Careful, when the couple bottles I already have kicking around run out I might try to take you up on that offer.
Assuming you’re Canadian, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting a few different parts of your country a handful of times, and each one was of the most memorable trips of my life, so I’m always happy for an excuse to return.
Depending on where you are, it may not even be the longest drive I’ve taken to get some whiskey (current record is about 12 hours)
I’m not much of a JD fan in general, it’s an OK whiskey but it doesn’t do anything that plenty of other whiskeys don’t do better.
I had a personal boycott of JD going for a few years, my wife and I are both whiskey drinkers and we visited TN for the 2017 eclipse. We decided while we were there we might as well make a detour to the distillery. I’m sure with the eclipse it was probably one of the busiest tourism weeks they’ve had there, so we weren’t surprised to find a long line waiting for us. We made the most of it, it took us about 45 minutes to get to the front of the line, it snaked through a little mini museum, and it gave us some time to decide which tour we wanted to do.
But when we got to the front of the line we were informed that all of the tours we were interested in were sold out, and the only one available was the one that didn’t allow you to try any whiskey at the end.
At no point during the 45 minutes we were standing around did they make any sort of announcement or put a sign up or anything to let us know that the other tours were sold out, if they had we probably would have decided to just go on that tour, but that really pissed us off, so we left.
I decided that I wouldn’t give Jack any of my money after that, not that I was buying a whole lot of it anyway.
A year or two ago they ran an ad campaign with some drag queens. I decided that my personal boycott had gone on long enough and I could reward that little bit of token wokeness, although I have to admit that I still haven’t bought any JD since then.
And like too many other companies it looks like they’ve now rolled back their DEI initiatives, so fuck 'em, back on the boycott list they go.
Now as a whisky drinker in the US, I’m disappointed that there’s going to be tariffs affecting Canadian whisky, I’m a little torn as to whether I should support my favorite Canadian brands or avoid them since the tariffs are going to be funneling money to the trump administration.
I’m certainly going to be cutting back on my American whiskeys and many other American products in protest. I encourage my fellow whiskey drinkers to the north to do the same, you guys make some fine rye, I’ll gladly take some Alberta Premium over almost anything made in the States.
I suspect I’m going to find myself drinking a lot of Scotch, Irish, and Japanese whisk(e)ys for the next few years, but I look forward to the day when I can hopefully enjoy some Canadian rye again without Trump’s tariffs.
If you keep an eye out for restaurants and such going out of business, you might be able to pick one up for pretty cheap, around me a lot of them seem to go to auction sites like hibid for liquidation
And of course weird things turn up on Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, etc. from time to time.
I suspect some of the newer slicers probably weigh less it looks like they’re mostly stainless sheet metal these days, but mine is made of some pretty massive solid metal castings and probably weighs close to 100lbs, so if you track one down like mine probably plan on bringing a friend to help move it. I can muscle it around to clean it and such, but I wouldn’t really want to carry it to or from my car, or up or down the stairs by myself.
Connective tissue can break down at a lower temperature, it just takes a lot longer, that’s the concept behind sous vide cooking after all.
I don’t think I’m breaking down a lot of that tissues, but it does seem to be doing something, it does seem to come out a little more tender from my smoker than the oven at a higher temperature, not a massive difference, but a little.
But yes, the thin slices is definitely the bigger factor, and I don’t really want it falling apart tender anyway so it can slice down cleanly.
I have a globe 150, which is definitely more of a commercial slicer, although one that’s probably 60+ years old.
I couldn’t be happier with it, and they do turn up occasionally on Facebook marketplace and such once in a while, so if you see one for a decent price snatch it up. With a little searching you can even find replacement parts for them online.
It probably would be if I were slicing it by hand, but slicing it down to lunch-meat thickness on the slicer kind of makes up for that.
And while I’m not going as low and slow as if I was BBQing, I’m normally aiming for about 250° when I do it in my smoker, which is a bit lower than I’d normally do one in the oven, so it does get a little extra time to break down the connective tissue.
But even when I do them in the oven I find that they come out just fine.
The model I have is a Globe 150, which is probably at least about 60 years old, still does its job just fine though.
Globe is still around and making slicers (I think they’re actually sort of the brand for slicers,) but you’re not gonna find them new for around $200, looks like their cheapest model is just shy of $1000, they’re definitely geared towards the commercial market.
