ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
We care about fuels to the extent that we have invested energy into them to render them usable.
So do you count the energy content of fossil fuels? Honestly, I don't know how much clearer I could make the difficulty in your current statements than I did in my last comment. You're really going to need to show at least an indicia of engaging with the question or I'll probably just have to write you off as non-responsive and give up.
Your current response doesn't tell me anything about how I go through the process of factoring in consumption rates. When I'm determining whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans", I need to do some math on some numbers, and one of the variables I have is, possibly, consumption rates. How does that variable fit in?
I don't think your latest response actually gave me anything to go on here. I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
Energy is the fundamental unit of investment because the measure under discussion is ENERGY RETURNED ON ENERGY INVESTED.
Ah yes, ipse dixet. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not really trying to engage.
That's an appropriate measure to use when discussing sources of energy! We are talking about energy
I mean, are we? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why is energy the real topic when we're talking about agriculture?
If it makes it easier to think about, then picture an incredibly tiny power plant which costs 100 calories to build and fuel, which then generates 90 calories worth of usable power as a result.
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
the actual answer is that we're talking about energy rather than money
Why? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why are you talking about energy rather than money or any of the other things that could be involved in the discussion?
As I mentioned, I already went through that article 9 months ago. I quoted the authors because I agree with their understanding of their own results - agreeing with something doesn't mean that I just scanned through for a sentence I agree with.
In that case, you could probably say something relevant concerning my remarks on the data contained therein, rather than simply resting on one of their quotes.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances
Nah, there's plenty of work that extends the concept to much more robust circumstances. And most of the time, when they're talking about limitations, it's like, "Yeah, gains from trade are still obviously positive and a major factor, but it's a bit trickier to make mathematically-precise statements that also work perfectly for predicting observational data, since there are all sorts of things like trade barriers and other refinements." This is throwing out all intuition gained for some strained belief that some fourth-order term that is mathematically-difficult to solve in closed form is going to actually magically reverse the sign of the result.
immediately
A claim literally no one has ever made.
what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers
Good news! We went from a world where some 90+% of people were employed as farmers to a world where ChatGPT tells me that the global figure is about 28%, but regions that are hardest hit by comparative advantage are down to 1-2%. I'm sure I would hate to live in one of those areas where it's down that low; those places probably suck from all the unemployment, starvation, etc.
what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently
That's literally the question of comparative advantage. Are you just worried about going beyond the two-country model in Econ 101? I'm pretty sure that even in Econ 301, they do multi-country models.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, let's work through this. Let's actually start here:
Indeed, there are some people alive right now, among the most severely disabled, whose labor is worth less than what it costs to keep them alive.
I agree that there are, and have always been, severely disabled people who are simply unable to support themselves.
"Comparative advantage" says that the value of an individual's labor will never fall to zero, and that they will still be better off specializing in something, and trading the products of that specialty for the things they don't specialize in, than if they try to be fully self-sufficient.
Here, you acknowledge, but skip right over something key. You acknowledge that being fully self-sufficient is a lower bound. That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history. Comparative advantage means that you will be better off than being self-sufficient, by your own acknowledgement.
It does not at all guarantee that the maximum value of an individual's labor, when they specialize in their comparative advantage, cannot fall below their cost of living.
But here is where you contradict yourself. You just said that they will be better off than being self-sufficient. That is, better off than their cost of living.
humans are horses
Humans are not horses. They're still not horses. This is literally a meme on the badecon subreddit, for good reason. Humans have agency, can understand (or at least act as if they understand) opportunity cost and comparative advantage. Like, the primary things under discussion here are a major reason why humans are not horses. Horses are more like hammers than they are humans.
Humans are finite, and thus, I would argue that our capacities are finite, and thus, the number of ways we can meaningly contribute to the production of goods and services is ultimately also finite.
Sure. Irrelevant, but sure.
automation will eventually cover all tasks, leading to complete automation
You're telling me that delivering me an even better standard of living than I currently have is going to be fully automated? And the marginal cost of such automation is going to be basically zero? (At the very least, lower than the cost of convincing someone to switch from their life of abundance and leisure to helping out.) Huh. Sounds pretty nice.
