When I was a kid, every Sunday after church we’d go pick up the newspaper from my grandmother’s house because she’d be done with it by then and my frugal parents sure as hell weren’t going to pay for their own subscription.

I of course was mostly interested in the comics section. I remember Doonesbury being a thing back then, and I’d read it and at some point I even started to understand it when I was a little older, but it was never one I particularly enjoyed, most of the other comics were far more entertaining to my adolescent mind. I remember Non Sequitur and Opus being my favorites back then.

Fast forward almost 2 decades, my wife and I recently got a subscription to our local newspaper, the same one I grew up reading every Sunday. The funny pages are a lot more condensed than they used to be, that’s probably a sign of the times as far as traditional print newspapers go. Some of my old favorites are gone, there’s a couple new ones that are pretty good, most of the old staples that are as boring and safe as always, I’m happy to see Dilbert gone even though that was once a favorite of mine.

Doonesbury is still there, and maybe it was always this good and I just was too young to appreciate it, but I definitely think it’s my new favorite.

It looks pretty damn good to me, but I have a small rant about tomahawk steaks in general.

I get that they’re a premium cut of meat, they’re a big fat slap of ribeye, but they’re also a novelty cut, the big ol’ handle of bone hanging off of it doesn’t really serve any purpose except being big and showy. The tomahawk steak is kind of all about ridiculous excess.

And I’m not knocking that, I love goofy, showy, ostentatious, kitschy shit. I’d even say that it’s kind of my thing.

And I think when you serve one like this, take it off the bone, slice it up, and serve it on a plate, that kind of removes some of the fun factor.

I have a friend of a friend who is kind of ridiculously wealthy and likes to throw very elaborate parties. One such occasion was a “viking feast” (the historical accuracy of this is dubious at best) where the only foods served are meats and bread, no plates, the only utensils allowed are knives and your hands.

There was a lot of meat. A whole lamb roasted over the fire, a whole massive salmon, many chickens, probably more than I’m forgetting, but most relevant to this, enough tomahawk steaks for everyone who wanted one to have their own.

And that I think is the environment where the tomahawk steak really shines. It’s the perfect “walking around” steak, it’s got a big fucking handle of bone built into it. It’s like the turkey leg you’re almost required to get at the Renaissance faire on steroids.

It’s staying true to it being a high-end steak, this was a special event, not something that happens every year and we’re celebrating, but it’s also leaning into the sheer novelty of the steak. It’s goofy and it’s supposed to be, and it’s not trying to pretend otherwise.

As an aside, another friend and I managed to wrangle a standing invitation to return to this when he throws one (it occurs when the local team plays the Vikings in the playoffs) because we’re both burly bearded dudes with no interest in football, so we pretty much stood outside by the fire all night drinking from horns we brought ourselves, and host was stoked to have “actual vikings” there.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Those are great, definitely gonna be saving those

I basically want that kind of guide for curing meats and other such things

Also there are some blind spots, something I was just looking for recently is canning some of my home-cured meats to save some space in my freezer. I know it’s a theoretically possible undertaking, I can go to the store and buy a can of corned beef after all

But reputable sources like the USDA and NCHFP are kind of silent on it and pretty much leave it at “we can’t recommend doing that, curing can change the density and water content and such and we haven’t gotten the funding to test it.”

I can find people who have canned their own bacon and such, and apparently not died of botulism, but I don’t exactly trust the processes cooked up by some off-grid homestead tradwife mommy-blogger.

Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook

I’d really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.

I’ve recently been experimenting with curing meats, I’ve done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.

And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.

And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren’t dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.

I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it’s a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and…

When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I’ll ever work with, and also doesn’t scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I’m not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.

I’d be pretty hard-pressed to name any of my friends who graduated “on time”

I’m well into my 30s now, a couple of my friends are still working on degrees or just graduated.

Changing majors, bullshit scheduling nonsense, life

Shit, there was a whole fucking pandemic that fucked up a year or two of your high school years, it’s pretty damn amazing that anyone your age is graduating even roughly on-time as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe it’ll throw a bit of a monkey wrench into your social life because you gotta skip out on a couple things because you have class. That’s life as an adult, we all got scheduling conflicts all the time.

