THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

Because some people who eat meat, are horrible wind up merchants. I don't understand why people can't be like "vegan? Cool!" as opposed to mocking and outwardly trying to trigger people who don't want to participate in animal abuse and slaughter.

We may have opened a can of worms here.

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GEORGE BALDOCK




ONE OF OUR OWN

Being vegan or veggo is fine. What I don't fully get is the huge industry built around creating plant-based meat imitations. If you crave the taste of meat that bad, it doesn't exactly sell veggo cooking as an exciting alternative - and yet it can be. One of my lad's circle of friends includes lots of veggos and, as they always seem to be berthed in my house, drinking my wine and beer, I've had to explore a fair bit of vegetarian cooking over the last few years and I've found I like it. Lots of really tasty recipes, that don't try and ape meat. I now try and drop meat/fish for a veggo option once or twice a week.

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.

I use to share this outlook but more recently I've really come to understand it. Firstly most veggies do not pick that diet because they want to sell 'veggo cooking', they do it because they don't want animals to die for their consumption. Meat tastes good. It is rich, umami and extremely versatile with how you can serve it. So trying to create something that can be used in cooking formats as wings, burgers, hot dogs etc. so you have something covered in braised onions and relish or deep fried and smothered in hot sauce makes a lot of sense to me. Just straight up veg and pulses do not always do the trick both taste wise and in texture. I do agree that sometimes pure vegetable based dishes are more enjoyable than alternatives, for instance if I am making a veggie chilli I just loaded it with beans rather than using Quorn. Equally I enjoyed a bean burger more than a seitan burger, but I get why a veggie would pick the latter.

Just to spin it around to meat eaters (and I am one by the way), if beef tastes so good why do we throw it in with tomatoes, garlic and basil for a pasta sauce? Or cover chicken with coconut milk, spices, tomatoes , onions etc. in a curry? I guess the answer is because it works well with those flavours. So making a non-animal options of a similar flavour profile and texture to use in these dishes is pretty understandable.

That's a really good question, and my go to whenever any one says "does anyone have any questions" after a presentation etc. just to see their response. I think it's one that Feynman used to ask his first year students (the other one being - if the sky is blue because blue has a shorter wavelength than red so is refracted more, why isn't it violet which has the shortest wavelength?), not to see if they knew the answer but to see their thought process when trying to tackle it.

This one's a little tricky to try and explain without drawing diagrams, but I'll give it a go.

The trick isn't to think about mirrors in terms of left and right, but in terms of absolute directions (e.g. East and West). Imagine there's a mirror in front of you which is due North. Stuff on your East is still to the East in the mirror. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the direction you're looking at it from (effectively, at least).
If there's an object to the North East of you (still between you and the mirror), when you look at it, you're seeing the light rays bouncing off the object and heading South. When looking at it in the mirror, the light rays bouncing off the object are heading North (before being reflected at you), i.e. you're looking at it from opposite direction. It's still to your East, but because left and right are relative directions, it's moved from your right to your left. Which makes sense as you're looking at it from the other direction.

If you hold up a clock, you'll see three is on the right (East). If you hold that still but walk around to the other side so you're looking at the back of it, the three is still on the East, but now it's on your left. That's essentially what you're doing when you're looking at a mirror - looking at the other side of things, which means that although absolute directions haven't changed, the relative directions have.
Sorry that's a bit of a convulted way of explaining things, but hope that's helped.

Copa America. Two groups of five. Top four in each group go through to the quarter finals. What is the bloody point of dicking around with a group stage for about three weeks to eliminate a grand total of two teams?!

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"You bought a bank out of social embarrassment? I sometimes buy the Big Issue out of social embarrassment. I don't buy a fucking bank!"

That made sense!

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.

So since Covid started, I've been spending a lot of time investing in cryptocurrency, stocks and start up companies.
I've also been researching financial markets and how they work.

What I struggle with is how markets are essentially impossible to predict, even over relatively long periods of time yet it has been historically proven (for instance with the Elliott Wave) that markets always follow the same pattern. This can be proven over very long periods (forever effectively) and short periods of time as well.

Even Bitcoin has recently been shown to do this and crypto is basically the Wild West of money.

How can that possibly be?

Sorry to be so boring but I find it very interesting that something so seemingly random has an overall uniformity that is completely predictable.

I now only 'invest' in crypto that is entirely free to start with

It's not boring at all.
There is no single/simple explanation.
Markets can be manipulated by the 'big players' - shorting/naked shorting for example. GME and AMC
Economies are dynamic and change all the time - the present isn't like it was 20 years ago. Companies come and go.
Rumours/uncertainty 'spook' the markets - eg the possibility of inflation and therefore interest rate rises
'Shocks' like 2008 and Covid throw 'normal behaviour' (if there is such a thing) out of the window
Etc

HOWEVER the general trend of shares on FTSE/NASDAQ is upward over time and will outperform bog standard deposit accounts etc. A company buys assets with debt and over time inflation erodes the real value of that debt as wages and spending rise. Those assets factory/offices etc will become more valuable (unless its like a high street situation at present) and so share prices rise.

The crypto situation IS indeed volatile and I only have a small amount in it. TRX has been falling over the past few days then today rose over 20%. Hmmmm.....
I can't see that changing for a while (the volatility) it is mainly speculative at the moment pure and simple (in my view). Why would a company/person want to hold huge amounts of money to use for transactions in an asset with a highly uncertain value?

Enough of that. Where's the red wine?

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Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment

That's a good question but BTC is considered to be along the lines of holding gold but gold doesn't drop 50% in three weeks usually
There's more than a few large companies holding BTC already, I only see that number growing in the near future. And I think they'll be buying other coins as well. There's way too many different coins right now and they can't all survive. I believe there will come a point where there will be a few stable coins that are used for transactions. We just don't know which ones yet...

I have a relatively small amount of money in crypto and I've swapped most of my BTC for Algorand recently and I'm staking that for a 6% return as well as dabbling in some new coins that currently have no value or purpose as such.
I'm working on the idea that if I get in early on enough new coins now, one of them might end up being worth something down the line and it's cost me absolutely nothing to do it.

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Yeah. Got 'a few quid' in Tron myself. But, as we've said, you have to accept the volatility. IMHO you'd (anyone) would be crazy to put a huge lump sum down.

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Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment