It’s not. I’m a mom with two kids at home, I write software for a living, and pancake mix is one of the staples in my pantry. Why this is so bizarre you would think it ironic, I have no idea.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
The first-past-the-post system, combined with our current primary system, is set up such that most Americans do not get the representation they actually want, and Congress is made up of extremists. We don’t have the Congress we have because most Americans actually want it that way.
I picked 2012 because that’s when the claw hammer discourse was happening, but I agree with you. You could write pretty nice-looking PHP by 2012, and a lot of people did. The claw hammer thing was itself looking back at PHP from several years before.
I'm the one asserting that women have been forced into childcare for millennia. It's the default state in the absence of societal support.
> It comes naturally to parents.
_Love_ comes naturally to parents. Almost nothing else does, in my experience. You are extrapolating from an incomplete dataset. Again, your mom being good at the job of staying home with kids does not make other moms good at it. You are talking to a mom who isn't. I do, in fact, exist. I am asserting that my family, and society, are better off because I had a choice of career. I guarantee my kids would agree. It has nothing to do with how much I love them, and everything to do with my aptitude for homemaking and preschool childcare.
> I’m going to reach for the tool that always works vs. sometimes works.
This is only logical if you're limited to one tool. Would you never buy a power tool because sometimes the power goes out and a hand tool is your only choice?
They have, in fact, been willing to break backwards compatibility when it matters. mysql_real_escape_string(), for example, my personal favorite bugaboo from the early days, was removed in 2015.
How so? What do they have now that they will be losing under the new system? It seems like having childcare paid for would be beneficial to any single working parent.
Firstly, I am a mother with two children, so no need to educate me about the bond between mother and child. Secondly, of course children love their parents. You seem to be conflating parenting with daytime childcare. This is a common misconception among people who romanticize stay-at-home parenting: it’s either “mom stays home during the workday with kids” or “the state raises the kids.” You may not be aware, since you say your mom stayed home with you, that parents whose kids are in daycare do still get a lot of parenting time in. They see their kids a lot. They feed them, clothe them, kiss their scraped knees, help them with homework, put them to bed, take them to the park and movies and church. Daycare isn’t 24/7. It’s also not some kind of robotic state-sponsored apparatus. Childcare providers are people who have chosen taking care of kids as their career, they often have a degree in early childhood education, and they love the kids they take care of.
And I do not apologize for the word “shunted.” No woman in a modern society should be forced to choose between having a child and being something other than a full-time childcare provider. Men don’t face that choice; women shouldn’t either.
Just because women have been shunted into childcare for millennia doesn’t mean we’re naturally better at it. It just means we’ve had to do it. Do you similarly think it’s a rarity for men not to be cut out for subsistence farming?
“You’ll have issues” was my way of saying “I wouldn’t recommend them.” IMO if you want to run in a loop, pick a language where that’s the standard practice.
Working with Drupal as a user is not the same as working as a Drupal developer. If you know Drupal well enough that you’re not flailing around trying to figure out how to do things—if you actually know the framework and you build sites with it regularly—it’s remarkably pleasant from a code perspective. The main problem with Drupal is the learning curve. It’s much easier to get started writing, say, a Laravel app. But for the narrow case where you need a heavy-duty content management system with features like multilingual and robust cache integration, and you’re willing to put in the time learning it, Drupal is not a miserable experience. It’s actually good software.
The developers come in all flavors, too. I spend my time writing Drupal code and the average quality is fairly high. (Code quality in the Drupal project itself has always been high, in fact, even when PHP was a disaster on wheels.) So it depends on what those people writing PHP for two decades have been working on.
That’s a perfectly valid argument. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make that argument. I’m just saying I don’t want to hear about mysql_real_escape_string.
To answer your question, I don’t know that modern PHP has big advantages over other modern languages. I’m not knocking on doors to spread the gospel of Symfony. But there’s no need to switch away from it either. And hosting is still easy and cheap. Prototyping your product as a Laravel or Symfony app is a reasonable choice.
This is a preemptive plea for people who last wrote PHP in 2012 not to opine on what writing PHP is like in 2025. It is not a hammer with two claws. It’s a modern language with types and tooling and package management.
You have clearly not shopped for childcare on the open market. Highly paid professionals still struggle to get childcare. Putting more resources into the system will be a net positive for all parents who need childcare.
That’s great, but not every mom is your mom. You just lucked out. This is like saying “my dad was a doctor and we lived very well and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Some dads aren’t cut out to be highly paid professionals. Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents.
> I’ve never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling
Understandable, but the thing is, staying home with kids is work. It’s a vocation. Everyone should get to choose what work is fulfilling for them personally. In the absence of reliable child care, parents don’t get to make that choice freely. It sounds like in a perfect world, you might have enjoyed staying home with kids, if that seems more appealing than the work you ended up doing. I can tell you I tried it for 18 months and I just about went crazy. I am a much better software developer than I am a stay-at-home parent. I feel for women who don’t get to make choices the way I did.
> are the children actually taken care of?
There is a lot of data by now comparing outcomes for children in childcare versus with stay-at-home parents. Both groups do fine.
> I’m really thankful my mother stayed home with us
It sounds like she did a good job of it; it was probably a vocation for her. You do need to understand that not every woman is cut out for that.