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Comment Re: Coconut milk? (Score 1) 184

I'm not aware of any way of making coconut cream other than from shredded coconut meat. "Ice coconut cream" fits the schema of your earlier post, but I wasn't sure whether you'd admit "coconut cream" as a noun phrase. When I made a frozen emulsion from coconut cream, lemongrass, ginger, and palm sugar I called it "coconut, lemongrass and ginger ice-cream" but explained to my friends that it was dairy-free so the lactose-intolerant could eat it. (I also served it as a starter, with prawn crackers, rather than a dessert, but that was for practical reasons: we were having a picnic at the beach and I wanted to serve it before it melted).

Comment Re: steak, burger, and sausage are formats (Score 1) 184

To answer the direct question, I think my grandparents got them from a local butcher in Ulverston. But note

The combinations of permitted herbs and spices may vary from butcher to butcher, but the prominent taste of Traditional Cumberland Sausage is quite spicy due to the generous amount of pepper added which is accompanied by a strong taste of herbs.

I must admit that I don't remember the "strong taste of herbs", but I do remember the pepper being the dominant flavour, sufficiently so that you would need quite a refined palate to precisely identify the source of umami.

Comment Re: steak, burger, and sausage are formats (Score 1) 184

Since you say in another recent comment that you're in San Diego, your experience is probably centred there. Although both burger and patty were originally primarily North American lexemes, the former has achieved much more international recognition. The Oxford English Dictionary describes burger as "Originally U.S." and patty as "Chiefly North American". While Vegeburger may have been an attempt to create market confusion when it was coined 80 years ago, "veggie burger" is the only name (except for more specific names such as "falafel") for approximate discs of minced vegetables intended for frying that I've heard in British English, and when it's used to describe home-cooked food there's no "market" in scope.

Comment Re:steak, burger, and sausage are formats (Score 1) 184

Here's a better idea, how about stop trying to make vegetables look and taste like meat?

Veggie burgers and sausages predate "trying to make vegetables look and taste like meat" by decades. They exist for the same reason that meat is made into burgers and sausages: it's a convenient form factor for cooking and eating.

Comment Re:Four major things that make this possible (Score 2) 84

Unfortunately it also requires the backers having similar views. Backers looking for a quick bump by playing the stock price quarter by quarter regardless of all other performance metrics hurt businesses because they compel short-term thinking.

For what it's worth I don't look upon the proposed end of quarterly reports by businesses as a cure either, I look at those sorts of reports as a way of assessing what could be going wrong with an eye on trying to correct it. I just don't think it's wise to use those as the main metric of success like the short-term traders would use them for.

Comment Re:Doesn't sound cheaper (Score 1) 84

Just from the summary it sounds like their production was scattered all over the world. It's difficult and expensive to keep good tabs on what's actually going on, particularly if much of that manufacturing is outsourced and it's someone else's factory producing parts to-spec but without direct firsthand oversight.

If they didn't downsize their American workforce it's probably because consolidating their production from overseas factories to one factory that is subject to close scrutiny meant that the job-losses happened overseas, not at home. It also sounds like their manufacturing is very heavily automated, meaning that the same number of employees doing things the old, less efficient way were able to take on the extra production capacity when the company switched to the more efficient way while closing those overseas factories.

Sharpie products have had pretty consistent and reasonable quality over the years, and they seem to be the most common standard by which permanent markers are judged, so they seem to be doing something right. Good on them if they were able to find a way to do it domestically and profitably.

Comment Re:uh no (Score 2) 130

And unfortunately usury seems to be the most widely accepted solution.

I've only faced financial security once in my life, I was young (was I even 21 yet?), I had just been laid-off as the doctom bubble burst, and that weekend my vehicle was stolen and per my folks' advice I only had liability coverage. Filing for unemployment covered my rent, my lack of vehicle meant I could cancel my auto insurance since obviously I didn't need it anymore, and my parents loaned me a car and covered food and utilities until I was able to find work within a few months.

I was lucky that I had access to a family safety-net, because sure as hell unemployment insurance payouts from the state-run fund only barely covered rent. It probably would have been difficult to get official food assistance since it's not oriented toward single men (I am not advocating that it be taken away from women, families, and kids, just stating the observation of current situation) and it probably would have taken time to even be rejected. But there are food banks that don't require being on food assistance.

I would personally love to see the system improved, to provide more coverage, and to better audit. There are always complaints about abuse of such systems, and while abuse happens, wouldn't it be possible to find and stamp-out individual examples of such abuse? The system does help people, it could help more, and the abuses could be curtailed if there was some will to actually investigate those abuses rather than just using them as pretexts to try to get rid of such systems.

Comment Re:I don't understand China... (Score 1) 26

Yes, but that's a _later_ problem.

The CCP is incredibly good at kicking the can down the road. I mean, most governments do a fair amount of that (not necessarily with regard to stuff in space specifically, only a handful of countries even have stuff in space; but there are other kinds of cans to kick down roads), but China is on another level. Short-term thinking is pretty much their whole modus operandi.

Comment Re:Good! (Score 3, Interesting) 153

Mmmhmm. There's a meme about an illegal money laundering medium, illegal hotel, and illegal taxi company, and probably another one that slips my mind. I'd argue that in many of these the goal is to privatize profits and push the burdens to operate onto the public.

I have no objection to businesses being forced to treat their workers well, and businesses being forced to go all-in when they are trying to do something, ie, structure to do it right and to give the development team the time and resources to do it, or don't do it.

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