cwicseolfor (has moved!)

Instance was slated to be closed; for as long as this account stays up, my forwarding address is @zeroes.ca!

Dilettante polyglot.: native english, un peu français, 點點中文, litt norsk, un poco de español
Profile photo -: Six-petaled white flowering crow's poison in the slant-light of sunset on dark grass
Header -: Moss growing up between the flagstones in the Forbidden City, Beijing

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npub19yp8l272nqtafrac76ntgr74yjht20kpgusk5u74u6j40duenqqq463krq

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cwicseolfor_at_urbanists.social@momostr.pink

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nprofile1qqszjqnl409fs97537u0df45pl2jft448mq5wgt2w027df2hk7vesqqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds9y4mdp

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Last Notes

2025-08-24 17:40:24 UTC

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#alt4you White text on black:
"The USA is the most heavily taxed developed nation once you include healthcare insurance
— a de facto tax, and other compulsory payables.
Add compulsory car and property insurance, student loan repayments, childcare costs, and prescription coverage. These are the compulsory payables of American life:
Pay, pay, and keep paying — more than nations that actually provide universal services in return."

2025-08-22 02:07:23 UTC

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Coming from where that propaganda is thick, reminding people that it's just methane sometimes helps them over that hurdle of language. (I'm sure OP above being knowledgeable has mentioned that before, but many many people do not know - I didn't, despite being an informational sponge, until just a few years ago.)

2025-08-12 17:14:18 UTC

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Likewise, link shorteners don't need to be used on Mastodon - all links automatically truncate to count as 23 characters. So for transparency, privacy, and internet security it's better to paste links plain-text.
Fedi tips article: https://fedi.tips/you-dont-need-link-shorteners-on-mastodon/

2025-08-12 06:38:51 UTC

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Tri-fold’s a game-changer, at least on my face shape, thanks to the flat flap under the jaw. For me the KNs were just-right (on the smaller side) but the N95 bifolds always gapped at either side of the nose or under the jaw, from being too large to be snug. It’s frankly depressing that there aren’t more sizes available this late in the pandemic; I thought we’d have continued innovating and have transparent, lip-readable, low-profile elastomerics by now.

2025-08-12 06:02:57 UTC

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It’s only anecdata but until I tried tri-fold N95s I couldn’t find a bi-fold to seal to me half so well as the KNs, leaving me dependent on my elastomeric. So there may be at least a few cases where that’s the better-fit option.
None of that makes sense of Mr. Dangling Strap, though. Maybe he was sipping water a moment before (not ideal but understandable.)

2025-08-10 21:23:33 UTC

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Do you have that reaction to sugar broadly? That's a *ton* more sugar than chocolate just by mass, so that would be my guess.

2025-08-06 03:55:48 UTC

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Baking is absolutely the gateway to creative cooking. I didn’t start cooking in seriousness until I’d been baking for some years (although not sure it deserves to be dignified as such - I’m anything but scientific when baking, I didn’t even own a scale until last year and bought it for *brewing.* It’s all by feel.)
But the “big batch of something for all week” really is the way. We just finished a big chickpea curry and a big round of pasta sauce. Ready stuff in the fridge is bliss.

2025-08-06 03:46:26 UTC

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Is it dinner all week? Works just as well in a microwave. I often am improvising and revising dishes throughout the first serving and sometimes well into its tenure as leftovers, though. Drove a friend batty until he concluded what I was doing was actually creative work which unlocked an appreciation for it.

2025-08-06 03:42:22 UTC

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I mean the easy way to test this is sticking one leaf at the bottom of a bowl and putting the hot food over it to wilt it.

2025-07-26 15:47:24 UTC

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Texas, specifically (I figured I'd given the US away by referring to "our" crappy electric service in the same breath as US kettle adoption above.) Legacy of sugarcane plantations in the South, I suspect. My father liked an unsugared morning tea but I think he took that up during a stint in New England and didn't get into looseleaf until I was selling it for a living, but then I'd never seen anyone outside of Asian families use leaves at all! Was it like that in AU?

2025-07-24 11:51:25 UTC

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Yeah, US influence just didn't seem a likely theory to me either. I wonder also if the new ~94C water spigots in offices relate, though they're rare in homes yet; looking that up led me to the existence of a branded model called a Quooker which is aerated.
Tea here's fruity, tannic assamica served iced, often sweeter than soda. (Though my family served it black with one to two sugars.) I didn't care for it until school in China, where lovely malty hongcha became an infatuation.

2025-07-23 17:19:42 UTC

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(My first job out of college in the Recession was actually selling looseleaf tea, and it was definitely seen then as a niche, aspirational habit, suggesting worldliness/ fluency in East Asian but especially trendy Japanese culture (though we mostly sold Chinese and Taiwanese teas), often thickly meshed in diet and detox culture, some alt-pharmacy herbalism or magic types …and the matter of "how to get hot water" was genuinely a regular barrier to adoption. Drove me batty.)

