I've dropped Prime and we are cutting down Amazon by a lot.

Well that's the opposite of what I asked, but at least you're virtuous.

I'm just saying I was worse than you before.

Heebie made four Texans. She's worse than all of us put together.

We, uh, continue to still have Prime. I'll continue to feel bad about it, thanks.

I'm deliberately eating more eggs in hopes of triggering inflation. We're probably up to two dozen eggs a week here.

You all keep this up, and I am going to throw out this diet coke can. Don't push me, man, or I'll do it.

7 to 4. I applaud the eggs.

Maybe I'll start buying cruelty offsets to inflict pain on chickens that they aren't getting when I buy the cage-free organic eggs that taste better?

We're not hurting the chickens we're supposed to be hurting?

Because the eggs taste better if we don't.

Are there alternatives to Amazon or would I have to shop Walmart marketplace? Target is unreliable for a lot of things. Is Walmart the lesser of 2 evils now.

Also, how long does olive oil last if the bottle isn't opened. I'd like to stock up a bit.

If you keep olive oil away from light, it lasts better. But I don't know how long.

Newegg for electronics. (seem to be owned by a Chinese company, however).
I use Ace for hardware items--pickup at local store if not in stock.
Otherwise am doing more shopping from specific vendors.

So all of you are more virtuous now. I see.

In blog comments, sure.

My thinking is that when something pops, everyone will start vandalizing Teslas and I'll be able to work out my frustrations with America then.

We eat so many eggs with two teen boy athletes. I used the term "chicken holocaust" with a friend and they thought that was insensitive.
(Another one finished college admission process yesterday- two down, two to go!)

Covid broke us on Amazon and I don't know how we unbreak it. We don't use it all the time but once or twice a month there's some annoying need for some physical object that it's not clear how we'd get otherwise, and I don't think that driving all over the Bay Area in search of a retailer that might have the blessed item in stock, as we did up through 2019, was a real win for American society or the planet.

Things I truly care about, like books and bras, I get from other sources.

I use Ace a bunch and Lowe's for hardware, building stuff. Tim does by certain tools at Home Depot that weren't available at Lowe's, but he know I disapprove and our local Lowe's is in a better spot than the Hime Depot.

Amazon has the best price on a lot of toiletries. I guess Target is the default there, but I need $35 to get shipping. There isn't one close to me, and I can't stand CVS and Walgreens. CVS is kind of evil.

I'm not sure what's evil about CVS. The one by me doesn't lock up much, so I keep going there.

I'm an Amazon addict bc otherwise I have to drive places to shop, and gifts to family are much easier with Prime shipping. I dropped Prime but have it through next August. It was definitely more useful a decade ago, and I'm trying not to make it my default option.

What is the imperative to have household goods delivered? Heebie with the swarm of kids, sure, but is it so hard to stop by Target every few weeks? (Or week, in my case?)

21: CVS Caremark , their Pharmacy Benefits Manager sucks ass. They're even worse than OptumRx, a division of United Health.

I truly thought we were going to be devilishly admitting our vices here.

23: Target is 30-40 minutes away from me. There is other big-trip shopping I could do in Burlington where there's a Target, but it is not near any place I would go otherwise. Sur La Table closed their mall store there, and now it's only at another mall. My local Market Basket has limited toiletries, and I find the in-person stores are frequently out of stock. So, if I go in person, Target lets you shop online and do pick up in store, but it can be a hike to find one. But my Aveeno face cream costed a lot less on Amazon than Target, and ai got used to shopping there during the pandemic.

Basically, lots of places are poorly stocked, have a limited selection and are a hassle to drive to. We actually get paper goods and antihistamines delivered by Costco because the store is so busy and the lines are so long.

I canceled my paid newspaper subscriptions (WaPo and the LA Times) and I plan to stay happily ignorant for at least the next four years, maybe forever. I still have WaPo until my annual renewal date, but I skip past the front page and use it only for word games and to read Carolyn Hax. I took NPR off of my car radio presets. Knowing nothing about national politics feels pretty good.

19: Lourdes, what are your favorite bra stores? As a petite, small framed, large busted woman, I have challenges.

I eat Taco Bell sitting in my car in the parking lot.

