You're absolutely correct. I just wanted to add a little bit: the vendors are sometimes perfectly content to pay that 2% fee to the credit card company. Handling cash is a pain in the ass: it has to be counted, tracked, shielded from theft by employees, and then watched carefully until it's deposited. Employees are subject to miscounting, and even when that's in your favor it's a hassle to management. Cash is easily embezzled, especially in small amounts. Shops that handle a lot of cash are also subject to plain old robbery, and that's a cost that has to be taken into account.
In other words, that fee isn't a complete loss to the vendor, so a 2% fee doesn't translate directly into 2% being passed on to the consumer. Some of it assuredly is, but it's less than the total amount.
Interesting. I haven't tried them. I've had single-origin chocolates before, but I think of them mostly as intellectual exercises, trying to understand the nature of what chocolate blenders do, rather than as simple "sit down and eat chocolate" foods. I wouldn't put them in my baking; I'm just not skilled enough to highlight the specifics of each kind of bean.
I'm sorry to hear that they're "lousy". Are you referring just to the milk chocolate ones, or also to the dark chocolate ones? What do you consider the key flavor defects?
I'm planning to tag every solar-power story "vaporware" until I see something that doesn't depend on additional breakthroughs before it comes to market. It seems like we get 50% of the way to something useful with every posting but never actually get anywhere.
I read that report. It mentions chocolate exactly four times, each time in conjunction with a definition of the Chocolate Manufacturer's association. I couldn't find a single specific recommendation having to do with chocolate.
Since the Chocolate Manufacturer's Association is specifically listed, I assume that there's something going on here that I'm not seeing. Presumably Guittard knows what the CMA's real purpose is. It seems to me that this a general statement of "We're going to allow changes to the standards" without revising the specific standard, and this is laying the groundwork for a future change to the chocolate standard. I suppose Guittard is trying to head that off.
Nonetheless, I'm always uncomfortable with the general notion of "Hey, here's this thing I'm opposed to. You all take my word for it and go sign the Internet petition!"
Yeah, I've never gotten tempering exactly right, even with digital thermometers.
Home candy making is mostly about pouring the chocolate into amusing shapes and/or colors. I've seen some beautiful work done. It can also be about making interesting fillings and flavorings for candies.
You can't really improve on the flavor of the chocolate you buy; it's not like adding an after-market stereo to a car. So in fact very little harm is done by adding the palm oil in place of the cocoa butter; you're not trying to duplicate the work of Valrhona. You don't get the same snap as you do with properly tempered chocolate, but that's usually not the point of home candy making.
I have the exact same reaction in reverse to the European butters. They like a sour tang to their butter which is much more like the natural ways of producing butter, where lactobacilli are used to produce a bit of acid to help the butter specks clump more easily.
No matter how many times I try it, it always reads as "spoiled" to me. I know that I'm eating what's supposed to be the very best, but my brain says otherwise.
The same happens with sourdoughs, the king of artisan breads, but the sour flavor that's supposed to say "fermented" says "gone off" to me. It's only in products where I'm not expecting it; I love lemonade, which is supposed to be tangy.
The really good chocolatiers can't have massively wide distribution because chocolate at that level is a very personalized endeavor. The chemists at Hershey's are trying to do one thing: meet a pre-specified flavor profile. They mix beans and other ingredients to try to make a consistent product. (And at the higher levels, like the Special Dark, that can be a very good-tasting product.)
Scarffen-Berger makes each batch to optimize the beans that they have. The product is inconsistent, but perfect in itself. And that level of attention makes it hard to scale up to a national level.
Thanks. I'd actually meant to include the photoelectric effect, just because my English teacher always taught me there should be three examples in a sentence like that, but I was tired. (And if I'd really been thinking I'd have included the ultraviolet catastrophe, too, just because I've always thought it would be a great name for a band.)
Chocolate is almost always made with sugar rather than corn syrup. Even Hershey's wax is made with sugar. If you made chocolate with corn syrup, it would be goopy. The fructose/glucose combination doesn't make for a nice crystalline matrix with the cocoa crystals the way sucrose does.
I am really looking forward to having the Passover Coke all year long, however.
Occam's Razor only lets you choose between two hypotheses which both adequately account for the data. Unless you've got some other theory with fewer entities in your back pocket that can explain things like the two-slit experiment and the Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Mechanics is the only game in town.
...will give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world Isn't there always going to be some company with more access than anybody else? Is it this guy's job to complain about whoever has the most information until nobody knows anything? Or will he be satisfied when two companies know precisely the same amount and there is no longer a single company with "the most".
I seem to recall people saying essentially the same things about XP: Win2K was spiffy, XP is just some visual bells-and-whistles, and annoying ones at that. Five years later they're begging to put XP on the machines rather than Vista.
