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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • if you ever feel so inclined, all you need to make your own tortillas at home is:

    1. masa flour aka specially treated corn flour

    2. a stovetop and a pan for cooking

    3. a plastic food storage bag

    4. something with a flat bottom, ideally transparent

    5. water

    the bag of flour typically has instructions for how much flour and water to mix. you can mix it by hand and form it into balls by hand. the size of the balls only matters if you care about the tortillas being “the right size”.

    From there, you press a ball flat, toss it on an already hot pan over medium heat, flip it after a couple of minutes, and remove it after a minute more. to press the ball flat, place it under your flat-bottomed transparent thing and mash on it until it looks tortilla-shaped enough for you.

    the plastic food storage bag is optional/recommended to stop the tortilla balls sticking when you press them. cut the food storage bag open along its seams and remove its zipper if it has one. what you have left is a single sheet of plastic with a seam/hinge in the middle.

    it might be sounding like a lot but it’s really just:

    • mix flour into wet balls

    • mash flour in your “press” made of random flat dishes and a plastic bag

    • cook the thing a little

    • eat

    if you iterate on those 4 steps a dozen times, you’ll be out like 50 cents of flour and you’ll have produced at least one satisfactory tortilla. and it’ll be so, so much better than store bought, you’ll think about it every time you have store bought tortillas therafter.



  • The only way to make a profit under capitalism is to satisfy the needs of your consumers, regardless if you want or not.

    This isn’t true. This isn’t close to true, not even a little. Rent seeking, manufacturing wants/needs, extortion, the list goes on and on, but…

    It will not be profitable if other external factors arise, just as regulations, licences, government-granted privileges that squash other competitors

    …Yep. You’ve defined capitalism so that all these inevitable features of a capitalist economy are “external factors”. What a stroke of genius. But much like the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, the myriad ills that inevitably accompany it are “external” only because capitalists have named them so.

    Scarcity is not something you can “conquer”.

    It’s not something capitalism can conquer, because any solution that would end scarcity for a good or service would thereby end profitability for the same. No capitalist would provide it; they’d sooner let their capital collect dust than be used without profit. Or in the case of the Great Depression, they’d sooner set fresh produce and livestock on fire than let other consume it without profit to themselves.

    The unplanned order of markets […] emerges spontaneously, so it costs us nothing.

    Markets cost us nothing because they emerge spontaneously? Things that emerge spontaneously cost us nothing? I’ll leave it to the reader to poke holes in this obvious nonsense. I’ll merely point out that capitalists have proven themselves masters at turning a profit from things that “emerge spontaneously”, costing everyone a great deal in the process.