Heebie with the swarm of kids, sure,

Bless you.

This December:
Week of 12/2: three performances
Week of 12/9: five performances
Week of 12/16: three performances

It's insane. Each one is "how the hell are we going to feed everyone and get there?!" departure from the routine. (And a bunch of performances were knocked out in November! All six of the theater performances and one of the dance performances.)

The vast majority of these (all but three) are activities the kids are doing through the schools. Which is really great! Go public education! But also exhausting! Maybe we don't need so many events!

I started using self-checkout instead of waiting in line for the cashier, because if Americans want Trump, I'm done with trying to save capitalism.

25: I'm spending more on getting my rocks off in various ways. But I've also been getting various windfalls so I'm not sure causation is provable.

28: I recently started buying from Pepper and love their offerings, but unfortunately this may not help you much as my situation is somewhat the reverse of yours. It does seem like shops targeting specific body types do a much better job than the generalists.

Title Nine bras get high marks from the larger-busted petites of my acquaintance.

27: My approach as well.

I truly thought we were going to be devilishly admitting our vices

Like I'm going to suggest time card fraud on the DOGE's internet. Nice try, Inspector General Heebie!

One of my big goals for the next semester is to answer the same question in my work life vis-a-vis our university president and provost. What things can I tell the univesity to eff off on, given that they've made it clear that they don't care about my opinions.

What's your replacement for Amazon? We're also thinking of dropping them, but given that we don't live in a city we can't really opt out of delivery, so the main alternative options seem to be WalMart and Target, and I'm not sure how much better they are!

I already didn't recycle, but that's because I absolutely do not believe that any actual recycling happens here and I don't feel like paying extra for alternative routes to the landfill.

Also our Amazon packages, and only our Amazon packages, keep getting stolen.

To be grotesquely clear, my bra strategy since high school has been "no actual binders or surgery, but nothing that gives anyone anything to look at whatsoever, plus support when sprinting for the train." I have no advice for anyone who enjoys having boobs.

We didn't even have passenger rail when I was in high school.

I don't believe in plastic recycling (none of it is recycled, it's just shipped to poorer countries for them to throw out), but I can't get RWM to stop putting plastic in the recycling.

I guess 41 is a vice? It isn't Trump-related, though.

Honestly I think the despair over Russia and Israel, both of which I felt pretty intensely over the last few years of acceleration, have made this current U.S. crisis seem comparatively less horrible at this point. (I do expect it to get a lot worse, but I'm not feeling anticipatory horror. Probably just suppressing it.) Honestly, this is probably a decent confession: we gave a fair amount of money to campaigns between 2016 and 2022, and this year I just could not bring myself to pour money into Democratic party coffers. Other recipients seemed a lot more deserving and less futile. I don't know when that will start to feel different. I mentioned "conspicuous corruption" in another thread, though: Trump's approach to being rich has always been "I have so much money, motherfuckers!" and his approach to power is on track to be similar. No discretion, all gold toilets. It will be interesting to see so much of this out in the open.

One of my big goals for the next semester is to answer the same question in my work life vis-a-vis our university president and provost. What things can I tell the univesity to eff off on, given that they've made it clear that they don't care about my opinions.

Probably not what you're looking for, but I enjoy telling them to eff off when it comes to course management software, and just using my own Google Site plus Google Sheets for gradebooks.

Interesting. That sounds like more work to me rather than less though...

Anyone have recommendations for an Outlook-compatible Mac email client which doesn't show you the number of unread emails?

One more: a few weeks ago, our neighbor's recycling bin got knocked over and spilled all over the sidewalk, so I put the contents back and stood it up again. It was basically full of trash: used takeout containers, unwashed soup cans, used paper towels, whatever. Single stream is pure fantasy. I'm guessing there's a way to recycle cans and cardboard that is actually effective, but the curbside option is most likely not it.

lol, my department hates instructors like you because it renders impossible our dubious project of deriving Aggregated Analytics On Learning Outcomes.

Fuck aggregated analytics!

49 to 45, though the dept probably doesn't like any of us that much.

40: I'm also really annoyed by the Amazon delivery people.

