Yes - not about coke but my understanding is that Heinz invested a lot of money over the years to standardise the taste across factories, countries and tomatoes themselves.
Coke itself is not consumed in a containerless 0g environment so the container itself imparts taste - hence why aficionados will often prefer glass over pastic or can. The bottling processing factory will also impart a taste, as will the local humidity which is why I often think drinks taste odd in Singapore.
My fav thing I heard was back in a chemistry lab someone told me a rumour coke had invested serious R&D into a plastic/surface that tastes like lemon to accommodate for the regular plastic taste that leaches from their bottles.
Interesting! According to [1] it's labelled as "less sugar" though, so it's not as if the original/standard Coke is different. There seems to be some widespread thinking that Singapore has issues with sugar consumption so I guess this is Coke's response (or perhaps they were forced by authorities).
> Coke itself is not consumed in a containerless 0g environment so the container itself imparts taste - hence why aficionados will often prefer glass over pastic or can. The bottling processing factory will also impart a taste, as will the local humidity which is why I often think drinks taste odd in Singapore.
This is 100% correct, I had to chuckle though when the thought of an actual living person considering themselves a "soda/coke afficionado" entered my mind.
Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations.
A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite.
Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...
There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...
This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50.
"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age."
"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age."
If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...
The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.
The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data.
The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.
Yes, but I guess I'd say that we should not attempt to capture an exact sentiment in making policy decisions. The bigger the decision, the more people are involved and affected, and the more people, the greater the variation in their sentiments. It simply doesn't make sense to try to somehow please each individual to address something like housing affordability in the US (or California, or Los Angeles, or even Monterey). The only way to do that is to aggregate sentiments into data. In doing so you lose precision about those sentiments, but that's good, because some of that precision is measuring idiosyncratic stuff that shouldn't play a role in solving the problem in question.
No, it shouldn't tell us everything, but if someone makes a very data-oriented claim ("millenials will be the first generation poorer than their parents") and you return with data that shows the opposite, you can make a claim that the data is poorly gathered, etc.
But pivoting to the "but it's not my lived experience, bro" is weak.
If you made the claim that "millenials have it harder than their parent" then we're talking something where experience can be more useful.
It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC.
Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
Assuming this is an earnest question - the lived experience is that for some people, they are less well off than their parents. This is a big enough phenomenon that it has been measured and AFAIK is well accepted as a fact. So being poorer than your parents isn't about living the experience of both your life and your parents.
Although anecdotally my father moved to the UK with my mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and by 27 my dad was able to afford his first property in London start a family, all without a uni degree and hadn't even yet finished his accountancy training. He did that without any family help and in fact was sending money home. This has always helped provide a bit of colour of how things have changed
That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials.
Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks.
Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware.
Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
I was a diehard Android user as the memory of Apple locking down things like the filesystem among other things really sowed some bad blood for me. But these days it really seems like they're kind of converging and Apple's privacy features are quite appealing...
The problem with police is a) that police have to deal with bad people and it is very hard to stay untainted when you constantly deal with bad people, and b) being a cop is no longer a desirable or rewarding job which not only causes applicant pool issues but also polarises the job and police force itself. Then the nature of polarisation is that it is self reinforcing. So if your job isn't rewarding financially or socially, the "perks" must come from somewhere and so it attracts people who seek to abuse power etc
I don't know where you are, but some of the highest paid public employees in my state are police. In fact, median salaries for cops are higher than those of software engineers.
Add the fact that they get generous pensions + benefits, and can retire at 45 and draw from that pension until they die, they have it better than most of the people they police.
It's one of the only professions where you can make north of $250k+ a year doing overtime by sitting in your car playing Candy Crush all night.
I believe strongly that people have zero problem paying their knuckle dragging police fuckwad of the day $150k if they would actually do the job they signed up for. It’s the fact that 99% of them can’t handle it that pisses people off
I don’t agree that police isn’t attractive or rewarding, the salaries have gone up and requirements reduced (college degree requirements in places for example)
Come with a pension and active lifestyle with a club(FoP) and a union in some positions, its ostensibly public service and you get to much more than peek behind the curtain.
Personally, I feel both ways about cops writ large. I feel like we could do a lot better really easily(mandatory body cam recordings please? Our guys literally just take them off.), and on the other hand I get it, they’re doing important work often enough.
Is MSG not bad for you in the way aspartame is not bad for you? I totally get that MSG is naturally present in dashi but the chemistry of dashi (a very messy and complex mix of substances) vs purified msg is going to be different, and the concentrations the japanese consume food containing dashi are very different to the way UPFs and chinese restaurants gratuitously smother your food in it. MSG is to many cuisines what butter is to western cuisine (ie moar is always bettah)
There’s no evidence linking MSG specifically with any chronic health issues and little reason to suspect there would be in healthy people at the quantities generally consumed. Funnily enough many people who are wary of MSG and try to avoid it would be better off looking at their sodium intake, which we know for sure has long term health risks.
I am someone who is sensitive to MSG and the new substitutes they put in food to replace it.
It is not "dangerous", and I think that is the problem with the messaging, but it does increase my anxiety, insomnia and fibromyalgia symptoms. And I also thing for most people it is fine, but it certainly does not work with my family's genetics. My mother had the same issue.
Many things in food now replace MSG. Any time you see a protein isolate, what they are isolating is the glutamate. Malted Barley Flour also contains high levels of glutamate and purines (like inosine) that work synergisticly with it to enhance flavor.
Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and it makes your taste buds more "excited". My mouth tastes like metal whenever I have foods with glutamate. It is not pleasant for me at all.
Well it seems pretty accepted that refined sugar is worse for you than consuming sugars locked up in fibrous fruits. From a similar intuition glutamates locked up in natural sources probably has a different bioavailability profile to refined MSG, incidental sodium intake notwithstanding.
In any case, everyone is different and catchall health advice lacks nuance. I have to very consciously consume more and more salt because I habitually cut it out to the point that I now suffer from hyponatremia especially as I exercise and sweat bucket loads.
salt was always advised to be limited, especially for those with high blood pressure. This hasn't changed, there are just vocal diet ideologues (mostly carnivore/keto) that are trying to post-hoc rationalize otherwise.
Everybody is sodium sensitive, it’s a basic fact that your body retains additional fluids if you increase your sodium intake, just talk to some bodybuilders. Chronic long term exposure to a high sodium diet is a risk factor for all sorts of issues because of this basic fact of biology. Way more so than MSG or even artificial sweeteners. But people focus on the wrong thing.
My understanding is that most people's blood pressure does not increase in response to dietary sodium, which is the sensitivity described in this context.
MSG is very safe in normal quantities with a similar safety profile to salt. You can drink MSG water to kill yourself but it’d be like drinking a gallon of seawater. It’s monosodium glutamate. Monosodium as in NaCl (table salt) and glutamate as in the amino acid and neurotransmitter. Once they disassociate in water, they’re both some of the most basic molecules used by all life, including for protein production.
Depends where you live but where I am it's not unacceptable to go for a run in essentially swim wear so you'd be sunning not much less than what you'd get in a public tanning salon
Coke itself is not consumed in a containerless 0g environment so the container itself imparts taste - hence why aficionados will often prefer glass over pastic or can. The bottling processing factory will also impart a taste, as will the local humidity which is why I often think drinks taste odd in Singapore.
My fav thing I heard was back in a chemistry lab someone told me a rumour coke had invested serious R&D into a plastic/surface that tastes like lemon to accommodate for the regular plastic taste that leaches from their bottles.
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