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What’s a point that you think many people missed?
The point can be a common phrase or lesson, the message of a work of media, something directly stated, etc.
It doesn’t have to be “universal” and can be a story from your life/school/workplace where, say, a lot of people missed the point of a meeting or directive or whatnot.
Whatever its source and impact, it’s something where you think that a lot of people really missed the point and went with a different and more incorrect understanding/interpretation.
What point did people miss? Why do you think they missed it? And why do you think your interpretation is the more correct one?
Caring about personal privacy should be important to everyone, even if you think you "have nothing to hide."
The point of protecting and maintaining privacy is not just to hide your own criminal/embarrassing actions, it's about protecting yourself from the potential actions of others in power who might abuse and weaponize their access to your information against you.
I often feel like trying to explain this to a lot of people (across the whole spectrum of tech-savviness) is like talking to a brick wall.
Ugh, I literally just got an email just a few days ago letting me know that my healthcare provider just settled a class action lawsuit because they were selling data to marketing companies. It’s simply disgusting.
I have a very glib example, top of mind, but this is how I tend to explain it:
Say that tomorrow they decide to ban all users of your preferred brand of phone, run them out of the country or worse. They've forced that phone maker to turn over all data related to who uses that brand of phone, and every identifying piece of information on their customers that they have. Yesterday, before the ban, you had nothing to hide. Today, you do. All that changed was who had your data. Oh, you were clever enough to hide your real information from them? You bought it through a third party? It was a gift to you? You just have it because your job made you have it? Guess you had something to hide after all.
That's a truncated version of the argument I make. Does it work? No. People tend to misunderstand marginalization and victimization, and tend to focus on how they can "beat" the scenario. Just like any victim would do in real life. "No, no, you see I'm not part of the victim class, because my case is special..."
It still doesn't work, but I do it anyway.
That reminds me of when I stopped using Facebook. There was some kind of app that connected with Facebook and allowed women to freely denigrated their previous sex partners. I found that outreagous from a privacy standpoint and announced my departure. I was then met with a torrent of snark because apparently privacy was an excuse and I was a pig with lots to hide. It's been years and I'm angry just remembering it.
Whenever I see something like this happen, I'm reminded of mob mentality, and how during riots people just get targeted. The internet let's us form these mobs that never die down. People who don't know better just sink right in and stay in mob mentality, eager to attack whoever they can.
Let us also remember that "No one is immune to social engineering" so the lack of knowledge is also prayed upon by the platforms.
I think the easiest example that most people will be directly familiar with are social media companies. They were built on harvesting personal information, and we've seen what they chose to build with it. Endless addiction machines, doom scrolling, the death of nuance, and the erosion of the social fabric. All in pursuit of extracting every last bit of value they can from their users. If there's more money to be made in your misery than your happiness, companies like Facebook have chosen to do so and will choose to again. If wealthy groups want to target the vulnerable, social media companies will happily serve as the middlemen so long as they get their cut.
In short, anyone who's unhappy with the state of social media, whether its direct effects or the indirect ones, have a vested interest in privacy.
I would say that it's even about much more important things.
To me it is about upholding the moral value of honesty (and things I derive from that). If you can't lie (hide, deceive, omit, etc), you can't be honest (open, including, etc) either. If you can't chose to lie you can't in any meaningful way be honest, sure you can still say true or false statements but that is not the same.
This isn't necessarily inaccurate, it's true that honesty is only a virtue because you have the chance to be dishonest, but in general I don't find "we should embrace a bad thing because it gives people a chance to overcome it" a compelling argument, personally. We don't tolerate trials because they're necessary evils to give people a chance to be jurors, we have trials because they themselves are useful, and the ability to be a juror is a new service that happens to arise from this. Similarly, I don't tolerate privacy because it's a necessary evil to give people a chance to be honest, I value privacy because imo it itself is good, and the ability to be honest is a new virtue that happens to arise from it.
Well, while
Is an effect of what I said, but while something about how you phrase it makes me a little uncomfortable, I will have to stand by point: if you want the positive you have to keep the negative and maybe it is as you say that the positive becomes a positive because it requires you to overcome the negative. (This feels like a very abrahimistic perspective, that I just don't share.)
But maybe that's why my gut reacts: I think the natural thing is honesty but sometimes you need to be able to be dishonest until you have calculated that it's safe to do or say something in a specific context, or at least safe enough to try it.
I must admit that I don't understand the bit about trials and jurors. I don't live in a country with jury-trials so I have most likely misunderstood the reasoning behind (and also obviously the actual effects of) jury-trials, but it is my understanding that the stated reason is to crowd-source a gut that can never be formalised. Maybe you refer to judges and not juries?
I'm thinking about the child that hides cookies or is learning to curse, and how that, in my opinion, is a very basic human need and if children can't hide cookies we will eventually not be human anymore.
I agree with this. What I'm trying to say is that I don't believe the ability to be dishonest (or simply private) is valuable because it makes the chance for honesty, I believe that ability is valuable because there are circumstances where it's important on its own merits. Honesty then contextually gains value, but granting that value is not the goal and does not itself justify anything, it's just a natural consequence of the situation being what it is, imo.
Replacing juries with judges also works, the specific details of the situation aren't the important part. I was just trying to use it as an analogy about what I see as the order of cause and effect. "Yes, [X good thing] is valuable because of [Y situation], but that doesn't mean [Y situation] is valuable because it produces the circumstances to allow [X good thing]; [Y situation] is valuable in its own right, and [X good thing] is a new opportunity which happens to come from that."
I've been trying to wrap my head around this for a day and I'm sorry to say (for me, I'm sorry for me) that I just don't understand. I would like to understand.
