Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

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@Ryu_Niiyama I missed your excellent post yesterday!

".you are just watching your life go down the drain with a retirement that you won't be able to survive looming. "

And then they can't figure out why birth rates are down and seem generally confused by this, and the solution is to import more and more young people from elsewhere and making said in-debted native population pay for them by taking more money from them.

" The middle class is being priced out of existence and there is really no room for us among the poor."

That's probably the best put, most simple version I've heard. That's really it. You can't move up, there's no actual stability in the "middle", and you're not poor enough to be "poor", so you're trapped forever in a nowhere place. At times I wonder if absolute poverty is an upgrade. They give you things taken from other people. Plenty of people in that bracket know how to "work the system" to get the handouts, then work minimum wage tax free under the table (illegally but "it's only wrong if you get caught"), and end up with more actual discretionary income than I do.

"The funny part is that I would be considered gainfully employed if I just listed my salary (I make more than both of parents combined did at the same age...), "

Yeah that's the thing. I'm making what 20 years ago I'd considered a dream - endgame. I'm set if I make that in my life. And now it's the "new minimum wage", especially around here, where the average is almost double that now. But I have to keep up in spending with those people because that's what's around me now.

"house, car and a dog people were subsidized by government programs, many that were not available to minorities."

Not really. there was some of that, but that's not the bulk of it. The reality was EVERYONE could work a middle class income. "Middle class" now means "professional class" for only the most skilled and specially trained. Back then "working class" was "middle class" and "professional class" wasn't that far above it. Now it's stratified, where "middle class" consists of "professional" and is more closer to what wealthy used to be before wealthy became more akin to medieval feudal lords, and "working class" is still called "middle class" for political purposes but is actually closer to "poverty." Back then anybody with an able body could work at any factory or physical labor job, and make true middle class money, pension, retirement, and only ONE person in the household needed to do it, the other took care of the household (No offense, but I still loathe the whole movement of women in the workforce, not because it needed to stay "men work, women raise the kids" but because it was a scorched earth program that played into the hands of the bankers and industrialists that doubled the workforce and halved the pay each....rather than changing the standard from men work, women raise the family to "it can be either" it changed it to what we currently have... nobody raises the family unless you can afford to import a nanny, everyone else gets to pay for it, and without two incomes you can't get by. That's one of the root causes. The other is that now to be anything but minimum wage, you need to be "professional", there's no working class middle class.

The longer root of that however, is simply overpopulation. Supply and demand (I've mentioned this in other threads you weren't participating in, but.) The European and American golden ages in the 50's and 60's were largely due to massive population reduction from the wars. The Renaissance was largely due to population reduction of the Great Pestilence. Too much labor supply, and gains in efficiency means less demands, means much of the human race is simply excess that's unneeded and each has little to no value unless possessing a significantly above average ability. To fix the economy, a purge is required. War, famine, plague, one or the other or all three. Mass extinction is the only real proven solution to the conundrum. China's working on it though. Please look forward to that.

