they could really tell the IRS to audit 501© and remove their status from the churches and bullshit Republican charities

That would be juuuuuust about the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It would mobilize gigantic swaths of voters who are heavily invested in rhetoric over fact-checking.

Doing away with Roe mobilized many of those voters who could be considered to be fence sitters towards the left. Removing church tax exemptions would move them right back and it would do NOTHING to solve the problem, because while the actual big offenders are happily USING the hell out of that tax exemption, they’re rich enough that they’ll get along fine without it.

It WOULD hurt a whole lot of TINY churches that employ 1-50 people per church and actually do community work, though. All of those would go away. That’s a LOT of rural food shelves.

I’m largely against the religious tax exemption, but that’s a problem we should worry about AFTER we can replace the nationwide infrastructure we’d be dismantling by doing so with something at least as effective as what’s there now.

Holy cow, thank you!

They’re processed, yes. The corn is milled, pressed into triangles, coated with preservative-heavy flavor powder and cooked in one order or another, possibly repeatedly.

What makes it ULTRA processed?

Frickin… most raw potatoes are “processed” because they’re typically not covered in topsoil when they get put in 5lb plastic bags.

A grass-fed organic, antibiotic free, roaming free-range massaged poterhouse steak is “processed” because it’s not still attached to the cow.

I’m trying to understand the definition, here. Almost everything is processed to some degree or another.

Is white flour ultra processed because they bleach and de-hull the wheat berries? Or only when it’s made into cake flour? Or do both of those count as “processed” and only “cake MIX” counts as “ultra processed”?

Am I making sense?

Do they?

I don’t even know what an “ultra processed food” •IS•.

How is it different than the “processed cheese product” that passes for most individually wrapped “American cheese” cheese slices? Or is that ultra processed?

Are Doritos ultra processed or just the regular kind of processed?

Which kind of ground beef qualifies for “ultra”? Only the pink slime or anything that’s been chemically treated?

I’m not being a pedantic contrary asshat, I legitimately do not know what qualifies something to be in this category and why it’s worse than normal processing.

Bpa from plastic tubing used in the processing of Annie’s organic leeched into the food. Is that considered contamination or a side effect of processing?

I heard Jack O’Neill and Teal’c in my head on this one.

J: Well, tell him unless he cools it, I’m going to throw down!

T: Have you eaten something that does not agree with you, O’Neill?

J: What?

T: Is your digestive system experiencing discomfort?

Daniel Jackson: Yeeeah, this is probably my fault, I explained the euphemism “throwing up” to Teal’c last night after Sam’s bout in the infirmary and I’m guessing he thinks the reverse means

J: No!

J: I’m perfectly… Continent.

The problem there is that the rise of reddit, specifically the fact that it has a much higher concentration of people discussing niche subjects due to its sheer size, ultimately led to the FALL of the forum.

Most of the places that USED to turn up in search results are GONE because there was no point in paying for hosting when a seemingly superior outside solution with greater reach and greater response times existed.

When helpful, contributing individuals remove their content from somewhere, it never hurts the big wigs that made the bad choice and it never teaches anyone any lessons because it never happens at a large enough scale to send a message. Hell, the giant reddit protest that led the lion’s share of people to Lemmy is barely a historical footnote and accomplished almost nothing particularly lasting or meaningful on Reddit itself despite being massive.

I’m not saying protesting is a waste of time, it’s not, it just needs to be better coordinated than even the aforementioned one was to be effective and stopping along the way to punitively shoot the largely innocent community itself in the foot does not produce any positive end results.

Don’t throw a temper tantrum and delete content, MIGRATE IT.

…when the bishops blessed the blueshirts down in galway…

Household economics are both micro AND macro.

The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.

You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.

The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.

Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?

In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.

By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.

Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.

All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.

The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.

As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.

Better hope your dump stat wasn’t charisma, then!

"Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.

Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad."

I was under the impression that, by definition, blended chickpeas were only one ingredient in hummus.

I thought in order to qualify as hummus it had to have blended chickpeas, tahini ( which is just blended sesame seeds, IIRC), oil, and lemon juice.

I literally never bought pb that isn’t 100% peanuts. Sometimes with a bit of salt. Stop buying junk.

It’s not automatically “junk”, it’s flavored.

It just happens to be the most popular flavor in the U.S.

I like my spicy red pepper hummus, other people like their extra-oil-and-sugar smooth consistency non-separating peanut butter.

It’s like the difference between corn flakes and frosted flakes.

often toasting the outside more than the inside

So, unless I’m mistaking your meaning that’s where I’d flip each bagel half 180 degrees before putting it in the toaster so the inside half faces the “more toasty” side of the toaster’s heating elements…unless I’m completely misunderstanding you?

Not even remotely.

That’s how old I was when I started pursuing it seriously instead of just dabbling. Two decades and change later and it’s still a choice I don’t regret.

The basics are fairly straightforward and the field is wide, deep, and mutable enough that everyone’s always picking up new things anyway. The only thing that’ll make you different from your peers is the ratio of how many birthdays you’ve celebrated v. how much direct experience you have. Thankfully that metric is spread out far enough amongst CS folks that it’s only useful as a point of conversational amusement and has no bearing on one’s ability to do the actual work.