Uhm, no, clue up man. You think power stations choose other technologies because of hippies?! Nice sentiment, but no. Things are not changing because environmentalists won some argument. Power sources are changing because the people making the choices are business people. If you have basic business training then the whole "peak oil" nonsense is obviously nonsense, because they were never the bumbling idiots that greens presume business people must be. They might have different values, and simply not care about the environment; and many of us believe that is exceptionally unwise of them. But they're not idiots. Peak oil bloviators fail to notice that people with different values who just want the money, they're going to switch as soon as the economic balance point is passed. They don't have some irrational attachment to oil, they're not going to drive off a cliff to avoid using renewables. Texas is a leader in wind energy, is it because they have more hippies, or because money?
Who cares if they care? Them caring about other things doesn't make it true that they have the most market share. That's the distortion field causing cognitive dissonance when you hear something that sounds vaguely anti-apple, even if it turns out to be a neutral fact.
If you have X busses and Y cars on the road, and the traffic congestion is really bad and everything is moving very slowly, and the buses are presumed to be continually traveling in a circle picking up and dropping off passengers, then reducing the number of cars on the road will decrease the trip time for buses and increase the carrying capacity of the same number of buses running for the same amount of time. If you decrease the cars and also increase the buses, as they describe in the story, then the effects are magnified.
You seem to be missing both the forest (the big-picture of traffic flow) and the trees (the specific vehicles chugging slowly down the street).
I'll give you a hint, it is the Public-Transit-Tree that the working class are using. The idea here is to get the partying yuppies out of the way of the buses.
Yeah, but it was just a bunch of whiny lowbrow faux-environmentalist propaganda. Oil is dirty and it sucks and other things are already cheaper. There is no need for a weird imagined oil supply catastrophe in order for people to switch to cheaper, cleaner, better fuel sources. That is happening already. Considering that we're already in a transition period, and the end of the modern world didn't happen as predicted, it seems a little late for you to be trying to recruit people to follow that nonsense.
Oil's market share will decline, oil will still be available, and that crisis wouldn't ever happen. There were already alternatives available, so the prognostications were idiotic from the start. Oil production from existing wells doesn't just suddenly stop, output decreases steadily, and they can measure what is left. There was never any reason to believe in catastrophe there.
Also, why "forget" about electric vehicles for [lots of people]? Just some hand-waving to avoid thinking about obvious solutions?
Perhaps nobody told you that France is a world leader in nuclear power?
Paris is probably the most resilient city in Europe. I don't even like the place, but the locals do, and most others too. If your flat is overpriced, yeah, sell it before the price becomes correct; but that doesn't demonstrate anything about Paris property reducing in value.
No need to appeal to "car culture" for an answer, when we don't have the population density to replicate the problems. We have problems with traffic more than with air pollution from cars. Only a few US cities have significant auto-sourced air pollution. Vehicles here are also newer on average, and have mandatory emissions controls that only a minority of companies were cheating on. Luckily European cars aren't very popular here, so we don't have the high percent of vehicles with fraudulent emissions ratings that Europe has. And India has less wealth, and they probably can't achieve the same sort of emissions control even if they tried; it would be like banning cars for many people who currently can afford them. With this measure, banning them half the time, they can defer responding to the issue until public health is so badly impacted that people tolerate a more draconian rule. Then that might feed back into their political discussion in the future, and make emissions planning a more likely political issue.
Apricots go from hard as rocks to over-ripe and on the ground in about a week... and that is on the tree! It is just not a good store crop. If it is in the store and wasn't locally grown, it is has living in a weird alien chemical atmosphere. You're really better off with dried ones, because they were picked fresh. The problem there, they turn brown, so most of them are saturated with sulfur. Trader Joes has a good price on dried, unsulfured though.
There is a public tree nearby that I eat them from most years, but you really have to keep an eye on it or you'll miss the whole season in a couple days.
The latest advance in tomatoes is leaving a little bit of vine attached; instead of picking the tomato off the vine, they cut the clusters and pack them with the vine. Here in the US, at first this was just the expensive ones in yuppie stores, but now the cheapest type of imported Mexican tomatoes are done this way. They're cheaper than the standard flavorless ones. They retain probably 25% of the flavor this way, instead of just being a reddish watery thing. Expect the tomato situation to get slightly less bad when more farms catch on.
Here people pay about double for local off-season greenhouse tomatoes that are picked ripe.
Around here the farmed salmon are fed byproducts from the fish packing plants, and it is high quality food for them. It really shouldn't reduce the flavor qualities.
