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I can choose not to buy magnets and chocolate eggs.

I can’t choose not to buy poison in the US (“organic” foodstuff is an expensive bandaid)


Organically labeled food not only use pesticides but use older pesticides that are more toxic and less effective so they must be used in larger quantities.


I'd like to learn more about this. Got a link?


I learned it long ago so nothing so comprehensive. Compare the LD50 of copper sulfate (organic pesticide) and glyphosate (Roundup).

"The LD50 for copper sulfate is 30 mg/kg in rats"

http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicro...

"The acute oral LD50 in the rat is 5,600 mg/kg."

http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/dienochlor-gly...


Nobody is dropping dead from fruit, so it's not the lethal dose that matters - it's the potential for bioaccumulation and the impacts of chronic exposure.


Fair enough but two sovereign countries aren’t expected to agree on everything. Variance is expected. What’s the data say in the pesticides?


Data says big agriculture has more lobbyist money in US Congress than the team behind the Kinder Egg. The FDA is a revolving door. Dangerous toys get banned because they're easy, usually seasonal and low market-penetration targets for politicians campaigning on protecting the children.


Can you share this data?


Opensecrets is a good source: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?Ind=A

I don't have the details of the contribution amounts of the Ferrero team on Kinder Suprise Eggs.


What’s data have to do with anything?

All I want is a label telling me what I’m buying. My prejudices against chocolate eggs or RoundUp will affect my purchasing decision.

Besides... data??? That’s a laugh! How do you a proper chronic long-term study in biology? Who’d be clean enough for your control group? What chronic conditions are you looking for (I.e are we only looking for yet another thing that causes cancer -yawn-, or are we looking for other ailments which appear to plague us today)?

Sure, everyone claims their study achieves the above, but then who reproduces the work to double check it?

I’ll stick to my luddite prejudices that serve me quite well. Just let me know what you put in my food, and I’ll decide if I want to buy it or not

(btw, guess who are the folks lobbying against labeling laws)


CO and CO2 are different.

Like you mentioned, CO is bad for us because of our hemoglobin. Otherwise I could imagine life using an otherwise chemically interesting molecule like CO (it can oxide further).

CO2... not so interesting. Aside from the reaction to make CaCO (?) and acidic when dissolved in water it’s quite limited being fully oxidized.

You need the ability to make things out of your molecules. Stuff at the ground state are boring!

Plants expand energy (otherwise wasted sunlight) to convert CO2 into O2 to make an interesting molecules, namely starch with which they can do something. If they had an endless supply of starches, they wouldn’t have bothered evolving with photosynthesis - just like we don’t care for photosynthesis since we have plants.


O2 is a triplet state molecule, so it has huge kinetic barriers for reactions. > No alien species advanced enough to look at us would assume we’d burn just because we have 0.21 Po2

The fact that there is excess of a reactant really means that there is an ability for interesting reactions, and therefore life. Ash cannot be animate because it’s (basically) at ground level and does not have the free energy to do anything.


I’m very proud to be Italian, and proud and love my countrymen.

If I were a Swiss, though, I would not leave my rifle, or any valuable, around in a Swiss train station if Italians are around. Or English, French, Germans, etc.

I wouldn’t be afraid if there were a group of Japanese though.

We’re just not as civilized.


What's interesting about Japan is that it's a mono-cultural society with high IQ and this country has not surprisingly the lowest crime rate in the world. Italy and Switzerland were like that a few decades ago.

BTW, what do you think of Salvini? Switzerland chose not to be in the European Union and it was our best decision ever IMO. It's like a startup: it's better to be lean and agile.


I left Italy before Salvini was a thing.


Hydrocarbons have very similar energy/mole and therefore energy/volume, energy/mass ratios.

This relationship breaks down for very short HC (methane, basic alcohols).

Differences in effective energy density result from the combustion cycle used: Otto is better than Diesel for the same compression ratio, but you can’t easily get high compression ratio


Hydrocarbons have very similar energy/mole and therefore energy/volume, energy/mass ratios.

This relationship breaks down for very short HC (methane, basic alcohols).

Differences in effective energy density result from the combustion cycle used: Otto is better than Diesel for the same compression ratio, but you can’t easily get high compression ratio w/ Otto. Therefore Diesels are, typically, more efficient.

However, if you use methane (high compression) in an Otto cycle with turbo compounding, you’ll probably beat diesel. But then you have NOx emissions


“How do you ensure the funds are invested properly”

Look up the Ontario public teachers pension plan, OTPP. It has its own quite extensive wiki page.

Spoiler: it has more assets than the entire state of PA public pension fund (by a factor of 6, if I recall)


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