Buy an eye mask for "can’t-see-your-hand darkness"
I've tried several $6-12 amazon sleep masks and they all work great. Even in a dark room I'll fall asleep faster and stay asleep much longer. It even makes afternoon naps possible. As long as it's not a $1 airline mask: it's got a bit of foam padding so the mask isn't directly against my eyelids.
The rouladen windows provide other benefits than total darkness. As they sit outside the window, they provide protection from severe weather. A company would make millions in hurricane country. Not only would they provide better protection than plywood sheets, nobody has to nail them up or pull them off and store them. They also provide light through rectangular openings unless they are rolled all the way down.
Rolladen (and many other companies) make hurricane shutters for sale in the United States. I can't compare them side by side, but they appear to be identical to European Rolladen shutters with heavier debris protection. I think this one is just wrong. They're available, they're just not customarily installed outside of hurricane country.
Grass roofs (aka green roofs) are also readily available in the US.
I love my puffy mask which sits directly against my eyelids. It’s now difficult to sleep without the pressure on my eyelids. The pouch is full of buckwheat (or something similar, I’m not a botanist) and was originally scented with lavender. I’ve had it so long the strap is going.
> Ethical Bans: Haggis, Scotland’s national dish, has been banned in the USA since 1971 because the USDA prohibits sheep lung in food. Many other delicacies like whale and shark are similarly banned.
This isn't an ethical ban. USDA banned all livestock lungs on 17 June 1971 based on a study from December 1969 that found abormalities in beef lungs.and the difficulty of inspecting lung materials. It's not similar to the ban on whale meat under U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, U.S. Code, vol. 16, secs. 1361-1421 (1972) excepting certain Alakasan indigenous peoples, to conform to international treaties, or shark meat which is not banned as such by USDA.
The approval was for bemotrizinol, but there are many other banned ingredients which are relied on for many of the beloved sunscreens. Although someone pointed out on /r/slatestarcodex that Amazon is now selling some grey market Asian sunscreens at not such an expensive price.
I hear this a lot. It's total BS. I should take a picture of the cheese sections at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. Or even the Safeway I was just at yesterday (except supermarket managers frown on picture-taking).
Not so much the selection of cheeses as the quality of American cheese. Maybe I’m totally out of date, but the last road trip I did, up the Pacific highway from San Diego to San Francisco and then to Phoenix via Vegas, I saw virtually no decent American cheese.a few French ones in a couple of restaurants and one rather nice Brie style Californian one.
Also, you're crazy, if you're going to places with horrid, horrid milk (desert California?), and looking for "good cheese." PA has some of the best milk in the western hemisphere. Come here, and good cheese is everywhere!
PA has better milk than CA? Entirely possible. I won't argue.
However, if you can get some unbiased subjects (not from PA or CA) to compare a Cowgirl Creamery cheese to the identical type from Pleasant Lane Farms, in a Triangle Test, I'll be curious about the results.
Hershey PA specifically has the second best milk in the Western Hemisphere (the best is down in South America). Not that I'm citing cheese from there, mind you.
I don't think you can find the same cheese from the two sellers, strangely enough. Pleasant Lane's doing Gouda, Cheddar and Curds (and Quark). I think these are ... more populated than what Cowgirl Creamery is doing.
Looking at awards:
"1st Place, 2024, World Dairy Expo(Brick, Havarti, Gouda)
3rd Place, 2024 American Cheese Society, MC Farmstead Category
Gold Medal, 2024 Los Angeles International Dairy Competition
2nd Place 2024, PA Farm Show
Silver Medal, World Cheese Awards (Norway)
1st Place 2023 World Diary Expo (Brick, Havarti, Gouda)
Silver Medal, 2023 Los Angeles International Dairy Competition
2nd place 2022 American Cheese Society, MC: Farmstead Category – Aged 60 days or more – 39% or higher Moisture – made from cow’s milk."
This is for just one of Pleasant Lane's cheeses. I think it's racking up more awards than Cowgirl (which may not mean as much as you'd like to think -- this is "it's consistently good" AND "we bothered submitting it again").