The flavor of farmed salmon is poor because they are less vigorous. Wild salmon have a healthy, high-exercise lifestyle. Farmed salmon have degraded DNA and even when released in the wild for most of their lives, they are less vigorous, less strong, less healthy, and have little genetic diversity.
Farmed trout taste bad for more reasons, because they're not picky eaters and they get fed a lot more grain filler in the pellets.
If you think farmed salmon is bad, try farmed tilapia. Sometimes they taste fine, but they're highly susceptible to "off" flavors based on diet.
Red delicious has been cultivated longer than that. The issue isn't how long it's been cultivated it's what have they done to it along the way.
Nothing, that is what they have done it. Exactly nothing. It is a clonal variety that doesn't breed true. They literally have done nothing to change it.
You can breed new types of Delicious, because it is an heirloom variety that breeds fairly true. But it is multicolored with streaks of red and yellow. But any of the mono-color Delicious varieties are clonal. They all have the same DNA. You can't breed a Red Delicious, you will get only Standard Delicious offspring.
You're really lowering the bar for "ignorant blathering," Mr Coward.
The lawn in front is the unused portion of the property. It is a big entrance area, that is all. The fruit trees are in the back yard, which is much more private, and is the outdoor part of the property that is actually used. Back yards tend to be much larger than front yards. The size of a front yard is typically controlled by zoning laws, with all houses in a neighborhood set back from the front of the property line by the same distance. This helps to ensure that the back yards have the expected level of privacy. In my city, nearly all houses have both trees and grass in the front, and trees in the back unless they were cut down to make room for a larger garden.
The shape of the lots and the ways houses are built generally means that a person can have an excess of seasonal fresh fruit just around the perimeter of the back yard. Planting fruit trees instead of decorative trees in the front is generally a social or political act; those trees are rarely utilized for food. They're for the birds; literally. Or hungry kids passing by.
Fresh fruit is pervasive, if you look at people's back yards. I guess that isn't what they show on the teevee, so the stereotypes don't reflect it. You can always spot a new first time home-owner because they're trying to give away fruit to their friends and co-workers until they realize everybody has enough already, and it is OK if it falls off the tree and fertilizes the soil.
The vast majority of Americans live in single family homes, with fruit trees in their back yards. Most communities have large feral blackberry patches that are heavily utilized in season, especially by lower income groups.
It is hilarious how far your stereotype is from reality.
The local farms often pick all the green tomatoes for sale, and then when they have them all they open the field to "U-Pick" locals for 50 cents/lb. Most of them at that point end up falling off the vine unpicked. The flavor is quite good though, even though it is a long shelf-life variety. The picking and storage practices are a bigger cause of the poor flavor than the variety. Picked fresh they're too strong to make a sauce without watering it down a little, unless you want it to be acidic enough to cause a pucker response.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the store apples are high grade for about 10 months of the year; 5 months of quality from the US, and 5 months of quality from Peru and Chile. And then a pair of 1 month transition periods where we get the same grade of apples as everybody else; less flavor, sure, but the texture difference is really apparent.
And if you go to a discount supermarket, you get the same quality they sell in non-apple regions. Most of the year here I can go to the supermarket and get apples that are fresh and indistinguishable from ones at the farm store, or ones that I "U-Pick" ripe off the tree at the farm. They'll squirt juice onto my monitor if I take a bite carelessly in front of the computer. The mushy ones they put in the 5lb economy bags won't even leave juice on your lip, much less squirt it across the room. But that is because those bags are packed for economies of scale and they're picked and handled for shipping even when sold locally.
The difference compared to a banana is that a waxed apple stored at the correct temperature can be picked ripe and stay fresh for months. Apples are full of tart, tasty natural preservatives. If I do a "U-Pick" run and have unwaxed apples, they'll only stay fresh a few weeks, but still much much longer than a banana. A waxed apple from the same farm, from the same row of trees, picked the same week, will still be crisp after a month in a fruit bowl at ~60F. You can't just wax a banana and have it stay fresh, so the distance you can be from the farms and still get fresh-tasting fruit is much shorter.
Another fruit that tastes different with modern varieties is the blueberry. I forage wild blueberries in the summer, and they're a very tart fruit, as sour as a cranberry. (they're in the same genus) They sweeten more than a cranberry when cooked, though. The farm variety is much larger, sweeter, higher yield, and juicier. Sometimes people let the memes overcome their brains and they always assume that farmers breed things only to taste worse. Those people should visit farms more often.
