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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • UN, which… failed to keep dictatorships out

    The UN while created with noble intentions certainly fell for the paradox of tolerance. They tolerate the dictatorships and human rights abusers because if they didn’t they’d be much less empowered to take action against them, or worse they’d form their own competing UN made up of nations motivated to join them and you’d just end up with another NATO and Warsaw Pact for example. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

    Ultimately the challenge comes down to how do you ultimately tame the leaders of the world who have absolute power. The founding fathers of the United States of America thought they had the solution with democracy and the many checks and balances they implemented into this new form of government they setup, but even that has its challenges and failures that they never could have forseen. The UN was the next experiment, trying to take the similar principles onto the world stage, and it’s been less successful (but at least has had some successes)





    • Milk and potatoes can give a good base of vitamins and minerals.
    • Potatoes are pretty cheap and very easy to grow if you have the time and will to try it. Just toss a few potato halves into a bin of dirt, water periodically and you’ll have more potatoes than you know what to do with
    • Toast can be a fairly cheap breakfast, although not very filling. It’s easy to quickly eat as you run out the door too
    • I’ve found making sure your dinners have multiple dishes actually makes the food go further and helps in saving money on groceries overall compared to not
    • A bag of freezer veggies can keep in the fridge for almost a week pretty easily, and it’s very easy to pour a bit out, nuke it in the microwave for 30-60 seconds and help round out your meal.
    • Hotdogs cook very well with ramen noodles (you can also sprinkle in some frozen corn too!), and that can make 2-3 meals for a single person
    • if you’re in the states, Aldi is genuinely a really good option to save money on groceries, plus their store brand stuff usually has less sugar than name brand
    • white rice is usually dirt cheap and a good base source of nutrients



  • I was too young to really know what was going on at the time but when my parents upgraded me from my Windows 98 spare parts PC they tossed Windows 2000 on the new PC and I remember it being quite wonderful. I never did get to experience Vista nor ME because my parents were well enough tapped into the computer scene to know what was up. Now I get to help them setup their first home server this weekend



  • In the mid-19th century there was a doctor in Vienna named Ignaz Semmelweis. He worked in a maternity ward and took extreme focus on the extremely high mortality rate in his ward, and Semmelweis eventually found that hand washing before providing care was extremely effective at reducing the mortality rate (consistent hand washing dropped it from 18% to 2% mortality rate) specifically doctors would do autopsies in the morning then (without any sanitization) move onto their duties in the maternity ward.

    Semmelweis had the seniority to mandate hand washing (specifically he identified Lyme to be very effective, but of course it’s very unpleasant to wash with Lyme) he had the data to back up it’s effectiveness, but what he lacked was the social capital to successfully shift the local medical culture to include handwashing before caring for sensitive prenatal and postnatal care. Specifically he was a dick about it. Because he was extremely outspoken about doing this unpleasant Lyme wash before providing care for which he couldn’t provide a good theory as to why it worked, he was replaced as the director, continued his advocacy with limited success and eventually was placed in an asylum following a nervous breakdown where he died of sepsis from a caretaker not washing their hands.

    His work was never recognized until long after his death. He probably could have had more success if he wasn’t so annoyingly loud and outspoken about this hand washing thing. It was clearly the right thing to do but it took time and effort, wasn’t entirely pleasant, and it wasn’t yet the norm. He saved hundreds of lives while he was in charge and hand washing was mandated, but because his successor ended the handwashing mandate countless more died at his hospital alone.

    The first successful soaps, in part created by a handful of individuals Semmelweis had inspired, were only successful when marketed as a cosmetic product to make you smell better (and by convincing people that they real!)

    The point is, in advocacy, no matter how right you are, if you’re fighting against “the way we’ve always done things” you will always have a significant uphill battle and have to play the politics and not be too upsetting to the order of things until some momentum is built, because otherwise, no matter how right you are, you can simply be written off as a lunatic and too annoying to be worth listening to



  • I haven’t been so lucky. Grandma gave our first child both a phone and a tablet before she was 2 (against our wishes) and lets her have full unsupervised access to whatever she wants to watch. My wife now is a stay at home mom to keep Grandma’s influence limited (she also plays fast and loose with regards to safety)

    But back on topic, we usually ask the kids what they want to watch, and if we feel they’ve been watching too much trash television we’ll say “let’s watch something on PBS Kids” and let them pick something on PBS to watch (because that’s our go to for higher quality kids content) so about 70% of their screen time is on high quality content and the other 30% is their choice.