It is illegal to a degree, it violates rules and regulations with the IRS. When they back a politician, they are supposed to lose their church non-profit status. But that doesn’t happen because any move to it would cause a huge “the government is attacking out religious freedoms/churchs”.
In fact it’s now a religious event every year called “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” to purposefully break these laws.
OP is not bothered by the downvotes, they are bothered that they are being used as nothing more than a “I personally disagree” or “I don’t like your opinion” button and that the vast majority downvoters are too cowardly to put forward their own counter opinion.
Any comment that is making an honest contribution to the discussion shouldn’t be getting downvotes. When comments are downvoted for no legitimate reason, the website becomes at risk of being an echo chamber.
A feature that is consistently misused is a useless feature. Either get used to them being used to express disagreement or admit that they’re a failure and stop trying to make them work.
Trading at all by Congress. They should be required to lock their money in a blind trust with heavy oversight. If a CEO has to publish their stock sales months in advance, congresspeople should too.
A 16 year old who just got their motorcycle license being able to buy a 200hp superbike capable of doing 180+mph.
For all intents and purposes, this should be illegal, because the teenager (usually) doesn’t have the skills and willpower to handle such a powerful motorcycle as a noob.
But it does feel awesome to be able to buy whatever motorcycle you can afford once you get your license in the US, rather than being forced to start on a 125cc that can’t even hit 60mph.
Eh, I don’t think the correlation of age is the causation of getting wounded or killed due to questionable decisions on powerful motorcycles. I’d venture to say the correlation is moreso in personality type, and aversion, or lack thereof to risk.
Like, you don’t see complete straight edge 16 year olds getting bikes, and from my own anecdotal experience, my straight edge friends were scared of it. Though if there wasn’t an inherent aversion to the risk, I’d bet those types would be incredibly safe motorcycle drivers.
The types that currently get them are the types that will take risks, regardless of their age, and we can’t rightly outlaw something because some risk takers act dangerously on them. We’d have to outlaw cars too.
the extensive statistics correlate highly with age on the below 20 and above 75 with a plateau in between. risk aversion and personality could be great factors but how would you sample and test for that across large groups? i dont want my insurance company to give me some personality test or judge my social media. but maybe AI would help them to do it soon?
It’s wild that’s legal there! Where I live learners and provisional riders are restricted by power to weight ratio (150kw per tonne/200hp per 2000lbs), and that honestly seems like it keeps them on reasonable bikes for the skill level without having them all stuck on 125cc bikes struggling to reach the speed limit
Your provisional rider laws are a lot more fair than Europe’s, which limit teenagers to 125cc for the first two year of riding.
150KW/tonne (with the rider) is enough to get a Ninja 400 or Harley Sportster 1200, both of which are plenty powerful for the street. But maybe these calculations don’t factor in a typical rider’s weight.
actually, no, not a complete disaster. During american prohibition, domestic abuse all but disappeared, same went for a big part of self-harm due to alcohol abuse. It’s normal to paint the prohibition as some complete mistake, but it has positive sides too.
And I say that as an enjoyer of alcohol and other fun stuff, disagreeing with banning it again
I’d be really interested to know the source of whatever stats say that. I mean, it’s not like people actually stopped drinking, so why would domestic abuse “disappear”? That also totally implies that domestic abuse almost entirely happens because of alcohol.
With how much political/financial influence/bribery was behind prohibition, I’d totally bet statistics are skewed in favor of prohibition.
Yes but this time we legalise all the other drugs. Huge profits.
In all seriousness, no drugs should be illegal and healthcare and education should be freely available. Universal income. We would need to make conservatism, lobbying and billionaires illegal.
Something (almost) no one has mentioned: factory farming of livestock. I’m not gonna say a person who engages in subsistence farming shouldn’t be able to keep a coop of chickens for eggs (as long as their chickens are well cared for), but large scale animal husbandry and livestock is devastating to the environment and genuinely cruel.