Horse shit, the red delicious is just an all-red clone of a Standard Delicious, an ancient heirloom apple variety. If you plant the seed of a Red Delicious, or Golden D, or any other "Delicious" version, the children revert to a Standard Delicious. Very old Red D trees will sometimes also revert. The flavor does not change.
The reason the Red Delicious you buy taste crappy is because they're grown in a low quality environment for apples, and are picked too early. They're grown in very large quantities in those conditions, and so they represent the main lower-priced variety. If you go to a high quality apple region like Central Washington and visit a farm store then you can taste what the variety tastes like when grown in the right soil, the right climate, and picked at the right time to sell locally. And you'll find that the Red D tastes exactly the same as other Delicious varieties. Which is quite good. It is a juicy, sweet apple. It has different properties than a Granny Smith, but only somebody completely clueless about apples would blame the variety in this case.
Find a better store, and stop mixing memes. Over-engineered for shelf life is true for things like tomatoes. Grow some in a garden and it is instantly obvious when you taste what an heirloom tomato tastes like. But freakin' apples?! No man, a waxed apple has a really long shelf life already. Grow a Standard Delicious in your garden, and compare it to one from the store. If they taste different, usually it is because the one in store tastes better. If you knew what you were doing, they'd taste the same.
It is pretty obvious that you've been told by your locals what fruit in the US tastes like, but no, you don't actually know.
And if your oranges are excessively orange, I'd like to propose that perhaps they have had food coloring added during growth, something that is banned in the US. Oranges, including the main low-flavor commercial variety that are indeed bred for shelf life, spontaneously re-green. They are not excessively orange. Oranges tend to get a fully orange color before they're ripe, and then they start to re-green. Americans generally know that the correct way to select oranges for purchase is to heft them in the hand; ripe, juicy oranges are heavier. And often less orange. If you're in a place where the consumers don't know shit about oranges, that might explain why the store is putting out oranges picked for color instead of ripeness. That's if they don't just have food coloring added.
We only have 5 or 6 banana varieties in local stores, but many of the Asian varieties have a distinctly startchy texture, along with being slightly astringent. They improve a lot with cooking. Raw, Cavendish has distinctly superior texture, high sugar, low starch, and indeed a very mild flavor. The real problem with the flavor though isn't the variety, but the user; many people seem to believe that a banana with spots has spoiled! Of course, it is just starting to ripen. Wait until the skin has black spots head to toe, with only minor black streaking and significant yellow areas remaining, and it will have a much more well-developed flavor. Still not my favorite, but they taste a lot better than in the unripe state; if you actually like the flavor of bananas. People who dislike that flavor are going to naturally prefer the mildest, sweetest version, or ones that are cooked in coconut products.
The distortion field also allows them to confuse feeling superior about their purchase with the item having an overall lead in market share. WTF? They don't even have 25% market share now. The vast majority of tablets are not apple products, they're android. They play a silly game where they pretend the generic compatible devices are not of the same type as each other, so that they can feel bigger. lol
He doesn't even mention the `belt, though. He's talking about all of `em.
But you can get a bunch of pebbles banging on your hull without having a large density across a broad area. You only need a localized density. A more serious sci-fi fan would already be aware that many objects are loose aggregates, not solid rocks. OK, now land "on" that thing to hide from radar, which is another thing this guy can't comprehend and for some reason thinks won't work. You might actually "sink" or settle down into the aggregate. Then when you fire thrusters to take off, you turn your "rock" into a cloud of gravel. If the ship has significant mass, it might then attract to the ship; it would indeed be bouncing off the hull, "ding ding ding."
A lot of people, including the author of TF essay, seem to be unable to use their brain in the "when would X be realistic" mode. They can only do, "in the first example I thought of" type of analysis. If a person actually reads significant enough quantities of science fiction to even have attempted his snobbery, they should have been exposed to numerous examples that are plausible. He hasn't, because he doesn't even read; he admits his attention span is too short for movies or television and then his only example, for any of the stuff he complains about, is asteroids in a Star Wars movie. Derrrrrrrrrrrrr
I hate to say it, but you seem to be in the same category. Read some sci-fi, then check back in. I mean, I blew up the idea that the asteroid belt not being dense prevents a ship from being in a gravel cloud... really easily. When you're trying to prove that things are so impossible that they are "unrealistic" in the context of science fiction, even hard sci-fi, there is a really high burden of proof. I mean, if you just can't think of the scenario, then that disproves the complaint. Why would object density be needed, other than when you're near a massive object like a planet? Sure, in Earth orbit it is different. And yet, satellites do get clipped; and not just by human space junk. You would need to be an expert in all these things to make the assertions. If you're not, even if you think you're right, you're not, because you don't really know. And if you do know, it should be obvious that the guy who wrote the essay... doesn't have even a minor clue.
