Youtube comments of mindstalk (@mindstalk).

  1. Irish holy book, possible de-Christianization: "how we invaded and stole the land from our own gods".
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  2.  @muha0644  Every Soviet leader from Lenin on was a 'goon'. Stalin was the biggest goon. And by goon I mean a terrorist killer.
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  3. But everything changed when the Straight Nation attacked.
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  4.  @HaydenX  "wed, bed, behead" is Henry VIII
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  5.  @rightwingsafetysquad9872  "did the math" Dubious math, especially if you include the cost of building the car.
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  6. Great to hear!
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  7. Wikipedia Soybean Oil claims "Chinese records dating prior to 2000 BCE mention use of cultivated soybeans to produce edible soy oil.[3] Ancient Chinese literature reveals that soybeans were extensively cultivated and highly valued as a use for the soybean oil production process before written records were kept.[4] "
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  8.  @rightwingsafetysquad9872  But not including the manufacturing cost makes the comparison meaningless, even if the math is otherwise valid, which I doubt. Especially since different diets have different CO2 production implications.
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  9.  @bobraekevelt7953  no, eight. Viii. The one with six wives. "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived."
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  10.  @jc13781  "the research had to have DEI and esg as core tenants of said research" No, this is false. " instead of general science" Claiming that general science stopped happening is a lie, pure and simple.
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  11.  @rightwingsafetysquad9872  Just avoiding beef would slash the inferred food emissions by a lot. If people replace going to the gym with biking, then get emissions go down too: they're not "burning" more food, just getting more use out of what they eat. And the G-Wiz does not seem at all representative of electric cars. Certainly isn't in the US. Think big empty cars at high speed.
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  12. That's not just Tokyo, that's all of Japan. Goes hand in hand with the national ban on overnight street parking.
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  13. I feel like there should have been two more verses, one with 'cheese'.
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  14.  @panicontheargo7034  I've never heard this for Daedalus's origin. Hephaestus tried to rape Athena, came on her thigh, the wiped off semen + Gaia resulted in Erechthonius, whom Athena adopted, and he became an early king of Athens.
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  15. Half of kids would die by age 5 due to infectious diseases. Make it past that guantlet, and even a population life expectancy of 30 would imply that the other half of the population is living to 60. Of course some die earlier in adulthood, so others live longer. Hildegard was well-off and didn't risk childbirth, probably the biggest killer of adult women.
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  16. But as he says, combining proteins might be why grain + legume beat out just eating grains. People wouldn't have known about proteins, but the healthier people could have survived disease and warfare better.
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  17.  @perceivedvelocity9914  Amazing how the US was mostly settled (and crossed with trains) before cars existed. Somehow we coped.
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  18. In Japan, no tipping. Not even "leave the change".
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  19.  @quetevalgavergaaa  A review of studies found that exercise was about as effective in treating depression as psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs. Works for some, not everyone. Good to try it first, though; free and makes you healthier.
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  20.  @KairuHakubi  Which makes "the moon is green cheese" make a lot more sense.
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  21.  @orangeapples  I realized in Mexico City that I wouldn't have to worry about disinfecting my vegetables if I just made soup or stew with them.
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  22. Horseradish (mustard relative) is another European pungent. More southeast Europe, but cumin is native there, and used to be the table spice rather than black pepper. OTOH it's also true that I've had very bland white home cooking, like pure steamed broccoli, with no salt pepper or herbs. Or plain chicken breast. (And other white home cooking with a heavily used spice rack inspired by India)
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  23. I really doubt the acid of ketchup is noticeable against stomach acid. Lots of foods more acidic than ketchup too: salad dressing, Coca-cola (okay, not good for you), pickles, sauerkraut...
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  24. As Tooya says, Rome wasn't that old. The "official" back-date for the founding of Rome is 753 BC, and we start getting records of the Republic in the 400s BC, I think? But the First Dynasty of Egypt is around 3100 BC. The oldest coherent texts we've found are around 2600 BC, with writing being somewhat older than that. So basically there was 2500 years of history of urbanized states by the Rome was founded, including multiple empires rising and falling, and the whole Bronze Age Collapse...
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  25. Hades: I'm the good husband! Loki: I'm the good father!
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  26.  @mightisright  12 miles round trip, 6 miles each way, 3 hours each way, so 2 MPH. Which might seem slow... but 6 hours of walking will wear you down.
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  27. Chicken rice and veggies don't have to be plain. You can use the same base in many different ways. He did say "seasoned". Herbs and olive oil. Butter and cumin. Ginger and soy sauce. Etc.
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  28. Not to mention refrigeration later.
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  29. But that's the acid in tomatoes, not 'nightshade'.
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  30.  @XFlaviousX  'where the saying 'Getting the cold shoulder' comes from.' According to wikipedia, that's a folk etymology disbelieved by linguists. Its origin is attributed to Sir Walter Scott in a work published in 1816, based on mistranslating a line in the Bible.
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  31.  @toomanymarys7355  Literally false. The abortion ratio in the US is around 18 abortions per 100 live births. Child mortality in the 1800s was nearly 50% -- 50 dead children per 100 births. I trust that you support free and easy access to birth control, and public support for mothers and children, to reduce abortions.
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  32. To expand on the HEPA vs. CADR (clean air delivery rate) thing: If you were sucking air out of a room and passing it through a pipe to another room, with just one filter, then you would want as good a filter a possible, a la HEPA, with it's 99.97% or whatever filtration. You might want this for your HVAC system, especially if it's bringing outside smoke-ridden air -- if your HVAC is strong enough to push air through a HEPA filter, which it might not be. But a purifier off Amazon sits in a room, sucking in air, filtering it, spitting it out, and sucking in more air... some of which was already filtered, because air mixes. Here, filtering some air very well matters less than filtering all the air ASAP. Thus the idea of a MERV 13 or 14 filter taped to a fan, or the bigger Corsi-Rosenthal boxes with more filters (thus more area, lower pressure.) MERV 13 is filtering maybe just 50% of the worst size in a single pass, but by cycling a lot more air in a given time, the setup can supposedly clean a room faster than a similar sized HEPA purifier. And for much less money, as box fans and filters are generic items. While as the video clumsily indicates, some purifiers have become overpriced brand items. My own advice: if you don't do a filter/fan thing, look at CADR/$. The Levoit Vital 100S has 143 CFM (cubic feet per minute) for US$120 right now, $140 list price, with electronics for scheduling and such. The Core 300 is $100 for 140 CFM. So those options are 1-1.4 CFM/$. If you look at other models or brands, you shouldn't accept less than that, especially if it means paying for outright harmful features like ionizers. You probably won't get much better, though I think I calculated 1.6 for some model. Paying more for quiet might be worth it, but good luck. Sellers tend to advertise their high-setting CADR and their low-setting noise rating, which is not very helpful.
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  33. Princess Dragon Tamer
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  34.  @voicelessglottalfricative6567  Ah yes, a "non aggression pact" that involved dividing Poland with the Nazis.
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  35. The tankies like gareth and voiceless neglect to mention that breaking the USSR was very popular with non Russians. Sure, many Russians miss their empire, just like nostalgic Brits today.
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  36.  @newsaxonyproductions7871  I think the book more tracks the Aeneid. The divinely guided escape from destruction (Troy); stopping in a tempting false home (Carthage); founding a new home (Rome); the quest for women for the new home; the great battle; reconciliation.
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  37.  @TheBaldr  I lived in Japan, it was awesome and I wish I could go back. Dense urban neighborhoods are great.
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  38. I would think horseradish, too?
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  39. As others have said, safety regulations are written in blood.
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  40.  @BlckSWANWhtRbbt  I would really want to see the methodology on that stat. Lots of people have milk and cereal for breakfast, that's not "cooking" but it's home preparation. Or they just skip breakfast, which eliminates 7 of the 21 weekly meals. Then, many people live in households where someone else cooks. How is that counted? Or they eat leftovers. Or make a cold salad and/or sandwich. How are those counted?
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  41. Going by a Discworld novel, wearing all black is bad for stealth. If it's really really dark it doesn't matter what you wear (also you can't see), and if it's only very dark then your black clothes stand out as being darker than everything else. So you actually want dark gray/brown/navy blue.
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  42.  @bryanleeyf87  It is not clickbait to say that Americans have mostly preferred white yeast bread to sourdough. A simple walk down the grocery store aisle shows that it's fact, not bait. This is the country that invented Wonderbread and liked it.
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  43.  @tpl608  The US South lost the Civil War, but got to write the history books for decades. "Losers were killed" is entire too simplistic a take on history. Losers often surrendered.
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  44. "Ötzi had primitive tattoos" As Max mentioned in the video.
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  45. "Human bodies haven't evolved in all of recorded history, shall we say 10000 years" False. Adult lactase persistence has evolved in multiple populations. So have anti-malarial adaptations, I think in just the past 3,000 years. European white skin seems to have evolved in the past 6,000 years.
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  46.  @CharDhue  Perhaps because cigarette smoke can also have a yellowing effect. Where I grew up, the white living rooms were yellow due to accumulated smoke and tar.
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  47.  @gnualmafuerte  "government is never the solution, always the problem." So you want to abolish the police, right?
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  48.  @thedullohanvids  My father said something similar, that our Chicago neighborhood was safe because of an alleged gangster down the street. I never asked him how he knew... it's an early memory, so I suppose it's possible he meant his own Depression Boston childhood and I was confused.
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  49.  @cordeliacentauri1737  Some Japanese furniture like a futon and low table could be brought up the stairs. Also, I know some European cities have cranes, to lift furniture up to a (wide) window. Not sure about Japan.
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  50.  @kaymiller77  Yeah, even without trees (and the one drawback of those 16 feet streets is being too narrow for trees), being able to nearly hug the building provides some shade for much of the day. For wider streets, another East Asian thing is "five foot way" (look it up on Wikipedia), basically mandated covered arcades.
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  51.  @youstink6753  To say someone is immoral is saying they do wrong things while knowing better. The argument is that the Snow Queen is so alien she doesn't know better.
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  52. I would note that rectilinear grids are at least 4600 years old, going back to the Indus Valley Civilization and some construction in Egypt. They've also been used by Hammurabi's Babylon, Greek colonies, Roman cities, Chinese and Korean cities, old Japanese cities imitating Chinese ones, European "new towns" or bastides from the 1100s, Aztec Teotichuacan... Savannah's 'Oglethorpe Plan' had an interesting twist on grid design, check the wikipedia page.
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  53.  @walawala-fo7ds  "urbanists want to ban solitude" It's crazy how you just make up lies like that.
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  54.  @sunnyherndon1224  Long pepper is 'hotter' than black pepper. At any rate, both peppers had to be imported from India and beyond; cumin is grown in the Mediterranean, so much closer to home. Long pepper seems to have been bumped out by chili pepper, which was even hotter and could be grown in Europe.
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  55. Japanese land use is a lot closer to "free market" than the US is. Even in the most restrictive zone you can have a small shop in your house, or build rental housing, or yeah a commercial parking lot, and switch between them pretty much at will.
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  56.  @SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648  Roman literacy might have been pretty high. But writing books and getting them published -- by hand copy -- is still a high bar. And anything on papyrus and outside of Egypt (dry) that had a century or so of not getting copied, simply vanished from material decay.
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  57.  @orangeapples  Tap water in most of Mexico isn't trusted, due to old leaky pipes. So it's assumed that produce has bacteria on it, and just rinsing won't help. They use various chemicals to disinfect stuff like apples or lettuce at home.
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  58.  @liquidrime  "I genuinely think everyone envies the US cities" Lol no.
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  59.  @ShellyS2060  No pig for Muslims, no cow for Hindus.
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  60. @ordinarypablo  What a silly comparison. People need water to live. No one needs beef.
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  61.  @timothystamm3200  Plus the modification of "meat is so cheap in the USA, woo!"
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  62.  @ge2719  US livestock is fed subsidized maize and soybeans.
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  63.  @EdOfSchmed  The Trespasser's Society is from _Unseen Academicals_.
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  64. "a questionable neighbor illegally installed a fence" So worried about "crime" that he committed a crime.
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  65.  @capsaicinkat7767  A lot of what he did was providing goods and services that people wanted: alcohol and gambling. Is someone running a legal wineshop, or running a horse racing track, today not earning a real living?
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  66.  @bakrahabibi5471  But raisins are good!
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  67.  @chrishooge3442  Like Hamburg or Salisbury steaks.
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  68.  @Davesobscurevideos  Ah yes, how foolish to want better ventilation for no energy costs.
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  69. Also what matter is not the current Portuguese word for bread, but what they said in the 1500s.
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  70. The actual line in the Prologue of Fellowship is "And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them)." There's no mention of second breakfast, nor really any other mention of additional meals, apart from Two Towers when Merry and Pippin have a second lunch to keep their friends company at Isengard. LotR is absolutely full of references to breakfast, though. Tolkien seems to have assumed breakfast, lunch, and a large supper as the standard meal plan. (Yes, I just did a bunch of text searches.)
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  71.  @GeorgeLiquor  "not incredibly smart to make these areas almost impossible for trucks" Good thing that isn't happening, then. Trucks can use boulevards too.
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  72. Grade separation can be nice but is expensive. Especially if accessible (e.g. an overpass with wheelchair ramp and not just stairs.) Probably a lot cheaper to just make the intersections safer. Bulb-outs, median refuges, removing slip lanes or rounded corners that allow fast turns, roundabouts to slow traffic and prevent left turns... Of course, the state DoT might value slightly faster traffic over human lives and deny such improvements.
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  73.  @benjalucian1515  Well, a lot of them seem to have lived on street food...
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  74.  @gerardojasso9259  "Too dangerous for that now" No, it isn't. Crime isn't high most places, has been going down since the 1990s, and generally doesn't target children. "Stranger danger" is real but massively overblown by fearmongering news stations. The biggest threat to kids is cars, sometimes getting run down by their own parents who don't see a kid in the driveway from their massive SUV.
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  75. 2240 miles from London to Jerusalem, in a straight line. 20 miles/day, 110 days. And you're not a bird, so I'd guess double that. OTOH I'd guess you'd take a ship across the Mediterranean at some point, not be hiking through the Balkans and Anatolia -- especially given that the latter was controlled by Muslims. Paris to Rome is 688 miles, call it 700, so at least 35 days on foot. OTOH the Canterbury Tales pilgrims were just going from London to Canterbury, 55 miles.
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  76.  @JonMartinYXD  As it should be. The one really justifiable zone is "keep stuff that's inherently noisy, smelly, or potentially explosive away from everything else".
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  77. @ordinarypablo  Based on the fact that vegetarians exist. Plus I never even said people had to avoid all meat. Beef has far higher emissions than other meats. You know that people do not need beef to live. Why are you pretending otherwise?
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  78.  @toomanymarys7355  lol no
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  79. @ge2719  "Of the total US soybean tonnage produced, about 35 percent was fed to US livestock and poultry as soybean meal. " So you're wrong.
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  80.  @dusanmurgaski7597  "back when they told the truth?" There is no 'truth'. Europeans have been calling almond milk 'milk' since the Middle Ages. The regulations are just a corrupt redefinition of language.
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  81.  @dusanmurgaski7597  It's a milk, it's been a 'milk' for centuries. No one is confused.
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  82. Massive discounts and high churn explain lack of profit easily. I'm more surprised that Hello Fressh apparently is profitable.
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  83.  @chaptap8376  They wouldn't have known about specific vitamins or nutrients, obviously. But they might have done things because those things felt better, or because of 'tradition' (with people with different traditions not having had as many kids.) I suspect the latter is why you see grain and legume combinations: people wouldn't have known about complete protein (or protein at all), but people with different diet mixes would have been less healthy and successful, until they either imitated the better diet or got replaced by people who did.
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  84.  @LeviHildebrandYT  ...so?
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  85.  @GarudaLegends  "fruit and vegetables being the least nutritious food right above rice, beans, and legumes." Calling any of those non-nutritious is pretty ridiculous. You sound like a meat cultist and I say that as an omnivore.
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  86.  @Cat1313sai  "But Japan doesn’t have walkable cities. It’s even worse for bicycle." lol what Tokyo has 15% mode share by bicycle, Osaka 25%. And these are large cities where you can't bring your bike on the train. There's huge amounts of bike parking at train stations, including underground bike parking in Tokyo. I lived 3 months in Osaka, and not in the center. Very walkable, tons of bike use, and of course excellent metro trains. 5 supermarkets within a 12 minute walk of my house, itself 12 minutes from a major subway station. Kids walking and using bikes are common in manga and anime as in real life. Certainly not being driven around by their parents as in post-1990 USA. Japan doesn't have much in the way of bike paths or lanes, true. Streets are either shared and slow, or people take the sidewalk along fast roads. And it's walkable in the sense of "there's lot of useful tuff you can walk to from home", of course not "you can walk across the whole city" -- long distance is what mass transit is for.
