The chocolate thing is because American chocolate manufacturers use butyric acid to preserve the milk. Basically, using fresh milk in chocolate is expensive, because you need to get it shipped directly and be located near enough to the dairy farm. So they intentionally spoil the milk in a controlled manner. This allows them to preserve the milk (as opposed to having it spoil naturally and go completely rancid,) which allows them a much more relaxed manufacturing process. This controlled spoiling method produces butyric acid in the milk.

The issue is that butyric acid tastes like vomit. Americans are used to the sour taste and don’t even really recognize that it’s not what chocolate is supposed to taste like. To them, that sour note is just part of chocolate. But Europeans come to America (and are used to fresh milk in their chocolate), and they are horribly disgusted when they taste American chocolate for the first time. Because Europeans aren’t used to having that sour note in their chocolate.

This is also why so many Americans fawn over foreign chocolate. It is seen as more luxurious, but most Americans can’t really place why it tastes so much better. The reason is the lack of butyric acid.

it’s far easier to start a business than to get a job

Also why so many Koreans run donut shops or nail salons, and why 7-11’s are almost universally franchised by Indians. They’re all relatively easy businesses to start, can be run out of any strip mall near a neighborhood, and all have the potential to hire and train your family members. And if your cousin owns a donut shop (and you’ve worked there enough to know how it works,) you can go open your own across town. Because if you come in on a work visa, your ability to stay in the country is held hostage by your employer. But if you start your own business, that’s not an issue.

a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

Ironically, the lump might have been what gets him into trouble. If he’s concealing a firearm without a permit, it can land him with some pretty hefty penalties. And if he has a permit but is printing (meaning the concealed weapon is visible through his clothes, like a lump) then it can also land him with some penalties.

It’s dependent on where you were, as each state has their own concealed carry laws. But in general, you’re not allowed to conceal a firearm without a permit. And if you do have a permit, you’re not allowed to have that concealed firearm be visible (even indirectly, like printing.)

Plus if you’re open carrying, Walmart internally bans them anyways. They’re a private business, and have the authority to dictate what people are or are not allowed to do while in their stores. The company has a blanket policy against open carrying, and (assuming they’re not barred from doing so by state law) the dude should have been told to leave his guns outside (like in his car) or be trespassed.

Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.

All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.

Nah, Yuzu is still working fine on mine. Basically, if you had the emulator installed prior to the takedown, EmuDeck will continue to use it.

Which is honestly a pretty good argument for just installing every single emulator (even if you never think you’ll use them!) because they don’t really take up that much space, and you could potentially lose access to them if you never bothered before a takedown.

Knives go dull much faster in the dishwasher. If you want to keep your knives sharp, you should be hand washing as soon as you’re done with them.

Also, get a damned knife block; Having your knives rattling around in a drawer is just asking for dull knives and accidents.

Nah, they don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. “I smelled weed” has been used for decades to skirt probable cause requirements. Because it’s transient evidence that can’t be saved or replicated, and you can’t prove that they’re lying. You can be 100% clean, but a cop claims he smelled weed and now your car’s interior paneling is getting ripped out on the side of the highway.

The cop lied to get the search approved. No more, no less.

If you’re referring to the wavy pattern along the cutting edge, that’s not from the folding process. The hamon is added to the blade during the quenching process, by adding clay to the steel. The clay causes the covered steel to heat differently than the uncovered steel. That differential heating is what is visible as the hamon.

It’s largely decorative, but does have function as it determines what part of the blade can be sharpened to an edge.

Yeah, Japanese steel wasn’t great, but they were working with what they had available at the time. Katanas were basically made out of iron dust, which had been melted into slag by filtering through charcoal. The resulting chunks of steel were basically straight up slag, not nice even ingots. So the steel they got was actually extremely high carbon in places, but that also meant it was brittle as hell, because those carbon pockets were prone to shattering.