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation! If I'm ever in Cali again (unlikely, unless the Coast Starlight's still running), I'll definitely check it out!
Anyhow, I didn't find any obvious cheeses that were comparable. Cowgirl seems to give theirs cutesy names. I thought maybe "Triple Cream Brie" would be a candidate, but I didn't find that on Pleasant Lane.
There's also this place, whose cheeses are widely available:
My exception is only to prove your rule. We’re from the UK, and our Western states road trip a few years ago took us to Grand Junction, as unlikely a spot to find decent cheese as you could possibly imagine. We dined in a French-themed restaurant and before our astonished eyes appeared a selection including Langres - rare even in the UK - St Agur and aged Comté. All in perfect condition. So you just never know.
american chocolates are horrible. India now produces lots of artisinal chocolate brands which are quite affordable, even the dark version which is my favourite. Indian chocolate is one of the best kept secrets for chocolate afficionados.
Loved reading this Daniel- read it much more as a celebration of other cultures and what makes them interesting, not so much as “restrictions”, as it were. Lovely work
There is great "hyperlocal" food scattered throughout the US, but, guess what? It's only available locally! California is great for this: try going to the Anderson Valley in Mendocino and you will have some of the best wine and produce to be found anywhere (I lived in Spain for many years, I know good produce and wine). I have found great local produce and food in PA, NY, and NJ as well. But, those roller shutters...sigh. I used to work night shifts, I would have loved something like that.
In the US, almost impossible to buy maracuyá (a type of passion fruit in Peru). I’ve found one specialty grower that will ship you passion fruit grown in the US at the price of about $5 each.
In Peru they cost about ten cents.
That’s one thing I look forward to whenever I visit Lima. Buy a bag of these.
The company in Houston that installed *Rolladen* on my home in the 1990s is still in business. In addition to the darkness and glass protection during hurricanes, Rolladen also provide top-notch security. The strips interlock so tightly, it’s difficult to break in without power tools.
I liked the Rollac people because the owners were (are?) German. May have been an “after market” installation, but they understand that. Most *Rolladen* in Germany are installed on very old houses.
Odd because they are at every Russian or Eastern European market I’ve ever been to in the us! Like Google “Russian market” in any metro area and you’ll usually find them there. They must be importing them illegally but don’t seem to be facing any negative repercussions
I looked it up a little and it turns out kinder eggs are illegal to *import* but not illegal to sell! So stores who acquire them are not breaking the law selling them. They can be audited and have their kinder egg stock taken away, but apparently this rarely happens because enforcement is too costly (at least according to what I read)
I was talking abt Kinder Surprise. I didn’t know abt Kinder Joy. Per wikipedia:
“As of 2017 Kinder Joy eggs, a similar product, are being sold in the United States. Instead of a toy being encased in a chocolate egg, it is in an egg-shaped plastic package with the toy and chocolate separated. Kinder Surprise eggs are still illegal in the US, but remain popular on the black market.”
About that little electric car, for “city driving”: death trap! This is one of those cases where the US is correct to bar the import.
Many years ago, I was driving my little Honda sedan, in a very densely populated city — just the kind of city that would be perfect for a microcar, you might think. I braked for a stoplight. The, bam!An old woman driving a Volvo wagon (tank!) behind me had hit the gas instead of the brake. I was thrown forward, cracking a couple molars and incurring permanent damage to my cervical spine. My dog was thrown into the windshield. The back portion of my car accordioned, as it was designed to do. Had I been in a flimsy box like the one pictured, I would have been killed.
The 'car' illustrated the Citroen Ami is a voiture sans permis i.e so underpowered that in France you can drive one from 14 years and up. There are petrol Sorry gasoline versions with 400cc engines 30 mph speed limit.
Doesn’t matter how little power they have. Real cars and trucks are on the roads, too! Even in cities where congestion and tight streets keep the speed down, a rear-end collision in a thing like that would be catastrophic.
That's the real problem. The US was built on highways and interstate infrastructure which encouraged us to create bigger, more powerful cars to get to places farther away. This is opposed to older, European infrastructure where things are closer together and roads weren't designed for vehicles.
