JoshuaFalken @ JoshuaFalken @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Who pays for the roads?

Given the EPAs policy on natural gas leaks was to ask the gas companies if they've noticed anything, I'd say we've got some distance to go on stopping the sale of natural gas stoves.

Climate Town has a good video on this subject - and others - that might be a good watch.

I can't imagine the news that must enter your sphere. Only lemonade stands and yard sales from the neighbourhood?

“The most powerful person in the world could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. “I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

Hard to make any disincentive when the ones running for office are in the twilight of their lives. If only there were any choice to the matter.

I checked the carriers around here and all of them unsurprisingly offer the same thing. 50GB 5G for 50€ that drop to roughly 2G speeds once the limit is reached.

Almost 20x the cost of your subscription.

You've got to admit though - probably wouldn't do it a second time.

Unfortunately disabling network access entirely isn't a universal feature.

I see what you're getting at, but there will always be the higher and lower end of any type of product. Many companies charge orders of magnitude more for goods or services that most people get elsewhere for cheaper.

As with most any issue of a company damaging the environment or abusing their workforce, the answer could lie with stronger regulation, but that's getting a different subject altogether.

I'm not entirely sure either Tony's Chocolonely or Castronova would see Toblerone or Hershey's as direct competition. Maybe Tony's would, given their lower price point. But if the main allure to a brand is the ethically sourced nature of the product, you've already lost most chocolate consumers.

At that point, you can afford to price higher as you're in a market where people that care more about the societal, humanitarian, ecological, etcetera impact than the impact on their own wallet.

Look, I've no interest in arguing the percentage of people that eat a full chocolate bar in one sitting vs not.

What I will point out is that according to a couple headlines I skimmed just now, Snickers appears to be America's chocolate bar of choice, weighing in at 50g. In the comment you replied to, I was talking about a 180 gram bar of of chocolate.

You won't catch me eating three and a half Snickers.

Moving on.

I like Consumer Reports. The samples of bars they chose across the chocolate industry seem fine to me. Where I take issue is in the way the data is presented. The article represents neither the manufacturers portion sizing on the nutrition label nor the FDA daily consumption figure.

Also, I'm sure it's only a fraction of people that bother to read the nutrition labels before purchase. If lead content was written there, then that small group of people would see that information.

I only meant that even these people wouldn't bother with this type of due diligence - that it would necessitate an organization like Consumer Reports. While it's an important thing to check, and I am glad they did the checking, my overall point was that the results tell me that lead and cadmium levels in chocolate are not something anyone needs to be particularly concerned about.

I read the Consumer Reports article you linked, but honestly I can't imagine lead levels in chocolate is something anyone would need to be concerned about.

The testing methodology CR used boils down to 'we sent the chocolate to a laboratory for testing and turns out there's lead above the safe limit in each bar.' Consumers aren't going to do this.

Also, the list on the article is flawed in my opinion. It shows the amount of lead and cadmium found in each chocolate bar, but doesn't scale it to the size of the bar. CR estimates in their risk assessment the daily consumption of chocolate by looking at the portioning of the bars on the nutrition label, and the average by the FDA of 30g.

In Tony Chocolonely's case, these figures are the same. As their regular bar size is 180g and the portioning is 1/6 a bar - 30g. This means that the CR listing a Tony's bar at 134% of the daily limit of lead, it would also mean eating 500% the amount of chocolate the FDA expects.

If you adhere to the average of 30g, Tony's is only 22% your daily lead limit.

Don't get me wrong, I've eaten a full bar in a day. But it's far from a daily occurrence, and I'm certainly not thinking of the health ramifications when I indulge.

Even at 265% the lead limit, the Hershey's bar is 120g, so a portion is 66%. The most frightening thing about that bar is that it's Hershey's.

Really goes to show what economies of scale can do. Castronova chocolate appears to have 65 gram bars at a price of $12. That's only 5g/$.

Tony's Chocolonely, a commonly touted ethical chocolate company, sells 180 gram bars for $6. 30g/$. Half the price for triple the chocolate comparatively.

