Wisconsin doesn’t have party registrations as part of voter registration (we used to, back when I first registered, which is likely why there’s some partisan representation, but not for a long time), nor do you need to be registered with a party to vote in the primaries (everything is on one ballot, you can just only vote for one party).

So that huge chunk of “independent” is probably “new” registrations from the last 15 or so years. They just don’t have data because it stopped being a tracked metric.

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The University of Wisconsin system of schools is well known for being good for the sciences, while still being state colleges, and thus more affordable for average individuals, particularly residents of the state.

However, in pursuit of profits, some of their academic hiring decisions have been…. Unfortunate. I won’t name the specific school this occurred at as the problem occurs across the board for associate+/-lecturer positions. And it occurs in most states. Education as a whole in the US has been commodified, and thus reduced.

Nope, I’m also a brown thumb due to having the attention span of a newt :) but I’m trying to figure out a way to make that tendency work anyway. Lazy indoor gardening. $10mil idea, which I’ll never profit from :)

If I can, literally everyone can (with freely available plans I’m developing! Because I like creating but the follow through… oof, nope…)

If you want to grow herbs, specifically, tho, I highly recommend water beads. You can get them on amazon for water bead blaster things, some 4x120,000 for under $10, which makes like a couple gallons of beads? They are also available at various retailers if you don’t want to support Amazon, expensive when bought for plants, cheap when bought as a toy. Go figure. You can mix your powder nutrient solution (10/10/10, with whatever additional nutrients you may need) with water, soak the beads in that water, plant the stuff in the beads, and then just sort of let it do its own thing, top it off with plain water as needed to retain the volume. If the herbs die, meh, just extract the nutrients from the beads with distilled/ro water for a day or so, let them dry, remix the nutrient and plant new ones!

You’ll get a good feel for what plants need and how lazy you can be with them. The water beads dry out as they are used up, but don’t really evaporate, so it’s a super clear sign to replenish them, with none of the disadvantage of organic soils (poor drainage, poor moisture retention, nutrient overload, etc.)

I’m planning to try the beads as a medium for strawberry rhizomes in the spring… I think they will do a decent job for some of the everbearing varieties. Or they won’t ^_.

I really need a friend who can keep a schedule so I can try my ideas… 😅

As someone who has worked in hospitality within the last few years; nope!

Servers expect tips (they shouldn’t), bartenders expect tips (they shouldn’t), sushi chefs (counter service style, where they basically are your server) and other “show” workers expect tips (they shouldn’t).

To-go orders, regardless of the source, including counter service, are not ever expected to tip, and the people working host stand or to-go are making more hourly because nobody is expected to tip those people. If you do it’s a nice bonus but it is NEVER expected. If anyone tries to make you feel bad about it (literally a fireable offense in the vast majority of places), just tell them they make above minimum wage and if they need more that’s between them and their manager, not you.

For a sort of… long-past personal anecdote that’s totally still applicable… I used to do counter service at an airport and we had tip jars… because airport. It wasn’t worth tipping for, but I wasn’t going to like… argue with tips on top of the shit wages we got (7.25/hr starting work at 3:30am)… I’d seed my jar with my own money every day and make 4x what the other servers made, or about $100/shift on top of my wages… I did nothing extra or different or special, and if I didn’t get tipped it was very whatever.

The kind who uses their platform to spread misinformation, in my experience. :)

I mean… my bachelors was largely neglectful tbh… if I didn’t know what I wanted to learn and how to learn it, it would have been nothing more than an extension of k-12.

