Category Archives: Body & Mind

How to Avoid Billionaire Trolls

Argument analysis flowchart

Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0

The biggest trolls in the world are also the richest. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp fame and Elon Musk of Tesla fame are trolling us online and we shouldn’t let them get away with it. Zuckerberg trolls us by censoring what we see and selecting what propaganda enters our screens, other tech giants do the same. Musk, on the other hand, trolls us by getting leagues of fanboys to defend his union-busting, tax avoiding, and questionable health practices. Let’s be clear: the billionaires who are troll like this are doing it for their own profit at our expense.

Don’t feed the trolls, feed your mind. Here are some tips to eliminate billionaire trolls from your news.

Thankfully some tools are still leaving you in control:

  1. Blogs are still out there. I had 50,000 visitors last month. You can still use RSS readers. You can subscribe to blogs like mine by email.

  2. I have recently discovered the fantastic substack community.

  3. Telegram is pretty decent as a secured news aggregator. My blog has a telegram channel. Nobody needs to know what you are reading.

  4. Twitter has a hidden feature (twitter list) which lets you subscribe to specific individuals and only see content from these individuals.

  5. DuckDuckGo is a fantastic search engine which mostly gives me what I am looking for instead of what it thinks I should find.

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Taxing Sugar Drinks Works if the Tax is Known

beer

Soda taxes get proposed often, and they have varying levels of success depending on how they are implemented. A new study reveals that when people are made aware that the sugar tax impacts the price of products they stop buying the unhealthy product. If you educate people then they act on that knowledge. One way to remind people about the health impact of consumer food products is on their bill.

But the share of sugary drinks purchased did decline slightly (45%) when the tags mentioned the price included the added tax.

Results showed that most consumers who chose to avoid sugary drinks with the added tax chose a drink that was not subject to the tax.

“Consumers are averse to taxes, so when they learn that their favorite drink has this sugary beverage tax, some are less interested in buying it,” Donnelly said.

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Even Bees Practice Social Distancing

Pandemics happen often in the animal world, and not even little insects can avoid them. Researchers have discovered that one of the greatest creatures on the Earth, the humble bumble bee, practices social distancing during a pandemic. By keeping far apart it reduces the likelihood of other members of the group getting infected and prolonging the suffering of the whole. Bees figured this out thousands of years ago. That’s right even beings as small as the bee are smarter than anti-maskers.

Social insects are particularly vulnerable to pathogens and parasites owing to the dense network of contacts among highly related nestmates and the large amounts of food stored in a nest under relatively stable environmental conditions (1). To counteract disease pressure, social insects have evolved, in addition to individual immune responses, many forms of social immunity, i.e., strategies based on the cooperation of the individual group members (2). The latter occur at the behavioral, physiological, and organizational level and can act synergistically to avoid invasion, establishment, and replication of pathogens or parasites inside the colony (2, 3).

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Here’s why social distancing is important for humans too:
Covid-19 Transmission graphic

Live Longer by Lathering Less

Showering too much is a problem that too many people have, but if you do like to over-shower you should stop using shampoo. Turns out that a popular and frequently used chemical in shampoos, phthalates, is bad for your longevity. Yes, shampooing too much can shorten life. Don’t fret! There’s an easy solution of just switching to buying unscented shampoo.

The chemical class is so common that phthalates are nicknamed “everywhere chemicals.” The chemicals pose a threat if inhaled or ingested, so children are at an especially high risk of exposure as they tend to put their hands in their mouths.

In an email to Insider, Trasande shared a list of tips for keeping phthalates out of your home:

Use unscented lotions and laundry detergents.
Use cleaning supplies without scents.
Use glass, stainless steel, ceramic, or wood to hold and store foods.
Buy fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables instead of canned and processed versions.
Avoid air fresheners and all plastics labeled as No. 3, No. 6, and No. 7.
Avoid microwaving and machine dishwashing plastics.

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A Small Diet Change Makes a Big Difference

Phramacy

Absolutely no one is shocked by new research that concludes beef is the worst thing to eat. If we’re going to feed billions of people on the planet while also having a livable planet for billions then we all ought to consume less meat. Raising cattle only to slaughter is a wasteful use of land that can otherwise feed way more people and cause a lot less damage to the environment.

The production of food makes up a third of greenhouse gas emissions so just by making a small change to your diet you can make it easier on future generations to survive. Eat less meat, eat more vegetables.

The researchers built a database that provided a consistent emissions profile of 171 crops and 16 animal products, drawing data from more than 200 countries. They found that South America is the region with the largest share of animal-based food emissions, followed by south and south-east Asia and then China. Food-related emissions have grown rapidly in China and India as increasing wealth and cultural changes have led more younger people in these countries to adopt meat-based diets.

The paper’s calculations of the climate impact of meat is higher than previous estimates – the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization has said about 14% of all emissions come from meat and diary production. The climate crisis is also itself a cause of hunger, with a recent study finding that a third of global food production will be at risk by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current rate.

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