Is this the theme song?

Nope. You aren’t measuring the percentage of liquid in a dough. You are measuring the percentage of liquid relative to the mass of flour. That’s why you can have 100% or higher hydration doughs.

No problem. I’ve definitely seen a lot of baking articles that somehow try and make this simple concept unbelievably convoluted.

The only other thing to know is that 1 mL of water = 1 gram of water. Which means 170g of water == 170 mL of water (At STP… blah blah blah. It’s not super important to hit exactly 70% you can hit 75% or 65% and you’ll be fine. It’s close enough to true).

Cooking allows for a lot of “feeling it out”. For example, most spices you aren’t really going to taste a difference between a tsp and a tbsp of the same spice. Just knowing what spices go into the dish you are making can often be enough.

For example, taco seasoning is onions, cumin, oragano, chili pepper, and paprika. By far, the cumin and onions drive the flavor, you could almost leave out everything else. With that in mind, it mostly ends up being just the technique. Brown the onions, toast the spices, brown the meat. The actual amount of spices that goes in won’t make a huge difference one way or another. What does make a difference is if you grind your cumin instead of using preground (that’s true for most seed spices).

Technique is often the most important thing vs exact ingredient measuring. The exception to this is baking. You must measure (preferably by weight) your flour and liquids. You can eventually do it by feel, but it’s hard. You’ll get much better results with a scale. Even then, it’s mostly just the process of targeting the right hydration. 70% does well for a lot of white breads (For every 1 gram of flour add 0.7g of liquid).

Quick, let’s cut taxes even further! We have people to kill in the middle east!

We are fortunately seeing some of this with the gerrymandering bills. The absolute right messaging came from AOC when asked about the Virginia redistricting “We have a bill on the table to resolve this very problem but Republicans refuse to support it. If they hate this, they can feel free to vote to stop all gerrymandering”.

It’s a great move and these are bills that need to be introduced frequently by dems right now. When people say “Yeah, but what can they do”. This. This is what they can do. Introducing these messaging bills for republicans to vote again and then grand standing on how republicans won’t do anything to help the working class.

But dems must follow through. Minimum wage is the prefect example of where they should follow through. Attach it to a budget bill and when the parliamentarian says “not allowed” tell them to F off and push it through anyways. Just as the republicans have already done several times since they took control. Or blow up the filibuster. Either is an acceptable act for when dems get power. But they must deliver.

If dems operate like they did in Biden term 1 or Obama term 1, they’ll be sunk in 2032.

I like to subscribe to the “magic makes it’s users imbeciles” fan theory. (Though the truth is that JK just isn’t all that bright).

It isn’t that the killing spell is unblockable. Harry and his mom managed to block it twice. But apparently magicians in HP universe are just completely dumb and unwilling or incapable of innovation. That was spelled out clearly in book 1 where an elementary logic puzzle was seen a good way to protect the greatest treasure on earth.

Ron’s dad, for example, lived in England. He could wander the muggle streets freely if he wanted to. He had a deep fascination of basic muggle items, yet he didn’t just go to his local library to check out a book or log on to the internet to learn about things that were his passion.

Yes “secret”.

High gas prices are a pittance if we can bring Jesus back! (I wish this were a joke).

Yup. In basically all terms, rail is more efficient than airplanes.

The only thing that makes Amtrak less efficient in the US is the fact that it’s unused. And the reason it’s unused is because it’s an afterthought in government spending.

1. Amtrak isn’t funded by the US government. They have to extract all their funding from operations.

2. Amtrak’s service is bad mainly because the line operators have found ways to make it impossible to effectively operate. That means late and long delayed trains with unpredictable arrival/departure times.

3. Amtrak is slow, mainly because it has almost no dedicated lines. It has to share them with line operators.

4. Very few people use amtrak.

The end result is a high price. Few people using amtrak means it has to hike ticket prices up.

The only way for Amtrak to get better is extensive investment by the feds and regulation of rail lines in general. Without that, as you’ve correctly observed it will always be disadvantaged compared to other modes of transport.

But hey, the war in Iran might make it cheaper than driving so that’s something.

My suggestion for anyone voting in the US. Vote early in person if possible. If you are going to vote by mail, do it ASAP.

That’s the best way to get your ballot counted, which is the most important thing right now.

Oh, and check your registration, like today. And tomorrow. And like once a week.

The worst time to vote is election day. Avoid that at all costs.

I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.

They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.

It’s the most nothing of nothings.

To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.

Gross.

This is the same sort of ruling that would argue you can’t ban false advertising. How long before some homeopath sues the FTC and FDA for stopping them from claiming health benefits? Won’t be long now till we get new fabulous snake oil cancer cures because the first amendment protects quacks from lying (so long as they “sincerely believe” the lie).

It’s satire. But damning that it’s pretty indistinguishable from real reps.

Red green color blindness is the most common form of color blindness.

To someone with that form of color blindness these shirts would be different shades of the same color (think, dark red vs light red).

I have one coworker with red green color blindness that said that peanut butter and zucchinis were roughly the same color to him (Oh, it’s also more common in men than women).

Palm oil is much better than any alternative

Palm oil does what palm oil does. And it’s useful in food manufacturing because you can create the same products without using butter or transfats. That’s pretty much the only reason it gets so heavily used.

But the actual alternative to palm oils is to stop consuming or manufacturing products using palm oil. That means some products should just be pulled from the market. Oreos, for example.

My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn’t tell you if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I could have rephrased “what it’s used for” to be “laxative”. A true statement which doesn’t expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.

People are biased to think “chemical name bad, common name good” and that’s the problem I’m exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.

The problem is a lot of nasty things come from less scary sounding things. For example:

Ingredient: Ricin, Where it comes from: Castor beans, What it’s used for: Poison.