As someone who was a professional baker for years, agree. Baking very much has intuition and art like qualities. It's just less forgiving of loose measurements until you know what you are doing.
It's less for giving but not as unforgiving as some people make it out to be. Even less so when you don't demand commercial level consistent results that can be sold fungible products.
Now I've been interested in cooking for 30+ years, and do all of our home cooking and baking, and there's no way I would believe that I can substitute typical from-scratch/pantry ingredients and get the same result.
This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol.
The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't.
Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.
It reminds me of when I first started eating homemade bread. At first I didn't like it because it was different than I was used to, I considered getting the additives myself to get the same texture, but eventually I learned to love it and now can't imagine eating supermarket bread.
Or don't. Or add different additives. When cooking "from scratch" you have the option to make what you like and not what some corporation has determined sells the best. A lot of the extra ingredients are only needed for the latter goal but not for the former.
I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
The thing to remember is that no one cares about hypocrisy. The people in power least of all. It's a classic authoritarian move to condemn something they engage in, because the authoritarian doesn't care about doing the right thing, they care about eradicating people whose will resist them in any way.
You will see capital L Liberals complaining about hypocrisy the whole time the autocrats rise to power, completely missing the point that hypocrisy doesn't matter. There's no scoreboard out there that says, opponent was hypocritical, automatic loss.
if nothing else, one has to give the ruling coalition credit for debugging the vaunted constitutional system. maybe the winning argument for the opposition will be to amend away all the vulnerabilities that were just exploited.
The US political system isn't code, it's rich vs. poor. It only pretended to be "democratic" and "moral" for 250 years because the propaganda and triumphalism held more or less, but now it's reduced to a depraved, tin pot dictatorship because of slowly increased corruption due to uncorrected weaknesses even Kurt Gödel identified that were never addressed because the rich/powerful benefited from them.
It's also wishful thinking to suppose a corrupt, weak Congress would ever do anything to limit their own corruption. John McCain discovered there was zero appetite for reform.
It would take the sustained, coordinated efforts of many ~millions of people to peacefully* overthrow and reform a system which is entirely corrupt and unwilling to work for anyone not rich/powerful. Instead, at present, American voters are far too uninformed, uneducated, divided-and-conquered and/or demoralized in red/blue team bullshit factions to clearly characterize the situation they are in and the most correct response(s) to it. There will be no "progressive resurgence" through political means, but there could be corporate James Carville->Ezra Klein pseudo-progressive swing to the pretend, corporate left fronted by another wife cheater, Republican Lite (tm) like Gavin Newsom. Nothing will change.
* Those with the power will abuse it and direct illegality towards their enemies just like every dictator does. The hope is that extreme, excessive measures taken against peaceful people weakens their pillars of support. It doesn't always as in the cases of the Bonus Army, Occupy, or about 90% of peasant uprisings. Viet Nam and Gaza Hostage protests similarly also weren't effective enough.
i make a code analogy because i believe the US was intended as a country of ideas and laws and systems, as opposed to the legacy of arbitrary ruling classes and colonial extraction that it separated itself from. pessimistically one might worry there is simply no system of governance that can scale to this size population and still espouse the stated core values. optimistically one hopes that we could be just a few amendments away from a more perfect union that takes into account technology and mechanisms of communication like x/twitter etc that can allow a single person with access to sufficiently large capital reserves to interpose themselves between the people and their elected representatives.
That was the marketing on the side of the tin 250 years ago, but that's utopian thinking.
The problem isn't the size or nature of government or the size of the population, it's that an embarrassingly under-educated populace can be manipulated into giving away their rights and freedoms to incompetent, corrupt morons. Neither direct democracy nor communism work and will never work at any large scale. What needs to happen is to give up on the false fantasy of "freedom of choice" and shift towards public administration through sortition. Throw away political parties, career politicians, PACs, billionaires, and Hobson's choice voting that doesn't matter to be replaced with limited duration "jury duty". Also, a fourth actual co-equal branch of government to audit and check the other 3 appears necessary given the Gödel's loophole-like weaknesses that have been exploited in a era with handheld mass broadcasting and generative LLMs that can create entirely fake media potentially manipulating millions into committing atrocities.
You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.
Social media isn't defined by the business model. Straight from Wikipedia: "Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks." That perfectly describes HN.
What makes it not a social media website? Social media is a function of what it does, and it's a place people comment, converse, share links, there's a user scoring system, there's a feed of recent events on the front page... how is it not social media?
If you hold it up to light to get a reflection, you are telling me there's zero perceptual warping of that reflection around the crease? None? It's as flat and perfect as a single sheet of glass?
Oooooof. Yeah, we should definitely let governments pipe their propaganda directly into every surface in our lives constantly. Surely that's something that's healthy and good for all of us. Governments have no incentive to lie and have no power to buy out all the bandwidth.
"Well, at least I made money on the government shutting down discussion" is deeply messed up.
If you are going to build strawmen to cut down over and over, there's clearly no intellectually fertile soil here. You seem to be enjoying operating both sides of some imagined conversation quite well, and I'll leave it to you.
The thread is about how an "At last I got mine" attitude towards making money from government propaganda ad revenue is a shit attitude.
You are the one who is out here building windmills to tilt at about bans on government propaganda. That's not something I ever suggested. Nor is it even germane to the thread. Again, you are engaging in some elementary school level straw manning.
One does not need to ban government propaganda, or propaganda generally, to avoid being proud to be paid to spread it. Consider: you could be not proud you sold that ad space. You could not sell that ad space to those people. You could not sell ad space generally. I'm sure one could come up with other ideas as well.
I hope you see now how infantile your diversions are, how juvenile the comments around thinking around corners. You wandered completely off topic and seem quite upset I didn't follow you there, then invented a version of me that did to fight.
Anyone who wants, in your case, is "whomever pays me the most", which is a far, far cry from "anyone who wants".
You can tell yourself this is the free exchange of ideas all you want, but when it's an auction for who can hold the microphone it's anything but free.
False, it's whomever pays at all. I don't know if you've looked at online advertising costs, but their very affordable. We aren't talking super bowl ads.
mine is "whomever wants" unless you're arguing that online advertising is prohibitively expensive. I'd just have to disagree with that.
In your case it's "whomever is approved" which is a far, far cry from "anyone who wants".
