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90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good
- AlexandrB 6y agoThis article is premature. There are many regions still either under partial lockdown or where people remain uneasy about going out. These trends may be interesting if they continue a year from now, but it's too early to tell.
- slg 6y ago"For good" is often used to mean a permanent change, but the context here is using "for good" as in an improvement which isn't necessarily permanent. Either way, that is sloppy writing and the intention should have been made clearer with a slight rephrasing like "for the better".
- addicted 6y agoI read it as permanent as well. Your interpretation makes more sense but is still not accurate because I hardly think a value judgment that cooking at home more is better, for example, is necessarily valid. And I say this as someone who cooked nearly every meal at home not because I needed to but enjoyed it.
- pen2l 6y agoI'd like to offer you my anecdote, suggesting this will have lasting effects: it forced me to learn cooking! My folks have commented on this a lot, I really stepped up my cooking game in this confinement. I've learned how to make a lot of pasta sauces, and how to do them _easily and quickly_, etc. The key was learning it well enough to become comfortable with it so that it doesn't loom as some esoteric activity which will eat some unknown amount of time. Moreover, I crossed the point of being good enough that now it's one of the activities I enjoy... and I'm now intrigued about general principles rather than wracking my brain over strictly, unconfidently following recipes to a tee. Basically, it forced me to get on the right track of starting a wonderful adventure.
- mntmn 6y agoMind to share some good pasta sauce ideas?
- pen2l 6y agoOf course! Marianara sauce: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara-sauce https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara... You'd have to buy a san marazano can and spaghetti for this, a couple bucks each, and you can store each for quite a while. You can add meatballs in it if you're not a vegetarian. Pesto sauce: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/07/best-pesto-recipe.html https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/07/best-pesto-recip... You might balk at the idea of having fresh basil... I would argue it's one of the things you really need in your life! Buy a small plant, it'll run you 3-4 dollars (if that). Keep it by your window sil so it gets some sunshine, and it looks pretty, and the responsibility of having to water it is calming and enjoyable. A whit'ish sauce: https://lilluna.com/creamy-garlic-penne-pasta/ https://lilluna.com/creamy-garlic-penne-pasta/ It really gets fun when you get fancy with it. I often add whatever vegetable I have at hand (e.g. , get some cumin seeds and bay leaves heated up in some olive oil, add some onions/garlic into this oil... and whatever spices you like and can handle (I'm partial to a bit of cayenne pepper, paprika, ground cumin), and finally add your $VEGETABLE). Add this to your pasta sauce.
- mntmn 6y agoNice inspirations, thank you!
- ironchef 6y agoNon basil pesto is also amazing. Some of my faves are with flat parsley (more spicy notes), ramps (not in season right now obvi), and mint pistachio
- ghaff 6y agoAlso Spaghetti Carbonara is super-easy if you're OK with bacon :-). Can also toss in some quickly defrosted frozen shrimp to many recipes. A lot of quick spaghetti recipes.
- mindslight 6y agoSrslywtf? Why is this article talking as if Covid-19 is anywhere near over? If the graphs were focused on say New Zealand I could understand, but taking the world as a whole (and the US specifically) we're still in the thick of it. I certainly do look forward to having beers and dinner out at a restaurant some time. That time is just well into 2021, iff we are lucky.
- Izkata 6y ago...why is "hair clippers" listed under "home entertainment"? Bad haircut pranks?
- klyrs 6y agoIf that's the case, I "pranked" my cat with hilarious effect.
- aaron-santos 6y agoBeing The Economist I suppose it makes sense they left out the absolutely massive shift in the trending of Marxism[1](~+900%) in the last few months. [1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0651vn https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F065...
- eterm 6y agoThat seems to mirror the trend for "cultural marxism", a term frequently used by the alt-right, so that trend chart may not show what you think it does. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Cultural%20Marxism https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Cultural%2...
- aaron-santos 6y agoNearly all of the "Related queries" contain reference to BLM. There's arguments to be made for many interpretations of the trends page.
- ggggtez 6y agoI'd like to point out that you are data-illiterate here. Here is an alternate explanation: Very few people search for 19th century political philosphies on Google, compared to the number of people who search for "hangover". Therefore all it takes is 1 news article, interview, book, movie, etc to cause people to do a quick search and find out what a word means. So called "using google as a dictionary" is all you are seeing here. The spike you are seeing, no surprise, coincides with a specific person describing BLM as "marxist". This has nothing to do with covid. It's honestly stupid for you to try to draw a straight line between COVID and marxism and imply that it's some kind of conspiracy that the Economist is hiding.
- bigcorp-slave 6y agoThis is a pretty hostile post that looks like it violates site guidelines to me. Can you express your point civilly?
- mindracer 6y agoHow can they possibly come a those conclusions when we’re still in the epidemic
- truthwhisperer 6y agomodern journalism. based on feelings instead facts. Indeed, still in the padamic
- cj 6y agoIronically, the first news article I stumbled across after leaving HN just now was “Simon Cowell broke his back falling off an electric bicycle”.
- ezoe 6y agoElectoric bicycle fall under the Healthy Living category? Like how?
