So you bring up emulsifiers and in my opinion, that is one of the big baddy's in UPF. Yes, we have been using emulsifiers for centuries, but the effectiveness of modern emulsifiers is on another level then something like lecithin from soybeans. The strength and ubiquity of modern emulsifiers has completely changed the food we eat. They are almost literally in everything we eat today.

Why are they bad? What do emulsifiers do? They combine substances that don't want to be combined. What in your body might this affect? Your mucosal lining. Emulsifiers don't break down in your gut as they pass through. They just emulsify everything as they move through. Including your mucus. That layer is extremely important for a normally functioning gut. Lose it and then chime will contact the gut lining. This disrupts the microbiota and allows things to get through your gut that are not supposed to. It causes inflammation.

UPFs contain many bad things, but they HAVE to be categorized to fully appreciate the levels of badness. Some things are just not that big of deal, and the "health industry" does everyone a disservice by not clarifying it.

from bad to not as bad:

- Emulsifiers (e.g., Polysorbate 80/60/40, carboxymethylcellulose)

- some stabilizers/thickeners (e.g., carrageenan)

- artificial sweeteners

- refined sugars

- artificial colors/cosmetics

- other stabilizers/thickeners/emulsifiers (e.g., xanthan gum, guar gum, pectin, cellulose, lecithin)

I see this as consistent. When you say "I play the piano" you are really saying, "There are many instruments – banjo, trumpet, clarinet, and piano. I play the piano". Saying "I play a piano" is also correct. But the inference is that you are referring to one particular piano.

In the sentence "There is a piano in the lobby" you are saying "There are many objects in the lobby. Among them is a piano, one of many in the world".

But it's still where the generic, simplistic application of the rule of "the for distinct, a for generic" fails.

When "you can play the piano", you can play any piano. When "there is a piano in the lobby", it's distinctively a very specific one.

So I would go on a limb and claim: whether you use the or a is also philosophical in nature :)

I see this as consistent with other replies stating that The is something specific in a group, and A is an indeterminant one of many.

How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".

That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.

The Chairman position is to protect company culture, not make operational decisions.

Not sure any chairman has their ear to the ground to fully understand the culture within their organization.

I never saw our CEO in person, never saw our chairman even on a webinar.

And yes it's not their job to be that low level, but they can't have an idea of the culture either.

Berkshire itself has less than 50 employees, so it's absolutely possible to do this.

"Company culture" at Berkshire Hathway doesn't mean the same as at most companies. BH buys companies and don't interfere with them. So while BH employs upwards of 100k people, the people whose culture the CEO cares about is probably under 100 people.

This is the answer. While it is very real to talk about "employee culture" as company culture, in this particular case, the "culture" I was talking about was from a corporate/investment/acquisition level. Howards job is not to understand how each company that BRK owns is run, that is the CEO's job. But Howards job is to look at BRK from a high level and make sure that the CEO is executing in the same way that Warren set up, namely – buying companies and stocks at a "fair" price or below, and not micromanaging the companies that they acquire. If the CEO is not living up to that, Howard's (and the board's) one card that they can play is to replace the CEO.

sounds like a role that can be replaced by GPT

I actually asked GPT that question some time ago.

The importance of top executive decisions is overstated, they often do no better than random chance. But their decisions are not where their value lies.

The important part is that they own their decisions, or at least appear to do so. And in doing that, they gain trust for the company, they are the company face. It is more of a performance than a technical job. By that, I don't mean it is fake, people will notice if you don't know what you are talking about, and it won't inspire confidence, which is what leaders try to avoid at all costs.

LLMs will probably be at least as good at decision making (I mean, that's almost a dice roll), and they can be convincing, which is important too, but they are completely lacking in the trust department. No one want to work for a machine, no one want to do business negotiations with a machine either. That's why it is important to have a human on top.

No, the chairman is there to represent the biggest shareholders and defend the common interest of getting the best out of the company.

Bowing to the king** is not a CEO's duty.

I love this.

As nerdy as it is, it is also an interesting historical look on how certain things in society/culture have a life that is hidden in plain view and quietly goes on. It is an interesting reflection on many things in life.

I run an ecommerce auction website on wordpress that is highly dynamic and can't be cached. Bots are a waste of cpu. I even turned off "prefetch" requests as I found that (android in particular) browsers will prefetch every auction item on the page as the user scrolls down the summary page looking at items.