Water boils at around 212 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on your altitude. So what.
It turns out that many cooking processes proceed efficiently at that temperature, and water will keep your cooking at that temperature, for hours on end if needed. This is incredibly useful so you can turn your attention away from regulating the heat on the stove, to more important things like thin-slicing some beef while keeping all your fingers.
Slow-cooking some beef? As long as there is some water in the pot, it will cook at 212F and not burn. Boiling some frozen corn? It will cook at 212F and not smoke if it’s in a bit of water. Forgot to defrost it properly, and need to cook a frozen pork chop? Put enough water in the pan to keep the temperature at 212F for 10 minutes before the temperature climbs, once the water evaporates.
That last example is a neat trick. If you can judge the right amount of water in your pan, you can “program” an automatic two-step cooking process. We enjoy occasional sausage links, purchased frozen from Costco (Jones Farms brand, if you must know). We put an 1/8″or less of water and four links in a fry pan, and start it on high. Once it’s boiling away, we turn down to medium-low heat and the sausage will defrost for 3 minutes or so until the water is gone. Then the temperature automatically increases to brown them nicely. And one gets an audible signal (loud sizzling) when the process switches over to the higher temperature, so one remembers to turn them. No computers, no Insta-Pot – just handy kitchen physics.
The water is like an independent board of directors for a successful company. There are so many markets to pursue, so many compensation schemes to try and so many candidates for senior manager roles that radiate confidence to get a company’s “paradigms aligned”. Every company should have an outside, independent board to provide stability, and apply the right type of organizational inertia so that managers are rewarded not for their confidence, but for their competence in handling real issues of customers and products.