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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Depends on what he means by “ultra-processed”, but you can bet that it’s probably not a reasonable criteria that he’ll be using.

    The man isn’t rational, and doesn’t base his conclusions on sound reasoning.

    Note the call to lessen regulations around “raw milk, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine”. That’s pretty insane.

    And I can almost be certain that what they’ll do is eliminate funding for snap benefits and school lunches going to what they’ll classify as “ultra processed foods”, without adjusting funding to account for what they left behind being significantly more expensive. Some definitions of “ultra-processed” include things like “store bought bread”, “frozen meals”, “soup concentrate”, “yoghurt” and “sausage”.
    Call me cynical, but I think if you apply the stricter work requirements for benefits they always want, while reducing the scope of the benefits to cover fewer things, and almost nothing helpful for the people with the severe time restrictions the work requirements can cause you’ll end up seeing people use the benefits far less often, because they give less usable food for the money. Then they’ll use that to justify reducing the size of the program even further.

    We expect people making school lunches to make hundreds of meals that finish at the same time, to have the meal be nutritionally complete, tasty, and now also not use frozen or premade ingredients. We give them literally $1 for the ingredients for these meals, and maybe another $2 for operational overhead like labor costs and equipment.
    Saying you can’t use canned tomato sauce, peanut butter, pre-packaged bread or ground meats is basically just cutting funding for feeding children under the guise of not paying for a scary sounding classification of food.







  • I had two premature babies in the NICU (twins with last minute maternal complications, everyone is fine but things were early), and they benefited so much from donor milk.

    Newborns in general and preemies in particular have basically no immune system. NICU preemies are also susceptible to a very serious intestinal condition that can cause parts of their intestines to die.

    Breast milk is filled with antibodies and various immune response related proteins that help bootstrap their immune system and might essentially prevent the intestinal issue entirely.

    Once you’re developmentally advanced enough there’s no real long term difference between formula and breast milk, but before then the immune compounds we can’t make synthetically are basically medicine.

    It’s a little odd because breast milk seems more intimate than something like blood, but it’s arguably more impactful.



  • Those aren’t typically used to mask anything, or to let you increase the air quantity. They’re typically used to keep the product stable during freezing, otherwise it can either turn into a brick because they froze too solidly, or because all the air escaped during cold storage.
    In terms of cost savings, it does let them shorten the time needed to let the mix sit before churning, but that’s just because it helps the fat globs come back together easier.

    There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using the gums. Xanthan is the only one really that isn’t available in an organic formulation, since they’re just bean powders mostly.

    What’s the difference between using coconut oil or pectin like Hagan dazs does (a fat solid at higher temperatures that works as a stabilizer, and a fruit derived gelling agent) and using guar or locust bean gum? They’re all just plant powders and roughly equally processed.



  • Changed with ice cream in general? No. But there are things that have been possible to add to ice cream for a while that do what you describe. It could be that you’re just starting to notice, you shifted brands, or the brand you liked shifted formulations.

    Many people dislike the things that get added to ice cream, and so there are definitely brands out there that don’t include those things.
    In my opinion the worst of the additives is not nearly as bad as a lot of people would make them out to be.

    In the broadest sense possible ice cream is sugar, fat, water and thickener where the fat has been cooled to a solid and allowed to just start to re-form into a lump, the ice hasn’t been allowed to form crystals big enough to notice, and the thickener and sugars glue the fat and ice together such that they trap miniature air bubbles.
    Some people insist that the fat and thickener have to come from cow milk in the form of milk fat and milk proteins, but that’s a bit pedantic for my tastes.

    The easiest way to cheap out on ice cream is to add a lot more air. Since we sell it based on volume, if we churn more air into it we get more ice cream to sell for the same quantity of ingredients, and the only effect is that the ice cream is lighter, softer and fluffier.
    There’s a legal maximum to how much air you can mix in though.

    The next hurdle you run into is that milk proteins are actually kinda shit at keeping those air bubbles trapped. Adding things like guar gum or carrageenan will make it much gloopier and hold those air bubbles better.
    This makes the ice cream last longer in a warehouse without the bubbles getting out and leaving your ice cream as a brick.

    Next is rampant ice crystal spread, which can turn the ice cream into a brick in the warehouse. This can be slowed down using something called methylcellulose. It’s basically processed plant fiber ground into a powder. It’s also used in pills as the inert binder, and as a dietary fiber source.
    It’s popular because is known to be safe and inert, it’s very cheap, it prevents ice crystal formation, and it has the fun quirk of getting thicker as it warms, for the added property of keeping your ice cream fluffy and areated as it warms up on your drive home.

    Finally, you can tweak the fat blend. This one isn’t as common because milk fat is already insanely cheap since we subsidize the hell out of the dairy industry.
    Changing the blend to use fats that are solid at higher temperatures does have utility for things you expect to be eaten slower, at higher temperatures, or if you want parents to not be mad that your ice cream makes kids extra sticky.

    By far the biggest way that I’ve cream will save costs is by putting as much air in it as possible. It lets them sell you less in the same size box for the same price.
    It’s a case where shrinkflation means making things bigger, which is fun.

    The brands that didn’t take that route invariably rebranded as “premium” ice creams, so they can charge more for the same thing without raising consumer ire.


  • Meanwhile, Dems simply don’t seem to care. They don’t repeal gerrymanders. They don’t amend the VOA. They don’t expand mail in voting. They don’t implement DC statehood.

    I mean, in Michigan they did, at least as far as Michigan has the power to do so. It amounted to fuck all.

    So while it’s all well and good to continuously look for a way to blame the outcome on one abstract institution or another, at some point you have to just say “fuck the voters who voted for a fascist, and fuck the ones who didn’t vote against him”.



  • Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

    High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there’s less sun.

    Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There’s less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
    Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

    A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

    Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

    Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
    That’s not to say that the differences aren’t real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
    For example, I’m nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
    Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

    We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like “height”, “toe and finger length”, or things like that.
    Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

    All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.


  • You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
    People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

    People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
    One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.





  • I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

    If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

    You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

    You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.