Romero recently released a book, _Doom Guy: Life in First Person_, if you'd like a long-form answer to that question.
Other commenters give more substantial answers, but I can vouch for the book as having a lot of history, clearly being written by Romero himself, and having a lot of self-reflection on the questions you're asking.
I'm going to give the advice here that saved my sanity in an open office: use headphones with "passive" noise canceling. I bought a pair of 3M WorkTunes with Bluetooth. They're just passive, sound deadening, hearing protection ear muffs like you would wear on a factory floor or in a construction workplace, with Bluetooth built. It blocks out all noise, not just white noise, and they're much cheaper than ANC head phones.
I wear the WorkTunes, plus ear plugs, plus I play cafe or brown noise through the headphones, plus I sometimes put on music. If that hadn't worked, I was going to go insane from the sound of the keyboard next to me.
You make a few substantial points, but any use of the "single income earner" argument is incomplete if it doesn't acknowledge that _women were also working at home_ while their husbands were doing income-earning work.
It's not only income-earning work that counts against prosperity: it's all work. Studies indicate that men and women gained 6-8 hours of leisure from 1965-2003. There are probably caveats and addenda to that, and you make other good points, but please also consider non-income work in your arguments.
There are fewer hours of work done at home now. The increase in leisure time reflects a decrease in total labor: income-earning labor, labor around the house, etc. Figures in [1] break it out a bit, although the years-reflected are a bit different than I used above. Search for "60.9" to find the relevant table.
That compares the 1960s to the 1980s. A lot has changed in 30 years. In particular Financialisation has increased dramatically. Are there any more recent figures?
Also, less work being done at home isn't necessarily a good thing. More people eating microwaved ready meals or takeaways probably means lower quality of life overall.
My comment was a rebuttal to the "single income earner" argument which suggests that in the post-war era we labored half as much as we do today.
I've got no other points to defend. But I'm happy to look at any of your points, and I understand and accept the argument that hours of leisure time is not a direct measurement of well-being. (:
Labor force participation of women in 1950 was 33.9 while males 86.4. So while males worked much more, the framing that makes it sound like women did not worked at all is false.
Upper and middle class women did not worked, poorer women (significant part of population) did and had to work.
That's probably one of the caveats and addenda. So, my counterargument doesn't prove that life has gotten better--maybe an additional kid is "better" than six hours of leisure time by some calculuses. But it does rebut any argument that we used to get by one 40 hours per week per household of labor but now we need 80.
Edit: Of course, as parent notes the drop in number of children represents at most _part_ of the increase in leisure hours. We can definitely attribute part of it to things that are definitely modern advantages, like labor-saving devices such as dish-washing machines. The year 1965 is kind of a poor year for my argument, in that by that point most households had the most labor-saving devices: refrigerators that allow you to shop and cook days at a time, washing machines that saved many hours of labor washing clothes, etc.
I've found that an emphasis on a clear spec, decoupling, testing, and producing quality code significantly reduce the "spin up" time that gets ever more daunting in an infrequently-visited project.
A clear spec means that I know what all has to be programmed. Decoupling my components means that I can make changes to my business-logic/back-end without having to make changes to my display/front-end, as long as the interface remains the same. Testing means that I can make changes without fear that I'm going to unknowingly break existing features. Quality code means that I can more easily understand the code that I've written after an absence. The upshot is that I always feel comfortable making a few quick changes, pushing commits, even after being away from the code for a few days.
A few concrete tools for writing quality code: write it to be open sourced, write it to be viewed and collaborated upon; use code quality tests like pylint, jshint, code-climate, whatever is appropriate for your language; display your code quality metric badges in your repo, badges for coverage, built-status, etc.
In general, "machine learning" means that an algorithm did it, and that the algorithm engages in some analysis of the problem space or the solution space. Usually that analysis involves an iterative or repetitive element: making several tries and modeling what makes a try good or bad, making a try and then changing the solution tiny bits to find a try that's slightly better, etc. And "good" or "bad" is determined according to a human-provided rubric (eg: +1000 points for every sight seen, -1 point for every mile driven, -10 points for every day taken, etc.)
Unless the problem is very constrained, there usually is no guarantee of optimality; here there is probably no guarantee of optimality. It might be "locally" optimal, in that there might be no better trip that differs from this one by only a tiny bit.
And, no, "machine learning" here doesn't mean the enterprise and establishment of "Machine Learning", just some algorithm that the author used.
> They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
In mathematical modeling, they say that every model is wrong, but some are useful.
Insofar as psychedelics are dissociatives, they can cause harm by convincing us to discard our wrong but useful models of the world. And I have experienced that when no associations seem significant, all associations gain significance, independent of usefulness.
Our brain works pretty well with our incomplete-but-useful heuristics, and the ability to discover these heuristics and transmit them culturally is one of our central powers as a species. I don't have the perspective of a state to say why exactly they have been banned, and I don't have the perspective of a god to say whether the lubrication of psychedelics might slip us into a greater local optimum. But I do have enough personal experience to say that bad things can happen to an unmoored mind.
That's an interesting conjecture, but is there any evidence at all? Say, in the form of dysfunction in cases where users of psychedelics come into leadership positions or positions of influence? Or among communities where use of psychedelics is common?
Respectfully, I make no conjectures. When I say that psychedelics can cause us harm, I mean that psychedelics can cause the individual harm, and I generalize from my own (extremely mild) experience.
