Is it any good? I used to like Lidl and Aldi breads before COVID, when you could slice it right there. They stopped that, and so I no longer had a reason to drive 5-10 miles out of my way to go there. I’d go back for a good sauerkraut, though.
I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:
After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”
OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”
While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.
“The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”
A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.
I’m going to be repeating this whenever this ad blitz is mentioned because it is MUCH WORSE than you think. America PAC is partially funded by Musk and his old pals at Palantir. They sell data and analyses of it. You might get registered to vote if your state is a solid red or blue, but CNBC reports (archive):
[…] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.
Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.
So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.
“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”
The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.
They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Again, Palantir sells information, so in all likelihood they are going to take that input to figure out exactly how to target people to ‘vote Trump’ using the very information the public gave them for free!
Thank you!
I’m so sorry.
Why can’t the U.S. buy decent sauerkraut at the store? Why must we make it ourselves or get awful kraut? Germany has a unique and delightful kraut for seemingly every town and village, but the U.S. has exactly one type from a handful of companies that all make it the same. Well, maybe two types if you count ‘canned’ but I don’t reckon that to be actual sauerkraut. What was the topic? Sandwiches? Well, if I could find a good kraut, I would spend my days trying to recreate a reuben-like masterpiece.
Is the statement at the bottom of the article new or did the earlier posters simply miss it?
… One of Best Friends’ recommendations for due diligence within the adoption process was to focus on the shelter’s existing system, Chameleon, which pulls information related to animal welfare cases. This includes animal abuse and animal cruelty cases. Checking MyCase was discouraged, as its use was problematic and could lead to biased, inequitable vetting of potential adoptees.
This story does not have enough detail, so I looked for more.
First, I looked up Best Friends and they are firmly no-kill to the exclusion of all else. I am guessing the ‘Chameleon’ referenced is this CMS, but I could be wrong. If that is the software, it looks like there is a way for people to add notes about specific animals, but it isn’t clear if you can enter notes about specific people. It certainly doesn’t look like it has a way of automatically checking police records for criminal records. It does suggest you can enter these types of ‘field’ data:
I’m guessing MyCase is this free Indiana-specific portal.
Now: if they aren’t talking about the free MyCase link I found, then perhaps they are using software that charges the Animal Shelter for each search. I can see getting fired for incurring costs that aren’t in the budget. Alternately, perhaps ‘Best Friends’ is giving them funding based on the shelter NOT rejecting any adopter ever for any reason – or at least thinking that is a condition based on this statement from the Best Friends ‘who we are’ page:
We’re making sure that everyone has the same access to loving pets and that every adoptable pet has access to the comfort of a foster home instead of a kennel in a shelter.
– note that the above is meant to foster diversity and its links to their diversity page (which seems focused on income disparity), but that quoted bit COULD be read to mean ‘everyone gets a pet, no matter what’.
I would think it incumbent on all employees to create notes/warnings about known abusers and have that be a flag if they come back to adopt, but I do see a case for allowing people to re-adopt an animal they voluntarily gave to the shelter because they had gone through a patch where they couldn’t afford to feed it, but now they can. Others might argue that this is abuse or that the owners don’t deserve a pet, but it is clear that Best Friends thinks that refusing such people is discriminatory.
That doesn’t mean that the particular abuse getting uncovered with MyCase was simply surrendering a pet until people got on their feet. Mostly, it just feels like there’s a bunch of stuff going on that no one reported.
Context?
Without knowing how this compares to other states, which areas have higher counts of rental properties, how other states compare, and things like average or percentage of: ages, incomes, ethnicities, and probably party affiliation, this doesn’t tell us much by itself.
I am encouraged that it is given as a percentage of the voting population instead of a numeric count (XKCD’s pet peeve #208), but it still looks a lot like a population map. I had to find a straight population map to compare where it differs, and as a quick visual trend they are similar. From https://www.someka.net/blog/ohio-zip-code-map/ :
Overlap that with an income map (from https://proximityone.com/srdmi/ohdmi.htm):
With only a visual examination, I still have little idea of what the map says about voter purging. I can’t tell if old people are getting purged as they die, if college students are getting purged as they fail to change from their school address, or if a particular party is getting purged just to sway elections.
