I was thinking Pasteur for pasteurization and canning of food. The difference in general health that having other things than starch and meat to eat in the winter made is quite large.
Tony Zbaraschuk,
I'd think surely Fritz Haber goes on the list, and Pasteur also.
Befriending our veterinarian, and asking endless questions, as a 10-12 year old.
Which led to him giving me a box of old Animal Health and Nutrition magazines when he retired from large animal practice when I was in my early teens.
Which taught me that there were two points of view on most questions, and data could give you any answer you wanted to get. Thank you Dick Beeler!
Which led to me questioning a lot of the authorities in my life.
Which left me named renegade, which is a price that never ends, but much saner than I'd otherwise be.
*ANH is a livestock industry publication; it is very anti-regulation. My parents were back-to-the-landers; I grew up reading Rodale Press publications.
Alex @ 57.
Well, the Reimer Plautdietsch NT renders Matthew 19:5 (For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh) as "Doaromm woat en Maun sien Foda en siene Mutta felote, en woat sikj aun siene Fru hoole, en dee twee woare een Fleesch senne."
While I have friends for whom Plaut (Russian Mennonite, not the current German version if there is one) is their mother tongue, I do not speak it. I can't find an NT reference to cleave meaning split in English.
Leah Miller @98
I would recommend looking at Tamora Pierce's books. I'm a fan of both her worlds: for treasure hunts specifically, the Alanna book with the search for the Dominion Jewel.
Also, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, especially Taran Wanderer.
For pension costs specifically, I don't know the answer. Since the VEBA cost-transfer applied to retiree health benefits, my assumption is that the bulk of the current cashflow problem relates to those benefits. Pensions to existing retirees shouldn't be legally subject to bargaining outside bankruptcy, while health benefits are, so I'm assuming that the concessions from the union with regard to retirees would have to center around the health benefits.
Until ERISA(1974), pensions didn't have to be reserved for. Pension accounting is very tricky. It's very sensitive to the expected earnings rate and to current asset values; pension regulators want to know that your pensions aren't underfunded, and the IRS wants to know that they aren't overfunded--so while there's some discretion in funding levels, there is less than might be expected. (For one thing, there is no ability to over-reserve in good years.)
Neither paper mentions that this difference exists because the Detroit companies were allowed not to reserve adequately during the years those liabilities were incurred.
That's true, but not really accurate.*
No one managed to accurately project retiree for the 1980 to present health-care costs. Every estimate--Medicare, companies, insurers--EVERY estimate--was wrong by a factor of about 5. That means that even maximal reserves--the most the IRS will allow to be held--were wildly inadequate.
We do have a taxpayer-paid universal single-payer plan for retirees over 65. The lack of universal healthcare isn't the problem when talking about retirees.
*I work as a life insurance actuary.
I have made brandied cherries for years, and have never pitted them.
My recommendation is to add the sugar to the cherries, shake vigorously, and let it sit overnight. Then add the brandy. This way, the cherries juice a little, and the sugar dissolves some. It speeds things up.
OTOH, I have some blackberry brandy that I made 10 years ago. It was much better after 4 years of aging.
Xopher: I am sorry.
abi et al:
I propose that there is a government 4.0.
Government 3.0 is democracy--consent of the governed.
Government 4.0 is democracy with an enforceable floor on how badly minorities may be treated: the Bill of Rights is an early form, the European Charter of Human Rights is a more-recent form.
Note that the largest reason humane meat is more expensive is regulation, most especially slaughter regulations. If you want to sell meat, it has to be* slaughtered in a USDA-licensed slaughterhouse, with a USDA inspector on-site, with a bathroom for the USDA inspector, and so on. The marginal expense per animal is much much higher for a small slaughterhouse, and it's very difficult to have a part-time slaughterhouse and be able to sell meat. (Last I heard, there are only two USDA-licensed slaughterhouses that slaughter for owners in all of Virginia.)
