CaptHaddock

Most bread-making machines come with a bucket the inside of which has been coated with teflon.  The manufacture of teflon use perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA, which is a carcinogen.  Although the DuPont, the manufacturer of teflon, claims that no PFOA remains in the finished teflon product, nevertheless vast numbers of people currently have small amounts of PFOA in their bloodstreams. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency has also said, "At high temperatures Teflon is known to give off a cocktail of 15 types of toxic particles and gases, including trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) and phosgene. These chemicals are known to be poisonous to birds. And in humans they case headaches, chills, backache, and fever - a condition known as 'Teflon flu'." 

The determination of what constitutes "high temperatures" has steadily been dropping over the years.  Here's the opinion of a consumer group, the Environmental Working Group:

But the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an independent US non-profit consumer group, disputes this. It says that Teflon begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260°C (500°F), and begins to significantly decompose above 350°C (660°F). Cooking fats, oils and butter will begin to scorch and smoke at about 200°C (392°F), and meat is usually fried between 200-230°C (400-450°F), but hot spots in the pan can easily exceed this temperature. 

So, it's up to you.  You could back your bread in a tin pan in the oven as humans have done for thousands of years without apparent harm or you could rely on DuPont's claim that teflon is perfectly safe.

4 hours ago, iReason said:

 

The little talked about "Spice Wars".

One of the primary reasons for conquests.

Spices were a reason for the Age of Exploration, but the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution were based on one commodity that was the first to have a globalized chain of production, cotton.  As industrialization made the English cotton mills ever more efficient, their need for raw cotton on a large scale demanded converting large areas of suitable agricultural land to its exclusive production.  But in India and Egypt, which had favorable climates,  existing social and agricultural practices meant resistance to such extensive restructuring.  The one area that could be efficiently cleared of aboriginals and then dedicated to vast cotton agriculture was the American Deep South, which was the largest producer of cotton fiber from about 1800 until 1930.

There is a fascinating book on the subject, "The Empire of Cotton," by Sven Beckert.

3 hours ago, iReason said:

 

The little talked about "Spice Wars".

One of the primary reasons for conquests.

44 minutes ago, Rancid said:

I find it ironic that the progressive left and Democrats are suddenly up in arms about racism. Here is a couple of interesting historical tidbits:

 

In the 1920s the KKK marched 50,000 men in hoods down 5th Ave in New York – they were headed to the Democratic National Convention...oops.

 

Apparently in 1860 on the eve of the civil war, no Republicans owned slaves - all the slaves in the US were owned by Democrats...ouch.

 

Not that there is anything to like about current Republicans, but it was a Republican government that freed the slaves.

 

Perhaps can now understand why the American Progressive Taliban is trying to erase history...too many inconvenient truths.

The Republicans did free the slaves in the 19th century and the Democrats did legislate civil rights in the 1960's against oppression of black people.  Is there some reason that you think today's Democrats should be indifferent to racism, because once upon a time Strom Thurmond and George Wallace were Democrats???

16 minutes ago, Gary A said:

Where do you find an elected politician who looks out for the little guy? They talk a good story, actually lie and promote populist policies that are expensive and most will never become law. They look after themselves and no one else. The object is to get reelected and to keep their cushy lucrative jobs. 

In your childish black-and-white thinking there is apparently no possibility other than self-seeking crooks and saints.  FDR accomplished great things for the poor and the middle-class,  including Social Security and the basis for the GI Bill, not because he was some kind of saint.  LBJ, for all that we detested him for the Viet Nam War, instituted Head Start and Medicare, both effective programs.  If it weren't for Social Security and Medicare, elderly poverty in America would be as prevalent today as it was in the 30's.

There's quite a difference between a politician who wants to continue in office and the kind of take-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich program that the Republicans tried to ram through Congress to destroy Obamacare.

The Republicans trash talk government to get gullible voters to accept lower taxes for the rich and poverty for themselves.

I'm with Bannon on this one.  Going after the statues is a stupid, self-defeating move that the Democrats should ignore.  Polls show most voters don't want the statues removed.  Far better to implement programs that actually improve the lives of the lower half, like Obamacare, than to alienate voters over what are only symbols, even if admittedly offensive. 

