No VPN partners or other bullshit, just great content enjoyed by a large variety of people. Most of military food interest, some use it for sleeping, or for better apetite under medical treatments.
His reviews of those old MRE cigarettes are amazing. He makes it seem like he's smoking pure ecstasy (figuratively, actually, w'ever). I've never smoked but watching those segments I'm jonesing hard to smoke one of those.
> Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.
Tom Scott did a video in 2019 entitled "This Video Is Sponsored By [redacted] VPN" where he explains why a lot of the ad copy at that time was often misleading, and why he didn't take money from them:
One of the main reasons you see so much advertising for them is because it's very easy to sell and very easy to get a partner account. They hand out those custom promo links to creators like candy.
More like "scareware", maybe not quite to the term, but they generally advertise on 'aren't you scared of the threats on the web?? well here they are so you should be scared! buy product' kind of thing. There are legitimate uses, but they can be so benign and almost irrelevant to whatever security pitch (like...getting around georestrictions)
Depending on what you need them for. Privacy? Your VPN provider will know your traffic but your ISP won't. Circumvention of georestrictions? Preventing problems when torrenting? Circumventing the GFC? There are many applications.
I use AirVPN myself. It is not as comfortable and convenient as Astrill but works for me. (Disclaimer: No affiliation and I have not tried AirVPN in China yet)
Israel has similar artifacts, both of WW2 under the British Empire and of the subsequent austerity/rationing during the state's first decade.
1. During WW2 the British established a ration of "standard bread" to eliminate wheat imports. This is still the price-controlled bread type, and led to the replacement of some pita consumption.
2. The austerity years coincided with (and were in large part caused by) a rapid doubling of the population by expellees from Arab countries. Lots of them were used to rice, but with food rationing and price controls were in place, rice would have been a strain on government finances. So the state pushed "Ben Gurion Rice", aka Israeli/pearl couscous, a good-enough substitute that could be made from cheap American wheat imports.
I'm sure there's more hiding under the surface, I just don't know all the history.
I'm struggling to imagine what would happen in the modern day if the US government went to war and tried to resort to WWII-style rationing. Limited meat, limited sugar, limited gasoline, a national speed limit of 35 MPH to save on tires... I legitimately think that the country would collapse.
Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.
Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.
Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
Making people stay home is a more major restriction than rationing non-essential goods. Social interaction is more fundamentally important to humans than being able to eat chocolate etc.
> Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
Overproduction was the problem at the time, not shortages. There was a shortage of money caused by loans - it was impossible to make money to both buy all the goods and pay all the loans. This is why money lending has to be banned, as it makes the markets stuck like this and causes a depression when the economy improves.
you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a couple months with world war two rations.
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
I'm no sociologist but WW2 was different in that they had one (or more) common enemies, same with post-9/11; if Americans have a common enemy, they can tolerate a lot of shit.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
> we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers.
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits.
So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job.
It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks.
So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.”
People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
It would be a totally different world, but I expect we would adjust. People are surprisingly adaptive, you just don't expect it beforehand and don't notice it after.
We spent a total of 262 days (by an NYT estimate, though the rules varied throughout that period) in lockdown throughout the pandemic. Did it suck mightily? Yes. Did we get through it? Yes.
(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens.
I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
It is important to note that people in 1939 often did not have experience with this either. A lot of WWII rationing and planning focused on educating people on how to do these things in the first place.
One thing I learned after moving to a rural agriculture area is how few farmers produce their own food. It just doesn't happen with anyone farming commercially.
We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
You may be interested in the early 90s BBC series The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a series somewhat reenacting the homefront gardening effort in WWII Britain. It’s on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSxMUY_E07w
The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr
> I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it
What would you like to happen?
Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.)
I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
It probably depends... is it a necessary war for the legitimate defense of our country, or is it another bullshit futile war started by bankers or politicians trying to make some sort of twisted legacy for themselves?
Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well.
(And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
We wouldn’t because there is no reason to. All those restrictions back then were because fertilizer, gunpowder, and rubber were all naturally sourced and in limited supply. We have self-sufficient synthetic or domestic production of all now.
In all out war, all available production or very close to it gets repurposed for the war effort. Those or other new rationing limits would certainly come into play when the US gets into a war that threatens survival instead of the run of the mill "make sure we keep production going in case we need it later" wars that we're used to. Maybe it'd be no new iPhone models due to semiconductor rationing or things like that but there's always limits.
What? Do you not remember the war on terror or covid? Americans would bend over and ask to lick the boots for the nutritional value if a world war was going on.
If you like stories about historical food, check out tasting history! [0] His recent two episodes on the Titanic survivors are gut wrenching. [1]. He also does WWII content. [2]
This reminds me of the regulation Swiss army cookbook, which has many unchanged recipes. Each meal is designed to be easily prepared with limited ingredients and a simple barracks kitchen. The meals are rated by their digestibility and other factors. I have been looking for an English translation for a while
It must exist but I didn't find anything in a 5 minute search. You may have better luck if you are a native speaker. The cookbook is Swiss Army Regulation 60.6 d.
Several years back I ran across a mention of a british wartime cookbook which was meant for ration book ingredients, and contained a recipe literally titled something like "life sustaining glop". Anyone know which this might have been?
I went to a Quaker summer camp in the mountains of Maryland in my youth. Once a week everyone went out on various overnight camping trips. Dinner was always "glop". It was just a mass of nutritious stuff that could be cooked in a pot over a campfire -- tuna, noodles, cheese, dried whatever, water which would be sterile after boiling. If you'd been hiking all day, it was delicious.
