You take that back, it happened 5 years ago at most!

I agree with you on planned obsolescence, but I think there’s more to the story. The quantity of things/conveniences in our lives is greater than at any point in history. We have two younger kids and the quantity of… junk they have is astounding. As parents, we’ve sought out lower quality/throw away/gimmicky toys for things like goodie bags at birthday parties. Sticky hands, silicone squeeze toys, etc. To some extent, the internet is contributing to this since shipping and handling aren’t free and buying a single fidget spinner for $5 doesn’t sound like a good deal when you can get a bag of them for $8.

There are also plenty of instances of people replacing perfectly functional items because the newer version became available. People buy them for status or for a perceived increase in convince/quality. This is true for compute/tech, but has been extending into things like smart home (replacing a functional light-bulb, switch, doorbell, thermostat etc for a IoT device). I get that some people are into these things, but it seems disingenuous to say that the only thing driving this is planned obsolescence.

We have to move toward less carbon intensive means of production, but we also need to figure out how to change the endless stream of “better/faster/newer” that people feel compelled to purchase.

I think the idea was “reduce consumption”. As a society we buy tons of stuff, way more than 50 or 100 years ago.

Oh, sorry - it was the post title.

The song in the meme is Ohio is for lovers by Hawthorne Heights.

And I can’t make it on my own (And I can’t make it on my own) Because my heart is in Ohio So cut my wrists and black my eyes (Cut my wrists and black my eyes) So I can fall asleep tonight, or die

Deep, I know.

Not to say that Dashboard Confessional doesn’t have similar lyrics, lol.

For everyone following along at home: this website is worth a click if you’ve never seen it before!

Rinsing rice does wonders. Without a rice cooker you’ll need to strain it, but it’s still worth it.

1. Measure rice by volume. Let’s say 2 cups worth
2. Put into fine colendar and rinse until the water comes out clear. Mixing with your hand will speed this up. You can also do this in the pot you’re going to cook in and dump water out
3. Put strained rice in your pot
4. Add cold water. The ratio of water to rice matters a lot and varies by species of rice. The ratio will be printed on whatever container your rice came in. For Jasmin rice it’s 2 water to 1 rice, so for our two cups of rice you’ll need 4 cups of water
5. Cover, turn on medium-high heat, being to boil. Don’t go far because it will boil over when it does boil
6. Turn the heat down to low, crack the lid, and set a timer. The amount of time needed will vary based on rice. For Jasmin, 15 minutes is a good check-in time
7. Pop the lid. See water bubbling up? If yes, replace lid and come back in a few minutes. If not, use a wooden spoon to get a peek at the bottom of the pot. See water? If yes, replace lid and come back fairly soon to check again. If not, your rice is done. Turn the heat off, fluff, enjoy.

We made rice for years using this method and it is a very reliable cooking method. Rice doesn’t really leave you a lot of wiggle room though, which is where a rice cooker comes in handy. As an added bonus, some rice cookers come with water lines in them. I measure my dry rice into the cooker, rinse using the cooker, dump most of the water out, and fill to the appropriate level.

Different species of rice have very different textures and somewhat (subtle) different flavorss.

Some rice, like basmati, can be cooked using the pasta method (intentionally use way too much water and strain the excess off after the rice is cooked). I guess all rice could be cooked that way, but you would be giving up some starch.

I work at a big company. We have tons and tons of problems to go solve that are getting little attention in addition to having a lot of redundant and/or “what would you say you do here” type positions. Most of this happens by accident, but it’s nearly impossible to unwind and redeploy those teams. My guess is that the big reasons why is because of leadership not wanting to look bad - a mix of “why did you staff this to begin with?” and “why did you let this go on for so long?” When these groups are eventually found during a reorg they tend to be let go vs redeployed, which makes it even harder for the remaining groups to do anything. The cycle is truly silly.

I agree with your overall sentiment, but I personally find googles fuel savings optimistic and/or flat out misleading. “Hey, you could turn off your usual route here and get there in a similar time… Or you could stay on your usual route and save 2% on gas” seems to be a very frequent occurrence for me.

I also don’t think that needs AI. The pathfinding algorithm just needs to apply different weights to the choices based on things like changes in elevation, number of stop signs, total distance, etc. Navigation systems from yester-year could do this well before the prevalence of AI. That said, AI can be used to develop and/or tune these algorithms instead of having a dedicated team of humans focused on this specific area.

Certification to be a bartender? Where at? I worked in the restaurant business for a decent amount of time when I was younger. The restaurant I worked at had a training regime for bartenders so they would learn how to pour accurately and learn the recipes for a ton of drinks, but it wasn’t mandated by the government. Front of house staff from several establishments in the area would hang out and our restaurants were far more lax.

I subscribed to the communities I care the most about and sort by subscribed and new. That said, across 20 communities it’s probably something like 10-15 new posts per day so after I get through those and interact it’s off to all.

But I do try to engage in the communities I want to see grow.

But but but… I want the little offshoot niche community to grow! I also want content to get seen by more than 5 people.

In reality there just isn’t the user mass to make small/niche communities viable right now, so you see more general communities filling the void.

An easy example is 3D printing. There are two 3D printing communities in the lemmyverse. There’s also a ‘fix my print’ community that’s a ghost town and a few printer specific communities that are also ghost towns. Posts in these more specialized communities tend to get a consistent level of votes, but very few comments.

I’ve intentionally been trying to seed more content, but it’s hard without literally posting the same thing in two spots.

Add in people posting the same thing across the various “same community” on all the various instances for extra silliness.

Agree on communities over here getting created during the exodis, seeing a small surge, and then kind of withering. I’m subbed to 15ish communities that aren’t even all that niche (3D printing, photography, woodworking) and it’s rare that they all get one post per day. There are obviously people lurking because posts will get comments, but I think we’re all a little wary of being the person to post a bunch of content for fear of no one else doing so.

Monoculture anything is bad. For example, many parks will have tons of trees but if you pay attention you’ll likely on see the same handful of species.

We have a chemical free yard that I also plant clover in. The high traffic areas are more clover than grass, which makes me think it holds up better. The clover also turns green earlier in the spring and stays green longer of we’re having a dry spell in the summer. Clover helps keep the grass happy and the pair seem to do a decent job keeping dandelions down, but we have them in our yard too. They don’t bother me at all personally and our kids like them. Thistles are not that common in our yard, but when they pop up I’ll spot treat them since they’re painful to walk on.

Our yard is about 3" of top soil on top of basically solid clay. When we moved in a little over a decade ago I tried taking on the dandelions, but I quickly pivoted to planting clover. Now we have tons of the stuff, fewer dandelions despite no chemicals (not that I really mind them anymore), and our yard smells fantastic in mid to late spring when all the clover is in full bloom. Tons and tons of bees, crickets, etc. We re-did a flower bed and intentionally planted swamp milk weed and red crocosmia in it. They look fantastic together and the bees absolutely love it, not to mention the butterflies.

But yeah. About English ivy. Been fighting that stuff for years…

Not many realize this, but sticking with the non-bee pollination theme you have things like beetles, butterflies, moths, some species of flies, ants, wasps… the list goes on.

Non-inscect options include some speciea of bats and birds.

That’s not even getting into the tons of other useful things insects do.

This is absolutely correct. Concentrating poverty is something that happens in most counties, but is very detrimental to society at large. Wikipedia has a decent article to get a toe in the water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty