我正在学习中文。中文很难！

I took a break from learning Chinese for a while due to personal stuff being busy and am trying to get back into it. Chinese is a very logical language, I think, and learning it is fun and interesting but challenging. I was just about HSK1 level, I think, before I stopped. I gotta boot up peppa pig in mandarin again - 你好小猪佩奇老师，我是你的学生！

I know several working class folks who grew up in the USSR who, while they admit it wasn’t perfect, were very happy with how things were then and - although some of them are now onboard the Pravda train to looneyville & love Putin and believe the Russian Orthodox church line that Ukraine is led by baby-eating, devil-worshipping, Nazi Pedophiles (not an exaggeration) - they admit things are much worse than they were then and place the blame squarely on moving away from communism & planned economy.

Because of strong social programs, they had access to good education, work & a high quality of life, and a level of recreation and leisure that seems wild to me as an American.

Communism is not a monolith. There are many tendencies. And YMMV depending on the folks in power, just like any system. Additionally, despots love to call themselves socialist/communist while doing nothing relating to seizing the means of production - look at Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) as an example.

Imagine if we asked folks “What’s your experience been like living in a capitalist regime”. Most people would think thats a weird question because of how many types of capitalist regimes exist - it’sa general economic framework, not a system of government. Your experience will vary wildly if you are from like rural Kenya vs the US vs Scandinavia.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). They are the ones playing defense against fascism and violations of civil liberties by the US government. This includes immigration, freedom of religion/expression, lgbtq rights, abortion rights, you name it they’ve done it.they are responsible for getting nunerous illegal bills/acts/laws rescinded. They do great work. The sort of work that is foundational to getting the US government on track.

Scar Jo. She’s just not a good actor. Same with Gal Gadot. Also Jack Black and Seth Rogen and the Rock, they don’t act - they’re just themselves in every movie.

That’s a very good point. I still prefer air poppers because it prevents burning the kernels, but a pot would totally work.

Breakfast: oatmeal

Snacks: popcorn (air popped, buy kernels. Need I recommend an air popper, but they’re like 20 bucks. Then you can eat cheap popcorn forever). Bonus tip: if you can get your hands on a cheap electric coffee/spice grinder or want to grind seasonings by hand into an extremely fine powder, you can make popcorn salt that coats the popcorn really nicely. E.g. curry popcorn (salt + curry powder), lemon pepper, ranch (get ranch dressing powder). Spritzing with a fine mist of water can help the salt stick.

Lunch/Dinner:

• Fried rice (egg, whatever meat/veg, I like doing soy sauce glazed canned sardines with it for a cheap meal)

• Red beans and rice

• Chicken & sausage gumbo over rice

• Enchiladas, rice, beans

• Rotisserie chicken tacos

• Collard greens and cornbread, you can add bacon or other cheap cuts of pork to add protein.

• Pasta bake (chicken, spinach, pesto, white sauce, little cheese, optionally dried tomatoes - dry them in your oven to save money or buy canned for a little more)

• Korean rice bowls. Chicken, gochujang (like $5-8 but lasts a long time in the fridge), red pepper flakes, ginger, garlic, vinegar, sesame oil. Marinate overnight. Cook on stove or in oven. Serve on rice with side dishes: carrot and cucumber banchan - just get some matchstick carrots, combine with vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, chili flakes. Cucumbers: slice thin, salt, drain. Combine with sesame oil, soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, red pepper flakes. Assemble.

• Filipino style Chicken Adobo (potatoes, carrots, chicken, onion, garlic, ginger cooked in a vinegar soy sauce based sauce)

• Make like 200 pierogis for like 20 bucks (and several hours) and freeze them for later. Boil or pan fry and eat with a sausage and some saurkraut. For fillings, I like a little ground meat with onion and mushroom and saurkraut - 1 part meat, 1 part mushroom, 1 part onion. Even cheaper is potato and cheese - typically this means mashed potato mixed with sour cream and cheese.

• Cabbage rolls. Head of cabbage, rice, ground pork, onion, garlic, a couple cans of tomato soup. Cook rice, mix with ground pork, diced onion, and garlic. Dunk cabbage head in boiling water for a minute or two, peel a leaf off, stuff with pork mixture and roll. Put all rolls in a baking pan on a layer of the tomato soup, top with tomato soup. Bake covered mins or until cooked (165f internal temperature)

• West African Peanut Stew. Lots of recipes online. Contains a mix of peanuts, peanut butter, sweet potatoes, collard greens, chicken/veggie stock, and optionally chicken. Very filling, calorie dense, and cheap. I make like 2kg of soup for <$20.

In general, if you want cheap food then look for cultures with rich food traditions born from poverty. Also look for more plant-based recipes or find ways to stretch your meat using fillers like cabbage and onion.

Examples: Louisiana Cajun, American South, India (at least the more modest dishes without lots of meat and cream/butter), Eastern Europe, Central and South America, even provincial French food & British “food” (I jest, but bubble & squeak or bangers & mash have fed many a hungry family)

Staple foods should include:

• Staple Starches: potatoes (sweet potatoes and normal potatoes), rice, corn, beans, lentils

• Chicken (whole raw or rotisserie) - benefit of a whole raw chicken is you can use the whole carcass to make stock and get enough meat for 2 people for a whole week. Rotisserie is the same deal, but precooked and not best suited for all applications.