As for his Star Wars (movie) complaint that he blames on science fiction books, I don't think we've explored that part of whatever galaxy they're in. Even if you claimed such fields would not naturally form, in the context of that story that is no impediment at all. They don't go into the background enough to say either way. They don't make the mistake accused, because they don't try to get science-y and explain it. Also, Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. You can only make these types of plausibility complaints about things that are supposed to be hard sci-fi. Otherwise it is "reader error." If you're worried about Han hiding from space worms inside rocks, what about the worm that supposedly keeps you on life support for thousands of years while it "digests" you? Seems somebody didn't understand digestion. And light sabers. I mean... come on. An energy weapon dueling sword I could easily accept, but one that intercepts and blocks shots from a laser rifle, or other energy weapon rifles? Exploding a planet suddenly with an energy weapon the size of a small moon?! If you hit it that hard, and it is a rocky planet similar to Earth on the surface, there are a bunch of things that could happen but none of them are it exploding like a grenade. If you were causing enough mechanical forces that it would break apart and send pieces flying, it would shoot off like a baseball. Home run! If they were knocking planets into their stars it would be more realistic. Or if they caused one side to massively heat up, and it returned to a molten proto-planet stage with no life, that would be more realistic. Even if you could cause massive cavitating vibrations in the core, you're turn it into a melted misshapen blob long before it would explode.
Well, "American Beer" is generic-tasting, cheap rice lager. That is why it tastes that way; rice makes better wine than lager.
And here in America, good beers are always regional or smaller. It is way too big a country for the national brands of most food items to be good. Economies of scale tend to reduce quality in some types of item.
Same with "American Cheese." Any American would assume it is a fake cheese when they hear the name; a real product would be regional or State-associated; "New York hard cheddar," "Wisconsin Swiss," "Tillamook cheddar"
any chemical for which the chemical name ends in "ose" is a sugar
If you can get to them to accept cellulose for their Earth Sugardrink you'd be able to support an impressive profit margin. And perhaps even lower the price of labor.
Sure, *we'd* know better, but the aliens might not
I was born on this planet and I'm pretty sure I'd spit out any Earth Sugardrink, and I doubt I would have any idea which varietal it was.
Coffee, I prefer an earthy, chocolaty Central American. Kenyan is fine if that is what is available. But anybody who thinks you can't tell the difference between tropical robusta and mountain shade grown is nuts. Or drinks "coffee" as a flavor of Earth Sugardrink...
But in bad SF, no one forced the author to put the tell-tale signs in there, he wrote them voluntarily, as he is a bad SF author.
Only if you buy into the idea of creating absolute lists of story elements that are bad.
For example, he slags on asteroids in a bunch of ways, but much of the big-name, known-good, Golden Age sci-fi has that sort of event. And the situations generally warrant it. Maybe this guy just reads awful books, and so the asteroid sequences suck. His actual example is a movie, which he says at the top he doesn't "do." Other sources seem to indicate that there is a full range of sizes of stuff to bounce off your hull, from dust all the way up to... whatever mass you can't escape.
His crap about Newton's Second Law is just a bunch of crap; yes, unless a story solves a bunch of specific problems with technology in the story, it would be impossible. I'm not sure he even understands what hard sci-fi is, and he doesn't seem to imagine that sci-fi authors are usually engineers. He basically writes a bunch of fiction in his essay about Victorian navy battles in space and the impossibility of various types of drive technologies... simply by proving that they are hard engineering problems. Wait, wait, we're supposed to agree that science fiction is bad or unrealistic if it solves hard engineering problems?!
He bitches about mining H3 on the moon, because it is expensive and hard and all these things, and those reasons may apply to bloviators in the media who talk about mining it in relation to space exploration, or some lame idea, but for fictional books?! All it takes to make it a good idea in a book is for fuel to be really expensive, and politics to prevent you from getting it anywhere closer. Done. Suddenly if you can afford it, it might be a good idea! Or maybe you're quarantined on a lunar colony, and figured out a way to mine it with the available tools. Done. I can keep going, and I'm just a reader not a writer.
