memfree

I thought I was going to rely to this question, but you covered it so perfectly that I’ve nothing useful to add. Thank you for putting in the time.

And for hot peppers.

You say that because you’ve never had the good stuff. :-P

Is it any good? I used to like Lidl and Aldi breads before COVID, when you could slice it right there. They stopped that, and so I no longer had a reason to drive 5-10 miles out of my way to go there. I’d go back for a good sauerkraut, though.

I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:

After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”

OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”

While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.

“The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”

A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.

Thank you!

I’m so sorry.

Why can’t the U.S. buy decent sauerkraut at the store? Why must we make it ourselves or get awful kraut? Germany has a unique and delightful kraut for seemingly every town and village, but the U.S. has exactly one type from a handful of companies that all make it the same. Well, maybe two types if you count ‘canned’ but I don’t reckon that to be actual sauerkraut. What was the topic? Sandwiches? Well, if I could find a good kraut, I would spend my days trying to recreate a reuben-like masterpiece.

Context?

Without knowing how this compares to other states, which areas have higher counts of rental properties, how other states compare, and things like average or percentage of: ages, incomes, ethnicities, and probably party affiliation, this doesn’t tell us much by itself.

I am encouraged that it is given as a percentage of the voting population instead of a numeric count (XKCD’s pet peeve #208), but it still looks a lot like a population map. I had to find a straight population map to compare where it differs, and as a quick visual trend they are similar. From https://www.someka.net/blog/ohio-zip-code-map/ :

Overlap that with an income map (from https://proximityone.com/srdmi/ohdmi.htm):

With only a visual examination, I still have little idea of what the map says about voter purging. I can’t tell if old people are getting purged as they die, if college students are getting purged as they fail to change from their school address, or if a particular party is getting purged just to sway elections.

If you are willing to switch, tell your current carrier and sometimes that will light a fire under them to actually address the Support call. We had that happen recently. Internet went out. The issue was outside our house with the provider’s line. They said they’d send someone a week later, so we pointed out it would be faster for us to switch providers, to which they replied, “We can’t get there tomorrow but how about the next day?” We accepted and they actually did fix it in two days instead of seven.

The latest pluralistic article starts with a long rant about “rent” and what’s wrong with it (then explains how Intellectual Property rights are basically the same thing and talks about software). Anyway, you might like the rent part: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/

Nah, that’s all about getting the dog to actually swallow the pill.

For us, it is about buffering the concentration. Even aspirin can upset your stomach (well, SOME people’s stomachs) such that making “Bufferin” was once a big deal. It was just aspirin with a buffering agent, but having a buffer really mattered for some people.

I’m not a doctor, so don’t take my word for it, but I’ve heard the same as robolemmy. To be a bit less abstract, my understanding is you eat enough so that your stomach will digest normally instead of just handling the medicine as a tiny bit of something caustic. A granola bar should be fine, but you might do better with a slice of bread or something a tad easier to digest. Then again, I don’t think it matters all that much.

their way rather than how they should be.

Every language has different sounds. It has long been understood that languages will translate words/names into versions they can actually hear and pronounce. Sadly, some people mock or demean people who try to speak a non-native language and make errors in it. In the U.S. it used to be fairly common to mock Asians coming from a language with only one liquid consonant sound for their inability to differentiate between ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds.

I know I can’t hear the difference in various Russian language vowels and while I can hear tones, I don’t know how I’d explain their pronunciation in an Anglicized name – or if it would be relevant.

While I appreciate that regional accents mean that non-U.S. citizens might not say “comma” the way it is heard in the U.S., I do expect that if a U.S. citizen tells me to pronounce their own name in a U.S. manner, then that is how it “should be” pronounced.

Happy to help!

Oh, I shoulda linked to a first-hand source where she herself wrote “comma-la” as the pronunciation (no particular accent on syllables). It is in her book, and also towards the bottom of this piece has that excerpts from her book: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/book-excerpt-kamala-harris-truths-hold/story?id=60234101

Comma-la (as she tells us to pronounce it), or even Com’la (as it is traditionally pronounced)

• https://theconversation.com/its-comma-la-insisting-on-mispronouncing-kamala-harriss-name-is-racist-144523
• https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/kamala-harris-name-how-to-pronounce-pronunciation-indian.html

Cory Doctorow has been calling out this enshittification for years. The whole read is good, but here is a sample chunk:

Amazon’s monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.

Amazon is no longer a place where a scrappy independent seller can find an audience for its products. In order to navigate the minefield Amazon lays for its sellers (who have no choice but to sell there), these indie companies are forced to sell out to gators (aggregators), which are now multi-billion-dollar businesses in their own right:

See also his piece Amazon is a ripoff.

A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon’s own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and “junk ads” (that don’t match your search) turn Amazon’s search-ordering into a rigged casino game.

You don’t see them. You are on the ice and so are they. They hunker down and purposefully cover their nose with their paw when you look in their direction. When you look away, they creep closer until your head starts to turn again. They don’t want you don’t see the little black spot getting closer and closer. If you are lucky and looking around while you are out on the ice, you will see a little black spot disappear. If you do. GET OUT NOW. If the spot was big enough to notice, the bear is probably close enough to charge. I hope your snow machines are close and ready to go.

But she has name recognition now that she’s been VP. That is a huge bonus.

It would be more useful if Biden did the Court thing rather than waiting for Harris to maybe do it if she wins. What if she doesn’t win? What is she wins, but the existing Court does yet more damage between now and then?

I do agree with you that Biden was a good President. I’ve never seen a President that did all the stuff we wanted, but they’ve always faced opposition and had to make comprises to get anything at all pushed through. I really wanted nationalized health care, but the best Obama could do was Obamacare – which isn’t great, but is sooo much better than the whole ‘pre-existing conditions’ denial system we had before. I really want the U.S. to stop backing Israel because of the Gaza crisis, but I don’t want to see all the surrounding nations to wipe Israel off the map if the U.S. isn’t there. I thought Biden gave a fantastic State of the Union speech. We know it was on a teleprompter, but he delivered with energy and style. I suspect his decline (as with so many other aging people) has been uneven/sporadic, so I can’t even blame anyone for ‘hiding’ his decline because I bet everyone was seeing lots of good days in there, too – at least until the last month or so.

Off topic: I have a relative going through a sudden decline. She’s been old for a long time, but the last couple months have been a dramatic change for the worse despite no particular health issue. She’s just suddenly much, much older and even her neighbors are commenting to us family. Seeing it in her, I imagine Biden might be going through the same thing.