Dave

Dave, 10 months ago

My mother in law makes a nice white sauce and leek dish, which goes good with a roast. I don’t know the recipe though, I don’t know if the leeks are cooked first or just in the sauce but you could probably search up a recipe.

Broccoli and onions are also great roasted!

Dave, 10 months ago

I’ve only ever boiled, sliced, and brined (is that the word?) beetroot. But I would guess you could make a slaw, which you often see in burgers at restaurants (red beetroot, I’ve never seen gold beetroot before).

Potatoes can be done lots of ways but I like to roast them. I boil for about 5 mins first, strain in a colander, flick them around in the colander to rough up the outside, then pour plenty of flour on and keep tossing them to spread them around. Into a roasting tray with plenty of oil.

If you have it, cover in a healthy dose of roast vegetable sprinkle, otherwise try plenty of salt, garlic powder, anything else you have that seems relevant.

Roast in oven at I dunno like 200c or 220c. Toss at appropriate intervals to stop from burning but allow to brown (Sorry, not too specific. Say 20 mins to start then every 10 mins after?). Keep cooking until nice and crispy but not burnt.

It’s probably like 45 mins of roasting but depends on your oven so try not to be tied too closely to a schedule until you have done it a few times.

Dave, 10 months ago

Specifically with lemmy.ml, a lot of people from many instances are having trouble with pending subscribe requests.

I think it’s because lemmy.ml is having trouble with so many users, the site is overloaded. You may just need to wait for it to eventually resolve.

Dave, 10 months ago

Yeah stuff like this is not the best experience at the moment. One thing to be careful of is that if you try to visit the URL directly, e.g. lemmy.nz/c/linux@lemmy.world, then it will not work if someone from lemmy.nz has not already searched for the community to trigger the federation.

Officially you should search for the community like so: !linux

This works for me when searching in the search box, but there is a weird thing where Lemmy will say “no results” then a couple of seconds later it will show up. If you’re the first person searching, it can be 5-10 seconds (maybe longer if the other instance is under heavy load).

The community search result is also just one thin line, so can be hard to see if you get post results as well which are a lot taller. You can change the filter to only search for communities, but there was previously a bug where if you were the first person to search for that community then it wouldn’t show up if you filtered by communities, only if you set it to All. Not sure if that’s fixed yet.

Dave, 10 months ago

Welcome!

Dave, 10 months ago

@idanoo What’s the haps with calckey.nz?

Dave, 10 months ago

Literally the only place on the page that says “shift work” is in the list of carcinogens, but I found this page on worksafe:

2.0 What is shift work? Shift work is any type of work that requires a worker to be awake when they would normally be asleep.

In the long-term, shift work can increase the likelihood of:

• gastrointestinal problems, such as peptic ulcers
• sleep problems, such as insomnia
• becoming obese
• developing colorectal, lung and breast cancer
• developing cardiovascular disease, including hypertension and coronary heart disease
• developing type 2 diabetes
• having a stroke
• early death.

Dave, 10 months ago

Was the place you grew up super cold in winter?

Because my alternative explanation is that we can get away with cold houses. Even if you leave the window open at night in the winter you are still likely to be able to put on another blanket and then put up with it.

In many countries they get -20C or colder through the winder, they can’t get away without building really warm houses.

Therefore they have been building warm houses for decades and are much better at it.

In terms of dampness, this may also be environmental, we are subtropical and so winters can be mild and humid leading to the cold damp thing.

Dave, 10 months ago

Did you get a wifi only one?

Dave, 10 months ago

There doesn’t seem to be any news about Relay after he commented about how it may be unfeasible over a week ago.

I think the user base of Lemmy isn’t big enough to financially support lots of different apps in the same way reddit did, but it would be nice to see at least one or two of the popular ones ported over.

Dave, 10 months ago

Nice! I rotated through reddit accounts about every 6-12 months just to split the data up. I haven’t deleted my old ones but am considering it.

Dave, 10 months ago

Haha yeah, me too. I should really check in to the subreddit of my app and see if there were any updates. I used Relay for Reddit, and initially the dev said they were going to try doing it as a subscription, then the more maths they did the more they realised it would never work.

Basically if you remove the free version and only have a monthly subscription, then you lose your low end users and retain your higher end ones. This means more requests on average, so the price needs to be higher, but the higher price means you lose some of the mid-tier users because they were willing to pay but not that much, then you only end up with the super high tier users, which cost too much for a subscription to support.

