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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Probably the 90’s in the US. For context I’m an '80s kid.

    The dust from deregulation had mostly settled, healthcare hadn’t skyrocketed, education and homes were still mostly affordable. Union busting and offshoring had settled down a little. Bankruptcies crushing retirements, too. You thought that the traditional paths of career, maybe getting married, and buying a house were still on the table. Politics were pretty stable and it was probably the last time you could make the argument that “both sides” were kinda the same. We were kinda coasting after the close of the Cold War…sure there were some skirmishes, but nothing huge. The were the “good old days” where shit was just going OK for the most part (please don’t pedantically point out what was wrong with society, no period is perfect, it’s just that the '90s had a few less bumps in the road). The internet was becoming a more widespread thing, technology was advancing rapidly. You could still save the Earth with a little recycling, Climate Change wasn’t obviously having effects as veiwed by the average person.

    Followed by the '00s where we got hammered really fast with dot-com bust, 9/11, recession after recession, decades of war, politics shifting hard right, rapidly rising costs thanks to speculation and corporate mergers…it’s been pretty unsettled for quite a while and for those entering the workforce now it’s rough.

    Yeah…the '90s. Things were still looking up until TSHTF in '00s and after.


  • Common refrain from my perspective. No wonder kids don’t like fruit. It’s bred to survive picking and transport with minimal damage, often seedless, and have as long a shelf life as possible while looking attractive. It’s picked under-ripe by a big margin.

    It tastes like shit. Pithy, flavorless, sour, etc. Some vegetables even fall into this trap. They’re big, pretty, and pithy. Dry. Hard.

    It’s been a noticeable shift since I was a kid, and I was spoiled by growing up in a major fruit-growing area. Could pick up a flat of fresh strawberries for $6. Fresh melons, tree fruit, berries…all were available during the summer. Didn’t have too much cooler-climate fruit like apples though. That fruit was better than candy many times.

    I’ve been making an effort to try to locate as much fruit or whatever to grow ourselves that tastes right, looks be damned. It’s a lot harder than I thought. Many of the seeds found at stores around this time of year are hybrids that often fall into the same commercial trap - big, showy, and shitty. You’ve got to go places like Seed Savers Exchange and buy the older varieties that are less fucked with.




  • There were several missteps by vaccine proponents that undermined their case. There was also a lot of hyperbole from vaccine hesitant people that made them look hysterical.

    Really. What missteps were made? The hysteria from hesitant anti-vaxxers and political fear mongerers were real, I would call “hesitant” people the ones who realize vaccines are a likely necessity but didn’t understand how the COVID vaccines worked and were probably influenced by lies from the ant-vax crowd.

    What middle ground could possibly be made here regarding “truth”? Vaccine risks are known and fairly well established. The risks of early COVID strains were known. The only people straddling a fence in the middle are those who lack the knowledge of the risks or have objectively real medical problem with vaccines, not some made-up junk about mercury or something.

    Vaccines are neither a 100% safe panacea, nor are they injectable death.

    OMG this is binary JAQing off. Nobody suggests either of these and it’s ridiculous to even posit this phrase.