This is probably related to the neural systems for olfactory fatigue, eg why you stop noticing certain smells that are constantly present like your own body odor and the smell of your home/room

There’s a very good Wikipedia article that explains it much better than I can. But taste and smell are closely linked and the sensory systems become fatigued from overindulgence somewhat quickly. Conjecture but the massive amount of flavoring and sweetener in modern beverages is probably a factor in hastening this process

I used my old ones a ton. I had the original nook and had been using it for 13 years. I finally upgraded to a newer one with a color e ink screen and I like it a lot. It’s a boox ultra tab c. It was pricey so I wouldn’t get it unless you really read a lot and like e ink

I use it for reading almost exclusively. I read 1-2 books a week and a few volumes of graphic novels/manga per week as well. I have poor vision and the e ink is much easier on my eyes than lcd/oled screens. I can read on this for hours but reading on a traditional phone/tablet/laptop gives me eye strain/headache after a few hours. It’s nice to have a screen you can read with no back or front light. I do use the front light at times but I usually have it off

It’s handy for taking notes and annotations. I’ve read it’s good for drawing as well but I am terrible at drawing so I don’t know. The stylus seems comparable to my friends Apple Pencil except you can use the back as an eraser like an actual pencil

battery life is much better to a traditional tablet - a charge lasts 2-3 days usually, can last longer if I keep the front light off and all the wireless radio stuff off. I’ve gotten it to last a week. It’s a bit heavy bc of the battery though

Wrt color it’s a mixed bag. It’s a very handy feature for manga and graphic novels. But the color panels are new tech so they come with issues; primarily ghosting/image retention. After some time I’ve found an ideal mix of settings to minimize the issue and make the color look as good as possible. The boox os also has a little nav ball that can quickly force a full refresh the screen at any point to remove any retained image. But the color is still not comparable to an lcd/oled by any means

Mine is based on a kaleido3 panel. There’s a newer gallery3 panel that has more vibrant color but with a trade off of noticeably slower refresh rates. It’s not actually an eink panel but something called acep; it was more meant for advertisements/billboards so quick refresh rates weren’t a priority. There’s also no real options for a device with it at the moment aside from one that has real mixed reviews and one that has an open preorder with no eta on delivery as far as I know.

It’s also a somewhat capable android tablet but I don’t really get this part. Like you can run YouTube and games and stuff. But i don’t know why you would bother? It’s workable but not nearly as good. The exception to this is web browsing depending on the site. Heavy text based sites work well in Firefox.

The weather will probably be a lot worse

And maybe PlayStation 6

This is pretty much what I meant by that fucked up misinterpretation of stoicism

Like you have the actual Aurelius stoicism which has some very good value; everyone should read meditations once or twice. But then it’s been cliff notes’d and perverted by a bunch of people into to lose the message entirely from “be in control of your emotions” to what you’ve described: horrific rigidity to keep it all in at all times until of course it doesn’t work anymore and you break down spectacularly. Like somehow the message has gone from “control” to “emotional numbness”

A similar dynamic has happened with nihilism where some the writings on it are not so bleak and terrible; that it is an expression of freedom. But over the years it’s been perverted into nothing matters, why bother

That’s for long term medical leave, like if you need to go to rehab. I mean for being able to go to like a single hour long doctors appointment. There is no protection for that whatsoever. If you need to go to a doctors appointment during work hours your boss has every right to tell you to go fuck yourself; you are not entitled to time off for a doctors visit even if it’s unpaid

I am an actual licensed therapist and while there are a number of real actual creating barriers specific to men pursuing mental health treatment there are a few factors I’ve consistently seen that are ubiquitous across gender, race, sexuality, class, etc

Money, time, availability

Therapy is inaccessible. I am a therapist who mostly works with insurance companies. They pay me about 100-115/hr. My clients will often have a high deductible health plan which means they need to pay this $100-115 per session until they hit their deductible, which can be 5,000+ dollars. It’s a lot to ask someone to pay $100+ weekly. On top of that they still usually have a responsibility afterwards of (typically) 10-30% so $10-34.5 per meeting which is still a notable weekly cost for many people on the high end especially after shelling out $400+ a month for months on end.

