I dont think most Mexican food in the US is tex-mex. Fast food like taco bell isnt tex-mex, and most taco trucks and takeout places aren’t. The main category of restaurant that seems to be largely tex-mex are sit-down places with names like “El Mariachi” that cater to non-hispanic people and advertise the cheapness of their margaritas.

Even the concept of food being “authentic” or “inauthentic” is pretty dumb. Pretty much every food short of raw foraged ingredients is the result of cultural exchange.

You could argue that an Italian cooking with chilis or tomatoes is inauthentic and that the resulting food is more Mexican than it is Italian.

Extending the concept from ingredients to techniques, you could argue that every food that relies on the cold chain (refrigerated/frozen storage and transportation) is an American food because the cold chain was created by an American.

Ah, that all makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I can see this being really useful once apps have handled all the ways people might want to shorthand things.

Actually seeing the grid makes it way easier, I think. I bet there’s a way to turn that on in the Google maps app itself.

How does that work?

V75V+8Q Paris, France

If you reach “v75v+ paris”, it’s less detailed than the full plus code, and “paris+8q” doesnt get you anything.

I would hope they minimize the use of homophones. They do use different forms of words, but the way the words are assigned, you aren’t going to have 2 really similar sounding locations in the same area. If you know someone went missing on a hike in Scotland, you’ll be able to figure out that the three words correspond to a Scottish location and not somewhere in Kenya.

It almost seems like a different use case. It seems like the plus codes are effectively like mailing addresses for places that dont have addresses (lots of countries). They still lack the ability to do clear, analog communication (e.g., over radio or just a person’s memory in a search and rescue situation).

I will say, I’ve noticed the plus codes, but never looked into them. It’s really good that they are open source and can be generated offline. Hopefully they have some adoption in other apps/devices.

The original use case, as far as I know, is helping search and rescue. Words that are easy to communicate verbally, and easy to remember, so you dont have to worry about bad radio or phone signal garbling communication. Even if your phone dies, or you dont have pen/paper, it’s easy enough to remember the three words and communicate to search and rescue after you’ve made it out to a trailhead or whatever.

Oh dang. I haven’t actually used the app in a while. It seems like the monetization of core features is a new thing?

It’s such a simple and good idea at its core, so it seems really stupid to muck it up. I guess I will just have to go back to using decimal lat/longs. At least mapping applications seem to be able to interpret those better now. For the longest time, even Google maps would just give you no results if you typed in what was obviously lat/long if you didn’t have the ° symbol and minutes/seconds.

The idea of “whiteness” being good is a super new concept in the grand scheme of things. People like to say things like “Irish and Italians werent considered white”, which is not accurate because they’ve always been considered white.

“White” just wasn’t enough to be part of the “in group” and people nowadays dont have any other terminology to describe what the in group was other than just white. If you go back to the early 1800’s, the in group was Protestant anglo-americans. That doesnt mean people from other European countries werent white, it just means they werent part of the in group.

“White” being the defining factor of the racist top hierarchy is super new, like 1966 new. The leader of the American Nazi party realized that they could gain more power by folding in white people from outside of their traditional in group (germanic or nordic), so inspired by the black power movement, he coined the term “white power”.

Even now, just being white isnt enough to be part of the top category to racists. Maybe an Italian is considered part of the in group, but not middle easterners (who are legally white in the USA).

Since “white” as an identity of people is relatively new (and only really makes sense in a racist framework), a lot of European/Middle Eastern Americans tend not to identify as “white” but instead by whatever jumble of identities their grandparents might have had. If your grandparents tell you they had a Cherokee grandparent, how are you supposed to know any different.

Not that I think you are wrong, but DNA tests dont necessarily paint the whole picture the way they companies selling them would like you to believe.

They’ve gotten better over time, but unless you have a bunch of samples you know for a fact are 100% Blackfoot (which already inherently doesnt make sense because the Blackfoot are a confederacy of different peoples), you have to just do your best to reconstruct what you consider to be “Blackfoot DNA”. People groups are also never static the way racists think they are.

In your case, for all you know, you could have had a few different Blackfoot ancestors who had offspring with French traders in the 1700s, or an English frontiersman in the 1800s. The offspring could have just been born and raised in the tribe and considered 100% part of the tribe, even if it turns out their DNA was 25% “Blackfoot”.

The problem is many many native children were intentionally separated from their culture. Lots of people who would otherwise be able to speak a different language, engage in other cultural practices, etc, are unable to because of actions by the government.

Then you also have really messy cases like the descendents of people enslaved by certain tribes, who should be able to be members of the tribe, but aren’t able to.

Probably because most people don’t think of it as a “profession”. Lots of landlords hire property managers, which is a profession, but the landlord themselves are just collecting the money. Small-time landlords that might have 1 or 2 places they rent out probably have a real job, and just landlord on the side.

It’s probably a relatively small percentage of landlords who actually do the work themselves, and do it as a full time job.

Yeah, I tend to get cookbooks from the library a lot.

Lol, 2 of the books that I own cause they do this well.

Yeah, I wish there was an easier way to distinguish what I’d call actual “cook books” from the vast sea of “recipe compilations”.

I.e., books that go over techniques, but then maybe just give some recipes as examples.

Not a problem I have, but generally, I hate bug spray because of how greasy and smelly it is (and the fact that deet damages synthetic fabrics), so I will go to a lot of lengths to avoid using it.

I use long sleeves and occasionally a bug net if the mosquitos are really thick. They can bite through clothing, so I make sure it’s loose. I’ve actually been thinking about making a garment to wear under a long sleeve shirt to add another layer to my shoulders where gravity makes the fabric sit against my skin.

I also use permethrin treated clothes if im going to be somewhere with a lot of bugs. I do try to minimize that to when I really need it because permethrin is harmful to a lot of beneficial insects, too. You could use a permethrin treated buff or something similar to protect your neck.

Lastly, picaridin comes in a lotion that is not greasy or smelly, and it works just as well as DEET for mosquitos.

It’s good to see that there are sane comments here.

It’s crazy to me when people go through a 10 step logical progression to justify how not voting is somehow the moral thing to do.

It is essentially a trolley problem, and maybe my personal philosophy is too utilitarian, but it’s an easy choice for me to throw the switch that causes the least harm rather than sitting by for maximum harm.

Also, there are a lot of non-voting actions you can do that improve things, but voting doesnt prevent any of those. Anyone who says they do direct action instead is full of crap: do both.

Despite all the attacks on voting rights, voting is still one of the easiest actions to take.

This plus a dose of a natural disdain for being given an answer in the question.

The proper way to phrase a question should be “what is your opinion on X?”. Asking why X is good forces me to accept your assumption that it is good.

Idk about merlin, but with iNaturalist, the purpose was logging sightings and locations of plants/animals/fungi/etc, and letting people double check your ID so it can be used in research.

This built a massive database of images, locations, times, etc, which is a really good training set for image (or sound) recognition. Now the app is really good at automatically recognizing stuff from pictures, so people just use it for that. The app actually started to try to penalize you for using it for identification without actually logging stuff.