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  87.  @ordinarypablo  Weird comparison, little dude. Crack shortens lifespan. So does a diet heavy in red meat. Being vegetarian lengthens lifespan. And evolution? Most humans ate beef rarely if ever. And they didn't eat modern factory farmed beef. You did not evolve to need beef. Even if you want to argue for meat, you don't need _beef_. Beef is not like water. Even meat in general isn't like water. You're just looking sillier and sillier.
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  88.  @fion1flatout  no, not rivals. Two important families, in different regions, that intermarried a lot.
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  89. Yeah, I just did some math for another comment, and hot dogs + whole wheat bread would get you 2x as many calories for the same cost, plus proportionally more protein and waay more fiber. Not that that's a good lunch but it was easy to research from my laptop, and it's indicative.
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  90. I made a butter sandwich for myself as a kid. Thick slices of butter between bread. Then I threw up. Amazingly, it did not totally ruin butter for me.
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  91. We already have lots of existing places, many of them in good locations; starting from scratch is a fantasy. Upzoning, infill, and redesign of existing roads.
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  92.  @brycemcewen6146  " Honestly a lot of people rent small flats like that as extra storage space" Could also work as a commuter home, rented for being close to the office, then go to your home further out on the weekend. Or for some high schooler sent off to a private school far from home, bonus of being smaller so they fit better.
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  93.  @shauncameron8390  "housing is a privilege" You think food is a privilege, too?
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  94. He talked about this in the video. Why ban pork for trichinosis and not beef for anthrax?
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  95.  @jgr7487  A pancake is not hardtack.
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  96.  @LeviHildebrandYT  That's like saying farmers prey on your need for food. If manufacturers were deliberately making air worse, then you could say 'prey'.
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  97.  @cayreet5992  What woman wouldn't like a creepy guy jacking off on her thigh? --and there's where Athenians came from.
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  98. "almost everyone who can drive" Bike friendliness is still important for those who can't, like kids.
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  99.  @toomanymarys7355  Also, your attempt at deflection is bad and you should feel bad. Compared to the number of abortions, hardly any women are murdered at all, let alone for child support reasons. And, well, I do support the state making sure kids are taken care of, and have thought forced child support payments were a poor way of doing so. Would make more sense for the state to pay mothers directly, and maybe to try to get money out of deadbeat fathers in compensation.
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  100.  @VeretenoVids  Gotta avoid trichinosis from unboiled vegetables :p
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  101. Modern example, in large apartment buildings: is this fire alarm yet another false alarm or smoking toaster, or the rare actual fire that means one should leave fast?
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  102.  @wanderingcalamity360  "Every time I've tried the historically accurate variety, I've been worried about chipping teeth on it. " That's why you crush and soak or boil them.
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  103.  @LifeWhereImFrom  "Microapartments are inhumane" say many people who went through college in dorm rooms that were even smaller... drives me nuts.
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  104. But they did have deaths before the changes.
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  105.  @kaymiller77  Yeah, I'm newly a fan of balconies and awnings (or other forms of shade, like Bermuda shutters.) A/C is magic but it'd be great to not need it as much, or to have housing that's habitable even in a power outage.
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  106.  @Archgeek0  And the Bishop Ring is a later (1997) and smaller version of the Banks Orbital (1987). Meanwhile Halo started development in 1998. And of course Nivne's Ringworld goes back to 1970.
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  107. Wow, the exterior looks exactly like the Chilean empanadas that my friends' maid would make. Stuffing is different: hers were usually beef, hard boiled egg (I think yolk and white, but it's been years), raisins, an olive, and I don't know the spices/seasoning. (Also empanada with just cheese filling for barbarian children.)
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  108. And note that they were calling it 'milk'! It's not some recent corporate branding.
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  109.  @mattwardman  I think "modal filtering" is the English for one of those concepts.
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  110.  @borttorbbq2556  Steel is lighter than silver. Around 8 g/cc vs. 10.5
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  111.  @kylegonewild  True about most of the modern world, but there's evidence of settlements before farming. Much more recently, the Pacifc Northwest had settled cultures without farming, living on the ecological richness of the region, especially the salmon runs. Jane Jacobs even speculated that it was early "cities" that invented farming.
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  112. Japan's malls look very different, though. Many stories tall. Parking off to the side in an adjacent garage you have to pay to use. I think I remember windows along the public walkways in my closest mall in Osaka. Supermarkets in the basement (near the subway entrances? I dunno the reasoning.) I actually lived near a very major train station, so there were malls of some sort on 3 corners, if not all four. What I described was one corner. Another had bigger stores in the basements, then I think even more above, but my friend and I didn't spend time there. A shorter (only 4-5 stories) mall on the third corner, we went mostly for the food court. Fourth corner with an older building, some quainter businesses like Don Quixote and a manga store.
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  113.  @Ryan-jm5jp  What book was that Mind in?
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  114.  @mamadouaziza2536  You're living in a delusion of fear. Crime isn't nearly that bad. Unless you personally know gang members, you're far more likely to be killed by a car than by a criminal.
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  115. Yeah, poor kid allergies are over determined. More air pollution (tend to live closer to or on car-heavy streets), more cockroaches or mold in housing...
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  116. Me before Fukushima: "I believe engineers can make safe nuclear reactors." Me after Fukushima: "But can I trust that they'll be allowed to, without cutting costs that result in disasters 40 years later?"
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  117.  @poisonpotato1  No one's trying to force you to do so. We're just asking for the freedom to build such things on our own property, rather than people like you using the government to tell us we can't.
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  118. "smell of rain" seems to really be "smell of soil bacteria products, aerosolized by rain impact"
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  119.  @kaneworsnop1007  As an actual pedestrian I love grids, especially with small block sizes. Navigation is trivial while allowing a variety of different (hence, more interesting) routes (assuming two points aren't just on the same street.) A route is no more than 42% longer (sqrt(2)) than a direct route, and a grid doesn't preclude the occasional diagonal, or of course a metro system that cuts across the street grid.
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  120. How did they have room to take prisoners?
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  121. Plus these apartments are far more stackable than vans (6 stories in this case!) and have full utilities.
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  122.  @JohnDegurechaff  The TVs aren't causing air pollution and clogging up public roads. Land value tax might be another non-ban curb on drive-thrus.
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  123. We want the same level of free stuff that drivers get.
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  124. I've seen useful shorts. I watch them more now that I use Video Speed Controller, which lets me change the speed, or rewind, on any HTML5 video, including shorts. My big complaint had been the lack of UI.
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  125.  @tpl608  You'd practice or take notes on wax tablets, not write history books. Papyrus in European conditions last decades; 200 years was considered extraordinary (wikipedia). By contrast there are multiple surviving Gutenberg Bibles from the 1450s, on paper.
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  126.  @ahmedel-sayedosman2951  There's also the opposite of recessed windows: latticework covered balcony, Mashrabiya. Windcatchers are pretty neat, though I think fans are pretty low energy compared to the rest of a developed lifestyle (like the fridge.) Just lowering the temperature of air would actually raise the relative humidity: cold air can hold less moisture before being saturated, so a constant amount of moisture would get closer to saturation. This is why clouds form as air rises and cools, the air reaches the dew point and moisture condenses. Air conditioners actually remove moisture as well, delivering cool dry air. I think a good future still has lots of air conditioning, but we should also build so it's needed less / doesn't have to work as well. Which means (in the US) upzoning so more people can live in dry moderate climates (like California and the Pacific coast, as well as using tricks like awnings, covered balconies, cross-ventilation architecture, etc. (Gven current trends, we also have to plan for the outside air being full of wildfire smoke, so not actually healthy to bring indoors without filtering.)
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  127.  @jchoward487  Especially if it lived with another hamster. Hammibal the Cannibal.
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  128.  @Kalabint  I'm glad someone else caught that!
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  129. That "Poor Knights" is pretty similar to US "French toast", though I don't know if we'd add sugar to the batter (vs. pouring syrup on afterwards)
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  130.  @stevieinselby  Well for existing cities, streets came first. If your pre-modern property lines and buildings are already only 5 meters apart, it would be devastating to widen the streets. Granted that doesn't stop people, apparently including even some parts of Japan, but it's significant. Japan is unusual in apparently keeping narrow streets even in newer development.
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  131.  @timogul  Metro transit can be faster than the congested traffic it bypasses. One reason biking is so popular in the Netherlands is that for short urban trips, it's often the fastest mode. Cars are diverted into longer routes around the city. There's also the cost dimension: if driving is a bit faster, but would cost a lot more in parking or congestion charges, do you drive? US massively subsidizes driving via parking mandates and free/cheap curbside parking.
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  132. Depends on destinations, too. A 10 minute walk to a convenience store will get some people walking even in hot weather. Also on how shaded the path is.
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  133.  @oldtc3615  IMO ideal is a covered balcony. Get most of the benefits of awnings, it's a rigid weather-resistant structure, and you get put yourself or plants 'outside' at the edge for more full sun.
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  134.  @briano9397  "No parent would let their child go" Incorrect.
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  135.  @jodofe4879  "People used to get paid in salt rather than in money (money wasn't really a common thing for most of history)." a) If they got paid in and could make purchases with salt, salt would be money b) There is in fact no evidence that Roman soldiers were paid is salt. 'salarium' does suggest "salt" but even the ancient Romans didn't know why, with Pliny guessing they had been paid in salt in the past. As far as we have any actual records, they were paid in loot or typical metal coins.
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  136. A Youtube sponsor that isn't a meal kit delivery, VPN, or website builder -- is that allowed?
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  137.  @admthrawnuru  Besides what @lyreparadox said, modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed to marginal environments by farmers; the peak h-g lifestyle we got to observe was probably the salmon run societies of the Pacific Northwest, which had social stratification, warfare, and slavery. But before farming there would have been lots of places like that. And in the Paleolithic, eating high on big megafauna like mammoths.
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  138.  @JonMartinYXD  Yeah, no reason a machine shop or textile (weaving) factory needs to be isolated, at least with sound proofing applied. I wonder why medium industrial excludes those things. Or what it means.
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  139.  @QTwentyTwo  Amazon Fresh: 2.79 for a Lunchable ham and cheese "cracker stacker", 340 cal, no fiber, 11 g protein. and a lot of the calories are from a cookie. 1.33 for a hotdog ($8/6 pack), 190 cal, 10 gr protein. 0.17 for a slice of whole wheat bread (2.79/loaf, lol), 100 cal, 3 g fiber, 5 g protein. So $1.50 for a hot dog + bread that's equal in calories (290) to the Lunchable minus cookie, with more protein and fiber. Or double the calories to 580 for about the same cost as the Lunchable. Not that that's a great lunch either but it's cheap and convenient and _better than Lunchable_. In reality I'd probably aim for a ham-cheese-lettuce sandwich, hell that's what my father gave me half the time (other half, PB&J with whole wheat bread and natural peanut butter) but that's slightly more research work.
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  140.  @ordinarypablo  Now you're just making up words and putting them in my mouth. I never said people hunted veggies. I said you don't need to eat beef. Lots of people through history have lived without eating beef, or even meat. So you're simply wrong.
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  141. Pontificating about the "decline" of a country and culture that survived for basically 3000 years, and even survived the Bronze Age Collapse, seems rather silly.
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  142.  @user-yr5yl6zt5l  " What can I eat instead of lots of refined carbs " Less-refined carbs. Whole wheat bread or pasta. Whole grains like oats or barley or brown rice. Legumes.
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  143.  @davidfetter  I'm guessing San Antonio was not a sundown town for HIspanics, given that Max mentioned Hispanic families living in San Antonio.
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  144. US associates step-through with women too. Odd how the "men's bikes" are the ones with a painfully located bar if you slide forward...
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  145. Doesn't seem to actually be true, sorry.
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  146.  @bon_dia_joves  Forgotten in lots of places. Lots of comments about Europe using rolling shutters instead, which aren't the same. Not sure about modern Asian construction; balconies often have a similar effect as awnings.
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  147.  @fluffysheap  There are various types of awnings, and overhangs beyond awnings. Fabric might not withstand the wind, but about about aluminum? Or something that's basically roof overhang but local to the window? Or a covered balcony, like the French Quarter galleries -- those survive actual hurricanes.
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  148.  @Homer-OJ-Simpson  Boston North End. Chicago went big on big streets even before the cars. Local streets are 66 feet, I think that's right of way rather than just curb to curb, but still.
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  149. @tommyshanks4198  This is a false argument. Goods and services need only a tiny fraction of the total traffic on city streets. Cities with few and narrow lanes still have lots of goods and services and deliveries.
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  150.  @LeTushie  " I guarantee people don’t lol. " Some do.
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  151.  @jazzjensen  And nutritionally, only the legumes (soy, pea) milks come close to comparing to cow milk. Almond or oat are jokes. I've never seen only almond milk anywhere, but my local Trader Joe's doesn't have any soy milk in the fridge section, only the shelf stable section. And only unsweetened soy milk (which is fine by me, but odd there aren't more choices.)
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  152. "when the coal that powers the grid does much more damage than gas" Actually, even years ago, studies were finding that electric cars had lower emissions than ICE cars in every state, even taking coal plants into consideration. And replacing coal with cleaner power automatically makes the EVs even cleaner. Of course, even cleaner is not using cars at all: allow walkable density, making biking safe, have public transit (more more efficient in a good city than cars.)
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  153. No "god of evil". Plenty of evil god candidates!
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  154.  @mrwolfdigtrainer  "Wyoming is freedom" Wyoming is federal subsidies supporting your lifestyle. California's taxes help pay for your roads.
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  155.  @hWat-Ever  Yeah. One curbside parking space can easily hold 7 bikes. 14 if they get very friendly.
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  156. "do you really have a democracy or is it just an aristocracy with extra steps?" Shrug If it's an aristocracy or oligarchy, it's a very large one. One with tens of thousands of members, rather than hundreds, and one which was politically egalitarian despite large wealth differences among the 'oligarchs'. Was the US an aristocracy before the 19th Amendment and civil rights movements, or was it a flawed democracy?
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  157.  @tuckerbugeater  mmm low effort comment spam
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  158. I've heard that California Missions were spaced around 30 miles apart, a day's ride.
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  159. " Who on Earth eats while in their car? " Lots and lots of Americans. If you're lucky they at least park somewhere to do so, but many eat while driving, too. "restaurants getting rid of dine in options...especially pizza places." At least the pizza places might be focusing on delivery, rather than drive-thru.
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  160. The ocean is smaller, but it's also dark and mostly opaque (except for sonar... which lets everything know you're there.) Space is at least transparent, you can see the horror coming. Down in the ocean, you may not see it until it starts knocking on the hull.
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  161.  @coreyhipps7483  Alas, the US largely doesn't have those transit systems, due to our choice to waste money on cars instead. And we really do have a huge amount of retail space per capita.
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  162. Worth mentioning the Dutch approach to biking, by analogy. They've done a lot of work to make biking safe and convenient, but that also include making driving inconvenient for urban trips, the "redesign your city" mentioned briefly in the video. Modal filtering means that bikes have direct routes, cars have to go around. People will bike when it's the fastest way to get where they're going. Same with transit, which can mean bypassing traffic and more direct routes. Also, frequency frequency frequency.
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  163.  @Volkbrecht  If true, that's fine, for many people for part of their lives. Americans spend their college years in dorm rooms that may be no bigger, and shared with a roommate. Workers may want a cheap place during the week, and go to their suburban home on the weekend. But also, that's not necessarily true. "Living" means different things for different people. An introvert who spends a lot of time on their laptop can "live" pretty well in such a place. (Plus, we're in the Zoom era.) A diligent student can likewise spend much of their time there, even if they socialize outside. There is no reason to ban building such homes.
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  164. And it's probably better than that; the ranking seems dubious.
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  165.  @BouXIII  Trees are great, but can do only so much if it's hot and humid all day and night.