2025-07-23 17:15:19 UTC

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Oh, sorry, that wasn't clear on my part - I was referencing the suggestion of "American influence" on UK kids from the article. I wondered if that idea was outdated; if UK kids are taking notes from peers, the sort of aspirationally wealthy US kids sharing their lives online via video media are often showing off fancy electric gooseneck kettles.
Until fairly recently, tea culture in America WAS microwaves and tea bags, though. So I wonder how old this "staff reporter" is!

2025-07-23 04:31:11 UTC

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While there’s some truth to USians not using kettles (mostly because our electric service takes much longer to boil water at 120v) they’ve caught on in a big way among fancier coffee and tea consumers, especially the gooseneck style for pourover. Some of these things are $250!
I use a plain cheap model but for a short while had a fancy glass one with multiple temperature settings. Unfortunately they often leak right as the warranty expires, mine included.

2025-07-13 10:27:18 UTC

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Quick aside, the characters you copied are just the transliteration of his surname (Telangpu) by which he’s most neutrally referenced, not the epithet you reference in your toot.

2025-07-10 07:09:14 UTC

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Jokes aside, if you’ve not worked customer service in the last 15-20 years, it may be useful to know that no response is far preferable to anything not full marks in terms of the service rep getting paid their full rate. Companies will use anything lower than 100% satisfaction as a metric to discount their performance score and one bad survey number can cut a few hundred out of someone’s wallet (all pocketed by the company, of course!) for that quarter.

2025-07-06 11:49:11 UTC

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There’s the WASP hangover about idleness/ the cult of work, but I think it’s even more insidious, and the language is a tell.
I think “convenience” is chosen deliberately as part of the marketing. Convenience is seen as indulgence, luxury, something the rich are entitled to beyond question but which the rest of us haven’t earned (and usurpation of which will, or else should, meet with consequences/ natural punishment.)

2025-06-27 14:13:44 UTC

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The solipsism is much of it, seeing people as automata. (But then, that’s what misogyny functionally does, and it starts practically in the cradle, so whatever their other context they have a lot of practice dehumanizing people by the time they’re wealthy and powerful.)
I think the destructive impulse arises when more wealth *can’t* change your relative station - since what matters is the gulf between yourself and others, immiseration of others is the new “more.”

2025-06-27 13:35:32 UTC

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Not to be overly serious but yeah, this is a SIGNIFICANT driver when rural land and/or flyover country is cheaper with a lot of inequality already. E.g. we get a lot of people moving from California in my part of Texas who think we’re some right-wing Mecca, and then we have to listen to them complain about how much Spanish is spoken here and how the locals are disappointingly woke.
I find they’re more likely to move for perceived culture than for tax fear.

2025-06-22 02:46:44 UTC

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#alt4you Tweet screenshot from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC
"The President's disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers.
He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations.
It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment."
Dated 6:42 PM on 6/21/25.

2025-06-10 00:08:10 UTC

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^ Yet more harm Musk has done via Tesla. Electric cars won't save us - we need to dump the car model - but resistance to electrified transport in general is an environmental nightmare.

2025-06-06 14:10:58 UTC

!!!! Holy SHIT? Like even for *him* this seems bad
via David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈‬
‪@whysharksmatter.bsky.social‬
'This seems like a great day to remind Bluesky that Stephen Miller lived four doors down from me freshman year
And our student council person asked him (and everyone) to sign a birthday card for our dorm’s janitor
And he threw a tantrum and wrote an op-ed about not socializing with “the help.”'
https://bsky.app/profile/whysharksmatter.bsky.social/post/3lqv5gxktyk26

2025-05-13 17:03:32 UTC

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As the article points out, even most the GOP in Texas likes renewable power, or did. This is explicitly anticompetitive grifting behaviour and reflects neither Texan public will nor basic reality.

2025-04-18 15:01:18 UTC

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If this was in November things started out even worse than I imagined. Certainly they will not be getting better anytime soon.

2025-04-13 20:40:56 UTC

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The US actually had quite a similar one!

2025-02-16 19:06:40 UTC

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Getting a smartwatch was a lifesaver - multiple timers ON MY WRIST! with LABELS!
But the best tricks I've found are analog. You can imitate a straw box cooker with those vacuum-sealed steel mugs - I put oats, nuts, fruit in one, pour over boiling water, then go about my day. Eventually I'll remember I was hungry, and presto: Oats, with no overboil risk!

2025-02-16 18:59:26 UTC

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I was thinking in terms of apartment-scale storage, but that does have one other significant advantage - baking them would really destroy the membranes and you'd end up with pretty crumbly calcium carbonate. (If you had the option of kilning it you could then use it to make lime, e.g. for plaster... but most of us even outside apartments can't do that at home.)

2025-02-16 18:51:59 UTC

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200F oven, or probably more practical for people not baking a whole oven worth of something daily, just drop in a cup - or the pan or pot you cooked your eggs in, still hot - and pour some boiling water over them.
I kept a vermiculture bin for years on an apartment balcony. It just looked like a planter with slightly sparse plants, because that's all it was. (I got a few tomatoes off it.)
People belabor the layering, but if you throw in wastepaper/ carton with scraps you're good.

