Compared to hydrogenated margarine that was pushed a couple of decades ago before we learned about trans-fats? Of course.
If you use it when cooking for guests, you should disclose that you're using it (especially for non-meat dishes) because it may add extra fat that they're not OK with or consider inappropriate for personal dietary consumption (they're vegetarian, don't eat beef products, whatever).
I have a friend for whom we can't use anything that has sunflower oil in it, which is _really hard to avoid_ in surprising ways (there are spice blends that I use which have a bit of sunflower oil in the mixes).
Omega ratio matters most taking total intake of 3 and 6 into account. Since tallow is overwhelmingly saturated fat, it's a moot point what the ratio is. The remedy to low omega-3 is just to consume more dominant EPA/DHA and even ALA sources. Omega 6 won't fly off the charts except through consuming lots of packaged boxed foods and ultraprocessed foods, which overwhelming use vegetable oils like soybean or sunflower (North American fat consumption has skyrocketed over a century mostly owing to these foods). Even if you consume some nuts or seed oil now and then, just consume fish or a supplement.
Arguably the "healthiest" cooking oil is olive oil. If we're looking at just the fatty acids though, replacing SFA with PUFAs is a stronger predictor of lower CVD and all-cause mortality.
Tallow is still higher in long chain SFAs than vegetable saturated fats, which are less healthy than short and medium chain SFAs (but neither is as good as PUFAs).
That sort of overwhelms the omega ratios. As I understand it, both fish oil and (fresh) flax seed oil are still better than tallow.
With RFK's dismantling of good science, politics can't be put aside, as his reasons are essentially "because I said so".
Not to be flippant, but we know that the answer to that is "No" because of Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1].
I haven't read the article ("too hard, didn't care"), but as a foodie:
- in certain food circles, it never went away
- industrially, McD's in at least North America used beef tallow as one of the par-frying oils for their fries well into the 21st century -- which caused a stir amongst vegetarians and Hindu who had assumed that the fries were vegetarian (I remember stories here in Canada in 2002-2003)
- beef tallow is now fascionable, which accounts for the reactionary resurgence for something that never really went away
- the science is very clear that the new guidance from RFK's worm-eaten brain is junk
- the science is also very clear that while saturated fats like beef tallow are bad for you compared to olive oil and seed oils, they're better than hydrogenated fats and trans-fat products that were pushed on the world for a couple of decades a couple of decades ago
Beef tallow is a net good inasmuch as it helps ensure whole animal use, but that doesn't make it healthy or suitable for all diets.
If you are deep frying, for e.g. french fries, any cooking oil that is solid at room temperature can keep them from being greasy. This includes beef tallow, but also coconut oil for a vegetable-based oil.
For some foods the being-solid-at-room-temperature property can be important for texture.
I have no disagreement with this and I think I said as much.
But the premise of the original article (that beef tallow ever went away, which is required for a comeback) is deeply flawed, and the fascionable junk science from RFK is the dumbest possible reason to use beef tallow.
Just don't expect me (a vegetarian) to eat anything that has beef tallow, and expect me to be very pissed off if I later learn a restaurant or food manufacturer uses beef tallow without disclosing it, because that's taking choice away from me.
Evidence for the negative effects of omega 6s and specifically seed oils is at best fuzzy and conflicting, plenty of studies have found little to no difference. Research on the subject is as best inconclusive.
I expect that, to the extent there's a problem, it's that they are an additive to most packaged/ultra-processed food products which can be non-satiating, and therefore boosts overall consumption of fats and calories. Sugar of course is another component.
id recommend you look into the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio , the tldr is that the ratio of omega 6 to 3 is way out of balance in the modern western diet , from my viewpoint this has been spurred on by oils such as soy and canola which are very high in omega 6
I won't bother as I'm vegetarian, which means that I really don't care the "supposed" benefits (which likely pale compared to the ingestion of long chain saturated fats present in beef tallow, as opposed to the short and medium chain saturated fats present in coconut oil). Beef tallow is irrelevant to me except for restaurateurs or food manufacturers who use it without disclosing it. (One should disclose its use in any case. For people who avoid pork, knowing that your product contains "beef lard" instead of "whatever lard was cheapest this week" matters, because they can't do "pork lard".)