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  166. In this case it's not "corporate greed" nor capitalism, unless by the latter you simply mean supply and demand. If supply is fixed and demand goes up, price goes up. In a sense, US wings are "overharvested" now the way lobster was -- not literally going down in supply, but demand outstripping supply. In the US, breast is the most expensive chicken part (after the modern wing), because Americans are scared of the fat of dark meat or something. In Japan, dark meat is like twice the price of breast, because they value the flavor more. No especial greed, just different demand, thus a different market-clearing price.
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  167. Spartiate/citizen women probably did have more freedom than other Greek citizen women; certainly other Greek men seemed to think so. But Spartiates were maybe 5% of the Spartan population, vs. the huge mass of helot slaves.
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  168. Hey, then there's Elcid Barrett...
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  169. They also need to allow more businesses nearby so there's someplace to _go_.
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  170. The convenience of cities is me being able to walk to almost everything I need in 5 or 10 minutes. Or families being able to have kids walk to school without being driven, or go do errands. As for taxes, it's not Cairo taxes that are keeping up the smooth pavement on that main street even as trucks rumble over it.
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  171. The other day I was reading about the ancient Roman grain dole, wondering how that worked when tenement dwellers didn't have cooking facilities. Wiki said you would take your grain to a baker, for milling and baking.
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  172.  @pennyforyourthots  "From what I understand, lactose intolerance is mostly a thing in Asia (China, Japan, Korea, etc) because of a quirk of genetics" Mammals produce milk to feed their babies; it's normal for adult mammals to not produce lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose. The "quirk of genetics" is northern Europeans being mutants who keep producing lactase even as adults. Aka "adult lactase persistance".
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  173. It is in fact not obvious why you shouldn't be able to run a grocery store from your living room.
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  174. Everyone deserves clean air, but in the meantime, fitted high quality masks like KF94s can make being outside (or inside, if you don't have an air purifier) safer in the face of polluted air.
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  175.  @grayrabbit2211  But the video didn't mention the idea, or the configuration.
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  176.  @rambcio4199  "Ofc u dont prefer worse quality, worse safety, worse aerodynamics, bigger weight, worse performance, worse clotches" If the last one is supposed to be clothes: most people prefer biking in their casual everyday cloths, not special biking outfits. As for 'quality' and aerodynamics and performance, there are other criteria, such as safety, which you've misattributed. Also theft risk. A cheap heavy thick-wheeled bike gets me various benefits compared to an expensive road bike * low temptation for theft * low financial loss if it is stolen * riding safely over gravel and potholes and road debris * less likely to get the tire caught in a slit like hitting streetcar tracks at the wrong angle * a more comfortable and safer posture Also, commuters/utility bikers are often carrying things. I doubt the aero benefits of a road bike matter that much when you're hauling two large shopping backs in your rear baskets.
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  177. This video wasn't very informative and contained no dark truths. Yes, some purifiers are overpriced and overhyped, with features you don't need or even want (ionizers). But "clean air" is not a made-up concern any more than clean water is, and there's no air equivalent for municipal tap water. Smoke is a real problem for many. Urban and suburban particulate pollution from cars is a real problem for very many. Airborne germs are a real problem and yes good filtration or ventilation do a help a lot. More useful would be telling people to look at air quality maps like IQAir and PurpleAir, or to get home air quality monitors, to judge their non-disease needs, and also how to evaluate air purifiers. (If you're getting less than 1 CFM/$, you're getting ripped off.)
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  178. Yeah, I think "jigsaw puzzle" is where Wegener started. Though there are other details: similar species on both sides of the Atlantic, mountain ranges that could line up. OTOH the idea of continents drifting around seemed pretty absurd. Until the seafloor spreading data came in in the 1950s, which apparently pushed people over into "okay this did happen, let's figure out how". Thus plate tectonics, to explain continental drift. (Likewise, people have had ideas of evolution -- species change -- before Darwin; Darwin and Wallace provided the _mechanism_, natural selection, that made evolution more plausible. As well as tons of evidence of it having happened.)
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  179. "There is nothing nice in this" $250/month rent is pretty nice. Do you feel that college dorms, often no bigger and shared with another person, are inhumane? Many people are happy to live in such places at least for a while. Who are you to get in their way?
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  180. Some sea men, even.
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  181.  @omegoa  So, just like drivers, then.
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  182.  @zachariah7114  Lol at comparing "no plastic bags" to 1984. Real lack of scale you've got there.
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  183.  @azurastar3223  Most humans through most of history and pre-history have mostly eaten whole foods, in most cases biased toward plants (including lots of legumes with whole grains.) Modern Westerners just aren't conditioned to it.
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  184.  @katnero-campbell6393  Downhill service but much cheaper flights.
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  185. Tests have found that manyKF94s have very good filtration, above 99%. Getting tight fit is their problem.
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  186. Don't know how old our fridge was, but growing up in the 1980s, we had the occasional defrost ritual. Speed it up by putting pots of boiling water in the open freezer. If you waited too long, no room for the pot. We also had a chest freezer in the basement, which I guess had defrosting? had a bit of ice but never a huge buildup.
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  187. Hating being a slave isn't the same as hating slavery. Probably many urban slaves hoped to be freed so they could save up the money to buy their own slaves.
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  188.  @Puerco-Potter  Good thing no one was trying to police anything like that, then.
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  189.  @briano9397  "no parent will ever let their kid bike on paths to school." False again.
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  190. "the solution is having the ring spin," The Ringworld already spins, to provide gravity (people live inside the ring's curves, not outside, as should have been obvious from the video.) The speed to generate one Earth gravity, at a radius of around 1 AU, is already such that Niven had to postulate an impossibly strong substance (far beyond carbon nanotubes, I think closer to neutronium) to prevent it from ripping itself apart. And none of this affects the gravitational instability. Once the ring is off-center, the stars pulls more strongly on the nearer part, and it will fall in. Search "ringworld instability".
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  191.  @MatthewTheWanderer  Bad for you anyway, if not "death food". Frosted flakes are over 1/3 sugar. Kids are growing up eating basically candy for breakfast.
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  192. fatsecret says one large stalk of celery has 50 mg of sodium, and another page says the minimum needed is 200-500 mg of sodium a day.
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  193.  @Nayenezgani  And by 'servants' we mean 'slaves'.
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  194.  @johnnye87  Yeah, as someone good at programming and math, it can be really hard to explain things I think are obvious now to someone who doesn't get it. In high school I was a teaching assistant for a programming class. The students were roughly 1/3 "fun to talk to, didn't need our help", 1/3 "did need help with guidance and debugging, which we could provide" and 1/3 "beyond our ability to help", not having anything like my mental model to see things like "your program didn't compile because you've pasted badly and it's not even a complete block of code".
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  195.  @sandal_thong  "one of the anchors of surviving malls is a supermarket." When I stayed in Toronto in 2021, I was a 10 minute walk from a mall with a supermarket (where I shopped), plus an optician where I got new glasses and a dentist where I got one of my post-covid teeth cleanings. There was a parking lot, but there was also an entrance right off the street and sidewalk, so you didn't have to dodge cars to get inside. Plus food course, and lots of other businesses. Seemed pretty health, even with covid and people still masking. One-story building though, unlike Asian malls. Transit... I think it was a short walk from a subway station, though not directly connected.
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  196.  @mamadouaziza2536  Stop living in fear.
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  197. Pork is usually quite a bit cheaper than beef. Dried beans even cheaper. You can calculate protein/calorie ratios, but: 40% of egg calories come from protein beans can be tricky because a lot of labels count fiber as calories for some reason, but I think 30-40% is realistic. whole wheat bread and pasta are about 14-17% peanuts 18%, and real nuts are lower potatoes 10% whole milk 22%, and lower fat milks will be higher 85% lean ground beef 33% sardines in oil 46%
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  198.  @shifty_dragon  "The number of comments here talking about Halo as the obvious example of a BDO meanwhile their primary example was some Star Trek episode" Her first example might have been V'Ger or something; her primary example was Niven's Ringworld. Which came nearly 30 years before Halo, probably inspired it, and is far, far, far bigger. One could just as easily say you seem to have a limited diversity in the media you've consumed, not knowing the classics like Ringworld or Rama.
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  199. pemmican: dried ground meat and fat. What's European dried ground meat and fat? Sausage filling, particularly stuff like salami or summer sausages. Though those are also fermented and salted -- and, apparently, tastier.
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  200.  @Zraknul  US and Canada zoning often require a 20 foot front setback. With a 40 foot lot width, you could put a whole small house in the front yard, a yard that will hardly ever get used. So much waste.
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  201.  @visionaryvapor8207  The US is the third largest country in the world by population. Took me like 15 seconds to look that up on wikipedia.
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  202. " it is cramped and chaotic. " I agree it's not the prettiest, especially in Street View photos. The big drawback of the narrow streets is no room for trees, though some streets are lined by people's potted plants. On the other hand, actually walking around wasn't bad, and I lived there for three months. And there are tradeoffs: the narrow streets means a very high ratio of taxpayer to street, and thus great maintenance. Building design is up to the owner, no aesthetic commissions, which can mean uglier and more chaotic buildings, but also cheaper ones with faster construction, and also quirkier buildings.
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  203. ​ @thederp9309  "when a US citizen hears the word “America” they can only think of the US" No, context matters. "Americans fly to Japan" is people from the US, "Americans discovered nixtamalization" is "people in the Americas". Words have different meanings based on context. I am from the US.
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  204. "often encourage food wastage by requiring you to buy a larger quantity than you want." Equally, it encourages you making multiple meals using that ingredient. "a half-sized item at 80% of the full-sized item" Economies of scale are real. You're paying for not just the food but packaging, shipping, store rent, store labor costs, store profit. So half the food does not mean half the cost to the store. Likewise, the cost of ingredients is maybe 30% the price of a restaurant dish, so they could literally double the size of the dish while raising the price only 30%, thus 'encouraging' either overeating or prudent use of leftovers. But conversely a half-sized dish would only save 15% of the cost.
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  205.  @jelsner5077  How about they build some BRT or light rail instead, which can carry far more people than a lane of cars?
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  206.  @luisfilipe2023  "I doubt they actually had worse living outcomes" The evidence of old bones suggests otherwise. Early farmers were shorter, and I think showed more health problems. Farming produces more food per land, but less diverse food, and can take a lot of labor; there's also a huge increase in diseases of all sorts. Food storage may look more secure (when you have surpluses to store) but foraging a wide range of food sources might be more secure in reality.
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  207. Yeah, just the other day I read wikipedia saying people would take their Roman grain dole to a baker for milling and baking.
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  208. For most First World people, if you're worried about few-day power outages, it's simplest to just have a stock of canned and dried food, rather than getting into home preservation. Even if you grow a lot of fruit or veggies in your garden, or buy bulk food on sale, preservation is competing with buying a big freezer.
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  209. That was sold as "mulled cider" in a bar in Massachusetts.
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  210.  @Trey-bien  Even one bad block or intersection in the bike network can wreck usage.
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  211. "The only time we really all tackled an environmental issue was the ozone layer issue," That's the big success story for global environmental issues, though there's also stuff like mostly banning whaling, and other endangered species protection. Nations have tackled national-level environmental issues multiple times: Clean Air or Water Acts, Endangered Species Acts, etc. But yes, it's easier to tackle an issue if it's fairly cheap to do so.
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  212. "The earliest mention that we have of pasta and cheese being joined together dates back as far as 160 BCE, when Marcus Porcius Cato, ultraconservative senator of the then Roman Republic, wrote his treatise on running a vast country estate, De Agri Cultura. In it, he included a few recipes for ritual gatherings and holidays that bring together what could be construed as pasta and fresh cheese. “Placenta” (pronounced with a hard c) is one of those. It was made with layers of cheese packed between stacked sheets of whole grain dough."
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  213.  @Bionickpunk  Even without HOAs, American zoning laws can be very stupid and restrictive. We hate our neighbors being free to have a duplex or corner store.
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  214.  @plangineer1375  What if you wanted a raised bike lane? I guess that would cut off the existing drainage from the remaining road, and get expensive again?
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  215. Cheap bikes; no way to quietly truck stolen bikes off to Eastern Europe; registered bikes; and maybe Japanese culture too. Supposedly a lot of "bike theft" is some drunk businessman 'borrowing' an unlocked mamachari and leaving it somewhere, with the police finding and returning it later.
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  216. They didn't drop from the Bronze Age to a new stone age until they discovered iron. They discovered iron, and then the Bronze Age collapsed.
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  217.  @kaneworsnop1007  A place has to be very dense, or have very narrow sidewalks, for pedestrian congestion to be a real problem. And pedestrians are small enough that I don't see 'funneling' as a problem of grids, unless everyone is literally going to the same place, in which case your street layout won't matter in the end. As for 1 vs. 1.5 miles, a different layout is going to have different trips that are long, I'm not sure there's that much savings. Unless you devote more and more space to streets in different directions, which has its own tradeoffs.
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  218.  @bellenesatan  "Judaism doesn't have a concept of Hell," The concept of divine punishment does not require Hell. Ask Job, Noah, Sodom, Lot's wife...
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  219. Well, you're taller people.
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  220. For pedestrians on stroads, even a narrow and ugly refuge is much better than no refuge. It makes a HUGE difference to be able to just look for a break in one direction of traffic at a time, rather than trying to dash across 4+ lanes going in both directions. In Richmond BC, Google was telling me to cross a busy road away from the distant streetlight, which seemed madness, until I realized that a short but wide bulb of grass allowed for staged crossing. Also, real solid bollards (not flexposts) are awesome and should be deployed liberally anywhere that fast cars and pedestrians interact.
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  221.  @toomanymarys7355  Living in fear and delusion.
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  222.  @DKF_oli  Well aren't you silly.
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  223.  @andrewsuryali8540  I think they ate fish too, but fish pemmican sounds unlikely to me.
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  224. "houston/austin/dfw takes all the money" Big cities generate most the money and pay most of the taxes.
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  225.  @mikek191  "Oat Milk without corn and soy subsidies? Would never exist! " Please explain how subsidies for corn and soy help an oat product.
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  226.  @HolgerJakobs  "They should introduce shops for daily needs in suburbia." Well, it's bad design from the legal zones up. Typically there isn't enough population to support local shops, and even with upzoning, it would take a while to get the density -- and without massive population growth, it couldn't happen everywhere; some places would get less habitable.
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  227. @ianhomerpura8937  It's not "excuses" to point out that US law is different. The stuff you describe is not allowed here. I think those are bad laws and HOA rules, but they're still what we have.
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  228. ninja lembas balls
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  229.  @R_V_  So you support drastically loosening zoning codes?
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  230. That does seem the most sensible approach. But then one would likely cancel after exhausting the provider's variety, or to take advantage of more sign-up discounts. Thus the churn.
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  231.  @danielernandes4989  Not just medieval Europe. Merchants were considered the lowest rank of society in Confucian thought.
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  232.  @BogeyTheBear  But Max mentions prisoners sometimes being taken aboard.
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  233. A spectrum of common elements also applies to the ancient Greek city-states, AIUI. Popular assembly, council or aristocrats, king; but differing in the balance. Athens ended up with a very powerful Assembly, and unique(?) elements like the juries, but there are still traces of the others. Homer's Odyssey portrays Telemachus, the young prince, calling and speaking to an assembly of citizens, asking for aid against the suitors.
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  234. They couldn't have. They could have known that rotating the right crops led to better crops than just growing the same thing in place year after year. How they found that, I don't know, but it's something trial and error could reveal.
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  235. "it's free." Well, kind of. If you replace $50 shoes every 500 miles, it comes out to 10 cents a mile...
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  236.  @James-vn8zb  Too bad you never learned compassion for kids.
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  237.  @cxssetteman182  traditional pancakes would use buckwheat, which is slightly higher fiber than whole wheat, and certainly high enough. Veggies, I got nothing
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  238.  @sahasrahla7  Roller shutters for homes are pretty much unknown in the US. (Businesses are more likely to have them.) "The only benefit of awnings is that your rooms still get some daylight," That's a huge benefit.
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  239.  @illiiilli24601  Thanks! I see in my journal I did watch it a few years ago.
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  240. I dunno about Williamsburg, but many Latin American cities have a square at the center -- for military purposes. The Plaza de Armas, where soldiers would gather and drill in parade. Could double as a marketplace the rest of the time. Greek agora or Roman forum would also be central plazas in a new city, for market and democratic purposes. No symbolism needed.
