This is why I think the ultra-processed term doesn't mean what people think. Just because I ran some tomatoes through a blender and strainer doesn't make them less healthy but it does make it ultra-processed. The health effects and the processing don't always have a lot to do with each other. It's more about removing or adding components to the food. To me, that makes "ultra-processed" a misleading term.

And yet you need both fats and carbohydrates in a healthy diet. Fries with some grilled fish and veggies is a fine meal.

That's the point: the terms "healthy" and "unhealthy" are far to broad and un-nuanced to be useful. There's nothing especially bad about making fries once a month. Eating a big batch three meals a day is another story. The dose makes the poison.

I get your point. Some classifications are easy. Some less so. I should avoid too much fat, just like I should avoid too much sugar and protein.

The issue is someone decided to bucketize foods by fat content and that's how formula and hot dogs wind up in the same category. I'm sure it's accurate by whatever metric got agreed upon. The issue is it seems it was a lousy metric: the amount and types of fat a baby needs is way different from what you and I need.

I guess what I'm arguing is that having very simply defined categories can obscure information as well as clarify it. I mean, I could have a very simple bucket, "food", and that's both very clear and very unhelpful.

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? Things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. If we over-simplify advice, we create all sorts of political battles, opportunities for corruption, and unfortunate behavior lead by hucksters. "Fat is bad!" is way too imprecise, as is "eat only what a caveman could find."

If we make the advice more nuanced, people TL;DR it. I have no idea how much of what kinds of fats I should get in my diet and no way of knowing how much I'm actually eating. It's just not worth it to me to figure that out.

And at some point, people decide eating chili cheese Fritos is worth any negative health effects. Life is about more than just living as long as possible.

Food and most other substances in the real world exist on a spectrum. There's likely no sharp dividing line between "processed" and "ultra processed". There's no vast gulf between "health" and "unhealthy" food.

I think we're probably better off not trying to put foods into buckets (unless it's a bucket of fried chicken). I know it's an attempt to simplify things for people who don't have the time or inclination to read food labels, if a food label even exists. But at some point we're arguing about whether a hot dog is a taco or a sandwich.

That said, the worry about microplastics is the particles can be quite a bit smaller than smoke or dust. Small enough that our lung linings can't block them.

I have no idea how much of a worry that is because, y'know, context and numeracy. If each lung cell absorbs one particle every 10 years, is that really a worry? Maybe it is, maybe not. And if it can be shown to cause problems, how bad are those problems compared to other things (like food borne diseases transmitted by re-used glass containers or infectious diseases spreading because of vaccine hesitancy)?

My understanding, and I live in the Bay Area, is most of the central valley air pollution is from farm equipment exhaust, agricultural petrochemicals, and particulate matter from burning field chaff. Air in the coastal cities is actually pretty clean.

I may gripe about gas prices here but our special formulations seem to have cleaned the air up.

I respectfully suggest you're way off. Any air pollution generated in China would need to cross 6,000 miles of open ocean. By the time it arrives here, it's thoroughly mixed and diluted with the ambient air. Given the global air currents, it might not even arrive in California, the jet stream arching through Alaska and Canada before it reaches the left coast.

It's adorable that a labor union wants to protect jobs. Good job, buddy!

Color me unpersuaded. I want us to take a consumer welfare first approach because that's what's really important. Forcing us to waste resources by keeping people doing something a machine can do better and cheaper makes no long term sense.

If customers decide their welfare is best served by having humans do the work, that's great. If they decide cheap and automated is better, so be it. What a Luddite labor union wants is totally irrelevant.

Yeah, I'd like some context too. 68k particles sounds like a lot. But for comparison, how many dust particles do I inhale every day? How many actual dust mites? How many non-plastic particles of various sizes do we inhale?

A human lung has something like 10-100 billion cells. That means we inhale one particle per lung cell every 15 years. Are the consequences of this measurable? Or are the health consequences of sitting at a desk all day ranting to strangers far worse?

Do they, though? Some of the worst air quality in California is in the central valley, a vast agricultural region.

I don't know about anyone else. I don't think anyone particularly cares when a suit talks about leveraging our synergies. Fine, whatever, everyone knows what that means in normal English.

What gets in the way as a grunt engineer is knowing what all the TLAs and project codenames mean.

According to the Wiki article about it, it's only really been in use since around 2000. It seems it really picked up steam around 2010. Near as I can tell, the current SCOTUS really believes Congress has to be explicit in delegating authority.

I don't think the doctrine has been in play long enough to say who it affects more. Problem is, many cases take years to hit SCOTUS so the president causing the problem may be long gone by the time a decision is handed down.

Given that every POTUS this century has been pretty happy exercising unbridled authority, I don't think there's really a partisan bent.

The SCOTUS has been increasingly using the major questions doctrine to limit executive action. The major questions doctrine, for those just joining, says that if the President wants to make a substantial and nationally significant decision about how to interpret a law, that interpretation must be supported by clear language in the bill indicating that was Congress' intent.

In this case, the CIHPS act was passed to give money away. It does not say anything about buying a stake in the company. That seems like a pretty large change to me. If Congress wanted to buy companies, they could have clearly said so in the bill.

That said, I haven't read the CHIPS act to maybe there's some ambiguous language.

Beats the heck out of me. The bedrock principle in American politics these days seem to be "My team, right or wrong." It drives me bonkers.

...is right twice a day.

This is the first time I've heard of Vance doing something I approve of. I don't like the man or his opinions but he's on the right side of this one.