i think the technocratic communist vs politics of the oppressed distinction works well enough for determining dating compatibility though

the wheat protein is in the burger bun (or your pasta/noodles, or the pie crust)

the problem with vegan meat substitutes is the vegans

why is Impossible Foods ground beef still the only product with heme? It's not just patent protection, because Motif Food Works has their own heme product. I talked to a yoga teacher and when I told her that Impossible burger had heme, the same substance that makes blood red, but made from genetically modified yeast, she told me she was never eating it again. We could have passable vegan bologna like immediately if Tofurkey added heme to their already good deli slices. But I suspect companies have to weigh the benefits against the cost of appearing unnatural or artificial.

On the Impossible Foods website they're advertising "13g total fat (compared to 23g)" and "6g saturated fat (compared to 9g)". Flavor, texture, and similarity to beef are being compromised for an appearance of being healthy. Saturated fat isn't even bad for you. If the customers weren't looking for a "healthier" alternative to beef, judged according to outdated nutrition science, then Impossible's product could be much more similar to ground beef. Like this is a deviation from ground beef on a fundamental culinary level and they advertise it like it's something to be proud of

How come Impossible burgers and Beyond burgers are all legume protein? Soy and pea, respectively. Everybody knows, and this actually turns out to be true, that if you combine legume protein and grain protein you get a complete protein. Legumes are lower in the sulfur-containing amino acids, whereas grain proteins are lower in branched-chain amino acids, and together they make up for each other's deficits. Like in Tofurkey, which is a combination of soy protein and wheat gluten. This also I'm told makes it easier to get a firmer texture. Tofurkey is an older product, predating the gluten-free trend, which is my guess about why the newer generations don't have gluten. So they're compromising on texture and protein quality, which is good for the small fraction of people with real gluten sensitivities, but I think it's really for the larger number of people who have been memed into avoiding gluten for no reason.

Your lungs can only exert maybe a 0.1 atm pressure difference in either direction against your surroundings. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001942/)

Humans need a pO2 of maybe 0.1 to 0.5 atm to survive indefinitely, but can withstand up to 3 atm temporarily (in clinical settings where they can quickly return the patient to normal oxygen levels if they start to exhibit oxygen toxicity). Above a couple of atmospheres of pressure, you can dilute the oxygen down below the natural 21%, though you have to switch from nitrogen to helium as the inert gas at some point. But you can't concentrate oxygen beyond 100%, which puts a limit on survival without a supply of pressurised air at 0.1 atm.

And to counteract that pressurised air, you need something on the outside of your chest pushing in. You can pressurise the air in a cabin, or an airtight suit, or you can design a suit so that the fabric itself exerts inward pressure on your body (mechanical counterpressure), with oxygen provided via a sealed mask.

Then there's the armstrong limit, which is the vapour pressure of water at body temperature, around 0.06 atm. Below this, bubbles of water vapour start to form in soft tissues, membranes and veins. Cardiac vapour lock can stop the heart, which would be a problem if there was any oxygenated blood to pump around.

Perhaps this is a stupid question but how does greater-than-atmospheric pressure differ from less-than-atmospheric pressure regarding both human bodies and the design of pressure vessels?

Like you can dive to >10m depth with a scuba, you don't need a pressure vessel for 2 or 3 atm, but in space at 0 atm you do need a pressurised suit. What's that about, why can we increase pressure easily but not decrease it?

And for ships with pressure vessels, does it work intuitively or are the two directions different? Does a submarine with a 300m operational depth (so 30 atm) actually have to be 30 times stronger than a spacecraft with its 1 atm pressure differential

yeah see this is my problem with DuckDuckGo

those are plimsoles them made us wear them (in plain black) inside at primary school so as not to track dirt inside.

this is pcbway and protolabs. you send them a cad file and 2-3 digits worth of money and get a custom part in the post a week or two later.

AWS but for robot factories

Bold new take: FPTP would have saved the Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic had a lot of problems besides its PR system. Not having a president who could effectively rule by decree would have helped more. The president also didn’t have to appoint the majority leader chancellor, and could fire the chancellor at any time. Also requiring constructive votes of no confidence. Collective cabinet responsibility (i e not being able to fire individual ministers by parliamentary vote).

Really the biggest problem was the fucked up semi-presidential system, since reactionary presidents unwilling to tolerate election results they disliked contributed strongly to a deadlocked political environment, well before Hitler came on the scene.

(Of course a lot of the problems of the Weimar era had nothing to do with its constitution—nobody thought the republic was really legitimate, they all hankered for a return of the monarchy or some flavor of socialism, and stuff like the war debt and the Depression fueled factionalism and extremism such that almost any political system would have struggled. But boy oh boy did the distribution of executive powers not help)

of course it's fucking french you can tell from the shape of the hammer

Roland Topor (French, 1938-1997)

I have one of those robot vacuums but there's a mirror in the house low enough to the ground that the lidar scanner can see a nonexistent room in the reflection so on the navigation map it's generated I have a room that doesn't exist that I have to forbid the vacuum from entering.

When there's a war on there's a war on.

But I think the idea behind the 'two state solution' is that Israel's peacetime interference in Palestinian affairs go far beyond what's considered acceptable under Westphalian norms.

They operate a blockade between Gaza and the rest of the Med, by threat and sometimes use of force. Blockade is generally considered an act of war.

Israel collects most of the tax in Palestine and sometimes withholds it. I don't fully understand the situation in the West Bank but Israel seems to perform most government functions there.