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  241. Numenor had been sailing around the world for 2000 years and running an empire for at least 1000, so some level of diversity can make sense for them. Also its location is basically subtropical, not that far north of the "Girdle of Arda", so darker skin (even if just tanned) makes sense too. The royal family was implied to be a bit inbred but I'm not sure there's anything to actual rule out some intermarriage, a la Aldarion and Erendis. And of course the last legitimate ruler of Numenor was in fact a queen, Tar-Miriel, though how that jives with Rings being made 1500+ years earlier is another matter...
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  242. " Paths, like alleys, are mugging-grounds. " Stop living in fear.
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  243.  @Distress.  Yeah. eminent domain a 5 foot wide path, 2.5 feet from each of two properties.
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  244. Dang, that's brutal. My college was tiny so probably unusual, but we had little kitchens in all the dorm hallways, and needed them since the meal plan only fed us on weekdays. Meal plan was a cafeteria/food service, with (student) waited dinners even.
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  245.  @TheDanEdwards  Yeah, that.
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  246. New tech doesn't always grow exponentially, and never without bound. Plateaus are reached, and there's no guarantee the plateau for lab meat would be competitive against even un-subsidized farm meat.
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  247.  @729MendicantTide  Malls and major subway stations are very frequently connected in Japan. But they'll be multi-story malls, probably with windows.
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  248. You also won't get to the store faster by car if there's nowhere adjacent to park your car. I didn't see car parking by your store, and of the four markets near me when I lived in Osaka, the closest car parking was a paid garage adjacent to Tennouji station... with the markets in the basement of the station. So you're walking a few minutes anyway. Vs. abundant and free or very cheap bike parking right by the entrance of the non-train station markets, and outside Tennouji. As for the video points: yeah! across the board. Living in Osaka and seeing its 25% bike mode share showed me that the Dutch bike paths aren't vital. What's vital is separation from fast cars, done by slow shared streets (both countries), or separation on fast roads via dedicated path (Dutch) or multi-use wide sidewalk (Japan, as you highlight.) People are happy to bike as long as they're not scared of being run down. I was tickled to see the MITT chart of fastest travel times. The blogger kchoze had made similar graphs, to understand by bus service is terrible in major Japanese cities (answer: it's squeezed out by walking, biking and trains; bus is almost never the fastest mode, unless maybe you can't walk far due to age or something.) Never knew there was an official version!
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  249.  @TTFerdinand  More like insufficient gruel(ing) :p
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  250.  @briano9397  Your reasoning is invalid because your claim is simply false. Many parents do let their kids bike on paths to school. End of story.
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  251.  @cbpostservice  I've also seen "rear wheel lock"
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  252. I think building height maximums in Japan default to a function of street width and setback. Wider streets, or upper stories that jut back, allow more height. I think that near train stations this is often waived to "as high as you want".
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  253. I like them for the simple reason that they have good products at low prices. When I first got into them, they had whole wheat pasta for only a slight premium over regular, vs. like double-price in mainstream supermarkets, though that's changed. They're still a great source of frozen fish, cheese, and nuts. Currently I can get basically the same whole wheat pita for $1.99 at TJ or $3.99 at Safeway, do the math. Cheapest soy milk around me too, though my transportation option doesn't favor hauling liquids home from there. Their European style yogurt is like 2/3 the price of Strauss's, probably the same product. Etc.
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  254. There's also variation, like protected roundabout designs, or adding beg button yield lights for a more official "stop for pedestrians now".
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  255.  @lakrids-pibe  As a kid, breakfast was regular corn flakes and milk. I sometimes sprinkled a bit of sugar on it... I suspect this was still a lot less sugar than frosted flakes, but cannot verify. Sometimes added raisins or berries (straw or blue), which would be healthier.
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  256.  @ISpitHotFiyaa  And how is food cooked by another household member counted? Some people both never cook and always eat home-cooked food.
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  257.  @jamesverhoff1899  Interesting! I never heard or thought of 'opening' mail suits. But front opening brigandine was common, AIUI.
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  258. It is acceptable to live in such places. Why do you think you have the right to impose your preferences on others, @carbonwarrior ?
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  259. But months didn't have the same length year to year.
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  260. My parents said that when they traveled in Europe and Egypt in the late 1970s, and said they were from Chicago, people would light up and make fingerguns and make "rat-a-tat-tat" sounds. The gangster rep lasts long.
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  261. Peacocks seem exotic and are from India or SE Asia... but then, so are chickens, originally. And peacocks are in the same family as chicken, turkey, and pheasants. Maybe they're not that different from a really pretty chicken.
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  262.  @cmdrls212  Is it freedom when other people have to pay for your choices?
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  263. The stewed crabs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfRpxj29RXE Nothing like over boiling seafood to make you question whether the recipe-writer was human.
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  264. " Is it really their problem if they're popular?" If they're dumping costs on other people via air pollution and clogging the public street, then yes, it is a problem.
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  265. Electric trains are quite CO2-efficient, and most people simply are not going to bike the distances efficiently covered by trains. As for sedentary issue... you walk to the train, and if it's crowded, stand as well.
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  266.  @Qwayeasn  "And what happens to rich people? They have everything and get bored." I don't think that's a valid generalization. I'm sure it happens to some, especially if they're in a culture that frowns on work. But no one has everyone. One can be more materially ambitious, or into reading, or research, or helping people. There's tons to do.
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  267. Chicken wing dishes as we know it depends on cheap and mass-produced chicken, which is from like 1940s USA. Historically, eating a chicken wouldn't be that common, and you'd eat the whole chicken, not somehow have buckets of wings left over.
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  268.  @jsynsmsrx-j5s  The curry made in Japan is its own thing now, pretty different from Indian curry.
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  269. Might work better with traditional Japanese furniture. Folding futon (not the couch-bed Americans call futons, actual 3-section mattress), low table you kneel at, etc. Stuff that you could actual bring up those stairs.
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  270.  @buddy1155  "crime ridden ghetto hell holes" The US has some of these, like in the North End or Beacon Hill of Boston, or some old alleyways of Philadelphia. They're high-value, expensive neighborhoods. Many places have somewhat wider streets: sidewalk, parking, one travel lane, parking, sidewalk. They're fine, not ghettoes.
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  271.  @Bionickpunk  It's not "more humane", you just like European aesthetics more. The first thing you need for "human planning" is affordable housing, and Japanese cities have excelled there. Japan is also quite good at transportation infrastructure.
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  272.  @Boomdizzle99  Much of NYC was famously built for poor immigrants. "Tenement apartments". Harlem. Chinatown. Cities have recently become places for the rich, because Americans want to live in walkable cities again and our zoning laws limit the supply. Demand goes up, supply is fixed, prices go up. If we were a free country we would be building a lot more such places, and prices wouldn't be so high.
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  273.  @hulahula6182  covid-19/SARS2 was more like 1% mortality before widespread vaccination. The mortality rate of a new virus can be much higher: SARS1 was 10-30% fatal. And SARS2 has a much higher rate of long-term health effects: blood clots, heart damage, brain damage, induced diabetes... The Federal Reserve estimates that around 1% of the US population is too disabled to work, due to covid.
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  274.  @flingonber  It's no more 'greed' than asking your boss for a raise, or taking the job offer with the highest salary. And not raising the store price wouldn't make wings more accessible, it would just mean stores were out of wings most of the time. Though maybe 'scalpers' would re-sell them at a higher price.
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  275.  @flingonber  They would be equally left out if there's no wings on the shelf. Messing with prices does not making a supply shortage go away.
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  276. East Asia seems to really love building balconies, which breaks up much flatness. Less obviously used for pleasure liking hanging out, more for drying laundry and putting out plants, and having access to the mini-split A/C compressor unit outside.
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  277. That's true in Japanese too. gohan for cooked rice, but also meals -- asagohan, breakfast (morning rice), hirugohan lunch (noon rice).
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  278.  @nickthenuker7916  I'm guessing that's a Simplified Chinese character, not the traditional one. The right hand side is similar, left side less so.
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  279.  @FoCoBuzz  "I respect yours and I expect you to respect mine" Sure, soon as we can stop subsidizing suburbs with handouts paid for by urban taxes.
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  280. Practical concern: flour is denser than hardtack (dunno if it's easier or harder to keep safe), but then you also have to carry the fuel to cook it. (Also water to make the dough, but then you need liquid to soak the hardtack, so that might be a wash.) Seems to me that unleavened pancakes would be a lot easier to make. Not big and fluffy but fresh-ish and soft. Still a lot of work though; no waiting for rising or long baking, but having to quick-cook pancake after pancake.
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  281. The video mentions whole-home HVAC units as split. But Japan and Australia have ductless mini-splits, which are small and per room, and just need an outside mount and hole in the wall. So still bad for renters (though he mentions portable ones! ground or balcony...) They're still expensive compared to window units, but efficient and quiet, and let you control the temperature of a room rather than the whole house. Japanese ones also have a heating mode which should be simply reversing the cooling cycle heat pump. Electric heat a la space heaters just turn electricity into heat via resistance, and yeah that's expensive. But heat pumps can give you like 4x as much heat because instead of wasting electricity they use that power to move heat in from outside. At that point they can be cost-competitive with gas heat. The mini-splits I saw in Australia didn't have a heating mode, but a friend claims they don't need it.
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  282. The "don't call it milk" thing is so dishonest, and I'm sad to hear that argument worked in Europe... which has used (and labeled as such) almond milk since the _Middle Ages_. People have been calling various white fluids "milk" for hundreds or thousands of years.
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  283. There's more and more evidence that PM2.5 (particular pollution) is bad for you even at 'moderate' levels that don't trigger smog warnings. The EPA recently lowered its threshold for 'Safe' from 12 to 9 mcg/m3; the WHO had already lowered its threshold from 10 to 5. And it doesn't have to be 'constant'. Just a couple weeks of 200+ AQI is pretty unpleasant, and dangerous for some people.
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  284. If you want bread and pasta, look for whole wheat (or other whole grain.) Current recommendation is 14 (or more) grams of dietary fiber a day, so 28 in a 2000 calorie diet. The average American eats 16 grams of fiber a day. A traditional rural peasant diet, dominated by whole grains, legumes, and vegetables, will easily be 60+ grams a day. There's a lot of evidence of fiber being positively good for your health, as well as being more satiating than refined carbs. And of course with a diet like that you're not eating a lot of red or processed meats, which have their own problems.
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  285. @amanawolf9166 I believe you! But is there an easy explanation of why cells are hard, and brewing beer or fermenting yogurt are relatively easy?
    2
  286.  @captainunderpants200  " Every technological achievement ever has been motivated by the desire to do less work" No, sometimes tech enables things that weren't doable before. Vaccines. Submarines. Going to the moon. Microscopes.
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  287. The Ringwold is in fact not functioning fine, though I think that's because later natives made off with part of the mechanisms. I wanna say Varley's Titan was having problems too, but I might be confusing it with another BDO story.
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  288. It's basically a simple Hamburg steak, with Wheaties in lieu of bread crumbs, no?
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  289. "It doesn't work except for all these places in the real world where it works." Width helps. Also, well, who's biking? Where you see really mass biking, like Netherlands or Japan, most bikes aren't that fast. Heavy bikes, upright posture, no helmets, speeds around 10 MPH; not 20 MPH road bikes. Having more separation is nice, when you can, but if you can't, it's still better to have a path than not. If you're on a fast bike, just slow down. Or if you want to keep going fast, stick to the roads.
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  290. a) I doubt we know b) how they agreed on sacred Olympic games is probably equally mysterious c) spear and a 90 cm wide round shield is pretty common kit world wide. A one-handed spear is cheap and easy to learn, and I'll quote acoup dot blog: "With a 90cm diameter, a hoplite aspis is going to cover a hoplite from just above the knee to the shoulder; a medieval roundshield has a similar level of coverage". The size is probably guided by the typical man's body, both in defending it and in working together in a shield wall, an arm's length apart.
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  291.  @cinemapigeon4898  Except it's not just in the idea phase. As the video said, bioreactors have been in use for decades by pharmaceutical companies. Vat meat wants to take a mature technology and say they can do it 1000x cheaper, somehow. I note that we have no commercial supersonic planes today, despite many optimistic predictions.
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  292.  @admiralkaede  "plant milk is just a term for plant juice" We've been using terms like "almond milk" and "soy milk" for centuries.
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  293. Some would dispute whether we're really a first world nation.
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  294.  @randomdude4505  " I also don't think we should pass laws that prohibit people from being able to do whatever they want with their property" Wait till you learn about zoning laws
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  295. Mamachari and omafiets are pretty similar, yes. I'm not sure if there was direct inspiration or just convergent evolution. I suspect the latter: similar problems, similar solutions.
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  296.  @Sp4mMe  Yeah, the oldest city grids are at least from 2600 BC, in the Indus Valley. Egypt had some at the same time.
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  297. Only Mr. Potato lost his head.
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  298.  @delicate_genius  No one looks down on the lower class more than the lower middle class, eager to differentiate themselves from the rung just beneath.
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  299. I just did a websearch on that. Ignoring Richard Gabriel who apparently thinks he can talk about Moses as a historical general, the consensus seemed to be that he couldn't. He had 40k surviving troops, Rome had 20k defensive field forces, 200k civilians behind walls, and the ability to _raise even more armies_. And to feed them, while Hannibal didn't have reliable supply or a port he controlled. And Rome still had loyal allies even after Cannae. So trying to besiege Rome would have been facing superior forces, without food, and open to getting flanked by Roman allies. So he ran around trying to get more of his own allies or secure a port. They also say Hannibal's goal was to break up Rome's coalition, and/or make Rome sue for peace due to humiliating defeat. Rome's goal was to not lose, no matter what. And, as a large republic, had very deep pockets of money, manpower, and morale to just keep going. Kill 8 legions? They'll raise another 8, and change their tactics.
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  300. "Qeng Ho reckoning of time is based on Unix Epoch which dates from January 1, 1970 and counts seconds" But they've forgotten that, and think the epoch is from the first Moon landing (an obviously more significant event!) with an unexplained 6-month offset.
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  301. N95s are called respirators. But they're designed to stop *particles*, not gases or fumes. There are some disposable N95s that include a carbon filter, but if you have lots of fumes to worry about then you're better with a cartridge-based respirator.
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  302. North won the US Civil War. South won the history books for 100 years.
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  303. Nah. All development should be friendly to people on foot or bike, period. Or at least as friendly as the density allows.
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  304. I feel I still saw tons of biking when I suffered through August in Osaka. I wasn't paying that much attention to it, though. Note, though, that around 3/4 of bike trips are under 4 km, and many of them are under 2 km. Lots of people don't have cars, and driving short trips is inconvenient anyway. So these are trips where if you weren't biking, you'd be walking in that humid heat. Would you rather walk 10 minutes to the supermarket, or bike?
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  305. I've never tried the ketchup, but when I was growing up one of our hot-weather meals was cottage cheese, pineapple, and potato chips (US chips). Still tasty, as is potato chips and cottage cheese by themselves. Or chips and yogurt. I could say something about the sweet and sourness of the pineapple enhancing the cheese or something, and the chips providing crunch. That Nixon photo, though. Ours was canned pineapple chunks mixed in with cheese. Tasty but wouldn't be my choice of a last meal. Maybe if you're in the White House and you ask for "cottage cheese and pineapple" as a comfort food (Nixon actually grew up poor), you get served cheese on pineapple slices on a plate because the House chef can't imagine anything else.
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  306.  @tommyshanks4198  Wider streets also mean higher property taxes, as you have fewer taxpayers per unit of infrastructure.
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  307.  @sprockkets  "They are the best in every category." Not in one category! Thin plastics compress a lot better when not in use, I could even keep one in my pants pocket. I could with a thick one, but with an uncomfortable bulge.
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  308.  @MisterZimbabwe  Concrete was one Roman tech that got lost. And the social organization and engineering knowledge to build aqueducts and various complex buildings. Middle Ages Europe later developed their own big buildings, like Gothic cathedrals, but for Dark Age ones...
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  309. "like a lot of the extreme urban planning " I bet you can't name a single YouTuber who's actually against "any single family homes". What urbanists are against is SFH zoning -- zoning that bans everything except SFH houses (on big lots, too.)
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  310. Weird History Food said that reasons sloppy joe's was popular in US schools were: (1) cheap (2) kids like them and (3) you can sneak some vegetables into the mix. If you didn't notice the veggies... _just as planned_.
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  311.  @qoelhex  Glass blocks UV
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  312.  @Justin-jy6fu  " Can anyone name a food that would taste worse without a touch of olive oil? " Chocolate?
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  313. Cumin is actually much closer, grown in Syria and Turkey.
