I’ve never been someone who can eat the same thing multiple days in a row, so i can’t do the “standard” approach of making proportioned meals. I also can’t just eat food I’ve heated back up in the microwave for every meal.

In a perfect week, I’ll make some bread, some rice, a soup/stew, a sauce of some sort, etc. I also make a lot of yogurt and ricotta-type cheese (from milk, not whey), because milk is heavily subsidized where I live.

I basically just try to have different things I can combine in different orders, and typically I’m leaving some part of the process to still be done each night (roasting veggies, boiling pasta, stir frying something, etc).

Roads.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm

Roads have an unbelievable cost when you really start to put the numbers together. A lane mile of a new interstate on rolling terrain costs 6.2 million in 2025 $. Keep in mind that is only a lane mile, so for 2 lanes in each direction, it’s $25 million per mile. Multiply that by the 49k miles of interstate, and you have a (super rough) estimate cost of 1.2 trillion to construct it today. Even resurfacing those roads is ~1/10 the cost, which is still a lot of money.

Ignoring interstates and looking at really run of the mill arterial is still staggering.

Picking a random square farming county, McPherson county, KS is an easy example. It is 30 miles by 30 miles, with a paved arterial every mile (ignoring towns). Thats 3600 lane miles. At $3.6 million per lane mile, that’s ~$13 billion to costruct the roads in a county with a population of 30,000, or $432,000 per person.

That’s really a feature to them, not a bug.

I, personally, have grown muscle tissue in a laboratory environment, so I know what it takes to actually grow muscle tissue. What I’m not familiar with is what the lab-grown meat industry practices are, but I just looked into it briefly.

There are 2 companies currently with approval to sell a lab-grown meat product in the US: Upside Foods and Good Meat.

Both sell chicken. Upside Food’s process is outlined in their FDA submission. They specifically state: “several media protein components (e.g., bovine serum albumin, growth factors) are required for sustaining cell viability and growth during the culture process” i.e., they rely on albumin from cattle like I suspected.

Unfortunately, since the “creation of chicken cells” is FDA regulated, but “production of chicken meat” is USDA regulated, that document doesn’t actually go into detail on how the cells are turned into the final product. This Wired article, however, says that they are basically just laying out sheets of the cells, and then manually stacking them to give some structure, which is not a scalable solution. Also, it seems like they are somewhat falling apart as a company not that they are running out of VC money. It looks like they are also trying to pivot into producing some sort of primarily plant based sausage with a little chicken cells thrown in. I’m assuming that’s a last gasp to produce something profitable.

Good Meats, on the other hand, I can’t find as much information on. The equivalent FDA document is on the other side of a link that seems broken. According to what they publish on their site, they are essentially vat growing cells, straining them off, and then extruding them into a shape.

In both cases, I don’t think it’s accurate to call the product “meat” since the cells will not have the structure of muscle cells (long strands), and there isn’t any tissue organization or adhesion to an extracellular matrix. It’s more of a pate even though they called a fillet.

The ecological footprint of both of the companies is greater than just conventional chicken production. I know this because both websites try really carefully to make it seem like they are better, but they can’t say that they are.

Upside foods phrases all of their claims as “what if we could do x, y, and z?” Rather than saying that they can do it. Good Meats similarly has an FAQ of “is it better than conventional?” and their response is “we believe it will be”.

In addition to selective breeding like others have mentioned, supply chain logistics have gotten much more advanced over the years. You can get many fruits right at the peak of ripeness year round due to sourcing and better storage methodologies.

Science has also gotten better at giving plants what they need to grow successfully, so almost all agricultural products are much larger than they would have been 50 years ago. If you take an apple tree from an orchard, and stick it in a random person’s back yard and neglect it, it will have way smaller fruit. Irrigation, fertilization, etc, allow things to grow bigger, but the parts needed for the actual reproduction don’t really grow much, so that extra energy just ends up producing fruit that’s more “watered down”.

