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walkitoutI’ve got a couple of these!
First up, WaPo had an article about Apo B testing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/01/08/apo-b-cholesterol-test/
Basically, for lipids to move around, they need a carrier, and it turns out it is the carrier that winds up stuck and calcifying and causing problems. Measuring the carrier is hella more helpful than measuring lipids AND does not require fasting. Well, it doesn’t require fasting if you do the test by itself, but if you do it as part of a lipid panel with other tests, those other tests will require fasting. So the test — which has two benefits (not requiring fasting and probably catching people who would otherwise be missed by the regular testing, and maybe NOT causing panic about some of the people who are flagged by people who get a non-fasting lipid panel done) — is instead just not done. You can understand from the prescriber’s perspective that it is no big deal to make someone else fast. And you can also understand from the person being tested that it _is_ a big deal to have to fast for 12-24 hours. I was displeased to learn that at least a couple of the places online where you can self-request a diagnostic test such as apo B tell you incorrectly that you DO need to fast for it. Oh well! Guess like the A1C test which has finally become the standard, this is just going to take longer than it should have. Perhaps this article will speed us to the better choice.
Months ago, at WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/interactive/2023/cleaning-quiz-how-often/
Question 2 is about how often you should clean your dish towels. I am a bit of a fanatic about replacing disposables such as tissue, paper towel, paper napkin, etc. with reusables such as handkerchief, dish towel, cloth napkin, etc. (If you want to talk about TP, that’s on you; we got some of those water bottles with the angled spout and let me tell you, that’s amazing. I have one that I travel with and it made the cut to go to Europe on that three country, carry on online, even on RyanAir. It is Worthy.). I typically use three or so kitchen towels a day and they usually go in the wash when they get really wet, somewhat sticky or at the end of the day. This quiz says you should wash the dish towel after _every use_. Here is the full explanation:
“If you use your kitchen towels while cooking, you need to throw them in the laundry after each use because they are probably making contact with raw food — and we’re not just talking about uncooked meat.
Greg Whiteley, an associate professor at Western Sydney University who focuses on cleaning and hygiene, says people often don’t realize that leafy greens can cause outbreaks of gastroenteritis and other illnesses. If you’ve wiped down your counter with a kitchen towel after cutting up raw veggies, that towel should go directly into the wash. “When you’re in the kitchen and you’re cleaning up your food, salads are nearly as risky a raw food as, say, chicken,” he says.
If you use your dish towels only to dry clean dishes or clean hands after washing them, you can keep them in circulation for three to four days, says Richardson. He recommends keeping a basket in your kitchen to serve as a hamper.”
OK, so, we _seriously_ have a quote saying that salads are nearly as risky a raw food as chicken. NO. Salads are NOT risk free, sure. But nearly as risky as chicken?!?! WTF. Not even close. If they were close, we’d have raw chicken restaurants, the same way we serve beef tartare or sushi. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Gah.
Now, should you put that dish towel in the wash after cleaning your surfaces with it? Sure. It’s wet. Wet grows shit. Time to put it in the wash (or hang it up to dry completely before using it again). Also, the whole point of that sink is so you can clean your hands and _dry them on the towel_. If you are trying to clean your hands by wiping them with a towel, without benefit of even water, much less soap and water, yeah, you are not housebroken and honestly, laundering the dish towels is probably not where we need to start with you. EW.
This next one is a bit of a mess, no supporting quotes. We’ve been planning a retirement … house seems inadequate, but we’ll call it a house, and we want it to NOT have any fossil fuels required in keeping it comfortable and so forth. So we are learning all kinds of things. But on the list of what we’ve been fighting against is Fear of House Batteries. The various professionals we’ve been working with are terrified of house batteries, and don’t even want to put them in the garage. I’ve pointed out that much greater volume of battery that we’ll be parking in that garage and I just can’t seem to get through to them. We’re currently entertaining ways to mitigate (there are some amazing fire sails and fire blankets out there). This is another situation where we really need to make a transition, and bad advice/poor tradeoffs are slowing things down.
