You’re getting the labels mixed up.

As a labeling requirement under U.S. law, anything labeled “American Cheese” must be pasteurized process cheese made from some combination of cheddar, colby, washed curd cheese, or granular cheese, which the law also defines pretty strictly. It must be made from these cheeses, heated and emulsified with an emulsifying salt (usually sodium citrate).

American cheese is allowed to have some optional ingredients and still be labeled American Cheese:

• Food safe acid (as long as pH stays above 5.3)
• Cream or milkfat, such that this added fat can account for up to 5% of the weight of the finished product.
• Water (but the total moisture content of the resulting product must still be within the other limits in the regulation)
• Salt
• Artificial coloring
• Spices or flavoring that do not simulate the flavors of cheeses
• Mold inhibitors from sorbate up to 0.2%, or from proprionate up to 0.3%
• Lechitin, if sold in slices

You can add milk, cream, buttermilk, whey, or certain other dairy products up to 49% of the finished product, but then you’d have to call it “Pasteurized American Process Cheese Food” instead of just American Cheese.

American cheese is made from almost entirely cheese ingredients. The individual slices being sold at the store, though, vary by brand on whether they’re even trying to be American Cheese (or whether they’re some kind of lesser “cheese food” or even lesser “cheese spread” or even lesser “cheese product”)

Regular Kraft singles aren’t American Cheese. Look at the label. They’re “cheese product.” Even the Deli Deluxe line has taken a hit in quality in recent years, even if they are labeled Cheese.

Go with other brands that actually put together a decent tasting American Cheese, and check the label to make sure it’s made with 100% cheese instead of 51% cheese (or less).

This is my counter! It was made for me!

My kids are younger than yours, which has some advantages (no homework, not really any extracurricular activities, longer sleep) and disadvantages (not really able to feed or clothe themselves, need parent help for bathing, still need some assistance on brushing teeth, need to be read to instead of being able to read on their own).

During busy weeks (like when one of us parents is out of town for work or something) we’re quick to switch from home cooked meals to takeout or eating out, may hire cleaners, and push off some of the social interactions, but I also recognize that I’m working with a pretty nice buffer in that I’m already hanging out with friends about 10 hours per week.

I found a good friend group of families with similarly aged children within walking distance of my home. We meet up maybe once a week at one of the local restaurants with patio space and let the kids play while we catch up. That space of 2-3 hours does triple duty: catching up with friends, getting the kids out of the house to do high energy activities with friends, and feeding everyone for dinner on a weeknight.

Having that kind of social group is key. My parents had church, but I’m not religious, so it was important to at least find a way to replicate that social sense of community somehow when I had kids.

Yeah.

There are 168 hours in a week.

I sleep about 7.5 hours, but am usually in bed for 8 hours. Let’s just call that 56 hours.

I work about 45 hours per week. My commute takes me about 15 minutes each way, so that’s a minimum of 2.5 hours per week of biking (this also serves as light cardio). More realistically, I do about half the pickups and dropoffs for my school age kids, so each one of those adds about 45 minutes, so that’s another 3.75 hours. That’s a total of 50.25 hours on work stuff.

I sneak in about 3 or 4 workouts per week during my lunch break, adding about an hour to each workday that I do that. On days I don’t work out, I might run errands or eat lunch with friends. So let’s just call that 5.

Let’s add 7 hours to our morning routines, where I generally have to wake up an hour before actually leaving the home. And another 7 hours for my kids bedtime routines.

That leaves just under 43 hours per week of everything else. I’m generally able to fit in social activities like meeting up with friends two or three times per week (10 hours), cooking and meal prep (10 hours, may overlap with social activities like when I’m hosting a BBQ), miscellaneous chores (5 hours), a decent chunk of TV, movies, or reading (10-20 hours per week depending on what sports season it is), other kid activities (10-20 hours per week, may overlap with other social activities).

So the ordinary workweeks are a bit tight but doable. Vacation/holiday weeks tend to give a bit more time, but also tend to add on the parenting responsibilities.

And if I’m feeling time pressure, there’s always places to get a bit more time: outsourcing some of the cooking and cleaning (not necessarily by hiring someone to come to the home but simply by eating out so that someone else cooks and washes dishes).

Dude knows ball

Lots of things we harvest before they’re done developing as they ordinarily would.

Plenty of herbs and vegetables get fibrous and unpleasant (or even impractical) to eat if we let them grow too long.

Pea varieties with edible pods (snow peas, snap peas) can continue to grow until their pods are no longer edible, while the internal seed can continue to develop and would need to be separated out like regular peas out of the pod.

Okra has a finite window where the actual fruit is edible. If you let it grow too long, it becomes hard and dry and gross, and then you’ll just have to save the dessicated seeds for planting next season.

Cucumbers are also harvested early, before they become a yellow fibrous gourd. I’ve had to look up recipes for what to do with these when my lazy ass actually let this happen in my garden, and went with some kind of Chinese pork and cucumber soup.

Baby corn is just regular corn harvested really early. It’s not actually a different species/cultivar.

Even sweet corn we harvest early while the kernels are still plump with water. Most other corn varieties we grow to where they get pretty dried out to be processed into cornmeal and other products.

Agriculture is really interesting. Timing the harvest is an important part of actually optimizing the product for specific purposes.

