Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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She said it has 35% cane sugar, which pretty much means 35% of hydrocarbons just from that (if the sugar is refined, down to 32% if it's totally unrefined) plus about 8% of the powered milk is also hydrocarbons, so let's say it's 40g hydrocarbons per 100g of product which is very bad for diabetics.

And this is without going into the total caloric level, which must high, not only from all that sugar but also because cocoa butter is pretty caloric.

There's 100%-cocoa chocolate (or even the 90% one) and that stuff is very sour, so totally different.

This is fine for kids, because it avoids artificial ingredients, but it's not for diabetics.

The lady doing the presentation said that it has 35% of cane sugar.

Also behind her you see "hecho con azúcar de caña" which means "made with cane sugar".

Cane sugar is generally at least a bit refined merely to purify it (so unlike High-Frutose Corn Syrup it's not made by chemically transforming something else).

That said, it's unclear if they use unrefined sugar cane, though that stuff is a complete total pita to work with hence I doubt it's not in the least bit refined.

Mind you I looked around and the info on this is all over the place: like for example saying "no added sugars" but then a bit further it turns out it has "cane sugar", which does mean that sugars were added (as the cocoa plant doesn't produce cane sugar, that would be the sugarcane plant).

Mind you, by all indications this beats almost all North American chocolates, but that hardly a tall barrier to overcome. It's pretty common to find similar stuff in European supermarkets.

I'm Portuguese.

Portugal fell so far down that in the XX Century until 1974 it was under a Fascist dictatorship and was so poor it got food help from other nations in Europe (but the dictator sure liked to celebrate the "Time of the Discoveries").

In our divergence of opinion, at least specifically when it comes to the timing of the fall of the US from its peak, time will tell.

PS: I don't think the destruction due to internal unrest is merely from economic disparities - that's just one of the symptoms. I think it's mainly social, cultural and structural factors that create downstream problems like said economic disparities and keep on doing it because the problem is structural, not merely economical, and those things sustain themselves (for example, corrupt politicians aren't going to put in place structures to fight corruption, quite the contrary). The fall is not merely from economic disparities, it's because the whole society has grown "fat and lazy" - the spirit of people and, maybe more importantly, of the power elites who control how the country operates, is that they are "winners", but all of that is anchored on the successes of their ancestors (in the US case, one example of that is American Exceptionalism), and that kind of posture doesn't self correct and the nation itself is too big and powerful for it to be corrected by external actors. The whole thing is a bigger version of the very commonly story told all over the World in various variants about how Wealth goes in cycles of 3 generations: the first builds it, the second consolidates it and the third blows it away - having been brought up in wealth the third generation doesn't have the same spirit as the people who built the wealth in the first place.

Anyways, this is just pseudo-Philosophical thinking and, as I said, time will tell.

On that last point, Rome, Greece, China, Egypt, Spain & Portugal (from the Discoveries time), several Middle Eastern nations several times (from the Babylonians to the Persians and even the Arabs - back in the 12th Century the most advanced people in the World were Arabs, then known as Moors) and so on (if I remember it correctly the Mayan civilization fell before the Spanish Conquistadores got there, which would make it yet another one that fell to internal problems rather than external factors).

It's a pretty common dynamic.

There is not a single competent politician with a history of working for the good of the many in an electable position in the US at the moment.

The closest was Sanders and you saw what the Democrat Establishment did to make sure he was stopped.

Also, I'm sorry but I was in investment banking at the time of the 2008 and after seeing how he unconditionally saved the worst abusers in that industry, I don't think Obama counts as a good guy, so Bush to Obama wasn't really a pendular move between extremes: by the time of Obama the choice for anybody other than the well-off and the rich had already been reduced to Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil. Obama was a masterful speechmaker, but when it come to actual policies he was just another neoliberal working for the 1% and once in a while making a show of throwing some crumbs to the riff-raff.

IMHO in terms of working for the many, America hasn't had anybody anywhere close to Eisenhower as President since JFK.

Expecting that there will be a white knight president elected this time around given the state of Politics in America is pure Hope with almist nothing to back it (the closest is the guy who won the Democrat Primaries for NYC Mayor, and he hasn't even been elected yet and we're talking about a major city filled the people far more educated and worldly than the average American, so it's unlikely that his likely victory will translated to anywhere else in America than maybe one or two other similar cities).