I find it to be useful, but I wouldn’t say that everyone would. I work a weird night shift schedule, which leaves me up by myself at night, so I have plenty of time to roast something up, slice it, and break down and clean the slicer while my wife is asleep. It’s heavy and takes up a lot of space so you kind of need to have a dedicated table or counter space for it, you’re not going to want to move it around a lot. I also live close to a restaurant depot that’s really liberal with their guest passes, so I can buy whole deli meats and cheeses from there too.
If this slicer ever dies on me, I don’t know that it would be worth it to me personally to replace it with a new one, but if I could snatch up a used commercial slicer for less than $500 I’d jump on it.
Not exactly what you’re talking about, but I was gifted a full sized deli slicer from an uncle who found he wasn’t using it much anymore, so I’ve been making a lot my own lunch meats. Chuck roasts and those boneless butterball turkey roasts are probably the things it’s seen the most of.
I do them in the smoker a lot, but I’m treating it more like an oven than BBQ, taking it to about medium rare. They still pick up a nice smokiness, and slice down beautifully on the slicer and it’s of course just a better tasting product.
Initially I kind of thought I’d be getting prime ribs for the slicer, and got a chuck as sort of a test, I was so happy with how the chuck came out I never really felt the need.
It probably could save me a bit of money, but I’m definitely loading my sandwiches up with a lot more meat than when I was buying deli meat, so I’m probably about breaking even on it.
I’ve also started dabbling in curing and smoking my own bacon and such, and again the slicer works wonders for that.
don’t use colloquialisms, or soft language.
Honestly, part of the problem with the current crop of right wing assholes, is that a lot of them are so fucking brainwashed that they don’t even realize that what they’re supporting is just outright fascist/Nazi bullshit, so if you ask them point-blank “Are you a Nazi/fascist” they’re going to answer “no” and truly believe that, even as they’re supporting rounding up immigrants into concentration camps and “ironically” making Nazi salutes.
They have absolutely mastered 1984-style doublethink and duckspeak. They’ll prattle on about being free speech absolutists while wanting to remove books about trans people from libraries or banning people with different opinions from their social media sites. They’ll talk about being fiscally conservative while absolutely fucking the economy. They’ll rant about draining the swamp and eliminating the deep state while they give some unelected goon unprecedented power to do whatever the hell he wants in the government with no consequences.
And they see absolutely no contradictions there.
So you kind of have to play fucking word games with them if you want to actually sus out what their actual thoughts are.
Tangential to this, but I’ve always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn’t in the loop
Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.
The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet
Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he’d be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he’d be out of office and we’d be about half a year into Dubya’s first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.
Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.
Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we’re getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.
We receive their reply about a year into Obama’s first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.
Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn’t even get to take part in this particular conversation.
We won’t get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn’t croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)
So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president’s hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.
You can see a pretty clear difference looking at fertility rates between red states and blue states. So there is definitely something to the idea.
What’s a bit harder to sort out is whether it’s because more conservatives are choosing to have kids in general, or if those who do are just more likely to have multiple kids.
I don’t think the argument is really that becoming a parent makes you more conservative, it’s more the other way around- conservatives are more likely to become parents
On paper it makes some amount of sense, with the lack of belief in abortion and contraception, emphasis on “traditional family values” and such.
In actuality, I don’t know if it holds water. I’ve seen a couple studies done on that idea, and the results have kind of been a bit of a mixed bag, I think my takeaway was more that conservatives who have kids tend to have more of them than liberals who have kids, but overall rates of liberals and conservatives who have kids in general were pretty damn close.
The first words in the body of his post are “barrel jacks” so to me it definitely reads like he knows exactly what they are and they are what inspired his post.
Since other, probably more common, names for “coaxial power connector” include things like “barrel plugs” and “barrel connectors” and such terms are used pretty frequently in the article you linked.
The rest of it feels like he’s just trying to explain the concept to people who aren’t as familiar with them.
But otherwise I agree with your comment, the lack of a standard is a big reason. In my various bins of wires, cables, and adapters I can find plenty of different mismatched wall warts with the same connector but otherwise wildly different specs. You don’t really want to be mixing and matching those all willy-nilly.