I feel that I just repeat myself since I can't neither express myself differently nor understand what you are saying.
My point is that privacy & openness or honesty & dishonesty can only exist if the other exists. Like light & dark. So if you take away one the other vanishes.
I suspect this way of thinking is called something, but I don't know.
You seem to think that they are not "paired" but exist by themselves, is this correct?
Maybe you could try and give another example of what you mean that shows how privacy, secrecy, dishonesty, lying, or similar can exist without the concept of honesty, openness or similar.
I'm not trying to say that they exist separately, one definitely relies on the other. All I'm saying that when I think of why I value privacy, creating room for honesty is not part of the equation—I value privacy on its own, the fact of it creating room for honesty is just a natural neutral side effect to me.
I’ve had good luck convincing people by pointing out that even if you trust the government and companies now, do you trust them ten years from now? Twenty? That data doesn’t just disappear because someone else is in charge.
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I don't really know where this idiom originated but it boils my blood anytime I hear it. It's one thing to be able to do something. It takes an entirely different skill set in addition to knowing a topic to actually be able to teach it. Teaching is the easiest job in the world to be terrible at.
I have a different perspective on this quote. I’ve found that people who, at some point, could not, made much better teachers than those who always could. The most talented in a field are rarely effective teachers since they never struggled to learn. While the skillsets are different, I don’t think they are orthogonal, since the experience from struggling to learn material often serves a teacher down the line. I still believe that if one wants to train to teach, they can develop those skills separately.
I also know this isn’t the original intention of the quote, but it’s unclear what the original intention was. From Shaw’s play Man and Superman, it may have been a satirical subversion of Aristotle’s “Those who understand, teach.” written for a one-off gag, or written as a line to illustrate the egotistical character of the protagonist. It could also simply represent the actual perspective of the playwright. I’d have to read the actual play to know, but I do think he didn’t intend for that quote to be spread so widely today.
I think many of us have had that one genius math or engineering professor who had never once struggled with these simple and basic concepts themselves, and thus they're unable to teach it beyond just writing the proof and underlining it three times in exasperation.
So, while I also dislike the original saying, i would like to offer, "those who couldn't but now can, can teach."
That lines up with my experience. I briefly majored in English education since I'm a pretty good writer, but quickly realized I'm not cut out for it because it's all intuitive to me at this point. I can't tell you when a semicolon is appropriate or not, I just know. Back in high school when dissecting story structure, I also remember struggling to explain why a fight scene early in one classmate's story wasn't the main "conflict"... And also because our teacher (who, to be fair, had been pulled from admin into teaching our class and probably didn't specialize in English) also reached that conclusion.
Other aspects of writing I learned through experience, so I have no baseline for what people would need to be taught at... Any level, really. Recently I watched a couple videos with writing advice relating to plot structure, and I'd figured out a lot of it myself long ago. Nowadays it seems so obvious to me that it wouldn't occur to me to mention those things if someone explicitly asked me for advice.
In a similar vein, I have given up explaining many aspects of technology to my mom. I'm not an expert by any means, but there are things that just click intuitively to me (i.e. why our TVs weren't 100% perfectly synced back when we had cable), and I lack the language to explain it. There's not even any mental dialogue I could try to use like, "Oh, it's because [reason]." If I had learned about it in a class, I could at least try to repeat what I was told, but I just have my brain saying, "Yep, makes perfect sense that it works that way."
Coincidentally I ended up accidentally teaching a math-heavy course when I am famously poor at mental math. My lack of skill at it made me think that I would be a terrible teacher, but surprisingly my students are all getting it fairly easily. Being able to teach the different methods of solving problems is key, it turns out, and sucking at mental math means that I know many of those methods.
You see this a lot in professional sports. Sometimes some of the most successful managers in the sport used to be a player, but they were very "bad" from a professional standpoint.
To be a good teacher is to be the machine that builds the machine. And that is much harder.
I think the harsh reality is that in most fields the best people get sucked into doing because that pays much more. It really shouldn't be that way. We will do better as a society if the incentives are reversed.
In my experience, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, sell real estate."
Or cars
I like this. That said, I see those who think that real estate is an easy path to glory burn out fast, too. All of that fakeness has to be so taxing.
I'm one of the people who has the instinct for how to teach. It is infuriating the amount of times I've stepped to the side to let someone more experienced than me take the wheel in training only to garble the ever living hell out of the material and leave the poor trainee completely confused. Then I have to come in later and validate their frustration and help them out. I thankfully work somewhere better now, but every other job i've had has done nothing but turn my hair grey at the incompetence from the most experienced people torching the newcomers.
Side note: Please validate a confused trainee's frustrations, guys. (rant incoming)
I get not wanting to get in trouble from someone finding out you said they taught it wrong, but it's better the leaving a trainee feeling like they're an idiot. Trainees are always vulnerable because they've opened up to not knowing anything, so when they've been left confused and downtrodden it only makes it worse when you pretend nothing went wrong. That creates the atmosphere that they can't ask anything additional, and once that happens you're both screwed.
This one also irks me... probably because I'm a math prof at a teaching focused institution. Before I found my current gig I worked at two universities where research pressure was the main thing. I wasn't a bad researcher, in that I was very effective at solving the problems I found interesting, but I was a pretty bad researcher in the sense that I only found a really narrow set of problems sufficiently interesting for that level of investment.
I love teaching and agree with everyone here saying that the teaching skillset is different from the doing skillset. The original idiom is straight up wrong, and many suggested by y'all are more reasonable.
