When I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when I was about 18, there is a mention of how in the summer they would get nettles in their gruel at the prison camp. Midwestern American me had no idea of the nutritive value of nettles and thought this was another layer of cruelty that the Soviet gulag heaped on its inmates. I had only encountered nettles on hikes in the woods, and held them in the same category as poison ivy.
Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.
A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.
In the 1930s American lawn care guides would tout volunteer herbs as a benefit of lawns. Today we call them "weeds" and spend a crazy amount of effort, money, and chemicals into eradicating them
If we had always had this attitude towards "weeds", we wouldn't have turned the weedy Brassica oleracea into cabbage, broccoli, kale, collard greens, etc.
In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.
When I was growing up in eastern Europe in 80s, older folks in rural areas with various joint ailments would daily gather stinging nettles with gloves and then literally whip themselves on the affected places.
Maybe it was just natural suppressant of pain or anti-inflammatory remedy, certainly no expectation to fix joints themselves (that even current medicine often can't fix) but nobody normal would go through such experience daily if there would be results.
fwiw a lot of us are trying to bring that knowledge back. I'm currently in the process of replacing as much of my grass as possible with creeping thyme, because it's nice underfoot, smells good and doesn't need mowed.
It’s effective in a clinical setting and honestly too dangerous to recommend in home settings without several layers of precautions.
But, in theory, highly specialized exposures to particular local allergies would be more effective than most of the clinical studies. And that’s what I would expect is driving the folk remedy.
Worth noting, almost all of the treatments like this are VASTLY more effective when done at younger ages. But they are also even more dangerous. So please speak to an allergist first and don’t do stuff you just read online.
Eh, good enough for me. Pretty sure placebo won't cut it with the severe allergy of my family members so we can just try and see.
(if it does have an effect then I wouldn't be surprised if it also matters if the nettles were regionally sourced or not - IIRC there were some studies suggesting that that mattered for the effectiveness of honey helping with seasonal allergies or not)
So credit card benefits suck, because the consumers can't be exploited to create a large profit surplus that can partially be used to benefit a small subset of consumers.
There are no benefits for any of the credit cards I could get since roughly Corona - I was using them before but all cards which had positive benefits were removed/discontinued since.
Hence I'm back using a debit, because it works the same (no benefits either way) and doesn't come with a monthly bill.
I don't know that I'd call not paying an extra 5% just to receive 1% back "sucking". It seems like a win-win to me. If you need something, pay for it (with that extra 4% saving) instead of jumping through a million hoops to pretend it's free.
> That’s because credit card benefits suck in Europe and there’s no point to using them.
Theres still a very good reason to use them - buyer protection.
I use a Virgin Atlantic reward card and have it set to pay off automatically, never running up debt. It both protects me as a buyer, and has the benefit of taking ~£500 off annual family holidays, and gives me a free companion seat in the process, effectively halving the price for one of the passengers.
If you purchase an item on credit, it's the bank that makes the purchase. You then pay them back, 30 or 60 (or more) days later.
If there's a problem with the item, you can "return" it to the bank — after all, they own it! So in practise you can ask the shop for a refund, or you can ask the bank.
It is a stronger protection than a debit card chargeback.
As an example, I bought flight tickets from an obscure budget airline on a credit card. Months later, beyond the usual debit chargeback time limit, the airline went bankrupt — but my bank purchased that service, and isn't going to provide it! They refund immediately.
>has the benefit of taking ~£500 off annual family holidays, and gives me a free companion seat in the process, effectively halving the price for one of the passengers.
You know you're paying higher sticker prices to finance that, right?
If I am then so is every other traveler with every single airline in the world.
Go on Virgin Atlantics site, search for any flight, you can then apply points to that, or redeem a companion voucher. That doesn't bump the price up prior to redemption.
I dont "pay" for the points I get, as I'm not spending any extra day to day. The credit card is free.
What shop? What on earth are you on about? Every single business in the entirety of the UK charges 3% more to cover virgin giving away cheaper flights? Use your words as this sounds nuts. Credit card rewards aren't exclusive to the UK so I can't work out what on earth you are talking about. If you are suggesting the UK as a whole pays 3% more on every single CC transaction then your argument becomes even more odd as you'd be contradicting your original point.
I've had very good luck with it the past 10 years. A few petrol stations in deep rural Spain didn't accept it, but that's all I can remember recently :-) They also have fantastic customer service
28.4 grams. The rounding adds up quickly, and there’s comments here about people trimming borders off of paper maps. That .4 matters. Also, 16oz to 1lb.
Also matters when your buying things for recreational purposes. Especially when only buying points.
the point of knowing the rough conversion is to be able to do head-math to get a close number. I use 30 a lot of the time, b/c most of the time a close estimate is all I need.
if you're cutting off the borders of your map, by all means, use a calculator
I had a SPARClassic at home in 1996! It was pretty underpowered, but it worked great as long as you didn't use X. I worked from my brand new PowerMac 7200 over ethernet to the SPARClassic, which gave me MacOS + Solaris as a development environment.
“your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive.
but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel)
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