There's a workaround, but it requires capital and organization. You can buy a live animal, and have it slaughtered. That doesn't require a USDA licensed slaughterhouse. There are many more slaughterhouses available. If you do that, though, the cost of pasture-raised beef is about the same as beef from the grocery store.
(Or, you can do what I do and kill what you eat. That isn't recommended for city people.)
*There is some exception for poultry, which is why pastured poultry is so important to the small and local farm movement. Getting a similar exemption for larger animals would be huge help.
I'm really not as old as this makes me sound, but I think it should be:
A is in APL, legacy language...
Farming also gives you access to odd ways of poisoning yourself, and sufficient lack of funds that you'll try things that suburbanites wouldn't. When I was a boy, a family, friends of mine, got very very sick with organophosphate poisoning. They (like my family, and a lot of others of our acquaintance) had, on the advice of the local vet, been using horse wormer to worm themselves; a perfectly safe enterprise if you use the right wormer and the right dose, but they'd gotten the nearly-same-named wormer that also kills bots. (Brandname vs Brandname-B). Bots are tough, and not helminths, and the usual anti-bot agent is an ACE inhibitor--in this case, triclorofon.
And NEVER go into an enclosed area where one person has collapsed without a rope and a guard. These people and I had mutual friends. Methane is a suffocant, not a poison per se, but it can still kill you, as can CO2.
A question on the geometry puzzle--if it's a spoiler, please delete it.
Does it have a definite answer, or a family of answers? I think I have two fully consistent solutions which aren't the same.
Mary Aileen got it--heat and humidity both at 100. It must be a regional expression, as it didn't occur to me that it might not be generally understood.
(Yes, yes--technically the humidity never gets to 100.)
Reminiscent smells:
Camel cigarettes. That was my grandfather's primary cigarette--the grandfather who taught me to cook, whose chef's knife I have, and whose copy of "The Fellowship of the Ring" I read on the sly. (Vindicating my parent's judgment that it was too scary for me, as I had nightmares for months afterward.)
Dairy farms: corn silage, cows, hay, and manure--smells like home. I grew up on a dairy farm.
Heavy outdoor sweat and hay--smells like my father, who hauled hay professionally when I was a preschooler; I used to ride along with him on the loads of hay. When I was in my late teens and hauling professionally myself, I smelled myself one evening and it brought back all those memories. Now, though, it's associated with Papa, but also with the headachy mild nausea of borderline heat exhaustion. (Yes, yes, I know--the safe thing to do in pair-of-aces weather is to stay in the shade.)
Thunderstorms--the gust of wind just before a thunderstorm has a characteristic smell, which means the heat is going to break.
With Eric Flint, I wonder what might have happened had Sam Houston been badly injured in the battle of Horseshoe Bend. Perhaps John Brown would have been a madman in a united North America, rather than a hero in Kansas.
The chef's knife that my grandfather used. He taught me to cook, and to use a knife properly and safely. I use it whenever I cook--it's an excellent, plain, carbon steel chef's knife.
janet,
Sam's rule of sieves:
In ascending order:
Push through a sieve with a spoon
Put through a chinese hat
Put through a food mill/ricer
Put through a Victorio strainer
At each step, the equipment is larger and takes longer to clean, but the throughput goes up.
I love my Victorio strainer; you can process a gallon of puree (applesauce from uncored, unpeeled apples; tomato sauce; pumpkin puree) in about 10 minutes. Setup/cleanup takes 15 minutes or so.
Memories of Kolozsvar:
Walking down a street, and noticing that the posts of the fence around the public park were painted in horizontal stripes blue yellow red--a clear statement that Romanians are in charge here.
(Kolozsvar is the Hungarian name: Cluj-Napoca is the Romanian.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 4 |
| 2008 | 41 |
| 2007 | 16 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2005 | 2 |
Total: 69 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by SamChevre:
Show all comments by SamChevre.