That’s great in theory, but there’s just too many people for that to be anywhere close to realistic. If we had about 20% of our current global population, then I’d agree with you, but even the worst pandemic in modern history couldn’t scratch 1%.
my parents grew up eating meat once a every few months, from animals they raised themselves. No big farm, just a house in a village. Is that not sustainable?
No it isnt because unless you eat/drink enough dairy or take B12 supplements, youre going to have a B12 deficiency if you do that. People forget that meat actually serves a nutritional purpose.
Vegans and vegetarians (once a month meat consumption isnt really an omnivore diet) are more likely to be deficient in Zinc, Iron and are more susceptible to osteoporosis due to poor Calcium uptake. Because animal protein does help the body to absorb minerals like Iron, Zinc and the like (it isnt known for sure why and phytates in certain plant foods also hampers mineral uptake) vegetarians and vegans need to overcompensate for those minerals in their food. On the order of about 50% higher than the RDA for omnivores.
Now I am not saying it cant be healthy, it can and there certainly are problems with how the average westerner eats, but I have no confidence in this being done correctly on a mass scale given the data that has come out. eg. 50% of vegans are deficient in B12 as measured by blood test and thats among a population that is likely much more aware of B12 being problematic since it is only naturally found in significant quantities in animal products and almost every meat and dairy substitute on the market is fortified with B12. And that widespread deficiency STILL happens. Vegetarians are less susceptible to B12 deficiency but still generally rely on the dairy industry to obtain that B12 along with Calcium and Zinc. And because B12 is water soluble not fat soluble, it needs to be obtained daily or in higher doses, semidaily. And the effects of B12 deficiency can be delayed months (pernicious anemia) or years (permanent nerve damage with the anemia hidden by excess folate consumption)
People need education and better meat and dairy substitutes that arent as processed to make this work. Right now, most of them have too much salt and saturated fats to be an improvement.
Denying that there are substantial differences between animal and plant protein is a weird take. (Anyone with a milk protein allergy is grateful that the proteins in plant milk arent the same as the ones in cow milk) Plant proteins arent always complete and the type of proteins arent the same. Plants for example, dont have proteins like casein which is present in cow milk. And as is pointed out in the linked review, can be deficient in amino acids such as Lysine, Cysteine and Methionine. (The sulfur containing amino acids they refer to) There is also evidence that plant protein by and large isnt absorbed as effectively as animal protein. Which is fine for the vast majority of people. i.e contrary to the fear mongering, vegetarians and vegans still get plenty of protein unless theyve done something horribly wrong. And the lower digestability of plant proteins has been useful in treating proteinuria (excessive protein in the urine) which is usually associated with kidney failure.
“A recent meta-analysis concluded that soy protein resulted in similar muscle mass and strength gains as animal protein”
“Meta-analysis revealed that although consuming animal protein provided a favorable effect on absolute lean mass compared to plant protein, the result was not statistically significant”
“As for muscle strength, meta-analyses showed no statistical difference in effect between animal protein and plant protein”
Also all the protein they are talking about is dairy not meat.
If youre going to cherry pick links that agree with you you can fuck right off. I have no patience for dishonest people. I gave you a chance to not be a cunt and you fucked that up.
I agree there are differences in the proteins, and thay was an interesting read but its clearly much less than you suggest, they are talking 1% differences or statistical anomalies. I took the time to read what you’d posted so I’m clearly not acting dishonestly but I am reporting you for offensive language.
You need cows to produce all of that just like you would meat. The way cow physiology works requires that calves be birthed periodically to maintain milk production at large scale. The dairy industry is to a large extent, a by product of the meat industry. Those new calves have to go somewhere. And you have to keep in mind that 70% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant as adults. They rely on nondairy meat products for the majority of the B12 they get. OR you switch people to vegan substitutes that have B12 added to them. Right now those are niche/luxury products which is problematic for developing nations. Like… imagine going from small scale cattle and poultry farming to relying on B12 bacterial fermenters and soy production at large scale. That might be doable if new processes for using certain strains of B12 producing pseudomonas bacterial cultures can be developed for fermented soy products like tempeh can spread there but again, those arent there yet. More R&D is needed.
