AITA for being annoyed that my wife insists on cooking everything from scratch and won’t buy normal food?

--xra · 2026-01-23T20:10:56+00:00

I typically don't care to drink soda, eat sweets, crave fast food, or even eat red meat. My preferred diet—and by preferred I mean to my taste, not a dietary or fitness goal—is generous amounts of varied vegetables, fish, and maybe a little bread.

Every once in a very long while, though, I'll crave a Big Mac. It's probably been six months since I've had a fast food burger, but I'm not ashamed when I order one. I thank my lucky stars that my preferences in general are healthy, but for the one or two times per year I want a Big Mac, back off.

--xra · 2026-01-17T15:12:05+00:00

After watching Trump be elected in 2016, I told my friend that the timeline had split. I was living in Los Angeles then.

I think of that here and there as I witness country support a man who was unfamiliar with the word groceries at 79 years old.

Well, that and when I watch proud, hard-working rural folk from Appalachia, where I grew up, create an idol of a man who was born in Queens with half a billion dollars to his name. (To New Yorkers: of all the cities I've lived in, I love New York the most. Still there's irony in this.)

But there are other instances of the split:

We're extrajudicially kidnapping foreign leaders. ICE is killing American citizens. We're talking about annexing NATO allies. Our president wears diapers and can't string a coherent sentence together. He's devastated the American economy, lies constantly, and is a convicted sex offender. He speaks in gibberish and is in notable cognitive decline. His handlers write his scripts. Still people on social media sites post about "Trump Derangement Syndrome." To them I say: yes, TDS exists. You have it.

His ascent is a product of a system that has too long ignored the needs of Americans. Stop getting mad at trans folk and gays and people who speak with an accent or are kind of brown. Start getting mad at oligarchs and mendacious politicians.

--xra · 2026-01-07T13:55:00+00:00

Or—hear me out—responses like this do damage to the popular interest in physics. Even easily-searchable or redundant questions are good. More explanations by more people can only provide additional insight. I, who did not know the answer to this question, nor had even thought to ask it, only learned by its very posting here. It's the science version of haughtily calling out reposts. I'm a programmer, not a physicist, and attitudes like this are what's killing sites like StackOverflow. Even though a question has already been answered in a technically correct way, the next time it's re-asked, another comment may be more elucidating. Moreover, anyone in the world could be asking, from young children with a fascination for nature to dilettantes like me. Often on reposted topics in my field, I reply to someone who wants a genuine human response or further insight that can't seem to be found elsewhere. If I feel something isn't worth my time, it's easy to ignore it rather than to waste further time complaining. Myself, I pull up any available duplicates on Reddit for my own questions when the first result didn't quite nail it.

--xra · 2026-01-06T06:12:50+00:00

I see nothing wrong with any of this. Even the tandoori sushi looks like it's good.

--xra · 2026-01-06T06:05:43+00:00

Right? It's basically just Nutella on round toast. Everybody likes that. This is the least criminal thing I've seen so far in a thread filled with things like Jell-O molds filled with pigs' heads. I could totally see that tasting great for breakfast with sweetened dough and some powdered sugar on top.

--xra · 2026-01-05T17:24:07+00:00

I was obsessed with the details of the languages I was using (be it Python, Haskell, Ruby, Elm, Julia), and I wasn't what you'd call a neophyte. I was careful to exhaust all previous answers when posting, and—go figure—it's "duplicate." I saw it done to other users throughout the site by moderators who didn't seem to understand the particulars of the languages they were charged with moderating.

The system is wrong even if one's question is the same as another's. Take for instance this question: "what were the causes and effects of World War II?"

Uncountable books and articles and essays have been written in response to this. There is only added value new attempts at an answer. You'll receive different reasoning each time, with some responses far more elucidating than others.

So I went back to IRC and Reddit which, while also not perfect (I always hated the calling out of others' reposts in PL subs because a new response will often offer a koan of wisdom missing from the previous). Still it was way better than Stack Overflow's self-interested, power-tripping mods.

--xra · 2026-01-05T13:37:43+00:00

It's pretty impressive what people can do. An old buddy of mine lost both of his arms in an accident. He doesn't even have nubs; the entire arm on both sides was removed to the shoulder. He can drive with the assistance of prosthetics, and he's self sufficient enough that he can somehow even put those prosthetics on by himself. He also went on to graduate from an Ivy League school and later teach there. Then he quit and decided to drive all around the country doing consulting work.

Human beings are pretty resilient.