He says he has a bunch more, but I think he's libeling himself with secret evidence.;)
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Uhm, no, clue up man. You think power stations choose other technologies because of hippies?! Nice sentiment, but no. Things are not changing because environmentalists won some argument. Power sources are changing because the people making the choices are business people. If you have basic business training then the whole "peak oil" nonsense is obviously nonsense, because they were never the bumbling idiots that greens presume business people must be. They might have different values, and simply not care about the environment; and many of us believe that is exceptionally unwise of them. But they're not idiots. Peak oil bloviators fail to notice that people with different values who just want the money, they're going to switch as soon as the economic balance point is passed. They don't have some irrational attachment to oil, they're not going to drive off a cliff to avoid using renewables. Texas is a leader in wind energy, is it because they have more hippies, or because money?
The hidden truth underneath the banana story: the future will still have bananas, and maybe more variety.
And you didn't know that feeling good is a real benefit?
Who cares if they care? Them caring about other things doesn't make it true that they have the most market share. That's the distortion field causing cognitive dissonance when you hear something that sounds vaguely anti-apple, even if it turns out to be a neutral fact.
Just warn them that it rains for 9 months a year and umbrellas are for social outcasts.
If they really love apples that much, they'll fit right in.
If you have X busses and Y cars on the road, and the traffic congestion is really bad and everything is moving very slowly, and the buses are presumed to be continually traveling in a circle picking up and dropping off passengers, then reducing the number of cars on the road will decrease the trip time for buses and increase the carrying capacity of the same number of buses running for the same amount of time. If you decrease the cars and also increase the buses, as they describe in the story, then the effects are magnified.
You seem to be missing both the forest (the big-picture of traffic flow) and the trees (the specific vehicles chugging slowly down the street).
I'll give you a hint, it is the Public-Transit-Tree that the working class are using. The idea here is to get the partying yuppies out of the way of the buses.
Ever heard of peak oil?
Yeah, but it was just a bunch of whiny lowbrow faux-environmentalist propaganda. Oil is dirty and it sucks and other things are already cheaper. There is no need for a weird imagined oil supply catastrophe in order for people to switch to cheaper, cleaner, better fuel sources. That is happening already. Considering that we're already in a transition period, and the end of the modern world didn't happen as predicted, it seems a little late for you to be trying to recruit people to follow that nonsense.
Oil's market share will decline, oil will still be available, and that crisis wouldn't ever happen. There were already alternatives available, so the prognostications were idiotic from the start. Oil production from existing wells doesn't just suddenly stop, output decreases steadily, and they can measure what is left. There was never any reason to believe in catastrophe there.
Also, why "forget" about electric vehicles for [lots of people]? Just some hand-waving to avoid thinking about obvious solutions?
Perhaps nobody told you that France is a world leader in nuclear power?
Paris is probably the most resilient city in Europe. I don't even like the place, but the locals do, and most others too. If your flat is overpriced, yeah, sell it before the price becomes correct; but that doesn't demonstrate anything about Paris property reducing in value.
No need to appeal to "car culture" for an answer, when we don't have the population density to replicate the problems. We have problems with traffic more than with air pollution from cars. Only a few US cities have significant auto-sourced air pollution. Vehicles here are also newer on average, and have mandatory emissions controls that only a minority of companies were cheating on. Luckily European cars aren't very popular here, so we don't have the high percent of vehicles with fraudulent emissions ratings that Europe has. And India has less wealth, and they probably can't achieve the same sort of emissions control even if they tried; it would be like banning cars for many people who currently can afford them. With this measure, banning them half the time, they can defer responding to the issue until public health is so badly impacted that people tolerate a more draconian rule. Then that might feed back into their political discussion in the future, and make emissions planning a more likely political issue.
Apricots go from hard as rocks to over-ripe and on the ground in about a week... and that is on the tree! It is just not a good store crop. If it is in the store and wasn't locally grown, it is has living in a weird alien chemical atmosphere. You're really better off with dried ones, because they were picked fresh. The problem there, they turn brown, so most of them are saturated with sulfur. Trader Joes has a good price on dried, unsulfured though.
There is a public tree nearby that I eat them from most years, but you really have to keep an eye on it or you'll miss the whole season in a couple days.
The latest advance in tomatoes is leaving a little bit of vine attached; instead of picking the tomato off the vine, they cut the clusters and pack them with the vine. Here in the US, at first this was just the expensive ones in yuppie stores, but now the cheapest type of imported Mexican tomatoes are done this way. They're cheaper than the standard flavorless ones. They retain probably 25% of the flavor this way, instead of just being a reddish watery thing. Expect the tomato situation to get slightly less bad when more farms catch on.
Here people pay about double for local off-season greenhouse tomatoes that are picked ripe.