38 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:

True, Trump is the #1 pox on the White House now.   Yet there are still a coven of dangerously flawed people hanging out there.  Gorka and Steve Miller are below awful.  Neither of the Kushners could get security clearances to mop floors at a county jail.   ....and others, who I wouldn't hire to wipe the mud off my pick-up truck.

 

                         Mueller and his team could be a disappointment for those of us wanting a thorough investigation and published results.  I want to believe Mueller's team will do a good job, and he certainly has a top-gun team.  Yet, there will be immense pressure for him to limit the scope of his investigation.  Mueller is not a maverick. He's a middle of the road bureaucrat.   He will find serious dirt on Trump, but I worry that much of the sordid stuff will be hidden behind walls of 'classified' and 'too-sensitive-to-publish.'

Matters have certainly come to a strange pass when we look for a defender of our democracy to the FBI, which has historically been the suppressor of political dissent and civil rights in America.  Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the entire intelligence establishment has been out to get Trump since before the election.  Mueller may not be a maverick, but this effort, of which Mueller is the current point man, is not a maverick operation.  I think the revelation of the number and scale of Trump's crimes will be a political-system-changing event.  I expect there to be convictions and jail terms and Trump could well be among them. 

There's a documentary film about a British plot to kill Hitler during the war.  They had a couple of Poles who were basically willing to sacrifice themselves to get off a sniper shot at the Fuehrer.  The plan could possibly have worked, but in the end the Brits decided to scrap it, because by then Hitler's military incompetence was a major asset for the Russian armies fighting the Germans. 

Similarly, Trump is so ineffective that the best outcome for progressives is not his removal from office to be replaced by the more conventional Christian zealot reactionary, Pence.  The best outcome would be to keep in place an isolated, disgraced, and ineffective Trump.

There's a good chance it could play out that way.  I expect Mueller to reveal explosive evidence of money-laundering by Trump and involvement with Putin that is tantamount to treason.  As that point nears, Trump will be in the position that facing the fallout from firing Mueller will be no worse than allowing Mueller to prosecute him.  So, he will fire Mueller.  All hell will break out with the Dems and a few of the Republicans, but the Republican House will never impeach Trump.

2 minutes ago, rijb said:

Get real.

Thinking critically was not exactly the order of the day for the mil, eh?

5 minutes ago, rijb said:

One of the first things we learned in basic training was to not blindly follow orders.

Which was so impressively demonstrated by the war crimes committed by US soldiers at My Lai and Abu Ghraib, just to spell things out for you.

15 minutes ago, rijb said:

Michael Hayden, a former general and director of the CIA and of the NSA, publicly stated that if Trump governs the way he campaigns, the military may well be legally obligated to disobey his orders.

The US military has routinely obeyed illegal orders from My Lai to Abu Ghraib.  So, that's a thin reed to hold the fate of the world.

If civilization does ever end in nuclear winter, there is no more likely candidate to achieve it than a psychopath with dementia like Trump.

10 minutes ago, Meljames said:

 

A deal is best for the Republicans. The worse  things get for Trump the worse off the party is, thereby their jobs. 

The Republican senators are unlikely to be involved in any decision to end the Trump presidency unless there is an actual impeachment trial with the Senate serving as the jury.  It will be up to the House Republicans to decide whether to pass an impeachment bill, but it needn't get that far.  A sitting president can be indicted and prosecuted for a crime including crimes committed prior to taking office, whether at the federal level or some other jurisdiction.   The precedent here is not Nixon, but Vice President Spiro Agnew, Nixon's VP, who was investigated by the DOJ for taking bribes.  Agnew and the DOJ worked out a deal where Agnew would resign, but avoid jail time.  The Congress was not involved.

Agnew later went on to make money happily selling uniforms to Saddam Hussein.  So, nothing was lost, save honor in that case.

6 hours ago, observer90210 said:

Learn Thai from a white guy?..

 

I was unaware that skin colour was an academic point of reference!!?

Don't be a putz.  The issue is not skin color, but the fact that the white guy is not a native speaker of Thai and probably isn't even competent in it.

Long-time Trump business partner, Felix Sater, says he expects that both he and Trump will go to prison.  Sater is cooperating with both Mueller and Congressional investigations.  Manafort may also be cooperating.

The noose is tightening.

