44 days, I take it?
The first few days and weeks were the hardest, of course, but around two months in it would also get a lot easier for me. That’s when it stopped becoming such a frequent thought and I’d even have days where drinking wouldn’t come to mind. Stay strong. Keep it up!
Thanks! You can do it!
I don’t know how many times I had quit drinking before it stuck. Never quit quitting.
I lost track of when I had quit drinking a year or two ago. I was pretty sure it was during the first quarter but couldn’t remember if I quit in 2021 or 2022. I’d tried searching through old messages and stuff but didn’t have any luck.
I just figured out that bank statements would tell me. Looking back, my last liquor store purchase was late March 2021… so I just hit 4 years sober a week or two ago.
I haven’t felt a desire to drink in a long time and it’s really really nice. I went through the worst 6 months of my life last year and worried at the start of it that I would find myself “needing” to drink. But somehow, I never even felt tempted. It kinda blows my mind. 1,465 days without alcohol. That’s a lot of days.
There’s no way in hell I’m drinking today. No question.
I suspect the problem there revolves around “how fast can you produce hydrogen?” Generally, oversupply events (and resulting negative prices) are brief. To take advantage of oversupply / negative prices, hydrogen production (or other energy storage) needs to be able to convert energy to storage very quickly.
I don’t know much about hydrogen plants, but I would guess that they aren’t super “peaky” — meaning they don’t have the capacity to ramp up and generate a lot of hydrogen quickly like they would need to really take advantage of the situation. If that is the case, hydrogen plants can still take advantage (simultaneously helping the grid and helping to stabilize prices) but not to the extent we would like.
“Worker owned and non profit companies should have a free pass to be anti-consumer,” sounds like the less popular opinion to me.
My friends and family absolutely know and see what is happening. When I go to the park and walk, I often hear people talking about what is happening (from the angle of “this is insane; how are they getting away with this.” The lady that manages the corner store that I chat with sees what’s going on. The people I work with are very aware.
Most of the people I know are scared and feel powerless to do anything about it. Of course, some are more aware than others and some are more scared than others, but they are at least moderately aware.
BUT, I live in a very liberal city and the people I just talked about are people I choose to associate with. My sample is heavily skewed.
I also run into a lot of people that are pro Trump. Drive 10 miles outside the city and you start running into a lot more MAGA folks. There are also people that avoid politics and are good at sticking their heads in the sand. Somehow they manage to remain unaware. Ignorance seems to be a concerningly common American trait.
BTW, OP, there’s a good chance the “both sides” people you know are republicans but are embarrassed to admit it. They’re the quiet trumpers — the ones that chose to elect a criminal who tried to violently overthrow the government four years ago. Unlike the rabid, loud MAGA folks, they are uncomfortable talking about this stuff because they know people find their views abhorrent. They use “both sides” as a method to indirectly defend their views without having to admit to having them.
Either that or they’re willfully ignorant about what is going on around them. But I find willfully ignorance and Repubicanism go hand in hand.
The OPCA document is fabulous. It drips with disdain for all of these wonky sovcit arguments while thoroughly dismantling them.
From the article:
There are some important things to keep in mind here, like the fact that 15 of the 17 studies were case-control studies. This kind of research cannot prove cause and effect, and it often does not look at things that might have affected both the exposure and the outcome.
A number of the studies that were looked at were of low quality, which is something that the authors also highlight.
Findings were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.
Soybeans and many other vegetables will pull in trace amounts of lead from the soil. There is probably some amount of lead in most/all soy products (as well as many other products).
California’s lead threshold for prop-65 warning is 0.5 µg/day. From what I gather, this is a very very low threshold.
Private citizens in California can sue and collect damages against companies selling products that should have a prop 65 warning but don’t. This has created a bit of an industry of citizens who go out, buy random products, test them for prop 65 chemicals, and if they find a violation get themselves a reward. From what I remember reading, Asian markets/producers are a very popular target.
This leads to a lot of companies putting labels on their product just to cover their asses. With such a low threshold for labeling and the fact that soybeans can contain lead, it seems to me to be smart business to always put that label on soy products because you might get a batch of soybeans that put your product over the threshold and get yourself sued. My hunch is that there is just as likely to be lead in the prop-65 labeled tofu as the non-labeled stuff and the difference comes down the to producers risk tolerance (or awareness).
Oh hell yeah. I want to see a Dendy reboot.
I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.
Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.
I typed in the url and… yeah, that was A LOT of boobs and butts.
Came back here to see that I mistyped the url. Doubling the “O” results in many boobs and butts.
Yeah, it’s kind of a fun one to play around with when it’s broken. For a slightly different workaround, you can also hold down momentarily on the playback slider, then drag. It’s the quick touch and drag (from the left) that seems to trigger it.
A feature request: add a setting to disable swipe from edge to go to the previous screen. For me, it’s a feature that I only use accidentally when trying to do a different swipe gesture.
Love the app. Thanks for all your hard work!
Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.
Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.
Long hold on the account icon, bottom center.
A pop up will appear allowing you to pick which account you are using (you’ll only see one since you haven’t added a second yet).
Click “edit”
Click “+”
Edit: on that page “pick another server” appears to bring you to that server’s sign up page. If you’ve already created an another account, use the “log in” button, which is below “pick another server”.
Yeah, I did some searching and see that the painting is known by that name but didn’t find anything discussing where the name comes from.
Wikipedia states that the original title was “La Venus del espejo” which translates to “The Mirror’s Venus”
I love your weird knife Wednesday posts. I’m not even into pocket knives, but I always enjoy reading these. Your writing is great and your enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious.
On this train of thought…
OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.
It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.
Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.
What’s “flat chat”? I don’t/haven’t ever done AA. I know a lot of bits and pieces - my mom kicked the habit through AA 25ish years ago.
I had close to two years once in the past. And a year or so another time. Complacency and “forgetting” what it was like are the insidious things that led to me relapsing. “I can drink responsibly” was such an easy lie I told myself because things were feeling easy. Thankfully I’ve learned that lesson and plan to not forget it.