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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Human nature. I don’t think it’s the worst economic system, but if you measure everything in dollars, and say that a business venture’s only task is to make value measured in dollars, I don’t see how it can avoid exploitation.

    As an accountant I want to say it might work if businesses were required to pay all the costs they currently externalize and hand to society and the future (so pollution or underpaying employees would be more expensive than being clean and paying more of the $ to the workers) but I’m not completely convinced.

    As it stands now, companies become profitable because they aren’t paying what it costs to produce their stuff. It seems baked into the system.


  • Waist to height is the only proven metric. And the problem with BMI is not that it is overestimating fat, it’s that it’s underestimating fat because it completely misses skinny-fat people, and the number of those is much higher than the number of jacked overweight not fat athletes.

    Add to this the complicating factor that it’s really torso fat that is metabolically active and dangerous to your health.

    Waist should be less than half your height, you don’t even need a measuring tape. Get someone to cut a string as long as you are tall, and see if it can go around your waist twice, with at least some extra length. If so, you are good, probably don’t have too much torso fat.

    ETA I don’t understand why they need that complicated formula, why not just a ratio? The only inputs are waist and height. Never understood the point of squaring height to get BMI either, it’s also just a mass to height comparison, why not a simple ratio?



  • I guess look around the world and see what’s working? Unfettered capitalism wouldn’t work, and cronyism isn’t unique to capitalism.

    Unfettered meritocracy doesn’t work either. Say I’m born smart and ambitious and become a captain of industry. Why do I “deserve” to make 100x or 10000x more than someone who is working hard but not smart or ambitious, or someone who is wildly creative in a not monetizatable way? And how do you even ensure all kids get the same starting line to actually have a meritocracy, if you are enforcing capitalism? 100% inheritance tax maybe, and the money allocated out to everyone?

    Maybe all these systems are ideas - capitalism, socialism, fascism, meritocracy, and none could be achieved in real life, because we aren’t living in a controlled test environment.

    On your specific question, I think cronyism and inheritance are problems that transcend capitalism, but if you could somehow magically disappear them, meritocracy would reveal its faults, there isn’t a perfect system. All we can do is try to think about what we want to achieve (environmental restoration, a healthy population, a vibrant marketplace that serves everyone not just a few) and try to incrementally get there.


  • Yeah I grew up before there was A/C all over, even in school didn’t have it until I was 12, and as bad as heat with no air conditioning is, it’s not as deadly as freezing weather with no heat. What do the homeless people do in cold places, do they just die in the winter? There is no season here where going outside in regular clothes would kill you, at least. Uncomfortable, sure.

    But again, I think it’s some epigenetic adaptation, I really do run cool, and now my kids do too.



  • Ha! Well as much as I hate the cold, I hate the heater even more. Resist turning it on until it’s really too cold in long sleeves and a sweater. Air conditioner we keep at 78F, and it helps to keep the house from mold/mildew, improves air quality. Heater dries everything out and feels awful. We do set the heater to 60F, and don’t run it often.



  • I have the opposite problem, when it gets past a certain coldness I can’t warm up without an external heat source. Hot weather I can be cool IF I am in the shade with a breeze, grew up without AC in Florida so probably just adapted.

    School kids here do have to do heat danger videos for athletics though, for some ungodly reason they do practices in the afternoons not before school and kids were dropping in the heat. It is dangerous like extreme cold is, I don’t go do yardwork when it’s the top of a summer day.

    Was just saying that if people can say they “love the cold” because they like being warm, it’s no sillier to say you like the heat because you like cooling off.


  • RBWells@lemmy.worldtoGreentextAnon loves sunny days
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    3 days ago

    Meanwhile, people who say they love cold weather:

    “I like sweaters, coats and boots, bundling up, sitting inside by a fire with hot cocoa.”. Really sounds like they enjoy being warm, not cold after all.

    So maybe “I like air conditioning, watching the sun from inside, the feeling of coming in out of the heat in the summer, a refreshing cold shower in the morning, being able to wear fashionable sunglasses and hats.”