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/longtime-trump-business-partner-told-family-he-knows-he-and-potus-are-going-to-prison-report/

1 minute ago, Meljames said:

I can see the  republican congress offering him a backroom deal to step down to avoid an impeachment and criminal  charges.  Saves everybody  a lot of face and a messy trial. 

But it's not so simple.  Pence could pardon Trump, but that would not protect him from prosecution for breaking state law, for instance in New York where most of his financial crimes were committed and which has an ambitious Democrat Attorney General, Eric Scheiderman.

Then too, pardoning a disgraced president didn't exactly work wonders for Gerry Ford's political future.  So, Pence might have second thoughts.

Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote Trump's  book years ago, is now saying that Trump will find a way to quit and will do it soon, i.e. before the end of the year or even sooner.  He will quit to avoid prison at the hands of Rober Mueller.

Schwartz knew Trump very well at the time, having spent everyday with him for 18 months in order to write the book, since Trump lacked the attention span even to sit through an interview.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-art-of-the-deal-ghostwriter-trump-will-find-a-way-to-resign/article/2623445

I ended up going with an Asus Chromebook on which I removed ChromeOS and installed GalliumOS, an Ubuntu derivative that supports most Chromebook hardware.  The Asus came from Amazon.  Installation was pretty easy.  Chromebooks are slow and relatively cheap, but with good battery power, eight hours in this case.  So, it meets my limited need for a laptop.

1 hour ago, boomerangutang said:

                   I think slavery was a lesser part of the reason the South rose up against the North.  I spoke with an 80-something yr old American woman the other day, and she opined that the war revolved mostly around economic issues.   Slavery was, among other things, economic in the sense that a slave was property owned by the man of the house (much like a wife and kids are, today).   

 

                    The south had a lot of ag products (cotton, tobacco, etc) and didn't want the North controlling the economics of it.   Yes, slavery was an issue, but even if the South had won (which it almost did), slavery would have been soon abolished, as it was everywhere else in the world, before and soon after the mid 19th century.

 

                       I just watched a special about how the Canadian Maple syrup industry is controlled by a small group of bureaucrats in Quebec.   I didn't think about it until just now, but it's somewhat similar to the situation which fueled the Civil War:    A group of bureaucrats (the North) controlling prices and commerce of products from the southern states. 

 

 

There is a reason that Americans are perpetually befuddled about the causes of the Civil War.  The cause of the Secession was the election of Lincoln, the first president elected withoutthe support of the South.  This loss of control of the government signalled the end of the undemocratic control of all three branches of the government by the South which was designed into the Constitution without which the South would not have joined the Union, according to slaveholder James Madison.  The constitutional mechanisms that enabled disproportional representation for the South included, the Three Fifths Compromise, enabling the Southerners to count each black chattel slave, with no political or human rights, to be counted as three-fifths of a citizen for the purpose of allocating seats in the House of Representatives, the US Senate itself in which representation was undemocratically uniform for each state regardless of population, and the Electoral College, in which the disproportionate representation of the South in Congress was transferred to the election of the President.

The sectional conflict that culminated in the Civil War was already dominant at the founding of the Republic.  Washington, D.C., was chosen as the capital on the theory that it would be a neutral zone between the North and the South.  I am not aware of any other country that chose to locate its capital in a neutral zone between hostile regions.  The proximate causes of the Civil War lay in the divergent interests of the industrial North and the agrarian South.  The North, which was developing manufacturing to compete with the established and more efficient factories of Britain relied on tariffs to protect their "infant industries" after Hamilton's policy.  But it was the South that paid the tariffs.  Objection to tariffs led to the Nullification Crisis of 1833, in which an early war was narrowly averted.

But the main proximate causes were the threat to the political (and undemocratic) hegemony of the South in the face of the vigorous national expansion underway from early in the nineteenth century.  Each new state that entered the Union threatened to undermine the South's control of the national government since few of the new states were suitable for growing cotton on which the slave system depended.  The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 were among the efforts to stave off the inevitable loss of Southern control of Congress..

The apparent reason that school children are not taught this straight-forward history is that to do so would require admitting the deeply undemocratic nature of institutions that we still have with us, the Senate and the Electoral College, necessitating a major restructuring of American government.  The result is that students are led to believe that the war was fought to end slavery, as if there was ever a period in American history when a volunteer white army could be assembled to fight for the rights of black people, a notion more ludicrous than which one can scarcely imagine.

President Trump is rich white trash.

Chromebooks are slower and cheaper, but with long battery life..  That fits my limited need for a laptop, but the ChromeOS itself seems far too limited since you have to be connected at all times.  It is possible to install linux on most Chromebooks, the best version being GalliumOS, a Ubuntu derivative.  That works well enough for me. 

But before the OP abandons Windows, he should review the software that he uses to make sure that he doesn't depend on some application that only runs on Windows.  I couldn't do without some Windows applications, such as Quicken and some other financial software.  So, I run Windows as a vm on my linux desktop along with linux vms.  Meets my needs.

7 hours ago, iReason said:

Trump’s Business of Corruption

What secrets will Mueller find when he investigates the President’s foreign deals?

 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption

 

Excellent primer on the huckster occupying the White House.

Well worth the read.

A good article, but complicated.  Trump has certainly sought out some of the sleaziest people in the world to do business with. 

5 hours ago, THAIPHUKET said:

:-) hard to trust anyone nowadays including myself when it comes to the Internet.

What progam are you using for encrypting G-DOCS?

duplicati.com 2.0 for backup to multiple cloud services including Google.

17 hours ago, THAIPHUKET said:

I share your concern and it is for real. The same is true when I can download an application from Google Play and must repeat my Master Password. How do I know who keeps what

Shouldn't be the same, because you shouldn't use your Google password ("Master Password") for anything sensitive.  You shouldn't trust Google.  For example, I do use Google Drive to store backups, but those backups have been encrypted with a strong password before being uploaded.  Anyone who got access to my Google password might be able to buy some apps from Play on my dime, but that would be the extent of my risk.

But you have to trust your password manager with the most sensitive data you have.

If you enter some countries, such the US and the UK, you can be compelled to provide passwords to your cellphone, presumably including those for your password manager, which is to say, for everything you own.

Not very likely of course, but a risk nevertheless.

11 minutes ago, Briggsy said:

1. I don't understand your first question.

2. You have failed to read my post and hot-headedly placed your own construction upon it.

3. Nowhere in my post have I stated that Thai employees are less honest. I pointed out the lack of trust. Employers here trust their employees less (in fact everyone trusts everyone else less) so they place safeguards into the system. Prevention is better than cure.

4. Paragraph 3 of your post is close to an ad hominem attack that is beneath your normally erudite posts.

 

Of course this system is onerous and favours the employer. However, if the "girlfriend" mentioned in the OP is determined enough to succeed, she will be able to find a way around this minor obstacle. Selling insurance is all about persuading people. If she can't persuade anybody to guarantee her, then perhaps she would not make any money selling insurance. It may not be her cup of tea.

1.  Read Voltaire.

2.  I did read your post closely enough to notice that at every point you consider only the interests of the business and never the legitimate interests of employees to the point of your fatuous suggestion that it's her own fault if her family is unwilling to cover the company's insurance cost.

3.  By persistently ignoring my suggestion that Thai businesses themselves just go out and buy the insurance they need, you imply that imposing the cost of that insurance on the employee is the only solution available to the business.  What does trust have to do with it?  Do you imagine for a moment that US businesses, for instance, trust their employees? 

I find your calm composure in the face of inequities affecting others, not yourself, to be exemplary.

33 minutes ago, Briggsy said:

I would not quite call it "abuse" Capt. Haddock. It is, rather, indicative of

i) the lack of trust that employers have here in the honesty of their employees

ii) the lack of trust that employers have here in the police and the legal system to gain redress or recover any stolen monies or assets

iii) the power imbalance that exists between employers and employees here. Employment law here is weak on many points except unfair dismissal.

iv) the nature of the job and the nature of the particular industry, namely selling insurance, which is riddled by dishonesty and petty theft.

 

Going back to the OP, I am confident that if the "girlfriend" could get a guarantee from somebody in a 'respectable job', particularly in the public sector, that may suffice.

Do you often feel that you live in the best of all possible worlds?  

Do you have any evidence to support your view that Thai employees are less honest that employees in the US or Europe?  As I have already pointed out, employers do not have to rely on the legal system to recover losses from employee theft, since they can buy insurance for that purpose in the insurance market. 

Are you as oblivious as your post suggests to the dishonesty of Thai companies compared to individuals?  Have you ever read the newspaper?