Curing (removing moisture from food by means of salt) is a distinct process from smoking (adding smoke to food as well as removing moisture via heat). Curing with nitrite and nitrate based salts (sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite) is what’s been implicated in cancer.

Smoking meat is much more complicated from a chemistry perspective. Different types of wood, different temperatures, moisture content, salt content, and cooking durations can all affect the concentrations of carcinogenic compounds in the food. For example, softwoods (such as pine) tend to produce a lot of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known class of carcinogens, but thankfully softwood is undesirable as a smoke wood anyway so is rarely used.

Smoking technique can also dramatically affect the result. Poor smoking technique allows the wood to smoulder at a lower temperature, producing a harsher smoke with more carcinogenic, toxic, and bitter compounds. Expert smoking technique uses a smaller, hotter fire which produces a much cleaner smoke that also results in better flavour.

No one is untouchable. No one is invincible. No one has unlimited resources.

One day Putin will seem untouchable. The next day he gets pulled out of a ditch like Gaddafi.

Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:

It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.

Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!

Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.

It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.

Or even better: build bike lanes lined with trees so we can ride in shade!

People don’t even agree on what good is, so there’s no way everyone can agree on what to do in order to do good. Many conservatives oppose progress because they don’t even agree that it is progress. They see a very sick society where the family has all but disappeared, social institutions have fallen apart, and the government can no longer be trusted.

Check it out, even including the partisan dimension of people trusting the government more when their party controls the White House, the overall trend is strongly negative. Just compare! Republicans trusted the government of LBJ — a Democrat in the White House for the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination — far more than they trusted the government during Trump’s first term!

Democrats have also lost faith in government and not even Obama was able to rekindle it for them. This is a very disgruntled, low trust society!

The Bible is notably silent on government social programs. Many Christians have taken it upon themselves to believe that social programs are evil, that they perpetuate the problems they’re intended to address, that they destroy the nuclear family, etc.

They sincerely believe that they are doing good by getting rid of these programs because they want to see the Christian family and the church take the central role on these issues, not the government. Furthermore, they believe that a government which tries to solve all social problems and create a utopia for everyone is fundamentally evil, hence the phrase:

“Don’t immanentize the eschaton.”

In their view, he would. They believe that Jesus wants people to give directly to charity, not to create government programs for it.

Also missing fried taro and fried cassava.

I’m a retro gamer. Old games are not dead games unless it’s no longer possible to play them.

Look at Nintendo. They’re still selling the VS arcade version of SMB1 from 1986!

It doesn’t really screw them over much. They made lots of money before they started doing this BS. They’ll make lots of money after they start complying with it. It’s just them being dumb.

An older game may not sell as well as a new one but a dead game doesn’t sell anything.

Wouldn’t that only be true if the third party was running a brand new slate of candidates? If the Republicans and Democrats are in secret talks to form a third party, it’s likely that a whole bunch of incumbents plan to break off from their parties to join the third party. They don’t need to win an election to do that, they could do it right now.

Of course their old parties would try to defeat them in the next election, but if these incumbents have been getting elected for many years then they’d still be hard to unseat even in a different party. Especially so if these members’ electorates are already disgruntled with the existing parties.

I really feel for Ukraine. They never wanted to take this step. They know exactly what they’re getting into: antipersonnel mines can halt Russian advances but they represent a bleak future of maimed and killed Ukrainian civilians in those areas.

Canadian here. I spent most of July 1 in bed! Was not feeling patriotic! Did not watch any fireworks.

The thing I wasn’t prepared for was not the lack of time, it was the lack of desire to play games.

More blood for the blood god!

I think people are reducing their tipping but not in the way you expect: they’re reducing their frequency of restaurant visits instead. I see so many restaurants operating on skeleton crews now. They all seem to be having a very difficult time keeping staff while their rents soar due to rising real estate prices.

By agree do you mean pass a law that bans tipping? Because there’s no such thing as “everyone agrees to do X” and then “everyone does X” when you’re talking about millions of people.

You don’t need money or a state to have capitalism, you just need private property.

You are still not addressing the difference between “a portion of individuals will be capable of having a viable pregnancy at this age” with “adulthood”.

My original comment never made that claim:

By human biology, a 14 year old is sexually mature and capable of becoming a parent. The terms “child, teen, adolescent, adult” are all social constructs. We as a society have drawn arbitrary lines and even changed them over time.

The fact that we may define adulthood at 16 or 18 or 21 (depending on the country or the context) but that indigenous cultures defined adulthood (subject to completion of the rite of passage) at 12 or 13 is strong evidence of the social constructedness of these terms. That’s what I wanted to illustrate along with the biology examples showing that maternal mortality is a tradeoff and not an indicator of sexual maturity.

Mortality risk in pregnancy never goes to zero. Many other species (such as salmon, octopi, many insects, arachnids) have a mortality rate close to 100% for either one or both parents after reproduction. Ultimately it is a tradeoff over resources between parents and offspring. Many other mammals have smaller offspring than humans though they lack humans’ large brain volume relative to maternal pelvis size. Scientists have debated about the reasons for women’s small pelvis size relative to the baby’s skull size and the rough consensus seems to be a tradeoff between intelligence and walking/running ability as well as agility.

Your definition of sexual maturity would seem to imply that the optimal time to have children is when a woman’s maternal mortality risk is minimized but that assumes all other risks remain constant over time. They do not, especially not in the past when famine was a much greater risk and all-cause mortality was much higher (including infant and young child mortality). This means the optimal time to have children would be much earlier given that famine or disease or other misfortune could strike the family at any time and that children matured into productivity quite rapidly (children didn’t always go to school for 12 years). It should also be noted that famine and the associated loss of body fat can halt the menstrual cycle in women of any age.

Lastly, I need to point out that many traditional and indigenous communities throughout the world have or previously had initiation rites to welcome children into adulthood and full standing within the tribe at or around the age of puberty. Contemporary society with its emphasis on more and more schooling has been the primary driver of the push to longer and longer periods of adolescence. The mental health and physical development effects of such extended adolescence are only beginning to be understood.