They will let just any old shitbag teach certain credits… like my natural science 101 class, taught by a guy who bought into “organic is better”, “mindfulness will fix all your problems”, and various other pseudoscientific bullshit… such that my final essay (science is my auti special interest; I couldn’t ignore it…) was dedicated to pointing out each and every one of the pseudoscience claims he made in class which were demonstrably false (with citations). He initially gave me an A on the paper and then thought about how much I was insulting him and downgraded it to a C. That C was so worth getting. Fuck that guy. I learned more disproving his nonsense than I ever would have listening to him about anything…

But I also took a biostatistics course where the professor led by asserting creationism. Dropped that bitch right quick and complained to faculty about it (feel free to believe whatever nonsense you like, but I’m not paying tuition to hear your pet theories about thermodynamics proving creationism). Fortunately that was day two of the class, and still within time to drop. Unfortunately replacing that class fucked up my schedule for the semester big time.

And those are just two of a handful of issues with higher ed, and my school was actually one of the better for science curriculum… I started a masters program and dropped it when I got bad grades on papers for using accurate but simplified language (I’m a science communicator; using esoteric language is not something I do, even if I can easily do so. My life goal is to make science approachable for the masses, not a clusterfuck of specialized terminology that doesn’t even resemble the same term from another field)

I vote absentee, as do most of the people I know, and after 2020, none of us are mailing our ballot back. We are taking them to the in-person voting areas and dropping them off with staff.

In 2020, there were reports of ballots being dumped, and so far there have been reports of drop boxes set on fire and stuff… it’s hard to trust, because of republican stooges seeding chaos, and enough of a pain in the ass to fix if it gets messed up that we aren’t taking chances.

Edit: seeing to seeding

I wish I had easy access to fresh food like this… actually I’m a lot closer to having that now, since we actually have a real grocery store again where the one from 10 years ago closed down… for the past 10 years it was 30 min by highway to the closest, now it’s 20 min by bike (assuming being in shape for it) or 10 by car, which still isn’t super close but it’s a lot better. (The closest farmers market that isn’t just people selling junk they made is still half an hour in either direction)

My friend lives like 10 min walk from a grocery store and goes daily as a result. Gets good discounted foods and fresh produce regularly.

But I’m working on some indoor gardening systems that… might… assuming they work nearly as well as I hope… might make a difference to my tastes. (Tho I do strongly prefer veg already, and don’t eat a lot of meat. It doesn’t agree with my stomach. Tummy likes fiber.) I just got a batch of oyster mushrooms started on cardboard (because why the fuck not compost my trash into food???), and 50 radishes are sprouted for a weird attempt that probably won’t work. worth a try.

Alternatively, we do away with non-alcoholic pre-mixed beverages entirely, which are mostly water, replacing them with something like fountain machines or even powder mix. Like a kurig or soda stream but instead of using single-serve containers, it uses a refillable glass tube (or something) of concentrate and meters it out as needed, and uses refillable co2 containers, for example.

Another option is to do on-site, on-demand filling, like what breweries do with glass growlers. You bring a glass or stainless steel gallon or half gallon jug, they do a rinse with sanitizing water, fill it up, and send you on your way. We could even bring back swing top bottles for individual servings (I have like 50 of those and they are amazing for beer and kombucha), and just use local or on-site bottling.

There are lots of options that don’t involve single-use plastics, and also don’t involve tons of extra shipping costs. We just have to incentivize making that switch at the company/producer level, rather than the consumer level. Like reusable bags. If the polluting option isn’t an option, people will adjust.

Aluminum isn’t really a great option either. Modern cans have to be lined with a coating of plastic to avoid corrosion. Sure it’s a super thin coating, but it’s plastic all the same (and can contain some pretty nasty largely unregulated chemicals like PFAS)

I’m here for glass, though, and maybe we’ll find a good replacement for the lining in cans if plastic bottles aren’t allowed.

I did this with my shark(nado) bagless vacuum. :)

Mmmm you gotta do the twist break, where you push sideways on the bottom part to see if you can snap off the entire clip piece, rather than having that shitty nub left.

But if you end up with the shitty nub by accident, you gotta bite that bitch off.

