I mean, totally reasonable... just, unusual? I've never had issues with "cold ketchup" since it's kind of unusual to use more than a teaspoon on anything unless you REALLY love ketchup. Do you by chance have sensory issues? Like sensitivity to textures and temperatures?

Depending on the PH levels they may never "go bad" as in, suffer bacterial or fungal growth. (Anything lower than about 4.6ph will have much lower chances of spoiling but this risk is not eliminated completely and there are plenty of people who get botulism poisoning from high acidity foods improperly stored, this is because while the bacteria may not thrive there, their highly toxic bi-products may persist even through cooking.)

But that's not the only reason we refrigerate stuff. Food, including condiments that are salty or pickled, are made of organic molecules, oftentimes many different kinds of complex molecules. These delicate structures begin breaking down the moment they're created the same way a jiggling lego tower will eventually become unrecognizable.

Refrigeration slows this jiggling and preserves the structure of these molecules, preserving the flavor and nutrition much longer than if you leave it out. If you go through those condiments fast, in less than a couple months, it should be fine, but everything eventually reaches a point where it doesn't have the same flavor or texture anymore and it won't be as nice as fresh ingredients.

If you keep those items in the frig, they will last for years. If not, you will have to replace them faster because they DO go bad eventually, even if it's just the taste degrading. Organic molecules are complicated and start breaking down the moment they are created, so everything food-related changes over time to "not food" or at least becomes flavorless and devoid of nutrition. Refrigeration slows the molecules from jiggling so much and preserves these fine structures.

It's just a choice. I don't really see the point of buying your own bottles of that shit unless it's just a matter of convenience. So come on, let's be honest, unless your roommate chain the ketchup the refrigerator, ya'll are just buying your own condiments anyway.

I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we're having raging debates about if science has value.... ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.

This population deserves the hardships coming, and that's a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.

Imagine a world where corporations that aren't even involved in your life can decide where you can and can't go, where you can and can't live, if you can receive medical care or not, what you can and can't eat, and so on. If we can break every aspect of society down to a system of "fees" to have basic services, we will rapidly have an entire nation of shanty towns, with about 0.1% of the population living in fucking castles on the mountains.

And this is what they want. Because the people pushing this tripe always think they're the ones who will live in the castles.

Not saying the current system is good, but replacing it with a "libertarian utopia" will be even worse. At least the system does the bare minimum work, we do have roads, we do have medical care, we do have trash pickup. It's not much but it's enough for most people so you would have to do a lot better to convince people why they should topple their comfort and pleasures.

It all sounds like it makes sense but it's not realistic. Rapidly we will end up in a situation where you have pass through 200 different forms of toll/fee collection to get to work, because without strict regulation of all companies, both public and private, they are going to exploit your lack of options. I haven't had anyone explain to me why we should expect a society of hundreds of millions of people to all suddenly be able to say "That's enough, line doesn't need to go up anymore." It's not how humans function.

You would need a central authority that would audit and review all these "fees" that pay for our roads and medical care and fire departments, and make sure they are allocated where they're supposed to go. And if we're doing that, why not just send the money to this central authority to begin with so there's no hiding shit? And now guess what we have. We have the system we have because it's how things evolve.

Our argument isn't that we should do away with a central authority that distributes our work, it should be that we want that work to pay for things we actually want, not the things that a few defense contractors and banks want. I don't want to do away with government, I want one that makes less self-interested decisions with the money we lend them. And so far all the alternatives save one or two, they just make it easier for these people to make self-interested decisions.

barely being taught even basic math under the guise of homeschooling.

yah that was me.

There was no actual "schooling" it was just a cover-story so people didn't pry and learn that my parents were too crazy/drunk/high/delusional to properly raise children. The first couple decades of my life I basically just wandered in the desert alone around my parent's "religious compound" a couple hours from the nearest town and tried to get my hands on any actual scientific or rational reading material that extended family members managed to smuggle in.

It had disastrous impact on my adult life. I did go to school later and excelled and soared through AP college classes... but with my life so handicapped from the start, I was unable to continue higher education due to poverty, unable to land a stable career, and worst of all, severe depression and anxiety from the CPTSD of basically spending 20 years of my most important developmental years isolated with two toxic, hateful, abusive parents and literally NOBODY else. I became non-verbal for years, people thought I was autistic. I have been in and out of therapy, on and off meds, and have had long, extended struggles with substance abuse, depression so bad I can't move some days, and thoughts of self-harm.

