banach_d

In Paris hotels have been extremely tightly regulated for a long time. The original system of 1-5 stars originated there, and was a government-mandated scale based on very specific criteria of quality and facilities. Lots of sharp practice by hotel-owners is outlawed. For example, hoteliers are not allowed to 'bundle' meals with overnight stays. This stops them selling meals of worse quality or higher price than cafes and restaurants. Given the regulation, it seems fair for them to expect that the authorities will crack down on unregulated competitors.

You might argue the pros and cons of the regulation, but it's clear that over the last 100 years, Paris is known as a great place to visit, and the availability of decent and decently priced accommodation has been very successful for the city as a whole, not just its landlords.

Recently someone said to me - rather than think of books as milestones to be completed, think of time spent with a book as a goal in itself, not a cost. This applies to lots of 'improving' books. If you spend an hour reading one of the books the article cited, you've spent an hour analysing detailed arguments in biology/history/psychology. An hour on a technical book, is an hour considering the problems and issues related to using that technology. An hour with biography or narrative history is an hour imagining what it would be like to be someone else or live in a completely different era. An hour with a self-help/motivational book is an hour thinking about yourself and what you achieve or overcome. An hour with a book of argumentative reasoning is an hour trying to argue with the author in your head. And so on.

Is it worth mentioning that many people enjoy reading books? If you spend 6-9 hours reading a book and you didn't particularly enjoy that time, probably your cost-benefit analysis is going to be completely different from the primary intended audience of most books, people who will enjoy reading it.

If you don't enjoy reading books, you don't have to read them.

I found the examples very surprising - because I think several of those books exist exactly to communicate a very specific, important idea. If you can describe in a few sentences what the central idea of 'The Selfish Gene' is - I would argue that the book has done its job 'transmitting' an idea perfectly. The reason the book takes a hundred or so pages to do that transmission is because the idea is 1. specialized - if you're not a biologist you need to do a lot of work just to understand the questions and the background 2. difficult - even if you're familiar with the biology, you need to think through lots of examples and discussions of what the selfish gene idea implies and 3. controversial - Dawkins spends a lot of time explaining what evidence he has, responding to other views, disclaiming misreadings of his work, and so on.

I have read that book, I believe I understood its central message, I could probably explain it (not very elegantly) in a couple of sentences, and I can't point to any other particular benefit I drew from reading the book, and yet I'm very glad I read it.

But if the brine is not frozen at the working temperature of your freezer, it's completely ineffective compared to water.

He walks back the 36 hours claim which he recognizes is a completely unjustified extrapolation. And the 'subtract 7 minutes' is a very dubious answer to a completely different question.

The actual article doesn't answer the question and this is actually a much more helpful answer.

This is an extremely interesting question, both from a scientific and a practical point of view, but the article doesn't really answer it at all.

He starts by measuring the temperature in the freezer, but then puts a realistic amount of food in it and doesn't want to let the food go bad. So he makes an extrapolation from the warming between -18 and -11, but immediately points out (fairly) that the extrapolation is not really valid. Then he answers a completely different question - how much cold is lost when you open the door. The answer to that is also quite dubious and of limited applicability.

The experiment I would like to see is this: fill a freezer (or a couple of different types of freezer) X% (where X could be 50, 80, 100) with a mix of different frozen foods, including ice cream, meat, vegetables, cooked meals, bread. Turn the power off. Every day, open the freezer briefly, long enough to retrieve some of your samples, maybe some from the top/front and some from the bottom/back. Then tell us, for a few types of food and location in the freezer, what day did the food thaw enough that you wouldn't want to refreeze it? What day did the food become less than perfect if consumed immediately? What day did the food become inedible?

People can put up with different levels of yickiness so you'd want descriptions more than numbers here.