I'd like to add to this discussion, though, the idea "those who cannot do, ought not teach". Where I work, due to the low research expectations, attracts some folks who genuinely "can't do", and boy howdy are they it great at teaching either. When I'm on screening committees, I am primarily interested in two things: technical skillset and social skills (specifically empathy, but also other communication stuff). If you have those, then good teaching is possible. You still have to want to teach well, but in our environment the skillset is still most important, and surprisingly often it's insufficient even in well-credentialed applicants.
May I ask what point you think people are missing?
I've always understood the point being to discredit having teachers in a "soft", you have to have it, field like acting or painting.
It is not about the teachiness but about de doiness as a way to both elevate the actor or painter as a naturally gifted person and the teacher as a failed wannabe.
I'm not saying it is correct, but it is the only way I have heard it used, so I dont understand what other point you think people are trying to make.
Ah, but now I see! Maybe, you are arguing that people who use the phrase don't realise that teaching is hard and a separate skill in itself. So, it's not so much that people have misunderstood or misuse the phrase but that the phrase just doesn't make sense.
I've always interpreted that as an age or mobility thing, like an ex-athlete transitioning to coaching little league after his knees go out or something. My dad worked in his field for 30 years and eventually lost his medical clearance for it, so now he's an instructor for new trainees in the same field.
Tax brackets and progressive tax systems in general.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "yeah I'd earn more if I took that position, but it'd bump me into a higher tax bracket and then I'd be worse off anyway".
That's literally not possible. Tax brackets tax your income earned above that threshold, not all of your income.
There's no way to earn more money, but take home less of it because of income tax, all other things equal.
Similar thoughts to "tax write-offs", which many people think somehow means the government pays you for the entire value of the thing you're writing off.
It's crazy how financially illiterate people are.
And charitable deductions. I often read and hear people say that wealthy people donate to avoid taxes. They're certainly donating because they believe in the cause or out of vanity (or likely some combination of both), but they're absolutely not getting ahead financially through philanthropy.
I think the process I've heard about is buying something with an appraised value, like art, getting it appraised at a higher price, and then donating it. Art can fluctuate in appraised value dramatically making it possible to cost effectively buy and donate to come out ahead.
this is just fraud, at least in the US the IRS have their own team of people who independently assess art values to prevent this
Apart from this just being fraud, as @saturnV said, it also wouldn't work very well. Respectfully, this is one of the rumors come up with by people who don't really understand how taxes work. If I donate $5M, it doesn't mean that I have to pay 5M less in taxes. It means my taxable income is lowered by 5M. And the IRS limits how much you can reduce your taxes to a certain percentage of your income, so you can't even reduce your taxable income to zero via charitable contributions. (For a property donation like this, you could only lower your taxable income by a maximum of 30%).
So in the art fraud scenario, you'd have to spend money to buy something, do fraud to get it appraised higher, donate it (and what charity is accepting high-value sculptures or whatever??), and then all you've done is spend money and commit super obvious fraud to lower your taxable income by a certain amount. It just doesn't make sense.
The only time this can be a realistic concern is if you have some sort of assistance program. Some of the cutoffs for those programs are extremely binary rather than in brackets. You wouldn’t lose money because of your taxes, but you might lose your assistance which results in an overall net loss.
The problem in the US with taxes is the 1% and such cannot be taxed, because they do not "make" money. Reminds me of when my literature teacher (which I was going to say "lit teacher", but that's a completely different idea these days haha) explained how many "pounds per year" were derived from bank interest in the Jane Austen books.
In the US, William Buffet isn't taking home all those pounds per year, but he's still got the financial backing to do whatever he wants. And most (if not all?) of his employees pay more taxes than he does.
So, tax the rich all you want, but the real rich ain't paying shit. I finally got to a tax bracket where donations lessen my taxes... which is pure crap, because I'd love to donate because I am able, not because I get more of my money back at the end of the year.
Respectfully, this is a misunderstanding of how taxes work. Here's a propublica investigation of the hyperwealthy. It is very critical, and even so concedes that they pay millions (sometimes billions) in taxes. The issue isn't that they don't pay tax, it's that the growth in their wealth on paper outpaces how much tax they pay, so their effective tax rate is extremely low. That sucks, but it's also a really hard problem to solve. Elon Musk's net worth comes from the amount of Tesla stock he owns, right? It's not cash he can go spend or whatever. So often he (and others) have massive increases in their paper wealth but it's not real money until the options are exercised. And when he sells the stock, he does get taxed. He paid $11 billion in 2024.
So in raw numbers, the ultra wealthy pay more taxes than anyone else. The issue is that as a percentage of their wealth, it's quite small. I know this sounds nitpicky but it's important to understand what the issues are and what they aren't!
No one is immune to social engineering. And it's not just scams and security. Marketing, algorithms and bias framing is all around us. Most people are too fatigued and overwhelmed to critically filter everything.
Something important to keep in mind is false equivalencies, especially in advertising.
Cheap is not always economical. Fast is not always efficient. Easy is not always simple. Impressive is not always useful. Likely is not ever guaranteed. Possible is not always ready. Popular is not always good. Newer/bigger/expensive is not always better.
There's so many times I've had someone intentionally twist their words to affect peoples judgement while covering their own ass.
Some examples comes into mind:
The boots theory : cheap boots doesn't last as long as more expensive one, so in long term you spend more buying several cheap pairs when you would have bought only one expensive one.
Swiss trains don't go as fast as they theorically could (for instance in the alpine tunnels are built for 250 km/h but the trains go at 200 km/h) . That's because its used as a buffer against delay. If for some reason a train departs late from a station, it can go faster to compensate. (there's other reason, such as the network design goal, and also just plain physics).
I don't know where this quote originates from, but I've heard people say "invest good money in things that are between you and the ground - shoes, chair and bed"
The boots theory is a quote from the character Sam Vimes in a discworld book by Terry Pratchett.