In a grain, for example, theres 3 parts: germ, bran, and endosperm. The germ is the little start of the seedlings, and it contains protein, minerals, and fats. The bran is the other coating that has fiber, protein, and minerals. The endosperm is mostly just carbs. In modern grain, the endosperm takes up a much larger percentage of the grain than in older varieties (and non-fertilized/irrigated/weeded/pest controlled fields)

And poison ivy more powerful

I’m very much not up-to-date on the lab grown meat industry (so take this with a grain of salt), but I have done cell culture.

There’s a reason most scifi with food grown in vats references bacteria, yeast, and algae. Single celled organisms have to be relatively self sufficient. You can grow more yeast/bacteria by feeding plain sugar to it. There are other nutrients eventually needed, but they can be given in simple forms (e.g., oxygen, inorganic salts, etc.) that you can isolate or create through simple chemistry alone.

Vertebrate cells are part of a highly complex system where they require sugars/salts/etc, but also growth factors, antibodies, and a whole host of other proteins, fats, steroids, etc. Some of those can be created in a lab with chemistry or special bacteria/yeast, but for the most part, scientists use fetal bovine serum. It’s a byproduct of slaughtering pregnant cattle, and it contains a lot of those things that are just too hard to create otherwise.

Cells also need to be given the right niche do grow and differentiate into the target cell type, so muscle needs to exercise, arteries need pulsatile fluid flow, nerves need electrical signals, etc. Without an immune system, everything needs to be done in a sterile environment.

All of that adds up to an ecological footprint that’s extremely difficult to reduce below the natural product.

You’re getting downvoted for saying something sorta close to true, but not exactly. I agree strongly with everything you said here, though.

Generally, with any complex human-machine interface, you want to cast as wide of a net for accommodation as possible because there are so many variables that come into play.

Like if you are putting together a basketball team, you probably want a bunch of tall dudes, but you never know how many Muggsy Bogues’s are out there unless you let everyone play.

For a fighter pilot, would you rather have a female with greater ability to distinguish color, or a male that can pull higher g’s? It’s impossible to say what specific traits would lead to the best outcome in all possible engagements.

Even things like colorblindness can be a positive in situations because camouflage can stick out to colorblind people. Some types of deafness comes with immunity to motion sickness.

That’s not true. With no controls, there is no significant difference in tolerance by sex. When controlled for height, females have lower tolerance than males. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3753357/

Honesty is usually the right move for most interviews. People usually try to put their best foot forward, which is good, but it can end up coming across as inauthentic.

If, for example, you are a fresh graduate, and you get an interview, they expect you to be inexperienced. If you claim to know how to use every program and do every technical process, they will know you are bluffing. It’s much better to say “I’ve taken a bunch of classes on X programming language, so I know it pretty well, but ive done some tutorials and little projects with Y and Z, and I’m eager to learn more” or “I’ve done some labs where we used A and B machines, but I had a summer internship where 90% of my days were spent working with C”.

Also, questions like “why do you want to work here?” can be answered with “my significant other got a job in this town, so now I need to as well” (obviously not in those exact words). To you, it might seem like you aren’t acting “excited” by the company enough, but the people interviewing you likely aren’t drinkers of corporate kool-aid any more than you are, so they will appreciate the honesty. Also, the fact that you have a reason to move to that town shows that you are likely to be willing to work there for the long haul.

Tl;dr, don’t pretend to be a unicorn cause you probably aren’t, and people don’t expect you to be. Just make sure you show that you are serious about wanting the job.

Yeah, this is super important. I’ve interviewed someone before who was actually pretty well qualified, but through interviewing him, it was clear that he was actually just shopping for an offer to use as leverage against his current employer, and he had no intention of working with us.

For example, if a job would involve relocating across country, you’d better be asking questions about the area, or if you are already familiar with the area, make that obvious. At the very least, ask questions about what a normal day is like, and stuff like that.

I think I made the mistake as a fresh grad of not asking some of those questions because I was desperate for a job, and I didn’t want to appear “picky”, but I’m sure I just gave the impression that I wasn’t serious about it. From their perspective, they probably thought “this kid doesn’t want to move across the country, they are just trying to get experience interviewing”.

