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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • paultimate14@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldEconomy
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    13 hours ago

    I know what you mean. When I was really young my parents took us to Florida to see our great-grandfather a couple times and that was the closest thing I had to vacation for a long time. The past couple years my wife and I have had a couple of long weekend trips to cities we can drive to in a couple hours, but nothing extravagant. Well, except flying out to Boston for a wedding, but I would have preferred to opt out of that.

    Seems everyone I work with, my parents, my in-laws, friends, everyone goes on cruises. I honestly think I would hate it even if it were free. People dropping a few grand real casual just to binge drink for a week. I could do that for like $200.



  • paultimate14@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldEconomy
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    1 day ago

    I know this is a meme, but j do often find myself frustrated with how often my friends and family want to go out to eat.

    I did some annual budget analysis and found my wife and I averaged almost $500/month on bars and restaurants in 2025 (also including takeout). I make over 2x the median household income in my area, but I still think it’s extravagant and luxurious to constantly be going out to eat or drink, or to be ordering takeout. The same friends who are working multiple low-paying jobs and complaining about money are also the ones making plans that involve Ubering both ways to a bar to drink.

    You can’t budget your way out of poverty and we should absolutely try to fix the systemic issues we are faced with. Poor people deserve to have a good quality of life too. But also people need to review their consumption and ask if they really should be going out to eat 3x per week, or going on cruises every year.



  • I only even reluctantly add Brady to the HoF, because he went to a completely different organization with completely different FO personnel and still managed to win a ring. Throughout his entire Patriots career I said “well, all these Super Bowls need to have asterisks next to them and I don’t think he deserves the HoF”, but then he went ahead and won it again in Tampa and made me change my mind. Although… All the stuff with his TB12 company does seem awfully suspicious and like a way to get him money outside of the salary cap… And what a coincidence that he famously took mid-tier QB contracts his whole career too… If there was ever more investigation into that it’s possible I would change my mind back.

    How many QB’s have won Super Bowls on multiple teams? I mean actually win, not just guys on the bench like how Kenny Pickett has a ring lol.

    1. Earl Morral. Backup QB to Johnny Unitas for the Colts and Bob Griese for the Dolphins. It feels weird putting him here- he only played for the Colts because Unitas was injured, and he and Griese kind of went back-and-forth as Griese came back from injury rather than there being a clear starter. So he gets credit for the specific games but not quite for the entirety of Superbowl winning seasons imo

    2. Peyton Manning

    3. Tom Brady

    That’s it. That’s the list.

    If Belichik had gone on to another team to have success perhaps I would view him differently. I really don’t think Deflategate was a huge deal, but Spygate absolutely was. The bigger issue with deflate gate imo was that it was more evidence of Belichik teams cheating. Two separate cheating scandals re-contextualizes his record-breaking success. Instead of wondering “how is Belichik so good at being a football coach?” Fans are left wondering “what else is Belichik doing to cheat that he hasn’t gotten caught for?”



  • I have a vague memory of reading an article years ago (can’t find it now) about how pre-industeializarion, the average number of people an individual interacted with and knew wa much smaller.

    We used to live in small villages. Houses would contain extended families. You’d probably know your neighbors pretty well. You’d know the people you went to church with. It was not uncommon for someone to be born in a village and live their until their death without ever leaving that village.

    Whenever I hear people talk about how humans NEED social connection I’m reminded of that. My college graduating class was perhaps more people than several generations of my ancestors interacted with. There’s a strong argument that we have hyper-optinizsd socialization today. Constantly connected to dozens of people we know and millions that we don’t. Stimulation, novelty, and distraction enough to last more lifetimes than I can imagine.

    Perhaps in this modern age, the person most difficult to engage with and the most important, is the self.




  • I was a Steelers fan and Mike Tomlin fan until last year. I couldn’t get behind signing Qaaren Rodgers as the QB. Please forgive me if this is comment is kind of me saying goodbye to the team.

    I spent last season not paying attention to the sport at all. I do miss it- following all the draft coverage, the spring training reports, seeing the shaking of the roster through pre-season. Following the season- the development, changes, setbacks, injuries, trades.

    I was considering watching again if Rodgers retired or went elsewhere. Tomlin stepping down makes the team way less interesting, but I was still kind of paying attention to coaching search. For them to hire McCarthy is just… Lame. An old guy who has already proved that he’s neither a great nor terrible coach. A known middling guy. A safe hire.

    It feels like the FO is still living in 2010. As if it’s mostly the same team and with just a few minor updates they can get back to the SuperBowl. And who better to lead then than the guys who beat them the last time like Rodgers and McCarthy? Surely everything is the same as it was 15 years ago, right?

    Feels similar to, but even worse than, the Arthur Smith hire. Safe. Kind of reminds me of a lot of their personnel moves too. Jalen Ramsey, Jonny Smith, Cordarrelle Patterson, DK Metcalf, Darius Slay, Patrick Peterson, McCoyle Pruitt, Van Jefferson, Scotty Miller, Mike Williams, Larry Ogunjobi, Patrick Queen, Donte Jackson, Cam Sutton, Keanu Neal, Joe Schoebert, Myles Jack, Juan Thornhill. It’s all been about taking guys who they really liked in the draft proces. Doesn’t matter if their first handful of years in the league were just mediocre. Doesn’t matter if they’re >30 years old as a DB who USED to be great. It seems so rare for young guys to be able to come in and even see the field.

