Yup. Some brands may mix other cheeses in for taste, but it’s basically just those two cheeses and an emulsifier. A little bit of butter may help them melt more smoothly too, but it depends on how dry the cheddar is to begin with. Younger cheddars will melt easier, and may not need butter at all.

American cheese is just mild cheddar and colby jack, with an emulsifier added to help it blend together and melt smoothly. You can literally make bootleg American cheese by shredding the two together, adding an emulsifier (like sodium citrate) and heating until they melt.

That same emulsifier is what makes it so good for burgers. Aged cheddar tends to melt into clumps, and tends to get greasy as the milk fat separates out of the solids. The emulsifier helps the cheese solids and oils stay together, making it less clumpy and greasy.

Or just incorporate more modular designs. Steering columns are only made for the middle ~70% of drivers. Anyone outside of one standard deviation on the bell curve will struggle to get their steering column adjusted properly. It will either be too short, (meaning they have to reach too far for the steering wheel, and the airbag won’t fully cushion their impact), or too long, (meaning they’re cramped when driving, and dangerously close to the airbag when it deploys).

For instance, I’m tall. I have proportionally long legs. In order to be able to properly reach the pedals without my knees next to my ears, I need my car seat basically all the way back. But that means I’m constantly reaching for the steering wheel, which doesn’t extend far enough to be comfortable. It also means that if I hit something, my airbag basically won’t do anything. I may rub my face on it, but the vast majority of the stop is going to be handled by the seatbelt. Meaning my left shoulder and collarbone will take the brunt of the force instead of having it evenly distributed across my torso. It also means I’ll be more likely to develop whiplash, as my head won’t be sufficiently cushioned by the airbag until after it has already snapped almost all the way forward.

It’s just Poe’s Law in action. It’s impossible to create satire that is too extreme, because there will always be someone who believes it to be a genuine post. The law was originally coined to refer to fundamentalist Christians, but was later expanded to encompass any kind of satire or sarcasm in online text.

The issue is that it affects things like student loan forgiveness, which often requires people to remain employed as a professional in their field of study for a certain period of time after receiving their degree.

No, it’s a licensing issue. H.265 hardware support requires an ongoing license. And HP+Dell don’t want to continue paying licensing fees for PCs they have already sold. So they’re telling customers “get fucked, use a media player with software decoding instead of using hardware acceleration directly in your browser.”

Japan is extremely conservative, so it’s not likely. They have good PR because they’re known internationally for anime and zany fashion… But the vast majority of Japan is extremely hardline conservative, and it has been getting worse recently too.

Jingoism has been on the rise in Japan, to the point that they have started discussing whether they should be allowed to have their own army again. That’s notable because in the wake of World War 2, Japan’s constitution was rewritten to explicitly forbid them from having an army. They’re only allowed to maintain a small Self-Defense Force, which isn’t allowed to operate outside of Japan.

There have been multiple instances this week where I have seen someone on Lemmy dismissing statutory rape because “the victims didn’t even feel victimized.” Honestly, I’m starting to wonder how much of it was because of the Fox News anchor’s “uhm ackshually Trump can’t be a pedophile because the girls were pubescent. At worst, he would be an ehebephile” rant.

Has the Overton window really shifted so far that we’re forced into having the “is statutory rape sometimes okay” conversation, like it’s some sort of rational political discourse?

It turns out the reality is people don’t want to work for shit wages.

Companies also used it in the wake of the pandemic to justify running skeleton crews. Why hire more workers, when you can just give more work to your existing workers for no extra pay? If they complain, just fire a few of the loudest ones to make a point and keep the rest in line.

Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos. She was sentenced to prison for defrauding investors. She started making claims that she could do exactly what the headline says. She claimed that current blood panels (which usually require a vial of blood for each test) were insufficient and outdated, and that her company could predict or diagnose a ton of diseases and disorders with only a pinprick of blood. She said that her company was already in the final stages of the research, and used those claims to entice investors. She said that her company was going to be on the forefront of a medical revolution, and investors were clambering to get in before they hit the market.

It turns out she was full of shit, was lying through her teeth, the technology didn’t exist, and they couldn’t diagnose anything with the tiny amount of blood she claimed. Medical professionals had been screaming about the fraud for a long time, but techbros and billionaires were happy to continue jumping on the bandwagon because she kept promising results in the near future. When the fraud finally came to light, Theranos’ valuation went from ~$9B to $0 basically overnight. It was a massive “she stole from billionaires, so we’re making an example of her and actually prosecuting the white collar crime that never gets prosecuted” court case that started way back in the mid 2010’s. It only recently wrapped up a few years ago (I think in late 2022 or early 2023?) and she’s still serving time.

I mean, SCP was literally the inspiration for Control. Like the game designers straight up said that SCP was their primary inspiration, and they skirted as close to it as possible while still maintaining enough uniqueness to avoid things like licensing issues. So yeah, it makes sense that you’d enjoy it if you like SCP.

Here’s a reminder that there are nearly 14,000,000 vacant houses in America, and less than 650,000 homeless people. The math comes out to ~22 vacant houses for every single homeless person. I’ll give you one guess which income bracket owns the vast majority of those vacant houses…

You have no inhibitive filter, and compulsively blurt out whatever you’re thinking, including whatever the person is thinking when you’re reading their mind.

