If you have a website, what are your earliest meaningful links that still work? I have almost no broken links since 2012.
a “protocol” sync engine, with multiple storage backends, and hooks to tie into “storage providers”, would be an amazing public good
Let’s talk about Biden, banking, and overdrafts….
[USA banks make over eight billion dollars a year from overdraft fees (by charging people who don’t have money).]
The difference between a blog and journal is the title field.
Instead of queuing ideas onto an infinitely expanding todo list, blogging (or microblogging) about it can be a useful way to find synergy. If someone else had maximum information to pick up where you left off, maybe you’d be free to do other things?
[Halve onions into a muffin pan; sprinkle with salt and pepper; bake for 25 minutes at 425°F then baste with butter; bake 40 minutes more and baste again before finishing.]
More clean hacks because so many of you asked for it!
[Refresh towels in the washing machine on a full cycle with half cup of baking soda instead of detergent and half cup of vinegar instead of softener.]
Only by tasting can you learn to connect the decisions you make with their outcomes.
[Taste, listen, smell, touch, and watch as much as possible.]
I cook mostly with my hands: they’re calibrated, by now, to turn things at the right moments, to choose correct amounts of salt. They seem to know before I do when to stop squeezing a lemon, or how much parsley to grab.
Ingredients don’t take three or five or ten minutes to be done; it depends on the day and the stove.
While your oven is lit, use its heat thoroughly. When a pan of vegetables comes out, replace it with a toaster tray of walnuts or almonds. They will be perfectly toasted after ten minutes or so and can be stored in the refrigerator for months and used in vegetable salads, added to pesto, or snacked on. Or scatter stale bread in a little pan, drizzle it with olive oil, and make toasted breadcrumbs or croutons.
If you can’t find anything to fit into the spaces vacated by roasting vegetables, use the oven’s heat once everything is out. Let it warm your dinner plates, or the meal’s bread. Use its ambient heat for loosening vinaigrette that’s hardened in the refrigerator, softening a stick of butter, or mixing pasta with cheese.
When you don’t taste heat first but instead the sweetness of cauliflower or beet, the prickliness of vinegar, or tingle of good olive oil, it is flavor, not temperature, you experience.
All cooked vegetables, whether boiled or roasted, become wonderful salads. They need only a handful of toasted nuts, chopped fresh herbs, a few vinegar-soaked onions, and a sharp vinaigrette. It’s really all most food ever needs.
By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once. You will also have had a number of satisfying conversations. You will have eaten a raw bite of kale stem and wondered whether next time it should be pickled. You’ll have tasted a particularly soft, cold, vinegary beet, and realized you wanted to make beet soup again and serve it cold. You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse, feeling out unfamiliar conjugations, brushing up.
The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It’s no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it’s no more or less pea for being pea or pod.
Find a turnip that missed the week’s roasting, asparagus bottoms, cabbage cores. As long as a soup’s ingredients are born in the same season, they will meld together perfectly in a pot and can then be blended until creamy. If there is a final cup of cooked beans or lentils that needs somewhere to go, once you’ve blended it this sort of hodeepodgey soup is the place.
The amount of food you have left from a meal is always the perfect amount for something.
[Handle insults by: 1) Adding silence or continuing as if it doesn’t affect you; 2) if a stranger, asking for their name, then asking to repeat what they said; 3) if someone you know, saying maybe they’re right and checking in if they’re feeling okay.]
respect for construction over destruction
Good olive oil gets bitter when it’s broken by blades.
[Cook all your veggies together once a week and keep them ready to incorporate during the week. Crispers are useless. Maximize your oven or re-use your boiling water.]
[While the oven is pre-heating, prep your veggies from longest to shortest cooking time.]
[When roasting different vegetables, pair the ones thay grow most similarly: keep together roots, stems, tubers. Beets are their own thing.]
[Phase 1: shake the tree, ask everyone; prioritize money and invoices; support yourself mentally as it might not ‘appear’ succesful to others or even to you; keep operations simple to start quickly.]