So the folding was invented, to even out the steel’s carbon content (just like how a Damascus steel blade has visible stripes, Japanese steel had invisible stripes of high and low carbon steel) and to lower the carbon content overall; Every time you heat for another fold, you’re evaporating some carbon. So the folding process took the steel from extremely high carbon pockets to a more evenly distributed carbon content.

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition. There’s no need to fold modern steel ingots because they’re already homogenous and can be produced at whatever carbon level you want.

Bathroom attendants are there to discourage drug use and bathroom sex. That’s literally their primary purpose. The fact that they have towels and mints is secondary to the fact that they’re just a walking overdose deterrent.

That’s why they’re commonly seen in clubs and bars where people would be inclined to do drugs or have bathroom sex.

Yeah, something like that. Dump five gallons of apple juice and two pounds of glucose into a carboy. Add champagne yeast, cap with an airlock full of vodka, and let sit for a few months.

The result is an extremely dry apple wine that’ll kick your ass. If you’re not a fan of dry wines, just add a splash of sprite or 7-up to the glass to back sweeten it.

Reminder to avoid using Amazon boxes for this: Their boxes contain a rodenticide to keep rats/mice away from their products.

If your drink has more than one type of alcohol in it, you need to go to the ER. Methanol is horribly poisonous, and it is not a pleasant death.

Alternatively, I have had several injuries that should have gotten stitches, but have never been in the ER. Growing up poor in the US means you end up rawdogging your injuries.

Sports are just soap operas for men. What will happen next? Who will get traded? Who will be benched vs played? Who will get injured? Which team will throw a game at a critical time? Find out next week!

Same. I was just kind of a boring kid. Went to parties, but was just never interested in getting wasted. Saw all of my friends getting blackout and puking their guts out 15 minutes later, and wanted no part of it. My first drink was actually on my 21st. And it was just enough to get buzzed, not even wasted. It turns out “just say no” is really fucking easy when you’re autistic; Peer pressure just doesn’t work on you.

Once I started drinking, I quickly realized how many young people have binge drinking tendencies as a result of their younger drinking habits. Kids drink to get wasted before they get busted. There’s a time limit on how long they can drink, so they binge to get drunk as quickly as possible when it’s available.

Ironically, now I homebrew mead and apfelwein.

To reiterate how bad public transit is, even in populated areas: I’m also in DFW. This is my daily commute…

It’s ~9.6km. Note that the bus/train option is entirely greyed out, because there is no public transit which runs from my house to my job. If I were to walk, the only option would be on the side of a highway. I would have cars passing me at ~70 MPH without even a curb for protection.

To walk to the nearest grocery store, it’s ~4km, with a large part of it along the shoulder of that same highway. Same with a major chain.

Nearest bus stop is ~6.9km, but that only takes me in a direction I wouldn’t need to go; There are no local bus or train stops that land me near where I work or live.

Honestly, it would probably be easier to just build a *arr program specifically for downloading YouTube videos directly. Tie it into the rest of the *arr suite, with naming conventions for Plex/Jellyfin.

For those who don’t get the joke. During the Cold War, China had a habit of issuing “final warnings” which didn’t have any teeth. Since the propaganda was regularly aired over the radio in Russia, Russians began joking about “oh this is china’s third final warning this week, I bet people are scared now” type of stuff.

Mozilla doesn’t have a VPN. It’s literally Mullvad servers, with Mozilla’s branding on top. Mozilla doesn’t deal with any of the actual server stuff; It’s all handled by Mullvad.

FWIW, it’s a nice little drop shipping side hustle for Mozilla. They get to skim off the top of every Mozilla VPN sale, while doing none of the actual server maintenance and having no ongoing costs (hosting, electricity, etc) related to the VPN servers. But to be clear, you can get the exact same service (for a little cheaper because Mozilla isn’t skimming off the top) directly from Mullvad.

Paying for a VPN through Mozilla is like paying for a Spotify subscription through Apple’s App Store; You get the exact same service as if you had gone straight to Spotify’s site, but with an added convenience fee tacked on by Apple.