    I remember after the last draft, when I was still following the team closely, and everyone was talking about how Kaleb Johnson was going to be a perfect fit and was already ready to start. People were predicting he would push Warren to the bench and surpass anything Najee Harris did. I don’t know what happened, but I see he only got 28 carries last year and I don’t see any reports of him dealing with injury. Seems he was just a healthy scratch.

    Now looking at the roster… Who would I even root for or be excited about? Cam Heyward is hopefully retiring, and TJ Watt should demand a trade. There’s a couple of interesting young players (Herbig, High Smith, the o-line, Harmon, Darnelle Washington) but nowhere near enough to merit watching them. I guess the roster will have a lot of room and they will be adding people this summer but I don’t have any hope.

    Khan doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. Colbert lost the plot several years before he retired. I’ve seen a lot of people point to Dan Rooney dying in 2017 as a significant down turning point for the franchise. I’m kind of skeptical of how much he was involved at that point, but the timing does work out.


  • I’ve noticed a ton of these too: it seemed to have started right around New Year’s.

    As someone who typically scrolls All, I’m not even sure if it’s specific to this community. There are a lot of Comic and Meme communities where these things are getting posted across various instances. I’m still not sure whether this is nefarious or someone trying to grow Lemmy. Could just be some college student trying to test out making bots, posting things they genuinely like. Though I have noticed most of the comics tend to em have divisive elements or say things that are obviously wrong. It seems like their goal might be to drive comment engagement.

    So I’ve been marking them with UserNotes as “Comic Bot” and usually just do voting and moving on. Occasionally commenting to draw attention to the user history for others.


  • paultimate14@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldSaving Money
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    7 days ago

    And OP is yet another account that was created incredibly recently just to post a handful of comics.

    It started happening with the new year. Tons of account getting created, in various instances, and posting comics to a variety of different communities.

    Idk maybe it’s someone trying to boost Lemmy’s rate for content and just drive the growth of the platform, but something about it just doesn’t smell right.


  • I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit

    That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.

    As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.

    More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.

    Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.

    What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.

    It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).


  • Started with guitar 21 years ago. Don’t remember the exact timelines, but I picked up bass and piano within a couple years. Then drums and singing. Dabbled in mandolin, banjo, cello. Most stringed instruments, especially those in western music, are pretty similar so they’re pretty easy to switch between. I even dabbled in clarinet because my older sister left it with my parents when she moved out, but I never put that much time into it.

    My talents in each have waxed and wanted over the years. Guitar was always my primary preference.

    The problem is that everyone and their mother can play guitar. It makes sense- tons of households have guitars lying around. Acoustics are a really cheap and easy entry point- any college student can pick one up and learn a few chords and start trying get attention. It fits in your dorm or in the car you’re halfway living out of. There’s also plenty of cheap box kits of really low-quality electric guitars + small practice amps that are affordable for parents, with the added benefit of making kids use headphones so you don’t disturb the neighbors. Drum kits, by contrast, are expensive, big, difficult to move around (band practice pretty much always has to be at the drummer’s place), and loud. So drummers are usually hard to find.

    So I spent time in bands as a bassist and keyboardist. Two separate times I had wealthier friends who played guitar and had younger brothers whose parents purchased a drum kit, but those brothers never learned to play, so I ended up behind the kit even though I couldn’t really practice on my own time. For a while I was the basisst in a band where the left-handed drummer didn’t have room in his house, but there was room in my basement so I ended up messing around and learning to drum left-handed a bit too. I’ve been the lead guitarist, but only rarely outside of my solo stuff.

    Bass is very similar to guitar. Different style, and I do think it’s important to change your approach and technique (I don’t use picks on bass), but a lot still translates. With keyboard I was never classically trained or anything- I mostly just learned guitar, bass, and vocals parts on keyboard. I put a lot of time into programming software synths. Often I would just match what those instruments were playing with a different texture, or just play chords underneath. As a keyboardist I would also be in charge of like, punctuation and sound effects. The kind of little extra things you don’t notice on an album and often gets cut out of live shows.

    I think I’ve been a decent singer. I initially took lessons with the intention of just being a background vocalist and maybe doing some acoustic open mic nights. I joined the choir in college and got selected as the best Bass to represent the school at an event one year. I kind of accidentally ended up as the lead singer of a few bands just by being the best singer in the band. Never just the lead singer though - always play drums or bass or guitar too. Singing is a lot of work- I needed to stay in shape, watch what I ate and drank (especially on the nights of practice or performance). It’s easy to identify mistakes as you’re playing an instrument, but for singing I would have to record myself and listen back to it a ton. I learned from my choir director all the little details to listen for- pitch drift, sloppy pronunciation, breathing issues, etc. And Satan forbid I catch a cold before a show. Right now I’m out of practice, so while I could totally rock out a karaoke night at a bar I would need a couple of months notice before playing a real show.


  • This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.

    “Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.

    In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.

    That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.

    Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.