• 2 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The line is complicated and blurry and changes for each person even. The only semi-consistent rule I can find, is that as soon as a company is involved and it becomes a “product”, it seems to get bad.

    That was my conclusion as well. I am not against science, I love science and industrial manufacturing, I was even willing to drink soylents! But even if you wave away the constantly changing food science health recommendations as normal churn of ever-improving scientific understanding, the interests of industrial food manufacturers are never aligned with my own. “We replaced butter with palm oil in our recipe because it is cheaper!” - well ok, good for you - “…AND it is also healthier for you! ;)” - I don’t believe it! I’ll check in back in another 50 years to see all the metastudies of the metastudies of palm oil consumption studies, but in the meantime the only rule of thumb that has survived every dietary recommendation change is to stick to whole foods.


  • You misunderstand the idea of cost per calorie. The expectation is that you start with something nutritionally-complete, like these soylents, the frozen rice+vegs+chicken dinners, or even the frozen apple pies (how ever nonconventional these may be), or if that is not possible then a combination of several foods in a ratio that makes them nutritionally complete, and then scale up to hit that 1500cals/day target. A single item or known ratio of items so I don’t have to think about this ever again. If I didn’t care about nutrition I’d just be chugging high fructose corn syrup (<$1/day) which you never saw me say. My daily meal ends up being rice and beans drenched in olive oil with some raw vegetables-of-the-day on the side, since I can’t afford the soylents.



  • I hate the amount of time it takes to cook and eat things every day. 😆 The microwavable frozen foods section would have been my first choice, there is usually enough selection to find something suitable, but the dollars-per-calorie cost is way too high, on order of $20-$30 per day. This pie is $15 and has enough calories for 2 days and takes zero work. Sugar and fat are already two of the three main ingredients I need. Also protein, but the wheat in the crust has some. Apples are a fruit, they have vitamins and shit. Looks good to me!


  • The authors do not note any conflicts of interest

    The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It’s like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the environment than electric cars written by an American.

    They themselves admit in the opening abstract that “Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil.” I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.

    Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It’s the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.




  • Democrats hate progressives. The two would be separate parties in a sensible democracy, but in the legacy first-past-the-post American system, splitting the party while Republicans exist is political suicide. There are more progressives than center Democrats, but they are not as united as the core establishment Democrats are, which made any one of them irrelevant in primaries up to now. RCV has given them a real chance for the first time. For example by giving Lander votes to Mamdani in the instant runoff. The moment RCV got implemented, long-serving Democrats started suddenly getting kicked out in the primaries. This terrifies them, so Democrats will continue to fight against RCV in the future. Just look how both Cuomo and Adams will try to commit political murder-suicide now by running as independent in the general just so that the “official Democratic party nominee” would not win.


  • It’s a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked “no vids for u” message, you’d get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being “buggy” and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no “smoking gun” blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

    The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.