Yeah, it’s more of a food safety concern—concern about cross contamination of lung tissue during slaughtering, if I understand correctly. I wouldn’t call that an ethical concern the way one might consider foie gras or veal to be ethically worse than other meats
Buy an eye mask for "can’t-see-your-hand darkness"
I've tried several $6-12 amazon sleep masks and they all work great. Even in a dark room I'll fall asleep faster and stay asleep much longer. It even makes afternoon naps possible. As long as it's not a $1 airline mask: it's got a bit of foam padding so the mask isn't directly against my eyelids.
The rouladen windows provide other benefits than total darkness. As they sit outside the window, they provide protection from severe weather. A company would make millions in hurricane country. Not only would they provide better protection than plywood sheets, nobody has to nail them up or pull them off and store them. They also provide light through rectangular openings unless they are rolled all the way down.
When I went to uni in Miami for a year, the dorms all had hurricane shutters—horizontal metal blinds that you could lever shut.
Rolladen (and many other companies) make hurricane shutters for sale in the United States. I can't compare them side by side, but they appear to be identical to European Rolladen shutters with heavier debris protection. I think this one is just wrong. They're available, they're just not customarily installed outside of hurricane country.
Grass roofs (aka green roofs) are also readily available in the US.
And no eye mask will improve the insulation if your room! Or prevent burglars from entering.
You are correct but that’s not what I use it for
I love my puffy mask which sits directly against my eyelids. It’s now difficult to sleep without the pressure on my eyelids. The pouch is full of buckwheat (or something similar, I’m not a botanist) and was originally scented with lavender. I’ve had it so long the strap is going.
No, because then you have something on your face.
No! Blankets are bad because then you have something on your body
Kinder eggs with an actual toy…choking hazard!
To a toddler, everything is a choking hazard.
You can buy them at basically any European or Russian market in the US, maybe they skirt the rules, idk
I was going to note the same thing.
> Argentina works the other way around:
Seems like it works the exact same way?
> Ethical Bans: Haggis, Scotland’s national dish, has been banned in the USA since 1971 because the USDA prohibits sheep lung in food. Many other delicacies like whale and shark are similarly banned.
This isn't an ethical ban. USDA banned all livestock lungs on 17 June 1971 based on a study from December 1969 that found abormalities in beef lungs.and the difficulty of inspecting lung materials. It's not similar to the ban on whale meat under U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, U.S. Code, vol. 16, secs. 1361-1421 (1972) excepting certain Alakasan indigenous peoples, to conform to international treaties, or shark meat which is not banned as such by USDA.
Came on here to say this: haggis is not unethical lol
Iiuc better sunscreena recently got some approval and might be coming here in a few months
The approval was for bemotrizinol, but there are many other banned ingredients which are relied on for many of the beloved sunscreens. Although someone pointed out on /r/slatestarcodex that Amazon is now selling some grey market Asian sunscreens at not such an expensive price.
Our long national sunscreen nightmare is almost over: https://www.theverge.com/column/952744/optimizer-sunscreen-bemotrizinol-fda-health
I don’t think they were banned, they are just not fda approved. I have been buying things like this from Korea and Europe for years.
One thing I’ve noticed on my trips to the US is the lack of any kind of decent cheese.
Overall US dairy is pretty poor compared to Europe, but the cheese is dreadful!
I hear this a lot. It's total BS. I should take a picture of the cheese sections at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. Or even the Safeway I was just at yesterday (except supermarket managers frown on picture-taking).
Not so much the selection of cheeses as the quality of American cheese. Maybe I’m totally out of date, but the last road trip I did, up the Pacific highway from San Diego to San Francisco and then to Phoenix via Vegas, I saw virtually no decent American cheese.a few French ones in a couple of restaurants and one rather nice Brie style Californian one.
I had some amazing blue cheddar (yes, really). There's tons of really, really good cheese if you know where to look.
