Its not that simple. Smokers that dont die suddenly (how many are those actually?) dont die much earlier because healthcare improved and also:
- kill/cause damages through passive smoke
- can/do cause enormous health bills (my dad struggled on for almost 6 years)
- cleaning up their trash costs money
- set fire to stuff with thrown cigarette butts
- often dont just die and just cant work anymore thus stopping working earlier, create less value in general
I'd love to read up on current studies/research but lots of studies are 10+ years old now but the damages seem to outweigh them not having a retirement.
All the things you listed arent things you interact with by pressing on them thousands of times in a day. Its a hard problem to make a keyboard that feels nice, looks nice and is waterproof. Its even harder if you know that the payoff isnt that marketable, I dont think I have ever seen a mainstream laptop advertisment talking about that you can spill stuff on it. Phones barely have buttons or holes anymore and it took us quite a while for the flagship-phones to be water-resistant.
Im sorry but the video feels a bit disingenuous with the way he is cutting the lime. With the normal knive he just pushes straight down on the lime and with the vibroknife he actually does a slicing move. Same with the cheese. It doesnt feel like an honest comparison
Maybe, though I'll note that this matches how I use regular knives with cheese & similar things: with a dull unscalloped knife I have to carefully go straight down to avoid tearing. If my knife is sharp (or temporarily oiled) and the food doesn't stick, I'll slice. Because I can. The end result is different: thinner slices, less crushing. Also faster.
I saw the same thing immediately. The robot arm could be calibrated to use a real slicing motion as well. They're misrepresenting the actual performance of this product.
I think "sourcing internationally" is one thing and avoiding China (or any single country for that matter) is another. The current administration puts a lot of effort on being independent from everyone else. I think that approach is misguided. We have allies and we need them anyways. Unlike the Soviet Union, China has 3x the population of the US. If we want to have weight on the international stage, we need our allies. If we can source pieces from multiple countries and ideally from allies, it's IMO a very minor issue. Always needing pieces that only come from a single country, especially one that's not a liberal democracy, is a much bigger issue.
That said, I think Chinese manufacturing has a huge advantage from factories being close to each other. Getting your PCB for prototyping in a few hours instead of 10 days is a huge advantage.
I'm also not a Sinophobe. I've ordered plenty from China. I even have a XiaoHongShu account.
As an inventor, one thing that greatly speeds up making stuff is a rapid order and getting parts. And in my case, I literally needed a rectangular sheet of aluminum. I did all the CAD work, submitted to local companies who could do it, and not a peep. I would have paid the American premium of getting it made locally.
I'm also not the only person with this problem. I know others who wanted to hire a welder for a 2 hour job. Even went to the Union hall. Nobody. Nada. And the guy was also part of the IBEW as well. Doesn't matter if you're paying.
And again, this was over a metal plate. No powder coating. No special treatment. Nothing.
I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small. But I would have brought more small fabrication jobs, and informed local makers that they could do this. But no.
"I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small"
This rings truer than it should. We had a locksmith out to give us an estimate to install several high-security locks that I can only assume would have been fairly good business. Never heard back from them. We didn't bother following up with them either because if they can't even bother writing up the estimate, how can I trust their work?
I wonder if it's a lack of competition in part based on a labor shortage and tight occupational licensing
I have a Garmin Instinct 2 Solar. The Solar feature is more of a gimmick, unless youre out in the sun the whole day for weeks it doesnt really make a difference.
But it doesnt matter much, the battery lasts 3 weeks. Its a great watch if you like the old-style digital watch screens
There were multiple, I think they were called 1p-LSD, 1cp-LSD, 1d-LSD, 1v-LSD and currently you can still legally buy 1S-LSD. Its a bit of whack-a-mole with the lawmakers because there isnt a blanket ban, only ever the specific chemical gets banned. Although stuff got quite a lot more expensive with every iteration.
Prior to those there were LSZ (lysergic acid dimethylazetidide) and AL-LAD doing the rounds in the UK. Very briefly PARGY-LAD too.
1P-LSD was something of a breakthrough IIRC (never tried it but I was still following the scene at that point) because unlike the others it is a pro-drug for LSD, being quickly metabolised to the parent compound, rather than a different but closely related compound as the others were.
Never heard of the rest of those though! I stopped paying attention sometime around then.
