exasperation

So why not focus on the foods containing that stuff, rather than the superficial resemblance of all foods that kinda look like the foods that contain that stuff?

Let's say you have a problem with potassium bromate, a dough additive linked to cancer that remains legal in U.S. bread but is banned in places like Canada, the UK, the EU.

So let's have that conversation about bromate! Let's not lump all industrially produced breads into that category, even in countries where bromate has been banned.

The NOVA classifications are difficult to work with, and I think the trend of certain nutrition scientists (and the media that reports on those scientists' work) have completely over-weighted the value of the "ultra processed" category.

The typical whole grain, multigrain bread sold at the store qualifies as ultra-processed, in large part because whole grain flour is harder to shape into loaves than white flour, and manufacturers add things like gluten to the dough. Gluten, of course, already "naturally" exists in any wheat bread, so it's not exactly a harmful ingredient. But that additive tips the loaf of bread into ultra processed (or UPF or NOVA category 4), same as Doritos.

But whole grain bread isn't as bad for you as Doritos or Coca Cola. So why do these studies treat them as the same? And whole grain factory bread is almost certainly better for you than the local bakery's white bread (merely processed food or NOVA category 3), made from industrially produced white flour, with the germ and bran removed during milling. Or industrially produced potato chips, which are usually considered simply processed foods in category 3 when not flavored with anything other than salt, which certainly aren't more nutritious or healthier than that whole wheat bread or pasta.

If specific ingredients are a problem, we should study those ingredients. If specific combinations or characteristics are a problem, we should study those combinations. Don't throw out the baby (healthy ultra processed foods) with the bathwater (unhealthy ultra processed foods).

And I'm not even going to get into how the system is fundamentally unsuited for evaluating fermented, aged, or pickled foods, especially dairy.

The NOVA classification system is "real" science, but in my opinion the arbitrary and vague definitions make it so that it's not very good or very robust science.

The infuriating thing is that I believe that nutrition is more than just a linear addition of all the constituent ingredients (kinda the default view of nutrition science up through the 90's), but addressing the shortcomings of that overly simple model shouldn't mean making an even more simple model.

NOVA classification is the wrong answer to a legitimate problem.

Spit out a random e-mail address and record which e-mail address was given to each IP.

The author mentions it's a violation of GDPR to record visitors' IP addresses. I'm not sure that's correct, but even so, it could be possible to make a custom encoding of literally every ipv4 address through some kind of lookup table with 256 entries, and just string together 4 of those random words to represent the entire 32-bit address space, such that "correct horse battery staple" corresponds to 192.168.1.100 or whatever.

Base64 encoding of a text representation of an IP address and date seems inefficient.

There are 4 octets in a ipv4 address, where each octet is one of 2^8 possible integers. The entire 32-bit ipv4 address space should therefore be possible to encode in 6 characters in base64.

Similarly, a timestamp with a precision/resolution in seconds can generally be represented by a 32-bit integer, at least up through 2038. So that can be represented by another 6 characters.

Or, if you know you're always going to be encoding these two numbers together, you can put together a 64-bit number and encode that in base64, in just 11 characters. Maybe even use some kind of custom timestamp format that uses fewer bits and counts from a more recent epoch, as an unsigned integer (since you're not going to have site visitors from the past), and get that down to even fewer characters.

That seems to run less risk of the email address getting cut off at some arbitrary length as it gets passed around.

The use of a "+" convention is just a convention popularized by Gmail and the other major providers. If you have your own domain, you should be able to do this with any arbitrary text schema, and encode some information in the address itself, especially if you don't care about sending email from those aliases: set up your email service to have a catchall inbox that can further be filtered/forwarded based on other rules.

It can be cumbersome but I could see it working at getting the information you're looking for.

It's not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It's that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren't designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn't really change the fact that an importer wouldn't be able to comply with vehicles that weren't engineered to those specifications.

Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:

That’s a sensible recommendation. Except the 3,000-pound 2010 Ranger featured by IIHS has become the bigger and taller 2024 Ford Ranger, which weighs up to 5,325 pounds. Like so many US cars, the Ranger got supersized, a trend fed by a mix of consumer desires and government regulations that carved out gas efficiency loopholes for the trucks and SUVs that make up a swelling share of the US vehicle fleet.

In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they're not street legal: they didn't get bigger because they weren't subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they're 25 years old).

People in garbage trucks don't experience the same magnitude of force in a crash of equal speed, even without crumple zones, for a few reasons:

• Sheer mass of the garbage truck means that the same amount of momentum transfer results in less force to the humans inside. A garbage truck might weigh literally 20 times as much as a kei truck, which means that an abrupt collision will transfer 1/20 as much impulse to the passengers (as most of the force goes into changing the speed of the truck). Even collisions with still objects (trees, walls, poles) result in less force on the passengers, as a lot of the energy ends up deforming or disintegrating that stationary object as a crumple zone.
• Driver/passenger height in a garbage truck is generally above where the collision/deformation occurs. The passenger compartment isn't under as much crushing force in a garbage truck crash compared to a kei truck at normal human height.
• The height of a garbage truck gives a lot more physical structure to dissipate the forces in a crash.

So the exact same shape/proportions of vehicle can be vastly different safety when large versus small.

It does include food and energy, but they also separately report a "core" inflation that excludes those items because food and energy tend to go up and down.

Looking at beef in particular, a pound of ground beef has gone up from $2.10/lb in 2008 to $6.20 in 2025.

Chicken breast, on the other hand, has gone from $3.50/lb to about $4.10.

Beef has been getting more expensive faster than inflation basically my whole life, while stuff like chicken, milk, and eggs have been volatile, jumping up and down at times, and stuff like rice and flour have long periods of stability with the occasional big permanent jump.

When I got married, sitting down with the caterer and choosing between dozens of flatware types, I realized that I personally like three dimensional smoothness, with round, cylindrical handles that have some heft but not too much width. I also like cylindrical tines that don't look like it was made from a flat sheet of metal cut and bent into shape (I prefer tines that are cylindrical, not rectangular prisms).

I also like curves along where the head meets the handle, and along the head itself. No sharp corners or edges.

I dislike ornamentation on the handle itself. I like plain, smooth handles.

I chose the forks for my wedding, and then later on in life, based on what I learned about my own preferences, I bought some flatware that fits those general principles (looks like the Sambonet Hannahs, but cheaper than that very expensive line), and replaced the ones in my house. Now I basically don't have any forks that I don't like.