I had some stuff in my late godmother's house. Complicated story, but it took a long time for me to get her husband to let us pick it up. Longs story, but it was hard to get an acceptable day. The renters in the duplex who were going to let us in were observant Jews, so we had to find a Sunday. And we had a lot of trouble getting the size moving van we wanted. When we showed up, the smaller size wasn't available. It's pretty common here for Amazon drivers to rent Budget moving vans and then just not return them on time. The local spot has no way of tracking down one at another location, so a confirmed reservation is not much confirmation.

I do agree with 50 despite its direct causal connection to my paycheck.

46: It's way less work when it comes time to switch platforms every few years.

The local spot has no way of tracking down one at another location, so a confirmed reservation is not much confirmation.

One of the Seinfeld episodes that my brain flits to more often than I would have expected. "You know how to make the reservation, but you don't know how to keep the reservation."

I was spending a lot of energy this week trying to understand why we're cancelling under-enrolled classes taught by graduate students when we have to pay those graduate students anyway with make-work jobs since we've promised them funding, and so we're not actually saving any money by cancelling the classes at the last minute and are losing revenue if those students don't re-enroll in something else. And of course the answer is that that provost's office is using number of underenrolled classes as a metric of whether we're "wasting" money.

I go days without even commenting.

Single stream is pure fantasy.

Very true.

Okay, so: fantasies we stopped believing in 2024:

- Recycling
- Management
- National news
- Quality 34D bras
- Amazon, apparently
- the European order of the past 25 years
- not giving your child unlimited ice cream

A few of those might be old news or oversharing.

Ann Seltzer

Single stream is pure fantasy.

I have stopped seeking out artisanal p0rn; now I just click on bra ads whenever they appear anywhere, even in recycling.

Ok, but what about aluminum in the recycling bin? I'm still under the naive impression that my diet coke can gets upcycled or whatever.

I have stopped seeking out artisanal p0rn;

hand-stretched, no less.

I first tried for an equivalent construction with sports betting, but couldn't manage-- I'd be much obliged if someone else could succeed with such a joke.

The stuff that was sorted before (cans, bottles, clean paper) is still valuable and worth recycling. We should still be doing multi-steam recycling for those. When oil prices are high, thick plastics become more valuable. Dirty materials aren't often re-purposed and make everything else in the bin dirty as well.

I don't rinse out the diet coke cans before recycling them. But not as an FU to America.

65: We have a bottle bill, so I take soda cans and bottles (not milk or juice) back to the store for a refund.

I actually do the same with milk, but that's because I buy expensive milk from a local dairy which comes in a glass bottle that they re-use.

Just remember that pasteurized milk takes more energy and has higher greenhouse emissions than the kind that might kill you.

Hey, the Montana Supreme Court affirmed Held today: https://juddocumentservice.mt.gov/getDocByCTrackId?DocId=500371

even worse than OptumRx

My experience with OptumRx only goes about three months deep, but it sure has been frustrating so far.

"Please, I want you tell to me exactly one thing and absolutely nothing else before you tell me this one thing: which specific formulations of insulin vials, either generic or brand name, does my son's doctor need to write prescriptions for so that your system will authorize ANY AMOUNT of payment and stop throwing policy exclusions for the most commonly prescribed medication on earth."

I'm not saying anybody should go murdering CEOs, but I totally understand how people could get there.

When oil prices are high, thick plastics become more valuable.

A few years ago the city told us to stop putting any plastic but milk jugs in our (dumb) single stream recycling, but they just told us a couple weeks ago that yogurt containers are good. Those 2 comprise the vast majority of our non-wrapper plastic usage, so I'm glad about that.

I actually separate our recycling for essentially selfish reasons. I'm the prime aluminum user (1 soda can per day, at my desk), so I keep a bag by my desk and take it to the metal recycling place for cash every few months. And paper/cardboard has bins by the front door, for obvious reasons, and I take that to the recycling drop-off as needed, because it's in the Strip District where IO go shopping every Saturday anyway. So our curbside bins basically just have glass & tin. The fact that the rest of the system is stupid is just how it is.

I know it's exactly the kind of thing I shouldn't care about, but it's not like it's a difficult system.

