calmbell · HackerTrans

6 months agodiscuss

Whole foods are affordable and healthy. My wife and I eat mostly rice, tofu, lentils (especially red), and vegetables (mostly frozen). We buy in bulk, spend around $350 a month on groceries (while barely eating out), and have a lot of variety through preparing the tofu and lentils in different ways. Our favorites recipes are from Nisha Vora of Rainbow Plant Life and The Vegan Chinese Kitchen.

calmbell

7 months agodiscuss

There was an attempt under Lina Khan.

calmbell

8 months agodiscuss

The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.

My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.

If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.

calmbell

8 months agodiscuss

There should be a world standard or standards for genuine carbon credits. Maybe the UN could create an agency that determines such a standard and verifies that carbon credits meet that standard.

calmbell

8 months agodiscuss

I agree there is nothing uncommon about that type of arrangement, but the amount of money involved is unprecedented.

calmbell

9 months agodiscuss

Enabling the state violence of authoritarian governments through surveillance software is unequivocally worse than the examples you listed.

calmbell

10 months agodiscuss

The key takeaway from this imo should be to only use password managers with a secret key like 1Password.

calmbell

10 months agodiscuss

And transferring money from a bank or brokerage account takes time. Enough time that anyone paying attention should be able to report the transfer as fraudulent before it completes and have the account frozen.

calmbell

10 months agodiscuss

The Palma 2 doesn't have stylus support. I seriously considered the Supernote Nomad, the modular design is neat, but went with the Palma 2 for the backlight and the Boox software, which seems to be superior to Supernote for everything but writing and notes. If my primary use case were note-taking rather than reading, I would have gone with the Supernote Nomad.

calmbell

10 months agodiscuss

Check out the Boox Palma 2. I love mine and it has an actual operating system (Android 13).

calmbell

10 months agodiscuss

Check out the Boox Palma 2. It has been an excellent Kindle replacement for me and is in the same smartphone form factor as the Paper Pro Move.

calmbell

last yeardiscuss

Here is an article from 2022 that does a great job of explaining the issue: https://www.columnblog.com/p/us-media-celebrates-letting-18-...

"Cut to 2022. Wages are still down 30% to 50% in key markets, and the job is as dangerous and taxing as ever. Naturally, the pool of people wanting the job would reduce accordingly. Thus, when demand for truckers increases, there’s a “labor shortage.” But, as Peter Greene noted in Forbes when debunking a related myth of “teacher shortages” in 2019, it’s not a lack of willing workers: It’s a severe lack of incentives—wages, unions, benefits—needed to entice workers to take on the difficult work"

calmbell

last yeardiscuss

Just to nitpick, there are North Korean defectors who are not South Korean citizens. For example, the U.S. has resettled North Korean defectors under the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_Human_Rights_Act_...

calmbell

last yeardiscuss

I was shocked to learn that 75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (search for "75-year-old white men").

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