U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life

Omg this is George Santos’s résumé. Insanity. Just pure lies and not even believable ones. pic.twitter.com/gffXl9twW9

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) January 11, 2023

KM, i frankly don’t give a fuck— cooking on an electric stove sucks ass, as a majority of cooks will tell you, and all of those articles are part of a continuous effort to shift the blame of industrial pollution and climate change onto normal people who don’t and can’t actually have much effect on these things.

Electric range is good if you are in a dorm freshman year and need a hotplate. After that, fuck no.

"if you have to cook on electric, you might as well go out to eat" - quote from a bougie kitchen magazine 20 years ago, still true

and yes, hard agree that personal choices are not the problem here, at all, ever

Electric is fine, you just can't crank it to high and expect to cut heat immediately so you have to plan ahead (except for induction, where you can control heat much finer than gas).

I've never lived anywhere with a useful vent-a-hood so high heat cooking is pretty much irrelevant anyway. When I had a gas stove I bought a plug-in induction burner that I used 99% of the time anyway.

Well, this thread took a turn.

I have an electric range. I live in an building about 45 years old.

As for indoor air pollution, I can understand concerns about it for some individuals and families, but frankly I just think that the pervasive desire to get rid of every harmful thing in our environments has led to anxiety, fear, and a culture of paranoia. For most people, a gas stove isn’t going to kill them. Shit, these boomers keep staying alive and they grew up in a world where everyone smoked indoors, constantly!

I’ve got a very “cold dead hands” attitude towards gas stoves myself

i have a gas stove and it’s good but gas ovens are terrible ime. they only have a bottom element ime wtf (to get heat from above you have to use “the broiler” drawer?!)

but like, i would be fine with switching to an electric stove. i’ve cooked on them before. like…. whatever. and if you’re really concerned with getting your pan immediately hot (do you work in a restaurant?) get a carbon steel pan or gtfo, that heavy tefal aluminum with a dementia-tastic coating takes twice as long to heat up

these boomers keep staying alive

To swerve again:

interesting and scary article about Montana, seems like a blueprint that is happening in a lot of places. This shouldn’t be paywalled, gift article so to speak:

”If you want to live here, be a Christian “

Quite possibly the cigarette smoking indoors led them to vote for Reagan, Bush, Trump, etc.

As I understand the reporting, the greatest harm of gas stoves is increasing asthma rates in children? Obv if you're an adult in your own home do what you want. The salient fact, to me, is how long fossil fuel/natural gas interests have suppressed this info, which has apparently been "known" for like 30 years??

interesting and scary article about Montana, seems like a blueprint that is happening in a lot of places. This shouldn’t be paywalled, gift article so to speak:

”If you want to live here, be a Christian “

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

I read a poignant response to that article this afternoon.

lol not to derail further but the ability to suddenly reduce pan heat from full blast to low is a key component of gas burners, and yeah it is pretty much needed for a fair amount of foodie recipes/tricks/sauces/desserts/etc

I'm sure I would work around this if I was using electric, have another burner standing by on low and switch, but still

In related news, apparently FIREPLACES in the home are HORRIBLE for air quality for children and adults and everyone around you who might possibly smell it and thereby inhale dangerous particles.

my childhood, ruined

THANKS IO (j/k nice to see u)

the entire time I was growing up we heated with a wood stove

Sorry, pal.

I had plenty of family that leaked methane all the time. Probably explains some things as it was definitely not good for air quality.

The spiritual succor of splitting a stack of wood and building a fire in a stove and getting a good coal going absolutely outweighs any negative physical effects from being near that stove, afaic. The thing I hate most about living in the city is actually that we don’t and can’t have a wood burning stove.

I had plenty of family that leaked methane all the time.

did you try telling them to stop eating beans?

a wood burning stove and an open fireplace are pretty different

i mean smoke from like wood burning is obviously not good for you. at least it kinda smells good though? gas pollution a little iffy i guess but idk whatever. car pollution is the absolute worst though. we knew that many decades ago and yes it's somewhat better with low emission vehicles but my personal crank opinion is that whatever is coming out of low emission vehicles is as toxic as ever. though not electric vehicles tbf. i live in a place where a weird weather phenomenon called an inversion makes it so that 'normal' car pollution is amplified like 100x during the winter. it's all compressed in one layer near the ground where it builds up for weeks on end. to me it feels like you're breathing in sublimated plastic-bag. it feels incredibly incredibly shitty. the only real solution to all of this is to reduce car dependency afaict, but that is politically not even comprehensible here, like basically unutterable, because socialism and the car industry, but every year we get a lot of messaging from local gov about programs to switch your wood-burning stove for gas or electric heating. always feels like a big red herring - how many people still use wood burning stoves? smoke from a few fires is not really a problem here. unless we're talking about wildfires lol.