That said, there's not much to really compare. Castronova seems to be going after a different market with most of the bars being titled as their place of origin and composition, not what taste to expect. A smart move for a business with a smaller footprint.

The few bars I saw mentioning flavours were the lavender dark milk, lemon and lemon salt, and Fleur de sel - an apparently high end French sea salt. Quite different than Tony's milk honey almond nougat or white raspberry popping candy.

They won't be replacing our orders from Tony's, but Castronova has a 12 pack I think we'll get to see what they are like. Thanks for recommendation.

My work had to change auto insurance providers after they increased their premium by 350% at renewal time. No specific explanation given of course - "rising costs through the industry". Apparently the new provider is about double the original rate. Got us all worried it would happen to our cars too. No ones mentioned anything since though. Only a matter of time I suppose.

Fantastic, I'll certainly be making use of that. I've never been one for digital reading - I printed out Little Brother and read it that way - but with no DRM how could you complain. I appreciate the link.

On your recommendation, I picked up a copy from my library this morning. Only had time for the first chapter, but I'm already liking it. Thank you.

I'd heard and used both phrases before but didn't realize they had the same author. Coincidentally, I recently reread one of his books, Little Brother, also by chance of reading about it on a Lemmy comment.

It's no surprise the author of that book has these views. I think I'll read more of his work.

You're not alone - what I did remember was completely incorrect. I would have sworn that the cover was burgundy with the title in black lettering. Also I had thought the whole time it was called Big Brother - which was quite the wrench in the machine when it came to searching online. Wrong on both counts. Goes to show how fallable memory is.

My library didn't have a copy but the author has it available for free on his website in a few different formats. I'm looking forward to reading it - it's a good deal longer than I'd thought. Thanks again.

I've had this vague recollection of that book for over a decade and could never find it despite multiple search attempts and even requests on tip-of-my-tongue esque forums. I just could not remember any useful specific information about it for the life of me.

To make this discovery from a random thread so organically is incredible.

Many thanks to you and @Stache_@lemmy.ml both.

Sounds like my usage is just different to yours. I can't remember why but I got accustomed to listening to audio at increased speed around a decade ago and slowly cranked it up to the point that now I can follow certain people's conversations slightly higher than 2x. Only with voices and cadence I'm familiar with though. Any guests on a show can really throw me off.

The silence trimming aspect is a bit absurd honestly. It makes laughter sound almost all the same and robotic; you have to infer where comedic, dramatic, or thoughtful pauses in the speech are; and if there's a more rapid fire back and forth in the conversation it can be tricky to follow. Although that last point doesn't happen with podcasts where all the speakers record separately and it's edited together to be coherent.

If you listen to a lot of shows, with hundreds of hours of episodes, it's worth dialing up as much as you can stand. Then again, if I didn't have two dozen podcasts with decades of backlog, I sure wouldn't be listening at auctioneer pace.

Well sure they could've made a larger battery and whatnot else, but it's not like the Vision Pro is some slightly polished Oculus. The tech allowing for 12ms visual pass though is impressive enough without any of the other things they developed for it.

While your point about Apple's tremendous resources has truth to it, I'd argue that even had they committed their entire cash reserve to the development of the AVP, it would still involve more people using the device than just the engineers designing the thing.

At some point diminishing returns mean you can't refine much further. I think the regular release of barely improved smartphones is evidence of that. Eventually when the goal of a pair of glasses - or hell, even contact lenses - is reached, this first generation Vision Pro will be one of many milestones we look and wonder how we ever had something so bulky and awkward looking.

Oh and the point I had made about the secretive development processes was to counter the previous comment regarding Apple 'not being deep into artificial intelligence'. No one outside of Apple really knows what they're doing. They've been tight lipped about underway ventures since Jobs returned to the company all those years ago.

As I noticed I'm typing a reply to a several day old comment, I'll leave a couple quotes Tim Cook made recently:

As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in… technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence, where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort, and we’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.

In terms of generative AI… we have a lot of work going on internally, as I’ve alluded to before. Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves. And so we’re going to hold that to this as well. But we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.

If you read all this, I'm surprised. I'm surprised I bothered to type it out. Cheers.