I think the problem this time around is systemic and "bipartisan" (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether) and also linked to the natural end of the period where the US was the dominant nation (basically, in the schedule of the Rise and Fall of Empires, the US has already been long enough in the peak dominance period to have reached the Fall stage) and as I meantioned in my last post, if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.

This isn't really an America-specific problem it's a much broader Human Societies problem, and whilst the details are different the general pattern is the same (corruption, pretty much all of the elites making money of unproductive activities and political connections, people in general having delusions of superiority that vastly exceed the actual present day achievements and so on).

I lived in a couple of countries on Europe and the daily and bi-daily shopping is only really for people who live in big cities and commute by public transport and will pass by a small grocery shop on their way home from work.

As far as I can tell most people do a single weekly shopping generally by driving to a supermarket or even hypermarket either on the weekend or at the end of a working day, hence the popularity of such large surfaces.

Even in places like The Netherlands people have side bags on their bicycles and can just cycle to a supermarket once or twice a week if they don't feel like driving there and bring the shopping on the side bags.

From my own experience with my grandparents (farmers in Portugal), rural food planing timeframes are even longer than a week, as people relied (at least 50+ years ago) on preserved meats and longer duration things like dried pulses, certain fruits, and staples like potatoes for months or even a whole year and then add in season fruits and vegetables and even just go outside and pick up whatever was ripe then from a plot next to their home (so, for example, make soup with some salted pork bellies and chipeas from their food stores and some spinach and carrots picked up from from a farming plot near the house).

Anyways, even in Europe doing a weekly shopping is generally more convenient.

Mind you, it's great when you live inside a big enough city and you can just hop out of the tram a stop or two early on your way home and go by a mini-market to buy, say, some milk and fresh vegetables, but that's not how it generally works for most people, mainly because even in a big city, unless you live right by the store it's more time efficient to do one big grocery shopping a week were you can go to bigger places with more selection.

People in big wealthy countries underestimate how far those nations can fall.

Argentina was the 5th richest country in the World at one point, and look at them now.

The higher you are, the more you can fall before hitting a new stable state: just look at those places which were once great imperial nations like Greece, Iran, Turkey or Egypt. I mean, most of the Middle East was once the seat of some great nation or other and look at them now.

The US going all the way down to the level of wealth per capita of, say, Russia, is a distinct possibility, if the structural elements which supported its high economic output start breaking (so, things like Education, the productivity of its companies and the belief of outsiders that investing in America is safe and has a good ROI, all things getting worse) and the higher a nation is in that scale the more such structural supports are required to keep it there (for example, not other developed nations don't relly on their currency being the World's Reserve Currency to prop-up its public finances), so the harder it is to stay there.

Being part of a Religion has social benefits, so don't be surprised if a lot of those non-Atheists don't trully believe it but participate in it because it's good for them or because of social pressure.

Certainly, and speaking in terms of Christians which is the ones I'm more familiar with, considering the number of people who actual strictly even just try to follow ALL the teachings of Jesus or even all of the 10 commandments, almost all "Religious" people pick and chose which parts they believe and which they don't.

(In modern society Greed and Envy by themselves are probably regularly broken by 99% of Christians).

Funny that more people own a car than have a driver's license.

External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it's maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won't power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it's not at all noticeable on the video playback.

Kodi install instructions are here

I don't use docker, I use lubuntu with normal packages. So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don't need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it's as if Kodi is the interface of that machine.

Qbittorrent is just the server only package (qbittorrent-nox) which I control remotelly via its web interface and the rest is normal stuff like Samba.

After the inital set up, the actual linux management can be done remotelly via ssh.

That said, LibreELEC is a Linux distro which comes with Kodi built-in (it's basically Kodi and just enough Linux to run it), so assuming it's possible to install more stuff in it might be better - I only found out about it when I had my setup running so never got around to try it. LibreELEC can even work in weaker hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or some of its clones.

Also you can get Kodi as a Flatpak which works out of the box in various Linux distros so if you need the latest and greatest Kodi plus a full-blown Linux distro for other stuff you might do the choice of distro based on supporting flatpack and being reasonably lightweight (I actually originally went for Lubuntu exactly because it uses a lightweight Window Manager and I expected that N100 mini-pc to need it, though in practice the hardward can probably run a lot more heavy stuff than that, though lighter stuff means the CPU load seldom goes up significativelly hence the fan seldom turns on and so the thing is quiet most of the time and you only hear the fan spinning up and then down again once in a while even in the Summer).

