

ah yes the free market enabled by small government 🤦♀️
paranoid linux sadgirl with imposter syndrome


ah yes the free market enabled by small government 🤦♀️


I’m not at all saying to throw in the towel. Quite the opposite. I just want people to be more understanding and less judgmental so we don’t push people even further away from learning self subsistence habits like cooking.


I remember as a little girl asking my mom to sew me a dress “because then we don’t have to pay for it,” and her explaining to me that fabric isn’t free, and it’s not even cheaper than clothes anymore. I was so disappointed and bewildered. Today, I’m still disappointed.
She also taught me how to make bread and I asked her if it was cheaper than store bread, so we sat down with grocery store receipts with the price of flour etc. and worked out that our recipe came to about $0.50/loaf (in ~2007). We didn’t factor in the cost of labor, heating gas, electricity for the bread machine, etc. but it was one thing we enjoyed knowing costed less than even the cheapest bread at the store.
I still make bread, but am afraid to do the math again.


I would argue that most people don’t make their own clothes mainly because the time and effort required to make clothes is VASTLY disproportionate to the time and effort required to buy clothes.
For food, it’s the same. Learning to cook palatable meals from ingredients (anywhere on the preprocessed spectrum not just raw) requires a lot of learning and often new kitchen equipment.
Especially if you’re truly starting from 0, as in no cooking knowledge was taught to you by family or community and you didn’t inherit any equipment.
Why should we expect people to sacrifice the time, money, and energy that their job is demanding more and more of from them as time goes on? Is cooking really different from all the other domestic skills that are no longer expected to be known by at least one household member?
More importantly, if encouraging cooking really is a more efficient way to improve average nutrition, why are we so quick to scoff at people who don’t know this skill, instead of acknowledging the myriad of reasons they were discouraged from acquiring it and using that knowledge to help us campaign more effectively?
(not saying you specifically were scoffing but def other people in this thread and people I’ve discussed this with IRL have, including myself in the past)


other essential survival skills include:
~100 years ago, most people either know how to do most of these things or had an immediate family member who did. Today, that’s no longer true.
It probably would be better if we all still usually knew how to do all these things (at least in my opinion). But we collectively decided that it was more important that most people just know enough to keep themselves and some kids alive between shifts at work.
Just because a bunch of us have the blessing of the ability to cook food doesn’t give us license to expect all our fellow citizens to do it when we have actively encouraged them not to need this skill anymore.
I’m lucky that my mom taught me basic sewing repair, and I really wish most humans knew even basic sewing because of how staggeringly wasteful modern fashion is. But most people would call me crazy if I started insisting that everyone should know how to sew and that people who don’t are inferior, irresponsible, etc.
Even if they didn’t, how likely am I to convince more people to sew if I come out swinging with insults?


devils advocate: do most people not make their own clothes because it takes effort and they’re lazy?


every time someone says “just cook it’s not that hard” i lose a little more faith in humanity. I’ve spent >14 years cooking as a hobby and for health/finances but “just cook” to me sounds just like
“just fix your own car”
“just paint your own walls”
“just grow your own food”
“just homeschool your kids”
“just sew your own clothes”
you can absolutely do these things yourself! but it’s also become socially acceptable, socially expected even, to outsource these kinds of specialized tasks to specialists.
“but everyone needs to eat!” yeah, everyone needs clothes too and we don’t expect people to make their own anymore because we collectively decided we wanted everyone to spend more time at work instead.


can we give this guy a fucking break 🤦♀️


yes, with a usb drive containing Linux installation media


I had the perfect phone. Sony XZ2 Compact. released in 2018 so not even that old
5" screen. No headphone jack, but I was honestly just glad to have a screen that small. Ran LineageOS like a dream.
Then came the 3G tower shutdown. Now, the XZ2c is capable of 4G LTE calling. Lineage even had the settings option for it unlocked (as opposed to stock). So I call up my carrier and ask them to please enable 4G LTE calling for my phone so that it’ll receive calls again.
Turns out, the major carriers in the US decided not to support 4G LTE calling for the XZ2c. There’s a line of code sitting somewhere that could be flipped to “true” and my perfect phone would work again. But no, fuck me for wanting to resist CONSOOM NOO FONE EVERY SIX MONTH.
Fuck capitalism I’ll never forget what they took from me



bonus:



accidentally turning your kids into Web 1.0 enjoyers lol


In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.
(AP News)
As far as US households, looks like not many. Most likely very remote locations. I had also read that some businesses maintain a dial up connection as a backup for broadband outages


even those who get vaccinated are still going to be exposed to a higher viral load from the increased number of people who won’t be able to get vaccinated


qUiEtLy listening
so… listening? this “qUiETLy” buzzword needs to fucking die
finally the robots’ true purpose revealed. we created them so we could say more slurs lmao


The alert that got sent to my family’s phones included instructions to check social media
I know it’s not what they were literally saying, but it came off as “911 broke use Facebook idk” and I had a giggle

The point isn’t that cooking is hard to learn. It’s that it’s harder to learn than continuing to eat convenience food. But it’s still not the easiest thing and therefore not realistically going to be people’s default unless we encourage them by somehow making it worth their while.
For some, just spreading awareness of how much healthier it is can be enough. For others, they’ll need systemic changes like access to healthier ingredients, metal health treatment, and jobs that don’t exploit them so harshly that they have no leftover energy to cook.
Yeah, you can start out with just pots and pans to make pasta, rice, beans, boiled or stir fried pre-cut vegetables, and other simple things. No knife and cutting board, no whisk, no cheese grater, no vegetable peeler, sure you can cook but it’s going to be challenging. Now you’re asking someone to go from being able to microwave a fully assembled frozen meal in 3–5 min, which they’re used to doing, to making a meal from ingredients with a substandard set of tools and little to no experience.
By the time they’re done cooking they’re going to be tired and frustrated by the result. If they’re lucky they’ll have the motivation to keep trying, building skills, and purchasing more equipment.
If they’re unlucky, they’ll see people on the internet belittling them for lacking a skill and tool set that not everyone gets handed to them by family and circumstance.
It costs you minimal effort to not be judgmental and discouraging to an entire category of people comprised of widely varying individuals whose circumstances you know nothing about. But you’re acting like that’s some cruel undue burden.