DCF usually gets these things right

David's protein milkshake has 2 grams of fat in it and tastes like a milkshake. The fat is one ingredient, EPG, and your body mostly doesn't absorb it. The label sorts itself into four systems, which is unusual for a consumer product. Protein system: ultrafiltered skim milk, water, lactase enzyme. Fat system: modified plant fat, EPG. Flavor system: Dutch process cocoa, natural and artificial flavor, salt, sucralose, acesulfame potassium. Structure system: dipotassium phosphate, gum arabic, cellulose gum, gellan gum. EPG is the interesting part. It starts as rapeseed oil. They split the oil into glycerol and fatty acids, insert propylene glycol units into the glycerol, and put it back together. Those inserted units sit right where lipase needs to grab, so the enzyme mostly can't break it down. It coats your mouth like fat and carries flavor like fat, then leaves without giving up its calories. 10 grams of regular fat is 90 calories. 10 grams of EPG is about 7. If you're old enough to remember olestra, that's the right comparison and it's the reason this one is built differently. Olestra was a liquid oil at body temperature, and that's where the side effects came from. EPG melts at 102 degrees, above body temperature, so it stays solid on the way through. The company describes the consistency as soft candle wax. The structure system is four ingredients. Gellan gum comes from a bacterial fermentation and forms a gel so thin you can't feel it, but strong enough to hold cocoa particles in suspension. It's what keeps the cocoa from sinking to the bottom during months on a shelf. Gum arabic is dried sap from the acacia tree. It's an emulsifier, so it keeps the fat and the water from separating. Cellulose gum is plant fiber that's been modified to dissolve, and it adds body so the shake feels thick instead of watery. Dipotassium phosphate is a buffer. Milk protein wants to clump when it's heated to make a drink shelf stable, and the phosphate holds the pH where the protein stays dissolved. The sweeteners are a pair. Sucralose is slow to hit and lingers. Acesulfame potassium hits fast and has a bitter finish. Blended, each one covers the other and the result tastes close enough to sugar. The Dutch process cocoa is cocoa treated with alkali, which darkens it, softens the bitterness, and makes it disperse in liquid instead of clumping the way natural cocoa does. EPG is GRAS, not an approved food additive. The company assembles the safety file, FDA reviews it and issues a letter saying it has no questions. There are three of those letters on file. The molecule was developed in the 80s and didn't reach a product until around 2020. The longest human study in the file ran eight weeks. So the safety data is real, but the long term impact is being written right now by the people drinking it.

1/ Today, we're launching @Mercury Books. AI-powered accounting software, for your bookkeeper or you, that categorizes and reconciles your transactions the moment they happen.

Humans really saw this and said “let’s make the floors laminate and paint everything gray”

Brewery halls and gardens are for families. You're a bad person if you complain about kids running around them. Dive bars are for adults. You're a bad person if you bring kids to them. This matter is settled.

For six months, Google Maps sent a slice of drivers in ten American cities down deliberately slower routes. About 30 seconds slower on average, and under 2% of trips were touched. The experiment ran on roughly 100 of the most congested road segments in each city, switching on and off day by day so each city acted as its own control. The results are out now in Nature Cities, from Google Research with collaborators at Berkeley and Stanford. The reasoning behind it is old and slightly counterintuitive. Every navigation app does the same thing: it finds you the fastest route right now, for you alone. When millions of phones do that at once they all pour onto the same handful of arteries, and those arteries stop being fast. Transport economists have been writing about the gap between what's good for one driver and what's good for the network since the 1950s. Nobody had tested a fix at city scale with real drivers, because you'd need to steer routing for a large share of a city's traffic, and about three companies on Earth are in that position. So Google put a penalty on the worst segments during their worst hours, which nudged the routing engine towards alternatives of similar road class and comparable travel time, then measured what happened across the whole network on weekdays between 7am and 8pm. On the targeted segments, traffic moved roughly 2% faster in the median city. Los Angeles got 4.56%, Atlanta 3.30%. Fuel burn on those stretches dropped between 0.5% and 1%. Across every road that saw a change in traffic, which covers around 80% of each city's driving, speeds rose 0.35%, reaching 0.5% during the morning and evening peaks. Total travel time on affected trips fell 0.69%. Their Bayesian model put the probability that the speed effect was genuinely positive at 99.8%. That adds up to more than 1,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent saved per year, per city, in most of the places studied. Cars and vans account for around 10% of global carbon emissions, and the average driver spends about 2.6 years of their life behind the wheel, so a fraction of a percent across an entire road network is a serious amount of fuel. Per driver, the saving comes to about 0.25% of an average journey, roughly one fortieth of the normal day-to-day wobble in how long the same commute takes. Nobody in those ten cities noticed anything, in either direction, including the people sent the long way round. The authors are careful about what they haven't shown. They measured the immediate effect, not what happens once drivers work out the freed-up route is quicker and pile back onto it, which is the standard way road improvements get eaten. Their penalty scheme was deliberately crude, so the ceiling on the approach is unknown. And the underlying Google Maps data is commercially confidential, so nobody outside can check the numbers. The finding sitting underneath all this is that a private company's routing algorithm has become a piece of transport infrastructure, tunable in the way a traffic light or a congestion charge is tunable. The obvious follow-up experiments are the ones a city government would want to run, not the ones a mapping company would. link to full article: nature.com/articles/s44284-0…

For all the alts I talk about on here like: $AERO $LIT $DRV $KNTQ $NEST I'm generally 90-95% staked. It's not because I care about the 2-10% APR yield. It's to stop myself from trying to swing trade 10% moves on assets I think will 10x. Most of us here now are going to get outperformed by normies who top blast the last quarter of this bull run. Gotta retrain your mind to bullieve again.

this note is killing it on Substack, thought I might let you guys enjoy

Logging off for the day to plan our newest cloud seeding program in the Southwest Rainmaker century

There's a decent chance you've never eaten a "real" tomato Refrigeration alters the activity of enzymes in tomatoes as well as breaking down their cell walls leading to changes in texture and flavor Trucks that are used to ship produce to grocery stores are always refrigerated as well meaning even if you don't refrigerate it yourself its flavor is still impacted Normally enzymes increase the level of volatile aromatic compounds that create the complex flavor of tomatoes The taste of a homegrown tomato fresh from the garden is a night and day difference

wow i can’t believe it finally happened

BREAKING: Situational Awareness sold "the bulk" of its stock portfolio to Citadel after "big losses in AI," per WSJ. The hedge fund, which reportedly had a net asset value of $45 billion on July 1st, is now in "crisis mode," WSJ reports.