My parents were absolutely convinced that biblical prophecy was real and was about to be fulfilled, they saw themselves as actual prophets or chosen ones that would play a part in the coming apocalypse, and for years of my life I was also convinced that I was part of some greater destiny.

Fast forward through my adult life, and I'm clearing out my parent's belongings after they drank themselves to death, wondering what the fuck happened and what my real future is going to look like. Do you think AI is going to replace grocery baggers? Because I fully see myself at 80 bagging groceries.

Shame we won't make it.

No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?

This is why conservatism and conspiracy go hand-in-hand. You can't believe the things that "feel" true if the "true" truths keep interfering with this pesky reality.

I can tell you the plain, clear answer but you're not gonna like it. Nobody does when I tell them.

Hold some yard sales.

For real. Assuming you live in a neighborhood and there are people around and it's safe to do so, this is one of the best ways to get to know the people who live around you. People go to yard sales to talk about shit and gossip, so it's a great way to know who's doing what, how everyone feels about their current neighborhood policies, who is running the school and who the local police or sheriff are, who is running for what position in local city, county and eventually state seats.

Having a grasp of your local political landscape gives you the power to get involved and educate people and get to know who is representing you, what the values of your area are, and you can influence elections or even challenge incumbents who often run uncontested. Any kind of local community organization and involvement is a pushback against the powers that be.

This is all because a lot of the people we have in seats of power in the USA did not earn their power fairly, they often have run without competition or were placed there by political organizations. These are the people who support the larger governmental powers. These are the people who cut checks, who receive checks, who write the bills that let the companies do the things they want to do to make more money.

Candace Owens is a product of this system that wants you to turn away from science and follow an authoritarian, because this is good for business. If you want maximum profits, get you a population that has no time, education or capital to change anything and get them angry at people who look different than themselves instead of their own government leaders.

If we purge the nobodies and clowns and paper-tigers who uphold this vision of America, we also get rid of their mouthpieces like Owens. She is not some passionate thought-leader, she's just a spokesperson for a bunch of rich fucks who want to keep squeezing blood from the population.

Edit: they want you to be less social. They want you to retreat to your discord friend-groups and social-media safe-spaces. They want to keep you from organizing, from connecting, from uniting and forming groups with a shared voice. This is how you beat them, with shared voice.

"But I'm not sooooooooooooociaaaaal!" You cry.

I don't fucking care. Adapt. It won't be the hardest thing you ever do.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we're asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it's a mix but mostly it's not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no "age of enlightenment." It's all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that's it. It doesn't even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.

Our society's rules about sex and dating have been upended several times in the last few decades, people are broadly more aware of far more social issues and the plights of others than we ever have been because we have all that access to people's innermost thoughts on the internet, whether or not those thoughts are reflective of reality is not important, it's the idea that we are all worried about becoming a subject of that collection of negative thoughts, and we tend to have negative reactions to even the idea of some people finding other people attractive because it's a sharp reminder that most people don't look like this, and most people don't know first thing about how to compensate for not looking like this.

And many guys don't even want to "compensate" by trying to fit some other image they don't know how to achieve.

Also, even though broadly our standards for women, sex and dating have changed so much, our expectations and standards for masculinity haven't really changed at all, so it's created a huge, confusing "wall" of sorts for men everywhere who don't really know how to find a place in a world that simultaneously expects them to live up to these standards that were established in the ice age, but also be some kind of "new male" who has feelings and is sensitive (but only if they're the "sexy" kinds of feelings) and doesn't threaten anyone.

Most young men growing up in the developed world right now have no idea how to date and be loved or even how to have positive emotional states or feel proud of anything while swimming in this social-media-soaked landscape. A lot of young men who haven't developed emotionally choose to either "disappear" from the world of dating and romance, or go the opposite direction and latch onto horrible grifters promising simple answers like the Andrew Tates and Sneakos of the world, and this is all also why the rates of intimacy and relationships between younger people is plummeting right now, to a degree that is seriously going to become a major problem.