• Filler vegetables: basically all of your cruciferous vegetables, onions, root vegetables

This is my bathroom! It was made for me!

Idk about MMA, but afaik his kickboxing record was pretty good, but essentially he was an average/slightly above average pro who had a massively padded record - he mainly fought people who were ranked far lower than him, won some low to mid level titles and didn’t take actual fair matchups or compete in tournaments that you’d expect actual highly ranked pros would compete in.

So, he was a perfectly adequate kickboxer and could beat a lot of pro kickboxers in lower divisions but nowhere near “best in the world” / “olympic level” or whatever else he claims

I think it’s a refutation of unregulated production & resource distribution in general.

In socialism, distribution would be handled by the state or locality, by the producers themselves, by a work coupon system, with money (a la market socialism), or theoretically in a sort of free-for-all all where people just request what they need. Only the last one is really implicated in a tragedy of the commons type scenario, with the money and work coupon systems potentially causing a smaller degree of that sort of an issue (as there would be less inequality, so less possibility of overproduction due to demand). Producers would, in that case, be encouraged to produce more to fill the increased demand, but there wouldn’t be a profit motive for doing so, and so a consumer-side tragedy of the commons is less likely. Also, producers’ access to resources would theoretically be more tightly regulated than in capitalism, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

In capitalism, distribution is dictated by the money system obviously and due the massive inequality there is a big disparity among people’s buying power - but more importantly companies consume the vast majority of resources and are encouraged to grow infinitely in a world of finite resources - creating demand where it doesn’t naturally exist to squeeze more profit out of folks’ savings, make them take on debt, or cause them to deprioritize other purchases.

In capitalism, people are not encouraged to consume infinitely more because it is not possible. You only have so many needs and so much income as an individual. The market invents new needs with advertising and such (you need makeup, you need the newest smartphone with ten cameras, you need glasses that let facebook spy on you), but consumers’ buying power is limited. People can’t really cause a market-wide tragedy of the commons, only companies can because they have the vast majority of the access to resources and the ability and motive (profit motive) to acquire them.

Tragedy of the commons, or some iteration of it, seems inevitable under capitalism, but is mitigated or eliminated under socialism

That’s the one book on basic economics they might actually read though. Fuck thomas sowell

People in the US often misunderstand what sorts of speech can be “free”. There’s plenty of restricted speech in the US - hate speech can intensify the sentencing on crimes, libel and slander are both punishable civilly, speech that directs or is likely to incite “imminent lawless action” (e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater - that is actually the legal reason for why you can’t do that if there isn’t a fire).

That doesn’t even begin to cover the sorts of speech that are heavily suppressed by the government and media but aren’t legally restricted - like how the media chooses not to cover large popular protests sometimes (famously, the antiwar protests around the invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan), or gives disproportional representation to counter protesters to give the illusion that both sides are equally popular, or how anti-capitalist stances are generally ignored or downplayed. Not illegal, but if you can’t really engage in those sorts of speech publicly, they may as well be.

Not with that attitude, they’re not. Back in my day we had good old-fashioned corn dogs made of every kind of dog you can imagine. German Shepherds. Dachshunds. Labrador Retrievers. Irish Wolfhounds. Greyhounds. Golden Retrievers. Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers. Border Collies. Normal Collies. Bull Dogs. Giant Schnauzers. Miniature Schnauzers. Corgis. Poodles. Airedale Terriers. Lhasa Apsos. Shihtzus. Chihuahuas. Xoloitzcuintles. But that was back when men were men and dogs were corn dogs.

Chia cryptocurrency. My dad got into it, and the price was mooning. Gave me an excuse to build a new PC and learn linux, so I thought it was a worthwhile investment. Sunk a decent chunk of change into hard drives that I still have laying around, but I’m using several of them and have a sweet gaming rig that I would’ve built eventually anyway and had something to talk to my dad about. So basically, just out the cost of some drives. All in all, it was a calculated risk that didn’t pay off but was still fun.

Well of course I haven’t read Marx. Communism’s evil, duh.

Most people? No, definitely not. Most Americans get vaccinated. More people than you would hope? Yeah, absolutely.

There’s so many people here who have crazy views on health and wellness generally. Juice cleanses. Chiropractic. Homeopathy. Fad diets. Faith healing. I think some of it is because people can’t afford real healthcare, but most of it is anti-intellectualism and propaganda.

“BEANIS” heh heh heh

All is dependent on what instances your home instance is federated with. Federation/defederation by your home instance determines what you see in All.

Szmer.info is federated with lemmy.world, so you would be able to see politics@lemmy.world, which has US politics. Unless you’ve filtered things out of your feed, but that’s different.

Whoa that’s really odd. You might submit an issue on github, if you want: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Huh. Comments shouldn’t be affected, as I understand it, just posts from defederated instances won’t show up. For instance, .ml is defederated from any and all porn instances - so porn doesn’t show up in my feed. I wonder if it could be a delay in the comments showing up, not actually an absence of those comments?

Either way, plenty of good instances to join that are less defederated than .ml

The particular instance doesn’t matter too much as long as it hasn’t defederated from other instances you care about & vice versa - since you can still see, post, & interact with content from other instances. I made accounts on .ml and .dbzer0.