> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know much about).
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
Why does the minimum purchase price of corn in China not make corn oil, a derivative product, more expensive?
Why does the low price of soybean oil in the United States not make soybean oil cheaper in China?
If the reason corn oil is cheap in China is that it's imported separately from the grain and therefore immune to the price floor... wouldn't that imply that corn oil is also cheaper outside China?
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.
You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?
(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)
Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.
Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.
> Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare.
That's not an example of nuance. An expensive fruit and a heavily-processed cheese are much higher-grade food than bread is.
> Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Same thing; cheese is a high-grade food, and even pesto is chock full of fat.
> Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
And this is a statement that even the poorest people in Japan aren't so poor that they have to subsist on rice. There's no question about which of instant ramen or ochazuke is a better meal. Instant ramen comes with tons of spices, fats, salt, some vegetables, and even a little meat.
It's actually traditionally 1 cup exactly here (scoop a measuring cup out of the rice cooker per plate). Most people in my house are 2-3x daily, I'm 1-2x daily because I didn't grow up eating rice (I prefer bread). We have 2 rice cookers going at dinner because 1 one is for the dogs exclusively.
Yup - family dogs eat what we do. Funny story - my mom's dog will not eat rice unless there's also fish (leftover bones will do). Rice+fish - bowl is cleaned up. Rice+meat - only the meat is picked and eaten.
Yes, but the idea is to have all of VS Code Extensions working as well, which is what Zed doesn’t have. There are just too many Extensions that people would like to use but on a less usage.
Not for that task, you don't. Just get a washer/dryer. They're very common where I live: the machine both washes and dries your clothes, and uses a heat pump system on the dryer side for high efficiency.
What's missing is a robot that will take the clothes out of your washer/dryer, fold them up, and put them away for you.
my dishwasher in my apartment simply doesn't work. i've tried everything, cleaning the filter, using special cleaning chemicals, vinegar, whatever. maybe if you can afford a nicer machine but if you're in an apartment and especially in one where they choose what dishwasher to use, then dish washing is not really automated at all. i rarely use mine because of how ineffective it is.
The solution is more teachers, smaller class sizes and not underpaying and abusing teachers to function as nanny’s also charged with raising your children.
This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.
So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?
I wonder what's stranger. That they think Trump will care about OpenAI's datacenter in Abu Dhabi, or that we're getting this news from tomshardware.com
He may care in the end, because TACO. Looks like this is a pattern of modern war where both sides are testing the escalation levels by attacking the infrastructure. It‘s like MAD, but going up in smaller increments rather than hitting with everything after one or two limited strikes like nuclear. Basically, you hit my power plant, I‘ll hit yours. It‘s the same path Ukraine went on: they initially showed restraint in responses, but now they are matching Russian pressure by choosing the same civilian targets.
Indeed. Tit for tat is well known to be an effective strategy. It's almost guaranteed to create one side that feels weaker than the other, while giving that party a way out.
Nobody except Israel is setting civilian homes as targets for their rockets. Not all energy infrastructure is even remotely „dual use“ (and this label is itself propaganda used to justify strikes on non-military targets).
All Russian infrastructure of all types would be perfectly safe tomorrow if they just stopped brutally invading their neighbors. Let's be plain and clear here: the Russian moral position lies somewhere 10 miles below the floor of the deepest ocean trench. The moral high road is pretty easy to achieve.
I don‘t think „moral high roads“ have any relevance in context of this discussion. If such conversation triggers you, try to breathe and think why first.
Yes, I find that quite often morality becomes temporarily irrelevant when it's inconvenient for the party acting immorally.
Nevertheless, this is the one of the vanishingly few conflicts where there is a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes the universe gives us a break from endless grey areas. This is one of those!
If you find the idea of an autonomous sovereign state defending it's borders 'triggering' I might suggest some soothing jazz and a warm milk.
This has happened in all ongoing conflicts but in only a few cases it is known to be intentional (Israeli strikes). I don‘t think USA or Iran does target residential blocks, but just like everyone else they may act on bad intelligence or it may be accidental.
And the reason is not just rules of engagement - such targets simply have negative value for attacker.
Dual use is nonsense, all power plants and highways are "dual use", hell so are farms, water treatment, dams... It's a term used exclusively to justify war crimes.
It's not a terrible target. Long-term it puts stress on US/UAE cooperation, and short-term it mirrors the destabilization inside Iran with escalation outside it.
From the armchair perspective, these sorts of strikes are exactly what I'd imagine that China is advocating for behind closed doors. A few well-placed drone strikes can cause more economic damage than any SAM shootdown or embassy attack could, tactically accelerating the war and strategically entrenching Chinese technology.
There is a difference between "fake it till you make it" and "blatant widespread fraud", but the line is blurrier than many startups would like to admit.
We could make it illegal to view images of ivory (with the logic that this might lead to a sale), but most people would consider that a step too far.
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