It's about how poor people can't afford to buy boots that will last. Rich people pay a lot more per pair of boots but over a lifetime poor people spend more on boots for a worse experience.
Im on mobile or I would include the exact quote.
Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, from Men at Arms:
Copied from https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/.
Add tires to that list.
And ladders
That’s a very salt-of-the-earth depression era kind of saying, but in the modern era, I’d include something that may be controversial: smartphones. They are the boot to the earth that is the internet, something that we all have to interface with these days.
To counter this just a little, imo not everyone needs go spend flagship money on a smartphone. Most people would be better off taking an honest look at what they use their phone for and buying the cheapest phone that fulfills those needs. I think a lot of people could save a lot of money by scaling back how much they dump into the latest and greatest that they are not actually using.
To add some context, I am a big tech guy, so I have a fancy flagship smartphone..... thats old by current standards. I havent seen much in newer phones thats actually useful but doesnt cost obscene amounts to get me to upgrade.
I see lots of people in my life upgrade on the regular cadence set by their phone contract (1-2 years) and then use their phone for stuff their old phone did just as well. People are free to spend their money however they want, but as stated above, I think many people would be better off saving the money if they dont need the hardware.
I'll disagree a bit with this one. I generally aim for about $200 budget phones, buy them out-of-pocket, and usually get a good four years out of each. I've probably cumulatively spent less on them than a single flagship phone would cost. And at the same time, they work just as well for me for making calls, sending and receiving text, and doing some light browsing with Firefox. And there's a certain peace-of-mind from viewing them as almost disposable - if I accidentally break it or have a problem, it just means its time for the next upgrade since it wouldn't cost much more than a repair.
(That said, much of my computing and internet use is on a custom high-end gaming/software development desktop, and that's a device that I did invest good money in. I much prefer typing a comment like this out on a nice mechanical keyboard to tapping at a tiny screen.)
As someone with a Pixel 7 Pro, I can’t say the expensive flagships are any more long lasting than midrange phones like the Pixel 3a it replaced. It’s actually on track to last slightly less as the charging port is failing
I recall seeing it first on reddit in a comment. The poster attributed it to their father. This was at least a decade ago.
I can’t speak for boots in particular but the price-quality link has been degrading for the last few decades and it seems there’s no way it will slow down, let alone reverse. This is especially true when it comes to clothing and accessories. It’s not too hard to find $200 articles of clothing at high end stores that are made entirely of synthetic fibers - plastic, basically. Even quality sewing techniques are becoming more rare. Shoes are harder for me to judge because I try to buy as few as possible but the last time I went I noticed that it’s basically impossible to get the quality of shoe I got for $50 a decade ago even at $80, and outsoles are generally made with much less dense materials than they used to be. A particularly weird cost cutting measure I have seen is that a lot of stores seem to have fewer slip-proof options, a feature that should be near-universal.
There has been a lot of discourse on this around the new Devil Wears Prada sequel - same high-end fashion brands as the original movie, but even from the trailer you can see the decline in quality.
I've noticed that a lot of people seem to think that marketing is just like 'I see a commercial for coke and then suddenly I want a coke'. Which like, yeah, I'm sure that's the case with some things, especially when it's something you could easily get/order right then and there like an online product, or maybe a fast food restaurant. But there's a shit ton more advertising that's more about brand recognition.
Like most car companies don't expect you to drop what you're doing and go to your nearest dealership to purchase a car after seeing their commercial. But the next time you're in the market for a car, you'll be much more likely to purchase one that you have good feelings towards. And those good feelings came to reside inside you partially through those advertisements. They're just trying to get you to A) remember their product/brand, and B) associate it with a specific term that you might value, such as practical, or affordable, or luxury, or whatever they're going for.
I noticed the brand recognition issue when I was a little kid and I was trying to figure out why McDonald's had commercials with a clown and strange costumed characters and sometimes didn't even mention food.
It seems like false equivalencies are effectively universal in advertising. The one that bothers me the most right now are these ads saying “the more you spend the more you save.” It’s a fundamentally false statement. If you are spending more you are doing the opposite of saving.
So I know how this sounds but, as someone on the autism spectrum I really do think I'm immune to most marketing, algorithms, and bias framing, because I am CONSTANTLY seeing and noticing those kinds of things and factoring them into my perception of reality.
I just don't naturally form opinions or thoughts blindly based on anything, there's always thought that goes into every thought and decision I make, and it doesn't take any effort whatsoever to critically filter anything. It's just a sense I have like situational awareness, and it comes as naturally as just basic thought and processing.
I guess it's my pattern recognition but I'm able to notice differences in my algorithms, and because of that I've opted to have a lot of control over those algorithms and to disrupt those algorithms as much as possible for myself.
And I deliberately expose myself to alternative biases on a regular basis to form complete opinions on things. The opinions I have are entirely my own and are not based on a group of people I identify with or people I agree with, in fact I am often disagreeing with them about a lot of things as well.
I have always been interested in HOW things work, so it's also allowed me to immediately sniff out bullshit in the form of marketing and propaganda. Like around COVID I was able to sidestep a lot of misinformation and stuff because I already knew how viruses worked, how vaccines work, how the immune system works, and about the properties of masks.
Even when it comes down to marketing and brand recognition, I don't use any of those to factor into my opinion at all, if I am looking for a product I do intensive research into the product and basically ignore the marketing. I look for actual people reviews, I am aware if the person is getting paid to review, I am aware that sometimes people leave horrible reviews when they feel slighted or disappointed.
