Spyke

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What are some of the best purchases of your life?

Kitchen stuff:

  1. A good chef's knife. It'll run you around 200-300 bucks, but if you treat it with respect, it will last you forever
  2. A mortar and pestle. They're big and heavy, but grinding your own spice mixes is something that will absolutely change the quality of your cooking. A mortar and pestle used to be super cheap, I bought a huge one for 20 bucks a few years back, but they're kind of expensive these days.
  3. A decent cast iron or stainless steel pan. Learn how to use it and maintain it, and it will last you forever.
  4. Nice dishes. Spend a little more to get something decorative for hosting. People coming together to eat is one of the most ancient social traditions we have. Make it your own experience. I don't even spend that much, I just raid places like Homesense when they're changing their inventory and have bought all my bowls and dishes for around 50-70% off. Sure I only have two units of most of them, but I'd rather have a bunch of cool high quality dishware, than a bunch of boring looking, feels like it'll break while I'm washing it garbage from Ikea.
  5. Get some glass tupperware. I have something like 10 pieces that I've picked up over the years and now I barely use plastic wrap. They're great for prepping, they're great leftovers, they can be used in the oven (not all of them, double check what you're buying) and they're freezer safe.

Clothing stuff:

  1. One nice black suit. You can go to a shop like Banana Republic and get one of theirs and take it to a tailor to get it adjusted. A custom made suit is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, and the ones that aren't are usually made from polyester bullshit. Make sure it's a classic fit, don't go for skinny or wide anything as those go in and out of a fashion, but a proper fitted suit will always look good. Make sure it's made from wool, a wool/cotton blend, or linen if you live in a warm climate.
  2. A couple of nice fitted dress shirts. 2 white ones, and then the other three can be your choice of color. Before you start going crazy on patterned shirts at Dan Flashes, make sure you have your bases covered. I say this as someone who wears a lot of patterned shirts.
  3. 2 pairs of quality jeans. One black, one dark blue. Don't skimp out here, check the stitching, check the quality of the material. Cotton only, unless it has like maybe 5% spandex for extra stretch. Just like the suit, get it with a regular fit, no weird carrot shape, wide leg, bell bottom or anything else.
  4. If you live in a cold or rainy area, get wool underlayers. It stays warm when it's cold, stays cool when it's warm, dries out on its own, and is naturally antibacterial.
  5. Never buy anything made from synthetics except for a windbreaker or a raincoat. They feel like shit, they make too much noise, they look like shit, they have garbage insulation properties, they straight up melt from heat (I watched someone's $1000 Arcteryx coat melt to a chair that was too close to a space heater; the nearby wool coat was completely unaffected), they pollute the environment through microplastics and by taking forever to biodegrade, they trap your sweat (the wicking away moisture thing is complete 100% marketing bullshit), and if you have sensitive skin they are prone to causing outbreaks and other dermal irritation. Stop giving your fucking money to those planet destroying criminals at DuPont and say no to synthetic fibers.

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Sweet tea

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It should be taxed on the corporate side. Taxing sugar on the consumer side becomes a poor tax, because poor people will still want sweets from time to time, making those treats now more and more expensive. Well off people will just accept the tax because it's marginal to them, but when your chocolate bar that you treat yourself to once a week goes from 1.29 to 3.29, then it really fucks your day up.

What should be done is incentives to provide less sugar/glucose-fructose on the product side and encourage companies to make snacks and beverages that have less sugar content.

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American TikTok user data stored in China, video app admits

Since this entire thread is full of "hurr durr, I already knew that, nothing to see here" style posts, I'm going to attempt to provide something of fucking substance in this thread so that it doesn't turn into another fucking version of reddit.

TikTok is not like the other social media sites, it is significantly worse. Not just because it's a foreign, hostile government that slurps the data from it, we can ignore all that for now.

No, what's important is that you can go on western socmed sites and criticize whoever you want, but on TikTok, criticism of Xi Jinping, Putin Erdogan, or the Uigher genocide will be censored. TikTok also censors pro-LGBT content, and to a higher degree than what is recommended by the countries this censorship occurs in. [Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content]

Unlike other services like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram, TikTok has been banned by numerous government agencies in many countries of the world, as well as by various Fortune 500 companies such as Wells Fargo. But clearly these companies and government agencies know less than a couple of neckbearded former redditors masquerading as experts on the internet.

Beyond that, the app has been found to: collect biometric data such as face and voiceprints, track IMEIs and MAC address (in violation of Google's policies), a keylogger for any links or apps clicked while using the site [Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-22/tiktok-in-app-browser-can-monitor-keystrokes-researcher-finds/101356198].

Still not important enough news? How about when in 2022, employees at Bytedance used location information to try and track journalists critical of Bytedance/Tiktok and dox their sources. [Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/tiktok-bytedance-journalist-data/index.html]

Now let's go back to why it matters that it's a foreign government that has all of this access. We already know what happened during Cambridge Analytica, and how this sort of information was used to manipulate an entire country into voting against their best interests, resulting in the clusterfuck known as Brexit, which is currently costing England 100 billion pounds per year.

Don't be an idiot and don't be a simp, this information should make you outraged, not cynically complacent. There's an old saying from a sorta cheesy movie known as the Devil's Advocate: The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, is convincing the world they didn't exist.

For one final reason why you shouldn't trust TikTok: just look at how China treats our social media, or how they treat TikTok itself, at home, and why it has an entirely different set of guidelines and results for content.

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Sweet tea

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Have you seen how much sugar those hicks put into their tea though? It's gotta be hot because they put coca cola grade amounts of sugar, to the point where it wont dissolve in the water anymore. Sweet tea contains 36-38 grams of sugar per 16 oz. That's a fucking soft drink.

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Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads

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Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.

It's just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we've seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn't have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn't hear where that ended up going.