The Maillard reaction cannot be achieved through simmering alone. The temperature is too low. Simmering meat over a long period of time is useful for breaking down collagen and making a rich broth but you will not have the same deep, browned flavour as a broth made from roasted meat.
“For some reason”
You seem like a curious person. You should do some more research into cooking and why the Maillard and caramelization reactions produce such delicious food. It isn’t the carcinogenic byproducts that taste good (those tend to be quite bitter), it’s all the other complicated compounds produced from those reactions of proteins and sugars. By the way, these reactions can be achieved without burning the food at all, just not with most traditional cooking techniques.
Even still, you can get cancer from cooking without burning food at all. Heat up a bunch of oil to its smoke point and throw some water in there. In addition to creating a huge oily mess, you’ll fill the air with countless tiny droplets of oil and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are a known carcinogen. However, you can reduce the risks by not reheating used cooking oil, instead using only fresh oil every time.
You can also greatly reduce the risks by not heating the oil to its smoke point. It’s actually not necessary to heat oils to their smoke point in order to achieve the desirable browning flavour reactions.
As for life time of only eating bland boiled food: I would trade away a couple extra years of lifespan for avoiding that. Keep in mind that many of the most delicious soups and stews feature lots of seared, roasted, or fried ingredients anyway. Plus as I said, you can still get cancer even if you never eat or drink anything unhealthy. The air, the soil, and the water are all polluted with carcinogens. Even switching to electric cars will not help: the road, brake, and tire damage creates loads of PM2.5 particles which will destroy your lungs. This damage increases with the 4th power of vehicle mass, which means electric vehicles (that are far heavier) are actually far worse at producing this pollution!
You’re throwing out entire continents worth of cuisine. You’re essentially saying “do not sauté or stir fry anything.”
But here’s the sad reality: you could live your whole life eating nothing but bland, boiled food and still get lung cancer from VOCs and PM2.5 particles in the air due to the pollution of city life.
Not true. No matter what stove you cook with, cooking can produce large amounts of oil fumes (vaporized oil particles), smoke, and other VOCs from your food. All of this stuff is bad for your lungs.
Unless all you cook is boiled pasta, rice, veggies, gently simmered sauces, and sous vide (but not seared) proteins, you’re going to need a good quality range hood that (ideally) vents cooking emissions outside.
If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.
Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.
Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!
Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.
I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.
I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.
The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.
I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.
I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.
I have been tutoring high school students as a volunteer for nearly a decade. Most of these in early high school (9-10) can’t even write a simple paragraph. How are they going to express critical thinking when they can’t even write very simple things?
I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that! And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.
By analogy, imagine trying to train people to be Olympians. Before they can perform in their sport they need to train their bodies to build muscle and endurance. Yet they insist on bringing a forklift to the gym because they think what it really want them to do is move weights around, not lift them.
How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?
No they were all over the place. They won a lot of seats but Carney’s Liberals won more.
In Canada I think there are just more left wing voters than right wing. Normally when the Conservatives win it’s because the left wing gets split among multiple left wing parties. This time, people abandoned those other left wing parties and jumped to the Liberals.
We didn’t oust our far right. They got more votes than they’ve had in decades. They just got them in the wrong places.
We also lost our left wing party whose votes got gobbled up by the centre-left Liberals.
How much of that is tourist country?
As a Canadian I feel bad for this. A lot of Americans in these tourist towns love Canadians and didn’t even vote for Trump!
Or if you’re like me and don’t care about the latest big studio games. I play games by development teams with less than 10 people, tending towards just one person. I have no desire to play any of Nintendo’s newest games.
That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!
The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.
A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!
But you don’t really have an advantage there. The super rich have a populist army of their own (maga) and they’re going all out with it in an attempt to destroy the left by attacking its foundation: academia.
Systemic change doesn’t happen without political will. Political will depends on personal opinions. Try to bring in systemic change with an election win but not overwhelming support then you get reactionary backlash like we’re seeing right now.
Also known as kicking the can down the road.
If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.
Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.
When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.
But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.
The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).
The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.
I like to think of it in terms of fault vs responsibility. It’s not our fault, for the most part. But it is our responsibility to do something about it!
I’m hopeful. Renewables are exploding in growth.