You don't. You finish your cup, you put the leaves back in, you pour hot water over top.

I cycle among these four randomly:

I don't know. This one looks a bit sticky!

Park Alpine Dry Gin

Converting $20 to local currency, I'd probably go with this:

This is so-called "Liubao Tea", a kissing cousin to pu'er tea. I did a review of my first batch(es) and it has rapidly (literally with one round of brews) reached the top of my circulation in teas.

The depicted tea is one aged from 1991 (the one I reviewed was tea stems from 2003) and is of one of the higher grades. A 100g package will set you back about $15 or so at today's exchange rate. 100g is about 15-20 servings, and each serving can be brewed multiple times (even my tea stems can be brewed four times without loss of flavour), so it's quite the bargain.

Save it for a time when you really need something warm, rich, and comforting. It will last forever as long as you store it in a cool, dry, dark space. And personally I think it's a bargain at 15 bucks.

Now imagine this:

I lived in Inuvik for three years (Dad was stationed there). For three consecutive winters I lived 30 days of night. You think you get SAD "down south"? You ain't seen nothin' 'til you've faced a whole month of nothing but twilight conditions or darker.

Which brings us to my first Sunrise Festival.

This is the most memorable sun-related event in my life, displacing even the total solar eclipse I experienced in Wuhan a few years back. For 30 days there was no sun. Further, for 15 days the "twilight" portions of the day got darker and darker until it was basically nothing but night. Then, for 15 days, in the depths of SAD you've never felt the like of, it got brighter and brighter at the high parts of the day.

Until the day of the Sunrise Festival.

This is the day that basically all work stops as close to noon we gathered out in the streets and playgrounds (in my case) and such to watch the sky. Watch the twilight get brighter and brighter and brighter. Until suddenly the sun peeks for a few minutes above the horizon, blood red, staining the sky, only to dip quickly back down.

Sure we've got another month of really, incredibly short days before we face something similar to normalcy, but it's all good. It only gets lighter from here.

The sun is back in town.

Indeed the "ten commandments" are something that was grafted on afterward. There is no list of ten specific things in the Bible held out as more important than anything else. Indeed in Jewish thought (you know, the people Moses was a part of!), there are over 600 commandments in the Bible, all of which are applicable. There's no ten specific ones that are somehow exceptionally important.

Even if you just want to ignore all Jewish tradition and scholarship, which "commandments" do you want? Those of Exodus 20:2-17 or those of Deuteronomy 5:6-21? You need both to make up all the "ten", and there is overlap between the two lists, but there are also some significant differences and changes. So you can't rely on just one of them to make up your "ten". But nor can you really put them together without papering over the fact that they say different things.

And your second point has bugged me since I was a child. I knew some very good people who studiously studied the Bible in my youth. I also knew some very bad people who did the same.

But I also knew some very good and very bad Buddhists.

And Muslims.

And atheists. (But not Atheists. Those are all basically bad people.)

And ...

You get the drift. I couldn't reconcile the Bible being the source of all that is good with the bad Bible-readers or the good believers in other things. It's why I'm an atheist (but not an Atheist).

This is called "no true Scotsman".

I think the best response comes from the Bible itself.

These people are the fruit of Christianity's seeds: "...Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Yeah, welcome to my world.

And it's not just with the loud fundamentalists who hold these attitudes. I completely cut off a friend of almost 20 years who seemed to be one of those "sane" and "quiet" Christians when, in a period of mild intoxication, he let spill everything he actually believed.

He believed women should stay at home keeping house and raising children. Women should not have careers or aspirations beyond that. He believed that all of his friends were going to Hell to be tortured for eternity. (He was fine with this. Absolutely copacetic.) He believed that victims of natural disaster and of crime deserved it because obviously God was doing this to them for a reason.

And that's when I realized that even the "quiet" and "non-extreme" Christians can have horrors concealed beneath their placid exteriors. So now I give very large side-eye when people think their Christianity is so important to their life that they have to bring it up at all in circles where it's not relevant.

A lot of the games I play only once or twice are "cute" and "fun" the first one or two times, then get very ... predictable. And naturally some are just games I don't like at all. I play them once, then never pull them off the shelf again.

Some games I really like, even after multiple plays, but they're too much a chore to set up. Or they're too hard to get the right number of players together for. Or they take more time than I usually have. Or they take more space than I can spare.

Then there's the "new shiny" problem. I could play some games over and over and over again, but the people I'd play with have seen this new game and they want to try it. And so many board games are being published weekly (it seems) that there's ALWAYS a new shiny that keeps people running toward them.

Oh, no muttering here. I go full-on announcer voiceover mode when I'm alone. And sometimes people show up while I'm doing it and I don't notice so they get it full blast.

I narrate what I'm doing in a voiceover.

🐘 ♟

How does melodic folk death metal strike you then?

A full fleet scenario for Star Fleet Battles would make this game look like tic-tac-toe.

It looks like it's a thing now, likely an infection from the USA. But back then it was considered really weird.

I've done a curl of butter on a single saltine. It's really quite good.