Suing you guys for the damage to my thumb from having to scroll past all this stove talk

it's the hot stove league of american politics

NPR got desperate after Car Talk had to end.

Is it better than experiencing the tree and its roots? Sometimes pain has to be endured and becomes bittersweet even if you are responsible.

1.9 percent of households in the US still use wood as the main heat source, youn. it’s a small number. and many of those households would be unable to heat their homes in winter without using wood, for any number of reasons, but mostly economic— living in an area where wood is so plentiful (and second growth, natch) that heating a home for the winter can cost thousands less than heating with gas or electric is a reality!

“the nanny state has gone too far” is not a position I would have expected this borad to take

I use a mikeywave

So is it better to go outside and use a propane grill y/n

i have a gas stove and it’s good but gas ovens are terrible ime.

Sorry to continue the stove talk, but otm. Best would be a hybrid gas range/electric oven.

They have those

lol I almost said I assume they exist but I wasn't going to google it because I don't want to start thinking about buying a new stove.

They’re called “dual fuel”

“the nanny state has gone too far” is not a position I would have expected this borad to take

― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, January 11, 2023 5:36 PM (fifty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Tbh I am impressed that I wasn't FPed and banned, cheers to the rest of you who are cookin' with gas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You'll have to take gas from my hot, charred fingers ...

thanking god the last word was what it was

My partner recently read Electrify by Saul Griffith - and found his model of a clean energy future quite compelling (if I understand the thesis correctly, it is that converting households to all-electric ASAP is the quickest and most palatable way to wean society off fossil fuels).

She went straight out and bought a small induction cooktop for about $60 Australian and uses that in preference to our gas stove (we have solar and our oven is electric already - per the hybrid model above). She is a keen cook and finds it better in many ways.

Obviously, there are plenty of passions in this thread! But personally, I see it as one of those situations where consumers might have to put up with some small differences/inconveniences while infrastructure gets to grips with lowering emissions.

Naturally I am prepared to be torn to pieces for my unsolicited thoughts here.

(*wean society off fossil fuels in this usage = excluding heavy industry, manufacturing etc, for which he proposes other alternatives)

that's what I said now

a continuous effort to shift the blame of industrial pollution and climate change onto normal people who don’t and can’t actually have much effect on these things

afaics, the infrastructure that discovers, pumps and pipes "natural gas" to hundreds of millions of homes globally is industrial in scale. leakage at well heads and in transport applies just as much no matter who the eventual user is and what matters isn't how small each individual customer is but the cumulative amount of CO2 generated in aggregate. I would agree that a single customer deciding to forego a gas appliance makes no real difference, but actions taken at the scale of government regulation DO make a difference and claiming that government regulation of individual use is no different than individual choice is pure rationalization, because you like to cook with gas and don't want to change.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmPBNMeXEAA5kIB?format=jpg&name=large

I’d be curious to see this for Europe pic.twitter.com/rlVdfYDNNE

— DEI coordinator for sinaloa cartel (@Forever_Wario) January 11, 2023

guess you’re lucky to live in a LIBERAL OASIS with your CHEF-STYLE GAS STOVE

just kidding this is all very dumb

i think gas stoves should be banned if only because it would annoy the worst utility i have to give me money to

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-fossil-fuel-industry-convinced-americans-to-love-gas-stoves/

Unbeknownst to both, Truong wasn’t their neighbor at all, but an account manager for Imprenta Communications Group. Among the public relations firm’s clients was Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, a front for the nation’s largest gas utility, SoCalGas, which aims to thwart state and local initiatives restricting the use of fossil fuels in new buildings. c4bes had tasked Imprenta with exploring how platforms such as Nextdoor could be used to engineer community support for natural gas. Imprenta assured me that Truong’s post was an isolated affair, but c4bes displays it alongside two other anonymous Nextdoor comments on its website as evidence of its advocacy in action.

btw the usual proposal is to ban gas hookups in new construction for the same reason we ban new lead paint. it's not to send the IRS into your home to take away your stove and strip the existing lead paint from your wall. if you like them you can keep them.

Aimless, again, I don’t care whether you consider my correct opinion rationalization or not. The proposal is government overreach. It’s refusing to address the massive amounts of pollution and waste made by industrial actors and the MIC, and instead legislating how people can live— because yes, for some of us, cooking and food are actually important parts of the fabric of our lives, and not just obligations or afterthoughts.

Here's a thought: cooking and food may be an important part of life for people with electric stoves as well.

That’s true, and I bet that a lot of those people would be better cooks and make better food with a gas range. Every person I know with an electric range wishes they had gas.