Like, what is even your model here? A magic robot that can provide all your food, shelter, luxury desires, etc., it costs how much? Why does it cost that much? Who is being paid when one is purchased? It must be obscenely cheap to beat out how cheap those things would be otherwise. $10? $100?
some of us will "run out" of ways to meaningfully contribute — again, the value of contributing will never hit zero, but it can fall below subsistence
Nah, you already agreed that subsistence is a lower bound for anyone who is not severely disabled.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
there are revisionist interpretations pushed by those who want to do it again
Nah. I think a lot of the data requires a pretty significant revision on the standard narrative, but I also don't want to do it again.
And the US drug prohibition has not, regardless of your protestations, covered itself in glory.
The good news here is that we now have memorialized that this is your standard. Not covered in glory. Oof, you are a pure child of light, and I'm sure this standard will never come back to bite you ever.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
From time to time, people discuss prohibitions here. The general zeitgeist is often that one particular interpretation of the the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s is conclusive for all prohibitions of any type everywhere and always. Nevermind that there are alternative interpretations of the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Nevermind that different prohibitions are different. We now have one data set from South Africa.
In 2020, the South African government banned alcohol sales as part of their COVID measures. Then they lifted the ban, and then brought it back unexpectedly, and then did that again
Every ban saw murders decline, and every reprieve saw them return. Stunningly, prohibition worked:
Perhaps they just didn't keep the prohibition long enough over any time period for the data to show that murders would have really gone up massively over time. Perhaps murders aren't the right measure. (EDIT: Perhaps there were other restrictions that happened concurrent to the alcohol prohibition; one might be interested to see if there are any differences in start/end dates for other restrictions and see if there is something like a DiD.) Lots of interpretations, but only one limited data set. I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury belief of mine.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Somewhat following hooser, I believe I can defend that term as it applies to the comment I was responding to.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
healthcare is more expensive mostly because we're using more of it
The healthcare industry is so addicted to insane price opacity aided by gov't subsidy of demand (and restriction of supply) that people are using significantly more, at higher prices, than they would otherwise.
education's getting more expensive because ... people want more of it, and price isn't tied to anything
On top of subsidizing demand (causing the people wanting more of it) and restricting supply, the price actually is tied to something - the gov't swoops in and helps universities price discriminate and try to tie the price as close as they possibly can to your personal willingness to pay. It's the outliers like Harvard where they hardly even bother with prices for most customers. They can focus almost entirely on the few 'whales' who will 'donate' tens of millions of dollars with no explicit promise (only a wink) that their daughter or granddaughter will be admitted and then hold distributional power over the rest to give out as is politically useful or maximally self-serving.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job?
I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Lack of high-quality data on an important women's health procedure is another indication of how the patriarchy doesn't take women's issues seriously.
Oof. I only tried to thread that needle one, many many moons ago, and I've mostly avoided engaging with bullshit people who demand such bullshit things ever since. It's real icky, and you will respect yourself a little less and hate them a little more for a long time. So, my first line advice would be that if you can think of literally any other options that allow you to avoid it, do those things instead and never look back.
(FYI: I didn't get the one thing I did try for; one interpretation could be that I'm just a hater for not getting it, though TBH, in hindsight, if I had gotten it, it would have been quite minor in terms of meaningful change to my life; but I am at least avoiding the alternate interpretation that could happen if I had gotten it, where someone could accuse me of asking others to make sacrifices that I didn't or whatever; there's never going to be any winning if people want to shit on you. Anyway.)
I don't think I didn't get it because of the DEI thing; I think their biggest negative was on something unrelated (which was annoying in itself, but that's a story for another day). But even so, I didn't personally think that my approach was remotely convincing, anyway. But I think that, in practice, my thing was actually just assessed by a bunch of profs from a bunch of different universities, with a much higher chance that they were really just assessing science stuff and totally ignoring the DEI stuff. I know from experience with the inside of quite a few different academic selection processes that in many cases, it just gets completely ignored. But of course, it's always a difficult challenge to figure out whether this university will mostly ignore it or pay close attention. I don't know of any strategies here other than having made friends with someone who has served on a faculty search committee there and had some sense about how seriously they thought the 'higher ups' took it. Of course, any particular department can also be more/less committed to the cause, but that's even harder to get good info on.