Otherwise, it’s never gonna matter. You’ll have a degree, that’s the only “important” thing about graduating. Unless you’re looking to get into some highly-specialized, super-competitive field, no one gives a shit how long it took you to graduate, how your gpa stacked up against the rest of your class, etc. It’s like the old joke “What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? You call them ‘Doctor.’”

Ketchup has kind of an interesting history

The term ketchup/catsup (or various other spellings) first appeared in about the 1600s, but tomato ketchup didn’t really catch on until about 200-300 years later. Before then it was used to refer to a variety of different sauces/condiments. Mushroom ketchup was a fairly popular one, some were based on fish sauces (you could maybe make an argument that Worcestershire sauce is a type of ketchup) etc.

The general consensus is that it was sort of the result Europeans attempting to recreate various Asian sauces without really knowing what was in them or having access to the right ingredients (for example trying to make something like soy sauce without soy beans)

Honestly, in that case it’s not even an inventory thing, just plan on ordering a couple days earlier and go for the longer slower shipping method so it ends up arriving on the same day. You don’t have to warehouse it any longer than if you ordered it later with faster shipping, and you save a decent chunk of cash.

To the best of my knowledge, the most common parallel universe theory that has any actual real traction in physics is the “many worlds interpretation”

Which is basically that any time some sort of quantum event is observed, the universe splits into multiple parallel universes where every possible outcome of that event is realized in its own universe.

Now people take that and run with it and make up all sorts of pseudoscience bullshit where those splits happen anytime someone makes a choice, or some pseudorandom event like a coin flip or die roll occurs. That’s not really what it’s about.

This is about wonky quantum physics, radioactive decay, collapsing wave function type stuff. I’ll be honest this is high level physics shit, I only kind of understand some of it, which is more than probably 90+% of people out there can say, for most people it probably means about as much as if you came up to them and started talking to them in a foreign language.

So that means that all of those parallel universes are going to be following the same laws of physics since they all diverged from the same universe.

That means that flying reindeer and traveling around the world in a night delivering presents down chimney and such is probably a no-go.

As far as there being a universe where some weirdo named Santa Claus decided to live at the North Pole and build toys, maybe, but probably pretty unlikely. I have a pretty hard time imagining a version of the world where different quantum outcomes would lead to that. Would, for example, a single uranium atom decaying or not decaying make that happen? Probably not. Of course, untold millions of tiny events like that can eventually add up to some big difference, but I still have a hard time imagining a situation where that would be the outcome.

Like I think someone in this thread already said, there are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.2, 0.001234, etc,) but none of them are “2” some things are just impossible.

I just built a PC after not having a computer for about 5+ years.

Built it for games, did not feel like I was missing out on anything in particular except games by not having a computer. There’s a lot of things I’d rather use a computer for but these days most of what I used to do on a computer can be done just fine from a phone or tablet.

During those 5 or so years, I maybe needed to use a computer about a dozen times, and if my wife didn’t have a computer I could have just swung by a library for a bit to take care of it.

I used to be the shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, it fell to me to arrange all of our freight pickups, which was annoying because I didn’t really have direct access to any information about pricing, deadlines, etc. so I was constantly going back to the office to show someone quotes to see whether the rates and transit times were acceptable.

Most of our freight was LTL stuff (less than truckload, a couple pallets, not enough to fill a truck by itself) but a few times every month or two we’d get full truckload sized orders.

When it came to them, often “intermodal” shipping had much better rates. Intermodal meaning at least 2 different forms of transportation were going to be used. Truck, train, boat, cargo plane, etc.

As a US-based company with mostly US-based customers, that usually meant rail for us.

However, almost none of our shipments went intermodal because it was too slow for our customers.

It wasn’t usually a drastic difference, we’re talking maybe 1-3 extra days in most cases. Over the Road (OTR) there weren’t many places in the US that we couldn’t get freight to from our location in 5 days or less, and those 5 day locations were mostly real middle-of-nowhere customers on the other side of the country.

It always blew my mind that we didn’t or couldn’t push our customers to just place orders 2 or 3 days earlier to save some pretty significant money on shipping.

I don’t claim to know much about the industry, i was just some kid who needed a job and ended up the shipping guy because I knew how to use a computer and spoke English. But we a textile company that made things like work clothes (chef coats, scrubs, industrial work wear, etc) and restaurant table linens, and we sold mostly to bigger wholesalers, business service companies, etc. who would resell it or provide it to their customers as part some sort of contracted laundry service or something, so not really something I’d think of as being particularly time-sensitive or wildly unpredictable that they couldn’t anticipate their bigger orders a couple days ahead of time

Guess it probably says something about how much we all love instant gratification.

I remember my 4th grade teacher having one of these and showing it off around 2000, it may have been the first digital camera I ever saw.

Blew my mind back then.

He was one of my favorite teachers, really into science, loved gadgets. He was an older guy who retired a few years later and I heard he wasn’t in the best of health, no idea if he’s still around, but I hope he at least lived long enough to appreciate how far digital cameras have come since then.

For me, a lot of it has to do with how it’s presented in schools

Pi, for example. One day my teachers just kind of dumped this magical 3.14… number on me without any real explanation. Just basically “use this number to do stuff with circles,” no real explanation on what pi actually is on anything, just “remember this”

Years later I found a gif of a circle sort of unraveling that showed how the circumference is π × the diameter of the circle

And sure, mathematically, the formula tells you that, but actually seeing that animated out made a hell of a lot more sense to me.

Now I got most of my basic math education before those gifs were so readily available, and smart boards were just becoming a thing when I was in high school, so it would have been a little hard to show that to a bunch of elementary or middle school students without having us huddle around a desktop.

But that’s something that could have been illustrated pretty well with a couple circles of different sizes (cardboard cut-outs, printed on paper, different jar lids, etc,) a piece of string, and a ruler.

And the same goes for a whole lot of different math things.

In the interest of battery life and redundancy, I think it might make sense to have 3 devices.

Ereader with an e ink display for reading, a lot of these can last days or weeks on a charge easily

An mp3 player for music. I don’t know what the current state of mp3 players is, I suspect a lot of no-name imported garbage, but over a decade ago I know my iPod used to go days or weeks on a charge with pretty heavy usage. Probably look for whatever has the least bells and whistles you can find- no touch screen, physical controls, etc. if you’re up for a bit of tinkering I’m pretty sure there’s a pretty active scene for people modding old iPods with better batteries, more storage, etc. that would probably be a great option.

A tablet or smartphone for movies, or possibly a laptop (I’m not an apple guy, but I’ve heard MacBooks have pretty insane battery life these days.) Keep all the wifi/cellular/Bluetooth/gps, etc. turned off, keep it on power save mode, disable anything you can that you don’t need to watch movies. Unfortunately if such a thing as a dedicated video-only tablet exists, I couldn’t find it with a quick search. If such a thing can be found, I’d probably recommend that.

A dedicated device that does one job well will usually be more efficient at that thing than a multipurpose device like a tablet, smartphone, or computer that needs to be able to do it all. An mp3 player only needs to be able to play music, it doesn’t need to be running a full-on OS that’s capable of sending emails, making phone calls, playing games, etc.

Also that way if one of those things does die on you, you still have the other 2.

I saw in one of your other comments your concern about a tablet having a bigger screen would be a bigger drain on battery life. That’s true to an extent, bigger screens draw more power, but since the whole device is bigger they can compensate with a bigger battery. I haven’t exactly done an exhaustive survey of tablet battery life and don’t care to look into it, but in my (fairly limited) experience, they usually pretty much at least break even or surpass phones in battery life. I have a cheap tablet that I really only use for reading it lives in my bag, usually in my car, often forgotten about for days or occasionally weeks at a time, and doesn’t exactly get heavy usage, but it usually can go at least a few days without a change, even with WiFi and Bluetooth left on. If I’m not using it at all, it can sometimes go a couple weeks just sitting idle. It’s usually good for at least a couple hours of streaming HD video, with WiFi turned off and 720p video on internal storage I imagine it’s good for at least a couple movies.

WiFi and cellular data are pretty big power drains too. I know when I check my battery usage on my phone that probably accounts for about ⅓ or so of it. Having those turned off can go a long way. Jailbreaking/rooting your phone to disable unnecessary services probably wouldn’t hurt, but that’s probably a drop in the bucket compared to just keeping your device offline.

I don’t really like brand favouritism, but if you’re able to find a Toyota in your price range, as far as I’m concerned it’s pretty hard to go wrong with them. I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of anyone I’ve ever known who’s had a Toyota who had anything really bad to say about them, even with the few years of Tacomas that had major rust issues around the early 2000s, everyone I know who had one felt that Toyota did a pretty solid job of doing right by them.

My current car is an '07 4runner. I bought it used with around 150k miles on it about 5 years ago, I now at just over 200k miles. and except for the usual shit like brakes that are expected to wear down every few years, the only major thing I’ve had to deal with was replacing the alternator. It does have a small exhaust leak that throws a code for the catalytic converter every so often (it’s on for maybe a couple weeks every few months or so) that I’m not particularly concerned about. I’m fairly confident that with not much beyond regular upkeep this car could make it to 300k+ pretty easily.

My wife is driving a Prius that’s a few years newer (2012 I think) she’s had it for a few years now, only thing she’s needed is new tires so far.

Growing up my mom had an '89 Corolla, and there’s a damn good chance it’s still on the road. At some point we sold it to my uncle who later sold it to a cousin, and after that we lost track of it, but around that time (circa 2010-ish) it was still going just fine, even after having a pretty large tree fall on it and all of the usual wear and tear you’d expect on a 20+ year old car.

Outside of my family’s favoritism for Toyotas, I also have a hard time thinking of people who have anything bad to say about Honda’s. I’ve also never heard anyone complain about their Subaru, I have less personal experience with Subarus overall, I’ve never driven one, but my overall impression of every one I’ve ever ridden in has been positive, and Subaru owners sing their praises.

Most people I’ve known with Kias and Hyundais have also spoken highly about them…

Overall, my general advice is buy from any of the major Asian car brands unless you need a larger pickup truck (¾ ton or bigger,) then pretty much your only options are pretty much American trucks. For ½ ton or smaller trucks, I’d personally stick to Asian brands still, with the possible exception of the Ford Maverick.

As far as specific models, my personal recommendations are

Subaru in pretty much any market segment they inhabit. Smaller sporty cars are dumb regardless of brand, but if that’s your thing, go Subaru.

Sedans/hatchbacks- Toyota Corolla or Prius, Honda Accord or civic.

Compact suvs/crossovers- Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV, Kia sportage, Hyundai Tucson. Wrangler if you actually intend to go off roading, Suzuki samurai if you’re going off roading and not in the US.

Mid-sized SUV: Toyota 4runner (I’ve dialed in that a midsized SUV is the right sized car for me personally at this point in my life, not going to go into all of the reasoning for that, but having driven a few different brands and models I am personally confident in saying that it is the be-all end-all of mid sized SUVs for me, if Isuzu ever makes a comeback in the passenger vehicle segment and resurrects the trooper I may be open to reevaluating that because I loved my trooper, but they’re all 20+ years old now)

Full-sized SUVs: do not recommend. If you can find one of the old school jeep wagoneers maybe do that for the cool factor, but if you’re contemplating a full sized SUV what you really want is a minivan, or maybe a Ford flex. They’re not “cool,” but trust me, minivans are the shit.

Minivans- they’re all pretty good, never met a minivan I didn’t like.

