Publicly traded companies are always going to turn to shit, the “Spotify model” is just appeasing shareholders with infinite growth.

The patients have an excuse.

Those damned blue-collar tweekers, they’re runnin this here town.

Why even have kids if they can’t be warrior-slaves for your crusade?

Solar power is not a feasible solution in all parts of the world, though, and large-scale storage is still very much an issue.

I didn’t think my point needed a “history of music” lesson attached. The rock bands of the 60s were taking the experiments of swing and blues musicians from the decade prior and refining them into the aggressive, over-driven and distorted arrangements. Not “rock & roll”.

The Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, these guys were inventing the sound of rock. I think they’re fantastic musicians. But Rush and Pink Floyd stand out more to me as timeless art.

More likely than the average Joe but guiding, like teaching or storytelling, is a distinct skill. Lots of people are totally blind to their own biases and the hypothetical 4 hour opera without context would definitely make me doubt their advice.

The media is captured, it’s complicit, it’s bought and controlled by people like Murdoch.

Alright, well, I don’t believe in ghost stories.

Yep. I don’t want to but there’s nothing particularly distressing about the idea. I’ve never felt “existential angst” or anything like that.

European settlers hated pretty much everything about the New World and tried to replace local flora and fauna with things they recognized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatisation_society

Nuts? No. It’s logical when the entire system is built to the benefit of heartless capitalists. What it is is enraging.

I just have no interest in being polite, permissive, or accepting of pseudoscience.

My intuition about souls is that they’re nonsense.

“La la la I make up my own facts” is an embarrassing stance to upvote, let alone put forth as an honest argument.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7015476/

There’s ongoing study about safe exposure levels, but the usefulness of animal studies is limited (mice are a poor metabolic analogue). The World Health Organization stands by 0.7mg/liter in water for chlorate and the key thing being looked at is how much remains on food as residue.

Regulations are only as good as their enforcement. The US has pretty good food safety laws (the discrepancies with the EU tend to be our “prove it’s bad” rather than “prove it’s not bad” stance on common-use ingredients and additives.) particularly with labeling. We don’t have fresh raw cheeses because we decided the best Brie wasn’t worth occasional listeria outbreaks.

Had cheap goods. With the way our food costs have exploded in the last five years we almost certainly wouldn’t have leverage over local production.

Ignoring that, the behavior that protectionist trade laws are avoiding is: Country A using tax subsidies to artifically deflate the cost of a good, flooding the market of Country B where it isn’t subsidized and eventually putting the producers there out of business so they become reliant on trade with Country A. Protectionism like this isn’t wrong, but people generally don’t like being told that they’re being barred from less expensive options so it gets dressed up in nationalism.

The USDA has banned hormones and steroids since the 50s and like 5% of chicken gets the (perfectly safe) chlorine rinse. European countries use the same rinse on leafy vegetables, they just banned it on poultry because they thought it would make processors complacent.

Only a small portion of US chicken gets the chlorine rinse, a practice that the EU recognized as perfectly safe by the way. They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices. They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.