Only when jorkin it

Uncontrollable and overwhelming diarrhea whenever you use any of the chosen superpowers, which is immune to any kinds of “and I’m immune to the side effect” types of loophole powers.

Or alternatively, companies can bribe a few local politicians to stall, then start building anyways when the deadline hits.

It’s mostly an issue when you have them sharing boot drives via partitions. If you keep them isolated to their own separate drives, Windows doesn’t tend to muck with things. It’s because Windows is bad about killing bootloaders, and automatically setting itself as the default in the boot order. So if you have it sharing a drive, it’ll nuke your boot. But if you don’t have them sharing a drive, and boot via a loader on the Linux drive, there is no boot loader on the Windows drive to nuke.

While I want to agree, getting it into the zeitgeist and public debate has value. This has the potential to get some of her “I didn’t really care about Musk before” fans to look into it further, which can only help sway opinion against him. It won’t sway his supporters, but that’s not really the point. The point is to target the fence-sitters, and to engage those who haven’t engaged yet.

It’s not news for people who already like or dislike Musk. It’s news for those who don’t already care.

To use this court case as an example, the issue wasn’t that the drugs were addictive. The issue was that the company lied through their teeth about it. The company already knew from the medical studies that the drugs were horribly addictive, but decided to lie to doctors and tell them that the drugs were perfectly safe. They had massive advertising campaigns aimed at doctors, to get them to prescribe increasingly high dosages, and to write prescriptions for much longer periods of time. The company actively worked against any kind of safety nets or support to help people come off of the addictive drugs, in order to keep a lid on the addictive properties as long as possible. Because the company wanted to sell more drugs, and the executives realized that getting people hooked would sell more in the long term.

That doesn’t mean the drugs should be illegal. Criminalizing the drugs only pushes them underground, where addicts will be left without any kind of support or safety nets. Instead, they should be available in controlled environments, with drugs that were manufactured in regulated lab settings to ensure purity/avoid lacing. They should be administered by staff who are knowledgeable about the full suite of potential side effects, overdose symptoms, and withdrawal effects. Staff who can monitor the addicts and ensure they don’t overdose, while also being able to provide resources, support, or even alternative medications (to control the withdrawal effects) for those who are looking to quit.

The drugs you mentioned are actually a great example, because very few people started with those. Those aren’t something that the first-time user sought out. They likely got a laced batch of something else, (because the drugs are illegal, the production is not done in controlled lab settings with guaranteed purity), which fucked them up hard.

Donald Trump owned teen beauty pageants and you think hes just an end consumer of Epstein’s child sex trafficking?

We also know that multiple girls were recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell while working for Trump. My theory for a while has been that Trump actively used his properties to scout potential victims. He’d find girls he wanted, and use their job to give them a small taste of how the rich lived. He’d let the girls see him and his rich friends living it up on his private resorts, and start dropping breadcrumbs that they could join that same class of elites if they remained loyal. He’d make them feel welcomed, but not comfortable. He would ensure they remembered their place at the bottom of the hierarchy, but he gave them a glimpse of what they could have in the future… All you need to do is remain loyal, and you’ll get your shot.

Then Trump would pass their info to Maxwell, so she could get to work grooming them. The girls would obviously have their walls up around Trump and co. After all, they’re a bunch of creepy old men. Having a woman as part of the recruiting team would normalize the situation and cause the girls to lower their walls. “Oh hey, this rich woman is really nice and understanding, and she seems to be on my side. And if she isn’t creeped out by the gross old men, maybe I was overreacting? I don’t want to miss a good opportunity just because I was overthinking things…”

Maxwell would eventually start the “you’re still young, so you have some time to figure your life out… But opportunities don’t wait, and you don’t want to be a beer girl on a golf course forever. Have you ever considered where you’re going to go from here” type of stuff. The girl has had a taste of wealth, and she’s wondering how to get it for herself. “I just need to be given a chance to prove myself” would inevitably be running through her mind on repeat. Maxwell would leverage that, and start pivoting them towards alternate lines of work. As if she were just helping out a friend. “You’re really pretty. Do you work out? Have you ever thought about modeling? I know some people who would pay a lot of money to have you in a Levi’s ad.” And eventually, Maxwell would invite them to the island for something that sounded benign, like a massage, modeling gig, cocktail waitressing for a party, etc…

When they arrive on the island, Maxwell will continue to normalize the overly sexual nature of the work. If Epstein is naked, Maxwell won’t even flinch. This is just how the rich live, right? He owns this private island, after all. He can be naked wherever he wants, right? This may be your only shot, so don’t mess it up by getting offended over some wrinkly skin.

If you read Virginia Giuffre’s account of how she was originally recruited, it pretty much matches my theory directly. She was initially hired to work on Trump’s property, then got approached by Maxwell. Maxwell was the one who actually recruited her and invited her to the island. And once Virginia was on the island, Maxwell was right next to her, acting completely unfazed and ensuring she didn’t panic when she saw a naked man on the massage table.

But the important part is that it all started with her getting hired by Trump. Trump was the one who scouted the girls and tipped off Maxwell. Trump even joked about Epstein stealing “his” girls, because so many were recruited from Trump’s properties. Trump was the opener, and Maxwell was the closer. Epstein was just the logistics, inventory, and scheduling manager