Actually, here, let me go to "down on it's luck latrobe":
www.pleasantlanefarms.com
Also, you're crazy, if you're going to places with horrid, horrid milk (desert California?), and looking for "good cheese." PA has some of the best milk in the western hemisphere. Come here, and good cheese is everywhere!
PA has better milk than CA? Entirely possible. I won't argue.
However, if you can get some unbiased subjects (not from PA or CA) to compare a Cowgirl Creamery cheese to the identical type from Pleasant Lane Farms, in a Triangle Test, I'll be curious about the results.
I'm not saying I'm placing a bet.
Hershey PA specifically has the second best milk in the Western Hemisphere (the best is down in South America). Not that I'm citing cheese from there, mind you.
I don't think you can find the same cheese from the two sellers, strangely enough. Pleasant Lane's doing Gouda, Cheddar and Curds (and Quark). I think these are ... more populated than what Cowgirl Creamery is doing.
Looking at awards:
"1st Place, 2024, World Dairy Expo(Brick, Havarti, Gouda)
3rd Place, 2024 American Cheese Society, MC Farmstead Category
Gold Medal, 2024 Los Angeles International Dairy Competition
2nd Place 2024, PA Farm Show
Silver Medal, World Cheese Awards (Norway)
1st Place 2023 World Diary Expo (Brick, Havarti, Gouda)
Silver Medal, 2023 Los Angeles International Dairy Competition
2nd place 2022 American Cheese Society, MC: Farmstead Category – Aged 60 days or more – 39% or higher Moisture – made from cow’s milk."
This is for just one of Pleasant Lane's cheeses. I think it's racking up more awards than Cowgirl (which may not mean as much as you'd like to think -- this is "it's consistently good" AND "we bothered submitting it again").
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation! If I'm ever in Cali again (unlikely, unless the Coast Starlight's still running), I'll definitely check it out!
what does "more populated" mean?
Anyhow, I didn't find any obvious cheeses that were comparable. Cowgirl seems to give theirs cutesy names. I thought maybe "Triple Cream Brie" would be a candidate, but I didn't find that on Pleasant Lane.
There's also this place, whose cheeses are widely available:
https://marinfrenchcheese.com/
I had to restack this because Substack won’t let me include links.
You should have done some googling. My links are all coastal, but I’d bet I could find some good cheese on the road to Vegas, too.
My exception is only to prove your rule. We’re from the UK, and our Western states road trip a few years ago took us to Grand Junction, as unlikely a spot to find decent cheese as you could possibly imagine. We dined in a French-themed restaurant and before our astonished eyes appeared a selection including Langres - rare even in the UK - St Agur and aged Comté. All in perfect condition. So you just never know.
You can buy Langres in my local Tesco
american chocolates are horrible. India now produces lots of artisinal chocolate brands which are quite affordable, even the dark version which is my favourite. Indian chocolate is one of the best kept secrets for chocolate afficionados.
Loved reading this Daniel- read it much more as a celebration of other cultures and what makes them interesting, not so much as “restrictions”, as it were. Lovely work
There is great "hyperlocal" food scattered throughout the US, but, guess what? It's only available locally! California is great for this: try going to the Anderson Valley in Mendocino and you will have some of the best wine and produce to be found anywhere (I lived in Spain for many years, I know good produce and wine). I have found great local produce and food in PA, NY, and NJ as well. But, those roller shutters...sigh. I used to work night shifts, I would have loved something like that.
We sell roller shutters in FL. They aren’t very popular because Americans want pretty over practical so they are usually just in commercial buildings.
They seem like they’d be good for severe weather protection. Is that why you have them in Florida? Hurricanes? Or is there some other reason?
In the US, almost impossible to buy maracuyá (a type of passion fruit in Peru). I’ve found one specialty grower that will ship you passion fruit grown in the US at the price of about $5 each.
In Peru they cost about ten cents.
That’s one thing I look forward to whenever I visit Lima. Buy a bag of these.
Seconding passionfruit! Had it fresh (American) in Puerto Rico. Doesn't keep worth anything (neither do mangos!).