As for docker, there are a lot of instructions out there on how to install Kodi with Dockers, but I never tried it.

Also you might want to get a remote like this, which is a wireless remote with a USB adapter, not because of the air-mouse thing (frankly, I never use it) but simply because the buttons are mapped to exactly the shortcuts that Kodi uses, so using it with Kodi in Linux is just like using a dedicated remote for a TV Media Box - in fact all those thinks are keyboard shortcuts (that remote just sends keypresses to the PC when you press a button) and they keyboard shortcuts for media players seem to be a standard.

It really depends on what you're doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I'm using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it's a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty almost all of the time.

Further, I don't have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren't that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC (a very small notebook running Linux) as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it's task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE PC as a home file server), but also take in account what you're going to do it and consider if new hardware won't be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don't be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don't be afraid to get new stuff if it's actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the "new stuff smell" psychological effect when buying new.

Whenever I read here Canadians here hoping for EU membership, I think about this: I'm sorry mates but you having chosen the insanelly unsafe rules of the US for all kinds of things, most notably food safety, means your regulations are totally incompatible with merelly Single Market membership (which would literally allow free export of that dangerous shit to the rest of the Single Market), much less EU membership.

Decades of regulatory alignment with the US means that all manner of Canadian products are dangerous and shouldn't be allowed into the EU, and now that your southern neighbor has shown its true colors beyond any doubt you should start unravelling that regulatory shit-show and align more with EU style regulation but, having lived in the UK when Carney was the head of the Bank Of England, I doubt he's the man for it: it's my impression that he's a man who knows who butter his bread - and that ain't the common folk - and it's for them he works.

Each billionaire is an individual problem AND allowing billionaires to grab and monopolize so many resources and even looking up to them is a systemic problem.

Without the systemic problem which is Capitalism and the shallow, greedy present day society, billionaires would be treated the same as other hoarders - though of as mentally derranged and stopped from going too far for their own good and the good of others.

There will always be nutters, but if the social system we have wasn't broken, this very specific kind of nutter would never be allowed to cause the damage they do with their mental disease.

The tendency for Authoritarianism and Racism never really left Germany: remember, Nazism was stopped by outsiders, not Germans, so mostly they changed the symbols and stopped outright saying certain things even whilst still thinking and practicing them - doing what it takes to make it seem like they changed, not actually changing.

So it's no surprise that on a racially charged subject involving a Genocide were tens of thousands of children have been murdered for their ethnicity, the German Authorities not only in quite an extremely Racist way sided with the Genociders very overtly because of their ethnicity, but also moved back some more in the exercise of the power of the state towards doing things like in the "good" old days.

The mindset of Racism and Macht macht Recht never actually went away.

I some discussion about Nvidia somebody what complaining how they were used to 200 fps at 4K but some graphics cards couldn't do it with raytracing on without using DLSS.

As somebody else in that thread said, it's masturbatory fps numbers.

Oh, it's totally fucked up and I do agree that Europe should proactively work against Dogey America.

My point is that Europe militarily intervening in an American Civil War doesn't have enough upsides for Europe to offset the downsides.

Well, been ahem told that a friend of a friend didn't found any videos there were "Your friendly neighborhood geek goes into the house of a hot milf to upgrade her Windows 10 machine to Arch and she shows them how hot she found their Linux install skills and how thankful she is", so that seems unlikely.

I was born in Portugal, a country which was back then under a Fascist Dictatorship.

It was a dirt poor European country were things were so bad that it got Food Aid from other countries.

Fortunatelly, there was a Revolution not long after I was born. In the 5 - 10 years after the Revolution quality of life and average wealth in my country went up dramatically.

In my own country, Fascism came to power when the Finance Minister during Republican years who saved the country from Financial Ruin, just captured power and made himself President - so yeah, starting from a very low point Fascism can improve things a bit for a while, but it doesn't take that many years for it to turn the whole thing into shit and that's what happenned in Portugal.

Fascists might sometimes cause a little Economic bump if they take over from a very low point (the same happenned with the Nazis in Germany), but it never lasts, and the ones in America are already going at it so ineptly and haphazardously that I bet there's not going to be any Economic bump.

The Fascists are incompetent as fuck and seriously regressive, so they eventually drag down any nations they take over once the cummulative side effects of their actions have time to work through the system. As America is already in a post-Imperial decay stage, Fascism will just accelerate that decay.