So a couple of weeks ago there was hope that some apps could continue as a subscription, but that hope seems to have died now.

Dave, 10 months ago

I think I’m gonna have to put this on my shopping list. It’s out of stock right now but I’ll check back another time - unless it was a limited time thing.

Dave, 10 months ago

Rather, kids are really expensive. You don’t realise until you’re living it but just things like how it’s not practical for a single parent to flat with others, especially if the kids are young. Kids eat - often more than adults do (even young ones). And if you want a job you need to somehow pay for daycare, which can be $12k+ for one kid under 3 (I guess under 2 now, depending on when the promised change kicks in).

So let’s say you live in Ōtara (I’m assuming a cheaper area of Auclland) as a single parent with one kid. Median rent for a 2 bedroom house is $575 so your money is almost gone already.

$150 a month for power (more if you have a cold house), $100 for internet/phone, and say $50/m for all insurances you need (contents + car). So that’s say $80 a week, so we are at $655 and that’s just the house.

Now we need food. This site says $200 a week for single parent with dependents. It doesn’t break it down so we can assume 1 kid is probably cheaper but also it’s from 2021 and food is a lot more expensive now so lets say it’s about right.

Kids also need clothes and shoes they are constantly wearing out or growing out of, they need to be socialised (transport to park at a minimum), they need car seats (they grow, so need new ones), medical care is mostly free but again transport. Lets go low and call it a total of $20 a week.

We have now got $875 of basic expenses with no discretionary spending, on about $650-$700 of benefit.

Long story short, if we as a country want to help some of our most at risk kids grow up to be model citizens, $700 is less than the bare minimum.

In reality WINZ is constantly dealing with extra requests for help paying for things, especially larger one off expenses.

Dave, 10 months ago

I think I’ve only had filter coffee from cafes that serve it, and cafes can be so hit and miss it’s hard to know if I didn’t like filter coffee or just didn’t like the way they made it or the coffee they used etc. I think I’ve only tried it twice.

When I make it myself, I feel like the coffee doesn’t end up strong enough if I don’t let it sit. I could probably do it with like 6+ tablespoons of grounds, but when I make an aeropress with twice what they say in the instructions and still need to let it sit to get the strength I want, I feel like I’m already using too much…

This is even when the beans have been roasted only a couple of days earlier and I grind it myself.

Dave, 10 months ago

I’m ashamed to say that the machine I made that drink with cost me over six grand 😢

😱

I’ve never actually used an aeropress but everyone seems to love them.

In my experience, an aeropress is a plunger that is easier to clean. I’m not convinced the coffee is any better than a plunger, but for sure Americans love it compared to drip coffee.

I could try using a plunger to foam up my coffee, I’ll try to remember to do that tomorrow and see if it works.

Dave, 10 months ago

I forgot I already had coffee plans today, will try when I’m home tomorrow.

I don’t really like filter coffee (or at least, I’ve never had something described as “filter coffee” that I liked). Might just have not had a good one.

Dave, 10 months ago

You know what, I think you’re right. But then does that change if you use a metal filter instead of paper? That’s more like a plunger.

I think of filter as pouring water through coffee, through a paper filter. The way I use the aeropress is more akin to a plunger. Coffee grounds and hot water, then let it sit for a while before “plunging” it. But it’s made with less water then you top it up after.

Dave, 10 months ago

That’s… an interesting contract. What happens if a government starts investing heavily in rehabilitation programmes and produces good results that you just can’t compete with not because you’re not doing well but because the other government prisons are doing well?

But yes, my concern about things like increasing prison sentence lengths is that there is lobbying happening. It reminds me of the time Act (I think) said that if they had to make their donor names public, they would lose 80% of their donations. Is that because it’s donations from companies running prisons and other conflicts of interest?

Dave, 10 months ago

Those 2022 numbers are pretty much the most National and Act have got ever (based on just scanning back through the years on the page I linked - so I may have missed some). I am very interested to see if it’s significantly larger this year.

Dave, 10 months ago

Maybe it comes under privacy, but the main scenario I can think of is similar to a reason why I think guaranteed anonymous voting is really important. For example, maybe your workplace surrounds you with very strong unionists or very strong capitalists, or just extremely opinionated people who potentially have a lot of power and influence over you if and when they choose to exert it. It’s not always ideal for your political affiliations to be out in public, so in those kinds of situations it could be a very strong disincentive for a person, or a general group of people, to donate due to peer pressure reasons that don’t apply to others.

