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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • For a lot of these large scale, epidemiological findings, it’s important to remember that the effects are small enough that you pick them up on a population level over a lifetime. I’d say that if you can, find a way to properly vent your stove outside if you are doing some home improvement. If you are replacing your stove, consider induction instead, and in the meantime, having an air purifier is good. Opening a window is probably also good. Other than that, I wouldn’t be super alarmed. Obviously, if you have little kids or something, you might have a lower tolerance for potential pollution, but it’s good to think about these things in context. Alcohol causes cancer, but everyone still drinks.


  • I think the people who claim gas stoves are best likely grew up either not cooking much, or had a decent gas stove, so their first exposure to an electric stove was super cheap, crappy electric coil stoves in student housing, or wherever they first lived as a young adult. Then when they were able to afford better, they got a better gas stove.

    I have a really crappy gas stove, and it makes me yearn for the cheap electric coil stoves of my youth.

    People say that gas stoves are more powerful and responsive, when the truth is that more powerful stoves are more powerful, and “responsiveness” is a fake concern. My crappy gas stove takes forever to get a pot of water boiling, especially compared to coil stoves. Yeah, you can turn a gas stove to 100% quickly, but that’s only better if it can put out more power. It won’t heat up any faster than an electric stove if the electric stove takes double the time, but also has double the power. There’s also not many cases where “time to maximum heat” is what you care about, I can’t think of any.

    Responsiveness the other way (hot to cool) doesn’t matter when you have a high thermal mass in the pan (or the pan itself has high mass), it only matters when the pan and contents are light, in which case, you just take the pan off the heat.






  • Yeah, a coleman (or equivalent) 2 burner camp stove combined with the adapter to use a full size propane tank is super handy. Combine it with a cast iron griddle, and you can functionally replicate a Blackstone for much much cheaper. It’s also way better for high heat cooking if you don’t have a good stove fan that actually vents outside.

    Also, sometimes when power goes out, gas does too (it’s still a grid that can fail).


  • Its my understanding that in Spanish, “American” refers to anyone from the Americas. In some languages/countries, the Americas are taught as 1 continent (Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and America), so a person from any country in the Americas would be called “American”.

    In most English speaking countries, we are taught that there are 7 continents, and north and south America are separate continents. In that context, you wouldn’t really use a term to refer to people from both continents. It’s similar to how, as a spaniard, I could not call you “eurasian”, i would just say “european”. In English, you would then have to refer to people as either “north american” or “south american”.

    In practice, we do refer to people from south America as “south american”, but north america usually gets divided into “central american” and “caribbean”, which only leaves the US, Canada, and Mexico.

    People from Mexico and Canada have obvious demonyms, while the USA does not. “Gringo” also applies to Canadians (and it’s specifically referring to non-spanish speaking european americans), so it doesn’t really work as a demonym. “Yankee” doesn’t really work, either, because it only applies to a subset of people from the US, so it’s similar to calling everyone from Great Britain “English”.

    I haven’t met any primarily English speaking residents of the americas with any problem with people from the US being called “american”.








  • For fitness:

    The absolute “best exercise” for someone to do is whatever they find enjoyable/fun, baring some sports, etc, that are harmful to your joints and/or brain (like American football). Fitness is about long term, sustainable effort. Some strict program that follows all the best science isn’t going to help you in the long term if you don’t stay consistent with it.

    As long as you are either creating forceful muscle exertions or getting your heart rate up (preferably both), and it’s an activity you can stick with, you are good to go.

    It’s similar with diet. Whatever you can consistently do to hit reasonable macros, with a nice bit of fiber and minimal junk, go for it. People might tell you that it’s better to get 100% of your protein from meals rather than having protein shakes, but for a lot of people, going without that protein shake will just end up with them undershooting their protein needs.


  • At the end of the day, most of what people care about isn’t age, it’s cognitive function (though age itself is important; why care about the America of 2040 if you won’t live to see it).

    Many of these people in power would fight age limits, but they are usually so sure of their abilities, that they may not fight cognitive tests with published results.

    For example, if you give someone a Montreal cognitive assessment, and their reaction to it is:

    Yes, the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions

    And those last 5 questions are:

    What month are we in? What year are we in? What day of the week is it? Where are you right now? What city are you in?

    You might think that person shouldn’t be in charge of the country.

    Oops.


  • In addition to what others said about the availability of the source code itself, there’s a whole legal framework around it.

    A company could have code where the source is publicly available, but they still could say that you are not allowed to copy, fork, sell/distribute it. In that case, there wouldn’t physically be anything preventing you from doing it, which sounds strange, until you think about how that’s the exactly how it works for books, music, movies, etc.

    There’s also an in-between for software that’s not publicly open source, but is open source to users. A company could sell you their software, and deliver it to you as open source code.