2024-11-30 13:39:45 UTC

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While wages (really, distribution of wages, inequality, because the economic production is CERTAINLY there) are the obvious biggest problem, data pretty well shows even people with generous wages, eg. fifteen times minimum wage, mostly spend for today too. There's a strong cultural push to ignore the uncomfortable notion that we might not always be able to work, because then capitalism doesn't value you at all. Same root as downplaying long covid.

2024-10-19 11:49:10 UTC

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The data confirms. My state Texas has been ~5% closer each presidential election to turning blue - 2020 just 5.6% red edge among the ~2/3 of eligible voters who voted!
Why only 2/3? I stood 40min outside in a thunderstorm, no overhead shelter. No mail option. Unannounced closures. Black neighborhoods, police escorted MAGA convoys by polling places!

2024-10-19 11:16:56 UTC

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People are ignoring that canary BECAUSE it happens to be singing in so-called "red states." They imagine most everyone living there resembles the leadership, a tiny minority of stale, pale, male plutocrats, and thus can be safely written off as "deserving" their fate.
We're gerrymandered, voters intimidated and suppressed, but it's still a chance.

2024-10-15 11:47:27 UTC

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Not to mention the racial, disability, and gender impacts. When people work from home their work - not how closely they resemble a professional image which happens to be that of an abled white man in a suit - is the basis for assessment and promotion. There are no parts of the office people can't traverse, the rate of microaggressions plummets (not least because everything is on record), people can be medically safe independent of their coworkers' risk assessment skills.

2024-10-14 21:19:13 UTC

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(Yeah, to be clear I don't think it's inherently masculine, just in a society where masculinity = dominance performance, men usu. get a pass. Just have a 500 char. limit, wanted to appreciate the introspection, note my bypass & why it's useful to me.
I'm not qualified to speak to this on the receiving end, but I've seen other white women do a softer version of the same thing by reflexively expressing *doubt* responding to women of color. That's part of why I think it's a power play.)

2024-10-14 15:32:16 UTC

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Good introspection. Masculine or not, even neurodivergent or not, it’s a habit worth investigating because it creates social discomfort (which eventually bounces back and hits you too when people are tensed for resistance.) I like to default to “thinking about it” even if you think it’s a bad idea at the start; people tell you more, unguardedly, which they like, but you’ve bought time to speedrun the ick of change in private, & it looks good professionally.

2024-10-13 16:21:57 UTC

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Whatever they said, I blocked them just a couple of posts ago for trying the reverse racism card, check their history. Smelled like sealioning.

2024-09-27 00:47:42 UTC

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You are correct that nobody looks but if they DID look it looks good!

2024-09-24 23:48:06 UTC

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Honestly they’re only tiny on a map; by population it’s enormous. If we actually had democracy it’d have been over for them fifteen years ago. Which is why we don’t.

2024-09-16 18:02:15 UTC

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Then there's the emergence of the Special Purpose Acquisition Company model (SPAC) which more or less functions as a loophole or bypass to normal IPO procedures, getting companies on the market which may not have been able to qualify themselves. Whether that's good depends on the company, but obviously any bypass of regulations (writ in blood, as they say - or at least the copper of lost coin?) poses some notable additional risks. 2/

2024-09-16 17:59:24 UTC

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I kept hoping I'd have the burst of energy to do a big serious educational post on this but it hasn't happened, sorry - I kept trying to compare pennies to ghost kitchens in terms of obscurity around both ownership & purpose, what sort of hurdles they have to jump to be listed (most trade OTC/ small exchanges with fewer listing reqs and might not have a lot of the normal disclosures you might hope to see for transparency.) 1/

2024-09-13 17:34:15 UTC

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I like this as a starting point, but rather than IPO, or perhaps as alternative to IPO (but they'd pick IPO every time) - progressive employee ownership plan? That was Bernie's pitch years ago, renewed in 2022 IIRC, and I can TELL you it scared the SHIVERING DAYLIGHTS out of the corpos.

2024-09-13 03:57:53 UTC

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Honestly I don’t know of any period in human history when women’s lives weren’t prioritized over the fetus they might be carrying. An adult capable of childbearing was the sum of a huge social investment, not to mention part of the social fabric. It took a lot longer and many more resources to produce another grown woman than another live birth infant (even then with only 50% odds of survival, needing a grown woman to nurse it.)
It has actually *never* been this bad.

2024-09-09 12:09:58 UTC

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The moments when you realize things are *different* elsewhere. I don’t know that people in my state could be often unaware of these laws becsue they reach so far as to hit private citizens. Example from 2017:
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/if-youre-boycotting-israel-texas-town-then-no-hurricane-relief-you

2024-09-08 16:39:43 UTC

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That magic when it's liquid until you open it, and the escaping CO2 flash-freezes it.

2024-07-06 01:39:17 UTC

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It's important work. But any important work is worth taking breaks from, too, when you need them. I hope you can find a balance that makes it sustainable to keep doing.