Recent examples is that I was trying to find "cooling" sheets because I run hot at night, but most sheets define "cooling" as "breathable" or "moisture wicking" but also ignore the fact that if you use a comforter or blanket that's not breathable it negates the "breathable" claim and if you're sweating enough for "moisture wicking" to be relevant that it's not actually cooling. Real cooling is about heat dissipation and heat retention in the fabric, which will work no matter if you have a comforter or blanket on.
Another example was I was looking for some scents to throw into my laundry to make my clothes and sheets smell a bit nicer. I got really frustrated because not a single laundry scent additive explained what it actually smelled like. They all said stuff like "Tropical" which smelled "Fresh" and "Sunny". WTF does "Sunny" smell like? Or what does "Lush" or "Clean" smell like?
I'm not saying any of this to toot my own horn, but it's definitely been eye opening realizing how many people blindly form opinions on things without really knowing why. All of my thoughts and reasoning have been openly clear to me. I don't form opinions then justify them like a lot of people seem to do.
I remember getting into arguments with my grandmother when I was a kid where we'd watch a movie and I'd ask her why she didn't like it, and she just had no answers, it was just "I didn't like it, why do I need to have a reason," and that literally never made sense to me, but now I understand she just kind of blindly reacted on emotion. Which was incomprehensible to me at the time.
The point of sous vide cooking isn't magic fancy gorumet food, it's to remove the high skill and experience barrier and replace it with exact scientific easy reproducibility so anyone can nail it first try. All those times learning a recipe from Gram Grams who judged doneness by humidity and barometric reading plus season of ingredients and hardness of water etc, who adjust things on the fly by feel and eyeballing, remove all that and just set beepy water fan to X for Y time, done.
Not that Tildes folks aren't aware, I'm sure.
Excluding recipes that rely on ultra low temp pasteurization, that is pretty magical.
The other advantage is that you can leave bag in the hot water for a while after it's done, before you have to worry about texture going too soft: sort of like restaurant heat lamp / tray that stays moist.
I use mine when I'm making a multipart complicated dinner because I don't have the skills to time everything on multiple burners right. Or when I want to start a part of dinner hours before while at work or overnight. It's usually not useful once I've learned to do it on regular heat fast, if I only have a few items to time correctly.
A restaurant might use it to keep many portions of popular items hot and ready for the next step, to cut down the skillfully finishing and plating part. It's how they can also sear and serve well done steak that's not jerky charcoal. But there's a lot of skillful magic that's happening after the wet, gray coloured food comes out of the bag: sitting in hot broth doesn't make food taste complex or look pretty.
You're right, but I'd add that you don't want to take that thinking too far and start assuming it necessarily cheapens or worsens the outcome.
It's like a lot of tools: you can use it to do a tedious job you'd otherwise have to do manually or just not bother with (even in a world of unlimited staffing budgets I don't think a lot of chefs would be lining up to stand around all shift watching thermometers on a bunch of pots and taking them on and off the heat to keep them steady for hours), you can use it to do something with better precision than you could realistically do manually (good luck targeting a reaction that needs to be held at 73C +/-0.5C for eight hours without a tool of some kind), you can use it to make a difficult manual job easier and more consistent (you can temper chocolate without one, but you'll never get a better result and you'll often get a worse one), or you can use it to make a job easier at the expense of a not-so-good result.
If it's expanding the repertoire, or cutting costs by simplifying things at equal or better quality, you actively want the restaurants to be using it for those things! The tricky bit comes when they start overusing it and the cost cutting comes at the expense of the final product.
Totally get what you mean. Honestly I think having a French name probably accounts for a lot of the fancy gourmet vibes. French-sounding cooking terms and words in English tend to be fancier as a whole, possibly even snobbish or posh. So I think it's natural that 'sous vide' sounds gourmet. If it was called something like 'bath soak cooking' it probably wouldn't have the same connotations, lol.
Sous vide is a natural extension of the written recipe: a way to take out the guesswork and learning by heart that made cooking basically magic for countless generations. But a lot of people still seem to have this magical thinking notion that cooking is not a skill that you learn, but rather is an inborn talent that some have and some don’t. Hogwash, of course, but pervasive.
People also greatly mistrust and misunderstand microwaves much the same way. As long as you understand what a microwave does and what it’s best suited for, it’s an essential kitchen gadget you will turn to time and time again; there’s a reason Chef Mike is in pretty much every kitchen ever.
My family is still convinced microwave re-heated food does something bad to it. (Edited typo)
My copy of Modernist Cuisine At Home has a very good microwave tilapia recipe. It's a good tool, but yes you're right that the chef needs to understand how it works to use it properly
My in laws do not have a microwave for similar reasons and that it'd be better to use a toaster oven, or reheat the dish on the stove.
My American contribution to my kitchen after moving was insisting I have a microwave (not that my wife needed convincing since she enjoyed having one in the US, but since family opinion is a big thing here I got a head of the ball saying I was buying one). I'm lazy and will take any American jokes or exasperation to be able to quickly heat up my food or easily melt butter on low temp settings in a coffee mug so I can wake up early and auto pilot pancakes for my kids before I've had my morning coffee.
Odd but funny microwave story: my in-laws store their bread in the microwave because "it keeps it fresh." In reality it doesn't, but it does save room elsewhere in the kitchen. Maybe that's where it started?
Maybe they thought keeping their bread in the microwave would function like keeping it in a bread box? I'd imagine a microwave wouldn't work as well as one though.
My father was always on about "exploding water molecules" like yeah dude, it's called boiling. "No, it's internal, it's worse, it's damaging the cells" sir, what do you think cooking is?
Understanding and empathy are not forgiveness. Just because I understand why you did the thing you did, and I empathize with the conditions that resulted in that outcome does not mean that the behavior is excused, and it doesn’t mean that I cannot demand that you pay penance.
—-
And one thing I’ve found myself boiling down for many people in my life again and again is:
Fast, Cheap, Good: pick two.
