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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • They’re processed, yes. The corn is milled, pressed into triangles, coated with preservative-heavy flavor powder and cooked in one order or another, possibly repeatedly.

    What makes it ULTRA processed?

    Frickin… most raw potatoes are “processed” because they’re typically not covered in topsoil when they get put in 5lb plastic bags.

    A grass-fed organic, antibiotic free, roaming free-range massaged poterhouse steak is “processed” because it’s not still attached to the cow.

    I’m trying to understand the definition, here. Almost everything is processed to some degree or another.

    Is white flour ultra processed because they bleach and de-hull the wheat berries? Or only when it’s made into cake flour? Or do both of those count as “processed” and only “cake MIX” counts as “ultra processed”?

    Am I making sense?


  • Do they?

    I don’t even know what an “ultra processed food” •IS•.

    How is it different than the “processed cheese product” that passes for most individually wrapped “American cheese” cheese slices? Or is that ultra processed?

    Are Doritos ultra processed or just the regular kind of processed?

    Which kind of ground beef qualifies for “ultra”? Only the pink slime or anything that’s been chemically treated?

    I’m not being a pedantic contrary asshat, I legitimately do not know what qualifies something to be in this category and why it’s worse than normal processing.

    Bpa from plastic tubing used in the processing of Annie’s organic leeched into the food. Is that considered contamination or a side effect of processing?


  • I personally felt like it was a reference to the complete lack of corporate loyalty to it’s employees.

    It’s hard to have a “career” in the classical sense the way my 90 year old grandparents did.

    You can still choose a field of work and if you’re lucky you’ll get to stay in it for most of your adult life, but between outsourcing in IT, fields being made redundant as technology advances/changes (from cashiers and retail to journalism and marketing, accounting, and phone work) and whole fields of manufacturing work getting shipped overseas, the number of lifelong fields of work available is rapidly shrinking, facing fierce competition for jobs, and becoming a moving playing field faster than most people can retrain for.

    “HR” jobs could get halved or more with chatbots providing benefits and payroll adjustment information. “Big data” is doing most of the “market research” that advertisers handled manually 30 years ago.

    Big money is still trying to sell us the “career” dream because it leads to the school loan debt they feed off of and temporarily gluts fields with workers to reduce salaries, but only a few handfuls of fields of work really have “career” style options anymore.

    I took it not as an insult to the people trying to have one, but as disdain and disgust at how the word gets bandied about like so much bait on a hook when the reality is fastly becoming far different for the 20- and 30- somethings of today.

    That might be just me being both charitable and jaded, though.











  • This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.

    The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.

    Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.

    Make it an end user safety feature.

    Force every notification to have

    “This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”

    with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.


  • What do you use now?

    I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

    Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.


  • Nope. Realistically speaking, in more than half of the cities that have some form of public transportation in the U.S., the public transportation is so inadequate that it’s not an alternative.

    At one point, a few years ago, to go from the northwest suburbs of minneapolis (maple grove/brooklyn park) to the north central suburbs of minneapolis (eden prairie/edina) by bus, on a weekday, it took 11 hours, a trip farther south into the city proper (spoke routes coming out from a central hub) and mutiple MILES of walking between stops. For a 20-ish mile trip.

    This is FAR from uncommon for anywhere with a bus system if you get anywhere outside the absolute center of the infrastructure. The spoke methodology meant you could get from the suburbs (and farther) to downtown and back just fine, but as soon as the busses stopped running every ten to fifteen minutes, you were looking at hours of switching routes and waiting to get from anywhere not central to anywhere else not central.

    That’s not an alternative to using a car, it’s a marginally available, occasionally usable, limited choice alternative to SOME walking, SOME of the time.

    Until there are 24 hour, regularly and frequently scheduled public transportation options going everywhere there are roads to, public transportation cannot be a viable alternative to all car use.

    I’d settle for it being a viable alternative to SOME car use, but much of the time, outside of a handful of MAJOR cities, it’s not.

    …and I took the bus in Minneapolis for years, despite having a car and a license. It makes sense when you live and work downtown, but that’s about it.

    The public transportation in most cities is only functional in the sense that the ignition works in the busses and they occasionally drive between a few points in a few areas.