How do you like the MPK Mini? How long have you had it and how has it held up to your usage?

Look y’all … “Crazy Cat Person” fails to be sensitive to my condition. I would prefer “Batshit Bonkers,” please and thank you.

My mother thinks US workers still get pensions if they stay at a company long enough. She also thinks that staying at one employer for decades is the key to higher pay, better benefits, and promotions. This is a constant, exhaustingly repetitive conversation with her every time I get recruited and poached by a company.

The original, the legend.

I am a founding board member and the treasurer for my regional timebank. I also have done custom software development and IT work for my county and city food bank. In the past, I was a founding board member and technology specialist for the local food co-op. I also used to own and operate a community bike shop where I performed free repairs for anyone who said they couldn’t afford it.

I prefer volunteer work that directly shores up my communities, promotes food security and social equity, connects local food producers to consumers as directly as possible, and empowers non-monetary exchange of labor and skills. For me, timebanks are the sweet spot for these goals. Everyone’s time is valued equally, and everyone has something to offer their communities on an as-able basis. More than that, a timebank promotes members to see all in their community as peers and neighbors despite any superficial differences.

So, like proper porn, you fully succeeded in capturing the shot from the sexy angle!

I’m all about the gelatiny bits too! When I purchase whole animals, I have the butcher package up the tendons for me. I even buy any extra tendon they have. Braise or pressure cook then, and put them in soups and curries.

For the horror readers, it’s in “Books of Blood, Volume 2.”

Every Paolo Baciagalupi novel and the first two acts of almost every Cory Doctorow novel. “The Water Knife” by Baciagalupi is fictional near-future extrapolation on the excellent non-fiction “Cadillac Desert.” “Walkaway” and the Little Brother books by Doctorow cast a stark light on the nature of power, surveillance, and authoritarianism in Western society. It doesn’t take a lot of social imagination to see that’s exactly where we’re going.

Alec’s call to action was refreshing amid so many other outlets smoothing over current events.

The first section though… I’m all in on renewable energy and have been for 15 years. What blew me away was how much I internalized the “challenges” to solar. Propaganda is a hell of a drug. Even as aware and informed as I like to think I am, I still managed to drink the wrong Kool-Aid. The numbers in favor of solar were surprising, even for this true believer.

Your list of ingredients there quite carefully left out the entire ladle full of cane sugar. By volume it’s about one third of the sauce by way of how every takeaway place I’ve ever seen prepares it.

0_0 Yowza… even if it’s “just” a #1 ladle, that’s a shit-ton of the white stuff. The place where I worked used ~1.5tbsp of white sugar per pound of chicken thigh. I… almost want to try one of these recipes you mentioned just so that I can get dessert and dinner in one container. :D

This might be true for the shittiest of Chinese-American recipes. Just like OP, I don’t know where you’re getting your sesame chicken, but I suggest you stop going there.

Now, regarding the bases being mostly sugar, if you’re talking chemically, your statement is true: starches are just chains of sugar. But if your GTC and SC only differ by crushed red, you’re getting robbed.

Source: worked pantry/prep in the most popular Chinese take-out-only joint in Albany NY while in college. GTC was by far the most popular dish, averaging ~700 orders per night, pre Internet.

Granted, Chinese-American recipes are chaos. In my experience though, the best GTC recipes use whole japones chiles which are toasted in oil to make them more fragrant and a much more attractive presentation. Rice wine vinegar, garlic, ginger, and oyster sauce are the other primary notes. The balance of these notes IMO are what define the signature of the best GTC for any given restaurant, and everyone is just bringing their own spin to that mix.

Some of the comments here and some of the “Best GTC/SC Recipe EVAARRR!” that I see on the interwebz… Holy hell, y’all. I want to come cook for you, because… DAMN. There’s some genuinely so-shitty-it’s-hilarious-yet-tragic C-A recipes out there.

I don’t know where you’re getting General Tso’s chicken, but may I suggest not going there anymore? :D

Government will always be abused and turned against the people so its power should be limited

Fully agreed. This is the nature of power. It is a problem as old as humanity, and there have been loads of attempted solutions to that end. Probably the oldest known is the Insulting the Meat Ritual in hunter-gatherer tribes to prevent hunters from becoming egotistical. Given the rarity of remaining hunter-gatherers, we can guess how that worked out.

