I’m a big fan of their shaken oatmilk espresso drinks.

I realized at a certain point that I could buy a bottle of syrup, a cheap espresso machine, espresso ground coffee, and oatmilk, and this would all pay for itself within a relatively small number of drinks. Like, I dunno, 30-40 drinks depending on the oatmilk and the syrup.

I’ve gotten pretty good at making my own Starbucks-esque drinks, and it means I can control the sugar better.

I’m not sure where the one in the image comes from, it isn’t listed in the Emojipedia page.

Won’t someone please think of these super important churches and their totally-not-coincidentally wealthy pastors?

For the record, a remarkably small percentage of pastors are actually wealthy. Lots of churches have a pretty poor financial outlook these days, and many pastors struggle.

That’s not to say there aren’t rich assholes fleecing (pun intended) their flock, and obviously fuck televangelists, but it’s not the norm for a pastor to be wealthy.

Edit: (Not disagreeing with the stuff about modern Christianity failing utterly to understand itself though.)

Yeah, but 1517 isn’t exactly recent memory.

John Brown was an extremist. This isn’t to demonize him, he was obviously in the right to fight against slavery, but unfortunately systemic progress happens within the system. Extremists can help create the environment for that systemic change to happen, but they can also stymie it depending on their methods and the prevailing ideas of the time. John Brown’s contribution was important, but he was never going to be a reasonable candidate for national office.

Calling Lincoln a centrist because there existed a more radical wing of his party is nonsensical. That’s like saying 1 is not a positive number because 2 is further from 0. Not a single southern state supported him, to the point that his election triggered a war over slavery. He was very firmly an abolitionist, which was certainly a more popular position than it had been previously in American politics, but was far from centrist.

What is going on at Boeing, seems to be way beyond acceptable!

This specific plane was built in 2001, and its engines were made by Pratt & Whitney. Boeing doesn’t build the engines, 747 engines came from Pratt & Whitney, GE, or Rolls Royce depending on the preference of the original buyer.

Air incidents happen all the time (though fatalities are rare). You hear about the Boeing ones because Boeing is in the news (for very good reason, with regard to the 737 MAX and to a lesser extent the 787). But Boeing wasn’t responsible for this incident.

If anything, Boeing’s design of the 747 proved itself yet again. That plane successfully climbed and maintained a holding pattern for 90 minutes after an engine failure during takeoff.

Don’t get me wrong, modern Boeing needs to be overhauled. But older Boeing planes are still remarkably safe. (As are the current ones, the 787 has never suffered a fatality or a hull loss. But they’re playing a dangerous game with safety at the expense of profit lately.)

Ok but how does this stuff keep happening to Boeing planes?

Shit happens to lots of planes. You just hear about the Boeing ones because reporting on them is in vogue.

I recently set up FlightRadar24 to alert me whenever a plane anywhere in the world starts squawking 7700, the emergency code. It’s REMARKABLE how often it happens. At least a few times per day, it seems like. There are well over 100,000 flights every day, and occasionally stuff goes wrong.

(And yet, whenever a fatal commercial air incident occurs it’s global news, because those are still exceptionally rare.)

Lincoln wanted to send the freed slaves back to Africa. He wasn’t as good of a guy as history class made him out to be.

You cannot simply apply modern ethics to the views and actions of people in the past like that. Nuance is required. Our thinking as a society changes over time, and our views as individuals are inherently constrained by what we experience and learn, and by the views of those around us.

For his time, Lincoln was progressive. He was an abolitionist who brought about the end of US chattel slavery.

Man I want whatever drugs you have.

(Honestly this was a fun read, thank you!)

I thought the Apple commercial was really clever. Squeezing all of the stuff into one device. I don’t really understand why people decided that it was about the death of creativity, there’s plenty of creative shit you can do on a tablet. And it’s not like the existence of the iPad precludes using instruments and paint.

Shit, 98% of what my wife does on her iPad is piano and vocal sheet music related.

Well you see, Kevin, your job is to keep at least one wheel inside the white lines. That’s the rules of the sport. Just like lots of sports where staying within the white lines is important!

If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to stay in the sport. If it weren’t for you handing McLaren a win last race I’d be begging you to retire already.

I understand people who miss the banshee scream of the V10s/V12s, or the roar of the V8s, but I’m already annoyed that they’re dropping the MGU-H for 2026.

The current turbo-hybrid engines are INCREDIBLE from a thermal efficiency standpoint. It’s insane. That’s part of why they’re quiet. They’re exactly where F1 should be taking ICE technology. More power from less fuel. Less wasted energy.

But I suppose that F1 is going to lose technological relevance anyway as the world shifts away from ICEs, so we might as well make the spectacle more entertaining. No one cares how useful racehorses are, just whether they’re fast.

Do you know why they call it the Xbox 360?

Cause when you see it you turn 360° degrees and walk away! GOTTEM.

Extension cables: If you have a desktop or tv, you can just grab some USB, hdmi or audio extensions and swap things using that instead of leaning behind the device.

This is what my receiver is for, with regard to the TV. But yeah, even in that case I have a spare HDMI that hangs out near the front of the TV for laptops.

Kettles

Lots of Americans have ones that sit on the stove. I have one that plugs in.

Part of the issue is that most outlets in American houses only provide 120v power, only special outlets provide 240v. So even though an electric kettle will boil faster than one on the stove, it’s not significantly faster like it is in other places.

Merely turning their own rhetoric back on them. But I appreciate the sentiment.

sob there are new terms that describe human beings because gender is not a binary, woe is me, I’m so upset… /s

‘Cisgender’ doesn’t even require there to not be a gender binary! These snowflakes are ridiculous. It’s not a slur, anymore than ‘heterosexual’ is a slur.

If one person pays all or a majority of the mortgage on a property, why do they then have to split that property 50% with somebody who contributed nothing?

Because marriage is a partnership and generally the people who “contributed nothing” are the ones who gave up or significantly delayed or harmed their careers to take up the home front in the marriage.

I know a woman whose wealthy husband told her to sell her small business because she didn’t need to work. A few years later when he divorced her for a younger woman and the prenup says she gets very little, she’s out on her ass with years of no work experience and no more small business.

America has an Oppositional Defiant Disorder problem, it seems.

Like I said in my reply to phoenixz, the term is overused and over-policed on the internet. Culture is meant to be shared.

But there is such a thing as cultural appropriation. Participating or celebrating a culture is fine. Naming your mascot “Chief Wahoo” is not.

I get that. White people carry so much guilt that we sort of knee-jerk about racial stuff.

I remember in high school I was talking about one of my co-workers, whom I described as “Mexican.” I was told by some of my well-meaning but extremely white classmates, “Don’t call him that, that’s offensive. You should say Hispanic. You don’t know where he’s from.”

I said, “Yes I do. His name is Juan, he’s from Mexico, and he’s Mexican. I know that because I talk to him. He was a police officer there, and decided to get out when he was shot three times. He came to the US and he works in a kitchen here.”

There is an episode of 30 Rock where Tina Fey’s character asks Selma Hayek’s character (the character is Puerto Rican) what she should call her. She says, “A Puerto Rican.”

Tina Fey’s character says, “I know you can say that, but what do I say?”

“A PUERTO RICAN!”

“That does not sound right…”