I have used the water drop trick occasionally. Usually I cook an egg at higher temperature though. I wait until the oil smokes and fry it to get a golden brown crispy bottom. My favourite egg to throw on a noodle or rice bowl.

Both have their place. I think both stainless and carbon steel are extremely cheap in the long run compared to nonstick for the simple fact these pans don’t wear out. Both types of pans will last for generations and can take a real beating, even from metal utensils, though carbon steel does not give a damn about scratches whereas stainless can lose some aesthetic appeal (barkeepers friend can help polish it up though)!

Besides the chemical reactivity differences, stainless pans (especially clad pans with aluminum or copper cores) tend to be much faster to react to temperature changes than carbon steel. At the same time can’t hold as much thermal energy due to lower density, so carbon steel is better for searing a large piece of food without cooling down too much (which can start boiling the food instead of searing).

Yeah plus when cooking some foods in stainless (such as meat) you want some sticking so you can build a fond which you then deglaze to make a pan sauce. Carbon steel is less ideal for this because the seasoning will react with acids such as vinegars, wines, or citrus which are all common ingredients in pan sauces. While a well-seasoned carbon steel pan can survive a deglaze with vinegar the dissolved seasoning can ruin the flavour of your pan sauce.

I have that same wok. You need a lot more oil for a flat bottom wok than a round bottom because the flat bottom doesn’t let the oil pool to the middle.

You absolutely can get nonstick eggs with a stainless steel frying pan and a small amount of oil but you need to actually practice heat control and cooking technique. It’s actually much easier with butter because the water in it will begin to fizz and you just need to wait for the fizzing to stop and the pan will be just about hot enough.

You still need to use the right heat setting which is specific to your stove and pan, so practice is needed but you can get a good feel for it by how quickly the butter melts. If it melts rapidly and gives off a lot of steam and begins browning then the pan is too hot (unless you want to do a crispy egg, but that should be done with oil instead of butter which has milk solids that burn and turn bitter).

Carbon steel, glass, clay, ceramic, aluminum, and enameled cast iron are all great too!

Also stainless steel has the potential to leach chromium into foods. Research into this is still preliminary.

He’s a great character of a horrible person; an anti-hero like Walter White or Hannibal Lecter. People like these characters because they give us a safe outlet for violent fantasies. They’re not completely without risk, however, because some people struggle with the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

I don’t think he’s aspirational at all however. He’s lonely and obsessive. He has many of the same mental health issues that his villainous rivals struggle with. The only difference is that he acts out his violent fantasies against criminals instead of the general public.

The fix is to legalize the construction of more of these walkable neighbourhoods which are the most desirable places to live (so developers could make a lot of money with relatively small plots of land) yet are illegal to build because city governments have regulated them into oblivion.

I was going to say! I was born in the 80s and I’m only 41. If I turned 50 in 5 years I would be very upset!

I think you mean private equity, which act as the scavengers of the economy, dismantling companies and selling them off piece by piece. Venture capital is about funding 20 startups and hoping one of them becomes the next Google.

The Maillard reaction cannot be achieved through simmering alone. The temperature is too low. Simmering meat over a long period of time is useful for breaking down collagen and making a rich broth but you will not have the same deep, browned flavour as a broth made from roasted meat.

“For some reason”

You seem like a curious person. You should do some more research into cooking and why the Maillard and caramelization reactions produce such delicious food. It isn’t the carcinogenic byproducts that taste good (those tend to be quite bitter), it’s all the other complicated compounds produced from those reactions of proteins and sugars. By the way, these reactions can be achieved without burning the food at all, just not with most traditional cooking techniques.

Even still, you can get cancer from cooking without burning food at all. Heat up a bunch of oil to its smoke point and throw some water in there. In addition to creating a huge oily mess, you’ll fill the air with countless tiny droplets of oil and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are a known carcinogen. However, you can reduce the risks by not reheating used cooking oil, instead using only fresh oil every time.