@ThanosReXXX By the way, speaking of American food, I noticed like you mentioned, all the chicken packages state "contains up to 15% solution." A.K.A. yes, they inject it with fluid here. I"m assuming it's a brine, mostly meant to preserve shelf life. So our produce is filled with waterproof pesticides designed to annihilate organic matter, our water is filled with heavy metals, and our meat is filled with brine (and who knows what else.) Why not just eat fast food? That's the other thing. Produce starts losing it's nutrients the moment it's cut from the plant. In a few days it's pretty much dead no matter how "green" it looks. Most of our produce is 1-3 weeks old by the time we get it, especially in the East. The overwhelming majority comes from what @Morpheel would consider the extreme south. Chile, Peru, Guatemala. Then it sits in customs quarantine for a week or so in CA. Then it's shipped ground for another week across the US, typically unrefrigerated (and might get frozen in winter in a truck/boxcar), then it sits in a distribution warehouse for some period of days, then it goes in another truck to stores where it sits in a stockroom for a day or more, before going out on the shelf where it sits for unknown periods of time. It may look fresh, but the produce has roughly zero nutritional value by the time you eat it. Odds are the potato chips have more actual nutrients. The grain has all the nutrients burned out of it by the high speed processing rollers, though that's likely true in Europe too (and same for polished rice in Asia.) And meat is typically frozen even if it's served "fresh" in the store. Same for fast food, lots of stores from the low end to the high end advertize "fresh, never frozen!" That's a lie and a technicality that is "true according to the letter of the law". Meat, and most other fresh food products except produce, are required by USDoT law to be frozen during transport over the road over state lines. That means unless it was grown locally (usually it wasn't, and if it was it's the extremely expensive stuff, or you live in one of the big supplier states for a product, like Texas for beef etc) it was certainly frozen before you got it. It would be illegal not to have been. So then how can they advertise both in chains and supermarkets "fresh, never frozen?" when the entire meat department was frozen? Legal verbiage. The FDA required measurement for commercially frozen food is below 0F. The USDoT required measurement is below 32F, the freezing point of water. So the food is transported below 32F, which doesn't qualify for being considered frozen by the FDA. Therefore the food was never frozen. Even though it was frozen for weeks.

Similarly a can of Crisco, which is, quite literally, a can of transfat...that's what Crisco is, a can of hydrogenated oil which is what transfat is, proudly advertises NO TRANSFAT! And TRANSFAT FREE! How? By adjusting the portion sizes. Government requirement for the Nutrition Facts sheet says that less than 1% of daily total can be rounded down to 0%. So they adjusted the printed serving size down to half a teaspoon. Half a teaspoon of pure transfat is less than 1% of your daily recommended total transfat. Therefore it can be printed as 0%. Therefore the 2lb can of transfat contains no transfat. And you wonder why we're stressed, confused, and unhealthy? Of course in CA, a lot of your produce was fresh. We tore down all our farms and build Porche dealers, corporate campuses, Home Depots, and 250 luxury carriage homes atop them. So we just get our "really fresh" produce from CA where we still get it a week and a half or so after you would have eaten it and it has no more nutrients left. And the rest comes from Chile and El Salvador. The meat probably came from China, and may or may not contain fluorocarbons, but we're not allowed to know because they removed the law that had to tell us, but it was definitely "fresh, never frozen!"

I.E. there's no discernible difference between freshly made food and McDonalds. They're both about as nutritious and poisonous.

NOW, as for your range hood, that makes a lot more sense. It doesn't look like much on the outside, but on the inside it's clear that it's what we'd call a "downdraft." That's a normal active ventilation system that many people used to get instead of hoods. They were popular in the 80's and 90's....now they're recognized as sucking (or more to the point, not sucking....) and not being nearly as efficient as a hood, but they're overall pretty decent, and I'm betting your building-wide system is significantly more effective than the consumer Whirlpool downdrafts of the 1980s here. For all practical purposes you have an external exhausting hood, even if it's not a hood. And that explains it. For me. No ventilation. Nothing. Not of any sort. All air in the room stays in he room forever. There's an aluminum mesh (or for more premium a stainless baffle) that separates the larger grease droplets so the air coming out isn't heavily grease laiden (the baffles work better than the meshes), and a charcoal filter to absorb some percentage of odor. But where your system DOES pull out whatever minor smoke emerges from the pan, the aluminum/baffles do not, the smoke just goes right through into the room. (Yes, you have smoke, you don't see it, and it's exhausted with your system.) Mine stays in the house and spreads. Additionally exhausting food odors externally is effective. Charcoal only can do so much, most of the food odor is just blown through the house.

These silly systems are common in the US where electric stoves are used. (Plus if you have an electric coil stove, you're going to burn stuff....the uneven heat guarantees that. I don't use the coil anymore I just have the one induction hob, but the exhaust issue remains.

If you want to experience the fun, block up your fan pipes. Put a desktop oscilating fan on your counter, and put an aluminum mesh and charcoal pad filter in front of it. Happy cooking. Welcome to my kitchen and that of may Americans. (Actually don't do that since you have gas and that could be very dangerous.....even here with gas, external ventilation is mandatory.) But you get the idea!