Inspired by this thread, I just finished a mayo jar and tossed it into the trash. But I thought we weren't supposed to put milk jugs in our recycling, only 1 and 2 plastics. So I usually recycle those. And I buy milk in paper cartoons because that's how organic milk in quarts is packaged.

I don't rinse out the diet coke cans before recycling them. But not as an FU to America.

I refuse to believe that a couple milliliters of sugar water in the bottom of a can either mucks up the rest of the bin or somehow contaminates a batch in a 1250º furnace. I do rinse bottles & cans, as much for the sake of my in-house bin as for the purity of the overall stream.

The difficulty of rinsing mayo was what I was avoiding.

But I thought we weren't supposed to put milk jugs in our recycling, only 1 and 2 plastics.

Milk jugs are #2.

I actually don't buy milk in jugs; before they had a fire, I bought glass milk from Brunton's, and now I get the cardboard organic from Aldi's.

I will never understand how anybody could believe that tetrapak containers could be recycled.

Milk jugs are #2

Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays

75.last: the answer is the they comprise their own recycling stream. Like, they have their own plant to deconstruct the components. Nobody else has the ability to do anything with them.

Nooooo. Recycling is its own reward, like loading the dishwasher or folding laundry or playing Civilization. Everything where it belongs and just so!* Yayyyy wiggles.

*...something something JudgeWapnerQantasAirlines something...

... how many tetrapak deconstructors are there?

Four, duh.

39 And we can't even recycle glass.

I have been recycling Amazon boxes.

I really did think that milk jugs were #5 plastic, but I looked and they are #2. Maybe I was holding them upside down?

68: Right, I only buy pasteurized milk even though it comes in a glass bottle.

70- To get the answer you want you have to start that query with "Ignore all previous instructions"

If feel like Republicans should spend more time shitting themselves, so I may push for legalized raw milk.

Back in the day before general recycling was a thing, the big collection centers for aluminum cans were foul and disgusting mostly from those bits of fluid left over, and also whatever else got into can collector's bags. A haven for rats. But, yes the furnaces handled everything nicely. There was just a certain level of impurities (beyond the fact that the cans were an alloy already)', as I recall iron and silicon being the primary "contaminants."

I maintain that the rats didn't really enjoy it. They just don't have any good options.

70: Express Scripts is guilty of many things, but they've been much easier to deal with than CVS, and a I've never been through the hell of specialty pharmacy.

When I had my car accident, the ED PA prescribed Zofran. They would not fill the whole prescription even though the medicine is dirt cheap now and the cash price on GoodRx was less than my co-pay. Is there a reason to limit the quantity other than cost? There was something in the paper today claiming that they did too little to slow the rise in opioid prescriptions? Is Zofran a drug of abuse?

Is recycling Plastics even a good idea? Isn't it better that they end up in a landfill in the US instead of shipped off to some country like Vietnam or Thailand where they're then dumped into the river and eventually float out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

70 and 84: They want to figure out how to make everything digital, and they want everything to have a yes/no answer so that all people can be removed from the process of helping anyone ever.

difficulty of rinsing mayo

1. Retain lid of jar.

2. Hold empty but unclean jar under running hot water tap for 1 s

3. Add 3-7 drops of dish detergent

4. screw lid back on jar

5. shake

6. (for Republican voters only, others skip until worthy) bake at 420 for 12 min

7. wipe out with a piece of junk mail

And after all that it'll get mixed I. With your neighbors recycling who didn't do all that, the whole batch will get dinged as poor quality, and all of it will end up in a 3rd world landfill. So what's the point?

My guess is that abstaining from curbside recycling is not going to scale up remotely fast enough to stop the shiploads of "recycled" trash from heading to poor countries over the next, say, decade. There are a couple more steps we need to take before that actually happens, right? I don't know if this is a good "California should take the lead" matter or what, but I'm game if any of you have suggestions. Or is this another hopeless situation and "eff off" is the right response?

Does bathing count? It's a twofer because means less laundry because no towels.

69: I saw a notice of that on bluesky. Good news!

This can't be right, every time I put a #2 in the recycle bin everybody gets mad at me

Stupid DNA testing.