Decentralization (why we’re here in the Fediverse, right?), social ownership of the economy, revocation of corporate privileges… all excellent goals to which we can aspire. It’s a bit hackneyed but the truism applies: think globally, act locally. On social ownership of the economy, may I suggest looking into timebanks? Join your local timebank if it exists; start one if it doesn’t. A lot of what timebanks (can) accomplish represents most of these ideals. Disclosure: I’m a founding board member and the treasurer of my local timebank, so I have a lot of bias for timebanks as one potential arrow in the quiver of effecting social change.

Does that answer your question?

Yes, thank you for the elaboration! I agree with your points regarding the police state. May I suggest Behind the Bastards’ 3-part on the history of policing (~2020 Jun 16)?The US has been a police state for more of its history than not. And the series underscores the Socialist tenets in your explanation: unions absolutely work. The police union in the US is ridiculously effective at protecting those “workers.” Too bad that union is protecting workers who stomp on the citizenry.

I will add that direct democracy prima facie sounds great, and I used to also hold this belief. We absolutely have the technology for a full direct democracy. The problems with direct democracy are legion, some of which we are seeing right now in the US with low-information voters. Now scale that up. The enormous volume of legislation and policy research on any single issue would stop most citizens dead in their tracks. Take international trade policy for example. My employer paid for me to study international trade compliance for five years. Ain’t nobody got time for that, and international trade policy hits all of us in the wallet, waistline, daily interactions, and health/wellness measures. We hoi-polloi still need to work, get dinner on the table, and do laundry. Voters should understand all of relevant issues at least at a cursory level, but wish in one hand, shit in the other… Hell, how many voters actually read the voter guides and research their local candidates? How many attend city council meetings?

If you want as direct a democracy as possible, focus your efforts at your local and state level. Small changes in your community have ripple effects. Get your neighbors and local social circle to educate themselves and attend. Connect with your local council and governing boards.

As @zxqwas@lemmy.world pointed out: don’t sweat the labels; choose the policies that appeal to your sensibilities. The labels and affiliations will shake out from there.

You keep repeating this, without going into any detail on what any of this means to you. How do you square economic equality with limited government? The former requires extremely strong and well-considered regulation with well-funded government agencies to stick it to corps and billionaires. Edit to add: also requires a strong, stiff-spined Legislative Branch, divorced from lobbying, divested from capital markets, with strict campaign finance reform. More regulation and agencies.

When someone says “I’m Libertarian,” the implicit translation is:

• I want to do any and all drugs I want (great, go for it; this is probably their only respectable plank, but enacted in isolation the consequences are dire)
• I want to fuck minors (eww)
• I don’t want to pay any taxes, but I still want all the trappings of a mutually beneficial society (“what do you mean my local roads are in disrepair, there’s no garbage pickup, and my neighbor poisoned my well with his unpermitted auto repair business?!”)
• AnCap FTW! (eww, again)

Libertarianism is an extremely naive political platform. Most people who subscribe to its ideals fail to investigate the history of Libertarian ideals in action. Speaking as a former, briefly Libertarian-voting individual, after diving into the planks of the platform, it quickly became clear that Libertarianism is antithetical to a functioning society.

Just keep telling yourself that, buddy. Also: “The guilty conscience needs no accuser.”

Repeatedly using a blatantly false assertion is called the Big Lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie). The derailing/zone flooding aspect, as @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world stated, is a Gish Gallop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop). There might be a term for using these together, but I am not aware of of what it might be.

I still want to visit the alternate timeline where Lucas didn’t cave to fan pressure. And the big reveal in Ep 3 is that Jar Jar is revealed to be the Sith Lord. Could Lucas have pulled off a Shyamalan-level surprise? We’ll never know.

Some people get their validation from sex. They might not even like the sex. In fact they probably don’t enjoy it but they do like that bit of validation.

It took me a few decades to get perspective, but then I encountered people with commitment issues, some of the more chaotic attachment style variants, and various traumas. “Ah, now I understand. You do you and be safe out there, neighbor.”