Up to this point, it's all reasons to run or to not care, which isn't super satisfying to you. My last suggestion will be the least satisfying. If you really want to still apply, and you really think you need to have something that is somewhat conforming, just use ChatGPT or pay someone to write it. They'll probably get the job done as good or better than you could do, and you'll feel slightly less icky, not having had to literally squeeze the words out of your own mind. At a minor cost of increased involvement, but to get slightly increased personalization, prompt it with anything about yourself that might be relevant or look for any area-specific DEI-sounding orgs on campus. It's cheap and easy to say you're going to engage with "[DEI Group] In [Academic Discipline]" or whatever that already exists on campus, and they're probably not going to follow-up to make sure you've actually done so. That said, I probably need to check in with some of my folks who either just went through their tenure review or are about to in order to see how much they seem to care about this BS stuff at that point. It's really hard to know if you're signing up to an organization that is going to make you constantly grovel to the golden calf or just pay a little lip service from time to time.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
You're losing track of the thread.
I had asked:
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
You had responded:
If the fuel is something that humans have processed and worked in order to make it useful, yes.
Then, I asked:
Does "build[ing] a solar panel to process and work the energy from nuclear fusion" count as processing/working to make it useful?
Now, here, you say:
We only care about the energy cost of building the solar panel, because that's what it takes to actually use it.
But this doesn't make sense, especially in contrast to how you seem to still think in the subsequent paragraph that we do count the energy content of fossil fuels, because we do work on it.
You need to choose one or the other option. We do work on both things to make them usable. Either we only count the work we do on it, and we do not count the energy content of the fuel, itself... or we do count the energy content of the fuel, itself, because we do work on it. Please clearly pick one standard to apply evenly.
The second point you've made also lost the thread. I had asked:
What is a "timescale relevant to humans"? Do consumption rates factor into this?
You responded:
Consumption rates could factor into this
I then asked:
How?
Your current response doesn't tell me anything about how I go through the process of factoring in consumption rates. When I'm determining whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans", I need to do some math on some numbers, and one of the variables I have is, possibly, consumption rates. How does that variable fit in?
We're spending those resources on military conflicts, poll numbers (see Biden draining the SPR), happy meal toys, artificial islands in the shape of a sheik pissing money away and making as many Americans as obese as possible for as long as possible.
I could make an even longer list of things I don't like about the world, but I don't see how any of these things are really relevant to the questions at hand. In fact, why didn't you just start with that in the first place? Just start with saying that we're totally ruined because we're squandering resources on all these things, then we don't even have to get into any tricky questions about how to measure real things.
Did you know that modern industrial farming techniques require 13 calories of energy to create 1 calorie of food?
That tells me a lot about the relative value of those forms of calories. Which also tells me that, unlike in one's personal diet, a calorie is not just a calorie, so it's surprising and weird that you want to make the measure be about unlabeled calories.
What is "productive"?
You get more out of it than you put in. If I build a powerplant for 100 dollars, and it generates 90 dollars of power before needing to be scrapped, I would have been better off not building it.
Ok. Do you think modern farmers are getting less money than they put in?
Calories is a convenient and easily understandable way to measure energy - I'm not sure how much more basic I can get here.
You can tell me, in basic terms, why energy is the fundamental unit of investment. You didn't seem to think that it was just one sentence ago. You seemed to think it was dollars for some reason. So I ask again. What is "productive"? Is it some measure of calories (which seems to be more confusing to measure with every comment that goes by)? Is it dollars? Or are other human values involved in some way?
Are you for real?
Yes, I am for real. If your predictions are correct, the price of certain resources will rise, and we have very clear results about price elasticity. Do you think price elasticity is bullshit, fake science? Short term financial crises/recessions are in a completely different category on completely different timescales.
Did you actually go and read the article you posted?
