Christopher Masto

It has gotten a bit weirder in the age of “everything is a subscription”. For example, I was just looking at one for a development browser I use. I’m paying $12/month. They have a deal now where it’s $84/year for new customers, for the lifetime of their subscription. Not a one time discount.

I didn’t go off complaining, but I definitely feel a little frustrated that my reward for being an existing customer is to get to keep paying full price.

How Flint is doing is irrelevant to what I said, the same as me picking on a polluted city in Canada doesn’t change the fact that Canada generally has safe drinking water.

The comment I responded to made it sound like US tap water is mostly not safe to drink. That’s demonstrably untrue. I’m not defending the horrors of industrial capitalism or condoning environmental destruction, I’m merely pointing out that the US does in fact have standards, regulation, and enforcement for drinking water quality. This does not mean it’s perfect, but it does mean that in general you can drink the water out of the tap, like I do every day.

I hate that we live in a world where only extreme viewpoints are allowed. Either the USA is the greatest country in the world or it’s a complete shithole, anything else is just shouted down. I still make the stupid mistake of caring about what’s real rather than what makes a good soundbite on social media.

“Drinking water quality in the United States is generally safe. In 2016, over 90 percent of the nation’s community water systems were in compliance with all published U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) standards. Over 286 million Americans get their tap water from a community water system. Eight percent of the community water systems—large municipal water systems—provide water to 82 percent of the US population.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_United_States

I don’t know where you got that idea, but public tap water is federally regulated in the US (at least for now). Bottled water is popular because of marketing, not because tap water is unsafe.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past few years where people refuse to read anything longer than a handful of words. In fact, it’s often lobbied as an insult toward the writer: “not gonna read that, bro” has a similar connotation as “what have you got there, nerd, a math book?” combined with “I guess I triggered you so bad you had to provide supporting detail for your ideas, ha ha!”

I think there’s a self reinforcing loop where we’ve all moved to mobile devices where it’s tedious and annoying to type anything, so we’ve gotten more used to shorter and shorter messages, making anything longer look old fashioned and out of touch. People who grew up with phones now feel like it’s tedious and annoying to even read a full paragraph (or watch a non-short video), let alone expend the extra energy required to decode handwriting and figure out a scribbled word from context. It’s easier just to say “not gonna read ur wall”, and reinforce that it’s now shameful to write a comment as long as this one.

Just saw another one this morning.

You might assume that, but in fact the ADA is one of the places where the US was ahead of the game in protecting people’s rights. It wasn’t always like it is now.

Virtually every app collects crash reports and anonymized analytics. Better for them to tell you about it than not.

They’re more than great coats.

I’ll give you that they didn’t get the numbers perfectly correct with the 95-99% thing, but I don’t think the accurate numbers change the point they were making – if anything, it’s a stronger comparison. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutrition), honey is 82% sugar and 17% water. HFCS is 24% water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Composition_and_varieties), which makes it 76% sugar.

When I say facts, what I’m referring to is that honey is basically straight high-fructose sugar, in the same way that high-fructose corn syrup is. Wikipedia: “The average ratio was 56% fructose to 44% glucose”. The HFCS that people freak out about in most food is 42% or 55% fructose. So these are very comparable sources of carbohydrates, which is one of the reasons it’s so easy to fake honey with corn syrup.

I’m not making a value judgement here, and I didn’t see one in the GP post that was heavily downvoted. Just pointing out that honey has a very similar composition as HFCS, do with it as you will.

As a bonus, my favorite use for honey is to make honey mustard dipping sauce for chicken tendies. Here’s my not-so-secret recipe: Gulden’s spicy brown mustard, honey, and mayonnaise. (adjust the ratio to your taste) And if you haven’t tried Mike’s Hot Honey, I say seek some out. You can use it in the honey mustard sauce, but I like to make myself a little yogurt, granola, and fruit parfait for breakfast and drizzle hot honey on it.

People are downvoting a simple, literal fact.

Not the question you asked, I know, but I have been buying my tea from uptontea.com since before they had a web site and you had to call in from a printed catalog. Loose leaf tea is economical and gives you a wide variety of choices. I’m drinking my go-to Kensington Breakfast Blend right now.

You have disabled Safe Browsing. That prevents files from being checked for malware, so all downloads are blocked by default (nothing to do with Firefox). As you noted, you can override the warning to download anyway, but it is an extra step to try to reduce the chance of someone accidentally running a malicious program.

This post is basically what the Lemmy community has become, in a nutshell. I thought there would be a mass exodus from Reddit but it seems like the only people who came here and stayed are far out on the fringe. Between this kind of stuff and “I refuse to own a car because the infotainment system is not open source!”, I find myself more and more gravitating back to Reddit for some normality… which is a hell of a thing to say.