Around here the farmed salmon are fed byproducts from the fish packing plants, and it is high quality food for them. It really shouldn't reduce the flavor qualities.
The flavor of farmed salmon is poor because they are less vigorous. Wild salmon have a healthy, high-exercise lifestyle. Farmed salmon have degraded DNA and even when released in the wild for most of their lives, they are less vigorous, less strong, less healthy, and have little genetic diversity.
Farmed trout taste bad for more reasons, because they're not picky eaters and they get fed a lot more grain filler in the pellets.
If you think farmed salmon is bad, try farmed tilapia. Sometimes they taste fine, but they're highly susceptible to "off" flavors based on diet.
Red delicious has been cultivated longer than that. The issue isn't how long it's been cultivated it's what have they done to it along the way.
Nothing, that is what they have done it. Exactly nothing. It is a clonal variety that doesn't breed true. They literally have done nothing to change it.
You can breed new types of Delicious, because it is an heirloom variety that breeds fairly true. But it is multicolored with streaks of red and yellow. But any of the mono-color Delicious varieties are clonal. They all have the same DNA. You can't breed a Red Delicious, you will get only Standard Delicious offspring.
You're really lowering the bar for "ignorant blathering," Mr Coward.
The lawn in front is the unused portion of the property. It is a big entrance area, that is all. The fruit trees are in the back yard, which is much more private, and is the outdoor part of the property that is actually used. Back yards tend to be much larger than front yards. The size of a front yard is typically controlled by zoning laws, with all houses in a neighborhood set back from the front of the property line by the same distance. This helps to ensure that the back yards have the expected level of privacy. In my city, nearly all houses have both trees and grass in the front, and trees in the back unless they were cut down to make room for a larger garden.
The shape of the lots and the ways houses are built generally means that a person can have an excess of seasonal fresh fruit just around the perimeter of the back yard. Planting fruit trees instead of decorative trees in the front is generally a social or political act; those trees are rarely utilized for food. They're for the birds; literally. Or hungry kids passing by.
Fresh fruit is pervasive, if you look at people's back yards. I guess that isn't what they show on the teevee, so the stereotypes don't reflect it. You can always spot a new first time home-owner because they're trying to give away fruit to their friends and co-workers until they realize everybody has enough already, and it is OK if it falls off the tree and fertilizes the soil.
The vast majority of Americans live in single family homes, with fruit trees in their back yards. Most communities have large feral blackberry patches that are heavily utilized in season, especially by lower income groups.
It is hilarious how far your stereotype is from reality.
The local farms often pick all the green tomatoes for sale, and then when they have them all they open the field to "U-Pick" locals for 50 cents/lb. Most of them at that point end up falling off the vine unpicked. The flavor is quite good though, even though it is a long shelf-life variety. The picking and storage practices are a bigger cause of the poor flavor than the variety. Picked fresh they're too strong to make a sauce without watering it down a little, unless you want it to be acidic enough to cause a pucker response.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the store apples are high grade for about 10 months of the year; 5 months of quality from the US, and 5 months of quality from Peru and Chile. And then a pair of 1 month transition periods where we get the same grade of apples as everybody else; less flavor, sure, but the texture difference is really apparent.
And if you go to a discount supermarket, you get the same quality they sell in non-apple regions. Most of the year here I can go to the supermarket and get apples that are fresh and indistinguishable from ones at the farm store, or ones that I "U-Pick" ripe off the tree at the farm. They'll squirt juice onto my monitor if I take a bite carelessly in front of the computer. The mushy ones they put in the 5lb economy bags won't even leave juice on your lip, much less squirt it across the room. But that is because those bags are packed for economies of scale and they're picked and handled for shipping even when sold locally.
The difference compared to a banana is that a waxed apple stored at the correct temperature can be picked ripe and stay fresh for months. Apples are full of tart, tasty natural preservatives. If I do a "U-Pick" run and have unwaxed apples, they'll only stay fresh a few weeks, but still much much longer than a banana. A waxed apple from the same farm, from the same row of trees, picked the same week, will still be crisp after a month in a fruit bowl at ~60F. You can't just wax a banana and have it stay fresh, so the distance you can be from the farms and still get fresh-tasting fruit is much shorter.
Another fruit that tastes different with modern varieties is the blueberry. I forage wild blueberries in the summer, and they're a very tart fruit, as sour as a cranberry. (they're in the same genus) They sweeten more than a cranberry when cooked, though. The farm variety is much larger, sweeter, higher yield, and juicier. Sometimes people let the memes overcome their brains and they always assume that farmers breed things only to taste worse. Those people should visit farms more often.
