The cost of entering the market is so high that it’s functionally impossible for any new carriers to enter the market without having major investor backing. The only way to make the cost reasonable for most people is to have a very large risk pool; you can’t get a large risk pool without having a lot of people signing up, which means already having the infrastructure in place to handle that kind of numbers.

If you insure, say, 1000 people, and 999 of them are incredibly safe drives, and one of them drives drunk and kills a busload of school children–costing the insurer a “mere” $1,000,000 because that was the limit of their liability–that means that every person in that risk pool needs to pay $1000 annually for that single accident, and that’s just to break completely even, without accounting for any of the overhead involved in running an insurance company.

I think you might have gotten old stock when you bought a ‘new’ tin. When I look on their website, it only has the vegan formulation listed, and the ingredients do appear to be derived from non-animal sources.

Can’t really expect anything else from a person that’s on a pro-tankie instance. Almost every time someone starts this both sides nonsense, it’s lemygrad, lemmy.ml, or hexbear.

If only more people were really aware of the health risks of consuming undercooked wild meat…

People do a lot of dumb shit. Some hunters still have a ritual of making a first-time hunter eat a raw heart from their first kill, which sounds like a great way to end up with a raging parasitic infection to me.

Pretty much. The idea that there’s any species that is purely an herbivore just isn’t born out in nature.

Saw an article recently about a whole family that god worms in their brains from eating undercooked bear.

That said, best speculation right now is that it was our ability to use fire that allowed us to evolve to where we are now, because we were able to pre-digest food by cooking it, and also have a very-high protein diet that allowed our brains to evolve to where they are now.

Your statement, “Even salmonella isn’t present in raw chicken […]” implies that wild fowl–animals that don’t have to worry about sanitary conditions in modern, industrial farming–would be safe to eat raw. Taking sushi and sashimi as another example, that’s safe(-ish) only because they use ocean fish; there’s no freshwater sushi because freshwater fish carry parasites that can infect humans, and so isn’t safe, even from the most pristine lakes and streams in the world.

I’d say that modern farming–when the best practices are used–is the reason we’re able to eat things raw at all. When you look at feces from Romans up through late medieval Europeans, you see that most humans had all kinds of nasty intestinal parasites. (Also, a certain amount of parasitic infection seems to be good, because it keeps your autoimmune system from always being on ultra-high alert.)

Nutritionfacts is a pseudoscience site.

The paleo diet is definitely, absolutely bullshit, but ketogenic diets have real use and purpose, if you can adhere to a strict ketogenic diet, and can do so without becoming malnourished (both of which are damn near impossible for most people). If you can get your body into a state of ketosis–not ketoacidosis, which is a potentially fatal condition most often associated with diabetes–then you burn off body fat much, much more quickly when you’re on a calorie-deficient diet, because your body is already using fats as a primary source for energy rather than carbohydrates. The downside is that you’ll feel like absolute dogshit for a few days until you adjust, since glucose is the preferred fuel for cellular respiration.

I’ll just leave this right here

tbh my take is alot of people would like an option between paying $2 for a garment they know involved exploitation/slavery vs an accessible1 independent option that doesn’t cost $500/garment.

I would have wanted to believe that too, but then you see things like Temu that promise clothing and consumer goods at impossibly low prices, prices that simply aren’t possibly without forced labor somewhere, and people eat that shit up. I think that most people have an out of sight, out of mind approach to it, and as long as they can’t directly see the exploitation, they’ll accept it.

1 Quick note on accessibility, there are ofc some scant options between $2-500, but what isn’t clear (ie. readily accessible) to the consumer is which of those options isn’t just some greedy bastard buying a $2 option and selling it on for $15.

I strongly suspect that this obscurity is by intent.

And, taking this whole thing a bit farther, as a designer that was paying myself $20/hr, I still can’t guarantee anything about being free of forced labor, because I have no way of realistically tracking everything in my supply chain. This is why there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so the best you can do is pick your battles.

Look, no one decides that they want to work in the mines because it’s good for society as a whole to have consumer goods made from what they mine. Everyone expects to be paid in some way.

If I’m making jeans as an independent designer–which I tried doing, briefly–and I decide that my time is worth $20/hr, then I’m going to have to charge around $500 for a single pair of jeans after you figure in all the time needed to make a single pair that’s been customized to fit a single, specific person. (Maybe more; I haven’t done the math in a decade or so.) Almost no one is going to want to, or be able to afford to pay that. Am I skimming off the top? No, I’m charging a fair–and actually very low–rate for custom work. But just like when I tried to do that a decade ago, no one can or will pay for that.

Even if we capped profits of investors, and capped salaries of executives, and had most of the profits going to the workers, people would tend to prefer less expensive goods over more expensive goods. That’s how competition in the market works. In a sufficiently competitive environment, without legal constraints, prices have to drop. (Monopolies raise prices by reducing competition; a sufficiently competitive environment assumes that there is no single company dominating the market.)

I’ve used one to set t-posts for steel targets before a match. It’s ever so much easier and faster than using a small sledge hammer.

when people google that they want immediate relief, not fucking oh go for a walk every day,

The problem is that there is no immediate relief that isn’t either a) suicide, or b) won’t make things worse in the long run. Even something like ECT doesn’t work instantly; it takes several treatments. Transcranial magnetic stimulation seems promising, but it’s not a frontline treatment. The generic shit is the stuff that actually works in the long run, things like getting therapy, exercising, going outside more, interacting with people in a positive way, and so on. “Self care”–isolating and doing easy, comfortable things–will make things worse in the long run.

Just because something is expensive doesn’t always mean that the standard of living of those making the product is any better.

Oh, absolutely. But when mills, etc. are in the US, there’s more direct control over the living conditions of the workers.

make everyone feel guilty all the time,

Then people just tune it all out, and learn to accept the inherent violence of the system. Sadly.

It is in part a consumer issue. Consumers want things as cheaply as possible, and companies that produce as cheaply as possible sell more product. We’ve seen the same issue with apparel; America wants cheap clothing, and so the mills in the US have largely closed, and most production has been moved overseas in order to make the final products cheap enough.

And while it’s partly a consumer issue, the fact that wages haven’t kept up with productivity–that is, more and more money is being skimmed out of the system by investors and executives rather than going to the workers–has been the driver towards making consumer goods more and more cheaply, simply because people have less purchasing power.

<serious> Frozen blueberries are about $15/4#, and don’t go bad unless you forget them for several years and they get hideously freezer burned. Yeah, they’re as good as fresh if you’re just eating plain blueberries, but if you’re making something that uses blueberries as an ingredient, they work wonderfully.

If I were in trades, I would love working on things like this, because you couldn’t just work on autopilot. You’d have to think about everything you were doing. That’s much more engaging than, say, cutting a hundred 2x4s to all be exactly the same length.

It also seems like you don’t understand that it being banned 50 years ago is not the same as it being banned for 50 years.

Dude, it is literally illegal at the federal level at this very moment. If you use marijuana, and you buy a firearm, you are a felon. The ban may not be fully enforced in some states right now, but the feds can, at any moment, and on a whim, go into California and Colorado and arrest every single person working at a dispensary and charge them under federal drug trafficking laws, and send every single one of them to prison for life.

I would ask what you’re on, but I’m pretty sure I can guess.

So, alcohol was banned far longer than marijuana.

…What? The 1970s were 50 years ago. And marijuana was illegal long before it was classified as a schedule 1 drug under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.