If you are willing to switch, tell your current carrier and sometimes that will light a fire under them to actually address the Support call. We had that happen recently. Internet went out. The issue was outside our house with the provider’s line. They said they’d send someone a week later, so we pointed out it would be faster for us to switch providers, to which they replied, “We can’t get there tomorrow but how about the next day?” We accepted and they actually did fix it in two days instead of seven.
It is much worse than that. CNBC had a recent piece on how America PAC is partially funded by Musk and is collecting specific user data.
You see an ad that says it will help you vote. If you are NOT in a battle ground state, it will actually help you register. But if you ARE in a battleground state, CNBC states (archive):
[…] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.
Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.
So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.
“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”
The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.
They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his old buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Palantir sells info. More precisely, they know how to intake truthful data and turn it into actionable details. I’ve no idea how they check for validity, though. Some days it feels like everything on Twitter is a lie and hearing that this ‘help you vote’ program is also a lie just makes me wonder if anyone is honest over there.
We already had the Expanded Access Program (thank you ACT UP) and we don’t want a repeat of thalidomide babies like we had before there were strong protections on how drugs get tested.
So now we have Expanded Access (EAP) with FDA oversite and Right to Try (RTT) without that oversight. Having both is confusing for everyone and most people don’t know which covers what. From Journal of Law and the Biosciences (they only sampled 17 neuro-oncologists from 15 different academic medical centers):
Many physicians described having difficulty in distinguishing between RTT and EAP or demonstrated misconceptions in their responses. A physician with knowledge of both pathways spoke about his colleagues generally: ‘I don’t think a lot of people understand the difference between expanded access and Right-To-Try’ [Participant 1]. The confusion resulted in conflation with the different features between EAP and RTT including structure, intent, and processes of these pathways. In response to our question ‘Have you provided a drug through Right-to-Try?’ one clinician erroneously replied, ‘I think most compassionate use is under that category’ [Participant 2]. Another drew a rough equivalence between the two despite the absence of FDA oversight for RTT: ‘I guess the way I try to think about Right-to-Try is like compassionate use.
Look, I don’t know if JD Vance had sex with a couch. I don’t even know if JD Vance had sex with couch cushions. But yes, I’ve heard that JD Vance did not WRITE that he had sex with a couch in his book. I don’t know if JD Vance wrote he had sex with a couch somewhere else, though.
John Oliver called Vance’s staff to ask and they hung up on Oliver, which was reported as ‘not a “no”’, so I had been thinking, ‘ya know? maybe that JD Vance guy really is a couchfucker, who knows?’ But here you’re saying he’s denied it? Or partially denied it? Well I don’t know what to think now, but I guess it is safer to presume JD Vance having sex with a couch is probably more legend than fact. Certainly, JD Vance having sex with a couch isn’t something you’d want to discuss in polite society or political debate because we’ve no proof and a possible denial.
The premise is suspect.
First, there are lots of (mostly) monogamous animals (‘cheating’ in monogamous pair bonds gets a fair amount of study).
Second, which gorillas? Are you talking about the ones that form alliances with several males and maintain friendly relationships, groom one another, and fight together against common enemies?
Third, monogamy (even with cheating) seems to have an advantage for species where females forage on their own rather than in groups/herds. There’s more to it, though.
This is from a pre-print study, so should be viewed with some suspicion, but it at least describes the current state of investigations:
Since phylogenetic inertia is not a realistic explanation given that four very distantly related lineages are monogamous, the implication is that monogamy has alternative fitness advantages for males. These benefits must also be advantageous for the female, otherwise she would be not willing to tolerate the male’s continued presence – and, perhaps more importantly, would not be willing to undergo the evolution of the expensive cognitive and behavioural traits associated with pairbonding (Dunbar & Shultz 2021).
the fact that primates, in particular, have a long period of offspring dependency suggests that the problem is more likely to be associated with offspring survival.
