It’s a freak out because they’ve been called milks for an exceptionally long time. “Milk” has never exclusively meant the product of lactation in English. It’s always referred to something white and more opaque than not.

http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/grec31.htm

As another reply mentioned, we specifically have recipes for almond milk from before modern English.
It’s hardly a new thing, just something gaining popularity.

We have specific regulations to prevent consumers from buying the wrong thing within reason. Because most people assume milk means cow milk in the US, that’s what the standard of identity for milk refers to. We don’t need legislation specifically saying that plant milk can’t use the word because you already can’t pickup two jugs labeled “milk” and be unsure if they’re the same thing. Same as goat milk, sheep milk, milk of magnesia, 2% milk, whole milk, skim milk, vitamin D milk, lactose free milk, chocolate milk or strawberry milk.
Hell, “muscle milk” is only technically barely a milk product, absolutely isn’t milk (two milk derived proteins that using prevents a product from being labeled cheese and relegates it to “cheese product”), and would be stupendously unsuitable for cooking. No one complains about it, nor how it contains no muscle at all.

I’d find concerns of consumer protection a lot more credible if they had insisted that other animal milks couldn’t be labeled as such, or at least objected to things like “coconut water”, “rose water”, “cactus water”, “birch water”, “maple water”, “water chestnuts” or “watermelon”. Consumers are evidently only confused by plant milk though, which also prevents them from reading the name of the product. Works fine for other animal milks though, and anything that isn’t milky.

Milky way, milk thistle, milk weed, milk tree, dandelion milk… The list goes on. Oh, and don’t forget cream of wheat or tartar, for when your milky substance is also thick.

Eh, I’m not nearly so optimistic. They also got terribly worked up over the word “milk” and labeling plant based burger “burger”.

It’s more about bending over backwards to protect the meat and dairy industry from facing any possible missed revenue opportunity than protecting their actual bottom line, and more importantly about demonstrating their continued utility to the industry.
Kinda like how they’ll work hard to prevent gun regulations that no one is actually proposing because the perception of the possibility of a threat is unacceptable.

It’s definitely worthy of severe remorse. I can’t go so far as to hope for failure though, because too many perfectly good people would be ruined by that.

100% thought you had done that, and just wanted to ramble some clarification in case. :) it’s pretty easy to focus on the “big” elections, and how what makes them shitty is essentially the “small” elections working properly-ish.

Personally, I’ve always wondered about a system where people directly vote for the representative they want regardless of geography, and then that person represents their constituency.
Geography used to represent a much more significant part of a persons interests, since you likely worked reasonably near where you lived, shopped and everything else. That’s less true now.
It’s moot since we’re not changing the fundamentals of our system anytime soon, but it’s interesting to think about.

It appears you’re saying that in some circumstances it’s appropriate to layout voting districts based on the political affiliation of the people who would end up in the various districts, with the intent of ensuring some seats are won by a minority party that would otherwise not hold power.

I’m saying that districting should be based on shared interests, predominantly geographic in nature because that’s how our system is designed, but that it should definitely not factor in political affiliation.

This means that if a political group is spread out and in the minority, they will not be represented by someone sharing their party affiliation, and that’s as it should be in our system.

Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Your regional representative is supposed to represent your region. If you’re the minority in the region then you don’t get to pick the representative.

We don’t have a proportional voting system. The system is not designed to ensure that elected party makeup matches voter preference distribution.
The minority voters in your scenario get their say in the Senate votes where everything is equal and the district is the entire state.

In any case, the scenario you’re describing is more representative of the cracking type of gerrymandering that’s the problem. A collection of voters in a region being split amongst multiple districts to dilute their votes is what gerrymandering is.

The issue is less to do with votes inside a district, and more with the apportionment of the districts themselves.

For something like the presidential election a popular vote makes (more) sense.

Where gerrymandering comes in is regional representatives. I’m supposed to have a congressional representative who represents me and my neighbors.
‘Districting’ is the general practice of defining what constitutes a group of neighbors. When done properly you tend to get fairly compact districts that have people living in similar circumstances represented together. The people living near the lake get a representative, as do the people living in the city center, and the people living in the townhouses just at the edge of town do too. (A lot of rules around making sure that doesn’t get racist or awful, but that’s a different comment). ‘gerrymandering’ is the abuse of the districting process to benefit the politicians to the detriment of the voter. Cutting the districts in such a way that people who tend to vote the same way get spread around to either never or always get a majority share, depending on if you want them to win or not.

The above poster is wrong, and gerrymandering never had a valid usage. If 10% of the population has a political belief but they’re spread out amongst different districts, then they’re supposed to lose, not have the system bend over backwards to give them a special group.
Districting has value though, since it’s the way the system is supposed to allow people from smaller areas to have their voices heard without being drowned out by bigger areas, but fairly, such that each representative represents roughly the same number of people.

Other countries also do this type of districting, they just have other systems in place that keep it from being so flagrantly abused.

What you take away from my message is up to you.
The sad reality is that a large portion of the country is very conservative and there’s only so much you can do within the system to stop the system from expressing the will of the people in it.
That the system failing people seems to make people move towards an ideology that makes the system fail more people is frustrating.
Most people aren’t in favor of fascism, but a slow drift into fascism is preferable to every systemic reform that could do anything to stop it in most people’s eyes. “Of course someone in Wyoming shouldn’t get more votes than someone in California, but if we actually do that then politicians might pay more attention to the place with more people to the detriment of the place with less”.

If I had a magic word that would solve everything and make people wake up and remember that our biggest prosperity has always come when we’ve invested the most into science, infrastructure and our society at large I promise you I’d tell you.

Vote as left as can make a difference in every election. Sometimes this will mean voting for someone who’s identical to the Republican on 99% of issues because they’re the only other candidate who can win.

Protest when the opportunity presents itself. This won’t stop them, but it will show some people that they’re not alone in being pissed and freaked out by all this.

If given the opportunity, make life suck for anyone who voluntarily associates with the admin. Sometimes that means taking a moment to share some unsolicited citizen feedback at their job or when you see them at random businesses, and sometimes it means taking their money for a coffee order and then dropping the ticket on the floor. Just make someone’s day a little worse, and make sure they know it’s not just because you don’t like them, but also their choices and beliefs.

Help people around you who might be negatively impacted. The nature of the help is something you’ll have to figure out in the moment.

If the situation becomes dire enough, remember why the second amendment exists and exercise your rights. Or flee to Canada, which is a valid option. People are worth dying for, a country isn’t. And anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.

Unfortunately, because they won the election and got the congressional votes too, there’s very little that can be done inside the confines of the law. Right now they are operating inside the broad outline of the law, so it’s harder to justify extrajudicial response. When that changes, that changes.

:) that’s why I referred to available technology, not the word. “Computers” were available, both as people and as semi-algorithmic adding machines, but the speed, capabilities and operating principles were different to a degree that the only similarities are a name and an abstract mathematical model.

Although picturing the brigades of women with adding machines occasionally sending a telegram to create a 1900s Internet is amusing.

I actually don’t believe you. Like I don’t think your shirt fell apart like that, and I don’t think you bought a plastic shirt.

Fabric lasting a long time isn’t odd. I’ve got a synthetic fabric gym bag from 20 years ago that’s fine. I’ve got a 10 year old synthetic blend shirt that’s never had an issue. I’ve got cotton shirts in the same range.

Synthetic fibers tend to be more expensive, and are more durable for the fabric weight. It’s why they use them for safety equipment.

You’re acting like none of us are familiar with clothes. Where are you buying disintegrating shirts, and why ? I’ve never encountered that and I’ve been wearing clothing for quite a while. I’ve only had any type of clothing tear like that if it snags on something like a nail.

Then why don’t you? There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that.

Your clothing probably isn’t made of plastic. It’s probably made of cotton. If you’re buying unrepairable clothing that’s a choice you made, since I think all of my clothing is repairable and it wasn’t purchased with that intention.

I know why I don’t spend my time patching holes in my hand made underwear: it would be uncomfortable, and it would take more of my time than a 5 pack of underwear costs.

We didn’t invent all this stuff because we’re stupid. We invented it because owning one pair of pants for your adult life is just absolutely miserable.

The other thing is that we’re both using devices that the most powerful people in the world would have absolutely no possibility of using anything close to as recently as 100 years ago. So it’s not just efficiency gains, but fundamental gains in what’s even available.

There’s a point in time where the amount of spices I have in my pantry would be enough to count me amongst the wealthy. Hell, dinner tonight would have made a king blush with how much pepper I used.

Too salty for my taste, the cheese ones make me feel awful and every other flavor tastes like gym bag smell.
Oh, and the dehydration mixed with salt blowing out your taste buds makes water taste off, so you’re just dehydrated longer.

Are you actually thinking that a joke image where someone isn’t overly impressed with doritos is viral advertising? On a platform with negligible traffic? With shills who call the product unhealthy?

That’s so weird I might not even be able to finish my Crystal Pepsi ®.

I mean, they’re definitely not providing the circus.

The phrase literally refers to giving people loaves of bread and a more frequent holding of games and public entertainment to keep people happy, not the notion of just distracted.

The current admin is making it harder for people to meet basic needs, and not doing anything to pump approval ratings.
A more modern sense would be to look for ways to make life easier that doesn’t fix anything, and to make life better that doesn’t improve anything, but has the perk of being explicitly because of the admin. A check for $500 and a set of movie tickets.

I don’t think it’s astroturfing to talk about what food engineers have figured out about human taste preferences.

A lot of people spent a lot of time and money figuring out what drives people to mindlessly eat. Then the ignored the health ramifications and started selling a lot of products that are just different textures of salted sugar fat with glutamate.

Same reason you’ll absentmindedly eat a basket of bread if you have cinnamon butter, or cinnamon rolls.
We can use the food science to predict that there’s probably a mild aged cheese that would be great on a cinnamon roll.

Less the long and narrow and more how it’s used.

A fishing net is also long and narrow, but we usually wouldn’t call it a spear because that’s not how you use it. If you spear something with your net you’ve made a mistake.

Personally, I’d say a duck beak is “spoonish”, and the fish hunters are “grabby”. Some are tweezery, and some are tongy.

People normally feed ducks food like bread. The woman was used to this, so she was startled to see someone feeding ducks birdseed.
We’re used to birdseed being used to feed songbirds or the various tree birds.
When the woman was directly informed that ducks are birds she was directly confronted with the knowledge that we put waterfowl in a different mental category than arboreal birds.
It’s easy to imagine the feeling of realizing you’ve had a very basic, totally benign blindspot in how you conceptualize something as simple as ducks, and the woman’s reaction captures that deep feeling of “now that you say it it’s obvious” that a lot of people have felt. Knowing the feeling, it being slightly uncomfortable but harmless, and the general whimsy of ducks makes it funny.

It’s funny because feeling empathy for silly mistakes makes us laugh.

My advice: only cook the toughest of meats for much longer than that. You can safely go longer, but the tenderness gets to be too much and you cross a line into unpleasantly soft.

Yours looks perfect though! What’d you season with?

“I’m not arguing anything” they say, arguing that it’s not a human right.

Get the fuck out of here with your double think.
Portugal and Sweden not respecting a human right doesn’t make it not a human right. Given how gleefully so much of Europe seems to be to deny people who have lived in the country for generations citizenship, to restrict their freedom or religion, or to just watch them fucking drown, I’m not super keen for the US to use Europe as a role model for human rights regarding citizenship.

Again, if taking someone from the only home they’ve ever known to live someplace they’ve never been, don’t speak the language, and have no citizenship isn’t a human rights violation, then nothing that matters is.
I don’t give a shit if Sweden says it’s fine.