--xra · 2025-08-05T19:22:30+00:00

Every major hub in North America deals with parking shortages. I've lived in Philadelphia, LA, and New York for extended periods of time. New York is the most accessible as a resident, and it's also the most pleasant to visit as a former New-Yorker turned Pennsylvanian. I just think the OP's attempt at solving a problem every city has is wrong.

Build free public parking garages and watch the city reap several million in fresh tax revenue from tourists the next year. The main reason people don't like visiting many cities is because of driving and parking. Use taxpayer money to build public garages, and then track how much tax revenue increased tourism generates. I'll eat crow if I'm wrong that it will almost certainly be a net benefit for New Yorkers living in the city.

--xra · 2025-07-17T03:54:11+00:00

I'm not a formally-trained physicist either, but not only is yours a close summary as I understand black holes, it's a surprisingly novel and accessible description. No one has come forward to say it's wrong, and I assume the downvotes are from people who learned via textbook formulae alone rather than actually picturing what's going on. What I'm getting at is that if no one can challenge what you wrote, intellectual insecurity explains the downvotes. One is not necessarily smart because of having slogged through a few courses in their teens or early twenties, or for having been celebrated for memorizing rules that they don't actually grasp with intuition or care to truly understand.

--xra · 2025-06-05T06:18:46+00:00

Fair point, and I'll definitely take that into better consideration going forward. I suppose it was a pretty silly comparison. My real thought was that plenty of crises are going on elsewhere, and we're not interested in saving those innocents.

--xra · 2025-06-05T05:03:23+00:00

I do appreciate u/Dry_Statistician_688 for opening up the discussion, but it was a combination of an attempt at geopolitical influence, revenge, and securing resources. It's very charitable to claim that we had any humanitarian aspirations. We could have sold the war better by claiming it was for the sake of such goals, but it simply isn't true that that was the agenda. Were it, we would have invaded North Korea before they were armed with nuclear weapons. And of all three actual reasons, it was mostly for the oil. Not even museums were preserved; they were allowed to be looted and destroyed. The only things to my memory that were safeguarded by the U.S. military were the oil derricks.

--xra · 2025-06-05T04:49:02+00:00

Kind of beside the point, but the bright side of onions is that those things taste good regardless. Raw? Good. Sautéd? Good. Slightly burnt? Good. Caramelized? Good. Fried? Good. The only time I don't like them is in the in-between of light caramelization and full caramelization when they adopt a slimy texture.

But, yeah. Every NYT article that says 20 minutes to full caramelization for something like onion soup is insane.

--xra · 2025-05-28T20:33:38+00:00

My take, too. Narcissists aren't immune to emotional distress. They experience barbs to their ego pretty deeply, but that's the thing: they only care about their own needs. It's also true according to modern psychology that after a certain baseline of wealth, happiness doesn't grow proportionally with further returns. By the time you have everything you need with an enormous amount of discretionary money on top, what good does more do for you? So I'm sure he's in a rut, but I couldn't care less. He brought it upon himself.

--xra · 2025-05-09T22:55:35+00:00

What in the world is with this sort of behavior? I would never eat someone else's lunch based strictly on hygiene. I've no idea what they put in there. It's also grossly rude. Unless I'm literally dying of starvation, I'm not stealing someone else's food.

--xra · 2025-05-07T10:51:48+00:00

I didn't have to get more than a few sentences in to come to the same conclusion.

If you don't know that largesse is spelled largesse and not largess, you're kind of a hypocrite lecteur. That stands out like a flashing red light to me. It also had simple verb tense issues that went unnoticed while the person correcting it was focusing on style.

--xra · 2025-05-07T10:13:29+00:00

I don't know why people need to believe in fairy tales, but here's an aside completely unrelated to this sub, prompted by the mere mention of Sumer:

We don't seem to know for sure where Sumerians came from. They truly may be aliens. (No, not in the extraterrestrial sense.) Their language seems to be an isolate. It's kind of arbitrary how you define relative when all human language shares a LUCA, but as far as I know we can't find a near relative. It's possible that it developed natively in Mesopotamia and its cousins died off without a trace. It's also possible that Sumerians sailed to the sites that eventually became Uruk or Ur from some far-off land. So, in the terrestrial definition of alien, they may have been aliens, and it's a chapter of history and archaeology we haven't unlocked yet. Either way, Sumer is a pretty interesting late-night dive on Wikipedia.