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  314. @danielernandes4989  My reporting what Confucians thought about merchants does not mean I endorse their beliefs
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  315. A huge difference AIUI is that Japanese zoning doesn't distinguish between single or multi-family, or owned vs. rental housing. There's just "residential". Zones and formulas determine how big a building can be based on width and setbacks, but not how many people can live in it. And parking mandates that are minimal or non-existent don't limit how many people can be their either. Vastly different from North America's "single family house on 1/4 care" or "apartments but one parking space per bedroom". So permissible population density will be way higher. Then, the more mixed zones -- even the most residential of zones allows some sort of small and home business -- means there'll likely be stuff you can walk to. And the greater bike safety means you can bike and access 10x as much area. Thus, much easier to live without a car, and for your kids to get around on their own.
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  316. @timogul  Most Americans live in metro areas. Suburban parking is abundant because zoning laws mandate it. A massive government subsidy for driving.
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  317. Try to reclaim some marginal land, maybe. Of course that runs out eventually. Join an army. If you're lucky, someone else doesn't have surviving sons and there's land available, maybe.
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  318.  @LifeWhereImFrom  I assume that's one reason bike mode share isn't higher compared to the Netherlands. Great for short trips, inconvenient for multi-modal trips. Another reason being how big the cities are: it's probably feasible to bike across smaller Dutch cities; not Tokyo or Osaka.
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  319. "no more grocery trips" is just a lie, anyway. Most people who try these probably aren't even getting all their dinners from them, let alone lunch or breakfast!
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  320. There are times and places where new tech is in fact better. Being able to directly move heat around -- heat pumps like air conditioning or fridges -- is like magic. But it'd be nice to not need as much, if only to keep down the monthly magic bill. ;)
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  321.  @I.____.....__...__  "problem with electric-baseboard heaters is the placement" The 'baseboard' heaters he's talking about are standalone rather than attached to the wall. Bit confusing, but I found some on Amazon, with a photo of one standing in the middle of the room.
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  322. @ Good planning is stuff like laying out streets (preferably a grid or something grid-like, at least for active transport and buses) and utilities, and reserving space for public schools and parks. The US instead bans apartments and grocery stores.
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  323.  @effexon  The comments are teaching me about alternative awning-like solutions. Bermuda/Bahama shutters, in fact designed for dealing with storms (wooden shutters, top-hinged and adjustable). Similar tiltable roller shutters -- in both cases, a rigid shutter with an adjustable angle.
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  324. quoting one website: "Tadpole trikes typically have a lower center of gravity placing the rider “in” the trike more than “on.” Having two wheels in front also makes them corner slightly better at speed, with two wheels offering more stability to resist cornering forces. However, being lower, they may not be as easy to get in and out of, so this is certainly a point to consider if your mobility is limited. They also typically have a larger turning radius than delta trikes, so may not be the best choice if you need to maneuver in tighter places."
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  325. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure she's pretty badass in Robin McKinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood
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  326.  @cAc0alex  "they didnt even know how to make water-sealed containers until pottery" Gourds were used to carry water, and you can make waterproof baskets with tar, or lining with leaves, seaweed, or skin/leather.
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  327. At least it wasn't brined chicken.
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  328. I've read elsewhere that it was the worst water. Descending safety: rain spring well river Though I suppose it could depend on the well and river.
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  329. Annoying comment.
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  330. If I trust Aliette de Bodard's Aztec historical fantasy novels, the Aztecs saw the stars as dangerous demons who had to be held back by the less unfriendly gods (fed by human sacrifice, of course.)
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  331.  @stuntmonkey00  Alec did speculate about an awning of low-heat-gain glass, thus letting light through but not heat.
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  332. "The solid type, not the swarm." Not that solid. Those were basically giant Mylar balloons, kept up by light pressure, rather than the rigid Dyson sphere. The comic author might have invented that idea of a lightsail-sphere.
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  333.  @aokiaoki4238  ...no. Salt was sourced locally to Europe, not via the spice route. Pepper wasn't cheap and wasn't used to preserve food.
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  334.  @aokiaoki4238  I have read multiple histories of salt and spice. What you say is all wrong. "it was cheaper to load mined salt from India and China." No. Europe had multiple salt mines like Hallstadt and coastal salt-producing towns like -wich towns in England. Used for preservation, it's a bulk good, not something you would transport from India. The real reason for the spice trade was, y'know, _spices_. Black and long pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg cloves... also Chinese silk, giving the other name, "Silk Road". "Black pepper was cheap" Black pepper was worth its weight in gold in Europe, until the age of navigation started to cut out the middlemen. It is used for flavor, not preservation.
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  335.  @aokiaoki4238  "Salt still was imported to Europe from the America by the British" Yeah I really doubt that. "Luxury stuff" _Yes_. This is well known. Pepper and silk are luxuries, not necessities.
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  336. " current vaccines are still required to keep COVID at bay. " Current vaccines aren't keeping covid at bay anywhere else. US and Europe have been steeped in covid for all of 2022; we just don't test and report as much. But death rates and wasterwater sampling shows the reality.
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  337. Any explanation for kosher laws is basically pure speculation, it's not like the rules are explained. The one guiding principle maybe might be 'purity' in some vague sense, like the prohibition on wearing mixed fibers. Or practicality, for the "alone out of insects, locusts are probably allowed", in case locusts had eaten your crops. But that's speculation too.
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  338.  @WYLNXCA  "It is a dead cycle that cannot be changed. " It can totally be changed, and some places are in fact changing it. Provide the bike infra, change zoning to allow higher density and mixed use, and use changes as well.
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  339. Lol at the LotR reference slipped in. But why do fruitcakes last so long? I'd assumed they were saturated in alcohol, but that seems incorrect.
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  340. I had dried goat and horse in Chile. No smoke or other flavors. Very bland. Possibly meant as a cooking ingredient? I've been making 100% whole wheat sourdough recently. 'gummy' reminded me of my current textures.
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  341. Rice needs lots of water and has generally been grown in warm + wet places. Southern China, India, Honshu, the Southern US, etc. You don't get much beans and rice in Northern Europe or Minnesota because you don't grow rice there. Instead the beans (or other legumes) combine with other grains. "beans on toast", or dipping bread into your mushy peas, or whatnot.
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  342.  @b_uppy  multi-story buildings can still have window overhangs or "exterior shading devices" built-in.
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  343.  @b_uppy  Sure. Just saying it's a design option that should be used more.
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  344.  @mbrsart  I know, mixing cheese and tomato sauce is such a crime! hides the pizza
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  345. One note: upzoning only along arterial means packing more people into the area of highest air pollution and car noise. We need to upzone the quieter areas too.
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  346. No, plants will not be filtering particulates out of your air in large numbers.
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  347. Only problem is if the zoning allows such residential development. (It probably doesn't.)
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  348. So "fettucini alfredo" is just one version of the older class of "macaroni and cheese", i.e. pasta/butter/cheese?
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  349.  @ixiai8294  Sounds like a Bermuda shutter with an extra degree of freedom (the roller bit, as well as the adjustable angle)
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  350. Andy: and housing has become twice as expensive, if your home doubled in value.
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  351. Separation from fast cars is essential for mass biking. If your fast roads don't have Dutch separated bike paths, then you need biking on sidewalks/multi-use paths, period.
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  352.  @illiiilli24601  Ooh! Youtube suppresses links, but can you point to the video title or something?
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  353.  @GNMi79  "Might be a little trickier if I had a rear rack and bag on it, I guess." So, like most of the bikes in Japan, then. Don't forget a possible child seat. Most bike trips are short utility trips, not mountain biking.
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  354. "Love your neighbor", said Jesus.
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  355. Was the crab cooked in the shell, scooped out, then cooked again in the skillet? That seems... bad.
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  356.  @TheGahta  " By what metric do y claim "most vegans dont do x"?" By what metric do you claim "most vegans do x"?
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  357. The Panasonic bike surprised me...
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  358. would a double boiler be helpful for making it?
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  359.  @ababababaababbba  I'm several blocks from an elevated BART line and I can hear it quite well.
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  360.  @MossyMozart  Wait till you realize what word "Knockturn Alley" plays on.
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  361.  @JonMartinYXD  Fair points. Thank you!
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  362.  @AnotherDuck  If you want to nerd out about our wide streets, look up "Street Standards as Parking Policy: Rethinking the Provision of Residential Street Parking in American Suburbs" Basically it's public design rationales that don't really make sense, inspired by vague idea of traffic safety and assuming inelastic demand for driving and parking.
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  363. I just put plain kernels in a brown paper bag and fold it. Ideally it doesn't burst and I can re-use the bag. Not sure if the moisture sensors would be useful for me.
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  364.  @alquinn8576  Most of which are bad reasons.
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  365. ADA doesn't apply to housing of only 3 units; if 4+ units but no elevator, does apply to ground units. If 4+ and elevator, applies to all. This is a 6 unit building, so ADA should apply to the ground unit, which probably doesn't qualify. But in a sane system, there would probably be a waiver; I expect the lot is too small and narrow to meet the ADA at all. Not being flexible simply results in the land not being built on at all, which is a waste.
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  366.  @goodun2974  I like to call them coffin freezers.
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  367. Possibly some of the locking is invisible: I think omafiets come with rear-wheel locks, so you can just stand up your bike (over-wheel kickstand) and lock the wheel and go into the store. It's not locked to anything but you can't just ride off with the bike.
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  368. "leftover boiled fish" why would you boil fish in the first place
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  369. He mentions that in the video, with picture.
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  370.  @jonesnori  Cats apparently go nuts for tuna water. There was a SciShow episode on it.
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  371.  @stephenspackman5573  "benefit of making it free" I don't think any of those benefits are robust. Pre-paid access from gated platforms improves flow. Any system with good ridership makes a lot more in fares than it spends on inspectors. Paid access doesn't prevent great transit systems from existing. I have nothing against free transit in theory; it's pretty nice. But for any real system, the extra funding it would take to make fares free would be better spent making service better.
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  372. As accessories. But also the basic bike was different: "youth city vs. youth mountain" bike as he said. The girls are getting a basket, fenders, and whatever you call that enclosed chain/hub.
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  373. Because we invented domesticated livestock that produced milk. And the majority of us aren't mammals that drink milk into adulthood; being able to do so is a mutation of the past few millennia, that just some populations enjoy.
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  374.  @bennyklabarpan7002  Giving milk to cats is bad for them, actually, and hardly something that would happen naturally. Adult mammals stop producing lactase, except for some mutant humans
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  375. Or Bermuda shutters.
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  376.  @toomanymarys7355  Real statistics: in 1900, 10% of Americans died before age 1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm 30% in some cities. More statistics: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c11542/c11542.pdf Estimates vary, but like 20-30% dying by age 5 in the late 1800s. So your attempt to drag abortion into a cooking show is factually incorrect as well as inappropriate.
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  377. [chewing intensifies]
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  378. They do!
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  379. Huh. I grew up with corn flakes, and I'd always thought they were a low or zero additive cereal. But I looked it up, and yeah: "corn, sugar, malt..." plus various vitamins. And sugar is 10% by mass and by calories. Which I guess is low for many American cereals, some of which are over 50% sugar aka "candy". But higher than I thought. I doubt they changed the recipe much from the 1980s?
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  380. "cooking with propane can't be safely done indoors without an extractor fan" Why is that? Do you have a source?
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  381.  @Rudol_Zeppili  Old World legumes include lentils, peas, chickpeas, fava/broad beans, soy beans, cowpeas, and adzui (aka red) beans.
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  382. We're still in the covid-19 pandemic. It never stopped, people just want to pretend that it did.
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  383. So, if dogs commonly got fed table scraps, is there any old (Roman or medieval) advice about making sure you don't let them eat onions, raisins, or garlic? Also, adult dogs should be lactose intolerant, so I wonder how the bread+milk diet worked out a few hours later...
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  384. I have a really old structureless Trader Joe's canvas bag, possibly from the 1990s. Also a few newer totes from somewhere. If I'm going shopping I bring my backpack, which usually has 3 more bags in (the TJ sack, a black tote, one of those new thick plastic bags that the store charges 10 cents for.) On checkout, fill the backpack and as many bags as needed, walk home. I also have an old-style thin plastic bag in my pocket for impulse shopping sans backpack. Around here, thin plastic bags are banned from supermarkets, though some takeout food still uses them. I did tend to use to accumulate them, but they were re-usable: garbage bags, food wrapping bags, insulation for making yogurt. By contrast, paper bags (even with handles) had no re-use for me (too awkward to want to bring back to the store), and the handles tended to rip off anyway. And as the video hinted, they're not obviously better than thin plastics anyway. The one nice thing about big paper bags was that my bike had folding baskets of just the right size for one, so I could bike home with a full backpack and two full bags, with stuff held in by the structure of the paper, better than plastic could do.
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  385. "offers fairly close the same heat reducing ability" No, they don't, because visible light streams through the window and heats up your room. The insulation does nothing to stop that, and makes it worse in summer because it's trapping the heat more effectively.
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  386. Yeah, just tonight I sliced some potatoes, microwaved them for ~3 minutes for pre-cook, then pan-fried them. I've also simply microwaved potatoes; I think that's where the "pierce to avoid explosion" is from, not baking. But if you cut up potatoes, they boil or steam (or boil-steam in a small amount of water) pretty quickly too. Microwaving doesn't save that much time compared to that, there's a lot of water to microwave.
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  387. Hah, I noticed the "golden tresses" when I read the Argonautica, too. Everyone I've asked since then guesses that Medea would have dark, even black, hair. Evil witch who's a priestess of Hecate, right? OTOH, granddaughter of Helios. I haven't read that Euripides. Medea is a princess too! I guess exiled barbarians don't count?
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  388. The other thing I think I remember is the Argonautica mentioning various shrines Medea established en route to Greece, which were said to still be in use.
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  389. 'Ban' isn't a bad idea when the "innovation" dumps costs on other people.
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  390.  @coltonwilliams4153  "To be fair to the explorers, magic that revives the dead isn’t supposed to exist." We could rephrase this as "the explorers are ignorant of magic that revives the dead, and ignore the warnings of people who know better." Like if they were warned not to drink the water from some lake, do so, and get (real) brain-eating amoeba parasites that they thought weren't supposed to exist.
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  391.  @mixolydia3309  I think what you describe is just a regular mall. Strip malls have stores accessed by a footpath between the parking lot and the stores.
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  392.  @ThatSoddingGamer  I've wondered about the second roof as well! You'd think it'd be a huge energy saver under the summer sun. I think more standard terms are "cold roof" and "ventilated roof". There may be a problem with moisture, depending on the design.
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  393. Some countries also fluoridate salt. I think it started in Switzerland, but can also be found in Germany, France, and Mexico, among others. Cheaper than fluoridating the water supposedly, and anyway Mexicans avoid drinking tap water. (They have treatment plants, but don't trust the pipes between treatment and the tap.)
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  394. It was an exotic Italian thing to many Americans of the time, too.
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  395. Also modern broths tend to be pretty salty. I wonder how the recipe would work without the beef.
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  396. Surprise Clueless reference! And lol Harry Potter analogies.
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  397. D&D: originally (well, Basic edition) only gold dragons could naturally change shape; they were also Lawful, and always spoke and had spells; the other dragons were Neutral or Chaotic and had a chance of speaking. Firebreathing red dragons were the most powerful after golds, and had 50% chance of speak/spell. AD&D made the chromatic dragons all evil and the metallic (with four new ones) all good; I think only the upper three (gold, silver, bronze) could change shape. I saw some illustration where the red dragon (Chaotic or Chaotic Evil, firebreathing) looked obviously European (Fafnir, Smaug) and the gold dragon obviously Chinese, but I forget if that was an actual Monster Manual or fanart.
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  398. But note that even RTGs are a niche use case, for space stuff where heat pumps would break the mass budget or be too complex or maybe not work in the environment. On Earth we use steam engines from the 1800s.
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  399.  @carbonwarrior  That makes no sense. Supply and demand. What makes housing expensive is the lack of housing. People who are willing to live in little units like these aren't competing for bigger units. These bring prices _down_, not up.
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  400. "Japan is unique in having a high rate of female cyclists " I don't think it's unique in that; Dutch have it too, AIUI. The very similar classic bikes in the two countries are "granny bike" (omafiet) and "mommy bike" (mamachari), both names attesting to use by women.
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  401.  @Jintsoo  Ah, fair. I think it mostly comes down to safety and the convenience of short trips. Biking doesn't feel dangerous in Japan (there's no bike-only infra, but slow streets and wide sidewalks functionally are bike infra), and short trips are useful, so most people bike at some point. Also it's expected that kids will get themselves to school, by whatever mode works for them, so that's a big chore that Japanese (and many European) women don't have to do, unlike American women of the past few decades.
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  402. That is not a huge issue compared to all the other waste a typical household produces. That's like claiming masks are a big waste issue when a household's masks for a week would barely line the bottom of a trash can.
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  403. Why wouldn't the chef wash his hands after leaving the bathroom?
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  404.  @camelopardalis84  "What do you mean by "AC paying for itself in a few years?"" That the shutters will lower your AC-induced power bill enough to pay for the shutters in a few years. Making up numbers: if you spend $400/year on AC, and then installing $300 shutters lowers your AC bill to $300/year, you'll be saving $100/year and thus pay for the shutters in 3 years.
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  405. I have a pretty old TJ bag. No side pocket, it's just a shapeless canvas sack. Might be from the 1990s, not sure.
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  406. Wikipedia says a congius was about 3.48 liters, so that would be 1000 sesterces (250 denarii) for 7 liters of garum. I'm not sure how much garum you would use at once; if you're sparing with it, like a high-Scoville hot sauce, it would last a while. Still expensive (just to have 250 denarii at once), but potentially "upper middle class" rather than "filthy rich". I note you used whole (chopped) mackerel, rather than just fish guts...
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  407. My previous bike was a Trek 800 hybrid or mountain bike, that I got on sale for $200 but was like $250 list price. Heavy steel frame, was 40 pounds after adding rack and baskets and lock, but it suited me, and lasted forever. (Disappeared one day after I'd left it out for a long while.) My current bike is a Zizzo Via folding bike, that I got for under $400. There are a couple of even cheaper Zizzo models in the $200s. My closest bike store doesn't have anything under $650, but I think part of that is local rent and expected income levels. And they're mostly into selling $3000 e-bikes now, anyway.
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  408. He said the older unit has a separate warmer, only 80 Watts, may not even need a thermostat.
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  409. Are traffic counts bi-directional? E.g. adding east and west bound traffic?
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  410.  @svr5423  "proper indoor rooms" ...the whole point of a balcony is to be accessible outdoor space. Some place to hang your laundry or put out plants or just step out and get some sunlight from your apartment. It's not a waste of space, it's doing something different.
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  411.  @svr5423  "step out" Yes, that's what a balcony allows me to do. Step outside casually, even in pajamas. Without one, I have to get dressed, put on my shoes, get my keys, leave the apartment building -- perhaps taking an elevator ride. Possibly putting myself out on a public sidewalk, rather than 'my' balcony to sit and read. And then reverse all that to get back in: let myself into the building, take the elevator, walk down the hall... There is obviously a huge difference in ease. Balconies also allow having some potted plants, or put out clothes to dry. So they're practical as well.
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  412.  @svr5423  It's not about producing food, that'd be silly. (Though you can get some herbs and tomatoes.) It's about having some plants handy. Many people like that. Useful balconies can be pretty small, far smaller than another room, so they're not really competing. Conversely, modern US units often have pretty big rooms to begin with, they can give up a bit of space. Ironically, Japanese units which are pretty small, are also very likely to have a small balcony for plants/laundry/access to the mini-split A/C unit. Also, the places that need multi-story apartments are the places least likely to have "a plot of land" nearby.
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  413. "As for the bike paths painted on the roads, anyone who doesn’t fall in the categories that allow them to ride on the sidewalks, should use these" No, they really shouldn't. People should not risk their lives to satisfy dumb rules.
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  414. Wiki "A distinction is sometimes made between "hot cocoa", made from cocoa powder (ground cacao beans from which much of the cocoa butter has been removed),[22] and "hot chocolate", made directly from bar chocolate, which already contains cocoa, sugar, and cocoa butter.[22] Thus, the major difference between the two is the cocoa butter, the absence of which makes hot cocoa significantly lower in fat than hot chocolate" And presumably thinner as well as lower in fat. I had "hot chocolate" at a cafe once, and was surprised; it is indeed much like simply melting down chocolate and mixing with some milk, if that. Thick, rich, probably more calories than you want to think about... "European hot chocolate tends to be relatively thick and rich, while in the United States the thinner instant version is consumed more often... In Germany, hot chocolate made by melted chocolate (Heiße Schokolade Wiener Art) is distinguished from those made from powders (Trinkschokolade).[28] It is often served with whipped cream on top.[28] "
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  415. Cheese and honey actually go pretty well together. Well, some cheeses. Not sure about goat cheese.
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  416. Fun episode, but I think you missed a step. Sure, we have this supply chain for selling turkeys, but traditionally that's selling whole turkeys to families. Not obvious just from that, that we'd also be slaughtering enough turkey to provide all the cold cuts.
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  417. Sumerian butter churn (art from 2500 BC) undermines the idea that butter was 'invented' via saddle or camels.
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  418. Tomatillos are related to golden berries aka "Cape gooseberries" (not related to most other 'gooseberries'). The mention of husk and stickiness made me look it up, since golden berries have that too. They are both related to tomatoes potatoes and eggplant, in the Solanaceae or nightshade family (so you shouldn't eat golden berries with green tint, that' s solanine, a la green potatoes.)
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  419. I've lived small but I think a bit much even for me... Do you have size/measurements for any of these places?
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  420. "I don’t see much protected bicycling infrastructure." Yeah, no bike-only infrastructure. The wide sidewalks are the protected bicycling infrastructure.
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  421. I don't understand the first example. It seems you just conjured new width out of nowhere for the multi-use path. Nothing else shrinks. The lanes do shrink visually but the numbers don't change.
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  422.  @sirprize5191  Exercise, including walking, is about as effective for treating depression as psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs. Which is to say, it works for some people, but not all. But it's worth trying, and is the first 'prescription' in many countries that aren't the USA, after all it's free and has the "side effect" of making you healthier.
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  423.  @gracedagostino5231  US has 23 sqft of retail space per capita. Canada 17, Australia 11, UK 5. That's the top 4 countries!
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  424. You could probably have a whole video just on Watership Down. It's kind of a rabbit Aeneid: The divinely guided escape from destruction (Troy); stopping in a tempting false home (Carthage); founding a new home (Rome); the quest for women/female rabbits for the new home; the great battle; reconciliation. It's also kind of rabbit Tolkien, with map, adventuring party (and multispecies allies!), fighting a dark lord, and conlang. Not a fully developed conlang, but it teaches kids in-universe dirty words. "silflay hraka, u embleer rah"
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  425. Most beans we eat aren't poisonous. OTOH red kidney beans need to be cooked very thoroughly. But if you suddenly add a lot more fiber to your diet, your gut bacteria may give you cramps and runs until they've shifted composition to match. Took me 2.5 weeks to adjust.
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  426. Airbnb kept getting mentioned in the same breath as Uber, yet the graphs belied that. Borderline profitable for years rather than deep losses, then actual profit once they scaled back their ambitions after 2020. And it's a very different business model: instead of lots of gig workers who don't control their prices, it's more like expedited Craigslist with reviews and payment escrow, with landlords having full control over their price and participation.
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  427. Except that he did mention cost. The minifridge cost $100 (or $80 on sale) but pays for itself in lower power use within a year or two, while keeping more stuff at lower temperatures. And where are you getting "2 year lifespan"? I'm 50 and have never had a large fridge fail in my life. Not sure I've even heard of a friend's fridge dying outright. Heck, the old one I'm living with was predicted to fail within a month, based on its noises... 2 years ago. Still going strong.
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  428. That's something of a myth. Medieval people drank water too.
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  429.  @vadimemelin2941  People thought we would be traveling by suborbital rockets, or commuting to the Moon, by now. Nope. Even the one supersonic plane died despite subsidies.
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  430.  @LifeWhereImFrom  Don't mamachari have a rear wheel lock or O-lock built in? Do people use those? One thing I noticed in Osaka was that lots of small business "bike parking" was just a taped off space on the ground. You don't lock your bike to something, you just lower the (over-wheel) kickstand and maybe set the lock and walk in.
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  431. Might not have a private room, private rooms might not have good locks...
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  432. Homer's Iliad has multiple references to cutting up meat and roasting it on skewers or spits.
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  433.  @xandercruz900  Your fantasies are not objective reality, and do not override the experience of an actual worker.
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  434. It sounds like a bread and cheese smoothie. Which sounds disgusting. But imagine if you'd put onion in it? Can you credit your translators? Not like Greek poets wrote English rhyming couplets...
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  435. I'm not sure when, but Athens did keep some elections, for generals (gotta actually be competent) and treasurers (gotta be rich enough to not steal from the state, was the idea. or to be able to get money taken back if you did.) But yeah, selection by lot for the Council of 500, the large and important juries, and various 10-person "get something" boards. OTOH, while Athens may have given us the term 'democracy', and a form of it which sadly hasn't had many imitators, it's not like all forms of democracy simply descend from it. The Roman Republic is about as old, and evolved in vary different ways. Carthage elected its leaders too. And modern representative democracy evolved in its own way, not obviously owing much to Athens. I've seen it said that Greek city-states all had magistrates, council, and popular assembly (and you see these in Rome and Carthage too), and varied in how powerful each component was (also whether the magistrates and council were hereditary or elected or what) and exactly how broad the assembly was.
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  436.  @FeedScrn  " Wine in Jesus' time - contrary to some teachings, was strong, " Though I think not as strong as some modern wines, due to modern practices including adding sugar ('chaptalization'). Also, Greeks and Romans of the time typically drank wine diluted with water; I don't know about the Jews then.
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  437. "not quite as high as it once was." So the question is: did Tokyo get objectively worse? (no) did it get overtaken by other cities (maybe) did they change their ranking criteria (maybe) is the criteria BS (maybe)
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  438. I believe the Islamic calendar is the only pure lunar calendar in the world (plus a Javan calendar derived from it.) Every other 'lunar' calendar is lunisolar: based on lunar months but with one mechanism or another to keep it roughly synchronized with the solar calendar (or put another way, with the seasons.) Most people want spring (and planting) to be at least roughly the same time on their calendar, while the Islamic calendar freewheels across the year. I've seen it suggested that pre-farming peoples would have cared about calendars too, for e.g. timing the migration of animals. Also that such calendars, and early farming calendars, would have been "the year starts in spring" (ice melts, first leaves, whatever), then counting lunar months into winter, when time didn't really matter, and resetting at the next spring. So basically a self-synchronizing lunisolar calendar. I'm skeptical of the Hindu calendar being based on Jupiter; Chinese does seem to have a connection but I think more complicated than "zodiac".
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  439. "When commercialism and industry is centralized, you get large urban sprawl" What? No, those have nothing to do with each other. "bike paths should be used as a means of work home transportation," Bike paths are a means of transportation, period. Jobs, shopping, parks, schools, whatever. Yeah, in a big urban area, many will find the distances too far to simply bike to work, though they might bike to transit to work. But work trips are only like 1/3 of all trips, you know? Majority of trips are short. Even in the US, half of car trips are under 3 miles.
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  440. Which is part of why biking is so low in Australia. Dutch don't wear helmets too. People doing casual biking on slow bikes don't want to bother with helmets.
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  441. It was funny when he comes on TV, pronounces his name... and then the announcer pronounces it differently. I note that at 10:59, his instructions say to add the butter, cheese, *and sauce*, and blend it all gently and thoroughly. The traditional Italian way, as I understand it: coat the pasta thoroughly in sauce in the pot, then servce. Vs. the American method shown at the end, of plating the pasta, and dumping some sauce on top.
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  442. It's a familiar sight to me, I think not from bans but simply from dense cities where it's not feasible or necessary.
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  443. That sounds a lot more expensive than using pipes, if you've already built the pipes, and have expensive labor.
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  444. Ooh! Great point, about shading the wall, something that window-only solutions don't do.
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  445. He mentioned that, saying you'd have to let the beans dry out again before grinding.
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  446.  @Arkiasis  Plus there is a burner. (No fridge shown but Japan expects tenants to provide their own.) You wouldn't be cooking complex meals easily but you could cook.
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  447. This may explain why I had a cheap light-weight serrated knife that lasted me, no sharpening, for some huge number of years. In fact it still works, it's just in storage due to a change in lifestyle.
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  448. If it's not tested as part of Bush's No Child Left Behind, then schools don't have time for it. You get what you fund, and funding follows test scores.
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  449. But some of us would like to keep direct sun out while not being blacked out, letting in some natural light and views (and air)
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  450.  @bigboyman5743  As an American I believe in letting others have the freedom to build what they want or think they can rent out. No one's trying to force you into small apartments, but current zoning laws forbid such places even though many people -- not everyone! but many -- would happily live in them for a while.
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  451. "100% of Americans would live in these homes" That's too extreme. But certainly many Americans would, for at least part of their lives. In fact, many Americans have lived in even 'worse' housing, called "college dorm rooms". My dorm rooms were often the same size as that apartment (though more rectangular), shared with another person, and lacking our own bathroom or kitchenette. And of course a small apartment doesn't have to be 11 m2, it can be 15 or 20 or 35, and still be an efficient use of land. It's American parking mandates that really kill this sort of thing.
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  452.  @dancooper6002  You can have A/C and adjustable roller shutters, so you have the option not to spend as much money on A/C. Bermuda shutters were designed for hurricanes.
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  453.  @donatodiniccolodibettobardi842  The Culture is one of the more famous utopias of modern SF, and hasn't cost Banks respect.
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  454.  @steffengustavsen9678  Can you buy propane or butane camping stoves in Norway?
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  455.  @brumpz  To be fair, you have to use the respirators and not take them off in high risk situations like bars and restaurants. I don't think even east Asian maskers are good at the latter. But it would be a lot less intrusive than outright lockdowns; I call it a lockdown for noses.
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  456.  @flingonber  Chicken wings per se are not a vital necessity. High prices of a good act as a signal to people to make more of the good, and to consume less of it. High prices can be purchased by non-rich people by saving up and buying it rarely. What's better, buying chicken wings occasionally when you want, or buying wings occasionally at random when you're lucky enough to find them in the store? And the people who get the lucky cheap wings might just turn around and sell them at high prices anyway. Scalper lottery.
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  457.  @flingonber  You're getting distracted by your compulsion to argue. We were talking about chicken wing prices. US wing prices are high because US demand for chicken wings is high, end of story. Increased demand and nearly fixed supply (no one is going to grow more chickens just to produce chicken wings) = increased prices.
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  458.  @sundaykessig-kinkaid7313  "likely the predominant democratic system to inspire the US'." They probably weren't, given the existing colonial governments, the English parliament, and the classical education that all the Founding Fathers would have had.
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  459. latitude, not longitude
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  460. Central Mexico City has various variations of boulevard. Paseo de la Reforma was close to the multi-way described here. Central busy car lanes, also with a BRT lane, with central median, and side medians separating local access. Where I stayed, the central median was pretty narrow, just wide enough to give some refuge to crossing pedestrians, but the side 'medians' were quite wide and nice. Further west by Bosque Chapultepec, the central median is wide (with walking path) and the side lanes vanish.
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  461. Tokyo doesn't have bike-only infrastructure. Slow streets and wide sidewalks are bike-friendly infrastructure.
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  462.  @F2a0bi0an5o  Though many "surgical masks" are themselves garbage. In the US or Canada, look for ASTM ratings. Even with ear loops, a KN95 probably fits the face better than a baggy surgical mask, so fake can still give better overall protection than surgical or cloth. ASTM surgical + mask brace would be better. Or get a real N95 or KF94.
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  463. I didn't realize that 'yeast' was an isolated ingredient in 1779 or earlier. Or was that a translation of what would have been sourdough starter at the time?
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  464. diagonal path: Slowing down cars is a feature, not a bug. Given typical bus or bike speeds, I don't know if they would be slowed down much by the 3-ways. Especially if you could banish most cars. That said, I would stick to rectilinear grids, maybe with some waviness.
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  465.  @bahshas  "are still where they left them and some of them are quite similar in their decoration " Except that a lot of the decoration has gotten grimy over the centuries, with some massive differences in color and brightness if you do a full cleanup. Same is true of some old paintings: there's an early copy of the Mona Lisa which was restored, and is much more vibrant than the real Mona Lisa with yellowed varnish.
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  466.  @xenotypos  I don't know about very large, but where I lived in Osaka had decently large supermarkets. Certainly I was happy with my options. As for Japanese zoning, this is the classic blog post that I think introduced it to the English-speaking world. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html?m=1
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  467.  @MDP1702  You really have to specify what your measure of efficiency is.
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  468. It has drawbacks, like legislators not knowing much about issues and being easily influenced by lobbyists with strong opinions.
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  469. You mention blue sky, but don't link to it in the description or in your profile...
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  470. [mini clack clack]
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  471. But commonly the armor isn't against your skin, some sort of padding is in between.
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  472. Wikipedia says rather "The word soup is a cognate of sop, both stemming ultimately from the same Germanic source." and "The word soup comes from French soupe ("soup", "broth"), which comes through Vulgar Latin suppa ("bread soaked in broth") from a Germanic source, from which also comes the word "sop", a piece of bread used to soak up soup or a thick stew. "
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  473. In the US, "women's bikes" have generally been the step-through ones.
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  474. Biking in the US is generally so dangerous-feeling that most biking is (a) people with no choice, (b) people who bike recreationally away from traffic, or (c) the kind of people who choose to bike in traffic, mostly athletic men on expensive road bikes.
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  475.  @AdeleiTeillana  "Most people don't actually eat a full restaurant style breakfast every morning though" Probably true, but then they're eating sugar bomb cereals instead. Yay?
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  476. What about building in a rigid overhang?
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  477. I lived in Osaka for 3 months, and took away all the same lessons and impressions (many of which I've been sharing in youtube comments for the past 5 years.) Osaka does even better, 25% of trips by bike. And note that this is with much worse weather than the Netherlands, also larger cities (so home-to-job distance will be bigger) and public transit that isn't bike friendly. Your Tokyo 'wide sidewalks' actually looked pretty narrow to me; I think the standard for arterials is supposed to be around 4 meters, or 13 feet or so. And in Osaka, most bikes along arterials were on the sidewalk/multi-use path (though many stayed on the local streets, too, of course.) Cynically, one reason more people don't look to Japan is that it's distant and more foreign; some would even invoke racism. But to be fair, I'm not sure how much we can learn from Japan's streets, except for new development. There's no quick path for turning a Chicago local street of 66 feet (right of way) into Tokyo street of 16 feet. For existing cities, streets are laid in already. We can re-arrange the asphalt easily, but I'm told moving curbs is expensive, and when buildings are already 80 feet apart wall to wall, there's not much we can do... unless we start building small buildings in the middle, creating two narrow streets out of one wide one. Density: NYC has a lower density of 10,000/km2 due to State Island and outer Queens. 15,000 is right there with Brooklyn and the Bronx or inner Queens. Paris France is 21,000. Also, I feel you should credit NJB a bit for title and "cities aren't loud" meme drop. :)
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  478. Honestly might be a waste. Ethan did a video (youtube ID E6w_W6GyHEs ) on Wagyu and burgers.
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  479. Like how long does it take for trees to get tall enough to shade? Especially for a two-story house?
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  480.  @Rocketsong  Thanks. So a fair bit of delay. And longer if you have a 2 or 3 story house. And then there are apartments that can be much higher than most trees... Trees are great! But yeah we should be building shade into our buildings, too.
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  481.  @GNMi79  Okay, bigot.
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  482. I just cook with a maybe 12" cast iron pan, and a smaller egg pan with one of those ceramic non-stick coatings for eggs.
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  483.  @JustinKoenigSilica  You sound like someone playing life on easy mode.
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  484. Not always that difficult. For his 'zipper' paths IIRC, connecting cul de sacs to a road behind, you could often just eminent domain a small strip of land from a couple of properties. There might not be much to walk to but at least the foot/bike network would become more gridlike.
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  485.  @chickentoucher55  "a park and a school nearby for their kids, people aren’t thinking about wanting a footpath at the end" Gee, wouldn't it be nice if the kids could walk to school on their own?
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  486.  @cmdrls212  "stack people in towers like livestock" Lots people enjoy apartments. You're the one dehumanizing people by dismissing their preferences.
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  487.  @leifmeadows3782  ummm if you know you're going shopping, you leave home with more than a purse. A tote folded in a purse is simply ready to handle impulse shopping.
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  488. What were the bus frequencies like? The ones in Osaka seemed terrible (30 minutes), but Osaka is a train-heavy city. The tourist circulator in Nara was great (4 minutes), but I don't know if the other buses there are like that.
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  489. Europe had public bathhouses -- like the Romans -- until the Black Death. It's possible to clean your body without a full body bath -- basin bath, sponge bath. Medieval people valued clean linen underwear a lot, with lots of laundrywomen.
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  490.  @lifeschool  "where they throw human waste onto peoples heads in the street" I dunno. Human waste was valuable: shit for the fields, urine for the tanneries. And towns often had regulations on this. Our idea of the filthy city might come more from Modern cities, when urban populations expanded faster than infrastructure, regulation, or enforcement.
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  491. gold: this is why you ask for controllable powers.
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  492. Folding bikes are another way of combining bikes and transit better.
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  493. Americans are not some magically different species. Give us more options and we take them. Provide a safe and direct route to shopping and more Americans will take it. I've spent my life shopping for groceries at urban supermarkets and never owned a car. I walk over in 9 minutes, buy stuff, and bring it home. If I need a ton of stuff I bring a personal shopping cart, or take a bike with baskets.
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  494.  @zam023  No, most Japanese streets are "local streets". It's where the front door goes, and carries foot, bike, and (one-way) car traffic. And it's on the order of 16 feet / 5 meters wide, wall to wall. Then the actual high traffic streets should have 4-meter wide sidewalks, carrying bikes and (possibly nervous) pedestrians.
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  495. At my supermarket, bronze cut is 3x the price of basic pasta. More than a little.
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  496. Shad at the medieval feast? I just saw that the other day, and yeah I noticed his horror at the 'bread'.
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  497.  @greatcoldemptiness  Basic Tolkien knowledge is reading the Hobbit and LotR, neither of which mentions Maiar by name; LotR barely mentions Valar.
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  498. Amazon has bikes for as cheap as $125, don't know how good they are. Zizzo folding bikes are supposed to be good, and you can get one in the $200s; I got a nicer one for $380.
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  499. "The Ramans do everything in threes."
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  500. A hybrid modern breakfast could be to toast some bread, tear it into pieces in a bowl, add your choice of milk and seasonings. Less messy (bowl and spoon), I wonder if it'd be cheaper than most breakfast cereals.
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  501. AIUI, by the 4th century if not before, the democracy wasn't limited by wealth; all male citizens of age could vote, even being paid a decent wage to show up at the Assembly or sit on the very important juries.
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  502. Potatoes aren't super protein rich, but supposedly more 'complete' protein even than soy, and much more so than grains. They also seem to be satiating far more than you would expect from a simple glycemic index. And yeah, the potato-fed Irish were said to be the healthiest poor people in Europe. That said, I have trouble imagining eating the 5-10 pounds of potatoes you would need every day...
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  503. Bermuda shutters designed for just that.
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  504. "double bag" paper bags often had to be doubled too, and even that might not save the handles.
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  505.  @zachariah7114  If your area has banned marijuana use, sex work, or replacing your house with an apartment or business, where you live is a joke. Oh hey, that's most of the USA.
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  506. Yeah, about the same as Brooklyn and Bronx, really.
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  507.  @pleappleappleap  IIRC both are around 14,000/km2, similar to his Tokyo neighborhoods, which was my point.
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  508. 1. As far as I know, not in general. (The video does mention a 5000 yen rebate for seniors to give up their driving license.) It's just sensible to bike when you have short trips and biking is cheap and safe. If you could bike at 3x your walking speed with minimal risk, why wouldn't you bike? There are dis_incentives to _driving_. Expensive gas, maybe harder to get a license, and above all, parking. No curbside parking and minimal parking mandates, so if you're driving in a city like Osaka or Tokyo you _will be paying to park everywhere. If you rent an apartment then you have to show the police that you've leased a garage parking space before you're allowed to buy and register a car, and that parking could be 30,000 yen a month. Also, where I lived in Osaka, most of the supermarkets around me didn't even have car parking. One was off-street, only accessible by foot or bike (with a huge bicycle hangar). One was on the street but on Street View I don't see any car parking, while there are bikes surrounding its two open walls. The other two were in the basements of train stations (and their associated malls); there were (paid) parking garages but you'd still have to get your groceries upstairs and into an adjacent building. And all four of those were within a 8-12 minute walk of my house -- my tiny house on a tiny lot, which did not have any car parking of its own, on a tiny street which you could drive down _very carefully_. So, you could walk or bike; drive to and pay for a garage and then walk down to the basement, in probably more time than just biking or even walking over; or drive further to some hypothetical supermarket further out that might actually have convenient car parking. Or in my case, walk from home to pick up my car from a garage or parking lot, to then drive...
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  509.  @RhiKlowho  Plus you can keep some other bags in your backpack, and go home fully laded with backpack + bags in hands.
    1
  510. Where do you think people would be moving from, Carter?
    1
  511. Wow, 10,000 comments in 9 hours, I'm sure I'll totally be seen. FB and Xitter still have chronological feeds (unless Xitter removed it in the last few months). FB's is harder to find though, and buggier, and runs out of posts. I wonder if Youtube's alg is better, or I just only watch things I like so it does throw clickbait at me... I do check the Subscriptions tab sometimes, but yeah, it's pretty good at showing me stuff I'd want from my subs.
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  512. " The last few years, people from Coastal states have been flooding into Texas' biggest cities. It's surprising so many settle in, in spite of the miserable weather." They move to Texas when they can't afford coastal housing.
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  513. No mention of TH White? Where IIRC Mordred's mother is Morgause (I think Morgan barely appears), and both Lancelot and Arthur are good people. Also Arthur almost marries a squirrel.
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  514. Eh, a grid is much easier to navigate different routes on than 'organic', and with short blocks makes for pleasant walks. You can also have mildly wavy streets for an organic feel but grid-like connectivity.
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  515.  @oyuyuy  I've lived my entire life in walkable cities, without a car. Again, from a lifetime of experience: grids with short blocks are great. Easy to navigate, easy to take lots of different routes for variety. Ideally most of the streets are narrow and slowed, with 4-way stop signs on most of the intersections. And even better, modal filtering, so it's not a grid for cars and you don't have cut-through car traffic in most neighborhoods. Decent [car] traffic flow is the least of my priorities. Cities should focus on pedestrians, bicycles, and buses (with their own lanes). If you want to drive fast, you shouldn't be going through a city.
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  516. Another thing closely related to covered porches is the "five foot way" (check wikipedia page) of some Asian streets, basically a covered gallery at heat level. I am mildly confident that Europe traditionally had similar covered arcades. There's a National Park Service article on the history of awnings; search for (national park service preservation briefs 44). It contained "awnings can reduce heat gain up to 65% in south facing windows and up to 77% on windows facing east"; also a claim that it could reduce air conditioning energy use by 25%, similar to your friend's model.
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  517. There's a National Park Service article on the history of awnings; search for [national park service preservation briefs 44]. (Youtube suppresses links in comments, AFAICT). It contained "awnings can reduce heat gain up to 65% in south facing windows and up to 77% on windows facing east"; also a claim that it could reduce air conditioning energy use by 25%, similar to your friend's model.
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  518. In most zoning code matters I want to move in a more laissez faire direction, but I am sympathetic to requiring new housing to have awning fixtures and balconies. Assuming that provision is fairly cheap, people in apartments should have the option of stepping 'outside' without having to put on their shoes. ...actually, I guess if the balconies are covered (perhaps by the balcony of the unit above), that might obviate the need or use of slanted awnings, except for the top floor.
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  519. - 1 Pint (475ml) Cream - 6 Eggs -- (me: that's like 300 grams of egg, or more) - 1/2 Cup (113g) Brown Sugar - 2 Cups (240g) Flour = 1128 grams I want to note that the flour is 21% of the mass of these "pancakes". This seems less like pancake and more like brownies.
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  520. "so there is nowhere to expand" do the zoning laws allow building multistory apartments if not then I see an easy solution to housing prices
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  521.  @adriennesugarman9795  Probably even those apartments aren't allowed on most of the land, which will be zoned for single family houses on minimum sized lots. That's how the rest of the US does it. Artificial housing scarcity "to preserve character", and defended by people who decry government planning otherwise.
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  522. As for dairy in Mexico, I noted that lactose-free milk was very easily available in Mexico City, more so than in the US...
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  523.  @dyingearth  I'm pretty sure Qeng Ho timekeeping came up in _Deepness in the Sky_, "only" 8000 years in the future. At any rate, the Qeng Ho were aware of the 6 month discrepancy and puzzled by it.
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  524.  @lady_sir_knight3713  Diamond did not invent the idea of geography shaping societies.
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  525. I tend to just buy packages of drumsticks, standard US supermarket size, and pan-fry them in 35 minutes. Less oil, though also these days no crust, just seasoning on the chicken (and pan).
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  526. I have a dim memory of doing that, though not of what happened. I think just sweet and sour milk.
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  527. "better for the environment" what, that's ridiculous
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  528. Better construction than cinderblocks, but there's still a lot of shophouses in Japan and I think other east Asian countries, including cookshops, where you might be sitting on a stool in the street at a bar lining the front of the shop, for your ramen or okonomiyaki etc.
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  529. Walgreens does drive-thru? I don't think I've ever seen that.
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  530. 'palta' is the word in Chile, as well. Now I have some idea of why! As for where a pirate would get expensive sugar: uh, he's a pirate.
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  531. Do you not have links for the photos? Especially of the painting with the girl and donut?
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  532. Wow, the plate armor is so *loud*.
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  533.  @merk9569  9 stories in ancient Rome. Look up "insula (building)"
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  534. Radial transit isn't that great in practice, especially for buses. Trains can get away with it because (a) they bypass traffic and (b) a lot of people were traditionally going to the center for work, but it's a poor system for going between different parts of the city, and a lot of people will drive because it's 1/5 the distance of a train trip. (Or bike, if you made biking safe and attractive.) For buses it's terrible because they're usually stuck in traffic, so they combine inefficient trip distances with the inefficiency of congestion. When Houston and other cities sought to increase ridership in the past 10 years, they reconfigured their bus lines as a grid of fewer but more frequent bus lines, improving service quality at basically no cost. (Same buses and drivers, deployed differently.)
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  535. My guess: it's earlier in Canada because the growing season is shorter and harvest comes earlier.
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  536. My parents would make steamed (I think) artichokes and it tasted good but the edible ratio seemed so bizarrely low tome. Sorrel seems both interesting but hard to find.
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  537. Most bike use is in cities.
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  538.  @Rubicola174  Yeah, that was part of the spark. Thanks!
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  539. Supposedly the Roman kings were _elected_, which helps.
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  540.  @Knobs4u  Probably wasn't actually 97 F and 88% at the same time. I grew up in Chicago and used to joke about "95 F and 95%", but in reality these combinations would have healthy people dropping like flies of heatstroke, because sweat would no longer work. They correspond to a dew point of 93 F, which is nearly unheard of; tropical cities tend to have dew points of no more than 80 F.
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  541.  @skeltonslay8er781  "I season my mouth, NOT my food"
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  542. And combined-arm warfare with effective use of the cavalry along with the pike phalanx.
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  543. consumption caption: "[instant regret]"
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  544. Looking at precipitation levels, seems like several of those cities may be in spots of slightly higher ranfall levels. Abilene and San Angelo are definitely in a higher rainfall belt. Rapid City is near a little wet blob on rainfall maps. Not sure about Amarillo and Lubbock. Water, once again. https://64.media.tumblr.com/59c21e68e5c6675575bc84a6746da4c0/tumblr_n3udirHXyt1rasnq9o1_1280.jpg
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  545. Got stats?
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  546.  @gurriato  "hundreds of thousands of years" Humans have not been drinking dairy milk for hundreds of thousands of years, just one ten-thousand of years. Humans have also been referring to soy or almond milk as 'milk' for centuries, since the middle ages at least. Even the Latin word for lettuce refers to its 'milky' sap.
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  547. @BellotaVerde You hope that private industry can bribe the government into rewriting the dictionary, forcibly overwriting centuries of linguistic use? Odd to openly endorse corruption for the sake of private profit, but you do you.
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  548. Chicago, French toast. Made with non-stale bread so getting the center soft was never a concern. The talk of easy burning made me wonder if you dare cook with an air quality monitor in the kitchen. :) I have been, and dry cooking is rather rich in PM2.5...
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  549. What were the little enclaves in Greece and Anatolia, besides Sparta?
