What you said is unbelievably stupid. Society resulted in science and technology which drastically increased life span and health span for the majority of people who have lived and are living. Society has lifted billions out of poverty and created wonderful opportunities for the average person who would've otherwise been a peasant living a short brutish life unable to learn and enjoy things.
We all participate in society, work in society, build society, rest in society, and benefit from society. People who paid their dues doing these things receive retirement at old age because of society. You can find edge cases where society isn't perfect, but none of these edge cases will justify the sweeping claims you made. You threw the baby out with the bathwater big time. You're pretty much advocating for anarchy and chaos.
Economic systems and religious systems exist because they are useful abstractions. Sometimes they map onto physical reality and correctly measure and explain the movement of commodities and as a result we get a more connected world and more trade. When the abstractions don't serve us well anymore, they get upgraded to address new complexity. That is why we have economic theory. Sometimes these abstractions map onto human emotions and lived experience across the spectrum of ages to give people hope and to answer the questions science cannot. That is why we have religions.
They're all beautiful, they're all abstractions that are useful, and they exist because everyone wants them to. There is no conspiracy by the old to subsume the young.
You have replaced God with "society" in your mind, and that's why you attack me with religious fervor, forgetting polite behaviour. There is no society and has never existed any society. It is a common myth, designed to organize people and to let some groups benefit at the expense of other groups - and to always let old people benefit at the expense of young people, because old people are not fit to compete.
"Paid their dues" is one of those myths, that translates to telling young people that they owe old people something for being born. Which is of course a lie, nobody is born indebted.
If "anarchy and chaos" is the option to having your blood sucked, I know what I chose.
All human progress is thanks to individuals who have made inventions and discoveries. Since modern man doesn't believe in God, and is too proud to acknowledge the greatness of their fellow man, they instead turn to the fairy-tale myth of a "society" who they say made everything possible, saved the whole mankind from slavery and poverty, and so on.
Feel free to do what you think is good for "society". I will do what's good for me and my fellow man.
I am interested in a source comparing small farms versus non-industrial farms in terms of nutrition per sqkm. That's a very interesting concept I've not heard before. How is nutrition per sqkm being calculated here? Would this reduce the availability of diverse produce by comparison?
I wanted to make a Twitter / X account but the sign-up flow requires you to solve 10 of those puzzles where you have to rotate the animal with the matching symbol to be oriented in the direction that the hand with that symbol is pointing in. After putting up with this next-gen captcha to train X's algorithm for free, it asked me to do another 10 because supposedly it couldn't tell if I'm a human or not. So I decided not to bother with making an account since it's clearly trying to monetize by obtaining free training data for its ML. I also don't trust that they're not attempting to associate performance on these types of tasks with someone's identity to infer things about them and sell that data further.
Is this what it now takes for a sign-up to be credibly done by a human? Or is it just a cheap attempt to obtain free training sets from people who aren't being paid to label data?
I could understand this if it were about Google's old CAPTCHA that used scans from books and could use the user input to improve an OCR system, or Cloudflare's CAPTCHA that asks you to click the pictures that contained traffic lights or bikes or whatever where the user input can be used to improve an image classification system.
Better OCR and better image classifies are things you can make money with.
It is not clear to me how one makes money from a "what way is this animal pointing?" classifier (especially since building that CAPTCHA requires them to have a photo of the animal where they already know it is pointing close to 0, 60, 90, 150, 210, or 270 degrees).
This seems to be a task that likely only be of interest as part of a CAPTCHA and so the most that your solving it for will do is improve the CAPTCHA. It's not like OCR or image recognition where you might be improving some separate money making product of theirs.
Plastics leeching toxic chemicals/compounds into food and water, especially when being heated, is a known thing. It's especially bad for the endocrine system. The disruption to the hormonal balance is noticeably affecting people.
Parent probably intended to say silicone, which is a plastic polymer. Silicone rings are commonly used even in stainless steel kettles or glass bottles for sealing the cap or lid.
"Technically, silicone could be considered part of the rubber family. But, if you define plastics widely, as we do, silicone is something of a hybrid between a synthetic rubber and a synthetic plastic polymer. Silicone can be used to make malleable rubber-like items, hard resins, and spreadable fluids.
We treat silicone as a plastic like any other, given that it has many plastic-like properties: flexibility, malleability, clarity, temperature resistance, water resistance."
It's a little misleading to just call silicone plastic with no disclaimers. That site is also called "life without plastic", so I'm not sure it's the most neutral source.
Strictly speaking, "plastic" simply refers to the physical property of "plasticity". Though it's also used as a general term for "all polymers", which would therefore include silicone (polysiloxane) too. However people also use "plastic" to mean "organic polymers" specifically, thus drawing a distinction between plastics and silicone.
I get the sense that people on the internet believe silicone to be more safe (e.g. for sous vide cooking or baby products) for whatever reason. Maybe because it is more chemically stable or decomposes to sand or whatever. But really you can't draw many conclusions about any synthetic material unless there has been thorough research. A given polymer species can have very different properties depending on the additives used, and those can be the most dangerous to health. And the same material between different manufacturers could have different chemistry and health risks. It's a big complicated world...
I would want to know, especially if it’s a large object and higher percentage probability, because then it’s a way to tell loved ones what we need to tell them and go forward together in love. We should always strive to do this, of course, but it would still be better to have the opportunity to do it.
