But you don’t call it “point four five caliber” you call it “forty five caliber”. Similar is 7.62 mm AKA “thirty caliber”. It’s reasonable that someone wouldn’t know that it’s literally just hundredths of inches.
Shotgun gauge is wonky, so it’s not a given that the number would just be a diameter in units they are familiar with. “Grains” are also a meaningless unit to most people.
The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between “a Wisconsin state senator” and “a senator from Wisconsin”.
Agreed. Jobs don’t go to the applicant with the highest GPA (or the most “skilled”), they go to whoever had an internship at their dad’s friend’s company (or friend’s dad’s company, etc.) each summer and got grades that were “good enough”. If you can get something like that, even if it’s not exactly in your area of interest, you don’t need to be too concerned about grades.
On the other hand, if you don’t have those connections, you need to be smart.
There are people who are able to get decent enough grades and get jobs on charisma alone, but they are a nightmare to work with cause you’ll always be picking up their slack (even if they are perfectly nice people that you enjoy being around).
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.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before those get banned, so i kinda want to get one, even though I dont really need one.
So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors
Don’t forget to also resent how much money sneakily goes to defense contractors (or other megacorps) by way of every other government office. It depends on the agency, but the majority of the federal workforce is not US government employees, it’s contractors, so taxpayer funds go to an army of middlemen before trickling down to the people doing the work. Taxpayers end up overpaying for labor, and the laborers make less money and with less job security than if that tax money just went directly to the worker.
healthcare, bicycle lanes, cheap and very good trains/metro/ferries/buses everywhere
Danish healthcare is cheaper than US healthcare, and bicycles/public transit are also cheaper than the car centric US transportation infrastructure. If the US adopted socialized healthcare and sane transit, we’d pay less taxes not more.
P.S. Does anyone know where I could get some metric-only measuring cups?
The key is to never use measuring cups, stick to the scale for everything. Using recipes made with mass is the best way to do it, but if you are trying to adapt a volume based recipe, look at the serving size on the food package; it should be given in volume and mass. For example my king arthur brand 00 pizza flour serving size is 1/4 cup (30 g).
Yeah, I think the problem is that the Chicago School is to economics what Freud is to psychology. Despite a century of progress since Freud, pop psych is still all based on him. The difference is that those in charge of policy don’t derive any benefit from applying Freud to mental health policy the way that they might derive a benefit from applying Friedman to economic policy.
Yeah, that’s true, but that’s not the only way to run experiments. “Natural experiments” where experimental conditions happen naturally can be exploited for scientific aims.
I think it should be treated similar to the medical field. They human body is super complex, and there’s competing mechanisms for all sorts of things. You could discover a mechanism by which a compound decreases blood pressure. There could be another mechanism by which the same compound increases blood pressure by a much larger amount. A lot of economists would just take that first mechanism as ground truth, and recommend giving the compound to a patient with high blood pressure.
I think in lieu of perfect information (which is always the case for economy and medicine), it’s best to just go for whatever is the least abstract benefit. The way I was taught macroeconomics (as a teen, I definitely don’t have a degree in it or anything), a minimum wage places an artificial limit on the total amount of labor that will be done, and therefore decreases GDP, and therefore everyone is worse off. That could be the case (I don’t think it is), but it’s very abstract, so it needs an overwhelming amount of evidence. Contrast that to the fact that a person cannot survive off of $2/hr, which is not an abstract conclusion, and you have good rationale for a minimum wage.
A lot of macroeconomics in particular seems to follow aristotlian thinking, i.e. you can just logic your way from step to step. It is interesting in that pure mathematics does work this way in that you can start with a bunch of axioms/definitions and combine them and work with them until you reach a conclusion without any need for experimentation. For example, you don’t need to measure a bunch of triangles to show that the Pythagorean theorem is true.
The way i was taught macroeconomics in school, it takes the mathematical approach of starting with a list of assumptions that seem to be true, and using mathematical logic to derive conclusions. The trouble is that: 1) many starting assumptions aren’t as true as you’d think, and 2) many of the “logical” steps also aren’t as logical as you’d think.
Supply and demand is an easy example. The classic idea is that as supply goes up, price goes down, and vice versa, while as price goes up, demand goes down. The existence of Veblen goods (i.e., things that people want because they are expensive) shows that the demand part isn’t right.
None of this would be a problem if it was just an intellectual exercise to help develop hypotheses for use with more sound scientific methods, but it’s used for policy directly.
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.
Diameter of pots is big, too. You get way more evaporation with a wider pot.
Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can’t ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.
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.
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.
My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:
The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.
I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.
Southern baptists were pro-choice until the rise of the “moral majority” required southern baptists to fall in line with the catholic church on abortion to create the supply side Jesus we know today.