Other clients have PPO insurance which is a fixed cost per meeting but this can vary wildly. More affluent clients have excellent PPOs where they might pay $10-20 per meeting which is not terrible. But that’s rare. We are often covered under the “specialist” copay and many PPO plans have tiered provider coverage now. So a copay for me might be $50 or more per meeting (the worst I saw was $125 which was absurd because it was actually $27 more than I’d get from the insurer in question).

So you have this on top of these plans taking hundreds of dollars out of each pay check. “Well budget for it”. Hard to do because the need for therapy can be inconsistent and many of these people are coming in fo(and specifically symptoms like poor money management). Then on top of that even if you do budget for it you have the inherent issue that the need for outpatient therapy is often not dire/acute so if something more pressing comes up (eg a serious dental/medical issue, car breaks down, short on rent) therapy might be the corner to cut if it’s already established because in the overwhelming majority of cases you won’t die without it; it will just lower your quality of life (sometimes significantly so)

Then comes the time portion. Even if you can get past the cost barrier you have the availability of the therapist and yourself. I’m a night owl and I work late but many of my colleagues don’t. I’m pretty nontraditional though, no kids and my partner is very career oriented themselves whereas many of my peers tend to value the traditional 9-5 much more so they can be home for their children and such.

So when you go to schedule with someone it’s often that you can only get seen during business hours. It’s one thing when it’s a doctors appointment that you have once every few months that you need to duck out of work for but a weekly hour long engagement is much harder to explain. This brings back in the masculinity issues - many men find this basically impossible to disclose to the workplace and basically wouldn’t even try to get an exception for weekly therapy. Even without explicitly saying so asking for 1 hour open a week consistently for a doctors appointment is going to be perceived as therapy by many. But stigma aside many of us simply can’t do that. I’m on the practitioner side and I know I’ve ignored my own physical health at times because it was inconvenient to schedule doctor appointments during my workday.

Our systems of employment (at least in the USA) simply do not provide or protect for medical leave, even when it’s very brief and especially when you are a low level employee (executives and admins tend to have less of an issue ducking out for doctors appointments in my experience at least). There is no legal right to paid or unpaid time off for medical appointments in the USA and that is completely disgusting in 2023.

The final piece is practitioner availability. I have a waitlist through October at the moment and am not accepting new clients. All of my colleagues are in the same boat. The old practices I used to work at constantly call me to see if I’ll take any referrals because their waitlists are so overloaded. The hospitals and clinics I have referral relationships with email me every week for updates. It’s extremely stressful. Every new client, especially adolescent, complains that they are happy to finally have someone after waiting 3-6 months. Even if someone wants a therapist they have to wait ages. It is not uncommon that I get someone and when I call them to start they say they don’t even remember why they called in the first place.

We need more people doing the work. Or ideally we need to make societal reforms so that there are less people experiencing mental health issues. I’ve been doing this almost 15 years now. I, and anyone who doesn’t exclusively work with the rich, can tell you that a significant degree of what we work with is people who lack resources and not proper mental illness. I mean, it is depression and anxiety, but it’s because they have been paycheck to paycheck for years or theyre under a mountain of student loans or credit card debt and the stress is just too much to bear. And their jobs won’t give them raises and there aren’t any other jobs out there that pay more. Not everyone is a software developer or investment banker that can jump ship to another 6 figure job with cushy benefits. Most people work jobs that pay 40-60k with shit benefits and little upward mobility.

To answer your question more directly:

In my opinion it’s a systemic issue based around that super fun phrase everyone loves, “toxic masculinity”. I personally do not subscribe to gender labels but I am amab/male presenting and get a lot of male clients as a result. Many of them tell me they hide the fact that they are in therapy from everyone but their partner. This is indicative of the problem; that being in therapy is weak. That being in therapy makes them a bitch, a wuss, all kinds of pejorative terms. It’s bad, is my point.

