deo @ deo @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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2 yr. ago

with another deposition scheduled for Saturday... don't forget that part. he wasn't even done giving evidence.

He wasn't even done giving the deposition that he literally volunteered to give...

I agree that it's nonsense, and thanks for pointing out that I can look up European nutrition facts -- i'm gonna start doing that. I wish we'd do the per 100g thing, but we don't which makes it easier for companies to game the system. My point was that nutrition facts don't always tell the whole story, especially if your country's regulatory bodies have been lobbied into submission by the companies they are supposed to be regulating, so finding out if your tea has added sugars may not be as simple as looking on the box.

Tic Tacs say 0g sugar in the nutrition facts, even though they're mostly sugar. They can do this because they aren't required to report quantities of sugar below 0.5g, but the serving size is 1 tic tac or, conveniently, 0.49g.

I do think governments should explore taxing unrealized capital gains too, though.

Oh, boy do they ever.

One big issue is that they can take out loans with stock as collateral. Yes, they eventually have to pay the loan back (and sell stock to do so, thus paying some capital gains), but they can still get around paying their fair share of captial gains (eg: sell the underperforming stocks to minimize capital gains, or just take out a new loan to repay the old one). While I can see the benefit of being able to use your stock as collateral for a loan, there needs to be changes to how capital gains are calculated in this case.

Another issue is that when they die, the inheritor of their stocks gets them with the cost basis reset (stepped-up basis). Let's say I have stock that I purchased for $10/share. I die when the price is $100 and leave it to my sister, and she sells it when the price is $110. She only has to pay capital gains on $10/share, not $100/share. If you combine this with a cycle of taking out a loan to repay your previous loan until you die, this means that your estate can settle the final outstanding loan with virtually no capital gains tax at all, since the stepped-up basis for your stock goes into effect once it goes to probate (ie: before being distributed to creditors and beneficiaries).

I'd totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i'd spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I'm still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don't care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.

I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren't getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!

I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can't get that at Goodwill!

That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills... Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn't there like it is in landfills since there's so much poop to eat, haha.

Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we're at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.

I'm actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I'm a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug -- so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it's much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.

Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences because their time is more valuable? Do you at least SEE the parallel I'm trying to draw here?

And I already admitted that I don't know what the optimal metric is. I just know that a flat fine that is the same for everyone, without taking into account their financial situation at all, is unfair.

I prefer the way the Hobbits do it: 12 months of 30 days, then 5 (or 6) days straight of winter holiday/new year festivities. But I would totally get behind this calendar in a heartbeat, too.

I certainly wasn't intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it's just that the marketing push to conflate "clean" with "green" has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we're running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we're currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that...).

I'm in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.

best case, you're releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you're also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.

I agree that everyone should be equal under the law, but that doesn't mean that fixed fines are fair. The same amount of money has a different value to different people, and that perceived value changes depending on one's income and wealth.

IDK if you saw my edit in my previous response with the community service example, but I think that might help clear up where we're diverging. If it takes me 10 hours of work to make enough money to pay the fine, but it takes you 100 hours of work to pay the fine for the exact same offense because our salaries are different, were we really punished equally?

1. stealing != traffic violation. while stealing may have a fine associated with it, it's generally based on restitution for the goods stolen + legal fees etc. So, you're moving the goal posts on me, and my feelings about how to handle theft of necessities is tangential to the discussion (for the record, my feelings are: if you see someone stealing necessities, no you didn't).
2. You seem to not be getting that the goal should be equal deterrence regardless of income or wealth or whatever the most fair metric happens to be. IDK what the baseline fine should be, nor what the most fair way to scale the fines should be b/c i'm a chemist, not a sociologist or legal scholar. But at the end of the day, if the only punishment is a fine, the wealthy don't have to give a shit.

Edit: for #2, let's use time instead of money. If instead of paying a $1000 fine, you could do community service. But the "value" of your community service is tied to your wage/salary. So, someone making $10/hr has to do 100 hrs of community service, while someone else making $100/hr only has to do 10 hrs of community service. Is that still fair in your view?

also, pepper spray, don't forget that. i'd wager the artificial saliva they used in the safety studies didn't have the same viscosity as pepper-spray-mucus-and-tears.

if you click the second link instead when you encounter a loop, it fixes it, though.

wouldn't count that stuff in the parenthesis, as it's just showing the translation of "japonic lanuages" and then the transliteration of that translation. Sometimes they'll have pronunciation or whatever in parentheses, and that shouldn't count for the same reason.

If instead of clicking on "japanese" again, you had clicked on "language family", you'd get all the way to philosophy in 8 or 9 clicks (i lost count and i'm too lazy to fix it).

if the goal of the fine is to deter people from committing a traffic violation, the person making $150k will not be equally deterred compared to the person making $75k. If the fine has too little impact, it no longer works as a deterrent. This is especially true for things like parking tickets, where you aren't necessarily putting yourself or others in danger like you might be for speeding (though, assuming the two people only differ in their income and all other variables -- like how willing they are to drive dangerously -- remain equal, then the point still stands).

i live in a red state, so much so that some races in the general election are uncontested. if i don't vote in the republican primary, i essentially don't have a say in anything because i will be out-voted in the general even if there are multiple candidates. so i hold my nose and try to find the least bad option in the republican primaries. I did vote in the democratic primary in 2016 and 2020, though, b/c i had to support the Bernie man, so it depends on the circumstances. This is what our FPTP voting system has reduced me to.

And signed into law by then-governor Reagan, no less!