Frozen (2013) doesn’t have a traditional villain. The main barriers to the main character’s happiness is a lifetime of being told to keep her superpower secret and the wedge it forms between her and her sister (whose stunted emotional development causes her to jump in the arms of the first man who pays attention to her).

Big Hero 6 (2014) does have a villain, but his motivations are complicated, and the main character’s journey is as much about overcoming the trauma of losing his brother as it is defeating the villain’s plans.

Zootopia (2016) reveals the villain at the very end, and most of the plot is driven by the characters grappling with societal injustice and prejudice.

Moana (2016) is a hero’s journey but the big bad villain is revealed at the end to be, like, environmental destruction personified, and the way to defeat the villain is to apologize and make things right.

Frozen 2 (2019) similarly has a plot where it’s revealed that all the problems are caused by the characters’ grandfather’s sins, and the way to fix it is to undo the betrayal and land theft of the indigenous people (which their entire kingdom is basically built on).

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) is one I’ve only seen once but I remember it being about climate change and generational trauma.

Encanto (2021) is for sure about generational trauma. The antagonists are mostly conceptual: crushing expectations/responsibilities that come with great power, the imbalance and negative family dynamics that come from parents or grandparents showing favoritism, insecurity that comes from going from poor to rich but believing that it can all fall apart in an instant, the toxic effects of keeping secrets. Oh and it all stems from the grandma seeing her husband murdered by soldiers in front of their baby triplets.

Strange World (2022) is about climate change caused by overexploitation of natural resources.

Does that actually add up, though?

Google released stats recently that the median Gemini prompt consumes about 0.24 watt hours of electricity.

For humans performing knowledge based labor, how many prompts is that worth per hour? Let’s say that the average knowledge worker is about as productive as one good prompt every 5 minutes, so 12 per hour or 96 per 8-hour workday.

Let’s also generously assume that about 25% of the prompts’ output are actually useful, and that the median is actually close to the mean (in real life, I would expect both to be significantly worse for the LLM, but let’s go with those assumptions for now).

So on the one hand, we have a machine doing 384 prompts (75% of which are discarded), for 92 watt hours of energy, which works out to be 80 kilocalories.

On the other hand, we have a human doing 8 hours of knowledge work, probably burning about 500 calories worth of energy during that sedentary shift.

You can probably see that the specific tasks can be worked through so that some classes of workers might be worth many, many LLM prompts, and some people might be worth more or less energy.

But if averages are within an order of magnitude, we should see that plenty of people are still more energy efficient than the computers. And plenty aren’t.

I wouldn’t say it’s all that “nonstandard.” The word “loud” is often used to mean distracting or attention-grabbing in a visual context, so extending it to other senses doesn’t seem like that far of a leap.

If you’re talking about a “large patch of psoriasis” that is apparently always on your skin and don’t know the first thing about cleaning and moisturizing products for your hair and skin, it might be worth exploring whether your psoriasis is aggravated by certain substances (including your hair touching your skin) and can be mitigated by consciously avoiding certain products/ingredients.

Are you talking about Dr Bronns, which also comes with large amounts of reading material printed all over the bottle?

For the Shin brand specifically, I like:

• Poached (2 minute boil) or soft boiled egg (6 minute boil)
• Frozen edamame (cooks in the broth in the same amount of time as the noodles)
• Fresh garlic (micro plane or mince and add to the broth towards the end of the cook)
• Baby bok choy (if cut into individual leaves, cooks in broth in same time as noodles)
• Shitake mushrooms (fresh, sliced, quick stir fry in the pot with butter or something to cook before adding water for the broth)
• Kimchi (just dump on top of the finished bowl as a garnish)
• Scallions (slice and put on finished bowl)

I usually only do one or two of these, but the point is to make it way better without actually adding to the cooking time. And the combinations of the above can work pretty well at mixing things up for a long time before getting bored.

Other ramen flavors, I sometimes add some of the above, or shredded cabbage, spinach, peas, other beans or legumes. Sometimes nori, canned corn, canned bamboo. Sometimes with the broth I’ll add gelatin to thicken. For some seafood flavors I might throw in frozen shrimp. Certain flavors can go with sesame seeds.

Attention seeking and validation seeking are baked into human personalities to varying degrees, and plenty of behavior predating social media (and even the internet) was motivated by those tendencies.

Giving his all

So yeah, that’s a lot of birds early on in the song. But I have to know, for the humans being gifted toward the end of the song: are they like performers you can hire for a single day? Or are they…slaves?

It would be a better metaphor if it were filled with profile pictures of beautiful people, but where the claw simply can’t grab individual flat photos like that.

It describes something going to a location, but not what you do.

Going to that location is a much bigger part of the astronaut job than it is any other job you’ve listed.

Lots of people swear by lots of things when it comes to cast iron. There’s a lot of confidently stated incorrect information about cast iron all over the internet, which gets repeated by commenters in places like reddit.

It’s like when people swore by flaxseed oil, which makes for a pretty seasoning that flakes off easily and is actually a terrible choice for cooking.

Or all sorts of old wives tales about not using detergent, or using chain mail instead of a regular scrubber, or avoiding metal utensils. There’s a ton of misinformation out there that doesn’t hold up to real experience (and often traces back to vibes, not science).

Plenty of people have sanded their lodge pans with no issues. I personally haven’t, but mainly because I don’t care enough about the smooth surface.

I don’t see why the seasoning wouldn’t stick with a smooth surface over a pebbled surface, though. The polymerization should happen at the surface no matter what.