Tomato sauce and everything hot tomato, especially if you use canned tomatoes, needs a bit of sugar. It makes it 100% better. It does not make it sweet, but all the flavors of the tomato just pop while otherwise it is only sour and bland.

Not so funny when it actually happens to you:

Because of really bad experiences with alcoholics as a child, I am afraid of people who drink. My psychologist and my doctor wrote that down.

When I became seriously ill and could no longer work in my old job, I had to retrain. To do this, you have to go to the German employment office and get an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, including what your doctor and therapist have to say.

They read the paper from my doctor and my psychologist, but just skimmed over the words and decided that because the word “alcoholic” was there, I must be the alcoholic. They told me that I could get paid retraining and benefits, but only if I attended a therapy group for alcoholics once a week - me, who is afraid of alcoholics because of the abuse I suffered as a child. … I immediately started crying and swore that I had no problem with alcohol, only with alcoholics!

It took 6 months to get someone at the job centre to actually read the papers word for word to find out that me saying “I’m not an alcoholic” was not me being an alcoholic in denial. I got a half-assed apology and my retraining 6 months after I could have started it because of this. Not to mention that every time I refused to go to AA meetings they threatened to take away my benefits and I was in such a bad mental state that I probably would have killed myself without the help of my family. Oh, and my family who tried to intervene were labelled as co-alcoholics, holding me back.

I managed to clean the kitchen and do the dishes every evening for two weeks in a row now and it is a start to be nice to tomorrow me. If it becomes a habit, I will try to do more, but for now it is hard enough, but also so, so satisfying the next morning! Past me, today me and tomorrow me are a team!

A robotic AI pet. Like a small dog or cat. Preferable able to read my body language and react to it. In a low price range that I can afford. Everything on the market is too dumb, too expensive, too hard to program and there is non that can read body language.

Insulting people who take their time to explain why people downvote you doesn’t make you any different than the worst of Reddit. Also you seem to not have an argument against what I wrote so that’s settled then. Have a nice day!

dodger

badger, my bad, English is not my first language

And any dog can become reactive.

Any cat can give you a scratch or a bite, it’s just worse if the cat is a tiger. That’s why most places do allow a small pet cat and not a tiger.

Sausage dogs are extremely tough dogs with a lot of prey drive, because they were bred to hunt alone for example a dodger badger underground defending its home. They bite often, are often (pro-)reactive but if someone dies through them it is an old lady stumbling over the leash and breaking her neck, not the dog ripping her guts out.

You are not completely wrong, but you are wrong enough to be voted down.

It’s the owners’ fault for not accepting that they have an extremely dangerous animal on a leash and that they haven’t done the minimum necessary to control it. They make excuses until shit happens and that shit could happen to them and their own family as easily as it could happen to a stranger.

On top of that, these breeds are far more dangerous than others. Even if another breed bites as often or more, the damage they do is less. This breed will bite and not let go, they ignore pain completely, their jaws make large wounds and with their muscular necks they can rip out large chunks of flesh. I do not care if Sausage Dogs bite more often and are rarely well trained, they do not manage to kill anyone, except an old lady who stumbles over the leash and breaks her neck.

Even the best-trained American XL bully dog is a weapon that can shoot itself, and once it starts it is unstoppable except by a bullet or being choked into unconsciousness. The breed was bred for this, it is in them like a sausage dog was bred to hunt alone under ground and chase a badger defending its home. They are tough as hell and bite attacks are common, usually ending in a small scar on someone’s lip or a torn trouser. If you keep your finger, your eye, your face or your life with an American XL bully dog you got lucky.

I am not very helpful, but don’t kill these hours, befriend them!

Dalits have been attacked and killed by the oppressor uppercastes for

no reason than because the criminals wanted to. I find it important to use words carefully, because there is never a reason beyond hate and wanting to feel superior. To mention what the attackers pretend was the reason is blaming what happened on the victims and accepting the attackers made up defense for their actions. If repeated often enough it will stick with people’s minds as an actual reason.

I find it important to make clear it was a hate crime, but Lauri Carleton was NOT killed “over a rainbow flag outside her clothing store”.

