Christopher Masto @ masto @lemmy.masto.community

He tends to dawdle away his time and accomplish nothing.

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2 yr. ago

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.

Admitting you were wrong/made a mistake/can’t do something.

Related: changing your mind. The one thing that can still destroy any politician is the dreaded “flip-flop”. Yet the thing we most need them to do is to revise their position in the face of new information.

I think most of the problems in the world come down to some sort of bullshit posturing that (especially male) humans seem to be compelled to engage in.

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.

Maybe Pac-Man. Wandering around a maze eating all day isn’t that different from my current life.

A return is what you file. The money you get back for overpayment is a refund.

Sorry, pet peeve of mine that comes up every tax season.

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.

It’s reminding me that most people don’t see the forest for the trees.

Spindrift ruined it for me.

For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.

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

My partner is allergic to coconut. That also means no palm oil. You know what has palm oil in it these days, often randomly replacing the previous oil in something that used to be ok? Everything.

I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn't that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.

Upper management just doesn't care. Reputational damage isn't something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don't actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It's surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail's pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you've spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.

I may have gone on a slight tangent there.

They're more than great coats.

I've made this cake a couple of times. It's quite good.

https://youtu.be/Yi1W5qgtNYU?si=l6cvn5YZTbAsZZzb

What do you do for entertainment?

Mostly silence, but when I was in high school (some decades ago now) I had a CD of Mozart music I would put on while doing homework. I still associate Symphony 40 in G minor with grinding through tasks.

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.

Stopped eating so damn much.

I read the The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker (who recently died, sadly) and followed his advice.