It’s bending the rules, since it’s a camping meal, but I have made it at home, too, since it makes a great depression meal. I got it from backpackers, who I’m pretty sure got it from prison inmates:

The Ramen Bomb.

Cook a crushed up packet of instant ramen noodles, maybe with a little more water than usual. Add like half a packet of instant mashed potatoes. You can also add a protein, like… chopped up Spam. Maybe some hot sauce or other fixings if you’re feeling fancy.

I hated how much I enjoyed it. Granted, that was when I was really tired and hungry, but that hit the spot.

Also, I’ve heard meals like the ones in this thread affectionately referred to as “glop,” by a fellow glop-enjoyer.

Minus the egg, that’s also a popular backpacking meal.

Oh, another one: anti-vaccination was pushed by health insurance companies to dampen public perception of government-run healthcare.

Vaccine development and implementation fucking worked. If people were happy with the results, they might end up swayed towards publicly-funded healthcare. So… put a lid on that by whipping up a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Some folks will no longer see the vaccination programs as successful efforts to protect public health, but as a conspiracy to… do something. And instead of pointing to it as an example of a public healthcare program, you’ve first got to spend time defending evidence-based medicine, which takes up so much fucking time and energy, and ultimately won’t convince people who bored too deeply into that alternate-reality tunnel.

It turned a public health initiative into a fucking tar pit, and now the once-free vaccinations cost over a hundred bucks if you don’t have insurance.

Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It’s almost a meme that they’re being singled out like they’re the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I’ve used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It’s a small thing, but it’s just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn’t cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.

Happy to help! It’s worked great for me, and a buddy of mine also liked it, so I’m fairly sure it’s not a fluke. :P

Also, my ratios were by weight. That’s only relevant because that’s what makes me push up against the maximum solubility. If you go volumetric, you have more wiggle room. The second point will be less relevant, but it’s still faster and easier than heating it in a pot, IMO.

Oh, and as a bonus: you don’t need to wait for the syrup to cool down.

If you’re going to make simple syrup, use a stick blender.

Firstly, it’s easier and faster than heating the sugar and water in a pot, which is the most popular method.

Secondly, you don’t lose any significant amount of water to evaporation. That’s not a big deal if you make 1:1 simple syrup, but if you’re going 2:1 (which I prefer), you’re already very close to the maximum solubility of sugar in water at room temperature. Losing a few grams of water can make it supersaturated, which leads to sugar crystals falling out of solution over time. Not a big deal, but a little annoying.

If you give it a try, bear in mind that you’re going to get a cloudy syrup at first. That’s totally normal, and it’s not undissolved sugar, it’s just air bubbles. They’ll float out over time.

This is especially true with generic medicines.

The cheapest I can get Claritin in my nearest supermarket is 50¢—$1.12/pill.

The store brand can be as low as 7¢—37¢/pill.)

The CostCo version is 2 or 3¢/pill.

All of them are the same. 10mg of loratadine, highly regulated by the FDA.

They can differ with inactive ingredients, so maybe you’d like a syrup or something from a name brand. But it legally has to be the same active ingredients, in the same amounts, in the same forms.

It might even be simpler than that. Capitalism just doesn’t care past the next quarter. And when ownership is disconnected from labor or even from customer, than it’s just a really rudimentary collective intelligence. The shareholders just want the line to go up, and everyone in the corporate structure is accountable to the shareholders, so they all do their part, big or little, to make that happen. It completely dispenses with personal responsibility, whether for negative externalities, direct harm, or even the future as close as months from now.

The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That’s all.

So I’m not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn’t even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.

You can also check the modlogs. They can be really revealing.

In my subjective experience, gender issues bring out the worst in Lemmy. There’s a small but very obnoxious contingent out there ready to fight, even if they have to put words in your mouth to do it, like you’ve pointed out.

First thing I found when I searched for “Maersk IBM blockchain”:

A.P. Moller - Maersk and IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform

…this might be why I like hiking and camping, now that I think about it.

Oh, this’ll be fun in the future when people try to whitewash it. We’ll have another chance to follow up by asking, “a state’s right to what, specifically?”