If it’s fast and cheap, it ain’t going to be good. Is it’s cheap and good, it ain’t going to be fast. If it’s fast and good, it ain’t going to be cheap. These are damn near universal rules of product creation and consumption, but everyone seems belligerent on being shown the truth that you basically cannot have all three, ever.
If there’s something that’s seemingly all three, then you’re falling for good advertising. You’re probably settling for a lower standard on one of the three merits and don’t realize it. But it’s the job of advertisers and marketers to assure you that you are, in fact, getting all three, somehow circumventing production realities. It’s maddening.
I think that depends on definition for the good and cheap axis.
If they're cheaper than usual because you've travelled to the source or cut out some middle man or have some sort of secret sauce advantage, you could actually get all three. Eg: Just going to the restaurant to eat instead of using delivery is faster, better, and cheaper.
There are also some things that by nature of specialization became all three: East Asian convenience store foods are cheap, fast, and good; gyūdon, ramen, Lanzhou beef noodles, Dai Pai Dong/HK cafe
etc all work on limited varieties, easy serving method, speed, and low-profit-high-volume to deliver insanely good products at rock bottom prices.
For "good", sometimes something is good enough for an off purpose use and doesn't need to be any better quality. Eg, these toothpicks fell on the floor and now they're discounted to 10% - perfect, I'm buying them for crafts. But I'll concur this is a settling for lower standards.
Your last section is getting at a very important point, there's a world of difference between "good" and "good enough." I work in engineering and in my experience that distinction goes into just about everything that ever gets designed.
Sure, you can build a machine that'll make 1,000 things an hour by using the best possible technologies. And naturally the customer will ask for that because who doesn't want the best? But then you do the math, and find that a similar machine using more basic tech will make 900 things an hour for a quarter of the price. Or maybe you look into their process and find that some other step has a much-harder-to-fix bottleneck where they can really only handle 500 an hour anyway. The best solution is usually the one that's just good enough for the requirements, not one that's overkill.
You hit on a point I failed to make: a good marketer, or a good designer, can make "good enough" not feel like a downgrade from "good" and make the customer feel like the sacrifice is reasonable.
And the flip is... most people really don't care about all three, even if they think they do. Most people really only care about one or two, the others can be "enough" if you can explain why they're ultimately not important to their end goal.
So I'll amend it:
Good, fast, cheap: pick two, apply the "Enough" tag to one or more at your leisure.
I think you're saying two different things. You're right that you can personally forgive and still expect to see them face consequences. @Narry is also right that that you can empathize and understand and not forgive.
Both are viable.
I turns out I didn't really know what the word "penance" meant.
It seemed like you were still saying two different things to me ┐( ˘_˘)┌
Sure. But I thought we were talking about the same due to my ignorance of the word "penance". That changed my interpretation of the entire comment.
Ah got it. Have a good one!
People who know how to clean actually look for the dirt. People who don’t know how to clean only clean what they can see.
I think I'm missing the point here!
I'm not the OP, but at a guess, it's that folks who've cleaned a bunch know where the really gnarly stuff is hiding? E.g. on the underside of your upper cabinets in the kitchen, caked on dust on the top side of the trim around doors, behind toilets, etc.
Alright, hmm well to me that just sounds like a preference. Like cables behind furniture being sorted all tidy or a jumbled mess because out of sight, out of mind.
Depends on what needs to be clean. When it comes to anything involving food, food equipment, etc., "out of sight out of mind" could turn out to be life-threatening. See practically any episode of Kitchen Nightmares.
Well yeah but like behind the fridge and such doesn't exactly matter that there's some dust where you never go.
Sure! I'm just relaying what my interpretation of the statement is. To some people, the definition of "clean" is that all areas must be absent of "dirty", so being able to locate all the places the dirtiness is hiding is critical for their definition. If your definition doesn't include that (i.e. out of sight, out of mind), then we've successfully identified that you, me, and my interpretation of OP's position are all different. Which is OK!
I get you yeah ^^
I didn't know my mom was on Tildes!
You know, for some reason I overanalyzed this, and I ended up seeing it in other context than the physical "cleaning", if that was your intention then you are a fine boi.
Spec Ops: The Line
Spec Ops: The Line wasn't specifically condemning you, the player, for being complicit in virtual war crimes that you had no choice except to participate in, or else quit the game. The game was condemning the actions of Walker. The 4th wall breaks were no more aimed at you personally than the scarecrow toxin in Batman: Arkham Asylum was.
But the game might nevertheless make you feel uncomfortable, because the moral lapses that Walker participates in might be relatable in some small way. Not to the level of war crimes, but from the making of self-serving decisions with noble justifications that just make everything worse.
Real life is not an action movie, and you are not the hero at the center of a story. That's the lesson of Spec Ops: The Line.
I'm sure it isn't new to you, but Jacob Geller made a fantastic video about Spec Ops a while ago. Highly recommend to anyone who played the game and didn't get it
The Observer Effect in quantum mechanics does not imply that quantum particles "know" that a mind has perceived them. It implies that fundamental particles are so incredibly small that any means of measuring them disrupts them in some way.
I would be very careful about any brazen statement on what any quantum behavior "implies", whether that is seemingly mystical or rational. The How of quantum mechanics is understood. We have a very solid framework that Just Works™and it is very, very useful. The Why is still a completely open question. It is why quantum mechanics has multiple "interpretations" - many worlds, pilot wave, ensemble, superdeterminism, the Copenhagen non-answer, etc - non of which are proven nor disproven. In some of those wave function collapse (i.e. the system going from a diffuse set of probabilities to a singular definite state (roughly)) is a thing that actually physically happens, while in others it is a "trick of perspective" where we didn't actually fully know the system, or even weirder bullshit.
