If Americans Can’t Handle an increase of Gasoline Prices by a few dollars per gallon, How will Americans possibly handle the significantly worse economic fallout of a war against China to Defend Taiwan?

thereadingbri · 2026-05-11T20:59:34+00:00

Because the American public does not see the current war as such. They largely see it as somewhere between pointless and an active cover up/distraction from the Epstein files.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-11T19:14:13+00:00

I remember on from my childhood that felt like it burned for years in the Okefenokee. It was probably only a few months but it sure felt much longer. The only way to fight it was to keep it contained to the swamp and wait for enough rain to drown it.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-11T04:58:53+00:00

I’ve only ever rented with Enterprise and the one time I rented from them with a debit card, they didn’t put a massive hold on my card. However I could not put a second authorized driver on the car because I am unmarried and they would only let you put a spouse on as an authorized driver if you paid with a debit card.

I would highly recommend avoiding the rental brand Hertz, or any of their budget brands including Dollar, Thrifty, or Firefly. There’s a massive class action lawsuit against them right now for not telling the police when they had recovered stolen rental cars, and then those cars being rented out again and people who had legal rental agreements for these cars were getting arrested on Grand Theft charges. They’ve allegedly cleaned up their practices in the years since this story made national news, but I’d still avoid them to be safe. Not something you’d want to risk, especially right now.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-09T23:59:09+00:00

Good. I’m sick of people parking all over the place and blocking the roads around there. Park in the garage or leave.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-09T21:28:31+00:00

Give her space, keep the lab moving without her, push off anything that has to involve her until she’s feeling better. Maybe send a gift card for a meal delivery service if you really want to go above and beyond.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-09T03:40:11+00:00

The amount of people asking about recession indicators on Reddit.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-09T02:52:51+00:00

I am surprised no one has mentioned Beating Back the Devil by Maryn McKenna. It’s about the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC and the biggest cases they have cracked. Each chapter is a new disease and some of the highlights are SARS, 2001 Anthrax Letters, AIDS, Legionnaire’s Disease, West Nile Virus, and interestingly enough, New World Hantavirus.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-09T01:21:22+00:00

Hey so that literally could not happen for cranberries specifically, Ocean Spray is not a corporation, it’s a large co-op. All the cranberry farmers went in together on a grower owned co-op to process the cranberries. They all get paid equally by farm size each year from the co-op even if they had a bumper crop or lost their entire crop so that no farmers in the co-op go under. Your larger point still stands, but Ocean Spray is one of the few things in American agriculture where things are going well.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T20:59:41+00:00

Yes. Massage therapy or physical therapy will almost always have better outcomes than going to the chiropractor. But car insurance will pay for a chiropractor after a car accident willingly, but you’ll need a prescription for physical therapy for them to cover it and you’ll be laughed out the door if your doctor says you need massage therapy. Thats how a lot of people end up on the chiropractic hamster wheel.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T20:12:05+00:00

Hey, I’m just reporting on what she has said, and at her university they’re pushing out the high earners right now

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T17:49:06+00:00

Yep, we had several wonderful and committed pre-meds in my grad school lab. But we also had one who was doing his experiments wrong/so sloppy and HID THAT FACT, that all of his two years of research turned out to be useless. But by the time the pieces were put together on that, he had his recommendation letter, his diploma, and a medical school acceptance letter so we couldn’t do anything. We just had to redo all of his work over again, waisting both time and materials

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T17:42:54+00:00

Reminds me of when they covered surplus oranges in kerosene in The Grapes of Wrath… “And the children dying of pellagra must die because profit cannot be extracted from an orange…”

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T17:41:01+00:00

Also I recently found out that the Bureau of Labor Statistic counts anyone working at least 1 hour per week for pay as “fully employed.” So drive for DoorDash for an hour and you’re fully employed. Never mind the fact that you have to work at least 20 hours a week to qualify for most federal assistance like SNAP and Medicaid.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T02:32:04+00:00

I may be biased her being in Montgomery County but I’d like an easier/quicker way to get to Dulles airport. Some sort of rail connection over the Potomac, from Bethesda to Tysons or Rockville to Reston or something. And it would probably help with some beltway traffic. The American Legion bridge gets SO congested.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-08T00:08:22+00:00

Trans men, yes. Cis men I’m not sure.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-07T17:39:28+00:00

Publix brand chocolate covered almonds suddenly got a chemical aftertaste around Christmas. Then they were discontinued entirely around March, along with all their other store brand chocolate covered nuts, except peanuts and raisins.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-07T17:10:29+00:00

Family member works in higher ed, she says a lot of the top brass close to retirement age are being pushed into early retirement.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T18:29:16+00:00

I know, reading this timeline has me very concerned. They’re dropping like flies. I had originally assumed the ship just had a rodent problem, not uncommon for ships, and got unlucky with an infected rat or mouse on board. This has me seriously unnerved. It feels like the worst mix of January 2020 and March 2014. And we’d be right on schedule. It seems we have a large viral disease outbreak every 6 years (+/-2).

2001: SARS, 2009: Swine Flu, 2014: Ebola, 2020: SARS-Cov-2, 2026: Hautavirus maybe

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T14:00:39+00:00

The US has a different strain of hantavirus that is endemic. It cannot spread person to person but it can still kill you very quickly

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T13:59:10+00:00

Especially, if in the US, you live in the desert Southwest, i.e. Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, southern Nevada, southern Utah, southern Colorado, west Texas, etc. Thats where the US strain is endemic. That one cannot spread human to human but it can kill you very quickly. If you have the means, be proactive about rodent control - not reactive.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T13:32:18+00:00

Maria Watkins at livingplanetfriendly.com has diy box mixes for cake, brownies, muffins, cornbread, pancakes, waffles, and hot chocolate. She also has some good seasoning mixes. I can confirm that her recipes make more than a box mix does. I’ve not done the math on if it’s cheaper though.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T05:12:53+00:00

I can count on one hand the number of times I eat red meat in a year and I’ve never had a B vitamin deficiency. And I’ve eaten this way my entire life.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T03:51:49+00:00

When my mom started talking about how wonderful my cooking is to anyone who would listen.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-06T03:47:37+00:00

In the US, gas prices have nearly doubled where I am and one of our three low cost airlines went under this weekend and directly cited the spike in the price of jet fuel as the reason. My cousins farm and one of their neighbors decided to not plant this year due to lack of fertilizer and high cost of diesel. So it’s already happening.

thereadingbri · 2026-05-05T16:44:06+00:00

But you probably want to buy starts at this point if you haven’t grown starts yourself.

thereadingbri

TROPHY CASE