This so-called "crisis of competence" has nothing to do with the right-wing shibboleths of "participation trophies" (variants of which have been complained about for CENTURIES!) and everything to do with the destructive effects of short-term planning and practices of leadership under "next quarter is king" capitalism.

The problem is that there are perverse incentives baked into capitalist praxis that make companies have to do short-term thinking instead of long-term. An example of this kind of short term thinking reward is that it looks good for the investor-class rubes when a company lets go half its workforce because on the balance sheet (something easily measured) you can immediately see a cut in costs without a corresponding loss of revenue. Profits seem to go up and thus the investor rubes are happy. Unfortunately there's something very valuable lost in that cut of costs that's not so easily measured as to persuade the idiot class who wind up in accounting-grade investment: institutional knowledge. So for an immediate gain of modest amount, the rubes cost the company the ability to actually continue to innovate, service, maintain, etc. their product or service line and over time the value of the company drops irrevocably. This induces the rubes to apply pressure to cut costs again (because it worked so well last time) and thus the death spiral begins and the company dies, to be carved into bleeding chunks that are sold off. Which again the investor-class rubes think is hunky-dory because they get the money from that sale. Who cares if the company is now dead and valueless?

So what does this have to do with a "crisis of competence"?

---

There are several issues:

1

There once was a time when new grads from university (who don't know shit about real-life praxis in any field!) would be trained on-the-job to become valuable, competent employees. They'd be given, in effect, an apprenticeship in their position, at quite a bit of cost to the company in the short term, to become valued and valuable employees later.

That "quite a bit of cost" is investor-rube kryptonite. So companies stopped training new employees and started poaching already-trained employees from other places. This worked great in the short term because the company would save the training costs and get an employee who could hit the ground running and be productive in a short time. This worked great until ... ah ... well I'm sure you can see how this is not sustainable when every company starts doing this.

As a "solution" for this, companies started applying pressure on universities to stop teaching airy-fairy "theory" and "fundamentals" and "genuine comprehension" and start teaching "job skills". Which means new grads could come in and fill a job quickly, but had no theoretical underpinning to understand the job they were doing.

And what a surprise! When you undermine education and turn it into job training, you lose competence! "OMG! THERE'S A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE! AND IT CAN'T BE OUR FAULT SO IT MUST BE PARTICIPATION TROPHIES! YEAH, THAT'S THE TICKET! PARTICIPATION TROPHIES ARE THE PROBLEM AND NOT OUR OWN MYOPIA!!!!111oneoneoneeleventy11!!!"

2

After #1 has been so thoroughly universalized, once again companies started looking for ways to cut costs in the short term without any regard for the longer term. How else can you save costs in the short term? Oh, right! You can squeeze the workers to do more work with fewer resources! Nothing could possibly go wrong here, right?!

Workers are thus forced to work to ever-more-ludicrous deadlines while having fewer resources to get their jobs done. It is inevitable that this process leads to lower quality as shortcuts are taken, problems are papered over, and quality drops. In the short term you don't notice this and profits rise. But as your product gets worse and worse, people look for alternatives, sales drop, revenues drop, and ... the investor class triggers #1. Or more of #2. Or #3 (for which q.v.).

But as before "IT CAN'T BE OUR FAULT SO IT MUST BE THE WORKERS! THEY'RE JUST LOWER QUALITY TODAY BECAUSE OF PARTICIPATION TROPHIES!" (Insert any of the other right-wing idiot shibboleths in place of participation trophies here: DEI, feminism, BLM, immigrants taking ur jerbs, etc. etc. etc. It's all the same bullshit made up by the actual guilty parties directing blame any other way they can.)

3

Then we move on to the third one: perpetual crunch. Most of the corporate world runs in permanent crunch mode. Everything's an "...EMERGENCY GOING ON. IT'S STILL GOING ON. IT'S STILL AN EMERGENCY." People are squeezed to work harder and longer (and often for lower salaries). This is, as mentioned above in other scenarios, unsustainable. Human beings need time to recover from stress. Adding stress has one of two outcomes.

The first of these is that people just stop giving a shit. If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. People start just doing their jobs and nothing more (which the corporate lapdog press starts calling disingenuously "quiet quitting"). This of course doesn't suit the suits trying to squeeze every last drop of blood out of the corpses of their workforce, so they squeeze harder.

Now we get the second outcome: burnout. Experienced people quit. Not just the company they're working for (though because of #1 that might happen a few times first), but rather entire industries. And when the experienced (read: competent) people quit, you suddenly have a "CRISIS OF COMPETENCE" invariably blamed on the usual right-wing shibboleths of laziness, DEI, feminism, and, naturally, that perennial favourite of the short of thinking, "PARTICIPATION TROPHIES!!!!1111oneoneoneeleventyone!!".

---

So you want to solve the utterly fictitious crisis of competence? Get rid of the real incompetence: the myopic monied classes. (Personally I'm a fan of guillotines for this, but firing squads are OK too.)

Yeah, I figured it out an embarrassing amount of time later.

My grandfather taught me the sublime joy of fresh bread smeared with fresh butter, wild honey, and garlic powder.

Most people I told about that would start singing that old Sesame Street song: 🎶 three of these things belong together... 🎵 after giving me side-eye and realizing I wasn't joking.