I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.

I’ve seen a couple reports that the ammo they found had anti-fascist and transgender inscribed on them.

If it’s true, that’s not definitive evidence of course, but it wouldn’t be zero evidence either.

It also feels a little too convenient to me after the Luigi thing. It could just be sort of a copycat, or it could be a right wing accelerationist trying to paint that picture.

And I fucking hate that at this point I don’t know which of those two options is more likely.

You can go way down the rabbit hole here, you can blame Christian European colonial powers, but you can blame the pre-christian Roman empire for opening that door for Christianity to spread into Europe in the first place, you can blame Jews for being the religion that Christianity spun off of, you can blame various other religions and cultures that eventually morphed into Judaism

You can do that all the way back to the first organism that evolved that had a hint of sapience if you really want to

But that would be ridiculous.

That’s all in the past, and while it’s important to understand how we ended up here, we can’t do a damn thing to change any of that.

However here and now, we have groups like family watch international actively fanning the flames and funding this crap.

They’re not the only ones, they’re not all American, but you have your head in the fucking sand if you think America isn’t the biggest piece of this puzzle.

It will of course depend on which place you go to.

I’ve only noticed 2 at this place (but it’s pretty wild how quickly you stop noticing peoples bodies when everyone is naked, so there may have been more,), but one of them is an employee, and another was a performer they had for an event.

The clientele is mostly (but not entirely) middle aged white people, and I’ve seen more than a few trump stickers on peoples vehicles there, but they do have rules about not discussing politics and religion and aren’t afraid to kick people out if they make an ass of themselves, so I haven’t witnessed anyone saying or doing anything transphobic. This place is also fairly popular with swingers and such (behind closed doors, nothing sexual allowed in public) and we’re all a little weird since we like going to nudist resorts, so I think everyone has adopted a pretty “live and let live” attitude towards people with lifestyles that are different than their own.

No shortage of gay, lesbian, bi, pan, etc people though, and there are usually more than a few rainbow flags flying around the campground.

So I can’t really imagine anyone making an issue of it at the place I’ve been going.

There’s also a few nude/clothing-optional resorts out there that cater more specifically to LGBTQ people, so that’s potentially also an option.

Also, weirdly, I feel like in a lot of cases, depending on the state of their transition, it may be harder than you think to tell someone is trans/gender non-conforming there. Can’t exactly base your assumptions about someone’s gender by the clothes they’re wearing after all. Not that people would necessarily assume the right gender, mind you.

It’s not everyone’s thing to be sure, but I started going to a nudist resort largely because of this. I really just wanted a place to go hang out that has a pool that’s not overrun with kids.

It is technically a family resort, not too many people actually show up with kids, but there’s occasionally a few, and while I don’t particularly want to see naked kids (or honestly most of the adults either, nudists are rarely the kinds of people you’d want to see naked,) the parents are obviously keeping an eye on their kids there and keep them under control.

Not that I really support cops confiscating orbeez guns as a general rule

But I work in 911 dispatch in a different area where orbeez guns aren’t illegal, and they’ve been kind of a problem this year.

I think some of our local delinquents have taken to freezing the balls or modifying their guns to shoot faster or something, because we have had a few injuries and broken windows and such linked to orbeez guns this year.

Even without that, they’re a pretty significant nuisance that have started a lot of fights because no one likes being pelted with orbeez.

And of course there’s the problem that exists with all toy guns where if you paint them black or are running around with them in the dark it can be hard to tell them apart from a real gun which is asking for trouble.

And the countless calls I’ve gotten from neighborhood karens who “don’t think it’s safe” or “that they shouldn’t be doing that here” is getting kind of old.

And not for nothing, orbeez can be really slow to break down in the environment and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re contributing to our microplastics problem.

If there is a way to twist the interpretation of a law to say that orbeez guns are illegal, I’m not at all surprised to hear about cops doing just that. Not that I generally support that, but if you caught me on a bad day after I took a bunch of calls about kids with them, I might be tempted to sign a petition to get them banned.

As someone who has regularly carried a variety of knives and multi tools almost every day of my life, I also can’t say I’m a fan of their knife laws.

That said, as-written, I don’t find them to be quite as bad as a lot of people make them out to be (how the police choose to interpret and enforce those laws is sort of a different matter)

It’s not the sort of knife I normally choose to carry, but all of the reasons I normally carry and use a knife for can be done perfectly safely and effectively with something like a regular Swiss army knife with a 2.5inch non-locking blade which should generally be ok to carry for no particular reason.

It should be noted that I do not carry a knife for any self-defense purposes. I feel very little need to defend myself, and even if I did a knife would be just about my last choice after pretty much any other object in arm’s reach. Even though where I am, I could pretty much walk around town carrying a halberd for self defense if I really wanted to and it would be legal, I actually do tend to choose my EDC knives to be pretty inoffensive-looking free of any unnecessary point/stabby bits and if possible.

And cases that really require more knife than that aren’t exactly part of my usual everyday carry scenario, and the appropriate knives for those occasions should be covered under the lawful justification and reasonable use exemptions (again, how the police actually apply those laws can leave something to be desired, but that’s often a problem here too)

Again, not a fan of their knife laws, but in the grand scheme, I’m not nearly as outraged by them as a lot of people are.

It could just be the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I don’t think it’s really a recent thing, I think it’s just hitting a point where the masses are really starting to take notice of it.

I’m pretty sure I remember seeing memes about CCTV cameras and such in the UK about 20 years ago now, and I don’t think it’s an accident that things like 1984 and V for Vendetta were written by British authors and set there.

As an outsider, it’s certainly looked to me like the UK has been kind of a nanny state for a long time, and it’s not a long walk from there to the kind of bullshit we’re seeing more of now.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.