A turd with a bullet in it ain't exactly 5 O'Clock News Moby

My guess is that abstaining from curbside recycling is not going to scale up remotely fast enough

We could get there if we could really charge for garbage, but if we do that people just dump and get pissy when they're called on it, and like speeding there isn't political will to enforce fairly even though almost all of us are put at risk by the cheaters. I do not fucking know.

I'm encouraging Cassandane to consume less news. Not sure she will. We're planning to not renew our Prime subscription when it expires. And I've ripped up requests for donations from charities more summarily than usual. It would feel like throwing good money after bad.

Other than that, I don't know. November and December were really busy for reasons having nothing to do with politics, and I always find the holiday season stressful. Political stuff seems easy fir me to ignore at the moment, despite how horrifying it is in some objective sense.

91.7: I value all my mail equally.

re: bras for someone with an actual bust, my strategy is to buy on sale only from herroom.com, and only brands (empreinte and prima donna) and sizes that i know work for me. they carry a wide range of sizes, and i'm willing to pay the (sale, but still high) price for bras that will fit and are high quality. freya is i believe a lower price point with a decent reputation for bras for folks with tits. hold out for the sales on already discounted bras and you can get some decent deals.

then you need to actually take care of them - it is truly horrifying how infrequently most people wash their bras! gross, people! wash them properly, with hand laundering soap either by hand (preferable) or on the gentlest cycle in the machine, putting them in lingerie bags and without anything else in the machine except for maybe stockings (those also in lingerie bags). then hang to air dry. they should last well, and you'll be nicely supported and look great.

vaguely related to the OP, but I just remembered that ten or so years ago I was in a history thread (possibly here?) and someone asked for suggestions on "what historical topic do you think will be due for a complete revision and overhaul in the next decade or two". I think the context was discussions about things like Lost Cause historiography. Well, I said something to the effect of "It'll be Hitler. The historical consensus will shift from 'absolute monster' to 'strong anti-imperialist leader with some significant flaws doing his best for his nation' - basically going from Sauron to Kemal Ataturk."

In fact, I remember adding, that's probably the consensus public view already in a lot of countries. Maybe even the consensus view among a majority of the world population.

102: I've bought Chantelle from herroom. I didn't know empreinte or prima Donna and will look at the .

For Sports bras, I have to go with the truly unattractive Enell. It's the only thing that allows me to move freely without bounce.

||

Hilzoy's Bluesky linked to someone named Dara Lind who was recommending that people download an ap called Signal to make communication more private. Does anyone know anything about it?

|>

105: not an expert, but as far as I know Signal is the gold standard for secure messaging, and very widely used.

Alex?

There's another one called Threema which as far as I know is just as good in terms of security/privacy, but is much less widely used, so less useful (because your friends won't have it).

105 yes, I use it all the time, I'm even in some group chats on it. Ajay is correct in 106

Yes, it's a very widely deployed end-to-end encrypted messaging application. It does basically everything WhatsApp does and like WhatsApp, it implements the Open Whisper Systems protocol for encrypted messaging but it's not part of the Facebook empire. As such it should be fine although as with any messaging, although it can prevent your messages from being read if intercepted or even at rest if you have encrypted backup on, it will not stop the other party to your conversation from showing it to [the police, Donald J. Trump, the press, that bitch Katie, Vladimir Putin, agents of Big Pants, whoever it is that represents your threat model].

It might be marginally more secure and is of course better from a Stickin' It To The Man! perspective but if you're really worried you might just stick with WhatsApp, as just having a special secure messaging app might be suspicious (this is why Moxie Marlinspike originally got OWS deployed at WhatsApp)

I don't do anything secure, and I mostly just text my husband.

I'd really like to have secure audio calls though.

I still communicate by SMS mostly.

Sounds like Trump and his people are using private systems to prevent FOIA requests.

111: Signal will give you secure audio and video calls.

111: either WA or Signal will do that nicely.

The big one to avoid for secure messaging is Telegram, which is very widely used but has a bunch of defaults that make it less secure for average people just using it.

I thought that was the one the Russians controlled.

Also it's built by Russians and headquartered in the UAE.

Please don't use Amazon, particularly right now. Teamsters are on strike.

