It makes sense, for example, if you use turmeric in a rice dish, would you say it is artificially colored? In a sense rice isn’t yellow, but it is a natural dye.
That is not what this is about. You've always been able to advertise rice with turmeric as free from artificial colors. Here, the FDA is allowing for so-called natural dyes which are just chemicals that have been extracted from plants (usually through solvents). Imagine taking the turmeric, soaking it in gasoline, then distilling the color back out of the gasoline. The only requirement is that the color itself is not petroleum-derived.
>Here, the FDA is allowing for so-called natural dyes which are just chemicals that have been extracted from plants (usually through solvents). Imagine taking the turmeric, soaking it in gasoline, then distilling the color back out of the gasoline.
That's basically what's done for vegetable oils so should vegetable oils be called "artificial" as well? Is there a principled way of defining what amount of scary chemical involvement is needed for something natural to lose its "natural" designation? Are pretzels at risk because they're dipped in lye (ie. drain cleaners)?
I believe if you’re using hexane to extract the vegetable oils it should definitely be called artificial. A highly artificial substance was added to the food at some point.
Lye is typically not artificial if it’s made from sea shells and wood ash like it has been traditionally. Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.
To point out how confusing this is: If you add a knife tip to a cow carcass to extract the steak, that is adding a highly artificial substance to the food at some point.
Likewise if you use steel balls to tumble-crush shells into calcium carbonate powder (don't know if they do, or if it's even a product, but neither are the point here).
"We are required to inform this table that your naturally wild-caught salmon had, briefly, at one time, a small hook inserted into its mouth. It was otherwise wholly without artificial feed nor other additives."
How do you write a law that slices between those ideas and hexane, clearly?
On a case by case basis that generally aligns with common sense. Most people can instantly recognize a hook and knife are very different from adding a solvent to food. Drug laws are a good analog for this. I don’t think the universe of possibilities in this space is prohibitively large.
You can probably begin by broadly calling petroleum and petroleum products artificial.
Ethanol would probably be classified as a natural solvent. The edge cases fall off very quickly, this can definitely be done on case by case basis without introducing onerous bureaucracy.
It can be distilled from petroleum, and there is the key distinction that wasn't answered - are "natural" ingredients ones that could be made by "natural" (I'm assuming that "biochemical" is meant here) processes, or are they ones that are made by "natural" processes? Or is it just petroleum that is the problem?
Where does salt fall here?
Why isn't petroleum natural, when it is plant-based?
>Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.
By that standard is anything artificial? Oil comes out of the ground, after all. At least with "natural" colors you can argue the actual molecule was synthesized by a plant and we're just purifying it, whereas for industrially produced lye it's entirely man made.
Can you define a "highly artifical substance" in this context? As you desctibe it, it seems to be "a subtance that can't be made entirely from feedstock that was once living".
Why is a solvent that is part of processing but nonexistent in the final product something that anyone should care about?
Your body cannot tell the difference between a chemical that is "naturally" sourced vs one that is "artificially" sourced. We are at a point in industrial chemistry that the sole difference is "Did the feedstock come from a petrochemical company"
>Why is a solvent that is part of processing but nonexistent in the final product something that anyone should care about?
That's exactly my point, because I'm arguing there's no difference between natural colors and vegetable oil, when they're both refined from natural sources using industrial processes.
Tumeric is a chemical that has been extracted from plants!
Your scenario holds for any part of any food processing, not just food colours. The issue is that the definition of "natural" when applied to food is impossible to pin down. Can we process using solvents? What if those solvents were brewed? At what point does heat and pressure treatment become "unnatural"? Can I use an acid for processing? Can I use vinegar?
The various vegetable, seed and nut oils that form the basis for so many food products are very problematic if you want "natural" food.
Where's the boundary between "natural" and "artificial"? If we're allowing processing in the definition of "natural" (e.g. extracting a chemical from a plant using a solvent) then everything is natural: it's all ultimately derived from something that naturally occurred on Earth.
2. you don't add the turmeric just to get the color
What this is about is if a company things their rice + turmeric isn't "popping" enough in color they can extract colors from other food or even non eatable plants and then say "no artificial colors" while the color of the end product is very well artificial/not natural.
Add in that "natural sourced" doesn't mean healthy but many people think it does this is pretty deceptive. (E.g. one of the worst pesticides, banned decades ago, was neurotoxin extracted from plants, _and then highly concentrated_. But 100% natural sourced so the FDA would treat it as not "artificial" even if the concentration of it and separation from the plant is not natural at all.)
My thing is why not just spell it out as "Color due to x, not due to some artificial dye" or something reasonable? It should just be descriptive enough, I feel like I've seen similar messaging on some foods.
The article makes some interesting points about the correlation between computer usage in schools and test scores. What I would be interested in is the unmetered computer usage outside of schools. Are students with restricted access to so-called "brain-rot" social media outperforming those with it?
