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Many food products include labels about their ingredients and how they were prepared. One angle for these is something like "prepared in a nut free facility" or "prepared in a facility which also handles tree nuts" or that sort of thing. These labels are in place for people with nut allergies, who want to affirmatively know that the thing they are buying which is itself not a nut was not exposed to any nuts on it's journey to reach them. This is done directly by the former warning with an explicit identification that there are not nuts in the place. The latter warning hits it from the other angle, by allowing that their might be some risk of nut contamination in their facility, and allowing the snack eater to judge for themselves on taking that risk.

I'm sure part of the motivation here is an honest and wholesome interest in keeping nuts away from nut allergy people, but part of the motivation is also a liability one. When someone has an allergic response to your nut-free chocolate chip cookie, you need to be able to point to your package and be like "Dude, it says right there, the facility handles tree nuts!"

If you say you're running a nut free facility, how do you make sure there are no nuts in your facility? It must be challenging to do this in a large warehouse-style structure which has lots of people coming and going. You never know who's going to drag in some outside nuts and accidentally drop them on the floor, and then bam!, you've got nuts. So I'm sure that part of the way you keep nuts out is to just not purposefully have nuts there. You make your nut things in one building and your no nut things in another. Then you probably instruct your staff on not bringing their friggin nuts into the building. Then maybe you have a guy who walks around looking for nuts and removing them.

But no matter how much preparation you make and effort you take to keep nuts out, as a responsible food packager in a litigious society, you definitely buy an insurance policy to cover the scenario where nuts get into your no nut facility (on the flip side, it would be funny to bring a lawsuit about how something which should have had nuts in it didn't have any...?). What this implies is that there's some insurance adjuster who walks around food preparation facilities and assigns likelihood and risks and other what I'm going to call actuarial stuff to the possibility that a nut makes it into this facility and ultimately into someone's food. Hot damn that sounds like a fun job.

These baristas sure like talking to people about how to brew coffee

In recent years the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been gaining support from people who like to think of new names to do things that we already sort of do but use new words for them and maybe modify them a little bit. The idea here is to just pay everyone some base amount of income, no questions asked, and without regard for whether they have other sources of income or not. This is supposed to be an answer for our robot future where the robots have all the jobs and the people currently doing the robot jobs don't have jobs anymore; and it's also supposed to be a more efficient way to replace a bunch of current welfare state stuff.

Like most ideas, there are parts of it which are really exciting and parts of it which are really horrible, both depending what mood you are in, but also depending who you are thinking about and how it's being administered.

One tweak I'd like to see in there is to index the amount of UBI anyone receives to their physical health, to create an incentive to get your act together and start killing it in the crossfit gym or whatever. Maybe everyone over 18 years old gets 12k per year as a baseline, and then you can move up and down depending on other stuff you do. If you're a smoker we knock off half and you only get 6k/year. If your quarterly blood panel shows good scores on your cholesterols and lipids, you get a 5k/year bonus. If you can run under an 8 minute mile, there's another 3k/year for you. We could couple this with an end to farm subsidies, and add some massive taxes on sugar and alcohol and whatnot.

This is a really good idea when you picture the most well implemented and supportive version of it being run by capable people supporting each other, and it's a really horrible idea when you imagine the universe of unintended side effects it would surely bring.

I can see the appeal of using a catapult, but not of burning tires

There's an ice cream store franchise in the US called "Carvel". A quick internet search reveals that they are almost 100 years old, and were started in Connecticut. How about that. I believe that they serve regular ice cream cones and bowls like you might find at any ice cream place, but they are probably better known for their novelty packaged ice creams and their cakes, which had like seasonally festive shapes to them. There'd be like a whale shaped cake for kids birthdays, a special thanksgiving turkey cake, and so on.

These cakes were all ice cream cakes, which means they are technically piles of ice cream and not cakes, but man we don't have time for that here.

I think it'd be really funny if one of the people working in the Carvel store put on a "new mom" act every time someone came in and ordered a cake. They would pretend the cake was a baby and be like super delicate with how they handled it and talked to it and so on. They'd hesitate and struggle to give it to the customer and probably start crying when a stranger walked away with their ice cream cake baby.

What will happen to podcasts when everyone has an internet mattress?

Most public school districts deal with formal teacher's unions as their only source of hiring teachers to work in their schools. This is theoretically nice for both sides because in a good faith world you'd get a vetted pool of teachers from the union, and they'd get some bargaining power in terms of negotiating their contracts. Of course, in most real cases you also get ballooning administrative headcount on both sides, and an inability to replace teachers based on merit.

There's a dynamic here which creates tribalism and totally removes the thing you'd want to incentivize (student outcomes) and instead inserts bureaucracy and stability instead. To the extent schools are institutionalized daycares I guess that's sort of desirable; but to the extent they are attempting to kick out educated citizens, it's probably not.

All that said, the part where school districts have pay scales where checking off certain boxes gets someone a salary or pension increase is sort of maddening to me. It's perfectly sensible from a bureaucratic perspective -- if what you want to do is avoid all possible bias and treat teachers as cogs, then something like "has their masters degree" is a thing you might put on a list to just always pay more for. But most private organizations would focus on the skills held by the person, and care less whether they came via a degree program or not. There's a selection there for "ability to get a masters degree" which is probably correlated with "knows the things a masters degree allegedly teaches", but is clearly not the same thing.

Separately, I think the sentiment of the "we should pay teachers more" people is in the right place ... what they are probably saying is "I'm frustrated that we have this thing which should be important and we have structured things in a way where it's not economically rewarding relative to other activities". But the actual reality on the ground in most districts I suspect is that teachers are being paid too much. There are typically far more qualified applicants than there are open positions, and recent data shows a 3-4x increase in the applicant pool in recent years vs just 10-15 years ago.

What you would expect here is that for hard to fill low applicant positions (science, math, etc) that districts would increase salaries to attract more applicants and for easy to fill high applicant positions districts could lower salaries and still have enough willingness to take the position even at the lower rate. Instead, with the union negotiating things like "years of experience" and "educational attainment" instead, all teachers are paid on that scale and the normal supply and demand dynamics are not allowed to work here. Yikes.

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A common film trope during a car accident or other traumatic scene is to show the first instant in normal speed and then as the viewer becomes aware that the thing is going down, to do like a super slo-mo version of the accident. Maybe a person very very slowly falls into an airbag; maybe a car very slowly goes off the road; maybe a bullet is very slowly moving towards a person, and so on.

This technique is just fine and I guess it can show more detail and heighten the drama in what might be a pivotal and emotional scene where things happen. I think it'd be really funny during one of these scenes to have something stupid or weird happening in the background. Like maybe the main character is struggling to hold on to their seatbelt or has a tenuous grip on a derailing train or something, but in the background of the scene there's a clown handing out balloons to little kids.