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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I think even if you exclude all nerds, you’ll find that sports fans lean right. Nerds, left or right, tend to be anti-sport, though that’s basically by definition (a nerd being a person whose hobbies skew intellectual rather than physical).

    That’s not the only way to define a nerd however. Another definition I’ve heard is based on the level of obsessiveness a person has with their hobby. In that world I would consider most of the biggest sports fans to be nerds. Think about how much time they spend looking at stats, talking about strategies, trades, drafts, listening to radio and podcasts, etc. All of that is very much in common with how video game nerds engage with their interest.

    I consider myself a nerd who loves both sports and video games (RPGs, Roguelikes, fighting games, RTS). However unlike many sports fans and athletes, I’m not religious or superstitious. I think that latter group correlates with being right-wing (perhaps even more so than education).







  • On the one hand I agree with them because having a Q&A site full of repetitive beginner questions will ruin its usefulness as a resource. On the other hand they handle it in the worst possible way. Instead of leaving around a bunch of “corpses” of closed questions they should just merge the beginner’s question into the original, already answered question. Just n Move it to the bottom of that question’s discussion thread and redirect the beginner to the answer at the top.

    The way they decided to do it essentially codifies all the things people hated about asking for help on IRC and later Discord.



  • Bad actors are going to build their vertical power structures whether you like it or not. This is the challenge liberals are posing to anarchists: if you are unwilling to build your own vertical power structure then how do you stop the bad actors from building theirs and then using it as a cudgel against you?

    Exile and public shaming are tools that only work against bad actors as individuals. They do not work when the bad actors team up and form a critical mass.

    In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength. The agricultural revolution changed all this because of food storage and the potential for an outside group to attack and steal the food. People formed power structures and developed the first militaries in order to defend their granaries and this led to the growth of large cities where people no longer had the ability to know everyone.

    Militaries also showed the power of hierarchies. Making decisions by consensus is slow. A military with a formal power structure has a huge advantage in combat against an unstructured tribe of warriors. This was proven again and again as the empires of the past conquered their neighbours.

    But I digress. A large city where it’s impossible to know everyone is a huge problem for anarchists who want to prevent bad actors from forming a vertical power structure and taking over. There simply is no known social tool which can combat against the formation of conspiracies and elites within a large society.






  • Both have their place. I think both stainless and carbon steel are extremely cheap in the long run compared to nonstick for the simple fact these pans don’t wear out. Both types of pans will last for generations and can take a real beating, even from metal utensils, though carbon steel does not give a damn about scratches whereas stainless can lose some aesthetic appeal (barkeepers friend can help polish it up though)!

    Besides the chemical reactivity differences, stainless pans (especially clad pans with aluminum or copper cores) tend to be much faster to react to temperature changes than carbon steel. At the same time can’t hold as much thermal energy due to lower density, so carbon steel is better for searing a large piece of food without cooling down too much (which can start boiling the food instead of searing).


  • Yeah plus when cooking some foods in stainless (such as meat) you want some sticking so you can build a fond which you then deglaze to make a pan sauce. Carbon steel is less ideal for this because the seasoning will react with acids such as vinegars, wines, or citrus which are all common ingredients in pan sauces. While a well-seasoned carbon steel pan can survive a deglaze with vinegar the dissolved seasoning can ruin the flavour of your pan sauce.


  • I have that same wok. You need a lot more oil for a flat bottom wok than a round bottom because the flat bottom doesn’t let the oil pool to the middle.

    You absolutely can get nonstick eggs with a stainless steel frying pan and a small amount of oil but you need to actually practice heat control and cooking technique. It’s actually much easier with butter because the water in it will begin to fizz and you just need to wait for the fizzing to stop and the pan will be just about hot enough.

    You still need to use the right heat setting which is specific to your stove and pan, so practice is needed but you can get a good feel for it by how quickly the butter melts. If it melts rapidly and gives off a lot of steam and begins browning then the pan is too hot (unless you want to do a crispy egg, but that should be done with oil instead of butter which has milk solids that burn and turn bitter).