Giving tips is okay. Paying your employees less because you expect them to be tipped is stupid. Culturally requiring tips to make up the majority of a positive income is ridiculous, but very difficult to change.
Yes exactly. And now every payment maybe has tipping options enabled it seems, and it takes more steps to skip tipping options than to tip. Ridiculous.
Fun fact: Pyramid Schemes (now called MLMs) cannot be made fully illegal because they are pure expressions of capitalism. In order to make them fully illegal they would have to admit the entire system is a scam, which they obviously aren’t willing to do since they benefit from it.
This is why I got a hamster, instead of rats. They LIKE being alone.
And SO MANY HAMSTER CAGES you buy in pet stores, recommended by pet store employees are WAY too small for them. So many of the wheels you can get for them are too small and give them back problems. If you buy something retail for a rodent, get the thing for a one size bigger rodent! Some of the things PetSmart markets for Syrian hamsters for instance are criminally small, enough to amount to cruelty.
But taking my hamster and putting him in the wild would be like taking a dude who lives in a five bedroom condo with a private swimming pool and an indoor gym and free door dash twice a day and sending him to live in a cave in the woods and telling him he should be grateful he gets to live free, the way he was meant to.
EDIT: Also… fuck hamster balls. Hamster’s have very very poor vision, so they can’t really see anything outside the ball. They’re rolling around in a confusing environment with very poor ability to gauge the outside world. If you put a hamster in one of these, you have no idea if it’s freaking out or stressed out or having a good time… but it IS rolling around in absolute ignorance of where it’s going or what it’s bumping into and if you pick it up and move it around it has very little understanding of what’s happening.
The sad thing is that the rates would still be pretty high just to cover the risk. People dont get a payday loan because everything is going fine for them financially.
Let’s say you need to borrow 5000 € for your first car, but you have only 700 €. First, you’ll need to find a lender who is willing to share the risk with you. Then, you form a joint stock company (Tom’s Volvo C30 2008 incorporated), where you own 7/50 of the car and the other party owns the rest. When you have some more money, you can buy some more stocks. One day, you’ll own the whole car and the lender has all of their money back.
So…instead of loans, you’re advocating that people form corporations where shares are bought over time instead?
You’ll still have to pay some interest to motivate the other party to invest, all you’ve really done is generate a bunch of extra paperwork to spin up a corporation.
The idea is to avoid the expense spiraling out of control due to exponential growth.
In order to motivate your business partner, you should have a contract that defines the price of the stocks in a favorable way. It’s like buying and selling really. The lender pays 4300 € for the car, and sells it at a higher price, such as 4600 €.
Oh, if you’re trying to prevent usury, it would be far simpler to either cap interest rates or ban compound interest in favor of simple interest.
Rate caps are the simplest solution least likely to backfire, but unfortunately they tend to push people away from legitimate sources of lending, so you do have to be careful that they aren’t too low.
Like I said, forming a corporation isn’t a simple thing, doing it to organize a personal loan would take up an enormous amount of time and money, and result in substantially fewer consumer protections.
Well, now that taking a loan is fast and easy, people tend to spend the money they don’t have and buy the things they can’t afford. Having some sort of a speed bump along the way should make people think a little more and avoid getting into unnecessary debt.
I agree, but forming a corp is time consuming in an expensive way, you need (usually) retain lawyers and an accounting firm.
I think it would be better if getting credit were subject to income and asset verification, and most importantly that the government make sure eligibility verification is not abusive, discriminatory, or inconsistent in nature.
Some forms of it are illegal, but it’s hard to define what exactly constitutes Gerrymandering. Rather than enumerating all of the ways that Gerrymandering is possible, we really just need to make it so only one specific policy for forming districts is used. I think mathematicians have been proposing models for this that attempt to create districts with roughly uniform distribution of population and isotropic borders.