That’s fair! I’ve often levelled this same argument against my friend when it comes to mastery and video games.

I mainly play video games during my lunch break at work. It would not really make sense to practice a musical instrument in the office.

Wow thank you for the very detailed reply! I’m saving this!

Yes I’m serious. I think my issue is that I use hot water to brew the tea and then ice to cool it down which makes it too watery!

But that’s the case even for home made bacon (or any home made smoked / cured food for that matter).

Every time I’ve brewed iced tea it always tastes super weak sauce. Canned/packaged iced teas taste wayyyyyy too sweet to me. I just want ice cold flavourful tea with a tiny bit of sweetness. How do you do that?

I’m sure Lipton iced tea is full of artificial colours and emulsifiers and possibly even fats for some reason, in addition to excessive amounts of sugar. I’m not going to defend that crap. No one should drink that stuff.

They’re not. I was just trying to give an example of something you could swap out the Lays for that would not be “ultra processed food” but still be just as unhealthy.

So instead of Lays they’ll start serving the kids fresh cut fries, double fried and generously salted.

The problem with those is all the additives, such as nitrates. You can also get nitrates from eating bacon which is not nearly as processed.

Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.

But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.

Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!

I think the runback is important to give you time to think. You can repeatedly attempt a difficult section of a game with a ton of checkpoints and get through it without actually learning it properly. You essentially get lucky that your hands do the right thing just enough to get by.

Imagine going to a piano recital where the person keeps messing up and repeating a difficult passage of the music, never actually being able to play the entire thing without making a mistake! That’s just not very impressive!

The goal of playing a difficult game should be to improve your skills and get better, figure out new strategies and use them in battle, not merely reach the end.

Ahh hello, European. As a Canadian I would like to point out that Canadians have rejected the demonym “American” (when it is applied to us) and have done so far as long as I can remember. We consider it offensive.

If you’re looking to start a fight with a Canadian, calling him an American is an easy way to do that.

Sandy is just so sweet. Makes me happy every time I see her!

Nintendo’s always been litigious and controlling of their brand. What they haven’t been (until recently) is price-gouging peddlers of derivative schlock resting on their laurels. They used to be afraid of low-quality games and rehashes diluting their brand (they witnessed the carnage of 1983). Now they just don’t care.

The question is: can you turn it into a product? Would people be willing to pay $100/lb for hand-pollinated almonds? It’s potentially something to explore on a small scale.

I would love to know how many vegans would pay that much for an ethical product.

Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?

I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.

One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.

You definitely could bring the wild pollinators back. I do that with my own garden in my backyard. But that means you’d have to remove parts of the orchard to provide a habitat for the pollinators, lowering the density of the trees. Lower density => lower production => smaller crop => more expensive almonds (or peaches etc).

If we want everyone to be vegan that’s gonna mean mostly giving up the luxury products that many vegans currently enjoy and switching to staples (beans, squash, corn, root veggies).

Manually pollinating thousands of almond trees is definitely possible. But then you should expect almonds to be in the same price range as vanilla pods, another manually pollinated crop.

The ones I always come back to are pollinator-dependent crops such as fruits and tree nuts. Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops. Presumably, if more people were to become vegan then we would demand them even more.

From what I know, vegans oppose the transportation of pollinators for pollinating these crops. Yet it seems most vegans eat plenty of them (apples, peaches, plums, almonds, avocados, etc).

To be fair, I think it’s pretty hard to get legitimate reviews from happy customers of a PSU. If it’s doing its job, you don’t even notice that it’s there. However if it fails, you’re likely to be highly motivated to go leave a negative review.

Not saying this is a good PSU. I’ve never used it; it could be a piece of crap with leaky recycled caps for all I know. The above issue is a possibility with many different utilitarian products.

I don’t apologize for or excuse anyone, I merely explain. Most people around here seem to prefer to hurl insults rather than understand the world around them. I block them.