Horse shit, the red delicious is just an all-red clone of a Standard Delicious, an ancient heirloom apple variety. If you plant the seed of a Red Delicious, or Golden D, or any other "Delicious" version, the children revert to a Standard Delicious. Very old Red D trees will sometimes also revert. The flavor does not change.
The reason the Red Delicious you buy taste crappy is because they're grown in a low quality environment for apples, and are picked too early. They're grown in very large quantities in those conditions, and so they represent the main lower-priced variety. If you go to a high quality apple region like Central Washington and visit a farm store then you can taste what the variety tastes like when grown in the right soil, the right climate, and picked at the right time to sell locally. And you'll find that the Red D tastes exactly the same as other Delicious varieties. Which is quite good. It is a juicy, sweet apple. It has different properties than a Granny Smith, but only somebody completely clueless about apples would blame the variety in this case.
Find a better store, and stop mixing memes. Over-engineered for shelf life is true for things like tomatoes. Grow some in a garden and it is instantly obvious when you taste what an heirloom tomato tastes like. But freakin' apples?! No man, a waxed apple has a really long shelf life already. Grow a Standard Delicious in your garden, and compare it to one from the store. If they taste different, usually it is because the one in store tastes better. If you knew what you were doing, they'd taste the same.
It is pretty obvious that you've been told by your locals what fruit in the US tastes like, but no, you don't actually know.
And if your oranges are excessively orange, I'd like to propose that perhaps they have had food coloring added during growth, something that is banned in the US. Oranges, including the main low-flavor commercial variety that are indeed bred for shelf life, spontaneously re-green. They are not excessively orange. Oranges tend to get a fully orange color before they're ripe, and then they start to re-green. Americans generally know that the correct way to select oranges for purchase is to heft them in the hand; ripe, juicy oranges are heavier. And often less orange. If you're in a place where the consumers don't know shit about oranges, that might explain why the store is putting out oranges picked for color instead of ripeness. That's if they don't just have food coloring added.
We only have 5 or 6 banana varieties in local stores, but many of the Asian varieties have a distinctly startchy texture, along with being slightly astringent. They improve a lot with cooking. Raw, Cavendish has distinctly superior texture, high sugar, low starch, and indeed a very mild flavor. The real problem with the flavor though isn't the variety, but the user; many people seem to believe that a banana with spots has spoiled! Of course, it is just starting to ripen. Wait until the skin has black spots head to toe, with only minor black streaking and significant yellow areas remaining, and it will have a much more well-developed flavor. Still not my favorite, but they taste a lot better than in the unripe state; if you actually like the flavor of bananas. People who dislike that flavor are going to naturally prefer the mildest, sweetest version, or ones that are cooked in coconut products.
The distortion field also allows them to confuse feeling superior about their purchase with the item having an overall lead in market share. WTF? They don't even have 25% market share now. The vast majority of tablets are not apple products, they're android. They play a silly game where they pretend the generic compatible devices are not of the same type as each other, so that they can feel bigger. lol
He doesn't even mention the `belt, though. He's talking about all of `em.
But you can get a bunch of pebbles banging on your hull without having a large density across a broad area. You only need a localized density. A more serious sci-fi fan would already be aware that many objects are loose aggregates, not solid rocks. OK, now land "on" that thing to hide from radar, which is another thing this guy can't comprehend and for some reason thinks won't work. You might actually "sink" or settle down into the aggregate. Then when you fire thrusters to take off, you turn your "rock" into a cloud of gravel. If the ship has significant mass, it might then attract to the ship; it would indeed be bouncing off the hull, "ding ding ding."
A lot of people, including the author of TF essay, seem to be unable to use their brain in the "when would X be realistic" mode. They can only do, "in the first example I thought of" type of analysis. If a person actually reads significant enough quantities of science fiction to even have attempted his snobbery, they should have been exposed to numerous examples that are plausible. He hasn't, because he doesn't even read; he admits his attention span is too short for movies or television and then his only example, for any of the stuff he complains about, is asteroids in a Star Wars movie. Derrrrrrrrrrrrr
I hate to say it, but you seem to be in the same category. Read some sci-fi, then check back in. I mean, I blew up the idea that the asteroid belt not being dense prevents a ship from being in a gravel cloud... really easily. When you're trying to prove that things are so impossible that they are "unrealistic" in the context of science fiction, even hard sci-fi, there is a really high burden of proof. I mean, if you just can't think of the scenario, then that disproves the complaint. Why would object density be needed, other than when you're near a massive object like a planet? Sure, in Earth orbit it is different. And yet, satellites do get clipped; and not just by human space junk. You would need to be an expert in all these things to make the assertions. If you're not, even if you think you're right, you're not, because you don't really know. And if you do know, it should be obvious that the guy who wrote the essay... doesn't have even a minor clue.
