I’ve read that red variants of veggies like cabbage get less attacked by caterpillars, and anecdotally, it seems to be true. It makes sense that insects would be evolved to target the more “natural” color.

I think it ends up being the same amount of work for me. Rinse rice (optional), figure out correct amount of water for that type of rice, place on heat until done. Rice cookers can effectively detect that there’s no more liquid water, but that isn’t the same as “done” unless you used the right amount of water.

IMO, rice cookers are really handy if you are the type of person who eats rice as a staple food item that you buy in giant sacks and eat the same variety of every day. I have like 6 kinds of rice I rotate through, so I think it wouldn’t save me enough work to justify a separate gadget.

I’ve never used one of the really fancy pressure cooker rice cookers, though, so maybe my feelings would be different.

Yeah, I definitely understand that. I certainly have things that I don’t use as much as I hoped (I’m staring at a solar panel doing nothing leaned against my wall). For me, I really need the resulting “thing” to be something that I will use/be excited about.

That’s why, for me, fixing stuff that’s broken, upgrading stuff, or repurposing stuff you already own is good. Replacing a worn out jack is a relatively simple task that can turn an expensive brick back into a nice thing.

The tools you need are not a very long list. You can get a cheap, crappy soldering iron for $6, solder for $4, a crappy multimeter for $7, and one of those magnifying glass/alligator clip things for $6 from harbor freight. Despite being poor quality, a lot can be accomplished with just those tools.

I ended up buying a bench power supply for like $40, but you can just get DC power supplies from the bin of assorted cords at your nearest thrift store for basically free.

Wow, you couldn’t be more different than I am. Over the years, I’ve bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there’s better tutorials for things now than “make a bunch of LEDs blink in order”, so maybe the terrain is different.

There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.

It seems like kits are divided into “contains every part of a specific project” or “contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here’s a booklet of tutorials for some”. I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.

Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just “necropsies” on broken things to understand how they work.

Something that you’ll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the “premium” widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.

I guess maybe it’s been a while since I’ve looked, but that soldering iron seems like a crazy good deal. I’ve been using a crappy iron with a way too stiff cord for the longest time cause I figured it wasn’t worth it for how little I have to solder.

If you wanted pizza to be “italian”, it would have to have no tomatoes, peppers, pepperoni, buffalo milk cheese, basil or a whole bunch of other ingredients that are commonly added to pizza.

Pizza is a global food, do with it as you will

I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he’s trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

Coffee beans aren’t beans. There are some beans that are roasted as a substitute for coffee, like the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree. In times of shortage, people have tried many things to replace coffee, like dandelion and chicory root. For the most part, the substitutes arent as good as the original, so people don’t stick with them. There’s a chance someone has tried to roast and brew pinto beans or whatever, but they probably taste bad.

It’s also useful as a visual notice of a parenthetical comment.

All news has a bias, some news just doesn’t tell you what their bias is. I’m not advocating for intentionally aiming for biased news, I’m advocating for knowing what the bias of the author/editor of the story is, so that when you read it, you know what conclusion they might be trying to lead you to. Even if a journalist tries their best to be impartial, that’s not possible, and like I said, it’s very easy to tell a one sided story with exclusively facts.

I’ve not read 1440 at all, so this may or may not apply, but I’d offer a word of caution to any news that purports to be “just facts”. You can absolutely promote an agenda with only facts by choosing which facts to publish (and what stories to even cover). It’s sometimes better to aim to get news from sources that are just very transparent about their biases instead of claiming they don’t have any.

Trains use steel wheels (unless the government is in the pocket of Big Rubber, like the Michelin trains in Paris)

There are a lot of facists who pretend that any time a company chooses not to amplify their content, they are having their rights curtailed. They know that it’s not true, but if they complain loudly enough, they can convince companies to comply. They are also trying to use the Streisand effect to amplify their messages.

Any time they try to paint it as a free speech issue is a psy-op.

There are real free speech issues in the US, but they don’t look like this.

The first $120k is exempt, though, so unless you are bringing almost $1/4 million a year, the majority is not taxed.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/foreign-earned-income-exclusion

There’s also tax treaties that can make things more convoluted.

I think most jus soli countries also have jus sanguinis

This is especially weird because the Netherlands does not normally permit dual citizenship.

It seems like many (most?) countries don’t like/recognize dual citizenship. The way it ends up working is that each country doesn’t have the power to tell the other country that someone isn’t a citizen. Each country just enforces it’s own citizenship within it’s borders. If you had US/Netherlands citizenship, and use a Dutch passport to try to enter the US, you will probably get yelled at by customs if they realize that you are a US citizen. They can’t stop you from entering the US but they can hold you for a while and pester you.

If you have a US citizenship but live in another country, most of your income will be exempt from US taxes (unless you are a millionaire, in which case you probably aren’t paying many taxes anyway).

A similar thing happens with countries that have mandatory military or civil service; you can be required to travel back to serve.

In my experience, “joined up” is the British English way of referring to the mostly informal way that people write “joining up” their letters. I don’t think it’s as formally structured and taught like it is (was?) in America, where pretty much every letter is different than in print.

There are plenty of essential oils that smell really nice, and are nice to have in soaps or candles or whatever, but I just can’t bring myself to give money to any of the companies that make them cause they all support crazies and pseudoscience. If there’s a company that doesn’t, I’d love to hear about it.

Olympic record is different than world record. He’s done a longer throw at a different event.