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It’s an age of marvels

blog.plover.com

271–280 of 425 posts

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people complain about taxation on tea or the lack thereof instead of appreciating how privileged they are to have access to Oriental tea.

Sometimes you actually do need to rewrite the whole project in a new language. FORTRAN just isn't the tool for the job anymore. But you'd still benefit a good deal from being highly suspicious that any person suggesting that course of action is naive to how much time and suffering it will entail. Arguably, the American revolution wasn't even necessary. A lot of people died as a result. England would have potentially…

>FORTRAN just isn't the tool for the job anymore.

This underscores the problem with generalities. I know of some applications that would be considered high-speed (both literally and figuratively, since they are related to rocket testing) that still rely on FORTRAN. So I think your statement needs some qualifies (what kinds of jobs?)

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#272
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from 1900.

Those are the ones that scared you?!? Walgreens/CSV literal buckets of medicine like Advil and whatnot were some of the scariest things I've seen, and worst of all, people DEFENDING them.

I'm curious why Advil is scary to you.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#273
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For example, one staple dish of Cajuns is called "rice and gravy." Essentially, you sear thinly cut 7-steaks, remove them, cook down some trinity, then add the steaks back with some water or broth and seasonings. That's it. The steaks simmer in the broth for hours and create their own gravy. We serve it over rice, usually accompanied by some roux peas (tres petit pois cooked in a roux with onions and bacon) and…

As someone who’s not American, I’m unclear; is going to a butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the market by supermarkets?

There are butchers in the supermarkets (at least the one I go to)

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#274
post #23

More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…

Kind of rough for those of us that prefer sand and grit unsliced break though..

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local bl…

This so much. People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.

>People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.

You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."

I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon Never study rocketry, it wil ruin your whimsical innocence.

It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't need to literally bring a whole factory and the input materials up on a rocket but instead use resources available in space. Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.

> It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space

I don't see any of the alternatives ever being competitive.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#277
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who’s not American, I’m unclear; is going to a butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the market by supermarkets?

from a google search: "A 7 bone steak is a cut of beef from the chuck section of a cow's front shoulder, which is considered a tough area of the animal.". You're not going to find that in a regular grocery store because not many people will buy it. You will find every other cut of beef, pork, and poultry considered edible though. You can go to a butcher but they're less common than a regular grocery store. Also, butc…

In most places I've lived, including Seattle, butchers typically buy the whole animal. They move smaller quantities but every possible cut of meat is available, you just have to ask. They may run out of a cut, since availability scales with the number animals they butcher and demand is uneven over the entire animal, or you might want something unusual outside the scope of their default breakdown of the animal, but you can always ask them to reserve that part from the next animal and they've always been happy to oblige in my experience.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#278
post #273
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who’s not American, I’m unclear; is going to a butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the market by supermarkets?

There are butchers in the supermarkets (at least the one I go to)

Walmart is 25% of grocery sales in the US and they only have pre-packaged meat because 22 years ago, some butchers tried to unionized.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#279
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who’s not American, I’m unclear; is going to a butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the market by supermarkets?

from a google search: "A 7 bone steak is a cut of beef from the chuck section of a cow's front shoulder, which is considered a tough area of the animal.". You're not going to find that in a regular grocery store because not many people will buy it. You will find every other cut of beef, pork, and poultry considered edible though. You can go to a butcher but they're less common than a regular grocery store. Also, butc…

Boston here. Market Basket always has 7bone, Costco never does.

Different stores, different clientele.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#280
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that it's staggeringly expensive and there's not much to see there, it seems like the right decision to hold off once we'd established it could be done.

Foolish short-sighted take. Imagine if the same opinion held during the age of sail. There's literally more resources than are currently controlled by our entire planet in the asteroid belt, and a lunar colony (at least a refueling station in space) would be a huge boon to anyone who wants to go explore further. If that's not good enough, how about outsourcing our shitty resource extraction and polluting manufacturin…

The problem with arguments by analogy is they inherently assume the analogy is valid. It's a circular argument.

The "cognitive shift" thing is just BS some space fans made up to sell their cult.

And no, Apollo did not launch "our discipline of computer science". Talk about spinoff inflation!

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