It's kidney beans that will really screw you up. Black beans don't require as much care, as far as I know. I'm careful with dried kidney beans, but I'll happily toss black beans into the pressure cooker and cook 'em right then and there. Maybe I'm slowly poisoning my family and don't even know it.

For black beans and others of similar size, the slow cooker works just fine. Even putting a thick padded bag around the pot works. (Bring to a boil, put pot in bag for 20 minutes or so, to warm the bag, then remove bag and boil again. Then you can leave it in the bag for a few hours and the beans will be cooked.) It's a cooking process that works way better if you're able to do it on breaks from work, though. I'll probably have to switch to a regular slow cooker when i go back to the office (and hope it gets as hot as my bagged pot). Kidney beans need a higher temperature, though. I don't even buy them because I don't want to mess with that.

Godammit Soyweiser I don’t disagree with you. There’s just no way to balance combat with babies as weapons. Everyone just rolls female chaotic/evil and cheese their way through life.

Sure. The two largest issues I have with it is that it assumes that textile production stayed largely within the household, and that textile production remained entirely women's work. Spinning certainly did, though he's wrong to say that European yarn production progressed neatly from drop spindle to treadle wheel, or that a treadle wheel gives you any particular advantages over most hand powered wheels besides possibly speed and easy ability to work flax. [For instance, in England, the treadle spinning wheel was viewed as a toy for rich women, unless of course you had to spin flax, where both hands are needed.](https://theknittinggenie.com/2014/03/05/youre-doing-it-even-more-wrong-or-how-the-great-wheel-survived/) I think it's also a bit suspect to assert that because X is women's work, and X is also necessary for survival, that X was valued in the same way, or in a perfectly complementarian way, to men's work. Of course, that gets into nebulous issues of what we mean by "value," and "value" gets harder and harder to assert the further back in time you go because of the lack of and nature of the source material. However, in terms of monetary compensation, spinners were often paid quite poorly (see the link above for early modern examples, and Hutton's "Organizing Specialized Production: Gender in the Medieval Flemish Wool Cloth Industry (c. 1250–1384)" for Late Middle Ages examples), or restricted in other ways that would prevent amassing wealth. In Hutton's paper, she notes that women who combed, carded, or spun were prohibited from having more than a week's worth of wool for two workers in their homes at any one time, ostensibly to prevent them from selling or distributing it to others. So if we're measuring value in terms of monetary compensation, then I would assert that women's work in textile production became dramatically undervalued beginning in the High Middle Ages, despite being a necessity for survival. Speaking of economics, the textile industry changed dramatically over the course of the Middle Ages. Deveraux is correct that textile production in the Early Middle Ages was based in the household, but he doesn't discuss the combined effects of technological and economic change on the industry. With the invention of the horizontal treadle loom and the advent of guilds, weaving and other facets of textile production became sharply gendered. (I'm going to just interject here that these changes weren't immediate over time or space, were dependent on the level of urbanization in a given region, and were not absolutes.) A really good overview of the changes that occurred within the textile industry with respect to gender can be found in Øye's "When Did Weaving Become a Male Profession?" And as the title suggests, not every facet of textile production stayed as women's work. It's generally accepted that the introduction of the horizontal treadle loom (circa 11th century in Europe, though the timespan of its local adoption varied substantially), which replaced the warp weighted loom (though again, the progression from warp weighted loom to horizontal treadle loom was not a nice, neat, linear one), was what drove men's involvement in weaving. Because one can weave faster (and weave longer pieces of continuous fabric) on a horizontal treadle loom, this allowed the weaving of cloth to develop into a centralized, professional industry. The shift from women's work to men's work naturally took time, as of course women held the expertise in textile production. But technology and the effects it can have on industry are powerful renegotiaters of what is masculine and what is feminine. What particularly helped to cement this shift was the advent of guilds. Early guilds were more open to women, and it would be wrong to say that guilds shut women out of weaving entirely and geographically universally. However, as textile production became more commercial, the roles of women were narrowed, and in instances where they participated alongside men, their relationship to production was informal, based on family ties, or subordinate to men. Returning to Hutton's paper, Late Middle Ages cloth production in Flanders was remarkably organized by gender, where men monopolized the higher status positions. For instance, weavers and finishers were essentially exclusively men, whereas spinners, washers, carders, sorters, and combers were exclusively female. Some overlap of gender did exist in dying, draping, and warp-winding, but on the whole, low status textile work ultimately became coded as feminine, and high status as masculine. Most of my own experience is with Early Medieval textile production in the North Atlantic, but I'll also recommend the book *Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities,* as it discusses the economics of gender, the intersection of the formal and informal economies of that time, hierarchies of production, and how Medieval women were actors within this system. Certainly there's a good bit that Deveraux does get right in his posts, but I sense that he suffers from a tendency I see from many recent popular writers, who in trying to reevaluate the contributions of women, paste on top of those societies a very modern, very complementarian understanding of gender roles. That this seems to crop up in textile production I believe has to do with the particularly romantic aesthetic of textile production itself. Preindustrial textile production is something we understand as being both socially and economically significant, however the ways in which it was socially significant don't quite match the ways in which it was economically significant. I'll have to dig up the book, but I remember a chapter where the author posited that the reason textile production became economically men's work but not necessarily socially men's work (obvious caveats of space, time, etc.) has everything to do with the way textile production was portrayed in antiquarian sources. In those sources, it was indeed women's work -- or work overseen by women -- and was viewed as having a moralizing influence on those women who undertook it. Consider of course Augustus banishing Julia and forcing her to spin as punishment.

i started to read Dune and had trouble taking it seriously because it's so obvious to me now that these guys all think they're the kwisatz haderach

You also listened to that podcast? Dunno if it was linked here or somewhere else. E: here it is https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/the-culture-series-its-billionaire-fans-w-kurt-schiller

My friend taught me this mantra... I’m a human being, not a human doing. You can just...be. That’s the magic of the value and dignity of human life.

EA marketing works hard to not make people think that. I market EA sometimes, and I usually focus on "You want to donate X amount of your resources to charity. Here are some ways to do the most good with X." I've never asked a person who seems to barely have enough money to live, to donate to charity. I've sometimes seen door-to-door charity marketers do that, and I've often seen megachurches do that. I think it's terrible and unproductive.