Saturday roundup

This week has given me many reasons to be proud of my country; one was the tremendous backlash against the transgender ban. And yes, it does matter that many things cost more than accommodating transgender servicepeople, because the people pushing the ban are using cost as justification.

The Onion hits it out of the park twice in one week. See also,

Pity those who have tried and failed to bring peace to the Middle East. I see the bids and asks across the Levant. I can spread the arbitrage from the Bosporus to the Khyber Pass.

The often left-out part of 'no pain, no gain' is 'no rest, no gain.'

Innovation has its place but so does maintenance. So many of us just want basic stuff to work well rather than bells and whistles. Reminds of that time when I bought my house and paid people to clean it, and emphasized that I was after a deep clean, not hospital corners, etc. (I got hospital corners, etc). Reminds me of when RM used to try to figure out why I was sick of his shit, but all he had to do was listen to the plain, simple truth rather than come up with creative theories. I wanted him to be the roommate who quit hassling me, not the one who went out of his way to be extra awesome.

As per the above, I've not paid someone to clean my house since. It only makes you happy to save the time if the people you're paying do it right. But yes, I make that call all the time with home repairs. I only opted to replace the toilets and tile myself this past fall because I was sick of trying to coordinate with potential handymen.

The most important part of this listicle on veganism is,

If you care about eating healthful, high quality food, plants are the cheapest way to go. (Compare the cost of an antibiotic-free, grass-fed steak with the cost of broccoli, beans, and whole grains like oats and brown rice.) This makes sense from a resource standpoint, since it’s inherently less efficient to feed crops to other animals so that we can one day eat these animals. We would save a lot of water, cropland, misery, and money if we just ate closer to the earth. Veganism gets a bad rap for being elitist and exclusionary, but the fewer animals we eat, the more people we can feed.   When it comes to most animal products, we don’t see the real cost. The price tag for meat, eggs, and dairy is artificially low due to disproportionate government subsidies to those industries and to the corn and soy industries that support them. And the price we do see still excludes the environmental cost of these products. A 2016 Oxford study calculated that beef would need to be taxed at 40 percent to offset its contribution to climate change. That’s to say nothing of the externalized expenses of health care required by years of eating diets low in fiber and high in saturated fat and cholesterol. Meat is a more expensive habit than we realize.

If I ever get a tattoo, it'll be one of these.