Yes I guess this falls under privacy, but it’s a good point. It’s possible to fully believe you are in the right, but not want those around you to see you as the enemy.

That and/or just limit the size of donations and sources to identifiable individuals, imho.

Yes, it’s the idea of parties relying on money from private people and parties that concerns me. But banning donations does make it more difficult for new parties to start (who presumably wouldn’t be able to get started without a large donation). Like almost anything controversial, there are no simple answers.

To me politics and political discussion should be driven by the enthusiasm of people who are being governed. If lots of people like an idea then each can donate a modest amount towards helping communicate it to others, just as they might donate their time. That way the movements have an amount of money and time roughly proportionate to their amount of support and enthusiasm, and I don’t have much of a problem with that.

I think the public funding model accounts for this. Parties currently get government funding, and it is apportioned based on a bunch of things such as level of support in previous elections and support for candidates in local elections. The pool of money would need to be larger I think, but I’m ok with that. We are only talking about a few million dollars a year.

I have more of a problem with disproportionately rich people donating disproportionately large amounts of money to promote and wash their ideas over everyone else’s discussion.

In 2022, National received about $5m in donations and Act received about 2m.

Act and National total, approx $7,200,000

All other parties combined, approx $1,260,000

This is not unexpected, you would expect National and Act to attract wealthy people and therefore large donations. But it does seem to give more voice to a smaller number of people.

The breakdown of the “All other parties” Is roughly $400k Labour, $400k Greens, $300k NZ First, plus some other parties with $50k or less total each. Notably, TOP received about $4,000 in donations, making me wonder if all those people on reddit aren’t that willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to supporting TOP. In the years leading up to the 2020 election they were getting $60k-$80k a year (from donors under $15k, mostly under $1.5k), so it’s interesting it dropped so substantially.

Dave, 10 months ago

Yes I agree. Also if you check the register, donor’s addresses are published too.

If someone’s concern is not privacy but that they don’t want to be seen donating to Act, they probably shouldn’t be donating.

I’m convincing myself we should extend the (already pretty generous) public funding for political advertising, and ban donations. The premise of donating to political parties concerns me somewhat.

Dave, 10 months ago

It is a weird contract. But it means they have to consistently do better than the government or pay us a lot, which is good. As long as they aren’t doing harm in the process.

It seems to heavily favour the government, if I was the prison company I’d be worried about signing it. There is probably more to the fine print, or perhaps just an exit clause so if in the unlikely event the government starts investing heavily in evidence based rehabilitation programmes then the private company can back out.

I’m very untrusting of the private sector getting involved in prisons in general. It’s open to all kinds of corruption and human rights violations. Justice, policing, armed forces, corrections, things like that - they all need to be under direct government control, in my opinion.

It feels, to me, like an insane thing to give up control of to a for-profit company.

I wish we could just ban political donations altogether. Or, probably better, set it at like $1,000 per person per year. Let people run campaigns on ideas, not advertising. Use the media to get the word out.

Parties get public funding for election advertising. I would support a ban on political donations, but I think that would need to come with a boost in public funding. I’d rather funding come without strings, though, so I’d be happy with that.

And, by the way, the only reason Act could have for wanting to hide their donors is because they know it will make them look corrupt.

That’s not necessarily true. There may well be people or companies (for example) publicly talking about their efforts to be more environmentally friendly, while privately donating to Act hoping for loosened rules. Even if the donations have no influence, making them public would make the donors seem like hypocrites.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a good reason to make them public (or ban them completely), but it could be either side of the transaction that would be made to look bad, and either may prevent the donations being made.

It’s worth noting that Act gets like 4X more donations than Labour as per the donation returns. In 2022 they received over $800,000 in donations under $15,000, and Labour received about $400,000 total.

This isn’t unexpected, but you do have to ask what the richest man in NZ gets out of donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to National and Act. I bet he doesn’t spend a cent that he doesn’t get a good return on.

Dave, 10 months ago

Hey it looks like this eventually got updated, the post title looks ok now.

Dave, 10 months ago

Haha I do have some stuff running on a Raspberry Pi, but not this, just stuff for me and some family.

I started running lemmy.nz on a $2/month VPS (which was surprising much snappier than the Raspberry Pi) but quickly got an offer for a much more powerful server, so couldn’t turn it down.