This is quite applicable to many situations I‘ve witnessed. I‘ve also witnessed the exact opposite. I.e. managers blame themselves to avoid making hard decisions with employees. It would be great to have this article and another article which addresses „hard decisions“ in order to help managers navigate ambiguous situations.
I know that jumping in to mention Kagi has become a meme on HN, but I do think it's important to keep encouraging people to move away from Google. The specific search engine barely even matters, as much as I like Kagi. The only way that any of these search engines are going to improve is if more people leave Google in the dust.
If people don't want to pay for Kagi, then use Brave Search. DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.
>DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.
I've seen this a lot lately, but no one has said why.
I solely use DDG and have done so for a long time. I have not noticed any specific changes, nor any degradation in my search results. I don't pay much attention to announcements or anything, so maybe I missed something?
Can you or someone please tell me how/why DDG is suddenly not recommended and "gone downhill"?
In one of the comments I made elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my experience with DDG is that it's become extremely "PG-rated" even if you turn off safe search. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but to me it's pretty clear to me that DDG is way more normie-safe than when I began using it several years ago. DDG shows me more of what I consider detritus than Kagi does. It's extremely bad at finding any results by exact text, but to be fair, every search engine is bad at this now. And finally, DDG hasn't had what I would consider to be worthwhile feature improvements in a very long time. The doodads that sometimes show up when you use a particular term like "qr code hello world" are neat, but ultimately not that beneficial in contrast to being given more control over the results themselves. Their other features are mostly things that have been solved many times over.
I've always been satisfied with my grocery-bought olive oil, but also curious as to what "good" olive oil actually tastes like. Is there a brand or vendor in the US that sells such a product?
I'm a fan of PDO olive oil from regions in Greece that are known for their olive oil. Anything from Crete, Messinia, or Kalamata is usually top quality.
Since it's PDO, it's guaranteed to be a single cultivation, and from a region that takes its quality seriously.
California Olive Ranch is good. They grow and sell their own, and repackage imported oil. Their local stuff is very good quality. They have some single varietals (as opposed to blends) that are very tasty.
Yup, I second this. It's pretty much the only widely available high-quality affordable brand in the US. You tend to see chefs on cooking shows use it as their basic everyday olive oil.
There are plenty of great niche/imported brands as well, but it's pretty random as to which store might carry which ones, if any.
How can you reliably differentiate their local stuff from the oil that's mixed with imported oil, or even know whether the imported oil is EVOO?
IIRC they're no longer certified by the COOC. Given the massive amount of fraud in the olive oil industry, independent verification seems like the only tool to do that.
But even if you want to go by the seat of your pants, it seems like a bad idea to trust a company named "California Olive Ranch" whose growth into a nationally known label depends on importing olive oil from outside California.
Easy. I only — and I know this sounds silly — drink domestic :) I actively avoid imported olive oil for just the reasons you suggest. Last I looked, something like 50% of oil labelled “Italian EVOO” was in fact not, and a solid proportion of it wasn’t even olives. I’m not gambling with that, especially getting it shipped internationally.
California grows olives just fine, so I always use California oil. Now, is California Olive Ranch cheating some cheap import oil into their native EVOO? They could be; I’m betting not. My bet is that their own interests are best served by being straight here — one credible allegation of adulterating oil and their reputation takes a huge hit. Meanwhile, they can continue to charge lots of money for a high-quality product, which is just as it should be.
In large cities or tourist towns you'll likely find a shop that sells nothing but olive oil and will provide you with bits of bread to dip in order to sample it to find one you like, like an ice cream shop.
No need to get as fancy as some of the replies below would have you think. Believe it or not, Kirkland brand olive oil (yes, from Costco in the 2-liter jugs) is widely considered, even by many professionals, to be among the best olive oils on the market that you can buy at a reasonable price. I personally use it and love it, and i'm originally from a region of the world where many families had many generations spent growing their own olives and making their own oil.
I just got back from overseas and while there went to a Michelin star restaurant where we got to sample different fresh olive oils and I can confirm they did taste somewhat like grass.
Well, there are varieties, depending on the olive type you get more or less of a bitter, spicy or fruity taste. Here's a quick guide to Spanish olives used for oils:
- Picual - strong, bitter and spicy, very grassy, also one of the most common single-variety Spanish olive oils. Perfect for cooking meat, or mixing/marinating.
