FWIW if you’ve only ever had commercially produced wine, your issues may actually be stemming from the sulphates used to preserve the wine. You may want to pick up a bottle of sulphate-free wine and see what happens; You may be pleasantly surprised. And if that ends up being the case, homebrewed wine obviously wouldn’t have those sulphates.

if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.

I can’t even count how many times I watched niche subreddits get ruined by the tyranny of the masses. As a niche thing becomes more popular, you get more casual lurkers. And those casual lurkers don’t typically have a strong knowledge on the subject. So they’ll start to upvote things that sound plausible and are eloquently written to make the reader feel smart for understanding it. But that doesn’t mean the info is accurate or correct; It just means the info appealed to the masses.

I work in a niche field of professional audio. The audiophile world has a lot of snake oil. Lots of people paying $2000 for solid gold cables when a wire coat hanger would sound exactly the same. I have seen “help, I have a buzz in my speaker and can’t figure out where it’s coming from” posts, where the top comment is suggesting a $7000 complete system rebuild… When all the OP needs is a 50¢ ferrite bead wrapped around one of their cables. But the “rebuild your system” comment was well written and sounded plausible to someone who only has surface-level knowledge, while the “ferrite bead” answer requires more in-depth knowledge on how interference is picked up in the first place. So the “rebuild your system” comment got pushed to the top.

Basically, nobody likes feeling dumb. And if a niche community gets popular, the laypeople begin to outnumber the experts. If a question has an answer that requires more than surface-level layperson knowledge, it will often get buried in downvotes from the laypeople. Not because it was incorrect, but because it made casual readers feel dumb. Even if the experts know better, they’re simply outnumbered.

They have port forwarding, but they were bought by a company that has been caught stuffing malware into purchased programs. Basically, it was a company that has a history of buying out otherwise legitimate software brands, and then bulking them with adware as a quick cash grab on the existing customers.

That buyout was like 4 or 5 years ago, but it left a sour taste in many people’s mouths. Because everyone expected the PIA client to silently get bulked with adware one day. Since trust is basically the only reason to casually use a VPN, it pushed a lot of their users to alternatives.

I’m in Texas, so there is a lot of Mexican cultural exchange. Spanish was practically a second language in my public schools, and most people speak at least a little bit of spanglish.

When a Mexican calls an American a gringo, they’re not being nice. “Gringo” is typically used as a pejorative, to refer to a specific type of “mayo is too spicy and I’m afraid of people who have melatonin” white people.

You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.

Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination… But it’s not the entire reason.

It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.

I give people hearing damage.
(I run audio for live events.)

A few times, yeah.

I’m talking about how in this image, the upper curved line is shorter than the straight line that follows the equator:

Because the curvature of the earth is greater than the curvature of the upper line. So by taking the upper curved line, you “skip” some of the curvature of the earth.

The point is that you can’t follow a straight line on a globe, because that’s longer than taking a slight curve. If you take a straight line, you follow the entire circumference of the earth, but following a curved path allows you to avoid some of the width. Basically, the circumference means a straight line is more curved than a curved path.

We can’t even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others’ hands every day.

Yeah, someone can do a lot of damage simply by ignoring the double yellow divider on a two-way highway.

Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.

Even weirder is that the most efficient way to steer them is not in straight lines. Because the most efficient way to traverse a sphere is on a slight curve.

Get a string and pick two points along the equator on a globe. Stretch the string tight. It’ll bend into a slight curve above or below the equator (instead of following the equator directly) as you pull it, because the shortest distance between two points on a globe is not a straight line.

I actually joked with my buddy that a golden retriever randomly picking legislation that was laid out on a desk would be better than the current administration. Like lay three competing bills on the desk, and enact whichever one the golden retriever prefers. At least we might have a chance of getting some good legislation on the books.