A lot of these are really regional (alcohol drive-throughs, horse and buggy, air conditioning, gas appliances) . I think it’s been years since I saw anyone write a check for anything, though, with the exception of something to put into a birthday card. Horses also aren’t allowed on highways, but they are allowed on country roads that people drive pretty fast on.

Double hung vs single hung windows it not something I would have noticed, but I suspect you are right.

Doorknobs, I dont know why we seem to like them. I guess the only benefit vs handles is that you won’t snag your clothing on them when walking by. That doesn’t beat the convenience of being to open a door using your elbow while carrying something.

The water bottle thing is relatively recent thanks to all of the companies somehow becoming trendy.

Thats “American style”, while keeping the fork in the non-dominant hand is “European style”. Allegedly, it dates back to when meals were served “service à la française”, which is when all courses are brought out at once, which is obviously the more common method of home cooking. Restaurants started doing “service à la Russe”, which is where courses are brought out one at a time.

With service russe, you have new sets of silverware with each course (or they are arranged in order), so if you are eating a course that doesn’t need a knife, you won’t be given one, and you’ll have your fork in your dominant hand. If you need a knife, that goes in your dominant hand, and you leave it there for the duration of the course.

With service française (or regular home cooking), you just have one set of silverware, and you only use the knife when you need it, so you might switch your fork to your dominant hand when you are done needing the knife.

For example, in America, no one eats a steak switching hands for every bite (cause that would be dumb and inefficient), and in Europe, you probably wouldn’t eat a meal that doesn’t need a knife with a knife in your dominant hand (cause that would also be dumb and inefficient).

Hydrolysis. Allegedly using shoes with PU soles often squeezes moisture out of them, preserving life, but idk if that’s actually true. I can definitely say heat combined with humidity will definitely degrade it pretty quick. Density of the PU really matters, though, cause some PU soles that are relatively rigid (like regular Chaco sandals) are basically bulletproof, while the more cushiony forms with air injected (like the Chaco “cloud” sandals i mistakenly bought, or blundstones) will break apart.

Agreed. Truly nailing a specific style of pizza can be tricky, but overall it’s not hard to make really good pizza. It seems like so many places just don’t even try. Dishonorable mention to Texas, who otherwise produces really good food.

“Fortified” means that liquor is added which acts as a preservative and it also stops further fermentation so you can have more sugar left in the wine. Oftentimes, herbs are added, too, which also acts a preservative.

In beer, IPAs are similar in that greater amounts of hops were added so it could survive the trip to India with less chance of spoiling.

I’ve made wine (and a lot of beer). It’s not hard, and people have been doing it for ages, but creating a good, consistent product does rely on chemistry/biology knowledge that they wouldn’t have had back then.

I suspect that a lot of the mystique around wine (like the idea that terroir is magic) is just down to the fact that a few hundred years ago, most wine/beer was trash, and the only stuff we’d consider “good” by modern standards is just down to luck that a batch didn’t get infected with the wrong yeast/bacteria, or exposed to too much oxygen, or a style that is meant to be drunk young (vinho verde) or oxidized (sherry).

There’s probably good reason that much of the wine that was aged/transported long distance a couple hundred years ago was fortified (Madeira, Port, sherry, vermouth, etc.).

Millenia of selective breeding have changed grapes, too. Without knowing for certain, my guess would be that on average, the sugar concentration in the raw grape juice would be roughly the same as now, but relying on wild yeasts or polycultures would not ferment as completely, so the final product would have lower ABV and higher sugar.

In beer, the actual grain and malting technology has greatly changed over time. 150 years ago, German immigrants to America couldn’t brew the lighter styles they were used to because American grain was much higher in protein so they had to dilute it with corn/rice. Older grain had a higher propensity for certain defects, too. Basically you had more inconsistency back in the day, and also just some things that were different.

I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.

Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.

pH doesn’t necessarily tell the right story if you are concerned about acidity for your teeth, GI tract, or taste. Something like distilled water will turn acidic with a pH of 5.8 due to co2 absorption. There’s barely any “acid” there, though, it just doesn’t have any buffering capability compared to water with some dissolved solids in it (like tap water). What really matters is what they call “titratable acidity”.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45776-5_22

Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:

• Faulty water level sensor
• Clogged water level sensor hose
• Clogged filter
• Clog around the heating element
• Broken check valve
• Faulty pump
• Clog between drum and liner
• Faulty control board

The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.

