> pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch
That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.
I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.
Tomatoes are one of the few exceptions when it comes to canning - they always taste fresher and more tomato like than fresh store bought tomatoes - and are preferred in most recipes.
The third option, would be garden fresh/farm delivered tomatoes - but they have a shelf like of about 3 days and can't handle transport - so the odds of seeing them outside of a farmers market (or your backyard garden) - are next to nil.
It is not the case that canned tomatoes taste fresher at least in my experience. For one they have acidity added - on top of already acidic tomatoes - to reduce the risk of botulism or they're heated in the can which gives them a slightly odd taste, certainly not the same as freshly picked ripe tomatoes.
Maybe I've just only ever had inferior canned tomatoes, or the tomatoes I've grown have been particularly good.
I do think everyone here is making the point that store-bought tomatoes are inferior to canned ones. Home-grown vegetables picked and consumed at the peak of ripeness will always be better than store-bought and artificially ripened, and the likelihood of them being better than canned/frozen is pretty high.
The original top level poster did just say 'from scratch' but I will grant that if 'store bought' is what people are discussing (as the comment I responded to was, I missed the word) that I do agree. That's mainly due to the tomatoes not being bred for flavour or picked long before ripening or stored long term as far as I know, though.
> pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes
That probably only works if you live in a country blessed with actual tomatoes. In Germany e.g. it's not easy to find tomatoes that taste like tomatoes.
The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal. [edit: 60% is fossil fuel generated, ~20% is coal]
Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.
I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.
Every state/local already continually asks for federal handouts to maintain their overbuilt 8 lane roads. The fact that people still want to add lanes to roads is mind boggling.
Coal provided 23% of US electricity generation in 2021, 20% in 2022, and is forecast to fall to 19% in 2023. The US now burns less than half of the coal it did in 2007.
On US average grid EVs get 93mpg equivalent. On the dirtiest (most carbon intense) grid in the US that figure is 42, the cleanest 256. Of course for EVs those numbers will get better each year.
Even if you still run off coal you are decoupling energy source from the vehicle allowing the vehicle to run off any source that currently makes the most sense. You can't run a gas car off coal but you can run an electric.
Power plants are more efficient than small combustion engines as well as having more sophisticated emission controls with no concerns for weight or size with a full time staff to maintain them.
The grid needs to increase 30% to support all cars, it only took 40 years for it to increase 5X from 1960 to 2000, about 4% per year, so less than 10 years to support all cars, easily doable.
> The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal.
It is easier to upgrade a (comparative) small number of power plants than it is to make everyone's ICE engine more efficient.
> Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs.
The amount of work needed to upgrade our grid to handle the increased usage of air conditioning due to global warming is greater than the work needed to support EVs.
I would certainly believe that the smog/pollutants from coal outweigh the benefits, but acording to this [1] Reuters article reviewing this question:
> Even in the worst case scenario where an EV is charged only from a coal-fired grid, it would generate an extra 4.1 million grams of carbon a year while a comparable gasoline car would produce over 4.6 million grams, the Reuters analysis showed.
People have been having a lot less sex for a while now. I think technology is largely to blame, too. We're so accustomed to things being served up for us that the ability to function outside that specific setting has atrophied.
We've become more connected than ever, but we're more singular and selfish than ever. This is worse with generations that have had an internet-connected computer in from of them their whole life, especially in the social media era (studies show). I expect people to be getting more and more neurotic and weird.
I think also that the effects of internet porn really can't be underestimated. There's something emasculating about one of humanity's ultimate drives being sated with a couple of mouse clicks. Then look at what is delivered: it's not sex, it's not even a depiction of sex, it's a depiction of a simulacra of sex. Generally speaking, porn divorces us from our own sexuality. Instead of exploring and developing our own sexuality with others, we're served the depiction of others performing for the camera and we get that in our heads. If you think that doesn't impact your sex life or sexuality I don't know what to say.
I've always done 20% because it's easy to do in my head. Nowadays it's a low tip for those tip prompts and I punch it in manually if I tip at all.
When I delivered food my tip spread was funny. Many people wouldn't tip at all, many would just let you keep the change or give you a token amount (~5-10%), and a few people would give you over 50% tips. Not many gave me 15-25%.