- Arbequina - not as strong, less spicy, with sweet, exotic fruity/grassy flavors. Awesome for making mayonnaise or ali-oli.
- Hojiblanca - somewhat middle-of-the-road, with moderate spice and bitterness, great for salads!
- Cornicabra - strength varies a lot, also spicy if harvested earlier, very sweet if harvested later. Great all-around. Tasty for cooking and for salads.
There are others, but these are the main ones. Early/late harvesting plays a significant role on taste, earlier being more bitter. In general, I love the very greenish-colored cornicabra olive oil, which are full of early harvest chlorophylls, and that are not too spicy.
Unfortunately, most non-Mediterranean (USA, UK...) grocery store extra virgin olive oils may not print the olive variety or is a blend oil produced and marketed for export...
The top recommendation is there, among other reasons, for that taste:
>This oil starts with a slight caramel flavor, but a bitter pungency blooms followed by a pleasant piquancy. We all enjoyed its grassy flavor, which one panelist said gave her “summer vegetable garden vibes.” The oil was rich but not overly fatty. One tester observed, “The way my tongue is responding reminds me of a good matcha—there’s that astringency, and then a long finish.”
100%, that was exactly what it brought to mind for me as well: like I had reached into the lawn mower bag and sprinkled in some essence of grass clippings. No thanks.
If someone wants to call olive oil without grass-clippings-taste "rancid," it's a free country, but that term comes with overbearing negative connotations so I'd personally prefer "aged" or something.
> I've always been satisfied with my grocery-bought olive oil, but also curious as to what "good" olive oil actually tastes like.
There's an initial flavor that can be idiosyncratic to where the olives were grown-- to me it's quite a bit more savory and subtle than the same kinds of flavors we associate with wines, but it's usually there.
Then there's kind of aftertaste with a slightly "spicy" burn-- if tasting a small spoonful it can sometimes make people cough.
I actually hesitate to write this as a metric lest some flavor tech in New Jersey reverse engineer it as a target for flavor additives to conola oil or some such.
Good olive oil is as complex as good wine or coffee can be. I recommend going to an olive oil shop and doing a guided tasting of a few different olive oils.
If you happen to be in NYC, Fairway sells pretty high quality olive oil under their house brand. Plus they have a tasting station in the olive oil aisle.
Other than the California brand others have mentioned, I haven’t found anything of similar quality in a supermarket, including Whole Foods and other high end markets.
You may consider looking into industrial / manufacturing positions, even if only temporary. These firms have a desperate need for technically minded people, and often apply programing principles in their engineering processes or physical automation systems. The problem has been so long standing, many don't even advertise for these types of roles anymore and instead pay headhunters' finders fees or have in-house training programs. Walking into their building and inquiring if your skill set could be useful is not at all a bad approach.
Either way, they certainly pay better than retail.
Best of luck, friend; I hope you're able to turn this challenge into an opportunity
I'm sorry, this sounds really tough and those words probably don't do it justice.
Prayer, which is distinctly different from meditation has been helpful to me.
I'm not an expert on any matters pertinent to mental health or spirituality for that matter--but if you just want to talk, DM me here: @awicz
This is such a refreshing comment. It's far better to engage in dialogue with those whom you disagree in order to understand their position opposed to assuming they are evil, stupid, or otherwise sub-human. Wouldn't it be wonderful if such an approach was applied not only to religious conversations but those of politics, work disputes, conflicts with your significant other...everything?
Cynically speaking, it won't matter if Brave continues to support the web request API, since all the other chromium variants aren't going to be. Once the market for extensions is 99% unable to support an API, it won't matter if the remaining 1% still does; developers simply won't target it.
What's your source on Vivaldi abandoning it? Last I heard they hadn't chosen yet. If they go full Manifest V3 then I'll have to abandon my thoughts of returning to Vivaldi (on Firefox now but there are some annoyances).
> First, Google decided to push on with discontinuing APIs used by several content blockers from the extension manifest v3. At the time, we made a promise to find a solution.
>
> Keeping support for the affected extensions (as with anything that gets discontinued in Chromium) would have been hard. Google usually removes most of the code a discontinued feature depends on and refactors anything that code relies on. So after a few versions, you end up with a patch that’s tough to apply every time.
I am reaching a little but their use of past tense makes me feel like they've decided.