When I first got into cast iron, I spent a lot of time on oven-seasoning. It turns out that your daily practice is much more important than that oven seasoning, and the two important steps are:
1. Get the oil hot before you add any foods.
2. Use a sheet-metal spatula/flipper
Humanity has known for a long time that when you get your cooking oil hot, it repels food instead of binding it to the cooking surface; but the amateur cook has forgotten because of a reliance on non-stick surfaces.
The sheet-metal spatula/flipper lets you clean the cast iron with each pass of the tool. A rubber/wooden tool will leave small, burnt on bits of food, which accumulate more bits of food; a sheet-metal tool with scrape those off before they become a problem. Also, a sheet-metal spatula will scrape the roughness of the cast-iron from the bottom of your pan over the course of decades, moving you towards that inky-black mirror of grandma's old pans.
I can cook anything on my cast iron, just by following those steps, even fried eggs: the surface is totally non-stick. And cleaning is simple too: sometimes I'll make a few passes with the spatula to scrape off any food that has dried on, but that's all I ever do.
For stuck-on food, I've had best luck with a coarse copper mesh pad (e.g. Chore Boy), which I use lightly, and only to remove the gunk.
In the past, I'd also used coarse salt as an abrasive, but I like the copper wool better.
I also heat the pan to dry it off. As to the comment about this promoting rust: if you have a well-seasoned pan, you don't have any wet metal; you have a wet seasoned pan. You could just as easily dry it with a dish towel, but this tends to get your dish towel dirty.
> Heat the pan after cleaning, evaporating all water.
Don't do that. It causes rust.
Metal rusts MUCH faster when hot than when cold. If you have wet metal that you are worried will rust get it as cold as possible, and let it dry. Best place is in the fridge - it's cold, plus low humidity helps.
A fridge is not necessary for cast iron, but don't heat it when wet.
I suppose that might be true, but have you actually done the math here?
If it dries say 50 times faster, does iron rust more than 50 times faster at 400F than at 70?
I have no way of knowing either way, but I've got a cast iron pan that belonged to my great grandmother and I remember my grandmother heating it to dry it off. My mom did the same with it, and now I've done the same--no rust.
I don't doubt that warm metal rusts faster, just how much faster.
There's a pretty big difference between drying something in a warm stove vs applying a direct flame to it on the stove top.
It takes just a few minutes to get the skillet hot enough where the water pretty much instantly evaporates. I'd imagine putting it in a warm stove took much longer to completely dry it.
What I said was that if you are heating the iron in order to speed up evaporation to avoid rust, you are being counter productive. You will avoid more rust (if any would be formed in the fist place), by just letting it air dry.
I don't know what you said, then. People are saying we put our cast iron on the burner for a couple minutes to dry it off and you're saying the direct flame will cause it to rust.
In my house, we stove-dry pans constantly, precisely to prevent rust, and we never get any. It's not intentionally an "experiment", but it's enough to make me think there's an issue with your methodology.
You probably would not get rust anyway, so stove drying isn't hurting anything much.
But it's certainly not helping.
The methodology was not complicated: I washed some porous/rough metal under the faucet, dried it with a paper towel, then put one piece in the oven at 170F, one on the table.
Maybe iron will rust faster when hot, but I don't think heating it to dry it is an issue -- I do that fairly often, and haven't had a problem.
Here's a counter example: There are many tons of metal in hot desert climates that have a small amount of rust on them, but nothing like the kind of rust from a cold wet climate. There may be complications from cooking, but, and this is without giving it much thought, I'd say that water is a much larger factor than heat.
My understanding about the "grandmas old pans" comment is that new pans are cast, i believe using sand?, in a way that leaves the "pebbled" texture. It's unfortunate, the smooth cast is certainly better, but I believe it doesn't have as much effect as you might think.
I've got two of them that I bought about 15 years ago (Lodge brand) -- they both had that roughness to them. One I use daily (the round one), the square one not that often. Looking at the round one now, and it is perfectly smooth, just like grandma's. So it can be done, it just takes a bit of time.
Yeah, they've definitely started out closer to smooth than ours. As you say, I don't know if mirror smoothness is terribly important, but it might let you get away with a bit less oil.
As I understand it most of the old pans were sand cast too, but they then polished them before selling. Modern manufacturers skip the polishing step. You could always sand it down yourself as abakker detailed.
It's nice in that it might let you get away with less oil day-to-day. My best answer is that you can get away with skipping oven-seasoning if you follow the daily practice, but not vice-versa.
With a metal spatula, you're machining the pan smooth over the course of decades, and also constantly scraping off any good bits that are getting stuck.
It would be excellent to have some better verbage for what the authors are trying to express. There are some components of white privilege that apply in this case, and some that don't. Obviously, Asian and Indian Americans don't get the benefit of "you're white and I'm white, so I like you," but they do get the benefit of some kind of "expectation of quality." And there's probably a third component, which may be closer to the authors' original intent: "you have similar cultural values to me, so I like you."
I think it's useful to consider those components separately. They suggest different vectors of attack against these endemic problems.
My thinking here is framed by John Ogbu's concept of the involuntary minority: all the minorities that became minorities in America by choice are doing pretty well; all of the minorities that were made minorities in America by force (either conquered in situ or brought by force) are doing pretty poorly. It takes a shoe-horn to fit native-blooded Hispanics into that dichotomy, but it helps there too.
Other commenters give more substantial answers, but I can vouch for the book as having a lot of history, clearly being written by Romero himself, and having a lot of self-reflection on the questions you're asking.
Here's some additional HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649594