Also! I know more people now who own (used) i3s or other plug ins that don’t take too long to power even at the slowest level of charging. Many of them have not bothered to implement any kind of charging solution at all, which I’m like, what? Meanwhile, the people involved in the house design have had to be talked down more than once from setting up a dedicated charger for each slot in the garage. We share one charger here between two cars and there is so little conflict we could probably do 3 and possibly four just swapping the one cord around if it could reach. But of course it would be better to plug everything into one charging station and for that station to be bidirectional (currently no real meaningful options here) and to manage when charging happens and make sure cars are charged when they need to be charged but not to necessarily be in a screaming hurry to do so. There _are_ two cord chargers out there now, and when I told the team about one, someone who shall not be named responded with this:
“I think you'll need something with a Type 2 (Mennekes) charge plug to be compatible with your BMW's, and this has J1772 plugs. I could be missing something or there could be adapters, but I figured I'd point that out.”
The house being planned is here in Massachusetts NOT in Europe. Also, I’ve owned an i3 since 2014. I’ve been charging it for a decade. And this person felt like they needed to tell me that I did not know the charging equipment that my car requires. When I told a friend this, she said, “Well, you know you are a woman.” And yep, that’s probably most of what was driving this.
Anyway. It’s hard enough trying to figure out how to use an EV to do the many things we take for granted about an ICE. EVs are fantastic, and I’m not giving mine up, but we also keep the Odyssey for road trips, because charging is still very tricky if you aren’t driving a Tesla in the areas where Superchargers are ready and waiting for you to pull up, charge, pee, get a cup of coffee and then head on your merry way. Most of the people with non-Teslas who are charging away from home have figured out a place which charges below market (or free!) that is in a nest of their activities and they are charging there mostly as a way to avoid paying for the electricity at home.
Status quo bias is real, and an important mechanism for ensuring that things _don’t_ change is to make shit up and give terrible advice so people don’t change to something that will actually be an improvement.
I’m not advocating for anyone to stop doing this or do it less or be more conscious of the fact that they are doing this. I mean, if you are doing this, and I try to get you to stop, you are going to have some absolute bullshit explanation for why it’s good that people do this, and then I’ll just hate you too. So I’m just going to point it out and invite you to get a macabre chuckle out of how this is why, once things are pretty okay, it’s hard to fix the obvious remaining problems until it’s kind of late and it’ll be worse than it had to be to get it to be pretty okay again.
First up, WaPo had an article about Apo B testing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/01/08/apo-b-cholesterol-test/
Basically, for lipids to move around, they need a carrier, and it turns out it is the carrier that winds up stuck and calcifying and causing problems. Measuring the carrier is hella more helpful than measuring lipids AND does not require fasting. Well, it doesn’t require fasting if you do the test by itself, but if you do it as part of a lipid panel with other tests, those other tests will require fasting. So the test — which has two benefits (not requiring fasting and probably catching people who would otherwise be missed by the regular testing, and maybe NOT causing panic about some of the people who are flagged by people who get a non-fasting lipid panel done) — is instead just not done. You can understand from the prescriber’s perspective that it is no big deal to make someone else fast. And you can also understand from the person being tested that it _is_ a big deal to have to fast for 12-24 hours. I was displeased to learn that at least a couple of the places online where you can self-request a diagnostic test such as apo B tell you incorrectly that you DO need to fast for it. Oh well! Guess like the A1C test which has finally become the standard, this is just going to take longer than it should have. Perhaps this article will speed us to the better choice.
Months ago, at WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/interactive/2023/cleaning-quiz-how-often/
Question 2 is about how often you should clean your dish towels. I am a bit of a fanatic about replacing disposables such as tissue, paper towel, paper napkin, etc. with reusables such as handkerchief, dish towel, cloth napkin, etc. (If you want to talk about TP, that’s on you; we got some of those water bottles with the angled spout and let me tell you, that’s amazing. I have one that I travel with and it made the cut to go to Europe on that three country, carry on online, even on RyanAir. It is Worthy.). I typically use three or so kitchen towels a day and they usually go in the wash when they get really wet, somewhat sticky or at the end of the day. This quiz says you should wash the dish towel after _every use_. Here is the full explanation:
“If you use your kitchen towels while cooking, you need to throw them in the laundry after each use because they are probably making contact with raw food — and we’re not just talking about uncooked meat.
