Also worth noting that AI was used by the researchers. It’s not mentioned in the article, but I guess AI helped sort out which sounds might be a name.

That would make sense. In Europe I got an IV just for blood samples. They could have been anticipating the possibility that I would need pain killers later, but seemed like it would have made more sense to use a normal needle and only do the IV if it came to the point of needing meds.

⚠ Folks-- use lynx to view that article. It’s fully #enshitified in GUI browsers (autoplay, ½-screen blocking bullshit) but decent in text browsers.

Indeed… now that we can simply enter a couple ingredients into a search field and get countless recipes, and also w/Youtube, I would expect people to be better equipped in recent decades.

The article covers that: “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can’t afford a basket of groceries.”

Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.

… or farmers trying to sell obscure things like celery root!

seriously though, the article seems reasonable and balanced to me. E.g:

• “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can’t afford a basket of groceries”
• “It’s important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem”.

Right but what if the cheapest food is idk, something like celery root? I think the idea w/the thesis of the article is that a skilled cook can adapt to whatever ingredients are cheapest at any moment.

I think I’m a decent cook but I also think I need to improve because when I’m in the produce area and have no idea how to use like 15—20% of the options there. E.g. celery root, cactus, and ½ dozen things I don’t even recognize.

What’s Kenji? Is it the cookbook mentioned here:

https://www.kenjilopezalt.com/

?

If you read the whole thread, I would not have to spell this out. These are preservatives (source):

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• sage
• mustard
• mustard seed
• cumin
• black pepper
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves
• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

They generally work by killing/repelling/deterring microbes that to a notable extent happen to be of the unwanted variety. Before yesterday, I thought salt worked similarly to the others on that list. Yesterday I learnt that salt is uniquely functions as a preservative due to a different mechanism (a drying effect).

Your logic is nonsense. To claim that because substance X does not kill /everything/, it cannot serve as a preservative – this is broken logic that you brought to the thread. Nothing on that list of food preservatives kills or deters every microbe - not even every harmful microbe. Of course they selectively mitigate /some of/ “the bad bacteria” (but note it’s a bit straw mannish for you to use the article “the” in your phrasing imply /all/ unwanted microbes). Most preservatives mitigate enough unwanted microbes without unacceptable overkill to beneficial microbes to justify use as a preservative. They are selected as preservatives for this reason. Foods that fail to significantly select against unwanted microbes (i.e. most foods) don’t get tagged as a preservative. How are you not grasping this?

You also have noteworthy bad assumption: that evolution does not happen outside of the ocean. The claim that because life started in the ocean, the ocean is therefore suitable for everything – this is bogus. Try putting a freshwater fish in the ocean. If a complex organism can evolve to become intolerant to the environment of its ancestors, why wouldn’t microbes also evolve to develop intolerances?

Indeed, that’s a good point. I wonder how many people don’t know that. I used to think “nothing will survive 250°F in my pressure cooker” and was tempted to cook some questionable pork. But yeah, would have been dangerous because chemical toxins from bacteria output would “survive” (persist) in 250°F. So after some quick research, I tossed it.

Though I might be surprised if 24hrs is enough time for brine to not only accumulate bacteria in high numbers but also allow enough time for bacteria toxins to be produced. How fast does that happen? I would have thought a day is too short (I don’t think I ever let more than a day pass between boils).

Actually that logic is broken IMO. A food preservative need not make life impossible for all organisms. E.g. hops (and consequential acidity) preserves beer to some extent by making life hard for some unwanted organisms. But hops do not kill everything (of course, because you intend to drink the beer). Beer can still spoil despite the hops.

But as I said in my correction, salt works as a preservative through a drying effect, which I did not previously realize (TIL).

I could always transfer it to glass or plastic to protect the pot but I guess laziness was the original motivator. Salt is cheap enough that I’ll probably just toss it going forward.

Yeah, indeed I just realized from an article I linked that salt only works as a preservative by drying out food. So salt water is indeed useless.

i get 403 forbidden w/that link. And archive.org chokes on it too for some reason. Does your source counter this source?

(edit) ah, I see the problem. Salt only works as a preservative by drying out food.

Well it’s not actually clear to me whether the soft water is to protect the dishwasher, or to make cleaning more effective. Soft water dissolves soap better which makes it more effective in cleaning. It also means I can use powdered detergent (which is cheaper than liquid detergent, but in hard water powder doesn’t perform as well). Soft water has the down side that it’s actually /more prone/ to corrosion than hard water (at least according to youtube plumbers). So I’m tempted to conclude the built-in water softener is just for cleaning effectiveness.

Also aren’t you afraid something will come to live in 2 days in warm salty water

Wasn’t salt the most popular preservative in the days before refrigeration existed? The stuff boils with heavy salt (like ocean water), so starts off semi-sterile due to the boiling. Then I don’t imagine many things looking for a home in brine, which then boils again the next day. This water is saltier than foods that rely on salt for preservation.

Starchy water sitting around is a breading ground for bacteria. Don’t do that.

That water is brine, if you do it right. Salt is a good preservative. I’ve tested it with up to 2 reuses.

Also, dishwashers don’t clean with salt water. They use the salt to reset their internal water softener.

Not sure why you thought I thought dishwashers clean with salt water. The manual’s advice was to mitigate salt grains that did not get into the salt reservoir that would sit on the stainless steel potentially for days.

Ah, I wondered if I needed to explain that, since dishwashers in N.America do not take salt. European dishwashers tend to have built-in water softeners (because it’s somewhat uncommon to have whole house water softeners). So we periodically have to fill a salt reservoir in the dishwasher to feed the water softener.

And email, done right (safe, no spam, secure, private) is one of the hardest things to do. It’s not easy.

It should be easy when ~95% of the traffic is internal, which is the important traffic. Students and profs emailing each other. How often does a school need to collaborate with another? Google has ruined email and if mail to externals is unreliable that’s fine. Hopefully students are not becoming helpless when the need comes to write a snail mail letter.

I would rather not condition students to satisfy corporate hoops imposed on them by surveillance advertisers.

But can you, do you want to explain setting up thunderbird to the median college goer?

Thunderbird is a convenience. Every student should have access to a UNIX or linux lab where they can type “pine” at a shell prompt and get a preconfigured mail client. If they want the extra convenience of using a 3rd party client, just give them the raw generic parameters. They are students – it’s their job to struggle through puzzles.