The Observer Effect, that anything observed is also disturbed, is a Classical effect and thus maps very well to the observed behavior of everything in the classical domain (which is most things, even extremely tiny stuff, as long as they aren't moving too fast, or are too heavy, probably, within my understanding). Seemingly, this maps simply to the quantum domain: the system was in its weird wavy state, we disturbed it by observing it, now it is in its defined particly state. But does that actually make sense? Why would disturbing something make it more defined, not less? Turns out, shit's a lot more complicated, which is why we haven't yet settled on a singular interpretation - not even all interpretations has observation as an important part of wave function collapse (I'd argue most don't).
(Of course, the Observer Effect also does kinda affect a quantum system, in so far as for us to measure the system we have to interact with it, but that is an effect we have to account for on top of the quantum weirdness of whatever wave function collapse means.)
I suppose this is the point that I think many people missed; when we say "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, no you don't" we do not mean that you can't understand the how. We mean that no one yet understands the why. We don't say this to discourage people from learning the mechanics, just to remind people that the why is still out there for us to find. And, that it is deceptively easy to build a classical intuition of the quantum phenomena that get in the way of a full appreciation of the really weird world of the quantum scale.
Wave function collapse is a bitch
Is that settled theory? Honestly my interpretation of the observer effect was "and nobody really knows for sure why that happens," but if we've figured it out, cool!
Here's a wikipedia article in case you're interested in learning more. Relevant quote:
We live in a society and have obligations to one another; no one is an island.
A portrayal of a certain viewpoint or behavior in media does not imply endorsement of the same.
I think your second point is very true. Though, interestingly, I find its counterpart equally fitting for this thread: Just because your portrayal is intended as a critique, that doesn't absolve you of responsibility for taking care in your presentation.
Artists and creators can't be held accountable for every interpretation of their work, but I often think we're kidding ourselves when we count a portrayal as a condemnation because the antihero "got what was coming to them" at the end, ignoring the previous 90% of the work that glamorized their behavior.
I don't know if I fully agree with Truffaut's "No such thing as an anti-war movie" perspective, but I am wary of people exploiting the label of "critique" to avoid addressing the potential impact that different portrayals can have.
This really pissed me off about the Wolf of Wallstreet. People are always very quick to defend Scorsase for glamorizing Jordan Belfort's crimes with "yeah but in the end he got divorced and went to jail and lost everything".
Yeah, in the last 15 minutes of a 3 hour movie that just spent most of the time hammering us over the head with how cool and badass belfort is and how fun his life is.
And now, Jordan Belfort gets to capitalize on his fame from the movie to pull in 80k speaking fees and run new scams while showing no real accountability or remorse while being idolized by a new generation of omega pilled hustle culture wannabees.
Way to go everyone!
Same for people like PewDiePie that joked about being a Nazi to an audience of millions. A few of those people took him seriously and one of them went on a killing spree while plugging PewDiePie's channel.
Platforms that enable you to reach that many people require caution. But it feels ridiculous to even suggest that given the state of things.
You don’t need to like Holden Caufield to like the book. It is almost a meme to rag on A Catcher in the Rye because Holden is not very amicable. But… so what? There are so many books with protagonists who are objectively worse people than the troubled youth Holden is, but the hate for him as a protagonist is so amplified in comparison. I never understood why. Not sure whether it’s the haters who are missing the point or if it is me! :b
Pretty sure the reason everyone dunks on Holden Caufield is that Catcher in the Rye is a commonly assigned book in school.
Yeah, a lot of other books have douchey protagonists too, but if I get annoyed I can always just stop reading.
I personally loathed ACitR because it was assigned reading on high school English, my teacher wouldn't stop frothing at the mouth about how brilliant it was at capturing the disaffected youth experience, and meanwhile I, a youth of the same supposed age, couldn't relate to a damn thing, with Holden reminding me only of my classmates that made my life hell.
That makes sense, but what is curious to me is that it was not required reading when I was in school. There are also lots of other books that were required reading whose protagonists don’t get as much hate as Holden. Anecdotally, it seems like the internet could have something to do with it.
I didn't like Holden before the internet and he was required reading. And the writing was not such, at least as a teenager, that I was still interested in reading about him despite that.
It's one of the reasons I think that high school shouldn't teach "the classics" as much as contemporary works that teens can relate to and learn from. But that's just my two cents. Maybe it's all us elder millennials online ripping on it.
For what it's worth, my niece was assigned to read the Outsiders by Hinton a couple of years ago and went and found the sequel on her own because she loved the characters and story.
Classic books can work if they are relatable.
Sure, and I liked Chaucer. But I am opposed to teaching the canon for canon's sake. It's already inherently biased. It's also not necessarily the best way to teach either an ongoing enjoyment of reading nor the critical thinking and literature skills. And we default to treating it as if it were the best.
We didn't read Hinton so I have no sense for the actual book. (If it wasn't in the SF section of my public library I did not find it as a teen)
Got it. I think we agree re Canon for Canon sake.
The outsiders is old by now but I found it to be a hell of a good read.
Much of the world elite seems to miss the whole point of the cyberpunk genre.
It's not meant to be aspirational.
If you dont want people to emulate your grim vision of the future then you shouldnt make your grim vision of the future look rad as hell.
Like the Torment Nexus (Wikipedia entry):
This but for the movie Idiocracy. It was funny 20 years ago - now it's depressing how close we are to it.
Changing your mind is often not a bad thing. We hopefully continue to learn and grow our entire lives. Sometimes we change our minds because we have learned something new. Sometimes it’s because our perspective has changed.
I’ve heard it described as strong opinions, loosely held.