In puerto rico, I got to drink running water out of a stream! (They test there, it's very uninhabited).
And so in Britain the purple skittle is blackcurrant, not grape. This goes for most purple cordials and sweets.
Ribena 4eva
Fancy toilets are becoming more available in the US. Kohler makes and advertises them.
You can also get Toto and other brands, but you’re going to have to go somewhere else other than Home Depot.
The company in Houston that installed *Rolladen* on my home in the 1990s is still in business. In addition to the darkness and glass protection during hurricanes, Rolladen also provide top-notch security. The strips interlock so tightly, it’s difficult to break in without power tools.
https://rollac.com
I also miss real Mon Cheri with cherry liqueur in the center.
I was about to say. I’m in Houston, too, and I was pretty sure you can get them here. You just need the right contractor or builder.
I liked the Rollac people because the owners were (are?) German. May have been an “after market” installation, but they understand that. Most *Rolladen* in Germany are installed on very old houses.
Kinder Eggs! Banned in the USA bc of small parts of the toys inside. Families have been arrested smuggling them in from Canada.
Odd because they are at every Russian or Eastern European market I’ve ever been to in the us! Like Google “Russian market” in any metro area and you’ll usually find them there. They must be importing them illegally but don’t seem to be facing any negative repercussions
yes the Polish place near the Trenton border has them
Interesting!
I looked it up a little and it turns out kinder eggs are illegal to *import* but not illegal to sell! So stores who acquire them are not breaking the law selling them. They can be audited and have their kinder egg stock taken away, but apparently this rarely happens because enforcement is too costly (at least according to what I read)
Sounds silly! Thanks
https://www.costco.com/p/-/kinder-joy-eggs-treat-toy-07-oz-20-count/4000335771
When costco sells, it's no longer banned.
I was talking abt Kinder Surprise. I didn’t know abt Kinder Joy. Per wikipedia:
“As of 2017 Kinder Joy eggs, a similar product, are being sold in the United States. Instead of a toy being encased in a chocolate egg, it is in an egg-shaped plastic package with the toy and chocolate separated. Kinder Surprise eggs are still illegal in the US, but remain popular on the black market.”
These ain’t Kinder Surprises tho!
About that little electric car, for “city driving”: death trap! This is one of those cases where the US is correct to bar the import.
Many years ago, I was driving my little Honda sedan, in a very densely populated city — just the kind of city that would be perfect for a microcar, you might think. I braked for a stoplight. The, bam!An old woman driving a Volvo wagon (tank!) behind me had hit the gas instead of the brake. I was thrown forward, cracking a couple molars and incurring permanent damage to my cervical spine. My dog was thrown into the windshield. The back portion of my car accordioned, as it was designed to do. Had I been in a flimsy box like the one pictured, I would have been killed.
The 'car' illustrated the Citroen Ami is a voiture sans permis i.e so underpowered that in France you can drive one from 14 years and up. There are petrol Sorry gasoline versions with 400cc engines 30 mph speed limit.
Doesn’t matter how little power they have. Real cars and trucks are on the roads, too! Even in cities where congestion and tight streets keep the speed down, a rear-end collision in a thing like that would be catastrophic.
That's the real problem. The US was built on highways and interstate infrastructure which encouraged us to create bigger, more powerful cars to get to places farther away. This is opposed to older, European infrastructure where things are closer together and roads weren't designed for vehicles.
Absolutely! Death traps. I’d rather take the bus than drive or ride in one of those things.
In Asia, a lot of people go about on motor bikes and scooters. These micro-cars are safer than two-wheelers, no?
But in Asia those two wheelers are usually traveling along with more motorbikes and scooters than cars. Safety in numbers?
True but cars have been increasing. In Delhi they outnumber two-wheelers in major roads.
“Hummus in Israel” 🤨
How is sheep lung an ‘ethical’ ban?
Yeah, it’s more of a food safety concern—concern about cross contamination of lung tissue during slaughtering, if I understand correctly. I wouldn’t call that an ethical concern the way one might consider foie gras or veal to be ethically worse than other meats
Thank you, I didnt know this!