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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.

    I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!

    I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!


  • That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills… Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn’t there like it is in landfills since there’s so much poop to eat, haha.

    Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we’re at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.

    I’m actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I’m a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug – so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it’s much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.


  • I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).






  • Pretty sure it’s the beaters (assuming that’s an electric hand mixer type-thing, i’ve never heard them referred to by that term) that made them gummy. Over mashing will break up the cell walls too much, releasing the starches and ruining the texture. Cooking chopped or whole doesn’t matter as much, since the number of cells broken by chopping is negligible. And the skin is water permeable anyway.

    You gotta mash by hand, that’s all.


  • Our pastor did a whole six-week long study of Acts, talking about how we needed to give more so we could fund mission trips and whatnot. I got caught up in it all (he was quite the orator, I’ll give him that) and donated a decent chunk of the money I’d been saving up to get a new iPod.

    My sister went on one of the mission trips and had to pay for literally everything out of her own pocket. Despite the plentiful donations for, allegedly, that express purpose.

    Cherry on the cake was that they soon broke ground on a new youth group building (which we didn’t need), complete with a coffee house (with prices and menu comparable to Starbucks). All I could think of was Jesus getting pissed at the vendors and money changers in the temple and flipping tables over. “‘My house will be called a house of prayer’, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers’.”