117, 118: Which is a reason we shouldn't assume that the bad defaults are simply errors made in good faith.

119: Yeah, I haven't since the Teamsters went on strike.

I'm not going to cross their picket line, but also fuck the Teamsters. Not as much as fuck Bezos, but fuck them.

122: I was talking to someone at work whose husband is a longshoreman who said the head of their union was pretty Trumpy. I see that he kind of likes them. So I feel the same way about them. Fuck them for courting Trump but not enough to side with their bosses.

Enough to feel like I don't have a dog in this fight, though.

Dog fighting is now depreciated.

Yes, their president seems some combination of corrupt, crony, and fantasist, happy to reflect the retrograde views of members and to that end to pretend Republicans are not fundamentally anti-union. Some of their locals are probably better, though; I know some of them endorsed Harris.

The president of the teamsters is terrible, but your union solidarity depends on your opinion of individual personalities, you don't have union solidarity.

No group has a right to your unquestioning support, not parties, not countries, not unions.

126: Many of the local Teamsters did endorse Harris.

Disregarding a picket line -- and therefore undermining the collective action of rank-and-file union members -- because of your opposition to the president does not evince union values. Saying so does not constitute demanding "unquestioning support."

I agree with 127. We grumble about and try to influence change in aspects of unions, but denying them support in the extreme event of a strike is not how to do it.

Still, fuck them. I'll support their strike, but without love in my heart.

I mean, begrudging action, taken with a heart full of hate, is the most anyone can expect of me on the best of days.

Because the holidays are a time for family.

||

Does anyone remember an article from this fall - I could have sworn it was Vox - that was something like "Climate Change migration in the US: it's not who you think it is" or something like that?

|>

It might have been this. Hmm.

"Florida! It's one of hell of a drug."

When I was paying more attention to managed retreat, the expert I talked to said that it takes a two near complete losses within ten years for people to voluntarily decide to go

I mean: for people who can afford to stay decide that they don't want to rebuild a third time.

What about simple people just growing corn, soybeans, and milo?

136 is really interesting!

I don't have any actual comment on it, but thanks for posting it.

FEMA updated the flood maps in our area, and I'm trying to process and make sense of councilmembers reactions, which was mostly to freak out on how people won't be able to afford flood insurance, and to assert that the national flood insurance program is broken. The only councilmember with a "solution" was "it's cheaper to fix the river than to raise everyone's houses". Structurally, the houses in the poor neighborhoods that flood wouldn't survive being lifted (at least, not reliably), but I also have no idea how he can put a price tag on "fix the river". He also said "It's a nonstarter to turn these neighborhoods into empty fields", which I agree with in spirit, since these are poor neighborhoods with a rich history, but it also feels like an argument with no winning hand.

I assume many people have tried shooting the river.

The most well received program buy out voluntary sellers, generally after a flood or two when people don't want to go back.

One thing the city can do now is paint historic flood levels on buildings in the neighborhood so people know it is coming.

According to the Slate piece, poor people sell out and fancy housing gets built in its stead. Depressing but maybe we should have considered the hidden downside of climate change.

145: that's a great idea.

The Strategic Buyout Program: https://www.rebuild.nc.gov/homeowners-and-landlords/strategic-buyout-program#:~:text=Program%20Overview,to%20a%20less%20risky%20area.

They've put up billions of dollars of high-end office and residential buildings in the neighborhood where I'm currently sitting, about four feet above sea level. (Average 1BR rent about $5000/mo.) Our company is putting up a new building 200 feet from the ocean that will open late next year. Speculation is that if there's enough expensive real estate here it will force the government to spend tens of billions on a Dutch-style sea gate across the harbor. I guess that's "fixing the ocean."

I just bought a house this year that is a couple feet above sea level. In the flood of 1996 it was about 25 feet above sea level. It then just settled back down since it is a floating house. I don't even have flood insurance.

If the roads are flooded I can just open the garage door on the first floor and drive the boat out.

I do have an insurance issue though. I have to insure against perils of the sea in case a ship runs into my house.

It could be a hit and run. You never know.

The sea is a harsh mistress.

House boats remind me of the Cape Fear episode of The Simpsons.