But the reality is that there's insufficient science for the promotion of beef tallow in RFK's health treason. For large groups of people it's off limits due to personal dietary restrictions (religious or animal product avoidance) and would be contraindicated for anyone who currently has cardiovascular diseases involving high cholesterol.
Use beef tallow, don't use beef tallow. I don't care unless I'm possibly eating food that you have prepared or manufactured (because I don't want rendered animal fats in my food). But don't pretend that it's a health food. It isn't, but can still be eaten in moderation by anyone who _doesn't_ mind beef products in their food.
Not sure how you got that from anything I’ve written, because it’s not what I said.
What I said is the FDA shouldn’t be promoting junk recommendations as if it were gold-standard science.
There are good scientific reasons to avoid animal fats in one’s diet. There are no good scientific reasons to add them back to one’s diet.
In moderation, they aren’t harmful and may indeed improve the flavour or texture of certain dishes when had in moderation. I personally love making butter sage gnocchi or ravioli (it doesn’t work as well with olive oil), but I only make it every couple of months.
Beyond everything else, we know that replacing animal protein with plant protein is a good way to improve health. But it’s not accessible or acceptable to everyone. It’s also not necessarily a good use of some land — land that might be perfectly suited to raising goats is poor for growing crops for human consumption.
I'm not vegan, but ovo-lacto vegetarian, so B12 deficiency isn't anything I've ever had to worry about.
With appropriate fortified foods (synthesized bacterial sources adding B12 to nutritional yeast, plant milks, etc.), vegans don't need to worry about it either.
A quick bit of research suggests that as much at 16% of meat eaters have B12 deficiency, so it's a systemic problem.
Right. They used solid blocks in the 1990s, but it was vegetable oil not beef tallow. Of course to make vegetable oil a solid block they had to make it a trans-far which is worse than saturated fat (as we now know, but didn't then). In the late 1990s they switched to a liquid oil, though I don't know how what it was (I suspect it still had a lot of trans fats, but I don't have information on the composition). I quit just after that, but I think they switched the fat used again in the early 2000s to something that was pure vegetable oil.
> The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
That would require that the individuals involved actually have taste. Instead, as with everything else from this administration, it's a toot on their favourite dog whistle.
Nah, it's just the US reinventing the German Antiqua-Fraktur dispute from more than a century ago, where only Fraktur was appropriate for expressing serious Germanic ideas. A sans typeface is un-German... ahh, un-American!
Of course, a couple of decades after that, Fraktur was declared too Jewish and thoroughly eradicated, killing among other things the sole remaining independent strain of Latin-script handwriting (other than the dominant one invented as a book-copying aid by the Italian humanists, thus “italic”).
Wasn't it mostly Hitler's personal dislike for it? That and the fact that readers in the greater Reich (the bits outside Germany) wouldn't be familiar with, or able to read, Fraktur
> In leftist popular culture there is a love for modernist style architecture, minimalism, and a disrespect for building beautiful things that cost a lot of money or time.
Which leftist popular culture? I mean sure, there was bauhaus, but it’s not like banks are putting up neo-gothic office buildings, they’re putting up spires of glass.
I prefer the protestant restrained aesthetic. Spiritual over material. Governmental buildings should be tastefully humble. It is a signal that the government is a servant of the people.
What’s an example that you’re thinking of? I think this can make sense - I mean if you have a town of 5,000 people and a government office there or something you probably don’t need a big, giant, building (unless that’s the message you’re trying to send). It’s also impractical from a cost-standpoint.
Federal buildings though should have gravitas and signify importance. If they don’t, and/or we think the government isn’t important, I’ll take my tax dollars back, thank you very much.
You can liken this to how western countries are leaving Christianity. Who can believe in God when you drive a Jeep to your mega church next to Costco and everyone is wearing sweatpants? (I’m not particularly spiritual but I see the problems here)
In Europe, Protestant churches are generally built much more humble than Catholic ones, because they are built with different philosophies in mind. (I am not familiar with American churches, so no comments there)
Similarly, I prefer government buildings to go for a similar route. It doesn’t mean that buildings have to ugly or small. But similar to Protestant churches it can humble, functional and elegant at the same time.
I do find it faintly ironic that Sort Of Greek Or Roman Or Something architecture was the villain in Ayn Rand's novel.
Living here in DC I don't especially mind Federalist Architecture, even though it does look like somebody saw some photos of Rome and Athens and kinda mashed them together. But I don't love insisting that a 19th century view of the second century BC must forevermore be the only possible taste.