I tend to disagree with people on the “numbers game” thing. The barriers to submitting a million resumes to a million jobs have never been lower, so people in charge of hiring are inundated with applications from people who’s skillsets and stated interests make it clear that they have not even read the job posting. It makes it so that people who are fitting for the job are like a needle in a haystack. It also doesn’t help that the people reviewing applications are not often the people who you’d be working with, and they don’t necessarily know all the right things to be looking for; they just have a list of magic words that they are filtering for. You might have a synonym of the right word on your resume, and they’d never notice it.

These days, knowing someone is especially the key in my experience. It doesn’t even have to be someone you know well enough that they’d give you an actual “recommendation”. You are probably better off sending your resume to 10 people who already have the job you want than submitting 100 actual applications.

It’s not the best resume in the giant stack who gets interviewed, it’s someone’s niece’s college roommate’s former coworker’s step-cousin.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.

I think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.

If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don’t just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can’t treat them as such.

If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.

Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don’t work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.

I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.

Seconding the national center for home food preservation document.

One thing that I like experimenting with that i have to search for every time is the time/temperature curves for pasteurization of different foods. Every “knows” you are supposed to cook chicken (and most “prepared foods”) to 165 °F according to the FDA/USDA. What most people don’t know is that that temperature is what your food needs to hit for 1 second to have the proper reduction of bacteria (e.g., 7-log for chicken, which is a really high bar). You get the same reduction with 15 seconds at 160 °F or an hour at a little over 135 °F. You can easily do that with a sous vide bath.

It’s really cool for people who are immunocomprimised or pregnant because you can cook a steak to medium rare, but hold temp for a couple hours, and it’s just as safe as if you cooked it to way hotter and ruined the meat. You can also do runny egg yolks.

Here’s the first link that came up when I looked for it, but I’m sure you could find the actual government publication.

https://blog.thermoworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf

Why would you want anything by volume? Mass is so much easier. 50 ml of honey is way more annoying to get into a recipe than dumping it right into whatever container the rest of the ingredients are in while it’s sat on a scale.

I think it depends on the type of tourist attraction. In places like beach towns, “locals” are usually people who happened to have enough money to buy a vacation house, and decided to make it permanent. Or think of ski towns where the cost of living is so expensive that everyone who actually works there commutes in from another hour away or lives in their car or a jam packed seasonal rental. Basically anywhere that tourism is the only industry, a lot of decent people will be priced out.

brings back a good degree of manufacturing

The idea that manufacturing ever “left” is propaganda. Union factory jobs have gone down, but the US is producing more than ever. They just want to dangle the carrot of good jobs over people who don’t realize those jobs have been automated.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-historical-chart

Married women would have a tougher time meeting proof-of-citizenship requirements if they took their husbands’ name

Yeah, that all definitely sounds reasonable to me. It’s just weird that if that’s the point the article was trying to make, they should have supported it a bit.

This article mentions that they are trying to disenfranchise people with the citizenship proof requirements, and it also mentions that they specifically want to disenfranchise women, but it doesn’t draw a connection between the two. In order for those to be connected, women would have to have more difficulty in producing that proof than men (which may be the case, but the article doesn’t show that).

To actually answer your question, though, at least from the conservative women I’ve talked to, they are fine with that. The conservative women I know are weak, and they essentially want to give up responsibility in exchange for freedoms. They actually want women to be second class citizens because it means that they don’t have to worry about anything (but they do have to just do what they are told).

There are old, conservative women who spent their lives as housewives who feel threatened by working women, so they want to maintain/go back to the status quo of women staying in the home (ignoring the fact that working class women have always worked). On the other hand, there are young, conservative women who do work, who yearn for the pretend vision of white, upper-middle class 1950s, where they get to just stay home and do what they want all day.

TL; DR: They essentially want to be like children, worry-free in exchange for less freedom.

P.s., there are definitely plenty of conservative women too stupid or unwilling to admit to themselves that the conservative position is women as second class citizens, but I wanted to respond with the perspective I’ve heard from people who seemed to be more honest.