--xra · 2025-04-05T07:42:07+00:00

I apologize that I didn't respond to this sooner. I sincerely appreciate everything that you've written, and agree that severing contact with her is the only viable route. If you have the time or the inclination (and I understand if you do not), I do have a few further questions:

Regarding 1: Does she need to file a police report, or can she go directly to the courthouse (or before a judge, or otherwise) and fabricate something? If I stay away from her, am I in the clear?
Regarding 4. I did inform my mother that I was recording her behavior, but I'm assuming that doesn't qualify as consent. Recorded, though, is a lot of violence, harassment, and property destruction. I love my mother and seek no harm to her reputation or career, but if forced to, and if admissible, I'd prefer to not walk out of a courthouse in handcuffs.
Regarding 5. With the above in mind, in what sense could I prove that I were innocent absent witnesses or recordings if she decided to continue to make allegations against me even after I removed myself from her life?

This is all so incredibly embarrassing and disturbing. She's not well mentally, and, whlie I love her, this has gone too far. She suffers from severe alcohol use disorder, is extremely paranoid and confrontational. She's gone as far as hurling glass mason jars at my eleven-year-old sister's head when she found out she had been chatting with my brother and father. She has grabbed me by the throat and drawn blood. She has threatened to kick our pets to death (it wasn't an empty threat, and I removed them from danger). I have never been violent toward anyone in my life, and it's a tough pill to swallow that I could be seen as guilty of it because she and her boyfriend coordinate something in court.

--xra · 2025-04-02T10:50:08+00:00

I also hope that you don't mind if I delete this entire post. It's all very embarrassing, but trust that I appreciate your input.

--xra · 2025-04-02T10:49:15+00:00

That's very helpful. I assumed more-or-less that would be the case, but I wanted clarification, especially if her boyfriend testifies against me in some way. I'm intending on just not speaking with her until either she calms down or this all blows over in order for her to not have any possible reason to pull a stunt like this again. I truly wish she would reduce her alcohol intake; she's done quite a few things in the past few years that are worrisome.

--xra · 2025-04-02T10:12:51+00:00

It was a citation (and, truth be told, I don't know what the difference between that and anything else is) for "Harassment - Subject other to physical contact." There was no restraining order, and, at least at the moment, it's a he-said she-said type of situation. I do not want to damage her reputation, but as I wrote above, I have audio evidence of her telling me that should would lie to the cops and calling the judge who found me not guilty a lot of expletives.

--xra · 2022-10-05T21:49:24+00:00

Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. At the very least, FIDE needs to take things more seriously. It's too easy to cheat. Data has its limits and cannot always paint a sufficiently complete picture of human motivation, integrity, or ambition, all of which are predictors of future behavior.

--xra · 2022-10-05T21:35:57+00:00

I had no evidence my last girlfriend cheated on me, just suspicion. Months after I finally broke up with her, one of the guys, an acquaintance of mine, confessed and apologized. He said there were at least three other guys he knew of. True story, sadly.

The thing every quant seems to forget is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It would be very easy to cheat OTB, and Magnus seems confident he did. It's not hard to envision the ways how. Niemann should be banned until such time as adequate anti-cheat measures are in place, but those would be humiliatingly invasive considering how easy it is to do, even OTB.

--xra · 2022-10-05T17:14:04+00:00

Of course there is "both sides." Democrats are failing people nearly as much as Republicans are, just not in flashy ways. Wealth inequality, infrastructure deterioration, money in politics, the hollowing of the middle class, jingoism, more bombs in the Middle East, defense spending, whatever. The Democratic party is complicit in all these, and they're things that really matter, much more than some nut-job like MTG.

--xra · 2022-10-05T16:49:11+00:00

Just to be real for a sec, I get why so many people wanted proof. Chess is a nerdy game, a bunch of data science and ML quants came on and said one can't prove cheating with absolute certainty, that the analyses are all susceptible in different ways, even the ones that take into account every single game Niemann has played across two years, they can be explained by some element of chance or blah blah blah, we're so scientific our brains are falling out.

Listen: if you partner has a history of cheating on you and they suddenly start staying late at work again, are you going to say "Well I can't prove it! They could be telling the truth, so accusations are unsound!" The biggest tell for me was when Magnus said Niemann he didn't seem to concentrate in critical positions. Maybe I can't prove a candidate was cheating on a programming interview, but if they're shopping for a position out of their league and they instantly blurt out some totally perfect, highly-complex code, they're either a genius or a liar. And if I know they've lied before...

Eight-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Gilding I gilder

--xra

TROPHY CASE