war1025

> this would have been over in a month

Yea. Because everyone would have starved to death.

> People who affiliate with "opposing a democratic election with direct violence" are.

The trouble is that many of the same people saying these actions were perfectly acceptable also have a habit of casually stating that all people who voted for Trump are the irredeemable scum of the earth.

> how is that just a unusually deadly seasonal flu

A smaller percentage of a very large number is still a very large number.

In March / April, people were claiming something on the order of a >10% fatality rate. We are much closer to 1%, and it drops off down to practically nothing once you get to anyone below middle-age.

> It's not apathy, it's fatigue.

I absolutely agree.

> It's been 10 months of terror and horror

I blame this squarely on the saturation coverage it has been given by media networks. People need time to hear themselves think or they'll go nuts. Politicians haven't been terribly helpful either.

I personally find it hard to get too worked up over it anymore.

When my neighbor caught it in July, I was very concerned for him. He was the first person I knew personally to catch it and I was worried for his health. Thankfully him an his wife and kid got through it fine.

Then in September another neighbor caught it, I checked in with him daily to make sure he was coming through it okay.

In October, my 98 year old grandma caught it. I thought great, this is finally the time. She's going to die from it. And then she got over it just fine.

In December, I had an aunt and uncle catch it, both in their late 60s. Both got over it just fine.

I learned the other day the reason I hadn't heard much out of one of my best friends is that just before Christmas him and his wife caught it. They also got over it just fine.

Heard this weekend that another of my neighbors had it in their house. Also getting over it perfectly fine.

I don't say all that to discount the tragedy for those who have died from it. It's a terrible thing and I wish it hadn't happened.

But we were sold Ebola by the media, and we got an unusually deadly seasonal flu.

Then add political affiliation as a protected class and prosecute people who break actual laws.

My personal opinion is that this discussion about tech, politics, censorship, etc. is something that needs to happen, and maybe all parties were completely within their rights to act how they did.

There are a lot of people who don't see that as self-evident, and what they are hearing is "if you are pro-Trump, you deserve to be a social pariah." That is a real quick path to radicalization.

Society is based on a set of mutually agreed upon rules. If you convince enough people through your actions that the rules are "Heads I win, Tails you lose", then they'll decide not to play by those rules anymore. And then all hell breaks loose.

I think Coronavirus is best thought of as a cancer.

It was easy to get under control in China. That was where it originated. It was centralized and easy to surgically target.

The spread to Europe and later the Americas was basically the virus metastasizing. Once something metastasizes, there is very little that can be done besides very heavy handed approaches that harm the surroundings as much as the thing you are trying to remove. That's basically lockdowns. And even when you make the largest effort you can manage, it is very often still not enough.

The reason island nations have been so successful is they by definition have strict borders, which means you can catch the virus before it has a chance to spread out to the point that you can never contain it again.

Coronavirus was beyond containment in the Western world by April.

Thankfully, we've learned that it's a much less deadly virus than initial impressions suggested.

I could agree with this view if the article was titled something like "Deplatforming is not the answer"

When you are in a politically charged moment like we were when that post went live, a headline of "We need more than Deplatforming" is implicitly stating that the actions taken were correct and justified. That is obviously something a large portion of the country is going to disagree with.

Ever since the ousting of Brendan Eich over his Prop 8 donations, right-leaning people have been a bit wary of Mozilla. Many of us still backed them because the ideas they claim to stand for seem noble.

Blog posts like the one in question make it very hard not to feel like Mozilla's position is "we disagree with you and we don't want you around." If they don't want us as users, then maybe it's better we go elsewhere. Brave is a logical place for such people to look since it is run by Eich, which was where everything started.

I went to the Brave website and had a look around Friday evening. I have also been using Firefox since back before it was even called that.

Part of me thinks I should make the switch, and then part of me think that I'd just be indirectly backing Google by switching to Brave.

Anyone have thoughts on that?

I don't know if Brave supports it, but I learned a while back that in Firefox you can add "smart bookmarks" (I think that's what they're called) where you put a "%s" in the url and then when you hotlink the bookmark it will substitute any words after the bookmark keyword into the url.

I've used that trick to add custom search keywords for multiple websites that didn't have an "official" Firefox search engine.

> In any two-party environment where only _one_ party regularly _does_ proliferate bigotry and violent attitudes

Anyone who believes this is a true depiction of politics in the USA is willfully blind.

If you are that level of paranoid then you shouldn't have an HN account to begin with.

There is a difference between "Quarantine when you cross a border" and "Shut down all commerce and tell people they can't leave their homes for months on end"

Because your vote is just as anonymous as your upvote history, which is quite a bit more private than your comment history.

> Does that make further mitigation efforts worthless?

Mitigation efforts are certainly worthwhile, but there are significant diminishing returns.

I would guess that 80/20 rule applies to mitigation efforts just as much as anything else. The vast majority of protection is provided by a fairly minimal set of precautions.

I think we see this borne out in the data. The places with the strictest lockdowns are doing better than the places with fewer restrictions. However, the numbers aren't so night and day different as to suggest that those additional lockdowns have been worth the price.

One thing I've wondered is how many "odd" social customs in various cultures (no singing / dancing, face coverings, etc.) could actually be explained by past epidemics. We've certainly adopted many of those restrictions in short order.