A "token amount" is pretty reasonable if you take tipping at face value, no? It's supposed to be a reward for good service. Waitstaff engage with you many times over the course of about an hour, and every person at a table receives service. It's fairly reasonable in this case to tip in proportion to the total bill. On the contrary, it's roughly the same amount of work for a delivery driver to deliver $100 of food as it is $10. Tipping the driver a few dollars (at most) seems not unreasonable in this case. The tip cannot possibly be reflective of any service rendered and it's essentially random what driver you will get, so you're not being biased or harming a particular person.
This is, of course, wholly separate from whether the tipping system is a good idea on the whole.
I honestly don't know, but do you think the $200/plate restaurant spreads your tips among more people? I would imagine their ratio of tipped workers to patrons would be higher than most restaurants.
I'm sure this varies so I came to this same scenario at a high end sushi restaraunt where there is a waitress, a sushi chef, a non-sushi cheff, hostess, bartender etc and every single one of those people are working on your dinner (closer to $100 per person, but still).
I wasn't sure and I had hoped the tip worked as you said getting spread around (at least to the sushi chef who takes the sushi order directly and drops it at your table). I figured the hostess would tell me straight up since she's not taking my tip directly and doesn't benefit greatly one way or another.
She made it clear to me. Don't expect anyone beyond the waitress to get a meaningful share. I presume she meant either the sharing was very minimal or the waitress was likely to pocket most of it before reporting the amount to the people she may obliged to share it with. That didn't sit well with me but I have a feeling she was telling the truth, especially in light of the fact that the waitress would have every incentive especially with cash to just pocket the money and tell everybody else they were stiffed or got 5% or whatever.
See my below post. The issue is the delivery driver has to pick up the order from a full service restaurant much of the time. The full service restaurant workers will blackball the delivery driver if he doesn't tip them, and that happens proportionally to the cost of the food. After 2-3 times the delivery driver not tipping the restaraunt at the food he's picking up, he will be waiting forever until his customers cancel.
I’m having trouble believing this. You’re saying restaurant workers are expecting tips from the delivery drivers coming to their restaurant for pickup? I’ve only ever seen drivers show up, confirm their identity and orders to the restaurant workers via an app, take the food, and leave.
> The full service restaurant workers will blackball the delivery driver if he doesn't tip them
Have things seriously gotten this bad, that restaurant workers are shaking down delivery drivers for extra cash? So much for solidarity with fellow workers.
Tips are for service, and selling food is not a service. At a restaurant, tips are for the waitstaff that brings your food and cleans up after you. Everything else is people hustling for extra cash. And yes we all like extra cash, but that doesn't make one entitled to it by putting a cup on the counter.
(Delivery drivers bringing food to your house, and drinks at a bar are two separate categories of service where tipping is legitimately expected. Although now that I think about it, maybe that second category was just the beginning of people getting suckered).
> Have things seriously gotten this bad, that restaurant workers are shaking down delivery drivers for extra cash? So much for solidarity with fellow workers.
This is why I call them bribes and say they are akin to feudalism (where the practice started). Because it separates us. Like I said in my main post, it divides a larger group that should be collectively bargaining for a higher minimum wage. I'm fine with tipping, but it being a social standard is barbaric.
Minimum wage is feudalism again though. You're outlawing the jobs of those who create less than minimum wage in value, thus relegating them to the black market and/or less employment. It separates the wage workers and benefits some of the poor at the expense of the even more poor.
This is absurd, I'm sorry. It is logically inconsistent and means that if wages, payments, or exchange of goods exist in any form as compensation for work, then the system is feudalism. This would not only go against the common usage (words mean what we collectively agree they mean), but render the word meaningless. Please don't do this, you're just adding noise to an argument and not providing a useful comment.
Personally I didn't agree with your redefinition, but since you go by a completely different standard than everyone else I went to your level to make you understand your absurdity.
> It is logically inconsistent and means that if wages, payments, or exchange of goods exist in any form as compensation for work, then the system is feudalism.
And no I was saying minimum wage law is doing the exactly thing you fear, which is split us apart by outlawing poor people from working if the value of their labor is less than the minimum wage amount. It creates the same bifurcated society you feared where the very poor now have their jobs outlawed and have to work in the black market and shadows already more than they already do. Minimum wage law is basically a giant "fuck you got mine" to people creating less than that value and creating a cartel where a number of poor people benefit at the expense of the even more poor through violence of the state.
The issue is the waitstaff that prepare takeout at some restaurants are "tipped" service workers.
Which means they don't earn almost any wage.
So if they spend all their time prepping takeout orders for delivery workers they make NO money. So they get very pissed doing this work and intentionally slow it down.
my experience is from several years back, things may have changed.
