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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Usually, on land that is intended to be preserved, they don’t want random people hacking away at vegetation, so they will have rules about it. If a park ranger or someone like that sees you cutting down trees or whatever, you are probably going to get yelled at or fined or something.

    It’s also highly dependent on species and location. Some invasive species will basically multiply if you try to tear them out, either resprouting vegetatively, or through seed spread. Species like tree-of-heaven or paulonia also become huge trees, so they probably don’t want you cutting those down.

    Some places like Oahu are basically 95% invasive species, so if you remove that, you have nothing left. Oahu is basically all guava and mesquite trees, and without that, the soil washes away, and there’s no hope of recovery, so invasive management needs to be done in consultation with experts.



  • The problem is that French food in the Anglosphere has literally been the fancy food since 1066. That’s why English has 2 words for every meat: the germanic peasant word and the french nobleman’s culinary word (cow-beef, chicken-poultry, deer-venison, sheep-mutton, swine-pork, etc).

    Being the default “fancy” food is going to do damage to any cuisine as the purpose becomes more about fanciness than tasting good or being what people from the place actually eat.

    For another example, look at American Italian food. In a lot of small towns, Italian restaurants are the de facto fancy restaurant . It’s basically made it so that Italian restaurants in much of the US are either way too expensive and fancy or they’ve gone the opposite route and just overcharge for really basic pasta with sauce (olive garden).


  • If you don’t like truffle oil, you probably just don’t like truffle, and that’s fine. Like the other commenter said, it’s literally just the same compound that’s been synthesized.

    2,4-Dithiapentane

    Real truffles obviously have some other flavoring compounds in there, but like vanilla vs vanilin, you’d probably have a hard time distinguishing between them in a dish in a blind taste test.

    I have eaten shaved truffles, and even that’s really a gamble. The problem is that they aren’t really good until they are “ripe”, but once you dig them up, i don’t think they ripen any more. There’s also a big counterfeit problem since many species look similar. I’ve had good truffles, and I’ve had truffles that literally just taste like nothing.





  • Seconding cooking for sure. You have to eat, so you might as well find a way to enjoy it, save money, and stay healthy in the process.

    Repairing things. Electronics, clothes, furniture, it doesn’t matter what, but try to learn how to repair stuff. It eventually encourages you to buy less, but higher quality items. Also everyone likes if you fix their favorite thing.

    Organizing people. This isnt often treated as a skill, but it really is. You’ll find over time that in your group of friends, someone is always the person to try to put together the next activity. Try to be that person. That’s super useful in all parts of life. Keep in mind that people will end up being lazy and expecting you to keep doing the work, but try not to take it personally.






  • There’s a pretty big range depending on use and material.

    Comments like “x has lasted me y years” don’t really help. If they are being used as hiking boots in an area where the trails are dirt/mud/roots, they will last a while. If worn on rough concrete in a job where you walk around in them every day, they will wear fast.

    There’s also a big difference in the type of sole. Some soles have effectively a big stack of foam as the outsole, which gives you some squish, but wears relatively quickly. Those a generally really thick, though, so it will still take a while to wear through. Some soles are softer rubber so you get better grip, but then they wear more easily. Harder rubbers last longer, but then comfort and grip can suffer.

    Dr Martens, and i assume solovair, has one piece of rubber that acts as the outsole and the cushioning. If you wear through the outer layer of the outsole, you can expose one of those air chambers and let water in.

    If your gait has you grinding through a portion of the sole prematurely, you could potentially talk to a cobbler about swapping to a different type of sole that won’t have that issue.



  • As it pickles, the contents will likely get a little softer, and the weight might drop down into the larger portion of the jar. If that happens, you’ll be able to rotate it out of the way, and get all your stuff out of the jar. Then you can actually stick your hand in and grab the weight and try to pull it out perpendicular to the opening. Odds are that the weight (and the jar opening) are not perfectly circular, so you can try rotating both to pull it out.

    Borosilicate glass (which this probably is?) has low thermal expansion, so heat probably won’t help.