Indeed. I've lived in Germany for 25 years, and I had to Google where it is. If 10% of the local town came to visit every year, that'd still only produce 8 visitors per day. The numbers just don't make sense.
Agreed. I'm an avid cook. Sous vide circulators are cheap now, and so are meat thermometers. Doing a steak well is one of the easiest cooking tasks, to the extent that I won't bother paying top dollar in a restaurant because it's so easy to do restaurant quality at home. I could teach someone to cook a restaurant quality steak in a couple hours and a few practice runs.
I've made steak probably 100 times in the past decade (sometimes with a sous vide) and I don't think I've ever made one I would say is great. Certainly not as good as what I can get at a good restaurant.
I think what my home steaks are really missing is the crust from salamander broiler. I don't have anything at home that can exceed 1000 F / 550 C.
There's so much written about how to cook a steak well, and I've tried a lot of exotic techniques (I have gas and charcoal grills, tried cooking straight on a chimney starter, have gas torches inside and outside). Most of what really matters is that it's dry, the pan is heavy and hot, you use enough oil to get good heat transfer.
If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.
There's really not much to it? Stick it in a low oven and bring it just under temp, then finish it in a ripping pan. If the results you're getting from that aren't restaurant-caliber, it's probably the meat you're buying. You definitely do not need 550C to put an excellent crust on a steak!
Salamander broiler would be incredible to have at home. We get decent results from using a cast iron pan thats as hot as we can get it. At most we can sear 2 steaks as it tends to cool off pretty quick even under high heat. Got any better alternatives that a home cook could use?
Are you just heating the bare cast iron to crazy hot temperatures and then putting the steak in?
I've thought about trying that, but I'd need to first strip the seasoning off the pan to avoid all kinds of nasty flavors. The second pan makes sense...
Reverse sear over sous vide -- moisture is the enemy of crust.
Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal can get to 650°F or so pretty quick, and does an amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.
As noted in an earlier comment of mine, I have one (actually made for burning weeds) connected to my gas grill tank, and a fancy Japanese one inside. They're honestly pretty rinky-dink. What they are good at is transferring heat just to the crust. But they only do a small patch at a time, and you have to hover for far longer than you'd think. Like, you do a little patch, leave the torch there for 30 seconds, move on. They just don't pump enough energy into the crust fast enough for them to be a general solution. I use them for touching things up, or crisping up a bit.
I feel like I am better off with cast iron or stainless steel compared to slightly bigger torch. Stainless steel allowing some deglazing for sauce. Torch is still too small area and burns more so sears.
I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet). At that time spell checking was only done in word processors. Pretty quickly every other environment, including Windows and macOS followed suite.
> I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet).
When was it that you added it to KMail?
Word '95 introduced the famous red squiggly underlines in 1995.
I believe KMail introduced spell-checking in 2004.
Reread the claim, the idea to add them to generic text widgets. I think it was around the mid 2000s when Firefox also started adding spellcheck, which is around the time I started learning how to spell things correctly.
A quirky thought: I'm very much an advocate of "free range parenting", and mostly grew up with it myself in the US, and it's what my kids have here in Germany. My 7 year old walks to school alone (in my neighborhood), my 10 year old takes the subway to school, and they have a large degree of freedom in our neighborhood, generally going to after-school activities on their own.
But I wonder if part of why people worried less in earlier generations is that we were so close to the time where childhood actually was dangerous: 100 years ago in the US, 20% of kids didn't live to adulthood (mostly because of diseases we can now prevent). I wonder if that had some cultural impact on perception of relative dangers.
Batches under a certain size don't have a problem with methanol poisoning. You need a large enough batch that you get a high percentage of methanol in the "heads". Usually for batches under 100L, it's not an issue. A sensible policy would be limiting "home" distillation to 50L batches (which is a lot of booze; hard to argue you need more than that in a batch for private consumption).
