exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Two sides to every story 6 hours ago:
Go outside, nerd!
- Comment on BIG (like Americans) IF TRUE 4 days ago:
51% is the threshold for calling it “process cheese food.” The stuff that is called “process cheese” is only allowed additives off of a particular list: water, salt, milkfat up to 5% of the weight of the total, acidifying agents, spices, artificial coloring, mold inhibitors up to 0.2% or 0.3% of the total weight.
There’s basically not an easy way to make something match the legal definition of American cheese without making it out of at least 90% cheese, because the amount of water and fat you can add to fit within the requirement that the end result be 47% fat, except that only 5% of the total can be from added fat, makes it hard to cut corners.
- Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 4 days ago:
Every culture takes/mixes foods from other cultures and makes it their own.
Perhaps more importantly, every generation remixes their parents’ and grandparents’ food.
French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican food aren’t the same as they were 50 years ago. Lots of new dishes were invented and remixed, sometimes from imported influence. It’s not like chefs sit around and refuse to do anything different from how they learned. They do invent and innovate and tweak recipes. That’s, like, the job.
- Comment on When did it become normalized to start passing credit card processing fees to the customer? 4 days ago:
Cash is riskier, yeah. But it’s also a lot cheaper depending on what the services and machines cost.
No, I don’t think this is true, and most merchants are coming around to this view. Adding an extra 15 minutes to the cashier’s shift counting cash, adding an hour to the manager’s shift driving the cash to the bank, doing all sorts of analog counting processes, maintaining a secure chain of custody so that the cash doesn’t get lost or stolen, the risk of actual violent robbery, it’s all going to cost more than the 3% fee that the processor charges.
but you have to keep the receipts from those as well just like you need to keep cash
No, everyone’s POS systems are totally digitized. There’s a database with all the transactions, not a pile of paper receipts. And the database actually links each transaction to an actual distinct card payment, rather than a digital note that the cashier took that much cash and put it into the register.
- Comment on When did it become normalized to start passing credit card processing fees to the customer? 6 days ago:
Even just reconciling the register every day is way easier with just cash.
No, it’s the opposite. Humans make mistakes with cash, and the overall drag on the store’s operations (from needing a safe for large amounts of cash, physically transporting cash to be deposited at the bank, dealing with theft/loss) tends to be higher than credit cards.
That’s why a lot of places have switched to entirely cashless operations, because cash is slow and expensive for them.
- Comment on Veganuary 1 week ago:
I eat about 3000 calories per day, but generally limit my meat intake to about 500 calories per day, while trying to hit at least 150g of protein per day. Generally that means I’m eating a vegetarian lunch, where the only animal product is parmesan cheese (gives a great umami kick to salads).
I eat a lot of legumes. Not just beans/lentils, but also a lot of green varieties like green beans, peas, edamame, snap peas, snow peas, and peanuts are like my go-to snack.
When paired up with grains, which you’ll generally already be eating enough of, the protein profile of most legumes complement grains so that you’re getting plenty of every essential amino acid.
And generally, I eat a lot of vegetables and mushrooms. On a per calorie basis, some vegetables are surprisingly high protein.
I eat a decent amount of yogurt or cheese, maybe 3-4 servings per day.
The meat I do eat tends to be the kind that lends a lot of flavor to a dish. 1 oz of bacon in a sandwich sometimes seems meatier than another sandwich with 8 oz of meat. Same with things like fish sauce or anchovy paste. I have a lot of soups and stews where the actual amount of meat involved is kinda low on a per serving basis, where the fresh meat is paired with a cured meat and things like mushrooms and fermented sauces to add lots of umami to a soup without actually consisting of that much meat. I also do stir fries, curries, salads, etc., where any meat is served with a lot of vegetables, as well.
So for example, it’s easy to eat a pound of meat in 2 half pound hamburgers. It’s much harder to eat a pound of meat in the form of burgers made from 3 oz smash patties. And smash burgers taste better to me anyway.
Basically I steer all my eating towards less meat, but I eat a lot and have pretty high caloric needs.
- Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. 1 week ago:
It basically doesn’t work out.
Theoretically you could have 2500 square meters of solar arrays above the weather beaming the power down to a dish with only a 500 square meter footprint.
But you’d still have to deal with weather with some kind of a storage solution. And 2500 square meters of area in space seems more expensive to claim than just 500 square meters of area on land, in pretty much any scenario.
- Comment on Me waiting for the cute Texas girls to DM me at 55 Water St. 2 weeks ago:
18 and 24 are worlds apart.
38 and 24 is an eyebrow raiser, 39 and 18 is a bad person who deserves scorn.