So when there's not a war it isn't fully peace, but an occupation. IDK if occupations have to be (at least aiming to be) temporary as a matter of international law, but it's clearly a norm that's in place. Japan and Germany got progressively less occupied and more independent until full sovereignty was given back to them in the 50s. Iraq was nominally only occupied for a year or so, and Afghanistan quickly had a non-Taliban government set up.

In contrast, the occupation of Palestine has gone on since 1967 with few signs of moving towards a resolution. So Palestine this time last year was not really in a state of peace, but of permanent one-sided war.

The two state solution is for Israel to stop doing all this and hand back full soverignty (over some area, possibly annexing other parts) to Palestine.

Maybe war will break out again, but there will be true peace when hostilities are not ongoing.

I don't really understand the idea of a two state solution for Palestine, especially when there's a war on, how would it even work? like what is it even calling for? is it basically a request for the US and other countries to forcibly disarm both sides? because I can't see any other interpretation of that "solution" that makes any sense at all.

by comparison a one state solution makes perfect sense, but almost nobody wants it, which is the entire problem here.

I think the secular christian rock is just the vibe he's been going for with his recent album. (this has made a lot of people very angry)

His older stuff puts the fact that he's the kwisatz haderach of jazz harmony much more front and center.

Feeling heterosexual domestic bliss in the car. Took the husband to the dollar store and watched him go wild touching all the products. Like the proverbial kid in the candy shop. Listening to the Financial Times’ Labor and Inequality correspondant review the new Taylor Swift album on their culture podcast.

The thing is, there's going to be horse-trading either way.

Unless you go full Switzerland, the best way to get the things you care about signed into law is going to involve compromising with other representatives on the things you don't care so strongly about.

Either you can have a bunch of small parties and the politicians do their dealings to form a coalition after the election, or you have a two party system and all the dealings happen before the election when the big-tent parties are having a leadership contest.

I think the former gives the voters the most meaningful influence over the terms of the dealings.

In a two-party contest between the partial bastards and total bastards, what are you going to do to incentivise nonbastadry, stick it to the partial bastards by letting the total bastards win? †

Honestly, I *don't* want to mix things with proportional representation. I see proportional representation as an excellent way of increasing the importance of dealings between politicians and reducing the incentive effects of the voters. But in my ideal world I'll need to negotiate with people who do like proportional representation, and this system is a compromise I could get behind. Plus you can plug and play any three different electoral systems for different compromises.

First past the post is a bad, undemocratic electoral system. First past the post privileges large parties by making small ones unviable, and distorts the composition of parliaments by wasting votes. It can be gerrymandered in a way proportional representation cannot be. It produces highly unrepresentative outcomes. It is a bad electoral system! All good voting systems are to some degree inclined to more proportional results.

I've never heard the accusation that PR "increases the importance of dealings between politicians," but look. I don't know how else to put this. That is a stupid objection. Just absolutely boneheaded. You haven't thought about this at all, I reckon.

People hate on "politicians" as a generic class, but it's like hating on lawyers as a generic class. You need politicians. You want politicians. You want people whose specialized job it is to read legislation, fight about what should go in it, represent your interests, and come to balanced compromises about those interests. People percieve politics as messy, venal, and corrupt, and it can be all those things, but guess what? The alternative to career politicians is part-time citizens who don't know what the fuck they're doing, have no expertise in the legislative process, and therefore are at the mercy of lobbyists who can walk them like a dog because they're naive and inexperienced.

There's this especially (but not exclusively) American pathology that is a suspicion of government that works too well. This peculiar notion that if only we sabotage government a little bit it will keep tyranny in check and make politicians more honest... somehow. But filling government with random yahoos doesn't get you a noble collegium of Tocquevillian citizen-lawmakers, it gets you a pack of Marjorie Taylor Greens and Lauren Boberts. You know--morons. Americans will support all these ballot initiatives that fuck up government on purpose, like term-limiting legislators and keeping their salaries low so only rich people can afford to go into politics (and even then are only willing to do it as a stepping stone to other gigs), and vote for people who promise to make government work even worse by cutting the budget and lowering taxes, and then have the absolute gall to whine about how badly the government works. My fellow Americans, you did that on purpose.

(And there's this weird paradox where Americans all loathe Congress. Who keeps voting these creeps in? Well. You do. Congresscritters are generally pretty highly approved of by their own constituents. The stereotype of lazy, stupid, venal politicians always seems to apply to the other guys.)

And you will also note that since the abolition of things that used to facilitate deals between politicians in the U.S. congress--since the abolition of earmarks and chummy socials between congressmen and the post--generally, since the post-Gingrich upheaval in the House--it has gotten harder to pass even necessary, basic legislation, because it is harder to make the basic compromises necessary to keep government functioning. Having three separate legislatures that each can claim a different sort of democratic mandate isn't a recipe for good legislation, it's a recipe for paralysis and constitutional crisis.

Winner!!!!

Happy to announce The Masquerade series by Seth Dickson has won the Sapphic Fantasy Book Tournament! I've been ill but will hopefully be starting our next tournament soon.

I think ideally you want a field near Oxyrrynchus in upper Egypt, where they worship the penis-eating elephantfish

So if you wrote some stuff down in a stone paper notebook using a waterproof ink and buried it in a field somewhere (say, minimally protected by a box or something), how many decades do you think such an artifact would survive and remain legible?

the contrabass saxophone is such an absurd instrument

oooooooohhh

What about human-wirtten fanfic of AI generated original fiction?

There are currently ~2300 works in AO3 tagged with "Created Using Generative AI"

I'll be upfront with my opinion, which mirrors my opinion in regards to my field: using AI will only hasten your own obsolescence. The point of fanfiction is not to crank out fics, but rather to enjoy the hobby and communities of writing and fandom.