> J. Kenji López-Alt, who recently literally wrote the/a book on wok cooking, would disagree:
Incorrect. He states certain foods and flavors will not work with induction or would be difficult without gas in the article itself. He suggests workarounds like a propane stove or butane torch, but he never claims you can replicate those flavors with induction.
> anything with a wok, just doesn’t work with induction
López-Alt, in the article[1]:
> But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.
> People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one.
So I think it’s totally fair to say he’d disagree. Not sure how you’d get “incorrect” out of that.
Everything has trade-offs. But on the whole, for most people, induction is going to be a step up over gas just purely as a cooking method. The air quality and climate benefits are a bonus.
That sounds a lot like the old "tastes approximately just like beef!" testimonies going around at the start of the last wave of vegan fake meat products. Yeah sure, some people might find the substitute to be palatable. But most of those you're arguing with have concrete and legitimate reasons to prefer a direct flame, so it's kind of silly to expect "close enough" to convince them.
That's disingenuous, Chinese households may have higher capacity burners than the average Western household but do not go anywhere near 100,000 BTU. This is reserved for restaurants. North of 10,000 is plenty for home cooking.
Oh, I agree that it's plenty, though apparently it's not enough to get restaurant style wok hei. It's also well into the range that regular induction stoves offer.
Read the article, that's not what he's saying. And it's said by someone who, if you know their history, cares to an extreme degree about what the end product tastes like.
My point is not that induction can't yield good results depending on the dish, but rather that people who care about cooking on a direct flame will not be satisfied with something that is suitable for "most" recipes. I've read plenty about this debate and if I had to pick one I'd stick with gas because of the added flexibility. But I would be fine with say, a hybrid stove that is mostly induction and has at least one high-capacity gas burner and preferably another lower-capacity one. Unfortunately, few induction "advocates" are making the case for the hybrid option and most prefer to exaggerate its suitability as a complete replacement as well as the potential environmental and health impacts of gas, which alienates anyone who simply wants a flame.
Obsolete models being replaced by current ones is a better explanation. NatGeo's video operations surpassed their magazine profit long ago. Why then retain the elements that can create a high-quality product in an obsolete medium? Customer demand shifts toward digestible video content in the form of Youtube and TikTok, and bingeable streaming content a'la Netflix and HBO.
If smarts follow a normal distribution, then someone 5x smarter than your average Joe is exponentially more rare. Supply and demand would suggest their compensation increase wouldn't merely be linear.
Speaking from experience, sanity depletes faster than one's retirement account increases with a draining job.
400k in SF is about 260k after taxes. Figuring saving 50% would give 130k/year in savings and an expense rate of 130k/year. At 8.0% returns, it would take 14 years to have enough to withdraw 4%/year match 130k.
Who says you need to match 130k? If you no longer have to work, you no longer need to live in the Bay Area. 70k would be luxurious in a less expensive place, if you take into account that you no longer have to work. Heck even 35k would be paradise. Many earn that while still working.
It's at the extreme end of the scale and will depend on your personality. Keep in mind that with 35K and no professional obligations you can do all of the following easily without any sacrifice in terms of leisure or family time or even energy levels:
- Shop around for healthy food at bargain prices
- Learn how to cook well and make the most of all that food
- Learn and have the time to fix 90% of maintenance issues
- Have the time and energy for sports and exercise
- Can dedicate more time to your family, kids need fewer toys because they have their father or mother back
- Travel for VERY cheap and you now have the time to actually do it at any time
- No longer a need to buy status or social class signaling goods because you no longer need to deal with professional expectations and setting a good impression in the minds of people you don't actually like
- Learn personal finance and your local legal system to maximize every drop
- No longer a need to buy things that make you cope with stress or long hours or even regular hours doing stuff you don't want to do
- As a corollary to the above, fewer risks of health issues, obesity, posture problems, alcoholism or self-medication, sleep disorders, psychological disorders, etc.
- Engage in creative pursuits
- Might no longer need a car in the traditional sense
To me that sounds like a better life than that of 99% of people who have ever lived. Now remember that we are talking about jobs and salaries for which a 4% rule at 70k or more is extremely doable. Which means you can not only have the life I just described but can also pay for your kid's education and the occasional health scare.
Flirted with a similar idea. The root of it was to externalize the mundane aspects of day-to-day life. The mundane: food, laundry, cleaning.
Food had two broad strategies: (1) Repeated Deliveries of staples with one afternoon a week dedicated to cooking, portioning and freezing. Meals are labeled and microwaved as needed. (2) Ad-hoc Food Delivery, think Uber Eats or Doordash for most meals. I found 2 to be excessively expensive. 1 requires dish-washing but I can mitigate it with using disposables whenever possible.
1 also requires setting up repeated automated deliveries. I haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but I'm sure there's an Instacart-type service for it.
Laundry: there are door-to-door laundry services, and/or using an in-house cleaning service mentioned below
Cleaning: there are maid services. If well-planned you could have them arrive to wash the dishes created in the above step, as well as retrieve/put-away laundry. A robot-vaccuum helps between cleanings.
As for activities with people with similar schedules, that's the difficult part. Adults are chaotic.
There's signing up for the military, which would also neatly handle your other items.
So far I've found that a co-worker-based activity group is reliable. You all get off about the same time, the people are relatively stable from week-to-week, and you all have similar work lives.
Second best was a regularly scheduled meetup group.
Not the OP but I typically hear such advice in the form of thinking of oneself and one's circumstances as being entirely one's responsibility.
>What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>?
Then the person in the hypothetical would need to decide to define healthy realistically for their condition. While it may be something you want, wanting something impossible is a non-starter.
>one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks
Great example, in this case the host can decide to call another doctor's office to get a second opinion. Or following up in person. Or escalating to that doctor's leadership/board.
The host actually did follow up in person and tried to escalate. There wasn't another doctor's office to send them to, because the tests were explicitly called by a specific doctor and there would need to be authorization to transfer the tests... authorization from the doctor who wasn't responsive. Like I said, this was extremely distressing to hear about the host needing to apparently decide that this was their fault and the resultant distress the host was experiencing when after two weeks and many attempts from many angles, they were unsuccessful, and according to the advice they had no one to blame but themselves.
Incorrect. He states certain foods and flavors will not work with induction or would be difficult without gas in the article itself. He suggests workarounds like a propane stove or butane torch, but he never claims you can replicate those flavors with induction.