Expensive water

I'm tired of buying expensive water. I'm not talking about water rates or spending way over the odds on bottled water. One's an unfortunate necessity the other a choice. I'm talking about the water that I don't have a choice about paying way over the odds for. I love bacon. Every time a cook a delicious slice of the stuff I'm dismayed with how much actual bacon is left in the pan when it's done. A ridiculous amount of snotty water escapes leaving the rashers half their original size. All that water costs me the same as the bacon since the bacon is sold by weight.

Now I know meat has a natural amount of water in it but the fast curing process used for producing bacon adds a load more unnecessary expensive water that I end up paying for as if it were bacon.

This article has some interesting fact about that water: water in bacon...

I remember proper slices of bacon (this makes me sound old) that would shrink only slightly when cooked and had proper bite to them. Apparently natural pork is about 30% water, a fair amount of this is removed is you actually cure the bacon leaving you paying for mostly bacon and a dryer pan. "Modern processes" involve injecting a buttload of brine into bacon so greedy manufacturers can sell you less bacon for more cash faster than actually curing it.

A modern slice of bacon can be up to 50% water. So when I fry a a couple of rashers and have to literally spoon snotty water out of the pan so I don't end up poaching my bacon I'm pouring water away that has the same monetary value as the bacon left behind...apparently. I doubt I could bottle it and sell it by weight for the same price.

Now that link I posted suggests that there is something being done about this. Currently the brine injection process can add 10% more water whilst leaving all the original natural water in place too. This will hopefully be cut to 5%. This still leaves at least 35% water in a rasher and means it hasn't been properly cured but it's a step in the right direction.

What we seem to have forgotten in the UK is that the consumers have the ultimate power. If you are tired of damp snotty shrinking bacon, mostly-bread sausages, cardboard with a vinegary sauce slopped over it in the frozen section masquerading as one of any number of apparently different recipes despite all tasting the same, we could all stop buying it. They wont make it if you don't pay for it. Buy your bacon from a proper butcher that cures the product, puts meat in the sausages, maybe even cook a little more often yourself rather than heating up a plastic tray of slop. We could all get back to enjoying proper nutritious food again and above all bacon would return to how it used to be. I shouldn't have to scrap white stuff off my rashers before plopping them down on a couple of slices of buttered bread (yes butter not margarine...margarine is just whipped up cooking oil, you wouldn't pour it on your bread wet would you? so stopped spreading it on there) with a dash of ketchup or brown sauce. Perfect!

(p.s. brown sauce is made from a number of ingredients, including tomatoes, but has been marketed and commonly known as brown sauce...so that's fine. Tomato sauce/ketchup on the other hand is made chiefly of tomatoes and has always been known as tomato sauce...so why the hell have people started calling it "red sauce"? Have people en masse forgotten the word tomato? stop it! Call it tomato sauce or I'll assume you are an illiterate dumbass).

Is living longer irresponsible?

Having seen this article: how nanotechnology is prolonging life... it occurred to me that repeatedly over the last few years there have been little breakthroughs covered in the media about living longer. It's always reported as a good thing as if we should just take it for granted that the human race as a whole wants and needs to live longer.

Now admittedly I understand the wish for a long life on the personal level and I bet I will be wishing for just a bit more life when my day finally comes but really is it a good idea for us to spend time and resources trying to ensure every human on the planet lives as long as possible (or at least the wealthy few that can afford some of these treatments)?

Shouldn't we be focussing on ensuring the quality of life of all humans instead? Or at least first?

There are many reasons why ensuring we have an increasing aging population is not a good idea, a glaringly obvious one is the fact that we don't have enough resources now for all the people alive to live an equal quality of life with the same prospects so how is it an improvement to ensure there are more resource users (even contributing ones, I'm not arguing that the elderly are just a burden) with more medical needs?

I'm not talking about use by dates for life but if you want to avoid munching on soylent green just a sensible approach to the natural process of life. Don't spend so many resources on making sure that absolutely every last human on the planet lives for as long as possible when you are doing nothing about the rate of production of new humans or the quality of life of those already here.

I don't get the general obsession with prolonging life. The personal one yes, but the scientific/medical communities who could be making progress in artifical limbs, brain repair, even less necessary things like faster learning processes, augmented senses...heck anything but making sure there are plenty more bog standard resource chugging humans for no particular reason other than because we can.

Get creative science! Make the Star Trek lifestyle that little bit closer and we can all live normal length fulfilling lives rather than dragging out crappy ones.

Short answer: yes, don't waste resources on living longer if you are going to waste that extra life just existing. Many people did many great things back when life expectancies were a lot lower than they are today. Maybe the sense of urgency drove them on, maybe they just didn't have time to mulch their minds while being fed plastic.

Dammit eBay!

So here we are, the first post of my new blog. I wanted it to be something light and breezy...welcoming...but then I searched eBay for something and I just had to exorcise the rage.

I started a search for an iPhone 3GS. I need it in working order but onther than that I'm not bothered about scratches as it wont be my phone (it's for a project I'm working on). So I set filters. I chose all the filters bar "faulty" because I didn't want a faulty device.
I got a page of results...the first seven of which contained three faulty devices. The sellers had listed them as "used" then openly stated in the auction that they were in fact faulty. One had a cracked screen, another would only display a blank screen, the third had no backlight to the screen. So basically three unusable devices.

What do these turds think the "faulty" category exists for if they think it's ok to put a faulty device in used then cover their backsides by stating in the text of the auction that it's faulty?

Why doesn't eBay stop this? I don't expect them to read every auction but surely some validation could occur. If a description is added that contains the word "faulty" then  surely they can check the category the item is being placed in and if it's not "faulty" show the seller a pop-up explaining that they are currently being a douche and if they then click ok and continue to post the same auction then set a flag for checking this one manually.

I'm sick of using filters to try to find what I want only to find they are barely worth while as people flatly ignore them when posting an auction.
If I search for a phone or a laptop you can guarantee that a large proportion of the results will actually be for phone/laptop accessories and upgrades and goodness knows what else despite the fact that there is a section specifically for those things.

I just want to find what I'm looking for not what other people want to show me even once I've set a filter TO NOT SEE THAT CRAP!

eBay get something sorted. The search results I'm getting are less and less relevant as people ignore the rules. Start enforcing them will you?