NGL as someone who jumped ship from the gas camp to induction, Induction is really incredible just how much better it is.
Everything about it is better with the exception of an annoying buzz from the induction on occasion.
- My carbon steel pans get to temp basically instantly.
- My cast iron gets to temp in a fraction of the time it took on my gas stove.
- It also works fantastically on my stainless steel pots and tbh it feels like I can get a pot of water to boil in half the time.
- Cleaning induction surfaces is way easier.
- For "specialty stuff" like woks, curved induction is so much cheaper, more convenient, safer, and more approachable than the equivalent gas setups.
This isn't me trying to suggest anyone should be forced to give up gas. It definitely has it's uses. However I really have to recommend trying out a nice, modern induction setup. They are like fucking magic.
Not just cheaper but more reliable. Here in New York I lose power several times a year - sometimes for multiple days at a time. In 5 decades I've never lost my gas.
+1, and the reliability point would be better as a top-level comment. Perhaps also noting the cost and environmental impacts of most stove-grade electrical backup systems.
Try searching for "UPS" on Amazon. How many of the search results would be capable of powering an electric stove (to cook meals) through a several-day electrical outage? If you looked at larger units (and generators) which were capable of doing that - what physical/electrical/safety issues would you face in actually connecting them to a typical residential stove? And once you're into the generators - those have their own fuel safety issues.
> Where in the western world can't you run an electric induction stove?
Anywhere that does not have electrical power available, during a power outage. Which the comment I was replying to very specifically pointed out.
“UPS” is the wrong search term. Buying a “UPS” gets you 1990-era tech for cleanly powering down a computer if the power fails or riding through a brown-out. You’re looking for an off-grid system or a hybrid system or a portable power station. A company like Ecoflow will happily sell you one for $600 or so that will power a perfectly nice induction stove at full blast for half an hour. (You don’t need full blast for very long to cook most meals — this is good for quite a lot of cooking.) Throw in a single solar panel and a patch of sun and it will keep you cooking indefinitely.
Impulse Labs would like to sell you a really nice 4-pan stove with a built in battery that will ride through a decently long outage.
But there's also the virtue of tech that just works, without everyone having to spend time & money researching/purchasing/maintaining/using backup systems to cover its frequent outages.
Well, in most developed countries it happens very rarely (less than once a year) and when it happens it's typically in the minutes or maybe an hour range.
As a backup I would recommend a camping stove that uses ethanol over using a UPS system.
Really? I think I’ve had 3 power cuts in 10 years (mostly in London), and none lasted more than 3 hours. What is so terrible about the state of electricity distribution in New York?
New York (the state, which is almost certainly what he's talking about) is mostly rural and has harsh winters. It gets a whole lot of snow dumped on it due to the lake effect. London winters are mild in comparison, and being a city, has more wires buried and thus protected anyway.
A lot of rural and semi-rural area, which leads to above ground power lines as it is more expensive to bury them. Add in trees to the mix and you have the recipe for power outages.
In the North East, usually a wet snow or freezing rain to ice will cause the branches to fall.
In the South, drought will often weaken the trees and winds will will do the rest.
Excessive rain can also cause problems when coupled with wind. The trees topple over, roots and all.
Hurricanes and tornadoes will often cause prolonged outages, note that the wind form these can reach far inland and beyond what we consider the edge of the hurricane.
I live in the Midwest, and we've had 2 instances of week-long power outages. Our power lines are overhead in many cases, and we have tornadoes. In 2012 we had an EF4 near here: 166-200mph winds! Overhead power lines do not handle flying trees very well. And even with high winds of 85mph, which is not uncommon, there are a lot of falling tree branches that cause downed power lines.
My newer neighborhood (25 years old) has buried power lines, but it's fed from overhead power lines, so we still have power issues. I'm not advocating for gas over electric, just giving some perspective from another part of the world.
> Basically instantly? How do induction hobs defy the laws of physics?
On an induction hob, the heat is generated by the pan itself. That’s the instant part. The pan itself heats more or less quickly depending mostly on its mass and what it’s made of.
A gas hob is much less efficient in the way heat is transmitted to the pan: the flame irradiates everywhere, not only on the pan, and the air around the flame and the pan moves, carrying heat by convection.
> If the massive difference is the pan type, why isn't it almost instant with gas?
A steel pan heats quickly because it’s light and thin. A cast iron pan heats slowly because it’s thick and heavy (kind of material also plays a role, but steel and cast iron are not too different in that respect).
> Or do gas hobs output way way less energy than an induction hob?
Off the top of my head I think they are comparable. It’s just that most of this heat is wasted.
With game consoles, costco hotdogs, uber and chatgpt - companies continue to sell at cost in exchange for market position, opportunity for extra sales, or more.
Perhaps this is the base price and the car comes with 1GB of soldered ssd and you need to pay $4k premium for 4GB.
Maybe but battery prices have been falling geometrically and that’s the most expensive part of an EV.
