I have seen crazy videos of where people even in video interviews are using AI to live generate a script and reading that. Now some companies require you to share screen to avoid that but people will put their phone under the screen where the camera can’t see it instead. I think soon we will return to in person interviews.

My exercise bike gives me a calorie count and apparently they are a bit better because the bike can actually measure how many watts of power you are generating which is the dream scenario for any calorie counting device. However even then they are only 80-85% accurate in counting calories because apparently we humans are all differently efficient in converting calories into watts. Despite this I still use that calorie number, but not to measure how many muffins I can now eat post workout, but just to compare my different workouts to each other. Recently I have been doing 1k kcal per day. Who knows maybe I’m efficient and it’s actually 800kcal. But it gives me a goal to move towards each day.

Skin cancer is the most easily treatable cancer with long term survival rates between 90-95%. Most deaths that do occur are those cases that were either ignored or undetected for a long time so if your skin cancer is detected early your chance of survival will be much higher than that. If you protect yourself with sun screen or otherwise make sure you’re not getting extreme amounts of UV the benefits of sun exposure far outweigh the detriments in my opinion. Let a loved one check your body for melanoma from time to time.

China is living in the future because they have highway intersections? I really don’t get this meme. You can find large highway intersections in the US too and that doesn’t make the US any better. Honestly I would say the opposite.

Soy fixes nitrogen and doesn’t affect the rest of the nutrients. Without soy in the crop rotation you have to simply buy more nitrogen fertilizer for the subsequent crop, which will make it more expensive to grow. Soy is good but it’s not a looming disaster without it. The EU barely grows soy and is doing fine. And regarding dust bowl. Those areas of the US have already switched from plowing to no-till decades ago. Another dust bowl is unlikely even with drought because of it.

Dependence on food imports? The US is a large net food exporter. And will remain so for a long time. Especially in wheat, corn and soy beans. Harvesting grains is incredibly labour efficient. The labour crisis is mostly in fruits and vegetables which are very labor intensive. Even if soy and grain yields would be unexpectedly badly impacted by climate change it will first impact the exports and lastly animal feed and agro ethanol. The yields would have to be unrealistically devastated for it to lead to shortages in human food like bread. So at worst we are looking at a shortage of meat, fruits and vegetables but we are extremely far away from any situation involving starvation. This also includes Canada, the EU and Australia. And it’s not all vegetables either. Potatoes, carrots, peas and onions are machine harvested and won’t get affected by a farm labour crisis and will continue to be available. No one is gonna starve for having to substitute broccoli and asparagus with carrots and peas. No one is going to starve when fruits gets expensive either, they are healthy but you can live without them.

It’s the part of the third world which currently relies on western food exports that will have food insecurity in a worsening climate crisis. The west is at worst facing a more boring and monotone diet.

Hey. I’m actually involved with two of the products that contain this compound. These have been under fire last year because the same compound degrades into a kind of pfas and have already been banned in a few EU countries. A process to ban it EU wide was already started even before this brain development news. It’s very likely that by 2028 this will be banned EU wide but it’s probable it may be even sooner than that. If any of you want to know it’s a compound that’s used effectively to counteract late blight in potatoes, a disease that can totally devastate the entire crop in a weeks time. Without anything to combat late blight potatoes cultivation in the EU would stall to a halt with severe shortages as organic potatoes are impossible to grow in some locations. However right now we have a couple alternatives left, so so far so good. I’m in favor of banning fluazinam.

Always hard to interpret these bottom procentile numbers because a certain procentile has 0 wealth or negative wealth. A quick search says 25% of Americans have 0 or negative wealth. I myself have negative wealth because I recently graduated and I have student loans. A homeless guy with 0 debt and 1 dollar in his pocket therefore can be said to be wealthier than 25% of Americans, and myself. However my quality of life is very good with an above average wage. And I can be expected to start going into positive net wealth later in life as I start paying off those student loans.

I would love to see numbers in lifetime wealth generation or something similar that would take into account that a lot of people are understably at 0 or negative wealth at early points of their life. Otherwise I have a hard time interpreting these bottom procentile numbers. Makes for great headlines though!

60% * (1/20) = 3%. 3% + 40% = 43% chance to get skin cancer compared to baseline

60% * (1/40) = 1,5%. 1,5% + 40% = 41,5% chance to get skin cancer compared to baseline

I did get the math slightly wrong I’ll admit but the principle is the same. And yes you could say you reduce your risk of sun caused cancers in half. But it’s not a meaningful reduction of total skin cancers. Redo the calculation to every form of cancer and you will have reduced your risk to all cancers by far less than a percent by switching from spf 20 to spf 40.

By staying in a deep mine the whole year I will reduce my risk of getting killed by a falling asteroid by over 99%. Sounds great right? But how big was the original risk really? That’s worth taking into account. You’re better off looking into ways to reduce the risk of other cancers than switching from spf 20 to spf 40.

For someone like you I totally understand. Getting sunburned after 15 minutes of cloudy weather is extreme. My condolences.

60% of skin cancer is caused by sun exposure. The rest has other causes. Therefore if you switch from 19/20 to 39/40 you would decrease your risk from 42% of baseline to 41% of baseline. Much less impressive if you put it that way.

DNA doesn’t just start getting damaged before the sunburn. It’s instantly from the first millisecond you’re out in the sun. However it’s surprisingly not a linear relationship where 60 minutes or sun carries twice the risk of 30 minutes of sun. The heavy inflammation associated with a sunburn has a cancer risk of itself, independent from the actual UV dose. So while minimizing UV is important, it may be just as important, if not more important, to make sure you are never sunburned. I can provide sources if asked

I don’t get chasing the biggest spf numbers. An spf 20 already blocks 1/20 of UV rays. I personally get a sunburn after approx 1 hour in my climate and with my skin. Logically I would then have to be outside for 20 hours to get a sun burn! That will never happen. Not even counting that the skin will partly self heal during those 20 hours. Even if you’re one of those who burn in 15 minutes a spf of 20 should still get you 5 hours before a burn.

