Few more ingredients but my carnitas have always been a crowd pleaser

• Pork shoulder
• Coke
• Orange juice
• Chicken stock
• Canned Chipotles in adobo
• Onions
• Garlic
• Spices - I mix it up a bit, but salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne, and oregano will usually get you there. Packet or two of taco seasoning would probably do the trick as well

I tend to eyeball everything, but usually about a 12oz can of coke, oj and stock until it looks right, one onion chopped up, however many cloves of garlic I feel like peeling and chopping

If the pork shoulder fits I do it in a pressure cooker on high about 2 hours, if it doesn’t I do it significantly longer in a slow cooker

When it’s falling apart, pull the bones out, shred (I like to use a mixer)

Then like you, crisp it up under the broiler, and maybe mix in some of the cooking liquid

For the record, the butterball boneless turkey roasts also include a gravy starter.

I buy a fair number of them when I find a good deal, I have a meat slicer and make most of my own lunch meats and they’re really convenient for that. Even with the added weight from the gravy which I also don’t use, they’d probably still be a money saver if I could keep myself from loading the sandwich up with extra meat.

I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternative, I may try at some point just cramming some turkey breasts into some meat netting and seeing how well it holds together.

From the article it does sound like this one may actually be biodegradable, the other implementations I’ve seen involve stripping lignin from the wood and impregnating it with resin, which all hair-splitting aside is basically plastic with extra steps. This is apparently using egg whites and some kind of rice extract instead of resin, so I don’t see any reason this shouldn’t be biodegradable.

Suitability for production and practical applications remain to be seen though.

I also assumed that was the process here, but from the article this does seem to be something slightly different. Overall process seems to be roughly the same, but they’re using biodegradable materials instead of resin, apparently a mix of egg white and “rice extract”

Now I’m personally skeptical about how long-lasting something made from egg and rice can be, although I guess there are still tempera paintings (tempera paint is made from egg yolks) around from the Renaissance, so what the hell do I know?

And the chemicals used to strip the lignin from the wood aren’t exactly the most environmentally friendly, but I guess arguably they’re better than some of the ones used in plastic production.

It’s cockney rhyming slang, it’s best not to think too deep about it

Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It’s not exactly flattering but it’s not really as much of an insult as it sounds.

The same kind of logic has them calling “stairs” “apples and pears” because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.

Or “cherry” meaning “lie” because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.

A lot of men’s fashion, especially formal wear, takes styling cues from military uniforms, the modern necktie descends from the cravats by some military unit (I want to say it was some mercenaries involved in some French war, but I don’t feel like looking up the specifics right now)

There’s not really a single robin hood canon, some versions of him are quite violent, others he avoids killing. All depends on who was telling the story and when.

It of course depends on your students, but I’m just gonna chime in that I read 1984 in 9th grade, so I would have been 14 years old, only a year older than your students. It was admittedly an honors English class, but depending on their skill and maturity I don’t think that you necessarily need to avoid it as an option. Maybe not as a take-home book for them to read on their own, but maybe as one to read in class to sort of guide them through and challenge them a bit.

I don’t know much about “kids these days,” it’s been 20+ years since I was their age, and probably around 10 years since I reread 1984, but nothing in my memory sticks out as something I would have been too bothered by as an older middle schooler and honestly probably pretty tame compared to some of what we were watching and reading on our own time (if I recall, the original Saw movie came out around the same time and I remember seeing it)

Again, you certainly know your students better than we do, but I assume that “dystopian literature” isn’t a required course but some kind of elective, and your students are signing up for it and probably wanting to experience some darker and more adult themes, otherwise they probably would have chosen a different class.

I also don’t like fish

I find that sushi is less offensive to me than cooked most of the time, so that’s one place to start. Still not something I’d actively seek out but if it’s what’s offered to me I can deal with it.

I also overall find freshwater fish to be more palatable, I enjoy fishing so if I catch some decent sized trout worth keeping I’ll eat them (it’s more for my wife, but if we’re already cooking it I’ll eat it)

My mom’s also not a fish eater, but can stomach flounder.

And the n-word is synonymous with “black person,” doesn’t make it any more ok or less hurtful to use it.

I’m not actually terribly surprised.

Not that most people breed or use them for it these days, but dachshunds are, at their core, hunting dogs. Full-sized dachshunds were bred to hunt badgers, mini dachshunds for smaller animals like rabbits, they have short legs so they can chase animals into burrows, they have a strong sense of smell, and they’re feisty, strong-willed little things.

Again, not to many people breed dachshunds for hunting instincts these days, but some of those traits still remain and once in a while you get one who could still make a capable hunting dog.

From a few minutes googling, it doesn’t look like there’s really any large predators to worry about on that island, and the climate is fairly mild.

I have a friend with a mini dachshund mix, we’re not too sure of the exact mix, we think maybe there’s jack Russell and Beagle in there (both pretty feisty breeds in their own right.) She’s a cute, tiny little, vaguely-hound-looking, old lady dog with tiny legs. She’s absolutely fearless, and despite never having any particular scent training, is a pretty capable tracker. When their other dog ran away and got lost, they just put her on a leash and she led them right to him. I have no trouble imagining her running around on an island, taking down some small critters, and living quite happily on her own for a few years if it came to it.

I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.

I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.

Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.

If you genuinely believe that, you are either living in some kind of serious tech nerd bubble, or you have no idea what replacing the OS means and you’re talking about doing software updates, tweaking settings, and installing apps.

The vast majority of smartphone users probably don’t even realize you can replace the OS, and if they do they probably don’t see the need.