A tidal wave of cheap EVs are coming, and not just from China. Ford apparently has a secretive cheap EV platform project in development. I’m sure there are others.
BTW I have a hypothesis that Elon is now working to get Trump elected because Trump will erect tariffs not just against cheap EVs but cheap batteries that domestic competitors to Tesla could use. If companies like Ford can buy cheap CATL batteries then that’s just as bad for Tesla as China selling EVs here.
Tariffs will only delay though. The hyper deflationary effect of tech is coming for cars. A car is just another tech gadget that is about to get cheap. Car companies that don’t optimize for this will die or collapse down to niche.
Edit: I will make a wild prediction. In five years you will get a 250 mile range small EV with adaptive cruise and other nice features for under $15k new.
Tesla is building the cars in China that they sell in China, and selling them for a profit. That’s perfectly fine, China is not worried about protecting their EV industry from Chinese workers building Chinese Teslas.
If China was building the cars in the USA that they wanted to sell in the USA, and selling them at a profit, they wouldn’t be looking at 50% tariff either.
The issue is only if/when EVs made in Mexico by Chinese workers living in Mexico are being dumped into the US market below cost in an attempt to destabilize the US auto market, and China thinks they can hide behind the USMCA free trade agreement to do it all tariff free.
Chinese Teslas are made in China, using Chinese batteries. BYD/Xiaomi can always do the same in the US (or just setup in Mexico and take advantage of Nafta or whatever the successor that does the same thing is called).
Hmm… if that’s the case then Elon is just voting against his economic interests like most of Trump’s other voters. They really have lost it over culture war nonsense.
tariffs are already in place for China EV's, Biden / Trump will inevitably raise them further to protect US auto manufacturers, even going as far as putting tariffs on 3rd country exports (i.e Mexico) to ensure these vehicles don't get in. The US consumer will have to make do with Tesla, and hope that Elon can produce a people's car for the mass market
Trump won't protect Elon. BYD is going to build cars in Mexico to take advantage of the USMCA. Stopping that would require Trump admitting one of his greatest accomplishments was flawed.
What is this drivel of nonsense. We’ve been combating overpopulation, the population and natural destruction cause by overpopulation. And now you have nut bags like this? What is this industrial revolution's swan song?
They certainly have a large stockpile of the cringiest boomer dataset on the planet, rivaled only by LinkedIn. Soon the AI loop will generate the largest neuron deactivation loop in human history.
I have a different theory. Mac sales have declined since the mass tech industry layoffs because most tech jobs would buy macs for their new employees. Since they aren’t hiring there’s no need to keep buying new Mac laptops. And mac pc sales outside of tech profession are very low.
If anything, I suspect individual purchases of Macs are pretty high. It's the routine corporate PC/laptop purchases where Windows dominates. I see a whole lot of Macs in coffee shops that are presumably not all techworkers co-working.
My anecdata (2 jobs at large Fortune 500 companies, 2 jobs at startups) suggests that large corporations run Windows, and it's the startups running Macs.
You are way overestimating the layoffs' impact on Mac shipment. And sorry to inform you that many people laid off are not developers and more likely use Windows over Mac, and even among developers roughly half use Windows or Linux on a PC. (People here seem to think almost every developer uses Mac, but that is very very far from the truth.)
A few thousand (or even ten thousand) tech workers getting laid off isn’t going to move the needle on Mac sales numbers, it’s not like they didn’t all go and get jobs elsewhere anyway.
Nobody is forcing anyone to watch it. Many people watch it voluntarily. If we are so sure that these media are so bad for people, why are so many people still watching it?
If the answer is that these media "hack" the human brain, then I don't think that banning the producers is the right way to go. The root cause is that people are too easily tricked. Banning the producers will only cause other media, such as YouTube or Facebook, to fill the gap.
Exactly right. The solution to a mass movement toward an ignorant and blind viewpoint isn't to censor it, it's to dismantle it with an opposing viewpoint and to provide a less ignorant way forward. Censorship of any kind doesn't solve anything despite what people want to think about Alex Jones or any others.
Nobody was forcing anyone to drive cars fuel powered by leaded gas either, could it have been so bad? And if it was so bad, why were so many people using it?
I would say that the answer to solve this is education, but unfortunately many states have decided that education is the bad thing, instead of blantantly misleading information. Even if you could teach it successfully in school, how many adults are going to go back to school to learn the media they're consuming is bad? If you're an ardent fox news viewer, how will you view that information?
> Nobody was forcing anyone to drive cars fuel powered by leaded gas either, could it have been so bad? And if it was so bad, why were so many people using it?
I wouldn't say this is a great analogy, because leaded gas was the only gas available, and alternatives to cars were disappearing in many cities. If you wanted to participate in the economy, you pretty much had to use gasoline.
I mean, you're not really correct. The first 10 years of my life every gas station had both "leaded" and "unleaded" options and it was regulations that forced car manufacturers to remove the the requirement for the former type of fuel.
