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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • When I was a child, my elderly neighbor grew pears, and they were the best pears. My parents live in the same house, and the pear trees my elderly neighbor grew are still in the same spot, still alive.

    The pears on those trees aren’t the same anymore. They turn meally before they get soft, and they never get sweet enough. They don’t have the same strong flavor, and they don’t bake up well in desserts.

    She taught me many things about growing plants, but never anything about what she did for the pear trees. So now pears aren’t what they’re supposed to be, and the reason is lost to me.






  • When you account for inflation, oil prices today are in line with oil prices in the early 2000s. The price is too low, and the risk is too high for massive infrastructure spending that would extract more oil from Venezuela to be worth it.

    Possibly, green energy technologies are now on a trajectory to overtake fossil fuels altogether - and they are already a factor in driving the price of fossil fuels (and therefore the profitability of many wells and mines) down substantially. If that happens, the long term value of Venezuela’s oil reserves, without suitable infrastructure already built for extraction, could be close to zero.

    In line with small government ideals, the best thing to do is let companies decide whether and how much to invest, but that won’t be a headline worth showing off. So Trump is trying to make $100B happen, and believes that that (alone) will restore the Venezuelan economy to the way it was.




  • I was raised religious, and fell for the whole “porn makes you unable to form real, properly attached bonds with another human” thing. Then I started reading the scientific background of that stuff, and - while you definitely can damage your ability to form strong relationships with porn (or just about anything else) - that made me far more porn positive.

    Maybe this is just me, but I actually watched/looked at far more porn when I felt deeply ashamed of doing so. Now that I’m OK with it, and it just feels normal, it’s comparable to a tool I have access to.