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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • Wind kinda has to go big for efficiency. It’s hard to beat the laws of physics on this. Not really feasible for individuals to do in a meaningful way unless you have a whole farm.

    Solar panels are workable-ish. Residential rooftop is OK, but the real cost benefit is from filling big, flat fields with racks. Homes have to be a boutique setup every time, and labor cost adds up.

    If you want to be (semi-) independent of traditional power utilities, the way to go is co-ops. You and all your neighbors go in on buying a field and putting solar/wind/storage on it















  • Close. WWII America had to invest heavily in farms to feed soldiers who need 4,000 kcal diets to support marching around with heavy packs all day long in potentially cold weather. That investment drove up automation in the farm industry, particularly with corn and soybeans.

    War ends, but the infrastructure is all still there. If farms weren’t heavily subsidized, they would collapse. There was real risk of fields going fallow on a mass level, resulting in too little food to feed the population. And then you have to keep subsidizing it, forever. Nobody has figured out a way out of that logic while maintaining a mostly capitalist production system.


  • Microsoft’s original plan was to own the living room the way they own the office space. Not just gaming, but all your movies, TV, shopping, etc. could be done through the XBox.

    Kinect was a particularly big jump in that regard. There were demos of AR-type stuff where you could see yourself wearing clothes you might want to buy. You could move around and the clothes on screen would move with your body. There’s some promo videos of that, but nothing concrete ever came of it.

    Now they have slagging sales for two generations, and a AAA industry that struggles to make a real hit and is laying off a lot of people. They can’t even hold onto the core gaming market much less get their tendrils into the rest of the living room. They then release a handheld that’s basically an upgrade of an existing handheld that wasn’t selling very well, but now with XBox branding.

    Is this a problem for the rest of us? No, not really. There’s plenty of alternatives, and we don’t need to care. Is this the result the money people at Microsoft envisioned when they started this ~25 years ago? No, not at all.




  • It’s commonly known among sous vide cooking. The internal temp for sous vide beef is often <60C, and that makes some people nervous. However:

    https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/1131-is-sous-vide-safe

    First, let’s talk about what’s dangerous. A few types of bacteria in particular are responsible for most foodborne illness: Salmonella, Escherichia coli, and Campylobacter jejuni. Salmonella, a resilient group of bacteria that is most commonly found in poultry and eggs, is ingested by chickens, and then contaminates their muscle tissue, ­intestines, and ovaries. Salmonella can migrate into the muscle of chickens, meaning that they are contaminated not just on the surface but also inside the meat. Escherichia coli is a general group of bacteria that reside in the intestines of many animals, including humans. But if ingested, some strains of E. coli can wreak havoc. Campylobacter jejuni is a spiral-shaped bacteria that causes one of the most common diarrheal illnesses in humans in America.

    (Edit: emphasis added above)

    This may not be true with techniques like blade tenderization. That can transfer pathogens from the surface to the internals.

    Taenia saginata will die in only 5 minutes at 56C, which is quite a low temp even for sous vide. In fact, most beef jerky recipes will typically set the dehydrator’s temperature higher than that. It’s typical that slightly lower temps will work if it’s done for longer–jerky and sous vide usually takes several hours–but I don’t have a chart handy for taenia saginata specifically.