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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • To add on to this explanation, the food industry in the US is chock full of fake marketing terms that are designed to get more eco-conscious consumers to fall into their trap. This is a problem across large swathes of the food industry, but one of the most egregious is chicken.

    • “No antibiotics” is supposed to mean the chicken was never given antibiotics (shocker, I know). There is no regular methodology for verifying this label is accurate outside of random sampling of poultry at slaughter.
    • “No hormones” is a completely useless label you’ll see used all the time. Hormones are not allowed in the production of chickens for slaughter in the US.
    • “Cage free” is another tricky one. Chickens are almost never kept in cages when raised for slaughter. Hens are frequently kept in cages for egg-laying purposes. If you see this on chicken breast packaging it probably doesn’t mean anything.
    • “Free-range” means the chicken had some kind of access to “outside.” There are no standards for how much “outside” space is required or what that “outside” space has to look like.

    So unfortunately a bit more legwork is required to make sure product labeling statements are actually worth something. That’s a problem in the US, but the opposite side of the coin is problematic too (like how many people now attribute “GMO” as meaning “toxic”).



  • “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” ― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

    “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” ― Captain Jean-Luc Picard

    “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” — Marcus Aurelius


  • Sure. Except “letting them evacuate” in this case is better characterized as “continuing to expel them from their homes under threat of violence.” I’m not arguing the 24 hour time period is the atrocity, I’m arguing the act of creating a humanitarian crisis under the auspices of a military campaign effort is abhorrent.

    It’s not like we don’t have any good reporting on the matter either. The BBC for example has already been attacked because they refused to declare Hamas as terrorists (a label I agree with, for the record). [This article](BBC News - Khan Younis: A Gaza city on its knees, now with a million mouths to feed
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67116403) provides some insight into the absolute horror regular Palestinians are going through right now.



  • Haven’t watched the video, but as someone who works in industry in the US I think the consumer side of a metric switch is the lowest barrier to entry. A much bigger hurdle is the fact that almost all of our raw industrial inputs are built on the imperial system. Need to buy raw plate or bar stock to have something built? It’s sized in imperial. And if you want to source metric you’re either going to have to pay more for it or look outside the US. And after that raw stock is purchased and you send it to a machine shop that machine shop is almost certainly using exclusively imperial tooling and measurement equipment. You can do the fake metric thing that some companies do where you dual dimension all of your drawings, but those companies will usually still design to imperial so their parts can be fabricated in the US.

    I’m absolutely not opposed to a switch to metric. I still perform most of my calculations in metric and then convert to imperial just for ease and because that’s how I was taught in school. But it’s certainly much more difficult than just deciding one day that we’re all going to switch.