war1025

How to season cast iron:

Cook with it. Use oil / fat.

Honestly, cast iron is about the most forgiving cooking surface you will find. People love to make it more difficult than it is.

Edit:

Some additional tips on cast iron:

Setting 4 / 10 (slightly below medium) is the default heat setting, and you have to really have something specific in mind to ever go above 5. I find that people who are used to teflon pans like to go up into the medium-high range. Things don't end well up there with cast iron.

Also buy a metal spatula. You aren't going to hurt anything, and it will be a more satisfying cooking experience. Plastic + cast iron is just going to leave you with a melted spatula. There used to be a ubiquitous metal spatula design, but I can never find them anymore. I've found it is much better to use something small like a cake / bar server than something big like a grilling spatula.

Don't cook on cold cast iron. The trick my mom showed me is you always wait until a splash of water (get your fingers wet and flick it on the pan) will start boiling on contact. If it boils into nothing immediately, you are too hot. If it just sits there and does nothing, you aren't hot enough yet.

To be clear, I don't think rioting is ever morally justified. Peaceful protesting is a different matter.

The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".

Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.

My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."

I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.

I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.

> One of those groups has a moral right to riot.

The trouble with morality is that if you ask someone if what they are doing is morally justified, they will pretty much always say yes.

It very quickly devolves into might makes right, which is more or less where we're headed.

Just like those Uyghurs in China, going off for "re-education" to learn how to be proper citizens.

I read somewhere yesterday that "political orientation" should be added as a protected class. I think there is a lot of merit to that idea.

> A fact is a thing that can be objectively verified

The past four years of "fact checking" have demonstrated those are not the sort of "facts" anyone is talking about.

> In particular since the "riots have been going all year" is demonstrably false nonsense.

Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, DC, etc. etc. etc.

> And how are you even going to equivocate riots to an invasion of the physical center of the US government

It's just a building.

"How dare you interrupt when the adults were talking" is basically how this comes across to pretty much everyone I've seen reactions from on social media.

Trump definitely had a chance to remain relevant post-election. As someone that monitors "alt-right" type people, he did a very poor job capitalizing on any of that. The past couple months have basically been the losing team talking up a big game to make themselves feel better.

The riots have been going all year. It was a different crowd this time, but riots are old news at this point. It wasn't a good look for the MAGA crowd and more than anything probably would have cowed them into submission.

But then Big Tech had to turn around and give everyone a reason to be pissed off again.

> completely done with the bullshit

I'm over and done with Trump, but it would have been a lot more effective for everyone if they had let him skulk meekly off into irrelevance.

Mozilla seems to go out of its way to make it harder for right-leaning people to back them with every move they make...

I can't help but feel we're in for a bumpy 2021.

Pretty sure you can buy Mein Kampf at most US bookstores. I know I bought a copy in high school, though I never did get around to reading it.

I think the entire year and everything about it has been a disgrace. Sure, treat them equally.

Unfortunately the non-Trump wings of the Republican party get you people like Mitt Romney. I'd vote Democrat before I backed that guy.

Really just planning to excuse myself from politics for the next few years.

> organize an attack on the United States Congress

Oh spare me the faux sanctimony. No one was "organizing a coup" it was a bunch of dipshits getting in over their heads.There is nothing inherently sacred about the capital buildings.

> The fake Thomas Paines here need to understand that we are at WAR. If you care about this country, this shit has to be put down mercilessly.

Just like all the BLM / Antifa shit this summer? Or is it only when it's the other side causing trouble that people need shot on sight?

They've wanted to ban him since day one. They just have the political backing to do it now.

> The only chance in hell this country has of surviving is if Republicans widely condemn Trump's behavior

Trump acted like a clown, but he's hardly the only agitator in this mess. The entirety of 2020 has been a shit show from all sides, and near as I can tell no one is interested in backing down.

Well, hey, as long as its your sub-human enemies going off to the death camps, it doesn't really matter, right?

Unfortunately, I think this is only the beginning. The Trump era was just a warm-up.

I know they aged the carcass for two weeks on my beef before they broke it down into cuts. I think the "dry aged" stuff is generally aged even further than that, right?

I think I read somewhere that mass-market beef is generally not left to hang after slaughter, is that correct?

I have a dream that someday America will get its head out of its ass and decouple health insurance from employer benefits.

That would change the employment calculus for a ton of people.

The trouble we run into is if you try to call their bluff and make them wait it out until they are actually hungry, suddenly it's bedtime and you have a kid who won't go to sleep because they didn't eat anything, and it stops being their problem and turns into a massive inconvenience for you.

But probably the better idea would just be for us to ration snacks more closely throughout the middle of the day.

I guess, yea, do business with people you trust.

I've found butchers and farmers to be generally upstanding people. I'm also in the heart of farm country. I would be a lot more leery of people targeting a more urban market.

> Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot.

You realize the median US household income is like $40k/ year right?

> The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money.

I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just keep going up.

Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.

I'm pretty well versed in the whole FIRE thing, and find myself more or less on that path.

One conclusion I've come to is that after people "retire early", they almost never actually stop making money. It just tends to end up being more entrepreneurial stuff that they make money off.

You don't "have to" work, but you "might as well", and all the sudden you may even find yourself in a more lucrative gig than you started with because you changed your focus and found a niche you can fill nicely.

Where would you suggest getting a "good" steak?

In my experience direct from farmer beef is so superior to store bought beef that I avoid eating beef bought from a store.

Fair enough. I guess my assumption is that all diet advice is garbage and people should just figure out what works for them. The government and health system have obviously been of no help to people.

I was surprised to learn when my kids were born that hospital food is just about as greasy and generally unhealthy as any fast food you're likely to come across.

A well cooked pot roast is not that much different from the sous vide trend that's becoming so popular.

You put the roast in a dutch oven coated in salt and pepper the same as you would with a steak and a bit of water, then you let it cook at ~200F for 4 - 8 hours.

Usually you also slow roast some onions, carrots, potatoes, etc. along with it the last little while.

Then make a gravy from the drippings.

The gravy is good on the meat, but it's more for the vegetables. The meat is delicious in its own right.