As for his Star Wars (movie) complaint that he blames on science fiction books, I don't think we've explored that part of whatever galaxy they're in. Even if you claimed such fields would not naturally form, in the context of that story that is no impediment at all. They don't go into the background enough to say either way. They don't make the mistake accused, because they don't try to get science-y and explain it. Also, Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. You can only make these types of plausibility complaints about things that are supposed to be hard sci-fi. Otherwise it is "reader error." If you're worried about Han hiding from space worms inside rocks, what about the worm that supposedly keeps you on life support for thousands of years while it "digests" you? Seems somebody didn't understand digestion. And light sabers. I mean... come on. An energy weapon dueling sword I could easily accept, but one that intercepts and blocks shots from a laser rifle, or other energy weapon rifles? Exploding a planet suddenly with an energy weapon the size of a small moon?! If you hit it that hard, and it is a rocky planet similar to Earth on the surface, there are a bunch of things that could happen but none of them are it exploding like a grenade. If you were causing enough mechanical forces that it would break apart and send pieces flying, it would shoot off like a baseball. Home run! If they were knocking planets into their stars it would be more realistic. Or if they caused one side to massively heat up, and it returned to a molten proto-planet stage with no life, that would be more realistic. Even if you could cause massive cavitating vibrations in the core, you're turn it into a melted misshapen blob long before it would explode.
You just double-wooshed yourself, maaaaan.
Well, "American Beer" is generic-tasting, cheap rice lager. That is why it tastes that way; rice makes better wine than lager.
And here in America, good beers are always regional or smaller. It is way too big a country for the national brands of most food items to be good. Economies of scale tend to reduce quality in some types of item.
Same with "American Cheese." Any American would assume it is a fake cheese when they hear the name; a real product would be regional or State-associated; "New York hard cheddar," "Wisconsin Swiss," "Tillamook cheddar"
any chemical for which the chemical name ends in "ose" is a sugar
If you can get to them to accept cellulose for their Earth Sugardrink you'd be able to support an impressive profit margin. And perhaps even lower the price of labor.
Sure, *we'd* know better, but the aliens might not
I was born on this planet and I'm pretty sure I'd spit out any Earth Sugardrink, and I doubt I would have any idea which varietal it was.
Coffee, I prefer an earthy, chocolaty Central American. Kenyan is fine if that is what is available. But anybody who thinks you can't tell the difference between tropical robusta and mountain shade grown is nuts. Or drinks "coffee" as a flavor of Earth Sugardrink...
True connoisseurs prefer elephant. http://www.cbsnews.com/picture...
But in bad SF, no one forced the author to put the tell-tale signs in there, he wrote them voluntarily, as he is a bad SF author.
Only if you buy into the idea of creating absolute lists of story elements that are bad.
For example, he slags on asteroids in a bunch of ways, but much of the big-name, known-good, Golden Age sci-fi has that sort of event. And the situations generally warrant it. Maybe this guy just reads awful books, and so the asteroid sequences suck. His actual example is a movie, which he says at the top he doesn't "do." Other sources seem to indicate that there is a full range of sizes of stuff to bounce off your hull, from dust all the way up to... whatever mass you can't escape.
His crap about Newton's Second Law is just a bunch of crap; yes, unless a story solves a bunch of specific problems with technology in the story, it would be impossible. I'm not sure he even understands what hard sci-fi is, and he doesn't seem to imagine that sci-fi authors are usually engineers. He basically writes a bunch of fiction in his essay about Victorian navy battles in space and the impossibility of various types of drive technologies... simply by proving that they are hard engineering problems. Wait, wait, we're supposed to agree that science fiction is bad or unrealistic if it solves hard engineering problems?!
He bitches about mining H3 on the moon, because it is expensive and hard and all these things, and those reasons may apply to bloviators in the media who talk about mining it in relation to space exploration, or some lame idea, but for fictional books?! All it takes to make it a good idea in a book is for fuel to be really expensive, and politics to prevent you from getting it anywhere closer. Done. Suddenly if you can afford it, it might be a good idea! Or maybe you're quarantined on a lunar colony, and figured out a way to mine it with the available tools. Done. I can keep going, and I'm just a reader not a writer.
He says he has a bunch more, but I think he's libeling himself with secret evidence. ;)