Shiloh alum here (my sister went to Catoctin)! My memory of camp food is pretty poor, but one dish I do remember is couscous with gato gato sauce. Canoeing or rock climbing trips had better food because you could carry more gear.
Though I've never heard of the term it's likely a nutrient-rich substance that contains what is needed to "life sustain". Maybe it was a powder that when mixed with water would turn into something that could be consumed. It definitely doesn't sound delicious but hey, when life is on the line, it should not matter much.
I only had it recently for the first time. Despite being widely seen in the US as a "poor people" food, inflation seems to have hit Spam pretty hard--I'm pretty sure the tin was over $4!
That said, while it looked rather unappetizing in its canned loaf shape, it's mostly pork shoulder, and after I cubed it and pan-fried it for a bit, it tasted like a crunchier ham steak. It was quite delightful when mixed into fried rice.
About 20 years ago I had a co-worker, transplanted from her native Hawaii to the Seattle area. Her cubicle was very nearly a shrine to Spam: nothing reminded her of home quite as much as Spam ads and such-like.
Me, the occasional fried spam sandwich is a delicious indulgence.
South Korea treats spam as a luxury good - it's a part of gift baskets and it can be found in budae-jigae - army based stew [1] (sometimes along with canned beans in sauce)
This is probably anathema to many, but I will cube spam and let it sit in a bowl of water for a few minutes. Likely leads to a huge reduction in salt and fat.
It's just a substitute for Bologna sausage... just handful of cans over few years with odd and specific recipes can be enjoyable, otherwise real sausages are simply better.
Processed food has been around in many forms for a long time (pasta and bread are processed food). You're thinking of ultra-processed foods, which came later.
This was, however, the start of a radical change in food culture in the US. WWII introduced refrigerated food transport, improvements in canning, and developing frozen and shelf-stable meals. The result was 2-3 decades of Americans eating TV dinners and canned foods, as well as the rapid expansion of fast food restaurants. The growth of supermarkets and year-round produce then shrank the available variety of foods, and intensive ag practices reduced the nutritional quality of those foods.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
> It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.
I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...
The definition of "ultra-processed foods" is governed by NOVA and its results are very suspect. Take a look at this boneless, skinless chicken breast [1]. It's considered an Unprocessed or Minimally Processed Food. We know that there's no way chicken breasts just "fall off" chickens like this: animals are killed, skinned, cleaned, butchered, and then packaged to get this product. This firm tofu [2] on the other hand? It's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries. Among many other problems, there's a huge bias in the NOVA system for food that Western diets consider "primitive".
While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.
Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.
If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity
why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.
Readit News
No VPN partners or other bullshit, just great content enjoyed by a large variety of people. Most of military food interest, some use it for sleeping, or for better apetite under medical treatments.
Never gets old :')
Tom Scott did a video in 2019 entitled "This Video Is Sponsored By [redacted] VPN" where he explains why a lot of the ad copy at that time was often misleading, and why he didn't take money from them:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
In 2022 he made video with an ad read from a VPN provider with more honest claims about their use cases:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlQuTRSmzc
You may want to consider this Helloween deal: 3 years for 65 Euros: https://airvpn.org/buy/
I use AirVPN myself. It is not as comfortable and convenient as Astrill but works for me. (Disclaimer: No affiliation and I have not tried AirVPN in China yet)
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1. During WW2 the British established a ration of "standard bread" to eliminate wheat imports. This is still the price-controlled bread type, and led to the replacement of some pita consumption.
2. The austerity years coincided with (and were in large part caused by) a rapid doubling of the population by expellees from Arab countries. Lots of them were used to rice, but with food rationing and price controls were in place, rice would have been a strain on government finances. So the state pushed "Ben Gurion Rice", aka Israeli/pearl couscous, a good-enough substitute that could be made from cheap American wheat imports.
I'm sure there's more hiding under the surface, I just don't know all the history.
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Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.
Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.
Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits.
So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job.
It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks.
So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.”
People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens.
I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr
(Findable on Dailymotion)
What would you like to happen?
Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.)
I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well.
(And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
Resources like aluminum, copper, rubber, pharmaceuticals, chips and rare earth elements.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/@TastingHistory [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7kGq4Ieak [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ROieDwLBw
Is there no point that's too far!? Unbelievable!
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https://vsmk.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/60_006_d.pdf-Koch...
That said, while it looked rather unappetizing in its canned loaf shape, it's mostly pork shoulder, and after I cubed it and pan-fried it for a bit, it tasted like a crunchier ham steak. It was quite delightful when mixed into fried rice.
Counterexample: spam fritters. Those and badly cooked ox liver were the two worst school dinners I ever had to force down (Brit, 1970s)
Me, the occasional fried spam sandwich is a delicious indulgence.
I assumed it indicated some customer-base with a significant level of nostalgia for the product.
[1] - https://youtu.be/-aO9pSOpA5Y
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This was, however, the start of a radical change in food culture in the US. WWII introduced refrigerated food transport, improvements in canning, and developing frozen and shelf-stable meals. The result was 2-3 decades of Americans eating TV dinners and canned foods, as well as the rapid expansion of fast food restaurants. The growth of supermarkets and year-round produce then shrank the available variety of foods, and intensive ag practices reduced the nutritional quality of those foods.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.
I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...
While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.
Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.
If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.
[1]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3266980891411/filet-...
[2]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/8410789140118/tofu-f...
why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.
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