I appreciate the message, but I find this presentation style to be unbearable, like a shitty clickbait version of a TED talk: fast cuts with exaggerated audience reactions, playing hide the ball with the actual information being presented. And then they took what I imagine is a normal studio production designed for normal TV screens and cropped it into vertical video, published on Youtube as a short. Gross.

Plastics are a broad category. But specific plasticizers, like BPA, have been demonstrated to cause specific endocrine issues, up to and including a causal link to certain cancers, miscarriages, and other reproductive/immune issues. And it’s not just correlations being found, as the research is showing the mechanism of action by actually inducing the effects in vitro.

And so when a particular plasticizer has been shown to be harmful, the research goes into other chemically similar plasticizers to see whether they have biological effects, as well. BPS is another plasticizer that is being studied, as it is chemically similar to BPA.

So we haven’t shown that all microplastics are bad. I’m skeptical that these effects would extend to all plastics. But some common compounds that are present in many plastics are a cause for concern, and the difficulty in treating water or waste for microplastics in general means that some of those harmful compounds are present in lots of places where we’d rather not.

We moved from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline based on the specific dangers attributable to lead itself. We can do the same for the specific compounds in our plastics shown to be harmful. Maybe the end result is that we have a lot of safer plastics remaining. But your comment seems to suggest that we not even try.

The brushes and loofas also contribute to micro plastic pollution.

That just defines fruit. Vegetable has no formal definition, and in practice is defined basically as “parts of plants we eat that aren’t considered fruits or nuts.”

My body is a machine for turning the flashes of tiny little lights precisely arranged on a slab of glass into little taps of my thumbs on precise positions on that glass slab.

I eat a legume for pretty much every meal:

• Peanut butter on regular rotation for convenience foods
• Peas or beans or snap peas as a component in pasta dishes or salads
• Blanched peas or green beans as a vegetable side when I’m eating dinner with a main and sides separate.
• Edamame with Asianish noodle dishes, including instant ramen
• Snow peas or snap peas as a component in stir fries
• Beans in salads (things like kidney beans or black beans)
• Lentils or beans in fast casual rice bowls of a Mediterranean influence
• Some kind of lentil or chickpea dish with South Asian food.
• Beans with Mexican food because duh
• Dried beans with my braises (cassoulet, chili, other random assortments of ingredients in a braising pot/dutch oven), only you gotta be conscious of how dried beans don’t cook properly in acidic environments.

I personally don’t care for tofu. I’ll eat it when it’s a component of a dish I happen to already be eating, but I rarely seek it out to be the star of the dish I order or make, with only a few exceptions.

But adding legumes/pulses to your meals is an easy way to get more protein, including amino acids (like lysine) that aren’t present in traditional grains like wheat or rice. And they’re generally a good source of certain types of soluble fiber good for gut health. I’m also generally less hungry (and get full faster) when I’m eating plenty of fiber and protein, so legumes help with both of those.

I eat a lot, so I still eat a decent amount of meat overall, but as a percentage of my 3500-calorie diet it’s probably smaller than the average Westerner.

Döner joints per km^2 is the most German unit I’ve ever encountered

Insane that people pay €14 for a bowl of rice…

I would imagine the expensive part isn’t the rice.

Yes, but that’s part of the humor, isn’t it? Sarcasm works best when there’s a nod towards (fake) sincerity.

That’s basically Pete Holmes’ origin story. His standup is good, his podcast is boring, but his 2-season series “Crashing” was probably the greatest TV show about standup comedy that I’ve seen.

I’m finding it shocking the number of comments that don’t seem to realize that this is the joke.

That’s basically just em dashes, which these days will get you accused of being an LLM.

the flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?

Any kind. There’s further breakdowns in access to flushing toilets, dry latrines, composting toilets, etc., but this is part of a long standing project to get people to stop open defecation in places where untreated human waste will mix into drinking water, food supply, etc.

India basically introduced toilets in a single generation.

According to this article, in 1993, 70.3% of the Indian population did not have access to toilets. By 2021, the number dropped to 17.8%. So literally more than half the population of India got access to toilets within 30 years.

We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.

That’s not even a government thing. It’s a finance/banking thing, as most major banks are still using mainframes and legacy COBOL code for most of their business logic.

Controversy and debate about whether the condition exists for literal hostages in a violent/deadly situation is a step removed from talking about whether people become irrationally attached to manipulative romantic/sexual partners, and stay despite all rationality pointing towards leaving.

I don’t know if Stockholm Syndrome exists for hostages held at gunpoint. But I do know that plenty of people have behaved irrationally about attachment to abusive people in their lives. And we don’t have to call that particular condition Stockholm Syndrome, but your argument doesn’t really disprove the topic of this discussion.

Can’t find another source for this tweet from either Twitter or Reddit, but here’s a screenshot of this tweet by Twitter user @hiimbobbi:

Personally, Belle was not fooling me or anyone. When the Beast changed into a human, I saw that look on her face. That was DISAPPOINTMENT.