I’m not using an always/never statement because someone always finds a way.
This is something I've been experiencing with young aspiring writers.
Taking negative criticism well does not make you subservient to the critic. It is quite the contrary: it displays your ability to put criticism in the context of a much larger artistic pursuit that is not defined by a single data point. Criticism may provide great insight, but only you can determine how and if it will impact your work.
How political can we get here? lol
RE: The multiple narratives around Renee Nicole Good
I think a lot of people on either side of the divide, the media, politicians, and especially conservatives, have lost the plot about this entire scenario and it's driving me insane and not just because of the obvious reasons about her murder.
First off, obviously the US is so divided that we can have two sets of people look at the same exact video and get entirely different readings. That's obviously an issue, and it's an issue that stems from different views on morality and justification. The same way a lot of people on the left didn't see an issue with Charlie Kirk's murder, people on the right feel the same way about Renee Nicole Good.
I'm not saying I agree with that comparison or that I am saying it's the same, just that it's how the two groups of people see it.
The problem is that the left is caught up in arguing about the morality of her murder and how it wasn't justified, and the right is caught up arguing that she put the officer in danger and was acting aggressively and he was defending himself.
HOWEVER, the angle that nobody seems to be talking about that is driving me up the wall and kind of proves it's own point is the fact that no matter what moral projection or defensive justification you project onto this situation, practically, the ICE officer shooting her was a bad call and endangered himself and everyone around him. Like literally no matter how you look at it.
If you dig into it with conservatives, they say that he shot her in self defense. To defend yourself is to prevent harm to yourself. However nobody seems to be talking about the simple fact that shooting her wouldn't have stopped the car at all and it's plain as day.
When the ICE officer shot Renee, her body tensed up and she floored her gas pedal and accelerated into the parked car down the street. This is a well known natural reaction to someone being killed in this manner, their body often tenses and goes rigid.
This fact alone in itself proves that shooting her would NOT have stopped the car even if she'd been deliberately trying to hit him. Like he actually shot her so we saw exactly what would have happened if she'd been aimed at him.
It was not a proper self defensive action as it would not have put himself in less danger.
This is why law enforcement is taught about shooting people in cars, that the moment you kill a driver, their car becomes unpredictable, so you're always supposed to use caution when firing on vehicles. This was not one of those moments.
If the car down the street had not been there, her car could have plowed into one of the homes, a bystander down the street, or another ICE officer.
He did not in any way shape or form make himself or any other officer in the area safer by shooting at her while she was in a moving vehicle pointed at him. Again, this isn't about angles or motivations, it's about law enforcement training, the same law enforcement conservatives are supposed to be defending.
So therefor it was a bad call even if everything conservatives said about her and the situation was true.
And a common response I get from conservatives was that the officer panicked and had a split second to make a judgement call, and again the entire reason we are supposed to train law enforcement is that we don't want officers to fall back on reactionary automatic responses in stressful situations, that does nobody any good, we want them to fall back on their training, which is the entire point of training.
The other thing is is that conservatives talk about how Renee put herself into that situation, but the ICE officer saw another officer struggling with a moving vehicle by attempting to grab the wheel, then placed himself in front of the vehicle. Again, that was a bad call on his part.
Anyways, I expose myself a lot to conservative spaces and try to dip in whenever I see an opportunity to disrupt some of their circular and reactionary narratives, this has been one of those opportunities.
I've had really good success using this logic to sidestep the typical narratives and really leave conservatives with very few solid argumentative options. In fact I've had a lot of success getting conservatives to agree with this logic, especially when bringing up law enforcement training and gun safety. It also really exposes the extremists that parrot narratives in those spaces because it pulls the rug out from the typical argumentative scripts they use to both rile up conservatives and argue in circles with the left.
The problem is that I don't see anyone else making this argument. I feel like the only one, not only in conservative spaces, but other spaces too. And it sucks because I'm getting success in arguing about it in this way and getting a surprising amount of conservatives to kind of snap out of their reactionary defense of him and admit that he shouldn't have shot her even if she'd been aggressive or whatever, but I have not seen anyone else doing this successfully, and haven't seen any mainstream media talk about the situation like this. And I can only do so much.
Anyways, if this is too political or controversial, feel free to delete this or let me know and I'll delete it. Not trying to start arguments but it did fit the description of the topic and has been on my mind recently.
“Two for the price of one” (or “buy one get one free”) is a scam, as are schemes where two items cost less than twice the price of one item. If a shop can sell you two items for 2.00, it means that one item costs 1.00; asking 1.50 for it instead is just dishonest markup. Despite, people somehow fall into the fairy-tale mode of thinking where one item costs 1.50 and the shop is somehow charitable to you by charging you less if you're a good customer and buy two. Bullshit.
In mathematics, the ‘=’ (equals) relation is symmetric; if a = b, then b = a. It directly follows that if you can get two for the price of one, it also means that you can only get one for the price of two (because the prices are equal). It's not charity. It's intentionally removing the option of buying one item for its correct price to force you to buy and consume more than you otherwise would.
This practice is manipulative and preys on widespread mathematical and financial illiteracy. It should be illegal, or at least it should be taught in schools what a fraudulent scheme it is.
Or it's a loss lead, where they expect to make more money on other things. Or they need to move a lot of items to compensate for a fixed cost. Or another reason.
I think the actual misunderstanding here is that prices are set based on the expenses of the seller. Prices are set based on what the market can bear. Sometimes that's a direct loss where you need to get rid of stock to make room for something more profitable, but mostly it's not, because store owners have the store to make a living or make money. There's also not a direct connection between individual items in the store and profitability. The total amount of money made is what should compensate for fixed costs like staffing and rent etc.