The methanol doesn't "come out in the heads" and batch size doesn't affect the final concentration as a % because roughly the same ratio is present during a run with a slight in crease in the tails due to the with methanol bonds with water.
Interestingly, after looking at this more closely, what I said is true of rakija, which is what I'm most familiar with (part of my family is Serbian), but appears to not be significantly true for grain distillates. Your sources mostly don't address these topics though; the latter one is mainly about copper and lead levels.
This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.
I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.
I always envied the amount of options bass players had. Even in the 90s there were new brands starting to pop up like crazy. Lakland, Ritter, Tobias, BassLab...
With guitars, apart from the metal guitars, there's only vintage-inspired stuff with either a tune-o-matic or a Wilkinson tremolos... I'm exaggerating but that's indeed what I see for sale on my local shops.
On the other hand we do have Teuffel guitars in Germany, so maybe I should just put up and buy one from Uli Teuffel while he's still young.
My fancy basses are a Lakland and a Sandberg (also German). But even, say, Ibanez was doing a lot of interesting stuff with low-cost instruments in the 90s, and on the high end there was Alembic, Modulus, Fodera, Ken Smith, hell, even Music Man (from Leo Fender), Tobias (and later MTD). Neck-through construction, active electronics, composite bodies, fiberglass necks. I don't want all of those things in my basses, but it was exciting to be able to try them. There was so much experimentation in basses at that time, but it was pretty rare with guitars. Again, Parker seemed to be the only well-known company doing it.
My theory has been that it was that bass guitar is a new instrument. Electric bass really isn't an electric double bass, but electric guitar is an electric version of a steel-string guitar. There was a lot of history and nostalgia in guitar playing, whereas bass was this new thing.
The other part of my theory is that bass amplification demanded it to some extent. Amplifying a bass was hard at the time. And it's come so incredibly far. Guitar players still basically use the same amps they did in 1965. But bass players moved quickly from tubes to transistors, and now to class-d amplifiers, and miniaturized speakers. My 500 watt amp weighs 1.1 kg and fits in the pocket of my gig back, and my 4x5" cab which handles 400 watts of power and goes down to 35 Hz is 30 x 30 x 30 cm and weighs 9.5 kg. Those together are smaller and weigh less than my 15 watt guitar tube amp.
Man I love how pragmatic bass players are. I also have a tiny Class D for my bass (I play a bit of fretless for fun) and it's magical how much better it is than the amps I played in the past. Granted I never had an SVT, but on the other hand my back is thankful for that.
I feel like guitar players are constantly trying to get into the technology but then fashion changes. Grunge for example made everyone sell their racks and shredder guitars.
Now that I think about it, I actually had a POD bean before I even had an amplifier, but then it became unfashionable to not have tube amps among my in-group back then. On the other hand I see lots of touring bands using Kempers, Quad Cortex, Tonex, etc. so maybe the tide has turned! For now!
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
I see, but the grid operator has to collect the VAT for every kWh from the customer. I don’t pay VAT for my balcony PV and also not for the energy I get from it. That is not parity, I as a producer have an advantage here.
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.
Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
That's 0,38 Euro/W of panel power, including inverter and cable. And there might be a solid price uptick on that because of the shop that's selling it. Wholesale from specialized shops is probably much cheaper...
Just for the record, that seems to be an 860Wp "Schwaiger Balkonkraftwerk 860 Wp Wifi fähig" for €325, "inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.", but not including "Versand- & Lieferbedingungen
+ 99,99 € Versandkosten". So it's €424.99, which is €0.494 per peak watt, about five or ten times the wholesale price of just the solar module.
Yes, but you could also just drive to one of the roughly 2.000 home and garden markets and just take one of the sets home with you in your car. Or get yourself cables and an inverter and buy the cheapest panels you can find, maybe even used ones.
The thing is: Prices are falling fast and that's great for everybody.
Adderall is just speed, which also has a long history of recreational usage. It was a widely used recreational drug decades before it began being used for ADHD.
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