Indeed. I was introduced to him via his appearances on the Woodwrights Shop. I really appreciate the publishing work he does. We've bought I think five or six books from Lost Art Press, and I'm sure there are more to come.

In the same way, in 2016 a lot of people voted for "not-Clinton".

Then again, the other side voted for Biden, so it's not like we've got stellar options here.

Well, my cast iron was a wedding present that my grandparents got in the 40s, so it didn't come "preseasoned", but it's also had 70-odd years of continuous use.

It's probably got "seasoning" on it, but it also is not at all "seasoned" in the sense that for example this article or the person I was replying to is meaning.

You asked if I could look at this in a different part of this comment thread.

What you say seems more or less correct to me. I think if you approach cast iron that way, you will have good results.

Basically, you don't want the pan to look "not-oiled", and how much effort you need to put into that depends on how much you are removing the existing oil during the cooking process.

I think the "looks oily" test is the proper determinant for if the cast iron is in good shape. Trying to develop a "seasoning" layer is likely to just cause frustration.

> Is there solid evidence that this is actually possible, as opposed to creating a layer on top of it?

I doubt that's actually what happens, but if you think of it that way, you'll end up with the right result.

> if I leave it out for 15 minutes without thoroughly drying it, it starts turning orange from rust

The thing cast iron has going for it is that it's black, and black hides a multitude of sins. I'd guess the orange isn't a huge deal, maybe it is though.

> If you can wear clothes that morning, you can solder.

I got a good kick out of this.

I read somewhere a year or two ago that basically compared cast iron to wood, which has helped my intuition of things a lot.

Here is a blog post [0] I read a few months ago about wood finishes. I think the following applies just as much to cast iron as to the wood he is talking about:

  So, when I choose a finish, I ignore the industry-standard scratch and adhesion tests. Instead, I separate finishes into two buckets:

  1.   Finishes that look incredible immediately but look like crap in 20 years (the short-run finishes) vs. finishes that look incredible when worn/abused (the long-run finishes).

  2.   Finishes that want me dead vs. finishes that I can apply while buck naked.

Basically I would equate Polyurethane with Teflon, and furniture oil with cooking oil.

Teflon will be great to cook on initially. As soon as it gets damaged, it will be hard to fix without stripping and redoing everything.

Oil will take more maintenance over time, but if it starts looking bad, you just put a bit more on. That's exactly how you should treat cast iron as well.

The trouble people run into is they try to use oil to create a teflon surface. That's not what it's for.

[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/30/rip-the-anarchists-...

> what stops SOME modern manufacturers to do the same?

I believe there are manufacturers filling that niche now. Field [0] is one that I'm aware of. I think there are four or five others.

[0] https://fieldcompany.com/

The youtube algorithm decided it needed to recommend a whole hose of cast iron videos to me over Christmas and they kept repeating this.

So I went and washed my skillet down to a matte surface, rubbed oil into it, and cooked an egg. Worked perfectly fine.

You won't ever get the "slippery" coating like with a teflon pan, but I also find cooking on that type of surface to be absolutely maddening since any time you try to chop or scoop in such a pan, the food just slides out from under you and you have to chase it about.

I want my food to "not stick" in the same way that a book doesn't stick to a table. I don't want an ice rink.

> If there were reliable, science-based information about how to care for the pan best, it would have saved me a lot of trouble

I think the trouble here is that the people who best understand cast iron are probably also the least likely to care about the science of it.

The main reason not to leave too much oil in the pan is that it will go rancid and get sticky and generally gross. That's not something you run up against if you use the pan several times a week, but if you have something like a dutch oven that you use maybe once or twice a month, you will come back to a mess that you have to deal with before you can cook in it.

The whole "you're making a polymer coating that mimics a teflon pan" idea is something that sounds fancy, but is impractical and unnecessary in practice.

> No need to bake in the oven or anything like that?

Correct.

I will sometimes do the oil and bake thing for our Dutch oven if it has been neglected a while and has bits of rust or other questionable-ness to it.

It could be, but in practice I've found that you can tell the difference between "too hot" and "still cold" very easily.

We have a Lodge cast iron wok [0].

That said, I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone as we rarely use it.

I read somewhere that unless you have a commercial-grade gas range, you are unlikely to hit the temperatures needed to really properly cook with a thinner metal wok. Cast iron is supposed to be a bit of a compromise because it can hold the heat better, but you can't toss it around the way you would with a normal wok.

As to carbon steel, I'd say go for it. I think you'll find it a lot less fussy than you have been told.

Also, I'd say stir fry definitely qualifies under the "something specific" where you would want to use the high heat settings on the stove.

[0] https://www.lodgecastiron.com/product/cast-iron-wok?sku=P14W...

As someone who owns more cast iron than is reasonable, I just wanted to go a step beyond upvoting this and acknowledge in writing that this is the correct view of things.

You want oil soaked into the metal. This idea that you are trying to build a non-stick surface on top of the metal is just adding extra work that isn't needed.

Wash with soap, dry of the stove top, put in some oil (I use peanut), then take a paper towel and rub the oil around over everything and at the end the metal should look shiny but there shouldn't be any pooled oil left anywhere.

If you are cooking something that doesn't leave a residue or strong flavor, you can skip the washing all together and just leave it there to cook with next time.

If you try to go the whole "never wash this" route, you end up with unhappy results going from cooking something with onions and garlic to cooking something more neutral flavored. No one wants onion flavored pancakes.