I’m my experience it’s about a ten to one ratio of people who shit on vegans because they “never shut up about it” vs vegans who actually never shut up about it. So a vegan wanted to show she could climb Mt Everest. She did it, then she died of acute altitude sickness during the descent, something completely unrelated to her diet. Her husband, also vegan, lived. She became one of hundreds of people who have died in that climb, all of whom wanted to prove they could do it. Just let people live their life how they want to. Heaping scorn on someone who died trying to prove themselves isn’t cool.

First thing to understand is global collapse isn’t an event. It’s a slow process that unfolds over years, or more likely, decades. We are already seeing it happening, but since it’s not like the movies most of us don’t recognize it.

The second thing is that baring some catastrophic imminent localized danger you aren’t going to see hordes of displaced people fighting for your potatoes. It takes real desperation to pack a bag, leave all the rest of your things, leave your home, and walk far away hoping it’ll be better somewhere else. Even now people stay in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places.

So, odds are you’ll have time to set up a garden, set up a rainwater collection system, maybe get some solar panels. Whatever you want to do to prepare for what you expect is coming, you can probably do it. One guiding principle in this is try to minimize your external dependencies. If you can feed yourself and live comfortably without a big shopping trip every week you are doing better than most. Independence from utilities is more difficult, but doable if you want to put the effort and money into it. Another principle is learn useful skills. Learn how to build things, fix things, buildings, cars, electric motors, etc. Most people jump to protecting yourself from bandits. Do you live in a high-crime area? If so maybe move. If not, take some reasonable self-defense precautions. You aren’t going to fight off an army or even a coordinated gang, so just don’t worry about it too much. Basically, live in an area where you get along with your neighbors and you help each other out. Bonus points if they are self-sufficient too.

I mean, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, so just try to insulate yourself from whatever system shocks might appear. You’ll need to adapt as the years go by and things get worse. Good luck. :-)

Are you just sick of beans and rice or have you not found a recipe you like? If the latter, try this one. I made it a day or two ago and it’s good.

Serious Eats Foolproof Pan Pizza is one of my regulars. You can put all kinds of stuff on a pizza and it’s still good. I’m vegetarian so I use fake chicken and such, but here are a few of my favorites. (they all have mozzarella)

• Teriyaki sauce base, fried tofu, green beans, mushrooms, red onion, fried eggplant
• Barbecue sauce base, chicken, mushrooms, red onions, pickled jalapenos, sweet corn
• Refried bean base, cheddar, onions, mushrooms, pickled jalapenos. Top with Romain salad w/ ranch.
• Tomato sauce base, mushrooms, onions, peppers, olives. (flexible, use what you like)

You can make the pickled jalapenos. And the refried bean base is just a can of beans with a little water, garlic, and salt. Heat to cook the garlic then blend/mash.

I also like a good vegetable pot pie. That one is made with simple ingredients like potatoes, carrots, celery, and mushrooms, along with any spices you like. She has a nice pie crust recipe too. Turned out well when I made it.

Well, your showerthought post was basically rich people cause suffering and climate change. It’s true they generate a hugely disproportionate amount of CO2. But my point (and maybe it wasn’t clear) was that when there is an easy energy resource just sitting underground, it’s going to get used whether by rich people or not. It provides too much of an advantage. Having coal and oil at your disposal is like having a near endless supply of free workers. One liter of gasoline, when used in an engine, produces roughly 2 to 4 kWh of mechanical energy, equivalent to the daily labor of about 100 people. No society is going to turn down that many guiltless slave workers. We were told 100 years ago it was going to cause climate change, but we didn’t have the technology to replace it with electric at the time. Effective batteries are a recent invention. So there really was no alternative. Your neighbor country is making use of millions of ‘energy slaves’ and growing their population like crazy. Are you going to continue plowing your fields with donkeys and hoping you can feed your people? No, using that energy was inevitable.

And now? Theoretically we could replace our energy infrastructure with renewables. In the US it would take at least 5 trillion dollars and who knows how long and how much energy to do it. But I don’t think it’ll stop climate change. Call me a doomer, but I think it’s already too late for that. We’ve already released enough CO2 to kill the planet. The effects just take about ten years or more to show.

Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn’t renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don’t worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn’t made with fossil fuels somehow. And it’s too late now. We can’t go back. We can’t all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can’t survive without fossil fuels.

tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.

My first guess was a three way portmanteau: fucking + tangled + angular. Not sure how angular fits. Maybe sharp pointed or something?

Well, I didn’t mention tomatoes. And I’m slowly replacing my grass with a sort of food forest. It may not be native wildflowers, but I don’t think I’m lost.

The point in the article assumes you are solely reliant on rain for watering your plants. Where I live it doesn’t rain for like three or four months in the summer, so that argument is invalid. I use irrigation in my orchard every couple of weeks to deeply soak the area around a tree. The wood chips around the trees do help prevent the soil from drying out because they keep it cool. It takes heat energy to evaporate water. And since the mulch blanket keeps the soil cool I only have to water the orchard once every two or three weeks.

I’m 57 and I started running this year. Overtraining is the biggest issue for me. I’m up to about three miles maybe four times per week, but most of those miles are zone 2 HR, really slow and easy runs. On the weekend I’ll do a tempo run, or intervals, alternately. If I maintain that schedule for more than a month or so I end up a little more sore every time I go running and my time starts to drop. So I have to take most of the week off every four or six weeks. I also take a lot of supplements; creatine, L-carnitine, Beta-Alanine, protein, etc. They help. I feel I can exert myself more since I started taking them. I also take EFAs for joint health, collagen for connective tissue recovery, and sometimes MSM, though evidence on that one is spotty.

Yeah. It was a lot like that. She’d find a recipe to try, or want one of her favorites, and I’d just ask her how she wanted things chopped and prepped.

She is. She has cancer and spends a lot of time resting. She has more energy in the morning. She makes her breakfast. But I do all the cooking at night and usually lunch too.

eh, it can work. when my wife was well enough to cook we’d divide it like she washes, I chop and prep, and she cooks, then we split cleaning. Now I’m doing all of that and I really appreciate the occasions where we have a friend visiting who is willing to do some prep and cleaning. I usually do the cooking even when I have help, mostly because it’s rare to find someone who knows how to cook what we eat. But I’m always eager to have help.

But that’s not the goal of the health care system, at least in the US. Pharmaceuticals, hospitals, insurance companies, they are all part of a larger capitalist system that prioritizes profit above all else. It’s a conflict of interest, with the owners of the business on one side and the customers on the other. One guess which of those two gets to make the decisions on how the business runs. So, no, it’s not designed to keep you healthy, it’s designed to make a profit. And if the largest profit comes from making us healthy, then good for us. But either way we don’t get a say.

I played The Last Campfire recently. It’s a small puzzle game and the only voice is the narrator, Rachel August. Maybe it’s just her accent but I think her voice has a haunting otherworldly beauty that just makes the game.

I wonder if that includes drug overdoses.

One thing to bear in mind is many of these plants don’t grow true to seed. Avocado, peppers, tomatoes, etc., you may get a plant that produces a fruit that resembles the one the seed came from. You may not. I’ve even grown peppers from seed packages that weren’t true to the variety on the label. All it takes is one bee to fly in from a hot pepper plant, for instance, and while the fruit made from the flower that bee pollinated will be true-to-type, the seeds of that fruit won’t be.

I think the shooter was good, but not a professional. They knew enough to sight in their scope accurately, but not enough to account for bullet drop. Nobody aims for the neck. Odds are he was aiming for the head. If you zero in your sight for 100 yards, the bullet can drop 3 or 4 inches once it gets to 200. And he seems to have disappeared without a trace, so he planned it well. I assume he cleaned up after himself. Odds are they’ll never find him.

When I hear Nazi I think of concentration camps and killing Jews. Kirk was a big supporter of Israel. Does Nazi just mean conservative fascist now? And if so is B. Netanyahu a Nazi? That seems weird.

Probably Thai and Indian, since they both have a strong vegetarian side.

Buy all the corporations and convert them into worker-owned conglomerates a-la Mondragon. End global capitalism. Sponsor legislation in all governments to end the wealth disparity plaguing the world.