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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The problem is that French food in the Anglosphere has literally been the fancy food since 1066. That’s why English has 2 words for every meat: the germanic peasant word and the french nobleman’s culinary word (cow-beef, chicken-poultry, deer-venison, sheep-mutton, swine-pork, etc).

    Being the default “fancy” food is going to do damage to any cuisine as the purpose becomes more about fanciness than tasting good or being what people from the place actually eat.

    For another example, look at American Italian food. In a lot of small towns, Italian restaurants are the de facto fancy restaurant . It’s basically made it so that Italian restaurants in much of the US are either way too expensive and fancy or they’ve gone the opposite route and just overcharge for really basic pasta with sauce (olive garden).


  • If you don’t like truffle oil, you probably just don’t like truffle, and that’s fine. Like the other commenter said, it’s literally just the same compound that’s been synthesized.

    2,4-Dithiapentane

    Real truffles obviously have some other flavoring compounds in there, but like vanilla vs vanilin, you’d probably have a hard time distinguishing between them in a dish in a blind taste test.

    I have eaten shaved truffles, and even that’s really a gamble. The problem is that they aren’t really good until they are “ripe”, but once you dig them up, i don’t think they ripen any more. There’s also a big counterfeit problem since many species look similar. I’ve had good truffles, and I’ve had truffles that literally just taste like nothing.





  • Seconding cooking for sure. You have to eat, so you might as well find a way to enjoy it, save money, and stay healthy in the process.

    Repairing things. Electronics, clothes, furniture, it doesn’t matter what, but try to learn how to repair stuff. It eventually encourages you to buy less, but higher quality items. Also everyone likes if you fix their favorite thing.

    Organizing people. This isnt often treated as a skill, but it really is. You’ll find over time that in your group of friends, someone is always the person to try to put together the next activity. Try to be that person. That’s super useful in all parts of life. Keep in mind that people will end up being lazy and expecting you to keep doing the work, but try not to take it personally.




  • Anyone replying “stretching” is basing their response on grade school gym class, not science.

    Studies have not shown that stretching has a positive impact on injury prevention, and this has been widely known in the literature for over 20 years. Stretching can improve performance in some sports like gymnastics where increased flexibility is needed, but that is unrelated to injury.

    Stretching has a negative effect on performance in other cases because it actually decreases muscle force generation.

    Think about it, would you think that loosening all the belts on a machine would automatically make it less likely to break down?

    So what does prevent injury?

    • Good warm-ups. Walk before you jog before you run. Lift an unloaded barbell before a loaded one, etc.
    • Strength. A joint surrounded by muscle is a stable joint. That means doing exercises that strengthen all the muscles, including minor ones. It’s part of why most people who know what they are talking about will try to get you to do compound lifts with free weights over single joint exercises on machines.
    • periodization/progressive overload. Basically slowly building intensity and then backing off to recuperate.






  • Great comment, and I’ll add that police, by the nature of their jobs, have to deal with a lot of things that people would (and should) find traumatic: grisly accidents, homicides, overdoses, etc. Obviously, EMTs have to deal with that kind of thing, too, but at least they usually have a partner they can talk to. Despite TV always doing the buddy cop thing, cops usually work alone.

    Everyone knows it’s a problem, but the main solution has been absolutely shoveling money at grifters like Dave Grossman to give seminars and write books on “killology” (wish I was making that up). The guy’s highest level of schooling is a masters in education in counseling, but he disguises that to try to make you think he’s a proper psychologist or psychiatrist. Once you know his hypotheses, which are pulled out of thin air and unsupported by data, you see them absolutely everywhere steeped into the culture of cops and military in the US.



  • I never understood audible. You pay $15 a month to be able to listen to 1 book per month?

    Shout out to librivox, if you haven’t heard of it. It’s audiobooks recorded by volunteers reading public domain books. Obviously hit or miss on the quality of the reader, but it’s free, so you can’t complain.

    Also, obviously, the humble local library and libby. (P.s., if you can get a few cards to different library systems, it’s really easy to get books).