This sounds like straight up employee misclassification and wage theft that should be taken up with state regulators. Surely a fast food place like McDonalds can't just put a tip jar on the counter, play coy that their workers are tipped positions, and underpay their employees. So it's a matter of enforcement on the smaller outfits that are able to fly under the radar.
I don't want to completely wash my hands of it because it's certainly possible the state regulators could be corrupt and just ignoring the problem, but just giving in to the corruption doesn't seem right either.
The law has always included consideration for this loophole. Every employee must at least average state minimum wage for their 80-hour paychecks, including tips.
So the employee has to record their tips (often but not always, in the same computer system they record their hours) and make sure their employer correctly compensated them for the shortfall between actual earnings and minimum wage.
Minimum wage laws basically says “Every employee must make the minimum wage when tips and employer payments are combined. Also, employers must always pay at least $2.13/hr (federal) regardless of amount that is earned in tips.”
The “real” issue is that $2.13/hr combined with averaging earnings over a paycheck leads to very very mismatched incentives for a business deciding what hours they should be open. The business has very low marginal cost so they’ll stay open during hours when it’s not profitable to the laborers because not enough customers ever walk in to make them minimum wage during those extra off-peak hours.
Good point, I had forgotten about that. It seems like the real issue in this case is that minimum wage isn't really much of a guarantee. Waiters are expecting to make much more than minimum wage, but got pushed into a different role that unilaterally altered their wage.
There was a class action suit regarding servers not being paid a full wage while being made to roll up silverware and napkins and other tasks like that where they were on the clock but not able to earn tips. My wife worked at Applebees and got a couple bucks out of this lawsuit.
What the businesses I saw this at did was the waitstaff worked the tables part the time and prepped take out orders part the time. So in effect delivery workers were stealing time they could use to wait tables or directly serve a takeout customer that would usually tip them something. It wasn't that they had staff just for takeout that wasn't getting paid regular wage.
Naturally the waitstaff super resented having to maybe take on less tables to do essentially unpaid work on the side of taking your order, prepping utinsels and drinks, possibly even making some very simple ready made stuff themselves, and plate bagging it up etc and a lot of the shit they have to do for a normal table except for no tip.
Yeah, it's certainly an unfortunate situation all around - mostly for the restaurant staff who are dependent on the tips - but probably doesn't change much from the consumer's point of view. FWIW I've not had significant problems with delivery. I think a lot of restaurants have gotten used to "the new normal", though to be fair the majority of meals I've had delivered have been mediocre, sometimes cold.
As any hourly worker waiting forever is a nice break from having to actually deliver food. Bonus if the orders are cancelled. Fault never makes it to driver.
I was working as a contract worker through postmates. I was not paid by the hour and earned nothing if the customer cancelled.
Later the courts ruled this was technically employment and I got a token check in a class action, but of course never back paid for the hours as an employee.
Yeah I did food delivery and a sizeable amount didn't tip at all. It also created huge problems picking up food because many of the places people ordered from were full service restaurants, and the workers would purposefully go slow as fuck because they knew they would get no tip as most the food delivery companies don't provision for a tip to the restaraunt people preparing the food for the food delivery guy. A few times I had to take a loss on orders to tip the restaurant I was picking the food up from just to get them to release the food.
The food delivery guy is basically seen like the UPS worker. All around I decided it was a fucked business model and quit pretty quickly.
Too bad I can't pick up any silphium or liquamen at the grocery store. Silphium is thought to be extinct and the exact taste and method for producing liquamen is still debated -- though we know it was some sort of fish sauce.
Asafoetida was substituted by the Romans when their supply of African laser (silphium) became unavailable. Liquamen, or at least something very close, can be purchased at oriental foodstores (look for nuoc mam or nan pla). There's even a modern Italian version called colatura.
It's not that unknown. The specific herbs and flavorings probably varied over time and place and those details are lost. But it was certainly a whole-fish amino sauce using the digestive enzymes of the fish themselves, and salt to prevent spoilage. Asian fish sauces are likely a decent substitute.
Plus garums are making a comeback and are already quietly being produced and used in some high end kitchens, based on work published by noma, using koji proteases to speed up the process. You can't quite buy them at the grocery store, and historical authenticity to roman recipes isn't the goal of anyone I know. But there is garum out there if you really really want it.
Anything can be marketed as "garum". The name isn't protected, all it takes is so naming whatever product you have. If our definition is some sort of fish sauce with various unspecified ingredients, then any Asian or other fish sauce is garum.