I'm quite certain that you're right: five years from now there will still be people longing for the Good Old Days but nearly all of the existing machines will have reached their lifespan and been replaced by Vista-bearing objects. Microsoft will be delaying the sequel, and everybody will be saying they'd prefer to stick with Vista.
I know of no better predictor of bad weather than an interesting astronomical event, at least here in the Washington, DC area. It's really spooky. How does it know?
They've improved it considerably since then. Five years ago the typography and design were actively offensive. These days it's much more conservative. Still a bit edgy, and not always wonderful, but almost always readable.
The content is pretty much the same as before: a lot of tech hype with a very low probability of ever seeing the light of day, but with a few reasonable articles.
No, it blocks all of the javascript, with a whitelist. It's pretty easy to add a new site to your whitelist, and you can select individual sites (so if there are several sites contributing to the page you can block the ones serving up the ads but not the ones giving you the navigation.)
Adblock is probably more generally effective, but I don't mind polite ads, so I don't use it.
Whenever possible I try to go with a reputable news source's version of the story. 99.99% of the time, if the link goes to the Heath Ledger Times Star Jones Dispatch, it's really just a copy of the AP or Reuters news wire. If I'm going to get that I might as well get it from the Washington Post or New York Times (especially since I've already sold my soul and possess the Devil's Cookie on my system anyway).
I've also got NoScript on my FireFox, which limits some of the worst abuses that a web page can throw at me.
I don't think it's a question of fault. This is really a warning to webmasters, and to the advertisers who use the statistics.
I'm hard pressed to say how this is news exactly. It's really a press release from a company called comScore. Betcha they've got a service to provide more accurate counts that they'd be happy to sell you.
FTFA:
Rep. Homan and his son Doug tried to add their little open standards boost to SB 1974 as quietly as possible. They wanted the modified bill to at least get through its first committee approval before anyone spotted what they had done. Let's hear it for open-source legislation. I wonder if anybody else reads Florida's bills before they become laws.
It doesn't matter what the rules are, or how many foolish insinuations you can make about your enemies' dress codes, if your legislative process lets you put stuff in without anybody knowing about it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely correct. I just wanted to add a little bit: the vendors are sometimes perfectly content to pay that 2% fee to the credit card company. Handling cash is a pain in the ass: it has to be counted, tracked, shielded from theft by employees, and then watched carefully until it's deposited. Employees are subject to miscounting, and even when that's in your favor it's a hassle to management. Cash is easily embezzled, especially in small amounts. Shops that handle a lot of cash are also subject to plain old robbery, and that's a cost that has to be taken into account.
In other words, that fee isn't a complete loss to the vendor, so a 2% fee doesn't translate directly into 2% being passed on to the consumer. Some of it assuredly is, but it's less than the total amount.
Interesting. I haven't tried them. I've had single-origin chocolates before, but I think of them mostly as intellectual exercises, trying to understand the nature of what chocolate blenders do, rather than as simple "sit down and eat chocolate" foods. I wouldn't put them in my baking; I'm just not skilled enough to highlight the specifics of each kind of bean.
I'm sorry to hear that they're "lousy". Are you referring just to the milk chocolate ones, or also to the dark chocolate ones? What do you consider the key flavor defects?
Millions?
I'm planning to tag every solar-power story "vaporware" until I see something that doesn't depend on additional breakthroughs before it comes to market. It seems like we get 50% of the way to something useful with every posting but never actually get anywhere.
I read that report. It mentions chocolate exactly four times, each time in conjunction with a definition of the Chocolate Manufacturer's association. I couldn't find a single specific recommendation having to do with chocolate.
Since the Chocolate Manufacturer's Association is specifically listed, I assume that there's something going on here that I'm not seeing. Presumably Guittard knows what the CMA's real purpose is. It seems to me that this a general statement of "We're going to allow changes to the standards" without revising the specific standard, and this is laying the groundwork for a future change to the chocolate standard. I suppose Guittard is trying to head that off.
Nonetheless, I'm always uncomfortable with the general notion of "Hey, here's this thing I'm opposed to. You all take my word for it and go sign the Internet petition!"
Yeah, I've never gotten tempering exactly right, even with digital thermometers.
Home candy making is mostly about pouring the chocolate into amusing shapes and/or colors. I've seen some beautiful work done. It can also be about making interesting fillings and flavorings for candies.
You can't really improve on the flavor of the chocolate you buy; it's not like adding an after-market stereo to a car. So in fact very little harm is done by adding the palm oil in place of the cocoa butter; you're not trying to duplicate the work of Valrhona. You don't get the same snap as you do with properly tempered chocolate, but that's usually not the point of home candy making.
