Plain tobacco leaves are much less dangerous for your health than the highly engineered commercial cigarettes that have additives that increase addictiveness, inhibit coughing, "improve taste", improve shelf life, etc.
> The overwhelming majority of independent research shows that filters do not reduce the harms associated with smoking - a fact understood by tobacco industry scientists in the 1960s. In fact, filters may increase the harms caused by smoking by enabling smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into their lungs.
Also, plain common sense will tell you that inhaling toxic smoke through a small piece of paper is not much healthier than inhaling toxic smoke directly.
Literally every source (including the tobacco companies themselves, who have been cowed by legal pressure) say that no cigarette is safer than any other. It's the tobacco itself that's the problem.
This is the settlement that Natural American Spirit had to agree to because they couldn't provide evidence that additive-free cigarettes are any safer:
I doubt it's likely at all. The thing that makes tobacco dangerous is high temperature combustion and nicotine. You get BOTH in natural tobacco.
The thousands of "chemicals" from cigarettes are not put in there. They come from combustion. Setting shit on fire makes chemicals turn into other chemicals, some of them very harmful. That's why many survivors of 9/11 later died from lung cancer.
> It's likely safer but not meaningfully enough to make much difference, as it's still obviously very bad for you
There's no evidence that it's safer at all. Reynolds lost a big lawsuit over its American Spirit brand implying that their cigarettes are safer. If they could have provided evidence to the contrary, they would have.
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point no-one wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.
Anyone who has enough audio engineering skills, feel free to build this!
When people complain about housing prices being too high, this is what I usually point them to. There are _a lot_ of boxes to tick, some of those boxes are critical, some are not so much. Some are severely punished, some are not so much. Some have extremely high costs and are a PITA, some not so much.
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
Something I've seen with renovations is construction companies not understanding how to attenuate sound, and not bothering to learn or, even better, consult someone who knows.
Well meaning PMs read up on products and throw them at the problem and it's treated as a great success because there are no hard targets, just a general desire to reduce noise, and that happened.
Ironically it was quiet enough in our previous apartment, but moving to a house we now have the neighbor using their awfully loud snow-spitting machine before 6AM after snowy nights... (And it snows a lot)
Noise is one of the things that improved moving to an apartment for me. We've got bylaws about noise with quiet periods, bans on bothersome noise, a smoking ban and a (loud) pet ban. We also have better windows that block noise, and decent noise insulation in the floors despite the hard flooring.
Compared to suburbia where neighbours started mowing at 7am, loud parties went late into the night and dogs barked all day, it's oddly quiet.
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
A quick google suggests that British Columbia's building code only requires STC 50 which is "you can hear but not understand a neighbor's loud conversation" levels of isolation. Though maybe your city has stricter requirements?
Only 50? I think that's pretty good when considered on its own but STC doesn't look at the whole picture. STC ratings and requirements for discrete wall and floor assemblies are a thing but with suites/party walls apparent STC is what mattered whether it was the provincial code or local bylaws. ASTC is king.
A bit higher possibly, but from firsthand experience let me tell you it's not enough by far. Effective noise isolation does not magically arise from used materials, it has to be planned and included in the building project. And it makes the building more expensive.
Majority construction anywhere is whatever can be built with the least cost.
In the US and Canada timber framing for buildings under about 6 feet is least cost. Other places without a lot of timber availability tend to build with other things.
I assume they meant “five-over-one”, five floors of stick built (framed with dimensional lumber, not timber) apartments on top of a concrete and steel first floor.
Timber framing is something else entirely, you can construct buildings taller than six stories with engineered wood products.
> The mid-rise buildings are normally constructed with four or five wood-frame stories above a concrete podium, usually for retail or resident amenity space.
What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.
political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative.
A Labour MP foolish attended a GB News show and when pushed admitted that the Online Safety Act was also about identifying speech by adults [0].
Sorry about the quality of the link, but the video is there (higher quality is available on X) and its not like the paragon of truth that is the BBC reported on this.
It takes just a few seconds to see that it's a random backbencher who is not in the government. We have a whole range of MPs, and some of them sometimes talk about things they have no idea about. The website you're citing is little more than propaganda, since it explicitly makes it seem like the MP has any connection to the government.
What a ridiculous take. There are many, many cities and towns worldwide that are primarily walk/bike friendly and they seem to do very well in terms of quality of life.
Well, do they have easily affordable housing for poor people? Or do they self-segregate into high-income areas surrounded by a halo of low-income areas?
Even if the electricity source would burn similar fuel, just the fact that you don't pullote right in the middle of population centers makes a huge difference. In reality, it's not only that, but _also_ that they use cleaner methods of energy production.
Huh, no. Pollution close to humans is bad for both city and rural people.
> The pollution always goes somewhere,
"The solution to pollution is dilution". We want the concentration of pollution low, so the health effects are low too, and we can give natural processes the time to decay/oxidize/etc the pollutants.
> not like we have large swaths of useless places
We do... we mostly care about the lower ~100 meters of atmosphere because that's where people live. That's less than 1% of the total atmosphere. This means we can distribute pollution over a volume a 100x larger than that that is important for us. And then I'm not even counting the vast amount of the planet that's uninhabited / non-land.
Also, smokestacks are designed to not directly pollute the air close to people, see:
People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives.
If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds.
Interesting Side Note: bleached/chlorinated chicken
The things which makes this a no go in the EU is ironically not the chlorination per-se, but the fact that chlorination is needed.
Like basically the EU thinks the way the US allows farmers to keep and raise chickens is so bad/unsanitary that chlorinating them isn't sufficient to make them safe for (repeated) consumption.
Which makes sense given that some of the things involved can lead to (non exhaustive list):
- non healthy chemicals _in_ the meat, not just on it
- increase in parasite, bacteria or virus infection _in_ the meat
- increased chance bacteria have some form of antibiotic resistance or other mutations
- not wanting to support "that" level of animal abuse (which is not just illegal but criminal in many EU countries, but also that doesn't mean that EU countries are that much better, they just drew a line on the level of animal abuse they tolerate which is in a different place then the line the US drew, but both are far away from the line animal protection organizations would drew)
You're wrong. The whole point is this: in EU, you cannot chlorinate your chickens. This means that to sell chicken, you need to make sure that your chicken is good to eat without chlorination (by making sure your whole production chain is sanitized up to sufficient level).
In the US you don't need to make sure your production chain is super high sanitation quality because you can chlorinate the chicken afterwards. This means that you don't have to spend money/effort cleaning up your chains, because you can dip them in chlorine after.
From a health perspective there is honestly not that big of a difference. The resulting product in both cases is chicken that's safe to eat.
The real reason for the difference in policy is the incentives that it creates for the meat-producers. In the US there is no incentive to keep sanitation up in the production chains because the chicken will be chlorinated anyway. This actually incentivizes sloppy (cheaper) production methods over ones that are more sanitized but more costly.
On the other hand, in the EU you cannot wash chicken meat, so it needs to be kept clean and sanitized throughout the production process.
> The whole point is this: in EU, you cannot chlorinate your chickens.
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue, really (pun intended).
In the end, it doesn't really matter why things got where they are - what matters is where we want them to go next. And US interests seem to be hell-bent on continuing to wash chickens. So they will continue to be banned from Europe.
>The real reason for the difference in policy is the incentives that it creates for the meat-producers. In the US there is no incentive to keep sanitation up in the production chains because the chicken will be chlorinated anyway. This actually incentivizes sloppy (cheaper) production methods over ones that are more sanitized but more costly.
If there's no actual downsides from the chlorine, what's the issue? In many cities the municipal water source is local river that's polluted, and needs treatment to be drinkable. Part of that process might involve adding chlorine. I'm sure that all of this can be avoided if the water is sourced, at great expense, from a glacier or whatever, but nobody would suggest we should ban chlorinating water, and that allowing chlorinating water would be better because it forces the water source to be clean.
The poor sanitation in American poultry farming can have other negative effects outside the meat being safe. Such unsanitary conditions make dangerous conditions for workers including an elevated risk of novel avian flues and, if ever the chlorination isn't properly executed, the meat is extremely unsafe to eat.
Chlorination is a good idea when you can't control the supply chain (i.e. drawing water through infrastructure that's been compromised) but the better solution (if it's reasonable) is always to fix the supply chain. In the case of a city relying on chlorination vs. bringing clean water in by train the chlorination is a clear winner. When it comes to meat it's a cost issue and the EU made the decision to force that cost onto the producer while the US has made the decision to bear the cost at large.
There is also an animal welfare aspect to it. Imagine we had super efficient production method that is 100% guaranteed safe for consumption, but it is absolute hell on earth for the animals, then I don’t think we should do it.
> There is also a genuine argument to be had as to, for example, whether the practice contributes towards antimicrobial resistance.
The chlorination is less in question here compared to the extreme overuse of antibiotics in animal farming in America. But it is fair to be skeptical of America's chlorination approach due to the increased danger of animal-human disease crossovers. Poor sanitation can lead to a lot of elevated work risks for employees.
> Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry group that surveyed its members. (Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.)
> Nowadays, the industry mostly uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.
What do European chicken meat plants use to reduce bateria load?
> prevalence of GM crops
EU grows plenty of GM maize. More will come. Are Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) crops bad?
That’s really the whole point - EU food standards indicate that the need to use acids to prevent bacteria growth is the problem. The EU system is based on having higher sanitation requirements at all steps from feed to cage to plate.
My understanding was that the meat-packing process in the US involves a butchering method that results in more fecal matter contamination, posing the risk of salmonella, which necessitates the wash. Those bacteria occur naturally, so you can't avoid that without being careful with butchering, which is probably what the EU standards require. But I doubt the big meat conglomerates like Tyson will want any hit to productivity, and they would fight a change every step of the way.
Mechanically separated meat bluntly ruptures the digestive tract and smears the flesh with feces. So they soak the feces and flesh together in a chlorine or acid bath to sanitize it. It's disgusting.