I did. But rather than just trust the words that potentially-motivated authors wrote to describe their own interpretations of the data, I actually went and looked at the data myself and drew my own conclusions. Did you actually go look at the data or even bother to read my alternate interpretation, then think about the data that you've seen and consider how to judge the differing interpretations? Or is the standard literally, "One author wrote one sentence of interpretation in a published article, so therefore it is revealed truth"? If so, I'll need a few minutes, but we can find some, uh, alternate revealed truth that might make you uncomfortable.
Sort of hilariously, just yesterday, Practical Engineering took a little run at one of the slew of modern myths about us running out of this or that resource. Focus special attention on his discussion of adaptation. And no, just because sometimes, there are fuck-ups and some bridge collapses somewhere or something, that does not mean that it is impossible for price changes to drive adaptation.
I know that at an entire three days old, this thread is completely dead, but I want to observe that NYT has suddenly found Jesus on this topic, now that it's Not Trump:
Still another challenge stems from a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court that narrowed the instances in which the bribery statute applies to acts by public officials, a ruling that makes the crime more difficult to prove if the government cannot show that payoffs were made with the intent to reap a quid pro quo.
Yes, yes, there was a SCOTUS ruling recently on the bribery statute. You know what else had a SCOTUS ruling, saying that it needed to be a quid pro quo? Campaign finance laws. Almost fifteen years ago. NYT obviously didn't care when it was all about getting Trump. It had never made sense and continues to make no sense to think that Donald Trump entered into a quid pro quo with Donald Trump to exchange Donald Trump's official acts for Donald Trump's money to pay off Donald Trump's financial expense.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
If the fuel is something that humans have processed and worked in order to make it useful, yes.
I'm confused again. Does "built a solar panel to process and work the energy from nuclear fusion" count as processing/working to make it useful?
we didn't invest anything to turn the sun on, and so we don't account for it in calculating EREOEI
We also didn't have to invest anything to create fossil fuels, so...?
Consumption rates could factor into this
How?
in the sense that if you are rapidly burning your lottery win to support an unsustainable lifestyle "hope you win the lottery again" is a strategy that someone might pick
I prefer "invest the proceeds of my previously productive business venture into a new productive business venture". If it's argument by analogy, then I don't see why this analogy isn't just as valid.
EROEI is a method for working out whether or not those ventures are actually productive
I mean, is it? That's kind of the question I started with. What is "productive"? Is it some measure of calories (which seems to be more confusing to measure with every comment that goes by)? Or are other human values involved in some way?
When I said adjustment there, I meant taking steps to prepare for a future with less available energy and more climate disruptions
Got it. You just define adjustments at the type that you like. But the good news is that market prices will cause people to take those steps anyway. Sounds like we're all good here.
Limits to Growth
Whelp, let's not talk about any of the theoretical problems with this work... or the failed price predictions. Let's just bask in the update. Oh Figure 3, how glorious you are. We were apparently wildly off on our estimate of how many resources there were (again, ignoring the theoretical problem with definitions here), but surely, we're right on tract to get exactly back in line with the old predictions... basically exactly in the politically-convenient near-future. So what if pollution hasn't taken off like predicted? It'll surely surely happen in the future, but now it looks significantly decoupled from the rest of the subsystems, so what the hell is the point of that again? Population might be coming to a peak; we'll see. And so what if we've done better at industrial output and food production; they're also surely to suddenly and precipitously collapse.... basically exactly in the politically-convenient near-future.
In the 70s, maybe this wasn't all that bettable (except for the bets that were made and were lost by the degrowthers). But now, this chart is suuuuuuper bettable. It's predicting sharp and rapid collapses from peaks that are pre-2025. Certainly, the data will be in to confirm this by, say, 2030. You should formalize the predictions from this model and put them on a popular prediction market. At least if society is going to collapse, you can make some money to mitigate the individual pain.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?
Check your hyperbole. Think seriously about whether this is a remotely reasonable thing to suggest. Perhaps think about the example of someone trying to make their own semiconductors. If their project fails, and they decide that being told that semiconductor physics works and that semiconductor technology is possible disagrees with their lying eyes, would you suggest that they check into an insane asylum? If not, what might you suggest instead?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Can I piggyback and have a non culture war sub thread?
