The power bowl is nice combined with other stuff. During Hatch chili season, I roasted up some Hatch chilies and removed the skin, stem, and seeds. Chop one or two up and stick them in the bowl. Combine with a heated tortilla.

Though that varies by country. It is also maybe not meat based but milk based.

And many items can be customized to be vegan or vegetarian with some simple substitutions or exclusions. The only problem is when the kitchen makes a mistake. Not a calamity for someone who is just trying to get a lot less meat in their diet, but a reason to be pissed when a vegan wanders into a region of reduced fat sour cream.

During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.

Well, it’s going through my head right now, so I will count it.

Ceilings in my ass

I just started looking up the different ways to order beers. Wow. Even if it’s based on the metric system, each country really did go and reinvent the wheel.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.

This truly is the strangest timeline, where Serious Journalists write about rumors of JD Vance having sex with a couch.

Because we are in the weirdest timeline.

Merry Christmas!

Can God have mercy on my soul as well?

There is that, but the larger explosion in housing prices can be largely chalked up to under supply in popular markets.

Car prices: supply is constrained because of supply chain issues where often just a small handful of the myriad of chips in the car are unavailable.

Housing: supply is artificially constrained by various laws, often of the NIMBY type.

Legistics?

Plenty of activists, even those with radical opinions, take that approach. They have a long term goal in mind, but to get to that goal they try to make incremental changes with the power they have.

Hermione got involved in house-elf welfare as an adult and was successful. I am not sure where that is covered, I think maybe Cursed Child? I don’t know much about what happens after the series is over, so I can’t speak to that in detail.

The fatphobia is real, but I’ve never bought the bit about the books being against Hermione’s anti-slavery stance (I assume that’s what you mean by a woman who speaks up as well). My interpretation was that Hermione was always assumed to be in the right because slavery is almost universally condemned in modern society. But she’s standing up against a system where even one of her two closest friends has been indoctrinated into it. Standing up to “others” is hard, but standing up to peer pressure is harder.

That said, the depiction of chattel slavery is of course inaccurate. Slave revolts were common, whereas the house elves want to be subservient to humans. I guess that could be marked up to house elves being a distinct species that may have been manipulated to be subservient, but that’s never explained.

What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?

The most mediocre dining experience (for the money) I’ve ever had was at a restaurant called “Smallwares.” Emphasis on small, it turns out. Case in point, we ordered duck breast, which cost a fair bit. I was picturing at least a fair amount, but it was the smallest smidgen slivered up with a dollop of sauce. It was the same with every dish, high prices for not much food.

Sure there were other places that had worse food. One remote dinner lacked any fresh food, but you can’t really help that when you’re in the middle of nowhere. But never have I felt like I was being fed by Famine from Good Omens.