Especially when you consider the fact that Claudia Schiffer was a celebrity in her own right and had her own thing going on, whereas Seinfeld’s girlfriend was literally still in high school. The power dynamics of each couple were wildly different.
- Comment on I've Hit The Perfect Weight 2 weeks ago:
I wasn’t aware that there were household scales with that level of precision, to 5 significant figures.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 weeks ago:
On July 1, 2024, the census estimates of the number of each generation of drinking age, if I’m reading this Excel spreadsheet correctly:
Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012, but as of 2024 the only legal drinking age was those born between 1997 and 2003): 31.3 million
Millennial (born between 1981 and 1996): 74.1 million
Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980): 65.6 million
Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964): 66.9 million
So assuming that 20-somethings have less money to spend on expensive alcohol, and recognizing that Gen Z has less than half the drinking age population as the other generations, it’s not surprising for that generation to spend less on alcohol, even if their habits weren’t different than the older generations.
Now, their habits actually are different, so that might stretch things further. But a better way to present the data would be adjusted per capita. And maybe looking at historical data about when prior generations were the same age.
- Comment on Teach me 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Too late 4 weeks ago:
I think you’re describing beer.
- Comment on Why are they different shapes? 4 weeks ago:
Whoops, didn’t realize you were talking about industrial scale. I guess that makes sense, and I would have no idea which type of bread uses cheaper equipment.
- Comment on Why are they different shapes? 4 weeks ago:
Making bread on a flat surface allows you to minimize costs of entry (not only don’t you need the forms which are relatively cheap, you can go with simpler/cheaper ovens), and this kind of bread has a more pronounced crust, which many people like.
Crusts like this generally require a lot of steam in the oven, and steam ovens are usually much more expensive than non-steam ovens.
If you want a homemade loaf that can actually produce the type of bubbly crust you expect in certain types of European style breads, you’ll have to trap a lot of steam where you’re baking it, often by containing it in a Dutch oven.
And shaping/forming a loaf that stays tall when being baked on a flat surface takes skill, lots of practice and experience.
- Comment on How the regime in Iran jams Starlink and what people could do 4 weeks ago:
You’d never get Kessler syndrome at Starlink altitudes.
Starlink satellites orbit at around 550km, and get dragged by the little bit of atmosphere that is at that altitude. Each collision might make more debris, but the conservation of momentum means that any debris that gets kicked to a lower orbit will probably burn up on the atmosphere while any debris that gets kicked to a higher altitude will be smaller mass and therefore cause less damage on the next collision after that.
Collisions can still happen, but the runaway conditions where debris begets debris won’t happen at those orbital velocities and altitude.
- Comment on What do I do? 5 weeks ago:
- Don’t feed wild animals. For this rule, the particular type of food doesn’t matter. Wild animals are harmed from human feeding, even if the food is nutritionally beneficial to them.
- Bread spoils fast, and spoiled foods in the environment can make a lot of animals sick.
- Bread doesn’t contain the nutrients that many birds need, so birds (especially young birds) that eat too much bread at the expense of not eating other foods might become unhealthy from deficiencies on other fronts.
I point out these three distinct reasons because the overall points being made don’t make it OK to feed wild ducks peas or whatever else. For farmed animals, though, farmers will want the overall nutritional profile to meet some standard, at which point old bread and other scraps could very well be part of a broader diet, in a way that manages household waste.
- Comment on I can't be the only one who learned this the hard way 5 weeks ago:
I can believe that Korean food has gotten spicier in the last 30 years, but I think it’s worth noting that Korean food was already plenty spicy before any of those financial crises, much more so than Japanese food, and all but a few specific Chinese regions.
- Comment on MFW I wake up to find Lemmy feeds full of USA stuff 5 weeks ago:
You misunderstand, riding trains increases the amount of shitposting capacity one has.
- Comment on The boy who was relentlessly bullied by his uncle 5 weeks ago:
It was a funny joke, a fun juxtaposition of the child’s book already under discussion, and a contentious and violent period in recent UK history.
- Comment on genius 1 month ago:
The etymology of helicopter is actually a compound word divided in an unexpected place:
- “Helico” means rotating or spiral.
- “Pter” means wing, as in the word “pterodactyl.”
So if we’re gonna bring that into another compound word, we should probably chop it in the right place: pterlord.
- Comment on Get on that grindset 1 month ago:
No, it’s a guy who edited the genes of some embryos in the hopes that a particular gene mutation would give resistance to HIV.
Only: the gene editing didn’t actually give the specific version of the gene studied to have an effect on HIV susceptibility, the gene is also associated with memory and other brain function, and the gene was incompletely edited so that there are multiple versions of the genes in both kids, when the studied mutation needed to be present in both chromosomes of the chromosome pair in order to show some kind of effect on HIV.