For human-specific stuff, here’s a piece on promiscuity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210680/
And one on the ideology of female ‘honor’ and predictors of who will feel what and how strongly : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10563489/
The U.S. uses sanctions all the damn time. Biden lifted SOME sanctions for a bit, then put them back and now there are calls for yet MORE sanctions. Sanctions all around! IMO, this hasn’t worked, won’t work, hurts the populace more than the leaders, leads to dangerous migrations that end up turning the U.S. more authoritarian as it freaks out about these refugees seeking relief from the policies the U.S. itself put in place, encourages a coalition of dictators who are all facing U.S. sanctions to trade with one another since we won’t trade with them, and is bad for so many more reasons.
From Washington Post (archive):
U.S. sanctions have surged in the past two decades and are in effect in some form in almost a third of all countries. In the case of Venezuela, U.S. officials were — and remain — sharply torn over the financial fusillade.
The Biden administration temporarily lifted key sanctions on Venezuela last year in exchange for promises from Maduro to allow a competitive presidential election, … But because Maduro has failed to follow through on most of his commitments, the Biden administration reimposed the sanctions.
If you prefer Al Jazeera:
Since 2014, output has contracted by 70 percent, more than twice the hit the United States suffered during the Great Depression…Over that period, some 7.7 million Venezuelans – a quarter of the population – have left the country in search of work.
Biden inherited a strategy of maximum pressure on Venezuela from President Trump. But despite applied pressure, consecutive rounds of sanctions failed to dislodge Maduro.
Biden, meanwhile, pursued a different approach. Under the 2023 Barbados Agreement, he eased some sanctions – notably on oil and debt – for political guarantees, namely free and fair elections and the release of detained US citizens.
The deal allowed Venezuela to earn an additional $740m in oil sales from last October to March. But after Maduro blocked Machado from running, and following the revival of a territorial dispute with Guyana, Biden re-imposed US sanctions in April.
Quick Post election status: https://www.axios.com/2024/07/30/biden-gop-sanction-venezuela-election-maduro
Congressional Republicans are pressing the Biden administration to impose harsh sanctions on Venezuela’s government for allegedly “subverting” the results of the country’s presidential election on Sunday.
The latest pluralistic article starts with a long rant about “rent” and what’s wrong with it (then explains how Intellectual Property rights are basically the same thing and talks about software). Anyway, you might like the rent part: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/
Quote from María Corina Machado (opposition leader kept off ballot) per CNN:
We definitely need to open markets in order to take advantage of that huge potential and turn Venezuela into truly the energy hub of the Americas.
How the how the country will benefit from that? We will have fiscal flows, and other resources, mechanisms through which the state will get taxes.
She seems to like money.
Nah, that’s all about getting the dog to actually swallow the pill.
For us, it is about buffering the concentration. Even aspirin can upset your stomach (well, SOME people’s stomachs) such that making “Bufferin” was once a big deal. It was just aspirin with a buffering agent, but having a buffer really mattered for some people.
I’m not a doctor, so don’t take my word for it, but I’ve heard the same as robolemmy. To be a bit less abstract, my understanding is you eat enough so that your stomach will digest normally instead of just handling the medicine as a tiny bit of something caustic. A granola bar should be fine, but you might do better with a slice of bread or something a tad easier to digest. Then again, I don’t think it matters all that much.
The headline is false. There are authors of 2025 that may want to ban IVF and the like, but they did NOT put that into the text. Surrogacy is questionable. Given that it states that human life begins at conception, its call for ending ‘abortion drugs’ can immediately be presumed to include typical contraceptive pills (but probably not condoms).
PolitiFact did not find any mention of IVF throughout the document, or specific recommendations to curtail the practice in the U.S. The manual doesn’t outright call for restricting standard contraceptive methods, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices, known as IUDs. Project 2025 pointed out the same.
However, it does recommend restricting some emergency contraceptives from certain no-cost insurance coverage.
Project 2025 DOES have this worrying language:
p. 450
From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.
p. 451
Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.
p. 457
Abortion Pills. Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.
It then goes on to detail how to end abortion pills. While the document specifically mentions mifepristone and misoprostol, the early language about life beginning at conception, it is not unreasonable to presume the practical end point might be ending birth control as well.
Alternate story from https://www.etymonline.com/word/cheesecake