- fatboy 6y agoI've noticed that people who don't identify as bikers are more and more opting for an ebike over an oldskool bike by default (and bikers too, as another steed in the stable). I don't think this is a bad thing for public health. Ebikes need pedalling too, they just assist. They assist quite a lot, which makes them fun to ride, and probably makes them more enticing to take out. The fact that they assist means you can go further in the same time, which is certainly what I witness happening amongst my bikehead friends and the people I meet in the mountains.
- adrianmonk 6y agoYou might get some exercise, but even if you don't, there are benefits to getting outside. Sunlight improves your mood, improves your sleep cycle, and helps you produce vitamin D. Spending time in green space has mental benefits like reducing stress, improving focus, and improving creativity. See https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_StressPhysiology.html https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_StressPhysiology.html
- thethethethe 6y agoI have an ebike and I get just as much exercise per-minute as I would on a regular bike, Im just going 30mph while riding upright, sometimes with 30lbs of cargo, in instead of languishing at 10-20mph and caring about the direction of the wind
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoMost of them require you to pedal, few have a throttle.
- 7leafer 6y agocovid-19 has changed the ability to tell truth from lies in 90% of world's population for good, this one is for sure.
- 7leafer 6y agoAnd I fucking despise you, downvoting cowards :) Enjoy your tiny power to make truth look bad in the eyes of the same moronic kin as you.
- 7leafer 6y agoAnd I fucking despise you, downvoting cowards :) Enjoy your little ridiculous power to make truth look bad in the eyes of the same moronic kin as you.
- 7leafer 6y agoWhy so few downvotes, motherfuckers? You ain't working hard enough for your money.
- rossdavidh 6y ago"Covid-19 seems to have changed [x] for good" is not worth reading, for all values of x, until we have gotten to a post-pandemic environment. It's like saying, in the seconds or even days after a car crash, that the car crash has changed your driving styles for good. Wayyyyyy too early to say.
- NoOneNew 6y agoYea, was going to say the same. I'm personally sick and tired of hearing "the new normal". No, it's temporary, get over the doomsday fetish. I swear this is worse than those hardcore preppers who pray for an apocalypse. Every person that goes, "the end is near" over every damn thing is literally the least or naively prepared person for such a thing. It's just a fetish developed by people unable to cope with any state of existence. They just think that if no one is doing well, then they're equal with everyone else.
- wolco 6y agoNot sure you are using the right word. If a prepper subscribed to your idea wouldn't they think they are better off not equal because of the investments they made.
- NoOneNew 6y agoThat's fair.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago> They just think that if no one is doing well, then they're equal with everyone else. A great deal of human existence is comparing yourselves to others, and exalting youself over everyone else when possible. If you can't be better than them at least you can take consolation they're equally miserable.
- shrimpx 6y agoAlso all those trends it shows are all approaching the old baseline.
- tempsy 6y agoAll I know is that a crowded elevator is going to be strange experience for many now for a long time, especially those who work in tall buildings. A small cough in an elevator is the new fart.
- caiobegotti 6y agoOh no, tie-dye has been having a 235% increase in searches.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoSeems like it would be pretty easy to game this sort of conclusion-making based on Google search terms. For example, let's say I control a popular app which installed on people's devices -- thousands of developers/corporations/other entities are in this position. I insert some new code in the app (perhaps via an automatic update) that sends a Google query for some search term from a pool of similar terms I have chosen. I can easily mimic the HTTP headers sent by a common web browser, thereby making my request indistinguishable from one that is intentionally submitted by a user, chosen from a list of common browser headers. By having large swathes of users all appearing to search for the same or similar terms I can make it appear to, say, the Economist, that the public at-large is interested in a given topic. From there, the Economist will make assumptions about the population at-large and then make conclusions about what this means. Then they will publish these "findings" as a story. Many readers will be swayed by the Economist's conclusions. At that point I will have effectively influenced what those readers now believe. All it took were some phoney searches. Later, I could remove the code in the next auto-update. By the time something like this was discovered by a user MITM'ing the app traffic and reverse engineering the app, chances are I would have already accomplished my objective: to influence people -- perhaps investors -- to believe a story like the one reported here by the Economist. (Note: I am not suggesting the Economist's conclusions are wrong in this case.)
- rsa25519 6y agoAre you suggesting this has actually happened, or are you just saying it's theoretically possible?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoPurely hypothetical. The only things I know for sure are that there is an enormous amount of 1. web traffic being sent automatically by people's devices which they are wholly unaware of and 2. willingness to allow "auto-updates" where no user ever looks at the contents of the code that comprises the update. It also seems like there is a trend of increasingly important decisions being made based on assumptions arising from analysis of web traffic, however I could be wrong on that observation.
- imgabe 6y agoThere is a thing with the media where they seem to take every trend as "the new normal" and extrapolate out to infinity anything that shows even remote signs of being embraced. It's usually not the case. Sure, there may be some lasting changes that arise from Covid-19, but it's probably not going to be as drastic as is being implied. Every time something new arises, the media is quick to declare "This is it! This is how things are now and always will be forever!" while ignoring the fact that a change just happened which would seem to imply that another change will probably happen again at some time in the future.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThe pandemic proved that remote work is viable. And some people will now be able to do it permanently.
- 7leafer 6y agowhat's really for sure is that covid-19 has changed the ability to tell truth from lies in 90% of world's population for good.