Now, as with any politician, he’s made some moves that i don’t favor, like one year there was a tax surplus, so he gave it away instead of giving it back.

Tim Walz during covid.

I saw that small businesses like restaurants wanted to close for the safety of their employees but the national chains wanted to stay open for profits. If individual businesses would have closed, they would lose business possibly forever. They needed the statevto mandate a closure to protect their employees and their ability to keep their customers. Walz declared a closure. I’ve spoken with almost s dozen local businesses who all feel the same.

Conversely, Walz allowed chiropractors to stay open because the state saw that they took some of the load off of the already overloaded hospitals.

Looking at all the bumper stickers and yard signs, he is quite unpopular, but I feel that he looked at the evidence (not the politics) and made a hard decision at the potential expense of his career.

Bonus, during covid, he had the best ASL interpreter on the press releases.

Same. I have a weird box hoarding problem now. I keep all the original boxes for stuff because when I move, it’s best to put the stuff back in the original box. I haven’t moved in almost 20 years, but I still have the boxes. Also, I need to keep all those “good sized” boxes for stuff that I’ve ordered. My spouse will look at me weird when I pick up a box and say, “this is a good box; we should keep it.”

I’ll mute the ads and add my own dialogue. It’s sort of like Weird Al for commercials.

Excellent answer. I fall into the category of your last paragraph. I feel like I’m in a country not my own and if this is what the populace wants, maybe I’m in the wrong place.

This actually connects a few things for me that I’ve been thinking about lately. I believe that the current “ruling” class has figured out, among other things, that it is easy to disrupt a collective action problem while somehow also solving it for their own groups. If you look at the people in the cabinet and other supporters, they’d all be fighting each other, but are somehow united under one man.

If I understand your post correctly, organizing to protest puts like minded people together to further organize into groups that can unite to solve common problems even if their personal problems differ. For example, if I’m out to support trans youth and I meet up with someone to support women’s reproductive rights, we both have a common vested interest in changing the current political climate even if I’m also a gun owner.

We had millions of protesters over the weekend. Did anyone listen? Nope.

What’s supposed to happen from protests? Let’s say that you have a representative who was just elected or reelected and they’re fully aligned with the current administration’s policies. They don’t need votes or your support. Of what use will protests have?

Does this imply that a state funded health insurance for all will operate at a net loss?

I can’t speak to the quality outlook, but from what I understand about enshittification, it typically requires a self-serving entity like a corporation whose interests are not in alignment with its customers/consumers/userbase. In some of Mr. Doctrow’s writings, he indicates that federating cans be a “circuit breaker” for enshittification.

In a well federated platform, when one node begins to act counter to its users, the users can easily move nodes/instances. This is one of the reasons why there needed to be a law to allow phone number portability. Email is similar, but only if you own your own domain. Look for Cory Doctrow’s writings on BlueSky for more examples.

I was going to post a link to Once A Month Meals (or is it Cooking?) but it looks like they charge a subscription now. A lot of sites have freezable recipes now.

Anyhow, it’s different than leftovers. Cooking lasagne? Make 4 trays. Burritos? Make 25. The key to freezer meals is to cool them completely before freezing and wrap it tightly or else you’ll get frost. For pasta, get those tin trays and use press&seal to store. For burritos, wrap in parchment paper, then foil as foil can stick to the tortilla.