I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.

I have a camp stove that I got for really cheap because someone returned it because the igniter didn’t work. The spark gap was too high, so all I had to do was poke the wire over a little, and it works perfectly now.

For me, the “power burner” is so weak it can’t bring a pot of water to boil or properly saute anything. Everything online says that it must be because the gas outlets are dirty, but they are spotless.

The cost of a TV is subsidized by advertisements and deals with different apps for prominent placement.

It’s salsa roja, salsa verde, salsa fresca, and any other fruit (mango is common) based condiment that you’d eat with chips. Salsa de mole, we just call mole. Other types of Mexican sauce like what you’d put over enchiladas, just gets called “enchilada sauce”.

It’s a common thing with loan words to have them only applied to the subset of things that were originally imported and called by that name. No one out of Italy, for example would call pizza bianca “pizza” if you gave them a piece and asked what it is (I’m talking about roman pizza bianca, not “white pizza” being back translated).

Sometimes the opposite happens, like “curry” being derived from a specific thing in a specific part of India, being applied by the British (and everywhere else they exported it) to basically any saucy Indian food.

The article isn’t clear enough about this. This pump is nowhere close to the fires, and the water coming out of the pump doesn’t get anywhere close to the fires, either.

The purpose of the pumps is to take water from rivers and send it to wealthy farmers. The farmers didn’t even need the water, anyway, this time of year.

I’ve never seen a gas stove with temp control. I’m not even sure how that would work. Controlling the amount of gas, sure, but not the temperature. In an induction stove, you can set it to 150 degrees, and it will hold that.

There are a million of these throughout the US. I think it’s done intentionally as a shibboleth.

There are plenty of essential oils that smell really nice, and are nice to have in soaps or candles or whatever, but I just can’t bring myself to give money to any of the companies that make them cause they all support crazies and pseudoscience. If there’s a company that doesn’t, I’d love to hear about it.

Making the panels high enough off the ground with sparse enough supports to be convenient adds a lot of expense. I mainly see it in paid parking lots where the shade can be sold as a value add.

I think it really goes back through history. Finland was a possession of Sweden and then Russia. The nobility would have spoken either of those languages depending on who was in charge, and ethnic Finns were essentially pawns for the larger powers, and the finnish language wasn’t even written down much.

This changed when Russia started to crack down on Finnish culture, leading to a surge in pro-Finnish sentiment. People even changed their names from Swedish versions to finnish versions, and went from using “Christian” names to names from finnish mythology or culture. Actually, it’s somewhat similar to how black Americans changed naming conventions in the Civil rights era. The very concept of finnish-ness was somewhat of a working class concept. This, combined with a similar law of jante type belief meant there was and is much more of a focus on the collective good than in other countries.

During the Russian revolution, a Civil War erupted between left wing and right wing, with the right wing wanting a German aristocratic monarchy over finland. The right wing actually won, but it was very short lived because Germany lost WW1 right aftwards, and a liberal democracy was formed. Finland was super poor, but started to build itself up as it’s own country.

When WW2 rolled around, most people are familiar with the Winter War where they held their ground against a Russian invasion. Most people aren’t as familiar with the Continuation War against Russia, where they (with the support of germany) continued to fight against Russia, or the Lapland war, where they actually had to fight against Germany to kick them out of the country. The Germans actually used scorched earth on finland as they retreated, knowing they were losing WW2.

After all of that, a huge swath of finland was destroyed by the Germans, or annexed by the Russians, leaving many homeless. Finland had to provide for those people, so homes were rebuilt rapidly throughout the country. Since they were in the soviet sphere of influence, but they weren’t a Warsaw pact country, they didn’t get any assistance from the eastern bloc (and they actually had to pay reparations as an axis country). They were also not included in the Marshall plan that helped provide recovery to western Europe.

They survived as a people by taking care of each other, and they are very proud of that. If you go to a Finnish museum, next to works of art and science, you’ll see things like the baby box, or other displays about the establishment of the welfare state. Many countries have a welfare system, but treat it like a dirty secret, while they celebrate what they were able to accomplish.

One last thing I think is really cool is that they are not afraid to experiment with policies. Many governments will do little trials of policy here and there, but not many go to the point of actually doing scientifically rigorous studies.