How do the economics pan out? Do you pay more for gluten at higher purity than the ~10% you get when you buy it in sacks of flour?
The retail case is interesting, although maybe not indicative of wholesale
I suppose this is a function of whether gluten is a usable by-product of making low-protein cake flour. In that case i would expect industrial bread to simply add by-product gluten to cheaper flour. But that might obviate the search for higher-gluten wheat that the article describes. Really, i need more data.
> I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours.
If you make sourdough, have a crack at using standard supermarket flour and then try adding some organic stone ground or other expensive flour with special snob factor.
I am far from expert but notice a big difference.
(I’d say to try 100% organic stoneground but getting a good rise can be quite hard).
> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever
Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
Non-drivers benefit from roads and vehicles, since they are part of society. Many non-drivers order from Amazon, for example, and are reliant on someone being able to actually deliver what they ordered.
I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.
This is a very different thing though. People ordering from Amazon already paid for the insurance for the trip with delivery fees. And I don't think you can bring up public services as an example. Non-drivers should not be paying for damages caused by reckless drivers, the drivers should pay for insurance, especially when drivers are the same group of people who complain about fundings of public transport.
You’re describing another (intentional) part of NZs ACC. It frees up the courts. This suit is just covered, and the courts don’t get bogged down (well, they do, just not with this stuff).
Note that many countries who have socialised healthcare and/or accident compensation also collect taxes or levies for higher risk activities as part of the base to pay for it all.
For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance.
The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.
Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group?
The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes.
If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance.
Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees.
You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.
The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee.
So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer.
So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates.
But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company.
So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer.
So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.
That makes you very out of step with most Americans. You choose to pick on the obese because it’s more socially acceptable, but also people with cancer, kidney disease, etc.
Your position would be considered deeply immoral by most people (rightly). Maybe spend less time on-line and interact with regular people.
Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
Yes, the government doesn’t have a checking account. When it spends money, that money is created and its balance sheet grows. When it receives taxes the balance sheet shrinks as the money is destroyed. If there’s a gap it gets filled by issuing bonds. Thats the national debt. These are conventions, not absolute rules, so governments can go rogue but it doesn’t end well
While not the only ones, the NYT notoriously pushed a lot of false and poorly verified information from questionable sources as fact in an effort to be the first to publish. They subsequently issued a mea culpa.
> there was a fear of "alert fatigue" coupled with a lack of confidence about the strength of the signals they were getting.
This and the parent comment might be correct, but also, the US has one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world and the US defence budget dwarfs everyone else’s.
They failed spectacularly in the role they exist to perform. This deserves criticism.
The role they exist to perform is maintaining the American empire and hegemony, and they've done a pretty good job of that up until ~this year.
'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires, like the one that radicalized OBL and provided a training ground for his friends and allies. If it were, they wouldn't be working half as hard in demonstrating to hundreds of millions of people that yes, America does, in fact, mean them harm, and is happy to inflict that harm on them.
> ...and they've done a pretty good job of that up until ~this year.
Not really.
When you look back, seeing how things turned out, history looks different than it almost certainly felt to most people at the time.
It took 250-300 years for the Roman Empire to collapse. You could make a pretty strong argument that the US has been in decline for decades, and that cracks in Pax Americana were already forming during the Vietnam War era.
> 'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires...
Even though I agree with you that the US shouldn’t have been executing the foreign policy it did, especially in Western Asia, I’m going to push back on your statement.
Since the 1920s, oil has been the #1 input to any industrialized economy, and since the 1960s, any economy. And since crude oil is the #1 commodity product (despite coming in different grades), it’s in not just the US’s interest but almost everybody’s interest to have a stable supply since a disruption anywhere causes pricing turmoil everywhere (as seen in the current situation). Without that, you disrupt food, healthcare, and production of almost any goods. So yes, it’s a form of self-interested safety.
Naturally even when you consider this as the policy driver, plenty of people will misunderstand, sometimes willfully, and use the machine for other purposes.
More importantly, though energy will remain the pre-eminent input to all economies,it no longer need be petrochemical. The US seems to be ignoring this, to its long (and short) term detriment.
That's a really solid set of counterpoints to which I'd respond that the foreign policy has not merely been to maintain supply of oil, but to do so at discount prices and prevent other powers from developing it. This has demonstrably not improved stable access to oil and necessarily requires bringing an increasing fraction of the world to ruin and relative turmoil. In short, it's bad long-term strategy because it's not sustainable. Meanwhile, they've notably resisted efforts to diversify access to alternative sources of energy that'd reduce that reliance on oil.
If energy security were that high a priority, the US would have been rushing head-first, instead of dragging its feet, in a transition off fossil fuels and onto renewables and energy independence.
So if USA hadn’t interfered in the middle east or supported Israel, ever, the oil supply coming from the Middle East would be significantly less stable? How…?
PBS Frontline isn't a bad source of information, but too prone to making stories and narratives fit the 60 minutes mark even at the cost of heavy cherry picking and producing misrepresentations.
True, but I think a lot of the reporting was done by WaPo who traditionally are not the worst offenders. Genuine question, do you think this particular video is sensationalism and cherry picking? It read as seeming credible to me, but I do worry I'm becoming more gullible/less critical thinking into my old age, unfortunately.
It seemed a very informative piece of journalism, very well done to be honest into the topic of "how the breach happened and how did Israeli intelligence failed".
I did not like the narrative of equating the pains of the two sides though, because they are very different in every sense.
I don’t know a lot about heat pumps, but one inefficiency that irritates me is that we are doing opposite things in isolation frequently.
I want to cool the house (so have waste heat) but also want to warm my water, so make heat. In winter I warm my house, except for the fridge where it’s trying to cool its contents.
If there was any overlap or coordination it would surely be possible to have less hardware, working smarter and using less power.
It good when making pizza and makes bread rise nicely.
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