And just categorically saying any alternative must be just as bad is just a non-sequitur, there’s no reason that should be true. Cookware is a good example, cast iron works just as well, is not as bad, the only downside compared to teflon is weight. But it’s not like sending us back to the stone age or anything…

You can have your own opinion here, but anything which performs like PFAS compounds, in the variety of uses that PFAS is used, will almost certainly be bad. In general when you make new compounds and materials which are more complex their potential health impacts are worse. PFAS is already an extremely complex material and while broad sweeping statements might not be 100% accurate, I wouldn’t bet that it’s replacement would be better for people.

It’s another thing altogether if you are recommending going backward in the development chain, cookware is a good example here but it’s limited case underlies the ubiquity of PFAS. Hell, PFAS is a major component in computer part manufacturing and is part of the reason computing technology has progressed as it has.

Um, no it doesn’t… maybe you’re confusing micrograms for nanograms?

I don’t have a lot of thoughts on the matter, I know a good bit about PFAS, not microplastics. Grams vs Nanograms is a huge difference, but I don’t know if that’s detrimental or not. Looking over the link you provided the study provides it’s own description of limitations which may or may not be trivial.

You can’t have it needed in some stuff and critically dangerous if it’s a bio-accumulating chemical that virtually never breaks down. To reduce it enough to not be a hazard world wide you would functionally have to stop using it everywhere.

I haven’t seen any definitive results on dangerous health levels, 4.4 ng/kg might be it, but then other studies show people with mg/L of blood concentration. Overall the effects of exposure seem to depend on more than just the concentration, such as health status, exposure duration, magnitude of exposure, and how lucky you got with the genetic lottery. Even then we are fairly certain it is bad, we just don’t know what or how specifically. I would also throw caution at any study using ng as a serious measurement here, especially over prolonged exposure. The problem with measuring on such a low level is that you have far too much uncertainty to claim any true accuracy, at best these studies are guessing when they throw out numbers. Hell, the EPA just came out with a standardized method for analyzing PFAS last year.

At those levels of exposure you’re probably getting it just from eating commercially grown fruits and vegetables, because it can bio-accumulate in those as well.

In reality no one can say for certain, but a lot of research is pointing to long term exposure being bad. The problem is that the research to determine how bad will take decades (and has been going on for decades at this point). Right now it’s being used as the boogeyman for every sort of ill from causing cancer, infertility, issues with lactation, liver failure, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, and auto-immune disorders. Basically the preliminary research says that it at least in part impacts all of these things, we just don’t know how much.

On the flip side bacon also causes cancer and high cholesterol at some level. That’s not to make light of the situation, but it does give some credence to your earlier statement.

The thing people are missing in these discussions is what are they willing to live without if we don’t use these chemicals. Going without non-stick cookware is literally the tip of the iceberg. How do we feel about cars, furniture, and mattresses being more flammable because they don’t have the fire retarding forever chemicals? How do we feel about stain resistance, oil resistance, water resistance, and slip resistance in everything including shoes, umbrellas, clothes, oven mitts, jackets, and more? How do we feel about needing to clean everything including clothes, appliances, and floors more often. How about in industry where it’s used as a fume suppressant so smelly chemicals don’t waft as far or fire fighting foams the next time an electric car catches on fire? This stuff is even in the wrapping of your food so the it doesn’t go through the packaging and cause a mess as easily.

Dupont coined the phrase “Better Living Through Chemistry” and that chemistry is PFAS. It’s in your clothes when you buy them, it’s in your detergent when you clean them, it’s in the cleaner that you wipe your washer off with, it’s in the floor sealant of the laundry room that washer is in, it’s in the gloves you wear while cleaning that laundry room, it’s in the carpet in the room next to the laundry room, and the list goes on and on.

Dropping PFAS chemicals fully would probably send us back to the 1960’s or we’ll end up replacing it with something just as bad that we don’t know the effects of yet.

From the mind behind the design of the Cybertruck and naming his website X. God that’s going to be some grade A cringe.

Part of the problem is that polling has been fundamentally flawed for a while now. Polling in 2016, 2020, and 2024 all showed Trump as losing and the polling agencies had to artificially weigh pro Trump supporters higher in the polls because they weren’t being adequately represented. It seems that a major portion of the problem is that some number of liberal/socialist poll respondents don’t end up actually voting and some number of conservative voters don’t end up responding to polls.

The right believes that the 2nd amendment exists so that the public can overthrow a corrupt government, in this faulty logic they believe that some normies with AR-15s can overcome the US military. Unlike January 6th the current political right also wouldn’t hesitate to use that military might to crush a violent revolution. At best what you are talking about would result in a civil war, assuming the military splits evenly as well, and at worst would result in the obliteration of the rebels. Given the number of Punisher symbols I see on military persons I wouldn’t bet on them supporting leftist revolutionaries.

Ok, how do you propose doing that? A violent revolution?

Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.

In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.

As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.

Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).

Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.

The example is the Telluride though? That’s the whole point. Of course any sane person would pick a cheaper car. For that matter why would you ever buy a brand new car?

I definitely agree, but I went with the option which would have the lowest monthly payment. On the other end local rates have a 36 month loan at 6.75%, but that’s $1,800 per month.

I just Googled and the 2024 Telluride has an MSRP of ~$55,000 in my area, used 2023 models are about ~$45,000.

Looking at an auto loan calculator, that’s between $700 and $900 per month with a 96 month 9% auto loan.

Point is, if you can afford the car you’re probably not worrying about the subscription except on principle. If you can afford the car and have principle concerns you’d probably buy a different car.

If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.

What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video

People seem to forget that the way Henry Ford was so successful was that he paid more than double the normal rate of that time. He of course didn’t do it out of the goodness of his black heart, but it’s undoubtedly one of the reasons for his success.

I have Windows 10, so things may be different for 11 or whatever version you’re on, but can’t you just uninstall OneDrive without specifically closing it? I feel like that’s what I did when it was default installed.

Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.

I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.

Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?

Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.

Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.

Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.

Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.

When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.

The only thing that seems expensive is the veggie patties in my opinion. For $4.99 I would have expected a 4 pack.

The buns are a bit pricey, but we’re talking a dollar and some change then.

Looks to me like you have most of 4 lunches and 4 breakfasts for $18.

Big thing that helps is switching off of Chrome. I’ve been seeing a lot of people say that we should stop using Chrome and I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Once the YouTube adblocker started picking up Ublock Origin even after clearing the cache I hard switched to Fire Fox and installed Ublock Origin.

I have not cleared my cache once and I haven’t seen a single ad.