For desktops and laptops, around 71% of them are running windows, somehow I doubt people are buying Linux or Mac laptops just to turn around and install windows on them. Then around 16% of them are running MacOS, and I doubt that any significant number of those are hackintoshes. A fair amount of the remaining 13% or so are probably people who have installed their own OS, but not all, some of them are using ChromeOS, I don’t hear much about people deciding to make their own Chromebook, and some people are buying an off-the-shelf Linux device.

Just kind of spitballing

For starters, you design a robot whose design is to take, for example, 100 steps forward, then take 100 steps back. Then you could:

Have it take a scoop of soil before it turns back, you now have a sample to test

Put some kind of chemical test strips (litmus paper, water quality, etc.) on it and send it towards a puddle of water you want to test. It splashed into the water and comes back, now you can see what the results on those test strips say

Not all electronics are so sensitive to radiation, and to some extent they can be shielded. Building a whole digital robot that’s hardened against radiation would be difficult and expensive. Sticking a couple radiation hardened sensors on an otherwise dumb pneumatic robot that doesn’t need to be hardened would be much cheaper.

Send the robot in with analog measuring tools- thermometers, barometers, film cameras (radiation can expose film, so picture quality may not be great, but it’s better than nothing, and just seeing how exposed the film is could be used to get a rough idea of the radiation level) etc.

Say there’s a big rock, and you need to know what’s behind it. Nowhere in the safety zone has a good viewing angle, and it’s either unsafe to fly over the area or there’s too much tree cover so you can do aerial photography. So you stick a mirror on the robot and send it out somewhere behind the rock off to the side o bit. Now you can look at the mirror through some binoculars or a telephoto lens and see what’s behind the rock in the reflection.

These are just a couple off the top of my head ideas as a layperson, I’m sure that a scientist or engineer actually doing this kind of work whose entire job is to think about this could come up with plenty of other good ways to use this sort of thing.

Electronics definitely make things easier, but we’ve had people doing science for millennia before we figured out how to do anything particularly useful with electricity.

My understanding (and it’s very possible that this is just urban legend) is that they’re intentionally made of paper so if they do get lost they’re more likely to fall apart instead of getting stolen.

They’re not really intended to be something you carry around with you all the time, it’s not like you’re usually going to be expected to produce on the spot during your daily routine. It’s more the sort of thing you’d keep at home with your birth certificate and other such personal documents.

IMO the real boneheaded move was making it a wallet-sized card instead of something more like a birth certificate. If you make something in that form factor, people are going to stick it in their wallets and carry it around with them and it’s going to fall apart.

I don’t think there’s any easy answer here.

If you stay, are you able and willing to fight and to what degree under which circumstances? What do you have to offer? Will you be more of a liability than an asset? How do you weigh your personal safety and wellbeing or those of your family and friends against the country or world? What do your prospects look like in whatever country you choose to flee to?

Ah, you mean the original “razor and blades” business model that ensures repeat customers.

(Yes, I’m aware that many people who use safety razors these days are not necessarily buying from brands that make both the razor and the blades, I am such a person myself, I’m somewhat joking on that)

But even in the realm of “buy it for life” items, you can still end up with repeat customers. Maybe you want a second razor for your travel toiletry bag, or to keep in your second bathroom. Maybe you just see one that looks cooler, or the handle is more ergonomic, or the way you change the blade seems more convenient.

And BIFL items still do sometimes get lost, stolen, given away, thrown out, or sometimes even broken and need to be replaced.

And unless the world’s population starts shrinking, there will always be new shavers hitting puberty who will eventually need their own razor.

With a DNA test, unless you’re questioning paternity or testing for specific genetic traits like cancer risk and such, once your parents have taken a test, you and your siblings don’t really need to, you know what your parents are so you know what you are.

My dad has a '93 ranger, the modern rangers are almost the size of the f150s of that era, and you can’t even get them like a 7ft bed like he has.

The 4 cylinder manages almost 20mpg which isn’t too shabby even by modern truck standards. If I could get pretty much the exact same truck with a modern engine, maybe a hybrid, it would be a no-brainer.

4wd would be nice too, his is RWD, and that thing doesn’t like rain, snow, loose gravel, pretty much anything but dry asphalt when you don’t have any weight in the bed.

We’ve gotten plenty of use out of that truck, we’re not towing or hauling anything heavy, but we’ve moved a lot of furniture with it, picked up some small loads of bulky lumber and such from the hardware store, hauled camping gear for a bunch of kids back when I was in scouts, etc. I don’t need anything bigger.

I’m kind of crossing my fingers that the maverick adds a mid gate to extend that tiny bed a bit. That would basically check all of the boxes I’m looking for. Ideally that would still be my 2nd vehicle in addition to a small EV for most of my daily commuting but I’d get enough use out of a truck like that to be worth it if I could afford and had parking space for a second car.

If you intend to continue living in America for now, DO NOT LEAVE THE COUNTRY if it can be at all avoided. Not into Canada, not Mexico, not to any other country, not by land, sea, or air. If you can, stay at least 100 miles away from any border.

Don’t count on your visa, green card, or any other documentation and paperwork you may have being sufficient to allow you back into the country. Honestly, I don’t think we’re far from you being potentially barred from returning even if you’re a naturalized citizen.

If you must leave the country for any reason, do so with the knowledge that you may not be allowed to return. Bring your important documents, extra cash, clothes, etc. make arrangements for your pets, figure out what your next move will be if you get to the US border and are denied entry, where will you go, who will you stay with, etc.

It depends on the context

If I’m just looking for a confirmation that my message was received, and the plans need to additional modification, a thumbs up is sufficient.

If I ask something like “Wanna meet up at the bar after work today?” And get a thumbs up, that’s sufficient. We know where we’re going and when, no more discussion really needed.

If I ask “you free to grab a beer this weekend?” and I get a thumbs up, that’s bullshit. When are you free to grab said beer? Where are we going for it? We have details that need to be hammered out.