• 0 Posts
  • 144 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle


  • Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.

    By all means, they need replaced. But they’re nowhere near the contributor that leaded gasoline was. That stuff probably fucked up 6 distinct generations. If you lived in a city, you were inhaling lead constantly.


  • Acorns are like the easiest thing to forage, though. I agree that foraging isn’t as simple for many people as the OP makes it out to be, but acorns are a bad counter example.

    They are high in tannins, which your body is pretty good at processing in reasonable quantities (they’re in tea, coffee, and wine), but many acorns DO have unreasonable quantities of them and they can cause organ damage. Luckily, tannins are water soluble, so you just need to crack them open and soak them in water for a few days, then rinse and they’re safe to eat.













  • Bill Nye kind of is a dick though.

    Some people are really warm in acute person-to-person interactions, but lack the chronic empathy to spread long-term kindness. See “southern hospitality” clashing with who those areas vote for.

    Others have a well-oriented moral compass but are just really abrasive in person. That’s Bill Nye. I’ve met him and he’s not like, super mean but he’s got a bit of a holier-than-thou (or rather, smarter-than-you) complex.


  • Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.

    My argument is “The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have.”

    Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one’s individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.




  • Bassman1805@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldBased on a true story
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    You pay for the ability to access capital you do not currently have. Nobody owes you thousands of dollars with which to but a car. If you want to buy a car with money you don’t have, then you have to give the bank something in return. That something almost always is “more money than we initially lent you, over the course of the loan period” and if you shut that down, banks just won’t give loans anymore. Suddenly poor and middle class people have lost their biggest tool for accessing capital.

    Lack of public transport is a separate problem. The US has dropped the ball across the board there. Only a handful of cities have any reasonable public transport and even those systems are old and often shitty.

    Education being so expensive that it needs to be financed, is a separate problem. Education is too important to leave to the free market, letting our system metastacize to this extent is the result of decades of compounding failures.

    16.9% interest is predatory, but “interest above inflation” is necessary if you want banks to do anything besides hoard money.