So part of the answer imo is not in having doggies and cool dude stuff in the office. Its far more complex and involves redefining masculinity to still including things like being a lumberjack or carpentry or whatever. From there though you need to shed the part where it means you have to be emotionally numb to everything, constantly display strength, embrace the fucked up misrepresentation of stoicism that has you shove all your feelings into your stomach, and glorify anger, rage, and violence as the only appropriate means of emotional expression.

this could also be extended to the stigma surrounding therapy itself and the tendency to associate therapy need with weakness. This is an issue that goes beyond therapy though; there are people who won’t see medical doctors for the same reason even though they’re in physical pain. Our pride is our downfall.

Tldr make therapy cheap and accessible, make protections for workers to seek medical care, increase the amount of practitioners (or decrease the need for them), and systemic reform to the societal concept of masculinity and pride. So probably gonna take awhile

Pea/soy protein itself as they’re just isolated proteins isn’t but the full product impossible/beyond is pretty comparable

Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America

Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.

So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.

But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.

Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.

Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.

I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources

But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).

Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem

What defines ultra processed? Are chicken nuggets ultra processed if I simply purée a chicken breast, add salt, shape, bread, and fry? I’ve turned it into something that is completely irrelevant to its original form. Is sausage ultra processed because I added nitrates? Is nitrate free sausage not ultra processed because I used the loophole where I added celery juice for its natural nitrate content instead of adding them directly?

When exactly does it become ultra processed? When a chemist gets involved and gives things proper names that freak you out?

Are you one of the kooky types that freak out when they see “sodium stearoyl lactylate” on the label of their sandwich bread even though it’s safe to eat and objectively makes your bread better and last longer? If so I’m sorry that you insist on eating bread that is not as soft and goes stale in 2 days

You can basically use it any way you would use ground beef, bolognese, meatballs, curry, tacos, whatever

Read on food and cooking by McGee and ratio by ruhlman to start

It’s probably from the yeast extract which is part of the heme

To be clear tho it still doesn’t have all that much salt. It’s more that raw beef just barely has any. Both impossible meat and raw beef pale in comparison to the salt content of the final burger, where the sodium content skyrockets from things like ketchup, pickles, seasoning the patty during cooking, the salt content of the bun, etc

And imo you should still salt/pepper an impossible patty after formation. As mentioned, while the salt content is higher, it’s still not terribly high, and imo it benefits from a bit more. In my experience it’s not like meat and you can salt whenever you want (whereas with beef you generally want to salt patties absolutely last minute to avoid giving the meat a lightly cured texture)

I wanted to very badly but then life happened and now I have a whole other career!

I still cook a lot though and I have a lot of weird powders and additives and machinery for stuff. I have a whole ass refrigerated centrifuge that can spin 3 liters at a time so I can isolate my own pea and soy protein in quantity! It weighs like 350 pounds and it’s from the 80s but fuck it, it’s super cool and I was able to get it for $25 from a lab I interned at. I can’t make soy leghemoglobin at home though at there’s no commercial supplier I’ve found so far so I have to still buy impossible or beyond meat if I want it, bummer

Hopefully there will be more food nerds on lemmy. I am only an amateur food nerd, there are way better ones out there

It’s an excellent foaming agent! Methocel f50 foams will last a lot longer than egg foams too

Just make sure you get the right kind though. Usually if you get “methylcellulose” it’s f50 but there are a lot of different types with different properties. The a4c variety I mentioned for hot ice cream will make foams but won’t work as well and is better for gel applications. But there are a lot of varieties of methocel and many are only subtly different from each other

It was a bad joke

The meat alternatives will only get better as time goes on and market demand grows. A burger or nugget is really not an impossible (lol) to recreate item; most of the meat texture is lost by the processing involved.

