The literature on PTFEs illustrates that it is, at best, uncertain whether there are health harms relating to contact and ingestion. Most of the studies struggle with confounds, controls, and sample sizes because almost literally everyone has been exposed to PTFEs. Toxicity researchers would not definitively agree that it is "completely harmless".

The other commenter is right, also, that PFOA and GenX (the chemical, not the generation) are more evidently harmful and both involved in, and released from, the creation of PTFE.

Just throwing this out here in case someone is like "wait, IS Teflon fine???"

Why would we even want that, though? Harris is a cop, and her presidency would likely be just as impotent and mediocre as Biden's. Like Biden, she's going to bend to corporate interests, please no one in the interest of pleasing everyone, not make or advocate for any major protective reforms to the democratic process (ranked choice voting, etc.), and try to take the high road against directly calling out fascism. When will the DNC get it through their heads that their departmental politics and seniority process shouldn't decide the president-- the people should?

Also, I find it immoral of them to play a horrible game of "switcheroo" with Harris and Biden. It feels like what you're saying is, they know she's unpopular and would lose an election, but if we switch her in for Biden through this presidency then everyone will see how great she is! We don't need an election, we just need the great and powerful DNC to plan our presidents for us!!!

To clarify in case it isn't obvious, I am a trans, disabled leftist. But this is EXACTLY why Trump is so popular and why everyone hates the DNC.

Is this household or individual income? Either way, whack

That's a good (and reassuring) observation!

Still, even if it's a bot/troll/etc. post, if we don't call it out when we see it, the culture of the community slowly shifts towards "bigotry is acceptable here"...

I'm gonna keep pointing this stuff out when I see it whether the user is acting in good faith or not :)

Aight you got me there

I, too, am down to clown tbh

Sure, notice that I included this possibility in the last paragraph.

Also notice that that possibility doesn't reinforce the perspective that "women are sluts for clown daddies"

I like the composition of yours more than Hyner's tbh!

He still gets credit for the cool idea though :)

The fact this has 40 up votes right now makes me feel like lemmy is losing a diverse user base. Like, where are the women to down vote this obviously shitty take?

Let's list some reasons why these women could have done this that aren't "women are sluts for clown daddies":

• he's their boss, and leveraging his insane power over them to make it hard to say no and keep their job
• he's just an extremely powerful man and they're afraid of pissing him off
• they have insecurities, (like the "loser cuck" fallacy!) that they aren't valuable or desirable as partners, and attention from someone as powerful as him feels like affirmation of their value even if they don't like him or he treats them badly
• they understand that, by not resisting his advances, they might be able to provide themselves a link to a financial source that could support them and a child
• he literally sexually harasses, assaults, or rapes them and they don't feel like they can criminally pursue one of the richest men in the world

Like, yeah, some of them might be individuals who have bad taste in men or are shitty people themselves. I'm even certain that some of them are! But damn, can we take the perspective of the woman for one second? It's not a good look to find yourself agreeing with incels on the internet

Why post this summary article from an obscure news group when you could have posted the actual report from the former official?

It's written in accessible language, so it's not like it's too technical to understand or anything...

Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.

It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and

It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and

It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.

I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the "average middle-class Westerner" (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally "one of the worst offenders". While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.

The chemist in me is appalled... But the queer clown in me is delighted 🏳️‍🌈🤡

I LOVE this

It must be different in different places. I went from a renter in one area, to an owner in the same area, to a renter again in a different area in the period of 5ish years (long story).

Rent in the first area was about the same cost for a two bedroom, two bath, 1000 sq ft apartment as the entire mortgage on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1200 sq ft house, including principle, interest, and taxes. The only reason people would rent there is because they don't have the money for a down payment.

When we left that area, we could have become landlords and rented the house out. We could have easily gotten twice the entire mortgage in rental income, but we felt that being a landlord was unethical (especially since we were relatively wealthy for that area, although we made less than the US median family income). We sold the house and broke even.

Now, we live in a much higher COL area. It's true here that renting is much cheaper than buying, but that's because you can't get a SFH for less than about $1.5 million here. My rent on my 1 bed, 1 bath, 700 sq ft apartment is more than twice my mortgage in my previous area. Our incomes have increased, now we make slightly above the median family income. But our leftover at the end of the month honestly went down a ton. If we weren't here to get an education, we'd be gone by now.

Just saying.... As someone who has both rented and owned, I definitely feel more like I'm shoveling money into a fire as a renter. Owning was the best financial situation I'd ever been in.