If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it. It’s not necessarily about a 19th century view of 2nd century BC architectural concepts (which itself is a bit of a farce of a comment) but more so about anchoring the longevity and legitimacy of governmental institutions to a historical heritage.
Similarly I wouldn’t recommend, say, that the Afghani people or Mongolia for example build federalist or Greco-Roman style architecture for their government buildings as it wouldn’t make much sense and wouldn’t have any basis in their history.
There’s also some science to it and we know the asymmetrical buildings and buildings which make entrances and other expected features hard to find cause measurable levels of stress and anxiety in the observer. Hostile architecture.
I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.
Well I wouldn’t argue Afghanistan is part of the Middle East culturally or geographically, but even if you did want to argue that, Alexander came and conquered that area for a little bit and then left. It wasn’t ever really culturally Greek.
But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.
Because its not real. He is completely right its a 19th century cargo cult of classicism. Its a modern anachronistic mashup of various old styles, I can bet if you asked an actual Greek or Roman era expert they will say these buildings combine elements 500 600 years apart.
I like how it looks but its also lazy and cheesy, I can't blame people who think we need more styles.
You’re missing the point. The styles aren’t meant to be 1-1 matches of Greek or Roman architecture, they’re rather good attempts at building and designing our governments buildings which that they harken to where our legal and cultural traditions hail from. That’s why the Capitol looks the way it does.
I’m not sure how that’s lazy or cheesy. I’m certainly open minded to other styles but they need to be rooted in western civilization. Otherwise you wind up with silly things like replicas of the Eiffel Tower in weirdly designed and inappropriate little French mockup towns, or you wind up with the lowest common denominator - Wal-Mart and strip malls.
Its literally in the name, neoclassicism. All I am saying is why did you say its "farcical" that its a modern view of an old style?
I think it is a lazy copy paste of old tropes. I know because I can see these tendencies in myself too. I like some old styles and if I had my way I could keep listening to newer bands that replicate this style my whole life. But the thing is, without the original inspirational fire behind the style its just a nice copy.
I see you had dissed on brutalism some time before, I really don't understand why. I feel at least in some ways brutalism is a non-pastiche manner achieves things like the imposing sense of grandeur and power of classical architecture.
> If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it.
Carolingian architecture didn't just cargo cult, they literally pilfered Roman columns and integrated them into anachronistic designs. If I recall my art history class correctly, the columns from Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel were "repurposed" (looted) from a Roman temple. [1]
This is also an example of architectural skeuomorphism: designing something in a way reminiscent of an older thing, to borrow the associations people have with it. In this case, Roman authority.
As an American I think they’re tacky too. That style of architecture for an airport doesn’t make sense really. Well. I bet it could be pulled off. But the “architects” designing the airports are the same people designing Greco-Roman architecture on disfigured American McMansions.
Art Decó, on the other hand, would look pretty Americana and elegant for your buildings.
It's basically the classical American city depiction for Europeans (noir movies, Superman, old comic strips from newspapers...)
Yea I don’t mind Art Deco at all. I think the car company Cadillac, which is based in the Detroit area, which is in my mind where I think of as the home of that style (even if it’s not), started including Art Deco as part of their design language and I think it’s a good use.
The leftists think trump is a dictator. The right thinks trump is an irresponsibly spending warmonger. And everyone thinks the entire damn government is rife with all sorts of bad things.
What Trump and Friends(TM) are doing here is basically stylizing the government to mimic things people associate with legitimacy since that's in short supply to the government these days. Serif fonts that harken back to when documents were for serious things and handwriting was the less formal format. Greco-roman government buildings and other "antique-ish" styles that subtly imply the legitimacy of the institution therein always has been and always will be.
Likewise I would bet a lot of money that over the next 20yr we don't see many/any 1920s-60s government buildings renovated to remove that aesthetic because people associate those decades with government that seemingly was functional.
Your last paragraph has it totally backwards. The government puts on this huge stupid show of looking big and important and fancy in order to distance itself from the fact that at the end of the day it's an organization that's fairly capriciously deploying violence.
Well, to encapsulate your point here - you don’t believe in the legitimacy of government so of course any attempt by the government to legitimize itself you’d find disagreeable. Is that right?
