CDNs like facebook continue to work, but a lemmy server on another continent is unreachable. Try traceroute.

Literally one block away:

I agree that OP is in the best position to report the crime to the police - they are closest to the police station, they have video evidence, they literally know who the thief is - but it should not be their responsibility! OP has done nothing wrong and there are no measures they could have taken to prevent this crime (other than not shopping online at all). If OP gets a police report, OP is taking up the task of being the victim, and then BestBuy has no legal obligation to refund them at all, other than out of the kindness of their heart. Rather, BestBuy is the victim in this crime, same as if the item was stolen off the shelf at their warehouse and scanner records forged. It is their responsibility to file a police report, if they want the numbers in their system to add up. Only then could they ask OP to kindly provide the video evidence to help them out, and they’d be lucky if OP would give it to them, having no obligation to do so.

Yes! It’s an olympics game of mental gymnastics where everyone - BestBuy, DoorDash, OP, the police - try to offload responsibility onto someone else. However, a crime WAS committed. Someone is the victim. The victim is the one who was deprived of property/money and will not have access to it until/unless the thief is caught and property recovered. BestBuy thinks OP is the victim, since the item was stolen off (not)their porch. OP thinks BestBuy should be the victim, since OP had no involvement in organizing the delivery. DoorDash could also take up responsibility of being the victim, since it was their (not)employee that stole from them.

If OP goes to the police now, they would be losing the mental gymnastics by accepting the status of the victim. BestBuy would never refund them in this case. It is in OP’s best interest to pursue the chargeback first. If OP succeeds in the refund or the chargeback, then BestBuy will have no package and no money, so BestBuy would be the victim. Then it will be BestBuy’s responsibility to report the crime.

The “libertarian paradise” idea is that as far as Best Buy is concerned, the item was delivered. If the DoorDash delivery driver happened to turn right around and steal the package, that’s a separate crime and a matter for the police to deal with, same as if anyone else had stolen it. And it’s OP’s fault for not picking the box up sooner, during the 3 seconds it was sitting on the porch. The porch that wasn’t even theirs. So anyway, the libertarian solution is for OP to contact police to track down the thief and either recover the stolen item or sue the thief for monetary compensation. Best Buy is innocent and no refund is coming. DoorDash is innocent too because they contracted with an independent contractor to deliver the item, and what the contractor does after the item has been delivered is not their responsibility.

@xavier666@lemm.ee If you sit at a magnesium fire, it burns at 3300K, which is hot enough to produce sizeable ultraviolet rays. So you can get your sunburn from that, damaging the DNA in whatever of your remaining cells have not been melted away by heat.

sacrifice the luxury of convenience and being able to get doordash whenever you want

Not necessary. I live in Manhattan and the street canyons are full of doordasher ebikes, and grocery store isles are jammed with instacarter trailer carts which they then hitch up to more ebikes.

otherwise empty bike lane

Over here in New York, everyone got an e-bike and now we get bike jams in the bike lane during commute hour. Dunno how I should feel about it. Aladeen? :(: Still faster than a car for sure.