Just curious, when you say "those products are still on the shelves", do you mean they're selling product from the lot numbers that were recalled?

You should be able to tell the grocery store employees and have them remove it if they're selling recalled products, but also I wouldn't be surprised if they're only selling products that are no longer part of those recalled lots

Edit: WAIT you said "still not on the shelves", sorry! Ignore my comment lol

I feel like this is true if the reader is meant to have the perspective of the person who feels that something is magic (the Hobbits, in the example from your video). However, not all magic in fiction is like this, and sometimes the reader is supposed to mostly have the perspective of Galadriel, or to gain her perspective over time.

An example is Lev Grossman's The Magicians. The reader has the perspective of the Hobbits at first, because that is the perspective of the main character. But the story has themes of "lifting the veil" of magic, and by the end both the main character and the reader have a more similar perspective to Galadriel.

I guess what I mean is, I agree with you and the video's author in large part... but like... to broadly say that magic "should" be used in literature in a certain way ignores how it can be used in different ways to great effect!

shoulda said "yarrr, ye dumb bastard!"

awesome!! I'm psyched you caught it and enjoyed it :-)

I feel like I've seen this take a lot more in the past ~5 years than I did before. Not just that zoos are unethical, but that any animal ownership (or really interaction of any kind) is inherently abusive.

You're certainly entitled to feel however you want about animal ownership and act accordingly, but personally I feel like it's honestly kind of a weird take?

Humans are obviously not the only species that develops symbiolotic relationships with other organisms (in a diversity of power dynamics), but we are also not the only species who take on specifcally ownership or shepherd roles for other species (like spiders with frog pets, or fungus farmer ants, among many many other examples). Thus, the ontological position this opinion must operate from is that humans are somehow distinct and superior to nature, such that we have separate and unique responsibilities not to engage in mutualistic ownership with other organisms, on the basis that like, we're somehow "above" that? That we're so enlightened and knowledgeable that we exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms?

Of course, a lot of our relationships to animals can be described as harmful in other terms without needing to take this specific stance. Like, our relationship with many agricultural animals can be critiqued through the harm done to their individual well-beings and through the harm their propagation does to the global environment. Or irresponsible pet owners can be critiqued for how their unwillingness to control the reproduction or predatory abilities of their pets can harm local ecosystems, like an introduced invasive species might. Or valid criticisms of many zoos when they prioritize profits over animal welfare, rehabilitation, ecosystem restoration, and education. Or that the general public picking up wild animals is a problem because it disturbs their fragile ecosystems and traumatizes them, especially when done on the large scale of human populations (but distinctly not for ecological study, wild animal healthcare, education, etc., like Steve Irwin et. al) But none of these are specific criques of the mutualistic ownership relationship itself as much as problems with the way we handle that relationship.

Idk, I'm interested to understand your opinion, especially if it has detail I'm missing beyond "we shouldn't have pets, zoos, or farms because we're better than that"!

it is definitely still a problem, the "naturalness" of the finish is irrelevant

even burning wood itself releases compounds that can be harmful (hence why we advise against breathing in smoke)

I second the idea from a separate poster that if you want to burn, seal, and add more burns-- just use a solvent to remove the seal before you do the second set of burns. Or burn it all at once before sealing

I will do my best! :)

There are a couple different concepts at-play here, and finding a single resource that summarizes everything I mentioned would be quite difficult. Moreover, given the information dissemination problem I mentioned, you'd be hard-pressed to find a non-academic description of this stuff (I.e. written for a non-biological or social researcher audience)...

But, I don't think that should prevent anyone interested in trying to learn more!

Here's some papers that discuss some of the issues at play here:

Is the cell really a machine?, discusses some of the issues with relying too much on genetics/molecule scale biology knowledge for determining the emergent nature of traits/phenotypes (with specific respect to the machine model of the cell... This paper is heavy on molecular biology)

Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism, a sociological overview informed by clinical and biological research discussing constructivist vs essentialist conceptions of race (heavy on sociology)

Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education , reviews several papers specifically addressing the information dissemination problem I mentioned, going back to the "source", which is education. This paper focuses on studies in undergraduate biology education but others are looking at education in at the k-12 level, also.

If you wanted to do a database search yourself, some keywords I'd use would be: race essentialism, genetic essentialism, (really just "essentialism" would get you somewhere), race in biology education, race in medicine