I have the exact same reaction in reverse to the European butters. They like a sour tang to their butter which is much more like the natural ways of producing butter, where lactobacilli are used to produce a bit of acid to help the butter specks clump more easily.
No matter how many times I try it, it always reads as "spoiled" to me. I know that I'm eating what's supposed to be the very best, but my brain says otherwise.
The same happens with sourdoughs, the king of artisan breads, but the sour flavor that's supposed to say "fermented" says "gone off" to me. It's only in products where I'm not expecting it; I love lemonade, which is supposed to be tangy.
It's all in what you're brought up with.
The really good chocolatiers can't have massively wide distribution because chocolate at that level is a very personalized endeavor. The chemists at Hershey's are trying to do one thing: meet a pre-specified flavor profile. They mix beans and other ingredients to try to make a consistent product. (And at the higher levels, like the Special Dark, that can be a very good-tasting product.)
Scarffen-Berger makes each batch to optimize the beans that they have. The product is inconsistent, but perfect in itself. And that level of attention makes it hard to scale up to a national level.
Thanks. I'd actually meant to include the photoelectric effect, just because my English teacher always taught me there should be three examples in a sentence like that, but I was tired. (And if I'd really been thinking I'd have included the ultraviolet catastrophe, too, just because I've always thought it would be a great name for a band.)
Chocolate is almost always made with sugar rather than corn syrup. Even Hershey's wax is made with sugar. If you made chocolate with corn syrup, it would be goopy. The fructose/glucose combination doesn't make for a nice crystalline matrix with the cocoa crystals the way sucrose does.
I am really looking forward to having the Passover Coke all year long, however.
Occam's Razor only lets you choose between two hypotheses which both adequately account for the data. Unless you've got some other theory with fewer entities in your back pocket that can explain things like the two-slit experiment and the Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Mechanics is the only game in town.
...will give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world Isn't there always going to be some company with more access than anybody else? Is it this guy's job to complain about whoever has the most information until nobody knows anything? Or will he be satisfied when two companies know precisely the same amount and there is no longer a single company with "the most".I seem to recall people saying essentially the same things about XP: Win2K was spiffy, XP is just some visual bells-and-whistles, and annoying ones at that. Five years later they're begging to put XP on the machines rather than Vista.
I'm quite certain that you're right: five years from now there will still be people longing for the Good Old Days but nearly all of the existing machines will have reached their lifespan and been replaced by Vista-bearing objects. Microsoft will be delaying the sequel, and everybody will be saying they'd prefer to stick with Vista.
So... not before August, then?
Rats.
The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, so theoretically, we're overdue.
Any chance of it happening before I'm forced to go to my cousin's wedding? Cuz that's going to be a real waste of time.
Yeah, but I want a sword made out of Chuck Norris' toenail _clippers_.
Note to self: bring an umbrella this weekend.
I know of no better predictor of bad weather than an interesting astronomical event, at least here in the Washington, DC area. It's really spooky. How does it know?
They've improved it considerably since then. Five years ago the typography and design were actively offensive. These days it's much more conservative. Still a bit edgy, and not always wonderful, but almost always readable.
The content is pretty much the same as before: a lot of tech hype with a very low probability of ever seeing the light of day, but with a few reasonable articles.
No, it blocks all of the javascript, with a whitelist. It's pretty easy to add a new site to your whitelist, and you can select individual sites (so if there are several sites contributing to the page you can block the ones serving up the ads but not the ones giving you the navigation.)
Adblock is probably more generally effective, but I don't mind polite ads, so I don't use it.
Whenever possible I try to go with a reputable news source's version of the story. 99.99% of the time, if the link goes to the Heath Ledger Times Star Jones Dispatch, it's really just a copy of the AP or Reuters news wire. If I'm going to get that I might as well get it from the Washington Post or New York Times (especially since I've already sold my soul and possess the Devil's Cookie on my system anyway).
I've also got NoScript on my FireFox, which limits some of the worst abuses that a web page can throw at me.
But regardless of anything else they invent things that extend and improve our lives, don't they deserve to make money from it?
Not for just making copies of the same drug over and over. They can make their money from the merchandise and live diagnoses.
That's right! Because anything that gets Americans killed, especially American soldiers, must be a good thing.
I don't think it's a question of fault. This is really a warning to webmasters, and to the advertisers who use the statistics.
I'm hard pressed to say how this is news exactly. It's really a press release from a company called comScore. Betcha they've got a service to provide more accurate counts that they'd be happy to sell you.
It doesn't matter what the rules are, or how many foolish insinuations you can make about your enemies' dress codes, if your legislative process lets you put stuff in without anybody knowing about it.
Nope. Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy.