A useful analogy is the Coca plant. Chewing its leaves will give a mild stimulant and is relatively benign. But if you extract and concentrate the active ingratiate it becomes highly addictive. This is pretty much what we have done with our food.
However, don't we grow tolerant to pleasures? For instance, the first time you have a salty chip, its great. The 100th time you had one, its not great.
Also, curious if you are limiting it to processed foods, or are making claims that potatoes are more addictive than before.
The first, obvious, but it has manufacturing and inventory costs. The latter is happening on such a tiny scale, its not noteworthy.
For some, the tolerance doesn't cause them disinterest but rather a drive to go further. Can they get an even _saltier_ chip? Or rather more flavorful with increasingly exotic condiments. Or one bowl no longer does it, maybe 2 will do.
You can see this in American supermarkets on the snack aisles. You see variants of the same products from plain/traditional, to novelty flavor, to 5x extra novelty flavor. It isn't just marketing or just the normal distribution of individual preferences. I think it is a hedonistic ratchet. You see it in the level of nuances specialists take to any field or hobby the deeper on delves. The craft beer connoisseurs to who keep wanting more hops in their IPAs are a good example too.
It’s just sugar, fat, and salt but at scale. No need for more.
Get it when you want and as much as you want. Doctors will say you can be healthy at size and advertisers will tell you to be body positive. Then when you’re over served and obese you can get weight loss injections and start all over. It’s the American way. An endless orgy of consumerism. Binge and purge like a hedonist Roman could never even imagine.
I think this is an accurate point. I would also add preservatives. Companies have an incentive to increase shelf-life, so they pump these products full of them, despite their effects on health.
Preservatives achieve their intended function by broadly destroying and preventing the growth of microbes, which are an integral part of our digestive system. So I would flip the question: what evidence is there that preservatives don't damage a healthy human microbiome?
As with most homeless issues the problem is a hard one. You can't let them accumulate trash. These sweeps are the only practical way of dealing with the issue. Is there more humane and compassionate approaches, maybe. But storing and proving ownership of property would be difficult and fraught with issues.
As with most other social issues. If you want this compassion find a way to pay for it yourself. The city is already operating on the input of its citizens and would love for you to take the issue off their hands.
The problem is that it should be the present. Oh, I've been an engineer for a while and I know the system can't turn on a dime, it would take some time.
However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.
The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.
Large bureaucracy wants people to be as fungible as possible, so that systems can be designed that interact with fungible units instead of complex, multifaceted individuals.
To be clear, most engineers at FAANG would describe their own companies as a "large bureaucracy", yet, the engineers at these places are highly skilled, "complex, multifaceted individuals". Their hiring strategy has demonstrated this time and time again on HN discussions. It is insanely hard to get hired into these places. There must be at least 10 qualified candidates for each role. And, weirdly, I would say that almost all of the most highly skilled software engineers that I have known in my career are also the most dynamic. By definition, that makes them fungible because they can learn new skills so quickly.
Computerization barely helps with "customized skill-based education" outside of parts of certain topics (some areas of math, notably, are very well-suited to it). Detailed feedback from humans is vital in many topics and for learning many skills, and, as they say, that doesn't scale. We can do it, but it means spending a lot more on teachers, so we aren't going to. We may eventually get a half-assed version involving LLMs or whatever nonsense, but that will be brought in mainly as a way to get by with fewer teachers (they're cost-diseasing into something we can't afford any more, it seems) not to increase educational quality.
My expected outcome for all of this is that the gap between rich and poor students will grow, as only rich students will continue to have decent student:teacher ratios (their ratios already tend to be a ton better than public school kids). Paid tutoring will become common somewhat farther down-market than it currently is, as more people choose to pay extra just to cover what their tax money used to, but no longer does.
What is missing in edtech is a concept of progress and partial correctness and guess work. The primary input in edtech is multiple choice. This is selected so a person does not need to evaluate the answer making it cheaper. But leads to kids guessing. Starting a blank line to write a response is what really kicks the brain in. There is no easy way out.
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
You probably want to get units correct too. Say Newtons vs Kelvins vs Amperes... Still able to estimate right size is in general skill that should be taught.
I don’t even think they taught that much, I’m pretty sure I learnt about Newtons in mechanics (A-level maths course), Kelvin from reading Wikipedia and Amps I think I knew because my dad worked in motor repairs. My knowledge is old now, pre-2008 before the Gove reforms.
IIR, that problem-solving method is called "Fermi estimation" - after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist who was particularly skilled at doing it. Perhaps you're smarter than you give yourself credit for?
At least from what I remember in A-level physics, a lot of the multi-choice answers usually had 2 sets of answers, both of which were ambiguous and could be the correct answer. A few questions even had answers where they were all the same answer, just with the digits either transposed or the decimal point being different. Stuff like
Honestly I think you’re giving British exam boards more credit than they deserve. You options were so ridiculous that you only needed to pay attention for 2 minutes out of a 1 hour lesson to realise what the answer was.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say I left the exam hall still none the wiser of what the actual formulae were!
The current Falcon rocket always expends a stage and lands a stage. Starship will land both stages. Also Starship is far larger and in rocketry there is something called the square cube law that means bigger is better. So its far more efficient. That leads to far cheaper mass to orbit costs.
In order to land not just the first stage but also the second stage more fuel will have to be carried on the ascent phase just to enable the recovery phase. This then necessitates weight savings elsewhere to avoid payload to orbit being cut way back. SpaceX chose to remove the landing system from both, the first and second stages (both because, after all if you can eliminate the landing system from one stage then you can eliminate it from the other).
This and other weight savings will enable high payload to orbit in a fully reusable launch platform.
Landing without legs requires something like this catch system -- something never done before, and clearly very difficult to do.
