Alright Washington state. As one of the two states which didn't move right this election, it's time for us to enshrine rights in our state constitution post haste.
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I've been storing my cheese all wrong
"Cheese is alive," said Kyra James, a food educator and certified cheese professional. "And needs oxygen and humidity to stay alive."
Experts across the field agree that cheese paper — that is, opaque paper covered with a thin layer of wax or plastic in varying compositions — is ideal for wrapping everything except fresh cheeses like ricotta, feta and mozzarella (which should stay in their original packaging with their brine). And yes, for cheeses cut in pieces that you buy wrapped in plastic, it's a good idea to re-wrap if you'd like them to last longer.
"You can keep cut wedges of cheese in these papers for literally weeks at a time with very little change to the quality and flavor," Ms. Saxelby wrote. For sustainability and economy, there are now reusable and compostable cheese papers, and you can even reuse the wrapping from the cheese counter after a rinse and dry.
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I was wondering this morning about how much of the current greedflation for food and other essential items is a byproduct of peoples' inability, or unwillingness, to price shop outside of single stores. In a world where you can now go to one store to get nearly everything, or even just purchasing online, the exercise of "competitive" price shopping has largely been left by the wayside.
It, honestly, feels silly to think about the work of going to multiple stores and comparing prices, then going back to the stores to get the desired items. The only time I do serious price comparison shopping are online for bigger purchases, or for the select differences my wife and I spot in pricing and value between Fred Meyers (our primary grocery chain) and CostCo.
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Washington State's gains and losses from other states
Relating to the graphics I shared yesterday about the shifts of voters and states politically, this is a well timed fluff piece which basically regurgitates some stats from the Census Bureau's report on state-to-state migration data.
First take away is that currently the state seems to not have seen a huge direction of immigration, it's basically flat between those who moved into state and those who moved away.
About 212,600 Washington residents in 2023 had lived in another state one year earlier. The estimate for those who left for another state was slightly larger, at 215,300, but the difference between those two figures is well within the margin of error, so let’s just call it a wash.
These numbers look very different from the previous decade, when Washington was growing rapidly from in-migration. Take, for example, the year 2015. Washington gained about 231,000 from other states and only lost 179,000.
Top states Washington gained people from:
- California
- Oregon
- Hawaii
And for states gaining the most population from Washington?
- Idaho
- Texas
- Kentucky
These all track as part of why Washington didn't see a red shift. Our opportunities attracted from those leaving even worse real estate markets for similarly political ideological Washington, and those who dislike the deep blue reality of Washington fled for those other states.
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Bob Ferguson plays chess
I randomly discovered that the incoming Washington state governor (and current Attorney General) Bob Ferguson plays chess. He was rated as an International Master, though he doesn't compete anymore. He did do a fundraiser in 2019 where donors could compete with him in a "simul" event.
At a fundraiser last Sunday, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson took on 18 chess players at one time in a special tournament known as a "simul." (Twenty people had paid money to play against him, but two people didn't end up making it.) After three-and-half hours of play, Ferguson had lost one game, taken three draws, and won the rest. Fourteen out of 18 isn't a bad showing for an AG who hasn't played the game seriously in almost two decades, and who only ever ran a simul once during his career as an internationally ranked chess master.
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Digital Archiving
Even before this election I had been thinking about digital archiving. Decades ago I had an idea for a tool that would download my web history and maintain a local archive for me to easily recover and find things I had come across. I am very prone to the "I know I saw something about this recently..." and having to google and search my history to figure out where I had seen it.
I never followed through on that project myself, for a few reasons. The primary reason was that the search tools we had were strong enough the majority of the time.
Now, I'm thinking about digital archiving again for the same reason I have most recently - the threat of the content going away and also just as an ongoing resource in case of not having Internet access. I started playing around with Archivebox yesterday. Archivebox is very close to what I envisioned with Datacomb, short of the automation process. It seems very interesting and robust, I just need to figure out how I would use it. Whether it would build off of my self-hosted Wallabag (a selfhosted Pocket-like reader app, which grabs articles for offline reading.)
I also have a homebrew Python app I created that I called 'Wikindle.' It downloads articles from Wikipedia and converts them into Markdown, though it doesn't download any images. The idea I have for that is to eventually get an E-reader device which can store the entirety of what it downloads (which isn't the entirety of Wikipedia.) As of last night's run, it was roughly 300 megs of text, though there are a lot of articles I want to filter out still.
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The idea that I could care about breakdancer Raygun retiring this, of all weeks, is honestly offensive. I can't believe the amount of headlines I've seen about it.
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Automated Archives for November, 7th 2024
This post was automatically generated.
Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
- The Oligarch Election
- A Few Rules For Predicting The Future by Octavia E. Butler
- The 2024 U.S. Election is Over. EFF is Ready for What's Next.
Chess For the Day
Record: 3-0-1
Net Elo Change: +11
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- November 7, 2023 (1 post)
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