You can also greatly reduce the risks by not heating the oil to its smoke point. It’s actually not necessary to heat oils to their smoke point in order to achieve the desirable browning flavour reactions.

As for life time of only eating bland boiled food: I would trade away a couple extra years of lifespan for avoiding that. Keep in mind that many of the most delicious soups and stews feature lots of seared, roasted, or fried ingredients anyway. Plus as I said, you can still get cancer even if you never eat or drink anything unhealthy. The air, the soil, and the water are all polluted with carcinogens. Even switching to electric cars will not help: the road, brake, and tire damage creates loads of PM2.5 particles which will destroy your lungs. This damage increases with the 4th power of vehicle mass, which means electric vehicles (that are far heavier) are actually far worse at producing this pollution!

You’re throwing out entire continents worth of cuisine. You’re essentially saying “do not sauté or stir fry anything.”

But here’s the sad reality: you could live your whole life eating nothing but bland, boiled food and still get lung cancer from VOCs and PM2.5 particles in the air due to the pollution of city life.

Not true. No matter what stove you cook with, cooking can produce large amounts of oil fumes (vaporized oil particles), smoke, and other VOCs from your food. All of this stuff is bad for your lungs.

Unless all you cook is boiled pasta, rice, veggies, gently simmered sauces, and sous vide (but not seared) proteins, you’re going to need a good quality range hood that (ideally) vents cooking emissions outside.

I’m reminded by the story I once read about Eritrea, a country with wealthy enclaves for the royal family plus foreign petro-engineers. The enclaves have these walls along the road with vast ghettos on the other side.

It’s a miserable place. The engineers tend not to stay long. Just make a lot of money in a short time period and then leave.

Yes. Capital flight is one of the last resort moves, as I said. Take your money with you and leave the hostile country.

No, it’s theirs. You agree to be bricked when you buy it!

If by issues you mean wealth distribution and the existence of an ultra-rich, powerful class, no. I don’t have a solution to that. The fundamental problem is that wealth brings power and the concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands brings other benefits, namely: coordination.

Smaller groups nearly always have an easier time coordinating their efforts than larger groups, so smaller groups tend to have a disadvantage unless they’re on the battlefield (and even then, wealthy well-supplied small groups of soldiers easily defeat large groups of poorly-equipped, poorly-trained peasants).

The big problem with the high-tax approach is that it’s a class warfare strategy. Apart from the communist revolutions of the 20th century, the history of class warfare has not gone well for the non-rich side. I think that moment in history was a unique one and unlikely to be repeated, barring the unforeseen appearance of some new decentralized warfare technology.

So where does that leave us? We can try non-class-warfare strategies. We want to align the interests of everyone, rich and poor, towards a common goal: peace, prosperity, and sustainability. Why would the rich want this? Because life is better that way! It’s much nicer to live in a safe, walkable, integrated, and prosperous community than it is to live in a walled compound surrounded by ghettos.

You frame it like those are the only two choices. They aren’t. The third choice is capital flight.

People constantly forget that governments don’t have godlike tax enforcement powers. In the real world people avoid taxes via a million different avenues. Absconding with their money for greener pastures is a last resort but it happens constantly.

Take China for example. Taxes are way lower than the US yet capital flight is such a huge problem that the government has enacted Capital controls. Yet capital flight from China continues largely unabated.

So what this means in practice is that if you want to have a 91% top corporate tax rate in the US without a gargantuan capital flight problem you’re going to need a government that is way more powerful and draconian than either the US or China is right now.

Now you might say “what if I just let everyone go and get the money back when they try to sell things to the US?” Well that’s basically what the US under Trump is doing right now, via tariffs. But then you tack on the capital flight beforehand and that means all the big companies, all the great jobs, leave the country before prices skyrocket. This is how you impoverish the US to third world status.

If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.

Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.

Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!