I say those 50+ SPF sunscreens are over the top and extremely few need a strength that high. Maybe if you’re sun allergic I could understand. And for cancer. Reducing my risk by 1/20 is enough for me. That’s a massive reduction and on top of that skin cancer is the world’s easiest treatable cancer with the lowest death rate. Skin aging? I don’t care. I’m not out to look 15 at 50. I wanna look 50 at 50. That’s my take on it all.

I have a well paying job, not overly so, but around 20% over the national median. I also have a wife and 1 (soon 2!) kids. I work 8-17 with a 30 minute commute. After work I’m too exhausted to want to do much of anything except some gym and maybe some gardening. Before I even got together with my wife she suggested that she be a stay at home mom, which I accepted. Because of that we are far far below the national median family income to the point where we technically are just below the poverty line.

But oh my god I don’t think I would want it any other way. My wife can take care of most of the domestic tasks and the brunt of the child care and none of us are overly stressed or burned out. I gladly take that hit in income in exchange for the huge quality of life increase compared to if we were to both work full time. I still help around the house on weekends so my wife can have some time off from her duties as well.

I constantly get more confident in our choice when I listen to colleagues and their constant complaints about how hard it is to keep your life together. Full time work, 8-9 hours a day, was designed in a time when a stay at home partner was the norm. It just doesn’t make sense if you’re single or if both are working. Maybe we two are lazy but I honestly don’t think we could manage it mentally and energy wise.

I do understand however that I’m very privileged to live in a very low cost of living area. Our lifestyle, with my wage, would be impossible in most of the country I live in. Living close to poverty is alright with me. I don’t desire much and we both have cheap hobbies. We cook all the food we eat. My wife repairs clothes that break. We only have one old shitty car. We don’t travel internationally. But we still manage just fine.

If I’m to pay more for retirement because I don’t have kids, then why shouldn’t parents pay more for the education of their offspring?

You could absolutely argue that childcare and kindergarten are chiefly to the parents benefits but school is not. In fact when school was first made mandatory it was a huge blow to many parents as they lost another worker at home/ their farm. School is for the benefit of the children themselves and as a society at large. You benefit from kids being in school because you can live in a more educated society, also you yourself went to school so it’s only fair you pay for others to also go to school.

No that’s not what this is about. The government assumes that every child will pay taxes. Every less child born means a lesser future tax base for the future retired. In effect if you don’t have kids yourself you are relying on the taxes of other people’s kids to pay for your retirement.

That could also work but then we still have to increase the elder care tax as a whole. In the end the result is the same. Childless people pay more effective tax (taxes - benefits) than parents.

If the purpose of the law is strictly to compensate from the strain a childless person puts on the pension system, and not to simply punish them for not having kids. Then I don’t see the problem of involuntarily childless people getting taxed. The involuntarily and the voluntarily childless both get the same benefit of not having to pay for their kids and therefore would have the same ability to pay. And they both put the same strain on the pension system.

Taxing the rich is always good I agree. But regarding having kids only to avoid taxes. Do the pension payments really scale up to super rich level? Or do they have a max ceiling. I don’t know exactly how Germany does it. But yes if the pension payments scale linearly with income that could be a major issue that’s true.

Maybe I’m gonna be bashed for this but isn’t this a good solution? We can all agree that forcing people to have children is a bad idea. Most would also argue that the state has no role whatsoever in deciding if people have kids, they should merely make it possible for those who want to have kids, to have as many children that they want. A policy punishing those without kids could be unethical for many reasons.

However that’s not what this is about. This is merely about childless people contributing more to their pensions. Which I think is fair since by not having kids they put pressure on the pension system. Childless people also have more disposable income on average meaning they have the ability to pay this. However those childless people who are actually poor are not unfairly affected since this is paid on their income. Low income low pension payment. Isn’t this the least worst of all possible solutions? I would love a discussion on this because I find this topic very interesting. Please disagree with me on this and let me hear your thoughts!

Sorry but you just produced a whole lot of bullshit. You admit that maize is more productive than rice in the US and Canada. But you never reflect more on that. The reason that listed average yields for maize is lower than for rice in most other countries has a very simple explanation. Rice is higher value per kg and if you can grow rice in a certain environment, you are very likely to do so. Maize then gets pushed to less productive land that can’t support rice, either because it’s too mountainous or it’s too dry. However what we see is that when maize and rice are grown on the same land the maize tends to either yield similar or more than rice. A few years ago I made an agricultural study trip to Indonesia where they grew rice everywhere where rice could be grown but grew mostly maize on the rest of the land. Traditionally they used to have highland rice varieties that could be grown without irrigation but they were mostly abandoned when maize came, because it was far more productive. All animals where also fed maize because maize was cheaper to produce than rice. Even animal farmers whose grain never ended up in market, were growing maize to feed their chickens, because it yielded the most. Maize has 4C photosynthesis that’s more productive than rice’s 3C photosynthesis in subtropical and tropical climates.

Now the claim you make that maize uses 5x more fertilizer I have no idea where you got that from, but I’m guessing straight out of your ass. If we are talking nitrogen it’s about 22kg per ton for maize and 18kg per ton for rice. However since maize has a higher protein content the nitrogen use efficiency ends up being close to the same. And nowhere near the 5x fertiliser claim you pulled. You also briefly mention water but rice is almost universally irrigated while maize is chiefly rainfed.