Not quite the specific chemicals anymore. As I understood it, when they outlawed 1v, the legislation was changed to also consider the weight of the molecule. Ok fine, still whack-a-mole, it just took the clandestine chemists slightly longer to figure out what mostly inert structures they could add to the LSD (though not actually add, since that would mean they were at some point making LSD, which is illegal) that would be cleaved off metabolically so you end up with LSD in your system
I havent seen anything about frequency in the article. Unless they control for that it doesnt feel like you should claim that weed is somehow safer. Of course you will have less damage from smoking a few joints a day (which would be very heavy use) vs the standart amount of cigarettes a cigarette smoker smokes.
There is a long-standing tradition in cannabis research of confusing the dose.
See: Rodent studies using insane super-doses injected directly with the equivalent of 140 joints+ every day, Marinol vs cannabis, claiming 5% THC cannabis as "high dose" in research, studies citing 'potency increase' as proof of increasing risk without controlling for dose adjustments, driving impairment studies using blood levels as measurement, etc.
Is this not a similar argument to condoms / birth control effectiveness? Condoms are 100% effective if used properly and they don’t burst. The failure proportion is primarily misuse. You build in the misuse / other factors into the effectiveness rate.
You'd be surprised about artificial contraception. Sure, when used they can be highly effective to prevent pregnancy, but they also train people to do risky behavior.
It's sort of like giving away free parachutes and plane rides to everyone. Sure, that support will encourage lots of skydiving. But eventually, isn't someone going to go up without a parachute, say "YOLO" and dive out anyway?
The same thing happens with contracepting, promiscuous men and women: they become accustomed to using one another as objects and free, easy access to sex whenever. But when that contraception isn't readily available at hand, they're going ahead anyway. They're going to do it regardless, because it's the habit they're accustomed to now.
So on balance, it's really been found that free access to artificial contraception tends to encourage and increase unplanned/unwanted pregnancies. And that's exactly why it's so plentiful, because the goal is the opposite of what you may think...
I’m not quite sure that was the point I was trying to make… more that the effectiveness figures often have “normal use” and other effects built in.
To your point, people were promiscuous before contraception, and we are now in a much better situation unwanted pregnancy / STD wise since its advent. I’m not convinced by the reasoning whatsoever.
This is a nonsense slippery slope fallacy, with a healthy side of the naturalism fallacy. Giving people access to contraception is proven over and over again to be the solution to STDs and unwanted pregnancy, and the "natural" methods of abstinence education and the rhythm method prove over and over to be ineffective. (If you have religious convictions such that the rhythm method is the only one acceptable to you, that's fine, live out your convictions, but it is what it is and it's not a prescription for society at large. A friend of mine once told me about going to a rhythm method workshop, taught by someone with 12 kids.)
> But when that contraception isn't readily available at hand, they're going ahead anyway.
They have been doing it anyway since the dawn of time, whether they ever had access to contraception or not. Sex is normal and healthy. The solution is to give them ready access to contraception.
Abby Johnson: You can find different studies that say different things. One in Colorado said you give women contraception and abortion rates go down; other studies say that’s not true. What we do know for sure, according to Guttmacher themselves, Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, is that 54% of women who are having abortions are using contraception at the time when they get pregnant. So the idea that contraception is working for women and that it’s preventing abortion is not true. If it were, that number would not be 54%.
> Sex is normal and healthy
So is pregnancy and childbirth. Why administer drugs to disrupt normal, healthy biological processes? Absurd!
Because people have a right to bodily autonomy. It's not absurd at all. What's absurd is the naturalism fallacy. You could say the same thing about building skyscrapers or treating cancer. Dying of cancer is a natural process of the body, why should anyone disrupt it? Absurd!
It shouldn't surprise anyone that many people seeking abortions are using contraceptives - they didn't want to get pregnant, after all. Contraceptives are reliable but not infallible. Abortion happens everyday in a society of hundreds of millions, but contraceptives failing is rare. It's not really any more surprising than a handful of people getting struck by lightning every year, even if it's more morally and politically charged.
> She is also author of Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey across the Life Line and founder of And Then There Were None, an organization that assists abortion-clinic workers seeking to transition out of the industry.
Thanks for quoting some culture warrior clown, but they asked for real sources.
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