How much does good pizza cost in 2024?

Back in May 2022 — let the record show, 20 months ago — I analysed the cost of the ingredients of an excellent home-made pizza. Based on the costs of bread flour, salt, yeast, tinned tomatoes and extra mature cheddar, I found that the per-pizza cost of ingredients was an satisfyingly low 53p (plus another 15p for the electricity to bake them, amortised over four pizzas for a total of 68p per pizza). Yum.

Here’s one I prepared earlier. This, unlike the cheaper version in the text, includes sliced chorizo and pickled jalapeños.

Semantic Versioning is a terrible mistake

When I first heard about Semantic Versioning, or SemVer, I thought it was one of those ideas that’s so obviously right that we were all going to benefit from someone having just codified it and written it down.

A slightly more successful experiment: Greek Salad pizza, take 2

Yesterday’s evening meal: a modified version of the Greek Salad pizza from the day before.

As I suggested I might, this time I mashed the feta with some olive oil into a paste, and spread that over the otherwise identical pizza (green olives, shredded red onion and sun-dried tomatoes). The hope was that, when combined with oil, the feta would melt rather than just charring.

A failed experiment: Greek Salad pizza

Here’s my lunch today: a pizza inspired by Greek salad:

Instead of mozzarella, I am using feta. The other toppings are green olives, shredded red onion and sun-dried tomatoes. Looks pretty good, huh?

What is the downside to Universal Basic Income (UBI)?

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the practice of giving regular cash sums to everybody in a population, irrespective of apparent need, as a foundation for their economic lives. It’s one of those idea that sounds crazy when you first hear it, but which makes more sense the more you think about it.

A lot of people like the idea of UBI, and I keep hearing about trials that have good results, most recently in a Mastodon thread on “the world’s largest universal basic income experiment ever (“23,000 cash recipients with 5,000 getting UBI for 12 years”). The results as reported in that thread are (1) entrepreneurship skyrocketed, (2) no inflation. Other trials mentioned in the comments reported (3) truancy improved, (4) graduation rates improved, (5) student health improved. There are plenty more studies that seem to show similar positives.

The Prestige Trap

Suppose someone at your place of work asks you to take on some new responsibility. There are three basic reasons why you might agree:

1. They pay you (e.g. overtime for staying late and doing extra work).
2. You enjoy it — the work is fun in its own right.
3. It’s prestigious.

When the three options are laid out like this, it’s suddenly very easy to see what prestige is, and what its value is. Prestige is what you get offered when someone wants you to do something that you won’t get paid for and won’t enjoy. And its value is, well, nothing.

So if, for example, I’m invited to join the editorial board of a palaeontology journal, my thought process is this: is it prestigious? If so, then am I being offered prestige instead of money or fun? And if so, then I probably don’t want to take the opportunity. In short, the fact that a role comes with prestige is a priori evidence that it’s probably best avoided.

As Jan Velterop noticed: prestige is just an illusion.

 

I aten’t dead

I was a bit shocked today to realise it’s been nearly three months since I blogged here — very unusual for me. I’ve been much more active over at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week in that time.

This post is just to let you know I’m still here, and I have a bunch of stuff I intend to get around to posting here some time soon including: The evolution of Hound Dog; The Prestige Trap; Magic Mirror, my 1983 adventure game for the VIC-20; and What I’ve been reading lately, part 50.

What I’ve been reading lately, part 49

By the Pricking of my Thumbs — Agatha Christie

I’ve always had a strange affection for Tommy and Tuppence, Christie’s couple of amateur detective who appear in five books spanning 55 years from 1922 to 1976, and who, unlike the better known Poirot, age in real time. By the time of 1968’s Pricking, they are described as elderly. Unfortunately, Christie herself also aged in real time, and wrote this book when she was 78 years old and definitely past her best days. While its predecessor N or M was tightly plotted, this one is loose and rambling, and the many threads never really come together in a satisfactory way. I will read on to the last Tommy and Tuppence book, of course, as part of my trawl through all of Agatha Christie, but I don’t approach it with much expectation.

Supporting the Blue Team

Someone asked on Mastodon the other day: why does anyone vote Conservative any more? It’s a legitimate question. The Conservative party in the UK now bears no resemblance to anything that Edmund Burke or indeed Margaret Thatcher would recognise as conservatism: it’s lurched further and further to the right, and in doing so cast out all the notions of economic responsibility, personal integrity, and family-values behaviour that we usually associate with the Conservative party — or, at least, that the Conservative party would like us to associate with it.

And this is a shame to me, because as I have discussed before, I have some sympathy with classic small-c conservatism. But instead of that, we have had a succession of chancers, clowns and worse leading the government, to the point where Rishi Sunak — who plans to divert money from poorer constituencies to richer ones — seems like a relatively safe pair of hands. Provided we can hold our noses and ignore all the xenophobia and hatred of refugees from elsewhere in the cabinet.

Ratatouille (the dish, not the film)

Having watched Ratatouille (the film, not the dish) recently, I was left with two impressions. One is that it’s an absolutely superb film: funny, touching, profound, delightful. If you’ve not seen if, you should fix that, whether or not you have kids. The other was that I really ought to try the dish that the film is named after.

I made it mostly for my wife, who loves aubergines and courgettes — food that generally does nothing for me. But it worked so well that I found myself really enjoying it, so I’ve made it four or five times now.