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  550. Thin plastic bags can be blown away by even light winds and float around on ocean currents. Thin plastic bags on coastlines don't have to have come from that country. Canvas bags are a lot less likely to go far.
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  551. He said "sister-in-law Akko"
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  552.  @cvoisineaddis  Sounds pretty similar to Bermuda/Bahama shutters.
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  553. Interesting, especially the bit about short sleeves making it less tiring to move around. And easier to take on and off, I guess. I was really surprised at how to take it off, didn't realize you couldn't pull it off like a cotton T-shirt (pulling up from the bottom.) Brigandine would have had some similar advantages, right? Easy to put on (if front and maybe side opening, side probably easier if they'd invented snaps or buttons rather than ties), centered weight. More protective, though stiffer and I don't know about maintenance. I assume Asian lamellar could have been like brigandine in functionality.
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  554. cow and other ruminants: basically walking bioreactors, who live on bacteria. Also like: termites and leaf-cutter ants, but stationary bioreactors, eating fungus.
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  555. Osaka, too. I lived at the intersection of a narrow street (one lane, one way for cars) and an even narrower one (cars probably driving very carefully to not scrape the sides.)
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  556.  @ericcarabetta1161  union busting is disappointing, but what other supermarkets are unionized?
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  557. Avoiding the center is what ring roads would be for. They could be wider further, giving drivers a choice of driving longer but faster. Or you could not give them a choice; there's no need to allow cars to drive through or into the inner center at all.
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  558. They fed deep-fried potato skins to mice, and blamed the potato skins? When fried foods in general can cause inflammation? Not to mention, mice *engineered to have inflammation*.
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  559. People who moved somewhere or descended from people who moved there, complaining about other people moving there "ruining it", and talking about moving somewhere else so they can ruin that in turn.
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  560.  @Bionickpunk  I would also guess a futon (proper Japanese one, a 3-section folding mattress, not US couch-beds), and maybe low tables that you'd kneel at (Japanese people are more likely to still be able to kneel comfortably for long periods.)
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  561.  @StopTryingSoHard  I think Japan was selling eggs at room temp, but advising that they be fridged once brought home.
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  562. Dedicated bike infrastructure (apart from parking) is mostly non-existent. What they have instead are lots of narrow (16 feet / 5 meter) wavy streets shared by all users, with 30 KPH speed limits and even lower practical speeds. And then the big streets will typically have 4 meter-wide sidewalks used by pedestrians and most bicyclists, with lots of bollards or barriers to fend off an errant car. The key thing is being separated from fast cars: either the cars are slow (narrow local streets) or you're safely on a wide and protected sidewalk. (Less safe for the pedestrians on the same sidewalk, oh well...) I did see a lot of bike parking at train stations, included paid secured parking. Tokyo reportedly has big underground bike vaults to handle all the bikes parked at its stations.
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  563. Coke and Pepsi are pretty acidic themselves, what with all the phosphoric acid, I wonder how they compare to vinegar. Looking it up... Coke has a pH of around 2.3; distilled white vinegar is 2.5. And a vinegar drink is diluted with water or syrup, so modern soft drinks are actually a fair bit more acidic!
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  564.  @coleball6001  Yup!
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  565. "Low-cal"? Butter, cream, and flour???
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  566. 25,000 years ago seems way early for pottery ovens; source? At 9:57 there seems to be a car enjoying the stove's heat...
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  567. The 'hobo' stew reminded me of minestrone... up until the tobacco and lint, anyway. Boiled onion and root vegetables is pretty basic and old. My father's Depression food was boiled hamburger (ground beef, not buns). He passed it on to me, my mother wouldn't touch it. Honestly by itself it's pretty bad, just rubbery meat. Put the meat on some bread, spoon some water (where all the fat ran off to) over the meat and bread, add a lot of salt and pepper, and it's edible. Even better if you poach an egg with the burger, and manage to transfer the egg without breaking the yolk in the water, thus running tasty yolk over the meat and bread.
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  568. @timogul  incorrect on all counts. Most drivers do live in metro areas, which include suburbs. All suburbs mandate lots of off street parking, just looking at the zoning codes. I have.
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  569.  @timogul  "definition are not walkable" Because of past government mandates and social engineering. Pre-car suburbs were walkable. Modern suburbs outside the US are often walkable, not to mention bikeable and transit-able. Car dependency was a choice, and a bad choice, disenfranchising a third of the population.
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  570.  @timogul  "suburban commercial developments would have LESS parking than they currently do" Yes. We know this when developments commonly put in exactly as much parking as they are forced to by the government, and we know it was too much when the parking is part-empty almost all year. "a plot of land with no parking" False dichotomy. There's a lot of room between "no parking" and "government mandated parking". "possible that such regulations exist" They most definitely exist, and are currently relevant. You're being almost willfully ignorant. Read Paved Paradise or look up the works of Donald Shoup
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  571. Interesting history, thanks. But "welfare states" don't cause de-industrialization. Increasing labor efficiency of industry, plus off-shoring, does.
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  572. Whole wheat bread already doesn't rise as well as white, and here you've replaced half of it with beans which have no gluten, plus may not have as much food for the yeast. Dosas are a South Indian pancake made with rice and bean flour, though wikipedia says it's 1/4 to 1/3 bean, not 1/2. The combined mixture is allowed to ferment for a day.
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  573. I balk at calling any one thing most important, but it's definitely up there. As a steam engine, it gave us a way of turning heat into work -- a brand new capability. And in reverse, it gave us the ability to create pockets of coolness from scratch, without having to import ice or exploit overnight temperature gradients -- again, a new capability.
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  574. One measure of a society is how it treats its prisoners.
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  575. Going by a different terminology, the beaver fur trade was commodity money (everything was basically being traded for or accounted in beaver pelts), while tobacco receipts would be representative money (the receipts representing a store of tobacco commodity). Pure "eggs for shoes" barter doesn't seem to last long; if people trade frequently then they'll quickly converge on some commodity to serve as 'money'. Like cigarettes in prisons and POW camps.
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  576.  @paula889  As long as you don't eat a surfeit.
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  577. Pasteurized egg, you live dangerously, or the rum kills any bacteria?
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  578.  @Bionickpunk  Perhaps when you grow up you'll learn that other people can have different preferences than you.
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  579.  @Bionickpunk  Immature copycat retort that doesn't even make sense. I already know you don't like such apartments. That's fine, no one is trying to force you to live in one. You are the one assuming that everyone else would react the same as you. And you are wrong. Many people will last long in such housing, without claustrophobia. The building is close to full with tenants. Even if people don't want to live in such places for more than a few years, that's fine, there's a place for cheap and small housing people can use for a while. There's no reason for such housing to be illegal, especially when it's making use of an awkward piece of land that would otherwise go to waste.
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  580.  @Bionickpunk  I'm not subjecting anyone to it. If people didn't want to live in them, the units would go empty. As for green space, I'm not sure such a narrow strip would actually be attractive, but anyway it's private land_. If the local city wants to buy the land and make a tiny park, it's free to. Otherwise, the owner should be free to do what they want -- which in this case was building cheap housing for 6 people. Something you apparently want to prohibit because _you can't imagine living there.
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  581. From past exposure, I'd say there's actually a decent chance there's a place to install a small clothes washer. (Japan, like German, tends to expect tenants to bring their own appliances, even fridge or maybe stove.)
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  582. So how do you cook with a clay oven in a modern kitchen? Just stick it on a burner? For someone used to high-conductive metal cookware, the use of clay outside of some long low heat feel strange.
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  583. And yet it can get pretty dang hot in the Boston summer, too. Especially in apartments without much ventilation.
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  584.  @bubbathedm  No one's making that argument except in your paranoid, persecution complex, imagination.
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  585. American. Self-checkout has usually worked for me, but I've experience at least one, maybe two, supermarkets that tried it and then removed it, so apparently it wasn't working for them. That said, my closest supermarket has even turned some of its normal cashier aisles into self-checkout, so guess it's working for them, or maybe they're optimistic.
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  586. Alfred sounds like some versions of Arthur. Except Arthur would have been trying to keep the Anglo-Saxons out.
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  587. Actually, living in those places is exactly what many people want. That's why they're packed with people. "Nobody goes there, it's too crowded."
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  588.  @mn5499  Knowledge of herbalism was probably built up over centuries or millennia, not by one generation of experiments. Also not that many things are instantly deadly at tiny quantities; a lot will just make you sick. And it's obviously impossible for ancients to have known about nitrogen.
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  589. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX08tDXPnz0
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  590. Thanks for sharing your experience, Ansarum!
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  591. I've also seen a "wood or alcohol" stove on Amazon.
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  592. "I have to make sure I look behind me to ensure a bike doesn't sneak up on me" Yeah, I learned that too (look back before moving left or right). I also accidentally caused a collision once: I saw a bike coming and stepped out of its way; old guy next to me stepped back for some reason, putting him in way of the bike. No injury resulted, but oops. It was a particularly narrow path, I think narrowed by construction scaffolding. Massachusetts shares Missouri's "bike on sidewalks outside of business districts", and after a few years of close calls with cars, I used that more and more, along with parks or low-traffic residential streets.
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  593. Would medieval clothing not include a hat or scarf? I'm pretty sure it didn't include covid-era cloth face masks, but OTOH I think they would be able to make one easily given the design, and masks are often great in winter. I use KF94s and N95s, and they protect part of my face from wind and make a nice warm pocket, it's way better than a scarf...
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  594. Funny how you feel safe saying "s*x" on Youtube but not "m*asturbation" (and here I am, censoring both out of fear of a filter.)
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  595. "milk that isn't milk can be called milk" We've been talking about soy milk or almond milk for over a thousand years, it's not some new branding thing.
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  596.  @thetrainmon  tbf they can live there without liking it. if cheapest housing is in the big development and/or poorly zoned area where a nearby store is literally illegal...
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  597. " 'alfalfa', a crop that only came into the agricultural world after World War II" Funny how Pliny mentions it, then.
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  598. Wow, and here I thought my Airbnb in Osaka was impressively small. That was technically a detached 2-story house (with like 3 cm of air gap from the next building), long and narrow and tapering. Kind of 3x7 meters except I don't think the widest point really hit 3 m. Still, total of 30-40 m2. Narrow and very steep stairs (ladder, really); I ended up just leaving my luggage downstairs and only going up to sleep, so most of the upper space was wasted for me. No tub, just minimal toilet and shower stall. Two gas burners, two sinks next to each other, mini-fridge, clothes washer. For just me, living out of my bags and laptop, it was mostly fine; if I had a friend over for dinner and anime, we had to maneuver around each other a bit. Was about $1000/month in 2019. One objective complaint about such narrow places, stretching along a street, is that they have no depth. Any sound from the street, like old people talking to each other at 7 AM, is a short distance from your head. I guess longer distance once you go further up. But that was annoying.
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  599. Pauliina Remes: "'Neoplatonism' refers to a school of thought that began in approximately 245 CE, when a man called Plotinus moved [to] the capital of the Roman Empire [and] began teaching his interpretation of Plato's philosophy."
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  600.  @Hogtownboy1  " So war on the car " Drivers kill 42,000 Americans every year. Cars are already waging war on us. Also, encouraging safe and law-abiding driving is not, in fact, "war on the car".
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  601. There are many reasons we don't have units like this, ADA is the least of it. For typical US zoning that building a) violates parking mandates b) exceeds the allowed lot coverage c) exceeds the allowed height limit d) is smaller than the minimum unit and bedroom sizes e) doesn't have mandated setbacks b-e are somewhat waive-able in higher density areas[1] but (a) has been nigh-universal. No one is going to build 150 sqft apartments when you also have to provide 350 square feet of parking to go with it. [1] And 75% of US urban land is zoned for detached single family houses only, on minimum lots of often 1/8 acre (5000 sqft) or more. A huge difference in Japan is that that concept does not exist: Residential zoning is simply Residential, there's no zoning for single vs. multi-family, or owned vs. rental housing. The zoning simply prescribes building size, and you're free to stuff as many people in as you can convince to live there. Equally important, a small building like that would have no parking mandate.
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  602.  @louisazraels7072  I totally agree! But the US does have parking mandates, even for dense urban areas.
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  603. Americans tend to have larger houses, with room for large fridge or even a separate chest freezer, making it easier to buy in bulk and freeze leftovers.
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  604. I've lived alone most of my adult life, cooking still makes fiscal sense to me. Not trying to cook *everything*; long complex foods like dim sum or Indian are definitely things to go out for. But eating out for sandwiches or basic pasta dishes seems ridiculous. And while the supermarket might compete on roast chicken price, I prefer my own chicken flavors, and the market doesn't really offer fresh cooked steak or pork or fried eggs... Burgers are a bit weird. I realized in college that a nice restaurant burger cost $6 (not counting tax and tip, probably) and I could make a rough equivalent for $1.50 and on a college budget that matters. OTOH I haven't been that great at cooking ground beef patties on my frying pans. OTOH again, was the restaurant burger 4x better than mine? (Granted that's a 1.50 burger via a committment to be making 4 quarter-pound burgers in short order, but I could live with that.)
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  605. Heh, reminds me of the 1950 Disney video "Motor Mania" (you can find it on Youtube), about some nice guy turning rude as soon as he got behind the wheel.
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  606. "Many people will never cycle---there are surveys which back this up" All the surveys I've seen show that the vast majority of people say they're open to biking, if it feels safe. And in places where there's a solid network of safe biking routes, we see lot of people bike. Americans aren't magically different. If you have a 15 foot path you can allocate 5 feet for walking and 10 for 2-way biking and it works. This is a real path near me, heavily used by both modes. If it's a short narrow connector path, bikes can slow down for the short distance.
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  607.  @muha0644  I meant that Stalin was a terrorist and mass murderer.
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  608. I've also seen "utility bike" for the category that includes omafiets and mamachari. My previous bike was basically a kit-bashed US approximation of that: cheap and heavy hybrid bike, added baskets and fenders.
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  609. BACCANO! woo. I dunno, I think a lot of that was sour grapes. Most people aren't really thinking about death, just going one day at a time. Immortals can too, especially if they still need to eat. Really the main problem (in urban/wainscot fantasy) wasn't even mentioned, the whole having to hide your immortality thing, faking being your own grandson and such. I like Hob Gadling from Sandman, a cavalier immortal of sorts. He feels loss and grief, but he's still going.
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  610.  @R_V_  The US has higher crime rates than Western Europe, and yet most Americans are in far more danger from cars and drivers than we are from crime. Yet people are afraid of 'crime' and 'immigrants' like much of the media tells them to be, and not of the cars far more likely to kill them. What keeps people off the street is the fear of being run down by traffic.
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  611. I smell fear.
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  612. Any idea how expensive cumin would have been? It grows in the eastern Med, so still distant from England, but a lot fewer intermediaries than spices from SE Asia.
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  613.  @gundamzerostrike  Yeah, there's all that biking in Japan because the streets are a lot safer than in most countries. No dedicated paths like Dutch ones, but narrow slow shared streets, or wide sidewalks along fast streets.
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  614.  @alquinn8576  "Biden's America" lol, blue states have lower traffic fatalities per capita. Not only did you make this gratuitously political, you got it wrong.
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  615. I didn't think you could be in central Tokyo and be 10-15 minutes from the nearest subway station or 5-10 minutes from the nearest conbini.
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  616. I think I have seen metal silverware on planes in the past 10 years. Non-US international flights are the way, like LAN between US and Chile. Or maybe it's flying a national prestige airline. Long international flights also get free wine offered, even in economy. A City on Mars says that hot sauce is highly valued on space flights to restore some flavor, with packets even becoming a currency on one shuttle flight after the supply ran low.
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  617. Now I wonder how many food processors were destroyed in researching the recipe.
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  618. I thought the prohibitions on meat eating came just from Buddhism, not Shintoism.
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  619.  @Pystro  As Girton said, probably lots of places don't have parallel streets. Even in Japan, someone pointed me at a stroad, where there are parallel streets for stretches but then they get cut off; if you're going a long way you need to stay on the stroad. (Fortunately, the Japanese idea of a stroad already includes wide sidewalks and physical barriers, though also lots of driveways.)
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  620. 'swerve' >_>
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  621. How does the creme d'chocolate differ from chocolate mousse?
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  622. HOAs are evil.
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  623. Also, the Roman new year was originally in March, and plausibly early on it was a lunisolar calendar starting in spring based on observations, with February as "eh, whatever" variable end of the year.
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