Also they’re overall a fine connector if all you need to do is deliver power to something, you only need a hot and neutral wire and the corresponding part of the inner and outer part of the plug (I feel like I’ve seen some that have a ground too, but don’t quote me on that, I’m not going to go digging through my bins to confirm that)
But nowadays we also often need a way to carry data to/from the device in addition to charging it. So to carry those data signals in addition to power you’d need more connections in the plug. You’d need to either have a couple pins inside the barrel which would need to be lined up properly which kind of negates the convenience of it being omnidirectional like OP wants (think maybe something like a ps/2 or S-Video plug) or you’d need to have multiple concentric rings which would make the plug bulky, probably too much so to conveniently fit into something like a cell phone.
Now a lot of the devices we’re charging by USB don’t necessarily need or even support any sort of data through their ports, and so could be charged or powered just as well through a barrel plug. So why USB?
IMO a lot of it comes back to iPods. For a lot of us who were around in the pre-smartphone days, that was our first experience with something that charged over USB. I seem to recall that apple didn’t even include a wall charger with them (pretty sure I remember a Foamy the Squirrel flash animation where he ranted about that) you just got a USB cable and either charged it off your computer or you went out and bought a wall adapter.
I’m sure that was a cost-cutting/cash-grab attempt by apple. They could sell you an iPod without a charger and save a few pennies there, and then also sell you a charger for even more money.
Around that same time, phones were also getting USB ports, or some proprietary connectors that you could buy an overpriced cable to connect it to a computer via USB so that you could pull your .5 megapixel flip phone photos off of it and post them to your Myspace. Often they came with a charger that had a mini or micro USB port or the proprietary connector on one end and was hard-wired to a wall wart on the other end.
I’m sure some bean counters at Nokia or Motorola or wherever decided “why the hell are we going to add 5¢ to the production cost of a phone to have a charging port and a USB port for data when USB already can deliver 5v of power? Just build the phone battery around that and nix the charging port”
And I’m sure that played out with plenty of other devices that needed power and data connections- GPS, PDAs, etc.
And so from there, people started having an iPod and cell phone in their pockets that both charged over USB, and before long they’d have a USB charger at home, at work, in their car, in every room in their house, so other devices kind of latched onto that as sort of a marketing thing “you don’t need to keep track of a separate charger just for this thing, you can use the same one you charge your phone with”
And of course before too long TVs, game consoles, AV receivers, etc. all got USB ports too.
As I recall, it mostly started with things that made sense, things you were probably using with your phone or computer anyway- Bluetooth earpieces, mice, keyboards, etc. then sort of branched out into everything else over the years.
You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)
I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds
It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.
I overall agree with technology connections on this with two caveats.
I have, in my day, used some truly craptastic electric stoves that seriously struggled to get a normal sized pot of water to a rolling boil. This was definitely the cheapest, crappiest stove that an Airbnb owner could possibly find to furnish the kitchen with.
I’ve also used some really crappy gas stoves but none have struggled that hard. So I think if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for budget brand stoves, you may find yourself really frustrated with some electric options.
Also, my home stove is a somewhat less craptastic electric stove, but still not at all high end. I find that for some of my cookware the burners are too small resulting in some serious hotspots in the middle while you can barely cook on the outer edges even after letting the pan preheat for a decent amount of time. You’re always going to have some amount of a hotspot with almost any stove, but this one is really drastic, and I’ve never experienced anything so bad on gas stoves, probably because the heat escaping around the edges manages to heat the outer parts of the pan a little better.
I’m not exactly pining for a gas stove, and I can’t have one in this house even if I wanted one, but it is a little frustrating sometimes as someone who likes to cook, which technology connections has admitted is not one of his many niche interests.
My next stove will be induction, and probably every stove I ever buy after that.
I guess the overall takeaway from this is, if you’re buying an electric stove and actually like to cook, don’t cheap out and make sure you get one where the burners can handle the size cookware you might use.
I work in 911 dispatch, my job is talking to people, and often quite unpleasant people at that.
On my own time, fuck that noise. Live conversation kind of sucks. When it’s next based I can walk away from it, think about it, come back write my reply and hit send. Most of the time I can’t exactly walk away from a live phone, radio, or in-person conversation and say “hey, good question, I’m gonna go take the dog for a walk while I think about that and get back to you in like 10 minutes” there’s an expectation that I’m gonna be there engaged in the conversation and keep everything flowing, and most of the time that sort of urgency just isn’t needed. I want to be a part of the conversation, but I don’t necessarily have big chunks of my leisure time to set aside to just talking to people, but I can squeeze in a message here or there while I’m doing whatever else I’m doing.