Exactly. In Roman times, they probably also had endless variations of what they called garum. There wasn't really any food authority. They would likely have used what would have been available to them locally. Mostly that would have been what they grew locally + what they fished out of the Mediterranean + what they could get their hands on via trade.
The recipe probably wasn't set down in stone. Which was of course one of the ways to publish information at the time. But mostly people just copied what other people were doing at the time. There weren't many recipe books/scrolls or literate cooks even. And it sounds like the process of making garum basically involved a lot of rotting fish guts so that doesn't strike me as something as a likely career choice for somebody with an actual education at the time.
So, basically the recipe would have gone something like: take whatever off cuts of fish, fish guts, etc. you have, add salt, and let it do its thing for some time. You get different results based on what fish you use, whatever else you might toss in (herbs, spices, etc), how long you let things ferment, etc. Probably all those variants would have been considered garum. Probably a lot of trial and error involved to get that right. That's also more or less how Asian fish sauces work.
Agreed but to use a modern analogy, while there are thousands of variants of kimchi, none of them taste like sauerkraut.
Lots of seemingly minor details can make a big difference in cooking. From the Asian sauces for example I know it even makes a difference what fish species is used. It's possible that there are fish sauces out on the market that are similar or even essentially the same as variants that were used in Ancient Rome but we don't know this.
It isn't available yet, but they rediscovered what appears to be silphium in 2022. It checks all the boxes. It's a slow-growing plant, but they have started trying to propagate it.
Oh god this gives me flashbacks. I never knew how bad corruption was on home computers until I started using git annex on a multi-terabyte file collection. No matter which computer or disk I used, it would inevitably happen. Then I started to wonder how much corruption had crept in before I was using git annex and never noticed it.
I've basically given up on maintaining large digital media collections for long term purposes. It puts my OCD in overdrive.
How about storing the data on a filesystem that performs data checksumming, also configured in a RAID-1-like mirroring profile to enable any corruption to also be corrected? Filesystems like ZFS or BTRFS could be a good choice here.
> One of the prime prerequisites of e.g. zfs actually is using ECC RAM.
ECC RAM is not a prerequisite for using ZFS.
Matt Ahrens, co-creator of ZFS and still one of the main developers, said this [1]:
"There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.
I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."
True, I phrased it too strongly. Let's put it this way: zfs (or btrfs, ...) can make for a bullet-proof system through checksumming and self-healing. However, its Achilles heel is non-ECC RAM. With it, at least in theory and excluding universal disaster, data can live perpetually and remain intact indefinitely. Without ECC, zfs remains at the mercy of what the RAM might get wrong. That's what I remember learning about it a while ago.
However, even if you're not using ECC RAM, you're much better off using ZFS or btrfs, because due to their frequent checksumming and checksum validations, these filesystems will usually detect memory corruption much sooner than if you didn't use them.
This could be immensely helpful in scenarios such as the great^4-parent poster.
Note that bad hardware is not limited to non-ECC RAM. ZFS and btrfs help just as much in detecting other kinds of bad hardware, such as bad SATA cables, bad disks, bad disk/SATA controllers, bad CPUs, bad power supply, etc.
But of course, once these checksum errors are flagged by ZFS/btrfs, it's a signal to test and fix/replace your hardware, not keep using a machine with bad hardware.
And yes, while ZFS and btrfs cannot fix errors that happen before the checksumming takes place (e.g. due to bad RAM, bad CPUs, etc), they can still detect these kinds of errors (in some cases, at least), especially when they happen after checksumming already took place. And they definitely can detect and fix errors in the rest of the data-to-storage-and-back path (e.g. bad disk cables, bad disks or disk controllers, etc).
Interest rates go up, money is harder to come by, people are building less since they can't get a loan, contractors find other work until construction picks back up.
I understand this much. But, the world is pretty weird at the moment. It seems more complex now than just moving interest rate levers around to manipulate the economy.
I'm not a fan of animations myself, though I think it could be somewhat useful with a tiling WM to help maintain (for lack if a better word) your orientation. Sometimes a new window will open and move the other windows around and get resized unexpectedly, or you'll move a window and lose track for a split second. Animation would show you where everything gets put so you don't have to reorient yourself. Not a very common issue, but I could see animation helping there.
Yeah they can be helpful in such cases. I used Gnome for a while and although I liked the overview animation, it was too slow for my taste and you needed an extension to speed it up, so I just disabled them. I see that Hyprland allows you to configure this OOTB though.
That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.
I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.