As a parent of a middle schooler and an elementary schooler, I don't need a formal study to answer that question. I've met my childrens' classmates. Sometimes, anecdotal evidence is sufficient.
And, I wish they were using real computers! Unfortunately, they're on tablets.
It's so bizarre to watch. The programmers of tomorrow may actually use iPads and LLMs, or similar. The abstraction from the work being done is increasing rapidly, and understanding of the underlying systems is decreasing. I know it's the way things have been going for decades, but it feels weird.
Toasts are a great way to lose information. They are a terrible design and should not be used. They distract the user, are not dense with information, and provide no value. If a message is important enough for the user to read, it should be a dialog box.
Dialogs are a great way to lose information. They are often dismissed by users that want to do their job and are interrupted by modals. Users focused on their tasks blindly dismiss dialogs.
Read the above as a critique to your strong opinion and not an opinion of mine.
My opinion is that toasts are great for notifications that can be reviewed/checked later, like chat notifications or finished background tasks.
What should be avoided, just for the same reason as modals/dialogs, is an overuse, causing fatigue.
Toasts are popular, but not the only option if you want to notify the user about completion of a longer-running action when the user may have already switched away from where they started it. Consider a status bar[0] instead. You can make it cute and animated, too!
Zero effort, and they animate. Components that have animation baked in are drug-like in how they hook in designers and devs who are only thinking about the visual presentation.
I can’t speak to people’s motivations, but I have been a very active member on this forum for a long time, and I was on the Rust team for about a decade, beginning before 1.0.
So the article is more like “Here’s why I started using Rust. If you thought I made a good choice then, well, I’m making a similar choice in case you want to join me.” Seems people find that compelling.
Just like Rust’s success was not inevitable, neither is jj’s. But I think it might work out.
You could also consider this a disclosure of sorts, I post a lot on this forum about jj (and Rust), and so knowing that I now have a financial incentive is important context to some people.
That line wasn’t even in the original post. It is not nearly the only technical advantage. The point of the post is just not about that topic, so that content is not in the post.
This is very funny. People just love jj! There are no conflicts of interest, at least not until now that there is a company built around jj. But they also started it because they love jj!
The algorithm started off by using one of those more simple methods and has evolved a lot since then. I'm exploring a few different directions now. It's difficult to say what will be the best direction to take it in until I have some more data to see what's working. I want to make something that works well for a lot of different types of workflows.
Yes, in practice this increases price transparency. Imagine everything could be monetized. They could charge for access to the bathroom, or water. What is the minimum expectation of what is included in the price of a ticket?
I'm against charging for bathrooms, water, or other such basic human needs while you are in the custody of the airline for the duration of travel. There should be a basic standard of human care that includes those things. Food should also be included for flights over 5-ish hours.
Carry-on fees are a whole another level of shittiness though. I, the customer, am the one carrying the bag, there should be no reason to charge for it.
It's like charging extra for wearing a red shirt or charging extra for wearing a hat.
> I, the customer, am the one carrying the bag, there should be no reason to charge for it.
It's on the plane, so it takes up some of the limited storage space, and increases the weight of the plane, which means more fuel burned.
Saying you carry the bag so there's no reason to charge for it is like saying you carry yourself onto the plane, so there's no reason to charge you for the flight ticket.
So either they build the average per-passenger cost into the price of every ticket, or they charge a fee only for people who want to take on the extra bag.
In practice, flights.google.com doesn't know the price of a luggage. So you might think a Easyjet/Ryanair ticket is cheaper, but I have had situations where actually after adding the luggage for every passenger the normal airline is €30 cheaper in total. And you get a free drink plus snack.
Honestly, it would be much better for transparency reasons if budget airlines offer a discount for no luggage instead of an extra fee.
I have incontinence, so I either wear diapers (still going to pee and defecate regardless), or I have access to the bathroom in time. If I wear diapers, there is going to be odor contamination in the area. It is bad for others, and for me, and their business too, I assume. Depends on the length of the trip; I try to limit fluid intake to zero before I go outside.
At peak season every year, O’Leary says something crazy like they are going to charge for the bathroom, or charge fat people extra, or get rid of arm rests, or have standing room only. The tabloids run the story, and always mention how cheap the flights are, including whatever the cheapest deal at the moment is.
It’s very, very obvious advertising. The tabloids go along with it because it makes people angry, which drives traffic.
Up until 1978 there was a lot more than this in the US. This is where we see photos of carts that brought prime rib to passengers and people in suits toasting with champaign glasses and there was so much space in the aisle that you could pass by service carts. It was like that because airlines were extremely regulated and not allowed to compete on price. So they competed on what was included. The result was photos of "a more civilized time" but also that almost nobody could afford to fly.
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