Projecting an image of legitimacy behooves the government because it makes everything they do (and there is almost always someone who loses dearly whenever the government does something) that much less likely to be resisted. Government is always pushing at the limits of its authority or at least going right up to them so just "seeming" a little more legitimate in the minds of as many people as possible pays back because at the margin that turns into a bunch of fights you don't have to fight, all the work you don't have to do to justify your actions, the appeals that aren't filed, etc, etc.
Think about how HN just takes whatever the EPA says at face value vs scrutinizing ICE. Every office, department, etc, etc, aspires to get the EPA treatment from as much of society as possible. Acting the part is part is part of that.
npm did not always do it right, and IMO still does not do it completely right (nor does pnpm, my preferred replacement for npm -- but it has `--frozen-lockfile` at least that forces it to do the right thing) because transitive dependencies can still be updated.
cargo can also update transitive dependencies (you need `--locked` to prevent that).
Ruby's Bundler does not, which is preferred and is the only correct default behaviour. Elixir's mix does not.
I don't know whether uv handles transitive dependencies correctly, but lockfiles should be absolute and strict for reproducible builds. Regardless, uv is an absolute breath of fresh air for this frequent Python tourist.
npm will not upgrade transient dependencies if you have a lockfile. All the `forzen-lockfile` or `npm ci` commands does is prevent upgrades if you have incompatible versions specified inside of `package.json`, which should never happen unless you have manually edited the `package.json` dependencies by hand.
(It also removed all untracked dependencies in node_modules, which you should also never have unless you've done something weird.)
In cold weather, one should always dress for 5℃ warmer than the temperature outside when you have a bike longer than 5 km. Runners pretty much have to do the same. Your body heat and good layering will take care of everything else.
Don't need one in Toronto within a ½ day or so of the snow stopping for the major bicycle routes (including the MGT).
Calgary apparently also does a good job of clearing its bike lanes.
And I do my Costco shopping by bike year-round. I think I've used the car for large purchases at Costco twice in the last year.
I _rarely_ drive my car anywhere in Toronto, and find the streets on bike safer than most of the sidewalks in January -- they get plowed sooner than most homeowners and businesses clear the ice from their sidewalks.
And in Toronto we're rank amateurs at winter biking. Look at Montreal, Oslo, or Helsinki for even better examples. Too bad we've got a addle-brained carhead who doesn't understand public safety or doing his own provincial as our premier.
I've made a private MacPorts port[1]; if I find that I use it frequently enough, I might contribute it to the main MacPorts port repo[2].
One thing that's missing from my perspective (and this is probably true for Homebrew packaging as well, but I don't do that) is Git tags / GitHub releases associated with your Cargo releases.
I can work around it for now by using an explicit release (`9ccd9bf53f9a309ccda42b5c17e9c1056493fb90` is what I'm assuming was your 0.1.0 release point).
I've also assumed that npm10 is sufficient (which currently installs node22 on MacPorts).
MacPorts separates `node` and `npm` packages like many package managers do:
npm10 @10.9.3 (devel)
Description: npm is a package manager for node. You can use it to install and publish your node programs. It manages dependencies and does other cool stuff.
Homepage: https://www.npmjs.com/
Library Dependencies: nodejs22
Conflicts with: npm3, npm4, npm5, npm6, npm7, npm8, npm9, npm11
Platforms: any
License: MIT
Policy: openmaintainer
The Portfile that I created specifies that if `npm` is present in $PATH (which isn't the user's $PATH because MacPorts uses `sudo`) then it should be used and assumed correct; otherwise, it says that the `npm10` port must be installed (because the instructions for oxdraw indicate that one must run `npm install && npm build`).
I think that trusted publishing has had a bigger impact than the gem signing that was introduced years ago and never worked well because the infrastructure wasn't present.
Olive oil? Peanut oil? No and (mostly) no.
Compared to hydrogenated margarine that was pushed a couple of decades ago before we learned about trans-fats? Of course.
If you use it when cooking for guests, you should disclose that you're using it (especially for non-meat dishes) because it may add extra fat that they're not OK with or consider inappropriate for personal dietary consumption (they're vegetarian, don't eat beef products, whatever).
I have a friend for whom we can't use anything that has sunflower oil in it, which is _really hard to avoid_ in surprising ways (there are spice blends that I use which have a bit of sunflower oil in the mixes).
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