[Phase 2: the real transition starts here; notice what gets the strongest reaction from clients; shape the work closer to your deeper interests and passions; share with others; increase visibility, maybe by writing blogs; find peers or start your own community; don’t partner or build an agency; don’t lock into a niche.]
[Phase 3: raise rates; find more senior and expensive work; zoom in where the market wants what you enjoy delivering; publish consistently; formalize business apparatus and legal entities; don’t hire, outsource, or operationalize; avoid getting complacent now that the money’s good; don’t burn out; stay visible; don’t lock into a niche.]
[Phase 4: say no to the work from previous phases unless money’s tight; find support from other senior indies to charge 10x your phase 1; keep learning and publishing; avoid offering ‘packages’ that trap you in phase 3 work.]
[Phase 5: are you presenting yourself to C-suite stakeholders?; can you take equity in your clients?; what do you want to spend your freedom on? and what is needed to sustain that for 15–20 years?; embed your real self in any book or conference you feel tempted to create; can you say no to phase 4 work?; what does phase 5 work look like?]
[To poach an egg: boil and simmer four inches of water; add a bit of vinegar; crack the egg onto a cup and pour into the water; after a minute and a half, lift with a slotted spoon and prod a bit to check; drain and store in ice water; reheat in simmering water before serving.]
I usually have at least one nicely cold soft-boiled egg on hand to lure my thoughts away from eating lunch out.
[Cooking seems like something to juggle amongst life’s many complications rather than a clear path through them.]
[Fast-and-easy recipe books try to sell us akin to ‘breathing air more rapidly’ while pasta is already ‘boil then toss’ and omelettes are already a minute away.]
[Cooking is transformation, and transformation is human.]
[Absurd to think that nature starts from scratch at dawn: cooking as well is continuity, picking up where something else left off.]
Stale slices of bread should be ground into breadcrumbs, which make a delicious topping for pasta, and add crunch to a salad. Or they must be toasted and broken apart for croutons or brittle crackers, which ask to be smeared with olive paste.
This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. If we decide our meals will be good, remanded kale stems, quickly pickled or cooked in olive oil and garlic, will be taken advantage of to garnish eggs, or tossed with pasta. Beet and turnip greens, so often discarded, will be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and filled into an omelet, or served on warm, garlicky crostini. The omelets or little toasts will have cost no more than eggs and stale bread, and both will have been more gratifying to eater and cook.
If our meal will be ongoing, then our only task is to begin.
if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it.
[Adding salt is more than just about boiling: it’s a way to cook one good-tasting thing inside another.]
[You already know how everything is supposed to taste: it should be ‘good’. And that’s as true for water as any other ingredient.]
[Add ingredients together warm, as they’re already transforming and open to change.]
[Push re-use of water by moving from less starchy to more starchy ingredients.]
[Taste the broth often and cook until delicious.]
We’re not saying what we’re saying, we’re saying what we’re not saying.
Kevin Komisaruk, American-Canadian Keyboard Musician
messaging that bombards us daily: fear and compliance are the new virtues to signal and will ensure our survival.
I also wonder how they process the contradiction of seeing our society celebrate those who disrupted history with peace and compassion, while persecuting those trying to do the same today.
Imagine luring each ant into a small individual-ant-sized box with honey, then scattering the boxes. This “maximizes the revealed preferences” of each individual ant, but it kills the ant colony as surely as boric acid.
our legal system is fundamentally oriented around individual rights, not group rights. No group has the property right to any individual. (No group, that is, other than the state).
YouTube Commentator Beau of the Fifth Column on Fact, Opinion, and the Democracy In Between
[Democracy needs people to slow down the overly progressive and drag along the overly status quo: high polarization where people can’t talk to one another limits the discussion that fuels a functioning ecosystem.]
[No matter how many times they try to distract, instead of disagreeing you can simply repeat “I understand that you disagree with me” or “I accept that you disagree with me”.]