I’m way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it’s very likely that I’m just out of the loop

But I hadn’t heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it

Then about a week later this happened

So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.

I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren’t telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.

There’s a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there’s a much bigger part that doesn’t want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those “I’ve become my dad” moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who’s ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I’m giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

We’re at or reaching a tipping point where I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we’re talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn’t already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.

And we’re running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren’t really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I’m not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don’t really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.

There’s a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.

But overall, I don’t think there’s as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.

My wife and I work different schedules. on the rare day off that were both home, she’s often out of the house when I wake up. She’s not great at replying to texts. I never know when she’s going to be home, and usually have no clue what she’s out doing or where.

But I know who she’s doing while she’s gone- no one. Because I trust my wife. I know who she is as a person, I know what our relationship is like.

I have no particular desire to know her location at all times. I’m sure if I asked, she’d share it with me, and I’d do the same for her. I might occasionally do that when I’m off hiking or something in case there’s an emergency, but half the time I wouldn’t have a signal anyway.

We are two humans with our own lives. Those lives are very intertwined, but we’re both allowed to go off and have our own adventures, occasionally some secrets, and we don’t need to know where each other is 24/7

1. Read the article, that’s why it’s there.

2. The post title even says it’s a French Jewish group. Not sure what kind of world map you’re used to but France people don’t generally come from Israel, nor Israeli people from France.

3. Fuck Israel, but shitty people come from all over the world, and 50 kids with 1 chaperone is a recipe for a bad time no matter what country you’re from.

I feel like a lot of people are going to take that as some sort of anti-space program sentiment, which may or may not be your point.

But for those people, I think it’s worth considering that we don’t know what all of those environmental challenges are until we go to space and find out.

One way or another, earth will become uninhabitable, whether by our own hand thanks to climate change nuclear war, etc. or by some natural phenomenon that we are powerless to prevent- gamma ray burst, asteroid impact, the sun dying out

In all likelihood, we won’t have to worry about those natural disasters for hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years, but we don’t actually know that for sure. For all we know, we could just be days away from destruction by some ridiculously powerful space-bullshit that we don’t even know to be worried about yet.

We aren’t always going about space exploration in the right ways or for the right reasons, but every tiny step we take does inch us closer to a better understanding of what’s all out there in the universe, what dangers it presents to us, and how we can avoid or counteract those dangers.

If we hadn’t been sending astronauts into space for the better part of the last century, we wouldn’t know that it might cause these kinds of vision problems, and so we wouldn’t know to work on a solution for that to have it ready for when it’s really needed. Sure would suck to have all of our other ducks in a row to set up a sustaining Mars colony or whatever, only to find out when we got there that 70% of our colonists can’t see right due to the trip there. Now we know, and we can work on a solution, whether it’s bioengineering, or special contact lenses, or whatever may be needed.

As a native speaker, I also didn’t really get the headline at first

I’d normally interpret “taking the knife to something” as roughly the same as “making cuts”

But graphene doesn’t make the fairphones and doesn’t support them, so nowhere to really make cuts

I feel like maybe they got the message that people are getting tired of headlines over using terms like “slammed” and wanted to do something different but chose a pretty terrible alternative.

At least we all know what “slammed” means now.

This is secondhand, half-remembered information I picked up from some stranger on Reddit probably a decade ago, so take it for what it’s worth

But my understanding is that in some parts of Asia, being a monk is just sort of a thing that some young people do for a short time, and a lot of them aren’t really what we’d think of as “clergy.” Not sure if that’s the case in Thailand or not.

It’s almost more like taking a gap year to go backpacking through Europe or whatever the kids are into these days, or taking a summer job that just happens to be in a Buddhist temple and the uniform is a robe and shaved head instead of a polo shirt and khakis.

Now these seem to be involving “senior monks” so probably not just teens and 20-somethings trying to find themselves.

But I kind of have to wonder how many of those senior monks are more like that friend you had in high school who took a summer job working at a surf shop or something and just never went back to finish college and are still working there a decade or two later than they are someone who truly felt a calling towards religious service.

Sounds like you did pretty much the same bit of googling I did, because I also ended up there and ctrl-f’d “Taliban” and only found the one result

For anyone who doesn’t go down the rabbit hole themselves, that result is “Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP)” or the “Pakistani Taliban”

Which is a group that mostly seems to be active in Pakistan (duh) and in Afghanistan near the border. TTP pledges allegiance to the Afghan Taliban, but the Afghan Taliban, at least publicly rejects that allegiance (though you can certainly make some arguments that they’re probably in cahoots, just keeping things off-the-books)

Interestingly enough, the US doesn’t seem to regard the Taliban (at least not the main branch that’s currently running Afghanistan) as a terrorist organization.

When you said that I thought they might, I was actually pretty sure it was the case, but on looking into it that doesn’t seem like they do, at least not officially.

Some other countries do, and there are a couple other Taliban splinter groups and such that do make the cut.

And of course, the entire history of Afghanistan since the Cold war can probably be of best summed up as “an absolute fucking mess” full of different factions, shifting allegiances, and all of that geopolitical nonsense, but you can make a pretty compelling argument that the US sort of put the Taliban in charge there in the first place. The us backed the Mujahideen against Russia back in the day, and while they’re not exactly the same organization, there was a whole lot of overlap between former members of the Mujahideen and the people who formed the Taliban. So from one angle slapping the terrorist label on them would be kind of like admitting “we backed the terrorists”

You know, I’ve read your comment a couple times, and I can’t quite wrap my head around what you’re trying to say, I can kind of parse it in a few different ways, and none of them quite seem like they’re really a direct response to what I said either agreeing with me or disagreeing.

It’s certainly possible that I’ve got a case of the dumb tonight, but would you mind rephrasing and expanding on your thoughts a little bit?