I'm interested in learning and pragmatics. I've looked at predictive flood maps before, but it's hard to have any sense of 'how good' they are. I'd also like to know if they are pretty off in some ways, are there any heuristics shy of literally replicating all of the work of coding up a topographic model, a precipitation model, etc., and just turning the dial up, that I could use to more easily get a sense of where is still pretty safe and where might be deceptively dangerous.
One thing that would be helpful is that if anyone knows where I can find recent observational data to compare to the old predictive maps, so preferably maps of the current major flooding with geographic detail that is somewhat close to federal predictive flood maps. Any other reasonable heuristics would be appreciated, though I am open to the answer being that there just aren't any good heuristics that can be generalized beyond detailed knowledge/modeling of a particular geographic area.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Epistemic hygiene is a community practice, not an individual practice
It's an individual practice with community effects, like any other hygiene. You seem to have been inoculated against actually engaging with the research by focusing on some random people that you think are stupid. Reversed stupidity (if it does exist out there somewhere) is not intelligence. If you're finding such people, engaging with them, and responding by becoming strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to saying that you can't possibly know anything about how the world works, you're descending to the lowest of the lows that you imagine your enemies to be.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Do you believe the person online who says that it's scientifically impossible to not be racist? (This one definitely personally criticizes you.) The one who says that lizardmen secretly rule the government? The one who has "119 scientific proofs" for why the earth is flat?
How are you supposed to know? Basic epistemic hygiene will get you a long way. Or, ya know, you can throw your hands up and decide that it's impossible to know anything.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content
That's not true.
[if] it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out
I mean, it is possible. Lots of people do manage it well enough. Just like lots of people manage to pass their numerical analysis class, even if there is some number of common 'traps'. It's only a few people who get bitter enough after falling into a common trap to decide that the professor is full of bullshit and the material is impossible, then dropping out of the class. Even apps do it pretty darn well these days.
CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil.
We get it; you're a very accomplished strawmanner. You don't need to keep making bigger and bigger strawmen to try to prove some point. We didn't count almost any vegetables (some exceptions).
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Questions I still don't understand:
-Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
-Do you, like Arjin, think that there is some discounting for energy sources that were going to be consumed "one way or another/no matter what"?
On to other things.
Whether or not it is renewable on a timescale relevant to humans.
What is a "timescale relevant to humans"? Do consumption rates factor into this?
you can't just assume that we're going to discover these things when making assumptions about the future, because there's no guarantee that a great new energy source will just appear.
Sure, but is there any factor describing something like the probability of new discoveries, given past developments? E.g., if humans never used fossil fuels, do you think the likelihood of discovering nuclear power was lower, higher, or about the same?
Related to this is from earlier in the comment:
If you want to use a financial analogy, they're a massive inheritance that gives us a supply of money far greater than we can actually earn ourselves, which meant that we can live a lifestyle more expensive than our income can support... for a while.
One could also plausibly invest much of that money in productive ventures; how is this taken into account?
Living a lifestyle that your income cannot support is a choice that leads to very predictable consequences, consequences which are substantially less pleasant than adjusting your expenditures before you go bankrupt.
This is getting far afield from the technical questions, which I still think are the core part, but I sort of have to ask - what do you have in mind when you talk about adjustment processes? A normal sort of adjustment process would be a market process - if the demand for some rare resource outstrips its supply, the market price rises. Speculators can help smooth out time-dependent processes (if they think the price is likely to rise in the future, they can buy now, pushing the price up now and implicitly conserving some of that resource for future use). We've had famous examples of the kind of vague "if you use too much stuff now, it'll be painful in the future" predictions that are unmoored from much technical analysis. Moreover, we have reason to believe that from an atoms perspective (rather than a calorie perspective), absolute use is going down even as lifestyles are going up. Are there technical reasons for why a calorie perspective is necessarily different?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target
Good news! The CICO folks that you dislike have entire articles on how this works, what the ranges are, how to understand it, etc. To steal a little bit of the plane analogy from below (not adopting it entirely), when a plane uses fuel, its dynamics change, too. That doesn't mean that physics don't work or that we can't understand how to use the system effectively.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content.
