Nemi

So you bring up emulsifiers and in my opinion, that is one of the big baddy's in UPF. Yes, we have been using emulsifiers for centuries, but the effectiveness of modern emulsifiers is on another level then something like lecithin from soybeans. The strength and ubiquity of modern emulsifiers has completely changed the food we eat. They are almost literally in everything we eat today.

Why are they bad? What do emulsifiers do? They combine substances that don't want to be combined. What in your body might this affect? Your mucosal lining. Emulsifiers don't break down in your gut as they pass through. They just emulsify everything as they move through. Including your mucus. That layer is extremely important for a normally functioning gut. Lose it and then chime will contact the gut lining. This disrupts the microbiota and allows things to get through your gut that are not supposed to. It causes inflammation.

UPFs contain many bad things, but they HAVE to be categorized to fully appreciate the levels of badness. Some things are just not that big of deal, and the "health industry" does everyone a disservice by not clarifying it.

from bad to not as bad:

- Emulsifiers (e.g., Polysorbate 80/60/40, carboxymethylcellulose)

- some stabilizers/thickeners (e.g., carrageenan)

- artificial sweeteners

- refined sugars

- artificial colors/cosmetics

- other stabilizers/thickeners/emulsifiers (e.g., xanthan gum, guar gum, pectin, cellulose, lecithin)

I see this as consistent. When you say "I play the piano" you are really saying, "There are many instruments – banjo, trumpet, clarinet, and piano. I play the piano". Saying "I play a piano" is also correct. But the inference is that you are referring to one particular piano.

In the sentence "There is a piano in the lobby" you are saying "There are many objects in the lobby. Among them is a piano, one of many in the world".

I see this as consistent with other replies stating that The is something specific in a group, and A is an indeterminant one of many.

How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".

This is the answer. While it is very real to talk about "employee culture" as company culture, in this particular case, the "culture" I was talking about was from a corporate/investment/acquisition level. Howards job is not to understand how each company that BRK owns is run, that is the CEO's job. But Howards job is to look at BRK from a high level and make sure that the CEO is executing in the same way that Warren set up, namely – buying companies and stocks at a "fair" price or below, and not micromanaging the companies that they acquire. If the CEO is not living up to that, Howard's (and the board's) one card that they can play is to replace the CEO.

The Chairman position is to protect company culture, not make operational decisions.

Look, I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but Cook's job, being the CEO, is playing politics. It is literally part of the job. Making sure your company is not going to get legislated out of existence is one of the things you must do as CEO.

I would not want that job. As a matter of fact, as I started up the ladder in the company I was working for I realized that politics (internal and external) are a big part of the job and I was just not suited nor qualified for it, so I quit. But that is what CEO's must do if they want their company to be successful.

I love this.

As nerdy as it is, it is also an interesting historical look on how certain things in society/culture have a life that is hidden in plain view and quietly goes on. It is an interesting reflection on many things in life.

I run an ecommerce auction website on wordpress that is highly dynamic and can't be cached. Bots are a waste of cpu. I even turned off "prefetch" requests as I found that (android in particular) browsers will prefetch every auction item on the page as the user scrolls down the summary page looking at items.

I agree, it is an interesting thing to ponder. I often phrased it to myself that the cost of technical debt compounds the lower in the code stack you go.

Said another way, tech debt has a multiplicative factor the farther away from the end user you get. Tech debt in the database is worse than in the data layer. It is worse in the data layer than in the business logic. It is worse in the business logic than in the UI code. etc.

This is related to the fact that it gets exponentially more difficult to refactor code the farther away you get from the end user. Changing the database is usually more difficult and impacts more things than the data layer code. And on and on we go back up.

So beware, i setup my APP3 on my daughters ipad and had hearing aids set with a hearing test. This way when connecting to my Pixel it would still apply the hearing aid adjustments, but I would not have other things like auto-pause when removing the airpod.

Well, I installed this and now my hearing settings have been removed from the airpods. And I guess you could say that this would be obvious because librepods doesn't support the hearing aids, what is not obvious is that installing it takes a set of APP3 that has been already setup and basically wipes them. Good to know for the future

I agree. I see a lot of comments alluding to the 'regulations' being bad. They are there for a reason. To keep errant bankers from loaning out too much money and creating an even more fragile system.

People have to realize that banking as a business is inherently broken. It is about lending long and borrowing short, which is very risky. Deposits are used to provide funds to lend long, but deposits can be 'called' at any time. The loans cannot.

But banking is also critical for a properly functioning society. It is in the government's (the people's) best interest to have a robust banking system in place. How to reconcile the risk with the benefit? By heavily regulating it.

Prices are set at the margins

Another thing that I read about on this topic was that once a land lord has gotten into a groove of extend and pretend they lower their costs and cut out the overhead of property management. This means that if they took on one tenant they would have to ramp up property management costs (and potentially refurb/improvement costs) and they are not willing to do that, so you end up with the situation where you can't rent a property even if you want to.

Interesting. Prices, as they say, are set at the margins - so given that, what kind of liquidity is there? How many are transacting? If the price hasn't shifted from $16k, it could mean that everyone thinks they are worth $16k, OR it could mean that no one has bought one in years and the last transaction was $16k. Those are big differences.

50% is a stretch. 20% maybe, depending on the vehicle.

But here is another consideration. Sales tax. If I buy a car and trade one in, the sale price that I pay taxes on is the price of the vehicle I am buying minus the trade in.

For instance, if I buy a new car for $30,000 and trade in a vehicle and they give me $15k for it, I pay sales tax only on $15k. That saves me about $1k in my area in sales tax. If I could have sold the used car for over $16k, then I would technically be money ahead. But your time is also worth something. For it to be worth it to me, I would need to be able to get at least $17k for the used vehicle to make it worth the effort.