Small pick-up trucks- Ford Maverick, or if you need/want a “real” truck get a Tacoma or Frontier, or go for old rangers/Mazda B series or a t100 if you’re ok with an old truck, or replace all of those recommendations with a Toyota Hilux if you’re not in the US/Canada

½ ton pickup- Toyota tundra

Bigger than ½ ton- you don’t need this unless you are regularly towing a heavy trailer or live and work on a farm, or do major construction business with your personal vehicle, or something to that effect. If that applies to you, take your pick of any of the big 3 American brands, I like Fords, but honestly I view this as the same as picking your favorite color, it’s what you like personally, don’t let anyone else yuck your yum.

Personally, and I’m not saying this applies to everyone by a longshot, what car you need/want is fairly personal, but if I had carte blanche to go out and buy any newish car I could find to replace my current vehicle I’d be looking at

Toyota 4runner or Tacoma Subaru Crosstrek or Outback
Ford Maverick

But I’m an outdoorsy, DIY-minded person, who goes “off-road” occasionally (I don’t go off roading for its own sake, but my life sometimes tak me driving onto a beach, or down some shitty dirt paths, over fields, etc.) has to commute in the snow, often has to pick up bulky lumber and such, and occasionally how small trailers.

My wife who doesn’t usually have any of those needs would probably be looking at a newer Prius, or maybe a Hyundai Kona if she decided she wanted something bigger.

And in an ideal world, I’d probably have a maverick or 4runner for my various outdoorsy and DIY pursuits, and whatever the smallest cheapest DIY hybrid or electric car I can find is for my daily commuting as long as it has 4 wheels, a/c, and a radio, pretty much anything out there would be just fine for me. But I can only count on having 2 parking spaces.

Honestly at 5k in this economy, you’re probably scraping the bottom of the barrel of anything that can be considered a “good” car, and you’re probably going to just end up with whatever is available near you in your price range with relatively low miles. Go asian if you can’t but don’t expect anything amazing to present itself.

By and large, Mennonites do skew pretty crazy and conservative in a lot of ways, but I think it’s worth pointing out that there can be a tremendous amount of variation from one church/community to another, there’s not much in the way of a larger overarching organization, a lot of policies, beliefs, interpretations and such are sorted out at the local level.

Some Mennonite churches are practically indistinguishable from the Amish, but there are some around that are very liberal. I live in an area with a pretty large Mennonite population, and the churches kind of run the entire gamut from horse and buggies to some of the most modern and liberal churches I’ve ever heard of.

They do, like I said, tend to skew more towards the conservative end of things, but there is a lot of variation there.

Every once in a while, as an out of shape guy in my 30s, I think about buying myself a pair of heelys.

Was never a skater, never really had much interest in them as a kid, but something about the idea of rolling around in Costco while I do my grocery shopping appeals to me.

Jawn

It’s Philadelphian, it’s a general purpose noun and can be used for any person, place, or thing.

Go birds!

I think I already addressed your first paragraph pretty well in my comment.

If you’re touting something as an alternative to the Global Positioning System, I think it’s reasonable to expect that it’s going to cover at least most of the globe.

It also doesn’t really seem like it’s intended to be an alternative, more like an extension or backup to GPS. If I available you should still be using GPS, this is just something you’d fall back on if regular GPS goes offline. Sort of like how you wouldn’t want to run your house off a generator 24/7/365, but if a tree falls on the power lines by your house you at least have the generator to keep your fridge running.

EDIT:

Also, for pretty much the entire history of TV, different parts of the world have operated using different and often incompatible broadcast standards. I don’t really see that changing and the rest of the world adopting ours, especially with the current administration being blatantly hostile to our allies. At best they’ll adopt their own standards that will do something similar to BPS but probably won’t be directly compatible, there may be devices that can make use of both, similar to how a lot of GPS devices can also use Galileo or Glonass.

It does sound a lot like LORAN-C, which I admit I forgot was a thing that once existed.

I know that in areas it covered, LORAN was supposed to be pretty accurate for positioning. I don’t know exactly how well this would compare to that, things like what frequency they transmit on, how much power, digital vs analog, number of transmitter sites, etc. will all come into play, and I don’t feel like digging into exactly how the two systems would stack up against each other. Could absolutely be the BPS totally blows LORAN out of the water, they might be comparable, it might be markedly worse, we’re well outside of my pay grade now.