Much more than that. Once you dial in where you are within the population-level variance, you get remarkably good predictions for how the noisy process works. I have a lot of background in stochastic systems, too, and I think this part trips a lot of people up. It's not easy to filter noisy data appropriately or to even understand the right timescales to pick for your filters. That's why the CICO people don't jump to an imaginary bailey and instead do things like creating an app that has a lot of filtering built-in.
Even though my degrees are actually in aerospace, I'm not sure the plane analogy is the best one for this part. Instead, maybe let's push things to a bit of an extreme with an analogy to semiconductor fabrication. In this case, someone could have some familiarity with the published literature in semiconductor physics, could go through a variety of published patents, but then when they try to make their own semiconductors, they fail. One response could be to claim that everyone in semiconductor physics is lying to them or just blaming them for doing it wrong; that those baddies are claiming that semiconductor physics "just works and must be perfect" or whatever. Another response could be that there are parts of the process that do require some specialized background knowledge to do precisely, perhaps some experience with tuning certain processes along the way that aren't always shouted to the rooftops in the public domain.
I think that careful filtering of CICO data also requires some mathematical experience if you want mathematical precision. I haven't actually used the particular app that I linked, nor am I privy to the tuning/filtering decisions they've made, but I'm familiar with the work of the guys who made it, so I have a reasonable amount of trust that they're doing a pretty good job at tuning it in a way that will work pretty well for most users. But the good news is that most people don't need mathematical precision here (unlike in semiconductor fabrication). I think @07mk goes a bit overboard in how wide of an error bar is needed, but for most people, you really can just hand-tune a bit with a little fudge factor, not needing to be super precise on your filtering, and see the results. But at the same time, if you do get into the details of tuning filters well (or offload that work to something like that app that probably does that ok enough for you), then you probably do get pretty precise predictions.
A lot of this comes down to error analysis and ranges for estimation. One group of CICO-haters say that it's just flatly impossible to filter in a way that gets you even remotely close to usable data without metabolic ward precision. Another group of CICO-haters say that any quantity of error violates their strawman that "CICO is perfect in every way". Most of the time, they don't put numbers to their error ranges. They don't put any numerical analysis tools to the question of how much data must be collected to achieve some O(epsilon) error or how different filtering schemes affect this. Frankly, many do fall into a small number of common 'traps', just like how undergrads in a numerical analysis course often fall into a small number of common 'traps'. I am lucky in that I have the toolset to get a lot more mathematical precision than most people, so I don't have to learn all of that from scratch or trust somebody else's filter. And when I did those things for an n=2 experiment, knowing all of the caveats about how noisy things are and how difficult the numerics is, my technical assessment was that I was shocked by how precise it turned out to be.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess.
This was something that started off difficult with my wife, too. She was biting off more than she could chew, was wanting to make three complex dishes in one afternoon (some of which might even be brand new), for example, and not even thinking about any cleanup. She would get real anxiety from all the crazy. To stem the bleeding early, I would come into the kitchen just to clean up everything while she was cooking. She has gotten better at figuring out how to clean as she cooks.
If you're not going nuts and making several complex dishes simultaneously, a dishwasher helps, a lot. If it's a big family with no dishwasher, there's definitely a much bigger time penalty in comparison to just eating takeout and throwing everything away.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I am sorry you had that experience. Unfortunately, it is probably unlikely that I will be able to figure out whatever was going on in your individual case through comments. But I'm not sure what is supposed to change about my understanding of the published literature from your example.
FYI, my personal experience included periods of gaining, and my trend line from the noisy data was bang on at 500cal/day = 1lb/wk on that side, too (and my wife's). But I'm not sure how you might/might not want to update your understanding of the published literature based on my example, either.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
It's mostly start-up costs. Admittedly, the start-up costs are high; we got 'lucky' in that wife wasn't allowed to work for a while during the immigration process, so she bore a lot of those costs while unemployed. We kept a spreadsheet of recipes; I usually did the calorie counts. But once you have the recipe and have done the calorie count once, it's done forever. (You also don't have to do this right away if it's not an important goal; you can always just go do it later, since you have all the information just sitting there anyway.)