Even if you believe that the evidence is strong enough to support the idea that a mutation in this gene can give HIV resistance, this guy didn’t actually do it in a way that was scientifically sound, and now two real human beings have to live their lives with the effects, including any off target effects, whatever they might be.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Only works if your sexual partner is non exclusive.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Clean jar, water+salt (look up how much), you’re good.
There are known food safety principles in fermentation, and it’s not an “anything goes” kind of practice.
It’s not just about the cleanliness of the jar, especially when you’re putting in vegetables that will carry their own microbes and spores on their surface or in the accompanying soil/dirt.
Most lacto fermented pickle recipes will follow guidelines for keeping things safe and for keeping things tasty (some bad ferments aren’t actually dangerous but just don’t taste as good), and there are a lot of helpful guidelines out there that depend a bit on the vegetable itself (which might have different water content, pH, commonly associated microbes or pathogens).
You don’t need to be able to submit a certified HACCP plan for your process, but for anyone who isn’t already familiar with the risks and best practices should stick with established recipes from reputable sources.
Some people talk about botulism risk, but the reality is that almost no botulism cases come from home pickling, and very few come from home canning. C. botulinum cells and spores don’t like acid and don’t like salt, so most pickling recipes will easily prevent that problem in almost any home environment.
All that is to say: it’s not exactly a high risk activity, but stick with established recipes from reputable sources unless and until you know what you’re doing with pathogenic risks.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Yogurt is interesting because it’s already acidic, and dairy contains proteins, salts, and acids that buffer pH. So the microbes that thrive in that environment are already able to handle more acidic environments generally, and then might not experience as acidic of an environment in the human stomach compared to some other foods.
A lot of probiotic foods don’t actually have more microbes in them, but have certain microbes that tend to be found in human guts. I wonder if there’s some kind of filter effect where only certain types of microbes are more likely to survive the stomach, and therefore our guts tend to consist of microbes that are hardy against those conditions.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
- “germans”, “french”, “danes” weren’t a thing. up until recently. they are genetically diverse groups.
I was under the impression that the DNA kits described actual ethnic groups and showed a map of the distribution of those groups overlaid on modern political borders or region names. Here’s the page on 23 and Me’s reports, which have a lot more granular detail, mapped onto modern political borders for reference, but where any listed nation or territory may have up to dozens of different sub-groups listed.
- Comment on Y’all ain’t ready for this 1 month ago:
Sharp knees, 2/10 would not bang
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
I wanted to avoid overexplaining the joke, but it’s also worth pointing out that the slight shifts in federal law this year is only a part of a broader push around state laws and American gun culture more broadly (and I’d expect them to keep lobbying for more federal deregulation after this year too), to where it’s now more economically viable to manufacture, distribute, and sell suppressors. According to this source’s analysis of ATF stats, we went from less than a million lawfully registered suppressors in 2016 to 1.5 million in 2018 to 2.6 million on 2021 to 4.9 million in 2024.
There’s a broader shift underway, and I was just making a joke about it.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
I’ve always understood it to be a remnant of a culture that de-emphasized genealogy and family pedigree, and had a lot more cultural and ethnic mixing in marriages at an earlier era. In Europe, it seems like there are a lot more family crests and aristocratic titles, from centuries of families maneuvering for political power through strategic marriages and what not, and stronger cultural taboos against marrying and having children outside of one’s ethnic group (and religion), at least up until maybe World War II.
So if there’s just less to learn from DNA testing (a person who happens to already have records of all 16 of their great-great-grandparents, who all lived in the same geographical area), I’d expect there not to be much demand for that kind of analysis.
Or maybe I’m wrong to focus on the gentry and aristocratic families, and have a misplaced view of how long that kind of stuff culturally persisted in Europe.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
If we’re talking table manners and conventions, at this point I’m on board with combining three principles, two from the West and one from the East, for making dining more convenient and more pleasant:
- (From Western restaurant norms): Every item on the plate or in the bowl should be intended to be eaten. The kitchen should remove bones and inedible seeds, and all garnishes should be edible.
- (From Western fine dining): Food should be properly seasoned when served. There’s no need for salt or pepper to be available at the table.
- (From Asian dining culture): Knives at the table are barbaric, and everything on a plate or bowl should already be cut into appropriate sizes for one handed eating.
That would also take care of the American versus English etiquette (and whatever countries fall on either side of that convention) on how to use knives at the table.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
It’s only quietly annoying because we legalized fun silencers this year!