A burger is obviously ground and a nugget is usually chicken that’s ground to almost a paste then shaped and breaded. At that point it’s finding something that can approximate the texture of the mushed up meat goo and then finding something that can convincingly flavor it. That’s why impossible was so adamant to get leghemoglobin cleared by the fda, it really is by far the best option. If not that your other options are basically trying to recreate a “meaty flavor” with spice blends and msg which is how the older meat alternatives worked

The much bigger challenge is finding something that can texturally approximate intact muscle (eg wings or steak). As you’ve said there are decent soy wings and there are steak strip things and such but these are generally passable. They taste good and are fine as a meal but they aren’t the same in the way an impossible burger is reallllly close to a burger. Lots of people trying though! Jackfruit, tvp, seitan, pea and soy protein, etc. but none of them come close to the mouth feel and texture of a wing or steak. Someday, maybe. I hope someone figures it out; I haven’t had meat in like 20 years or so but I do miss the texture of steak from time to time and wish I had something that could recreate that

Imo impossible meat is superior to beyond although nutritionally it’s a mixed bag. It introduces a decent amount of carbs (9g per 4oz) and has over 5x the sodium of beef. But it also has a bit of fiber and a either comparable or more vitamin/mineral content than beef. Protein is comparable to 80% ground with 20% less caloric content

Beyond is similar.

They’re both basically vegetable proteins with binders and fats and some flavorings. The big game changer flavoring is leghemoglobin which both use. It’s a protein isolated from soy that is very similar to certain enzymes from bovine muscle. Impossible got the fda to approve it in 2019 and it was challenged; there are some concerns on whether it is safe to eat. I’m not super well read on the issue but from what I’ve perused the issue is one of a lack of long term testing and not of any direct concern.

The textural difference between the two is because beyond uses isolated pea protein, which gives it a texture that’s a bit chunkier and imo more sausage like, and impossible uses soy protein, which imo is more like a cheap burger patty you’d get at McDonald’s.

The fats are typical fats like coconut oil or sunflower oil to recreate the fatty part of beef and this is the current weakness of the products imo. Coconut oil is used because it tends to stay solidified at room temp so when you’re making patties it feels like there are chunks of beef fat. In practice this is weird because they are far too hard and aren’t dispersed enough throughout the product; I believe this is why these fake meats tend to stick to the pan much easier than actual burgers cooked in a skillet.

The binders are big scary words like methylcellulose which is also a source of fiber and can be used as a laxative so people latch onto that and freak out. But it’s only used as a binder to help it hold everything together here so it’s like a tiny amount that just provides a bit of fiber that you probably desperately need if you’re having burgers for dinner. Fun fact: Certain preparations of methylcellulose (a4c) turn into gels when heated so you can use them to make hot ice cream! It’s pretty weird to eat, like a normal ice cream base that solidifies when you put it into boiling water

The other ingredients are stuff like beet juice for coloring

Final fun fact: technically impossible meat is not vegan because animal testing was done during its development.

Thanks for reading my unprompted essay on the composition of modern vegan meat substitutes. This was brought to you by my failed interest in becoming a food scientist. Also you may note I don’t really discuss how they compare to meat and that’s because I don’t eat meat which by law I am required to mention in all posts about food

Comparison of excellent quality vanilla vs excellent quality chocolate should leave you with the takeaway that both are excellent. you may have a preference for one over the other but that’s hardly objective

My personal preference shifts based on mood and (more so) based on quality. Excellent chocolate bar vs budget ice cream that uses vanillin instead of actual vanilla beans? Probably the chocolate unless I’m searching for that nostalgic artificial vanilla flavor. A shitty chocolate snack cake with like 2% actual chocolate and 98% palm oil vs a well made panna cotta? Going vanilla.

You mean you don’t want communities infested with bots promoting thinly veiled advertisements and reposting crusty old content to farm upvotes to make their accounts look more legitimate?

Logitech has been making atrociously shitty fucking internet based software for pretty decent hardware since the first harmony remote back in 2001. Only buy their hardware if it absolutely will never require software of any kind imo

Almost any cash only retail business in 2023 is highly suspect outside of some outlier situations like rural markets