Actual cooking time can really vary. We have a mix, with some recipes that are pretty quick and easy to make; honestly, many of these take less time than I would have taken to go out of my way, fight through traffic that always seems to get worse, stop by a drive-thru, wait through what always seemed to be a longer and longer line, and then still have to wait for it to be prepped. Just a burger and fries? Easy peasy, honestly takes almost no time. Maybe 15-20min of cook time for the fries, and you do the burger while they cook. Even faster if you're just microwaving a baked potato. There's a ton of really simple meals, like throwing together a salad or making some spaghetti (purchased frozen meatballs are an easy starter), and legit, I'm probably saving time over running to a drive thru.
Up to this point, you don't even need much "meal prep"; you just need meal planning, so that you can pick up all your groceries for the week in one stop rather than having to constantly run out to the store to get that one thing you're missing.
Getting more into meal prep, with a little time and effort, you can start freezing things to have some 'ready made' stuff that just needs reheating for days when you have no time. We'll have more extravagant recipes that we'll make on some weekend that we're going to be home anyway (winter is fantastic, especially because the cooking keeps the house warm), and we'll just make a double/triple/whatever batch (depending on calorie counts and how many portions we're wanting), bag it up, freeze it, and bam, we've got ten meals that we can just pull out and reheat over the next few months. Family size matters for what is plausible. If you're not a big family, you can bang out twenty days worth (or more) of lunches/dinners in a long afternoon. A freezer helps, so you don't have to eat the same thing every day for a week, which is what a lot of meal preppers do. But we'll also sometimes do, say, a casserole or roast or chicken that we'll just eat for three days in a row or whatever. That maybe takes more time than if you're stopping by Chipotle and buying enough food once to have it sit in your fridge and eat on for three days... but probably less than stopping by Chiptole every day and buying individual meals each day.
Now, once a week, one of us goes through the recipes and picks some for the following week. Can take into account if we know we have some work thing or whatever and put something super easy on those days. Then, since the actual recipes are right there, make a grocery list. That whole process maybe takes 20min now, tops. We often do it between sets while we're at the gym, so it doesn't even take up what would otherwise be productive time. I spend wayyyy more time writing stupid comments on TheMotte than I do on almost any of this.
Costs are a big question mark; it really depends on what you want. We've definitely culled some recipes that were good and tasty, but not so good and tasty that they justified the cost. If you want everything artisanal and fancy, sure, you can rack up the dollar signs. But when you're making it yourself, you really can tailor it to what you want, and for an equivalent quality, you're almost always saving (or for equivalent cost, you're almost always getting better quality). I will absolutely put a cheap American cheese slice on my homemade double cheesey until the day they ban it; nothing else melts quite like it; fight me.
It definitely changes your relationship with restaurants, though. So many times, when we do end up in a restaurant, there's like half the menu that would just pain me to order, thinking, "MFer, I can put Alfredo sauce on some pasta for like a buck o' five; why would I pay you fifteen for it?!" Restaurants now are mostly for being social, when traveling, for an experience, for some international dishes that are kind of a pain to get/keep the ingredients, or for some dishes that genuinely do have a significantly higher home prep cost/difficulty (I may or may not be finally close to cracking sushi well enough; this was always one of our few 'always worth just picking some up' meals).
Since I feel like I need a closer, I will just remind you that the start-up costs are absolutely high, and you will probably feel very very frustrated for a while. But like with most things in life (exercising, taking up a new sport/hobby, buying a house for the first time, hell, being married, etc.), it does get easier. You can try to ease into it, too; don't feel like you need a brand new recipe and make every meal yourself every day for three months; just plan to substitute some number of meals a week to start and hopefully be fine with repeating some things as you're building a repertoire. One last thing that also helped my wife is that I always assured her that if something went horribly wrong with a new recipe, we can always just go pick something up/order something in/pull out a frozen pizza or something; it's not the end of the world. Thankfully, we only had to do that a handful of times.
Right in that first block quote is:
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