No one gets killed because of a rainbow flag. You get killed because an asshole who wants to rather die than adapt to the world changing wants to spread fear with his last action and needs desperately to find a “reason”. Let’s not pretend he had a reason any other than being a coward.

My heart goes out to her family, friends and the community impacted.

An office I can walk to. I might even prefer that to a home office, because I find it hard to get away from work when it is always looking at me at home, even in my spare time.

An office where I have a say in how it is furnished and how it looks, together with my colleagues of course. Natural light, being able to sit or stand at my desk. “Please do not disturb” signs that people respect when I want to concentrate on my work. A place that is built to reduce noise, and that allows me to have it as cold or warm, light or dark, as I need it to be that day.

A place where I can eat and drink when I need to, and a place where I can lie down for a moment when it helps me recover from a difficult task.

Basically, make my workplace a place to live, because work is life, not a separate thing, and you go home to start living.

War Games (watched it not long ago)

Joshua/WOPR: Greetings, Professor Falken.

Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.

Joshua/WOPR: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Atlantis got flooded and look how famous it is today.

You see an alien peeking around a corner. You know to have a 99% hit chance. You miss.

Gas import from LNG (US) ist the lowest of all imports we do and don’t pretend it is a gift, you had too much of it and didn’t know what to do with it. It makes your country a lot of money: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Gasversorgung/aktuelle_gasversorgung/_svg/Gasimporte/Gasimporte.html

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Gasversorgung/aktuelle_gasversorgung/start.html

To secure gas supplies for the coming winter, a storage level of 75 percent must be reached by September 1, 2023. The storage target was already reached in June 2023.

Gas imports are way down and our reserve is filled to the brim for Winter and Germans actually know how and are willing to safe energy. You can’t beat the numbers with words. It is not going to happen.

I totally agree and it is the same for Germany. That’s why especially wind energy for South Germany was held back for so long, how dare communities go energy independent. It seems the resistance there is broken now, at least I hope it is and not just an election promise that gets broken after the Bavarian election.

The last three nuclear power plants generated 6.7 TWh until their shutdown on April 15. In the first half of 2022, the figure was 15.8 TWh.

Coal-fired power generation also fell: Lignite-fired power plants generated about 41.2 TWh, a sharp decline of 21 percent from 2022 (52.1 TWh). Net production from coal-fired power plants also decreased by 23 percent, from 26.2 TWh in 2022 down to 20.1 TWh in 2023. Electricity generation from natural gas decreased only slightly from 24.3 TWh to 23.4 TWh. In addition to gas-fired power plants for the public power supply, gas-fired plants in the mining and manufacturing sectors also supply the industrial own consumption. These approximately produced an additional 24 TWh for industrial captive use.

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2023/german-net-power-generation-in-first-half-of-2023-renewable-energy-share-of-57-percent.html

And we are getting the fossile gas consumption down by laws made towards changes for the industries and private households that will have to have other means of heating in the near future, although it is not an easy process. We also lead when it comes to home insulation and other means of saving energy, even our stubborn automobile industry is finally turning.

We are not going back to nuclear energy and we are going towards renewable energy more and more and it has already proofen that not even a war in Europe can change that. We will sit and watch when you fight for uranium and pay 10+ times more money than planned for the next nuclear plant that’s 14 years late and will not add to the grid, but just be finished in time to replace an old nuclear plant that is falling apart and then you pay for that and pay for the old plants because they aren’t sustainable by themselves, like these in New York:

New Yorkers are paying $40 million every month to subsidize nuclear power – over $480 million in the first year alone, nearly 200 times as much as the state is spending to develop renewable energy. And the nuclear costs will take a big jump in April 2019, because the subsidy is scheduled to increase every two years – even while solar and wind power keep getting cheaper and cheaper.

It is not working. It is not the future. It is not even a good investment anymore. And I don’t even have to talk about nuclear waste or uninsurable risks to proof it.

Also it works so flawlessly for the French (not*), why not do it too?

*France is slowly overcoming stress-corrosion problems (35 out of 56 reactors were down, drought is another problem), and Finland celebrates the commissioning of a new reactor (albeit 14 years late), while on the other hand monthly German nuclear generation will be zero for the first time in over 50 years.