Well, the preview image for this sent me down a rabbit hole, and I’ve binged the whole series over two days. Now, to wait for new chapters again.

It could be, but it’s hardly a typical US recipe. It’s a 70-something year old fellow from Leitrim, importing spices from Monaghan to sell something he grew up with and can’t get here to other Irish folks. Ironically, the ones who complain the cinnamon is too spicy tend to prefer the US-made product of another company. The same people will also tell you with a straight face that HP sauce is awful spicy, so they need to get something else for their meals, so make of that what you will.

At the other end of the extreme, I’ve had multiple Irish and English customers at work say they won’t eat our white pudding, as the cinnamon makes it too spicy. There’s plenty of old people like that in either country that bring down the average spice tolerance by quite a bit.

I think it’s just old tribal knowledge that people have turned into a meme at this point, just like people thinking all versions of Linux are so arcane and obtuse, you need to be a master programmer or hacker to be able to make it run without crashing. When I was first starting out with it, around 2009, I remember having somewhat regular issues with my sound and my wifi just randomly deciding I was unworthy of either sound or wireless internet access. That was across distros when I was initially checking things out, as well as across releases of the same distro once I (mostly) settled down.

These days, I can’t remember the last time I had such problems that weren’t either the result of a specific bug that was shortly fixed, or the fallout of something stupid I did myself while tinkering with something and not paying enough attention.

And even for those that do have email and internet access, rural America isn’t exactly known for having robust infrastructure or government programs to respond to disasters, so they could quite likely find themselves unable to access their email in the aftermath of a disaster, anyway.

Going to college purely for a career is a hell of a gamble

Sure, but it’s a gamble that everyone tries to tell you is a sure thing in your youth, and they pile immense pressure on you to do. Maybe things have changed recently, but it hasn’t been all that long since I was in high school, in the grand scheme of things, and I remember how you were basically treated like the world’s biggest idiot if you didn’t plan on going on to get a university degree. Maybe the only exception was if you were going to join the military, with the understanding you were doing so in order to get a degree on the cheap when you finished.

I think everyone who wants to do so, and who has put in the work to be at the appropriate level academically, should have the opportunity go and study at university, but I also believe that the vast majority of people have no need to do so, and ultimately will not benefit from it. Unfortunately, modern society treats universities not as institutes of education and monuments to the pursuit of knowledge, but as glorified vocational schools. It seems largely to be at the impetus of companies who have decided to externalize any training costs onto potential hires, substituting any sort of on the job training for “Did they check the box that says they have a degree?”

In the past 30 years, I’ve seen massive changes in how companies operate just by watching the sort of jobs my father could get. When I was a kid, he could get hired on with nothing more than “I like computers, I’ll actually read the whole manual for the system I’m working on, and I understand there’s a 6 month probation period to see if I actually do that.” for jobs that he would be summarily screened out for today, despite having successfully done in the past.

Like, don’t get me wrong, he’s dumb as hell in a lot of ways, but I’ve still seen extra stupid stuff in his career trajectory that reflects this. I recall him being fired because he got an IT job at Ernst & Young that he’d been successfully doing for years, because they suddenly said “Everyone doing this job needs to have a degree and the following certifications, and if you don’t have them and do this job now, you need to get them ASAP and reinterview for your role.”

I could excuse this as entirely accidental had the person running over the chicken been the lead car, and the chicken suddenly leapt out into the road. Someone else had stopped to let the chicken cross, and this person either presumed they knew better than the stopped driver and whipped around them, or they simply didn’t care. I doubt people would be looking to excuse the driver’s actions had the first lady been stopped for a little kid who ran out into the the road that our chicken killer wouldn’t have been able to see through an entire car obstructing their vision. At the very least, the second driver acted irresponsibly, if not with wanton disregard for the potential hazards.

Ah, yes, smartphone bad has to be the leading cause. It couldn’t possibly be something to do with the fact that, of young adults who still live with their parents, many have worldviews antithetical to that of their parents, and simply don’t want the headache of repetitive and predictable conflict when their father starts ranting about how the country is going to shit because of goddamn commies like Joe Manchin, or similar nonsense. And for those who live apart from their parents, it most certainly has nothing to do with the degradation of our working conditions, such that many full-time workers have schedules that are inconsistent from day to day, and week to week, and full-time hours are contingent on having 100% open availability to work, making it exceedingly difficult to sync up the meal time schedules for two working adults. I’m also pretty sure the rising cost of living and stagnant wages also haven’t done anything to curtail the ability of young adults to go and eat out with friends. Must be the damned smartphone.

