What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.

It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.

And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).

It was a light hearted joke about the definition of “knowledge,” which is notoriously slippery.

They’re making educated guesses outcomes. That’s not knowing.

Oh shit do we need a crash course in epistemology here

There’s a time and a place for some intellectual humility, and that swings both ways. There are a lot of things we just don’t know about the people we’re close with, and at the same time there are a lot of things we don’t fully understand about ourselves, that the more objective outside observer may be able to identify pretty easily.

And that goes both ways in a parent-child relationship, a sibling-sibling relationship, a friend-friend relationship, or even a spouse-spouse relationship.

My wife certainly knows certain things about me that I myself have blind spots about. And vice versa.

I can change her

Coral can recover after bleaching, so the threshold for bleaching is different from the threshold for dying.

I mean it comes up basically every day here where people complain about censorship in a screenshot submitted to some shitpost or meme community.

where the fuck are these people buying detergent

I just did the math on mine, I’m paying about 10 cents per cycle for laundry detergent. Even if the ingredients to make my own were literally free, I’m still only saving about $5 per year. Not worth my time.

Yeah, I just looked it up. The name brand that I buy is $23 for 132 fl oz. With the way I use laundry detergent, at 0.5 oz per cycle, that’s 264 cycles for $23. Less than $.10 for the name brand stuff, maybe less for a store brand.

I have kids so I run 2 batches per week, but that’s still 20 cents per week for a family of 4. Not sure that’s worth making my own.

It happened a lot in our nation’s history that folks would have relatively simple kitchens not equipped with scales or even a set of measuring cups

That’s, like, every nation’s history. Cooking has never required that much precision, especially home cooking. Even baking can be done by feel, with enough experience.

I appreciate compliments. I have a hard time accepting overly specific compliments.

The original note that started this thread was on the overly specific side.

Whoa that slur will get you shadow banned from some social media sites

The Chinese have a method for curing eggs in alkaline solution until they turn black and somewhat translucent, too.

With olives, there’s basically no way to eat them off the tree and have them taste edible. They have to be processed in some way to remove the bitter compounds, usually by brining or curing. So using an alkaline brine is one method, and not that uncommon (even for other colors of olives).

Other uses of alkaline compounds in cooking include using a lye bath for browning for baking pretzels or bagels, certain types of springiness and chewiness for noodles (for example, for fresh ramen), and processing corn into cornmeal through nixtamalization.

Are you talking about the office or the sauna?

given the logo

…and the business model