There was a podcast episode years back about how large quicksand loomed in popular culture for a whole generation, before vanishing as a concept almost completely.
And sure enough, I remember as a kid in the 80s worrying about stumbling into quicksand while wandering around the bushes in rural Canada.
Then I forgot about it as a concept until I heard it on that one episode, and I haven't heard it since.
What a crazy irony. Here we were thinking we had to survive the nuclear age and get to the point where we were all connected and well-informed. But it turns out the nukes led to an unprecedented period of peace and global information access and communication may destroy us all.
Yeah, it's a barrier. Factoring in cost of living, getting elected to congress would be a significant pay drop for just about any middle class person (unless, of course, they were willing to accept the legally-grey 'benefits' that come from the position, like early info on stock market movement along with freedom from prosecution).
It's just weird to watch Americans complain that "All our politicians are old retirees and lifers, rich assholes, or thoroughly corrupt! Why is that? I don't get it! Also, why are they getting paid a halfway-decent middle class salary (before factoring in cost of living), we should be paying them minimum wage--if that!"
Like...duh, guys.
You're right that upfront costs are a problem, but that's a hard problem to solve. Also, in the age of crowdfunding, it's a less significant problem than it's ever been before.
Yes, that is the status quo. If you want to change it, you need to accept higher pay so that more average Joes seek election and then vote to restrict trades by sitting politics.
Constricting pay only cements the status quo by making it so that only rich people or cheaters can make a living as a politician.
Apparently parmesan works pretty well! I mean, the times I tried it were failures, but not due to parmesan, which didn't burn (except the piece or two sticking out). It was a tip from a NY style pizza video, I think.
And to pay politicians! Doctors, lawyers, bottom -rung programmers, and ambitious plumbers all make more than the people who run the county--and aren't expected to constantly fly themselves across the country and maintain multiple residences--at least one of them in one of the priciest markets in the country.
The only people who want that job are already rich, or are great at schmoozing and finding donors.
Pay them so well, all your best and brightest want to grow up to be legislators, and have no urgent need to start accepting graft. At least make it competitive with writing python scripts.
I started making pizza during COVID, and ended up with the same solution after failing with flour & parmesan. Of course, the parchment paper starts to smolder as soon as it hits the pizza stone (cast iron in my case). It gives the pizza a little bit of smoky paper flavor. I considered it an off flavor at first...but eventually I came to appreciate it.
The other day, my wife forgot a piece of parchment paper in the air fryer, and it got sucked to the element and singed. My mouth immediately started watering...
Seriously, I had to scroll down this far to find this? Their evidence is that millions of people support Trump, and Trump wants to be a dictator, ergo millions of people want a dictatorship. Sorry, not people: "whites".
So first, fuck Donald Trump. But while he's certainly said some wild shit, and I do believe that in his heart he would love to be a dictator, I'm pretty sure he's never said anything out loud like "I want to be a dictator". I'm sure a certain number of his fans would be happy to have him as Dear Leader, but most of them want him as President. And, just as many while people voted against Trump as for him, and a significant percentage of the country can't stand the fucker.
Meanwhile, Trump has been growing more popular with non-whites.
This article reads like a hit piece on "white people" by a 14-year-old.
It's also less accurate. Ever notice your phone sometimes drops from 100% to 80% in only a few minutes, or hangs around at 10% for ages? That's because with batteries it's much less simple than "full, medium, empty". There's actually a bunch of code to improve the estimation specifically for your battery, and still they can behave strangely.
I concur, this is also my experience. The car GPS has never directed us to travel further than the charge allows--and it will include stops at superchargers on the way as necessary. It's really not that big an issue.
But, the range that it presents you in the UI is not the actual range that you can travel. The fact that the car won't plan out a route for a location 300 miles away when it claims you can travel 320, but will instead include a stop at a supercharger at around 200, kinda proves they know this.
I think the projected range is basically the platonic ideal if you were traveling in a perfectly flat landscape, with no wind, with an external temperature of 18.2°C, traveling at 37.25 miles per hour or whatever. Every deviation from that ideal will hurt your range. In my experience, I tend to get probably 250-ish miles on a 320 mile charge, depending on the time of year.
Gas vehicles tend, on the other hand, to undersell the range in my experience, and people are used to going further than the car says they can.
FWIW, I'm running NixOS but gave up on running the Lemmy module. I gave up when I realized that Lemmy seems to need superuser access to the Postgresql server, to install plugins or whatever.
So instead, I used Arion to make a docker-compose image, running in podman. Works great so far.
It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.—a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible.
I stopped reading shortly after this, because the rest was paywalled...
They didn't start that until the war was well underway, and Russia was already stopped in it's tracks.
Also: much of that hardware is coming from Europe, not the US. Also: if NATO disbanded, Europe would have to ramp up military spending: Trump's big complaint was that France and Germany aren't carrying their weight.
There was a similar kid in my school who had a thing for pooping right on center court in the gym. He'd try to escape his supervisors to do it. One time was in the middle of my gym class during a floor hockey game. It was...something.
Same kid used to have seizures: he'd go stiff and fall over. Sometimes he landed head first. The sound of a human head hitting a concrete floor with no attempt to soften the blow haunts me to this day. You could hear it halfway across the school...
Huh...I can't find it on YouTube, but it rings a bell. Was it something like "quicksand played a much smaller role in my life than I expected"?
Found the podcast...