Pneumonic plague is a particularly aggressive form of the plague, where you basically need to be treated within the first 24 hours of showing symptoms in order to have much chance of surviving, and you can die in as little as a day and a half. Initial symptoms include fever, weakness, nausea and headaches, aka the same symptoms as probably >90% of the illnesses most of us contract, so I can see how it would be easy to underestimate the severity of it, until you start coughing up blood.

Further, while I don’t know this person’s circumstances, in a country where there’s no guarantee of either universal healthcare or paid sick time and protections for workers who call off work when ill, I can easily see how someone might say “Eh, it’s just a cold, but I’ll tough it out, because I can’t afford to go to the doctor and/or miss work,” when they notice some of the milder and less remarkable symptoms, then wake up the next day coughing up blood and already be screwed.

They’re going just about as well as they are everywhere else in the US, barring that one guy in Texas that got killed opening fired on a Border Patrol facility the other day. Before you get too snarky, let’s have some examples of the folks in states that always have a hard-on for gun ownership who are actually proving what you’re implying here? Oh, the good gun-owners generally aren’t rising up, but those states are actually welcoming the Gestapo with open arms, since they voted for this? What a surprise.

Keep on living in your fantasy world that the 2nd Amendment bros are going to actually get off their asses and do something about it. Other than cheering it on, that is.

I sense yet another “Cut out your bullshit, Max” rule change brewing. He’s clearly been fishing fos these safety car penalties when he isn’t controlling the restart lately, yet when he does lead the pack, he’s immediately on the radio morning if P2 so much as pulls alongside his rear axle. He’s going to keep on storming past people on safety car restarts right up until he causes a massive crash, then play the victim. It’s getting beyond tiresome.

On the other hand, I’m not sure what Yuki was meant to do to avoid that crash. He was at the apex and already on the curb on the inside when someone tried to cut across him.

Really terrible stewarding, all around.

I had this for a while, and eventually just got really good at doing math without fully waking up.

Nah, just a regular noodle ball of nope. Unless they bite you, it gets infected and you choose to ignore it, about the worst a garter snake will do to you is cover whatever part of you is touching them in some stinky piss. Like, leave them alone unless it’s absolutely necessary, but garter snakes are pretty chill.

Garter Snakes

Garter snakes were long thought to be non-venomous, but discoveries in the early 2000s revealed that they produce a neurotoxic venom.[12] Despite this, garter snakes cannot seriously injure or kill humans with the small amounts of comparatively mild venom they produce and they also lack an effective means of delivering it. In a few cases, some swelling and bruising has been reported.[13] They do have enlarged teeth in the back of their mouths[14] but their gums are significantly larger and the secretions of their Duvernoy’s gland are only mildly toxic.[13][15]

I wouldn’t rule that out, but I also wouldn’t jump straight to that conclusion. Spanish news media in this country is beyond screwed, it skews even more right-wing as a rule than English mainstream media, in my opinion. During the 2020 election, I would watch the news on Univision with my mother-in-law sometimes, and would see them just not translate something a democrat said in English that didn’t fit their agenda, misrepresent what they said in the translation, or selectively omit things they said to make their remarks sound much more sinister and authoritarian than what they actually said. They were also constantly pushing right-wing conspiracies that had been debunked weeks or months prior, with no mention of their having been disproven.

I would constantly have my mother-in-law coming to me asking about these old ass conspiracies, because with her only knowing Spanish, that would be the first time she heard of them, and she was shocked we weren’t freaking out about it.

More leaning to the morons side, despite how Fox likes to portray immigrants as a monolithic group of rabid socialist and commies backing the Dems so they can destroy the constitution and get gulags up and running, a lot of immigrants from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean have been fairly conservative, in my experience. A lot of them grew up heavily propagandized by right wing regimes in their home countries, many are much more religious than your average American by birth, and others have had negative experiences with nominally left-wing regimes in their home country that they can’t get over. The last one can be kind of understandable, but the other two drive me crazy.