Take this whole exchange for example, I saw your comment, decided I wanted to reply to that, but I had some things I needed to take care of, so I did them, thought about what I was going to say, and wrote it out when I had a few minutes. You’re going to see it when it’s convenient for you, and maybe write your own reply, which I’ll see and reply to when it’s convenient for me, and so we’ll have a back-and forth conversation that may span a few hours or even days, even though each of us only wrote a couple messages.
I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)
When their accents are so thick that you can’t even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you’re counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that’s a problem.
We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it’s taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can’t know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can’t really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don’t know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.
I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I’ve gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don’t think I’d ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I’ve never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.
You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there’s some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.
I’m not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they’re saying the alarm is at the “Wendy’s” (I would have sworn that they were saying “Landis,” we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)
Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.
And don’t get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I’m proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I’m sad that my own ancestors didn’t keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can’t really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes
My family is polish, I’ll second the bacon. Also dried mushrooms, I want to say my babci used porcini
I don’t disagree with the need for local, on-demand production for some oddball parts in some cases, but I do think that 3d printing is the wrong technology for it in this case
This seems like a perfect use for some sort of CNC lathe to me. Pipes are cylinders, and lathes are pretty much the perfect tool to create cylindrical objects. Chuck a piece of metal (or whatever material you need to make the part out of), turn it down to the correct inner and outer diameters, cut the right threads on either end, and you’re good to go. Need to be able to pet a wrench on it? Start with hex stock.
I’d have a lot more confidence that a part isn’t going to start leaking if it’s carved out of a solid piece of material than if it’s made out of many layers of material deposited on top of each other.
The only thing a lathe would struggle with is things like elbows and tees, but with a little know-how you can get around that by just making adapters to more readily available standard elbows and such, using flexible tubing, tube benders, etc.
The idea of 3d printing these parts really feels like a “when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail” situation.
Philly area
Yes cheesesteak, hoagie, soft pretzels.
But I believe strongly that a roast pork Italiano sandwich loaded up with sharp provolone, roasted long hots, and broccoli rabe is the best Philly sandwich.
Go a little out into the suburbs around Norristown, and you’ll also find the “Zep” a sort of pared-down hoagie, one kind of meat, cheese, oil and spices, tomatoes, and plenty of onions.
I’m not going to wade into the minefield of which sandwich shops are best except to say Pat’s and Geno’s are garbage, but maybe worth it for the experience if you’re a tourist. Avoid anywhere that advertises as a “Philly Cheesesteak” look for cheesesteak, steak sandwiches, or even just steaks. For a Zep I don’t think it’s controversial to say Lou’s ro Eve’s are the places to go.
Tomato pie- close relative of pizza, thick sort of focaccia-like crust, square, thick tomato sauce, dusting of Parmesan cheese, served cold. Staple of many parties here.
Also in the suburbs - Franzones pizza, Bridgeport is the original location, but the original owner sold it to a relative and opened the one in Plymouth/Conshy location and another in Manayunk. You’re going to either love or hate the pizza, thin crust, very sweet sauce in a spiral on top of the cheese. There’s a few imitators out there but Franzones is the original.
This is the right time of year for them so “Irish Potato” candies. Sweet cream cheese and shredded coconut, rolled in cinnamon. Nothing Irish about them but they kind of look like potatoes.
Zitners Easter eggs- chocolate candies with various fillings.
Goldenbergs Peanut Chews- chewy molasses candy with peanuts covered in chocolate
Mallow Cups- like a Reese’s cup but full of marshmallow and coconut instead of peanut butter
Scrapple - don’t ask what’s in it, just eat it.
Pork roll (kind of a jersey thing, but ubiquitous in Philly too) it’s basically round spam
Pepperpot soup- this is old Philly food, like revolutionary war Philly, it’s damn hard to find these days but every few years some local restaurant gets the idea to recreate it. It’s a hearty, slightly spicy beef and trip soup. There’s some Caribbean pepper pot soups that are kind of similar.