It was primarily that shadow. Until recently I worried every time I fidgeted too much or got angry enough that I wanted to punch somebody [0].
Knowing I could become sympathetic at any point made me more conservative in my career. Once that happened I would have less than five years of earning left. As a kid I wanted to start a business [1], but that was always too risky. Instead I’m the guy who actually considers the employer life insurance options because there’s no way anybody will insure me on my own. I’ve worked at a couple of late stage startups, but I’ve never been part of the early days where payroll is on the line every month.
This could have been mooted by a genetic test at any point. My wife, brother and mother thought I shouldn’t get tested. They’re the ones who know me the best, so their unanimity was influential. But it was my decision all along and I own it.
[0] In hindsight the fact that I never actually acted on a violent impulse should have been reassuring instead of worrying)
Any tips for setting up a smartphone with a macropad as mentioned? I like this idea but worry it introduces a lot of complexity for the non-smartphone literate population.
Does anyone have suggestions for an simple audiobook/music player like this for the elderly and or those mild dementia? It should have large, tactile buttons, simple play/pause interface, volume control (ideally knob), and be able to read from sdcard or usb/
- I've used the Relish 'dementia radio' [1] before. Its a radio with support for reading from usb, but has no memory so useless for audiobooks. Very overpriced.
- The 'National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled' has excellent cassette type players [2], but they only take their cartridges. Ideally something this format but supporting usb/sd card
- Another comment [3] here suggests a smartphone with a macropad. this could work. they also built a custom solution.
A Yoto player might work. They're designed for children. They have two knobs (with momentary switch) to control everything (and a small on/off button). They're designed to be usable by children who cannot read, primarily through Yoto cards.
These are just NFC type cards with with some kind of DRM. They allow your player to connect to an API, download the audio content (books, music) and store it locally for instant playback whenever the card is inserted.
Normally I hate vendor lock in stuff like this. But surprisingly they also sell "blank" cards. Using the app you can load any audio content "onto" them (same deal - audio is sent to cloud so it can be redownloaded if local storage runs out). These are pretty cheap and can be "wiped" and reused as many times as you want and you can write on them or mark them up. You can even design a specific image to show on screen when your custom card is inserted.
The hardware is good quality too and can survive daily life.
If there is enough material on Spotify, you could grab one of those mini-keyboards with 6 or nine buttons and remap them to play/pause, next, previos, and just leave it on shuffle on one playlist?
It does increase mating as I pull together many packs and teach them to get along with one another. I break up their sparring when it gets too aggressive to preserve their eyes. I even know what music will increase mating when the females are in heat but I can not explain why they like it. We lost a great deal of deer in the last few years and especially two years ago due to incredible snowfall. If anything I have restored some of the population. If it gets out of hand the game department will issue more tags or move some of them to other parts of the state that most of the deer died from starvation. I have also kept them off the highway for the most part. When I first started there are on average 20 dead deer just along my stretch of highway. Now there is 1 every other year.
They are still very much afraid of humans with myself being the exception. If someone gets near their feeding area other than me they will scatter. They all come to me and then go back to the mountains far away from all humans except the hunters. Some of the older bucks even know to get up to 10,000+ feet where there is no food but also mostly no hunters whereas the rest of them go to 9500 feet and get picked off first by bow hunters then firearm and also by predatory animals mostly mountain lions.
Something else that often comes up is the increased rate of getting CWD. This is true however they would all be exposed regardless as they all end up on shared paths eventually as the prions are highly resilient to break-down in nature. It was detected in a town near me and I expect a portion of one of the sub-genome to get it and one of the sub-genome to be immune. I am testing a theory on tightening cell junctions on what scientists mistakenly named the blood brain barrier by reducing inflammatory food intake and only time will tell if that reduces the impact at all.
Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system.
Yep, San Francisco's BRT line has been a huge success (despite being typically way late and over-budget). And actually SF has had 'proto-BRT' for a long time, but IMO they still need more subways.
Bodega does have a growth boundary, per google. (IMO the lack of that is the 'root of all evil' of USA development patterns.)
I enjoy checking all the native plants growing on my place. I discovered another yesterday that I would love to eradicate since it really takes over quickly.
It's in the geranium family Geraniaceae, and is one of the most ancient cultivated plants around. Its use was so common that it has spread from the Mediterranean area where it is native to most every other inhabited place. People ate it and fed it to their animals and it was used as a medicine so they had multiple reasons to carry some with them as they migrated across the landscape.
Supposed to taste like a parsley. I ate some yesterday and agree that it is close to parsley with a slightly more sharp flavor if you just eat the leaves and stems. I tried some of the seed pods and that was a no-go. They would need to be cooked to be edible since they are hard and fibrous raw. I haven't tried the root yet.
It's unlikely that I will ever eat my way out of this invasive infestation but I will add some to the salad to see whether my wife notices.
To be fair, a lot of Asian ingredients have picked up such weird English translations that they could use a rebrand. Case in point: "Prickly pear ash" is an amazingly unappetizing translation of the spice's proper name, sanshō or sancho.
"Prickly ash" is an ingredient in Chinese cuisine, particularly Szechuan cooking. We buy it in quantity at Asian groceries where it's pretty inexpensive.
In the US it's known as "Szechuan peppercorn". Preparing it for use requires carefully inspecting a handful for stems and thorns (which can be quite big), pan toasting and crushing/grinding to a coarse powder.
As pointed out in the sister comment, the spice has a mild numbing effect which counters the heat of chilis. Adding a little to hot dishes makes the flavor more complex and enjoyable.
For people who like to cook it's an ingredient worth experimenting with across culinary boundaries.
Part of the problem with the English translations is this ambiguity. Sansho comes from a different species (Zanthoxylum piperitum) of the same genus, native to Japan and Korea. The flavor is different, but reminiscent. I keep both sansho and red Sichuan peppercorns for use in different dishes.
Is that prickly ash? Like a toothache tree with all the sharp spikes on the trunk?
It looks like sancho is the berry produced by the tree. The leaves look similar to our toothache tree or Hercules Club as some call it. I know that the bark here in NAmerica has been used as a local anesthetic for a long time. It produces a tingly, numbing sensation when it becomes wet. I have used the bark to numb gums or throat pain. I never tried the berries.
My tree here died in the last drought. It was a birdshit variety since it was growing along the fence. The seed was dropped by a bird as it rested on the fence and I got a tree as a result! Gotta wait for the next one I guess.
Different tree, same genus. I'm not sure if all species (of 250+) in the genus have edible fruit, but the berries of several Asian species are harvested for spices, including Sichuan Peppercorns, which are made from the dried berries.
I would bet that the flavor (citrusy, with a numbing effect) is similar among all the species, but varies in strength and pungency. I'm not sure if I would bet that any species is safe to eat, however.
I'll need to look into the ways the tree was used by Native Americans and early settlers. I have known about the use of the bark for decades but don't recall anything about other parts of the tree. Thanks for the information.
You can still live comfortably without depending on private (I meant large private) entities in Kerala. Also there are supermarket chains but they haven't overtaken normal non-chain grocery supermarkets. Not even close. Of the top of my head I can list three chains near me and most of my household lives without needing to buy from them and just going to regular stores.
Edit: To add to it. In Italy, you eat pasta for lunch. To buy cheap pasta you go to Pam/Conad/Carrefour/Aldi/Lidl supermarket chain and buy Pam/Conad/Adli/Lidl branded ones as usually they are the cheapest buy vary in quality. But here getting cheap Rice, for lunch, is different. In Italy, to buy basic milk you do the same and probably the cheap whole fat one is branded by the supermarket. Here, you go to the diary, which gets from a collection of local farmers. To buy eggs, you don't go buy supermarket branded eggs, you could pay someone in your neighborhood with animals to supply. I've never seen supermarket branded eggs until I reached the west to be honest.
The dirty little secret is that mom-and-pop stores are extremely inefficient compared to big chain businesses. A big business is also a lot more likely to actually pay taxes to the government, and it still manages to beat the mom-and-pop store on efficiency even after accounting for that!
Yes, they are efficient, obviously as economies of scale. Add in consulting and quants and they'll rise in profitability. But the problem is decision making power lies in hands of select few. When you are a too large a corporate, you basically have no oversight over how much you can optimize in exchange for ill social effects. All corporates had humble beginnings, and over time hyper optimization for profits creep in. Maybe in the beginning, the synthetic preservative they add to optimize profits, was below the threshold, but over the years as need for profit and 'growth' grows and, managements and mindsets change, they could very well go above the threshold and, being big now be profitable enough even after they were caught and they had to deal with the repercussions. Well why would a rational actor not squeeze every dollar out of the customer when they can still be profitable even when accounting for the money they could pay as repercussions for fraud? I'm not saying mom-and-pop are defenders of righteousness or smth, but just from watching the news I can say I trust them over corporates, because they are A) are scared of law as they have more to loose as a percentage of what they have than INDIVIDUALS in the corporate B) feel better moral, idk attitude?, towards the customer, mostly and COMPARATIVELY than the corps.
Of the top of my head, I think, cooperatives might be the current best solution or some decentralized frameworks/systems for stores considering efficiency vs power concentration.
> pay taxes to the government
Here, at their turnover local stores are exempt from income tax
> When you are a too large a corporate, you basically have no oversight over how much you can optimize in exchange for ill social effects
It's actually easier to have meaningful oversight over a single larger firm than a bunch of local stores. The thing is that what people often refer to as "ill social effects" of large businesses are not proven to any meaningful extent. At least the gain in efficiency is quite real and can be readily ascertained.
So you are saying the individuals (not affiliated to any corporate) in a field are collectively doing/did more harm to people and environment, on purpose, than all the harm corporates in the same field are collectively doing/did, on purpose?
Corporates have power to sway governments/FDA/X in their personal favor (unlike a common individual for his own personal favor). As bigger the power of entity gets to the power of government, more government looses power over it, more at the discretion of its decision makers its users become. Why would a rational actor not do bad for profits if they can get away with it? Why would an entity, with a power, not exercise it, if net benefit to self is positive?
Mom and Pop shops likely won't invest in softwares for inventory or payrolls or analytics but big chains will. That means the more big chain markets swallowing mom and pop shops more capitals invested for software and other tertiary services. This boost GDP
The small shops here are private entities. They're owned by low to mid middle class families - similar to what you might call a 'mom and pop store'. But they're so common around here that we simply call them 'provision stores', 'general stores', etc. There are also small specialty stores like for stationary, agricultural produce, diary and bakery, office work (photocopying, DTP, etc), etc. They usually exist within 5 minutes walking distance of your house. There are even small shops for much rarer stuff like electronics and mechanical components - but they're farther away (my special interest, since I'm an engineer).
They don't have everything - but it's quite possible to live here without having to visit a big chain supermarket. Those chains do exist here and we do use them and online shops like Amazon and Flipkart occasionally for the rare stuff. The point here is that the small shops aren't 'large' private entities. These store owners are in a similar social class as you are and often know you personally. They even help you get the best deals and personally deal with product quality issues. A similar 'middle-class' supply and logistics chain also exists behind them - so it isn't easy for any big player(s) to disrupt and (co-)monopolize the market. They all pay their regular taxes to the local government and spend their earnings in the same local economy. Their economic incentives also align with yours - inflation hurts them as much as it hurts you.
The advantage of this is that multi-billionaire chain owners with their own cartels can't decide when to hoard stuff and drive up profits and inflation. This is very useful in situations like the big-chain-driven post-covid inflation and the current anti-oligarchy protests seen in NA. I was in NA during the post-covid situation. It always felt like a part of that inflation wouldn't have happened if small stores existed everywhere there. Boycotts also work better if you have alternatives. So I made it a point upon return to Kerala to tell everyone how important they are. I shop almost exclusively from them these days.
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