EDIT: Caveat for Ryu, when I said things like "everyone" could work factory etc, I realize there's the minority issue, and for the large concept I'm blithely ignoring that, because that was another disastrous scorched earth issue where the problem back then was that the American way of life was denied to specific groups systematically. And when Civil Rights became a thing, instead of the effort going into changing it so that it was no longer denied to said groups and was truly available to all, the effort went into destroying it so it was available to none instead.....and a good chunk of that was funded/provoked by the USSR...... We truly did lose the cold war.

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@Tyranexx Yeah, from what I now know about US public transport, coupled with your shall we say, temporary hindrances in the social department (I'm still convinced you'll be able to overcome them at some point, so I'm sticking with the positive outlook), I can well imagine how much of a thing it would be to participate in this means of transport.

Besides me always having been a people person, I've also learned over the years to close myself off, in areas or rooms that I don't want to be in or with people I don't want to be with. I can even still communicate in that state, more or less like on auto pilot. Once you can read people, it's easy to keep a conversation going while not being interested at all, and all the while still giving the other person the impression that you're actually listening, and on the positive side, you're at the very least doing them the courtesy of being polite.

Those are all tricks learned in sales and in the management training that I did. Actually at an American institute, now forbidden in Europe because of some of the rather questionable and/or controversial methods they use, but they still exist. Look 'em up if you want to read some more about it. They're called Landmark Worldwide nowadays, and they've labeled themselves as a "Personal development company", which is basically a front for a company that uses NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), and re-educating methods such as build-break-build and so forth.

In and of itself, these things aren't bad or evil, but they sometimes went to extremes with using them. Don't know if they're still doing that, but back then, that sure was the case. I found out about it back then, and even though the first courses and sessions I followed, were actually quite beneficial to both my work and private life, I then decided that any follow-up course wasn't really my idea of money well-spent, so I signed off on it, and moved on to other avenues of personal development that weren't so controversial...

@NEStalgia Well, I have to say, I was always of a mind to go back to my roots some day, but you're not exactly doing a very good job of advertising modern day USA to me so far, and what we see in the news over here also isn't all that great, so all of that combined has put me firmly back in my seat on the fence...

As for the liquids injected into meat: over here it's plain water, and it's not meant as an extra preservation measure, but simply to "nicely" fill out the meat, so that, for example in the case of chicken fillets, they look nice and fat. Brine would only make sense if you'd want to pickle food, if you ask me.

The whole text wall about vegetables, grain, rice and frozen meat is also USA exclusive. Over here, all meat and fish is only ever moved from the butcher or harbor that it's picked up from in so-called cooling trucks, basically moving refrigerators, but it's never frozen. Laws are also quite strict concerning that over here. No such trickery with words or phrasings possible over here. Same with vegetables: when they arrive in the super market, they need to be what is labeled as "day fresh", and it's replaced every other day.

The process is harvesting, washing, packing, transporting and being delivered to the supermarket. It's a 2 day process at most, and it's never frozen either, much like meat and fish.

As for rice: only white rice is completely devoid of any useful ingredients, which is one of the reasons that I only eat brown rice.

Crisco is so infamous, it's even known over here, although hardly anyone, except maybe for a handful of expats, is actually using it...

As for the ventilation system: oh, it's definitely more powerful than any electric hood would be, or like the 80's systems you described. The closet does a pretty decent job to isolate the sound it makes, but if I keep that door open while switching it to it's "high" setting, then it sounds like there's a jet plane taking off, somewhere in the near vicinity...

And it's actually an updraft, because the air gets sucked up, all the way through six storeys of apartments, and goes out the roof, where a sort of a filtered, stainless steel chimney pipe is located.

And not to worry: I won't try your "let's emulate NEStalgia's kitchen" project over here. I've been known to do some reckless things in my time, but that is not going to be one of them...

@Knuckles-Fajita "In exciting news"

You bought a PlayStation? Why on EARTH would you do that?

Hope you get the promotion, though. Better make sure you're prepared for it. Wouldn't want to multiply those visits to the doctor, now would we?