Greg Whiteley, an associate professor at Western Sydney University who focuses on cleaning and hygiene, says people often don’t realize that leafy greens can cause outbreaks of gastroenteritis and other illnesses. If you’ve wiped down your counter with a kitchen towel after cutting up raw veggies, that towel should go directly into the wash. “When you’re in the kitchen and you’re cleaning up your food, salads are nearly as risky a raw food as, say, chicken,” he says.
If you use your dish towels only to dry clean dishes or clean hands after washing them, you can keep them in circulation for three to four days, says Richardson. He recommends keeping a basket in your kitchen to serve as a hamper.”
OK, so, we _seriously_ have a quote saying that salads are nearly as risky a raw food as chicken. NO. Salads are NOT risk free, sure. But nearly as risky as chicken?!?! WTF. Not even close. If they were close, we’d have raw chicken restaurants, the same way we serve beef tartare or sushi. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Gah.
Now, should you put that dish towel in the wash after cleaning your surfaces with it? Sure. It’s wet. Wet grows shit. Time to put it in the wash (or hang it up to dry completely before using it again). Also, the whole point of that sink is so you can clean your hands and _dry them on the towel_. If you are trying to clean your hands by wiping them with a towel, without benefit of even water, much less soap and water, yeah, you are not housebroken and honestly, laundering the dish towels is probably not where we need to start with you. EW.
This next one is a bit of a mess, no supporting quotes. We’ve been planning a retirement … house seems inadequate, but we’ll call it a house, and we want it to NOT have any fossil fuels required in keeping it comfortable and so forth. So we are learning all kinds of things. But on the list of what we’ve been fighting against is Fear of House Batteries. The various professionals we’ve been working with are terrified of house batteries, and don’t even want to put them in the garage. I’ve pointed out that much greater volume of battery that we’ll be parking in that garage and I just can’t seem to get through to them. We’re currently entertaining ways to mitigate (there are some amazing fire sails and fire blankets out there). This is another situation where we really need to make a transition, and bad advice/poor tradeoffs are slowing things down.
Also! I know more people now who own (used) i3s or other plug ins that don’t take too long to power even at the slowest level of charging. Many of them have not bothered to implement any kind of charging solution at all, which I’m like, what? Meanwhile, the people involved in the house design have had to be talked down more than once from setting up a dedicated charger for each slot in the garage. We share one charger here between two cars and there is so little conflict we could probably do 3 and possibly four just swapping the one cord around if it could reach. But of course it would be better to plug everything into one charging station and for that station to be bidirectional (currently no real meaningful options here) and to manage when charging happens and make sure cars are charged when they need to be charged but not to necessarily be in a screaming hurry to do so. There _are_ two cord chargers out there now, and when I told the team about one, someone who shall not be named responded with this:
“I think you'll need something with a Type 2 (Mennekes) charge plug to be compatible with your BMW's, and this has J1772 plugs. I could be missing something or there could be adapters, but I figured I'd point that out.”
The house being planned is here in Massachusetts NOT in Europe. Also, I’ve owned an i3 since 2014. I’ve been charging it for a decade. And this person felt like they needed to tell me that I did not know the charging equipment that my car requires. When I told a friend this, she said, “Well, you know you are a woman.” And yep, that’s probably most of what was driving this.
Anyway. It’s hard enough trying to figure out how to use an EV to do the many things we take for granted about an ICE. EVs are fantastic, and I’m not giving mine up, but we also keep the Odyssey for road trips, because charging is still very tricky if you aren’t driving a Tesla in the areas where Superchargers are ready and waiting for you to pull up, charge, pee, get a cup of coffee and then head on your merry way. Most of the people with non-Teslas who are charging away from home have figured out a place which charges below market (or free!) that is in a nest of their activities and they are charging there mostly as a way to avoid paying for the electricity at home.
Status quo bias is real, and an important mechanism for ensuring that things _don’t_ change is to make shit up and give terrible advice so people don’t change to something that will actually be an improvement.
I’m not advocating for anyone to stop doing this or do it less or be more conscious of the fact that they are doing this. I mean, if you are doing this, and I try to get you to stop, you are going to have some absolute bullshit explanation for why it’s good that people do this, and then I’ll just hate you too. So I’m just going to point it out and invite you to get a macabre chuckle out of how this is why, once things are pretty okay, it’s hard to fix the obvious remaining problems until it’s kind of late and it’ll be worse than it had to be to get it to be pretty okay again.