You could argue the market would have gone there anyways, but it's actually insane how much damage to human health and the environment was done in the interim until regulation forced the matter.
>If we are so sure that these media are so bad for people, why are so many people still watching it?
Although I don't have an opinion on this particular podcast situation, this statement doesn't hold any water.
You are implying that if people do something, it must not be bad for them because.. people continue to do it.
There are tons of things people do that are objectively bad for them. Hard drugs (fentanyl, etc.) being an easy example.
The point is there is not and will never be consensus on what is "bad", so it ultimately is decided by power imbalance rather than some higher moralilty.
In a liberal society we allow things we don't like in order to maintain individual freedom as a higher good than "perfect" society.
Those who do envision "perfect" society and pursue it with the power of the state are the worst sort of authoritarians, because it's all done "for your own good", no matter what you think.
It's not necessary to hack the human brain if you can hack the YouTube algorithm. I get recommended this crap once in a while even though I have zero interest. Starting with a "Private" browsing window, it was pretty common to hit Andrew Tate shorts extremely quickly 6 months ago or so. Jordan Peterson's over-dramatic rants are another favourite YouTube recommendation.
The free for all market also gave me access to a hundred chefs who vastly improved my cooking. It also gave me access to a dozen woodworkers who taught me how to work safely and efficiently. A whole host of gardeners in my USDA zone with hyper local content relevant to me and taught me about native plants.
The free market has saved me thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in home repair costs. From changing my blower motor, to installing my Ecobee w/o a common wire, to installing ceiling brackets correctly, repairing my garage trolley.
The free market gave me podcasts and podcasters which taught me a ton about international conflicts and their history. Gave me access to brilliant environmentalists and conservationists doing incredible field work.
The real price I had to pay was hearing people endlessly, endlessly, endlessly complain about, and in so doing, amplify people that they don't listen to, disagree with, and think are harmful.
> It also gave me access to a dozen woodworkers who taught me how to work safely and efficiently.
And also "woodworkers" who would take transformers out of microwaves and run the resulting current through bare nails to make fractal lightning patterns in wood. If you're starting with a blank slate on wood-based projects how do you differentiate the former from the latter?
This is meaningless because what "common sense" is changes person to person. The person yelling about how 5G will damage your brain would say that it's "common sense" that "radiation" is bad for you so 5G must be bad.
You're basically saying that the way you avoid doing something dangerous recommend by others is by already knowing that it's dangerous. Well duh.
I don't think most people getting into something the first time would reasonably try a hard project and make it harder by adding electricity in the equation. I think your example is really just absurdity to be honest.
I also don't know what point you're making.
Since some people can't tell who the experts are and what a beginner is, we need to regulate youtubers?
For an outsider it's baffling to see 50% of the US slowly getting brainwashed to the point where they reject all facts out of spite, and think it is important to be contrarian on literally every social issue.
Whatever you think about CNN or MSNBC, FoxNews is pretty over the top, it’s basically a tabloid at this point with many tabloid stories.
I disagree with the premise however: it’s not that American media has so much influence on American consumers, rather American media is producing the product that their consumers want. The influence is basically reversed.
As an outsider it seems to me one half wants to burn books, regulate love and curb compassion, the other wants to improve education, regulate hate and promote compassion. It’s pretty easy which side to choose.
The reason for the two alternate realities in the same country is primarily to do with what information you consume.
As an exercise, go to the front page of Reddit everyday. You will almost always notice on the first page or the first few there are always posts on politics. And the vast majority of these posts are the "bad" takes/actions/scandals on rebuplicans/conservatives.
If you go to r/conservative , you will see the "bad" takes/actions/scandals of the democrats/liberals.
On Reddit the echo chamber for democrats is the entirety of Reddit except for a select few subs. The echo chamber for conservatives is in their own subreddits. On conservative websites this is the opposite.
If one looks only at the Reddit front page, no doubt they would not like the republicans because it's a highlight of their low points. I.e a Reverse Instagram, post all the bad parts of your life.
This is the issue. The two realities is from getting information about how "good" your side is and a feed about all the bad stuff from the other side.
The reason why you think 50% of the population is like that is precisely because the information you have received about that side is their bad highlight reel. And they will equally think the other 50% of the aisle is brainwashed because of all they are viewing your bad highlight reel
This sounds like the official signaling coming out of the US' nation-state George Creel-styled media. I'm personally grateful for the distributed and non-curated media. DC is just going to have to get over itself and adjust to the changing landscape. There's good and bad. When the original printing press came out the #1 books were for witch hunting and yet society -- in the end -- was better off for it.
Ehhhhhh you don’t want to go down that road though. Or at least, I don’t want to. You can still punish people for advocating violence, you don’t need to step in and exert government control over the platforms they use to publish content on.
I didn't make an argument for regulated speech and this isn't really about free speech since neither were criticizing the government.
All I did was point out that they aren't able to say whatever they want without permission or friction because there are consequences to intentionally lying over time to hurt people.