In college I bought myself a 50 pack of those cuz I lose shit a lot, and that clip never lasted more than a few hours on any new pencil…

I’ve had this a lot. I’m almost 40, live alone, and never married, but I often get stuff addressed to “Mr and Mrs solarmonkey”… as a bonus, since my dad’s generation there have been zero new men with that last name (only girls from my dad and his brothers).

I love getting junk mail addressed to my mortgage co-signer, though. He has never lived here. Sometimes they address me with his last name, which is pretty funny (it’s my step-dad, and my mom died years ago, so we really don’t have much of a relationship at this point, and definitely don’t share a last name).

I like throwing that stuff directly in the recycling. If you don’t even know who I am that makes my job really easy.

He’s going to do that anyway, whether it’s allowed or not. His plan is to break the country by any means necessary. What actual difference does it make to trumps plans if Biden keeps doing his job until he’s not in that job anymore?

The answer is none whatever.

Consider getting a toaster oven the next time your toaster dies.

I’ve had mine for like 15 years now, use it all the time, and it’s still chugging along despite being $25 new. They are built a lot better than toasters because they are made for multi-purpose use, and the heating element is much more robust. Plus no springs to fail.

I know that doesn’t help the overall problem, but it might solve that one problem :)

So the sitting president shouldn’t be allowed to keep doing things they have been doing for years, just because it’s close to an election and someone unrelated might do something else after getting elected?

That’s stupid. Sorry but it is. It’s the same logic that prevented Obama from seating Supreme Court justices. And look how that turned out.

If this was the first ever time it was tried, maybe, but even then, we’d never have anything nice in that case. And we’d never get anything done from August to January in election years, which would also be intensely stupid.

We need to take what we can get, not be all weird about when it happens.

I’ve played other stuff, it all makes me a bit mildly queasy for a few min while I adjust and goes away.

Skyrim was intense violent nausea, and it got worse as I went. Whole different ballpark of motion sickness. I’d love to be able to play it but realistically I’ll probably never be able to get past that.

But it’s also not a game that was made to be VR, where literally everything else I’ve played was, so even with tunnel vision set to max during movement it was just too much texture, too “close”, and too fast.

You should try it if you haven’t, see if it makes you sick :) I’d be curious, if almost nothing else does.

That’s what I said about Skyrim. First person immersive world seemed perfect for VR.

It makes me violently motion sick, though, like to the point where I barely made it through the opening cart ride, and had to stop after 5 min of free movement. :(

Having textures race past, and feeling like you are in or barely above the ground due to the floor texture not having adjustable height to account for depth perception, while “moving” is super uncomfy, imho.

I’m super with you about wanting it, though. I’m desperate for VR to be immersive like that, and not vomit-inducing.

No you weren’t being unreasonable. They absolutely weren’t trying to help you out of the kindness of their heart, they were trying to seamlessly get your info by just keeping the conversation moving, and not asking if you -want- to sign up, to which yes or no are the only answers. When they ask for your number it’s weird to answer as though they asked a yes or no question, and that’s intentional.

I’ve worked retail, I was trained on canvassing sales (just trained, I quit before I started because it was super shady tactics I wasn’t comfortable with), that tactic is 100% intentional to get the info without you thinking about it. Some places even give bonuses if the employees sign up a certain number of people. Nothing altruistic about any of it.

When you don’t follow their script they get confused… because it’s a script. Not because they think you are mad; they don’t care about you as long as you don’t yell at them. You are just nameless face #545 of the day.

Whenever someone asks for my number or email I smile and tell them “oh, I don’t have an account with you, and I really don’t want one, but thank you all the same.” It’s direct and maybe a bit rude to some people, but they typically apply whatever discount anyway, and if they don’t, meh.

If they ask for zip code or address, I tell them they don’t need it, and with those I will get rude if I get pushback. This includes when I call for product support or something and just have a question. “No, you don’t need to know anything about me to answer my questions, and I won’t be providing it unless I feel you need it, regardless what you think or what your system says.”