Generally, I agree with your post. About "keep them out of the fridge": I thought this is mostly due to wash or not-wash the eggs before packing. I think washing removes a thin layer that makes the eggs last longer, but can be visually less appealing. Please correct me if you know better! Japan also vaccinates heavily for Salmonella, and they eat plenty of raw eggs in their cuisine.
They didn't say "it's affordable so it's okay". They said "if it made it very affordable, then one could make an argument for it". And they're right. If you could reduce poverty by providing food at 1/2 or 1/5th the price of European-quality food, that would absolutely be worth having an argument over. Of course, this isn't actually the case, which is why they then said it's the worst of both worlds - American food manages to be both unhealthy and expensive rather than only one or the other.
This does make the food much _cheaper_. You can buy food with high quality standards in the US but it is much more expensive. Most people in the US choose the cheaper option.
To a degree, those are also convenient excuses a country uses to protect their own food industries without being overtly protectionist. USA's agriculture industry can readily decimate the leaders in most other markets when they have to compete on price. Between the subsidies, lower standards, and sheer scale, it's practically impossible to compete.
> The others I agree with, but there's no evidence that HFCS or GM crops are bad.
That's a clever slight-of-hand.
Sure, GM crops are not intrinsically bad... it's just that they enable the farmer to spray pesticides and herbicides which are very clearly linked to bad outcomes in people who consume the food.
So the only way to ensure you're not eating food sprayed with those things is to choose a non-GM alternative.
>Sure, GM crops are not intrinsically bad... it's just that they enable the farmer to spray pesticides and herbicides which are very clearly linked to bad outcomes in people who consume the food.
You're accusing me of "clever slight-of-hand" when arguably the original offender was the OP. If it's really true that "GM crops are not intrinsically bad", then just say "pesticide ridden crops" or whatever? Isn't it a "clever slight-of-hand" to lump all GM crops together?
While glucose is used by nearly every cell in the body and has tight regulation by insulin, fructose is largely processed by the liver, where it more easily is converted into fat, triglycerides and uric acid.
Intrinsically this messes with our bodies insulin resistance, for a start, contributing to diabetic issues, as well as increased fatty liver disease, and elevated triglycerides.
It bypasses our body's normal appetite regulation, as fructose also (in addition to insulin) does not stimulate leptin, providing the body with no/less feeling of satiation, and is also less effective at stimulating ghrelin (hunger hormone).
You feel less full, you keep eating, calories and obesity go up.
This is at its worst in liquids, as liquid fructose is absorbed rapidly, and leads to effective weight gain even at small amounts of consumption.
Carrying on from that, contrary to your statement, HFCS has absolutely been linked in multiple studies to increased obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.
I can't imagine where you're hearing that there's "no evidence that HFCS is bad" other than those in the production pipeline or their lobbying.
I still don’t see your evidence of these claims. HFCS is also known as glucose-fructose syrup - it’s not all fructose, either 42% or 55% typically. Glucose and Fructose often go together in your body, so the signal would be there. In your gut, sucrase breaks sucrose (table sugar) into glucose and fructose. In drinks, when sucrose is exposed to CO2 and other acids it turns into fructose and glucose before it hits your gut!
So if you are saying fructose is bad, you are saying table sugar is bad in much the same way and that fruits like apples which are high in fructose would be problematic.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23181629/ - countries with higher HFCS availability had higher T2D prevalence, and the association persisted after adjusting for country-level BMI and other factors.
> Glucose and Fructose often go together in your body, so the signal would be there. In your gut, sucrase breaks sucrose (table sugar) into glucose and fructose. In drinks, when sucrose is exposed to CO2 and other acids it turns into fructose and glucose before it hits your gut!
Nothing in this contradicts me. But the more fructose versus glucose, the more hepatic processing, and the fewer hormonal signals, leading to increased ingestion.
It's not that one is objectively "bad and only bad", its that our metabolism is not tuned to such a heavy fructose vs glucose ratio.
>Carrying on from that, contrary to your statement, HFCS has absolutely been linked in multiple studies to increased obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.
The question isn't whether HFCS causes those ailments, It's whether it's worse than the alternatives. It's not as if for lack of HFCS, coke will disappear from store shelves and everyone is going to drink water, for instance. Otherwise it makes no sense to call out HFCS specifically. It'd be like hemming and hawing about how unhealthy coke is, but turning a blind eye to pepsi.
>but as of 2022, there is no scientific consensus that fructose or HFCS has any impact on cardiometabolic markers when substituted for sucrose.
HFCS came about when there was an abundance of corn and nothing to do with it. So when they discovered corn syrup they added corn subsidies and heavily tariffed cane sugar. Ethanol appeared and is a far greater corn sink, so HFCS no longer even serves that purpose.
But the processing industry doesn't want to disappear (money and job losses), so they lobby and the status quo remains. Same with private health care in a cozy position where they act as an unneeded middleman. It's too lucrative to certain people, and they won't willingly give it up.
you do know those are industrial food manufacturing outcomes not farming outcomes? Ain't no one bleaching my families chickens, or giving their cattle growth hormones. Americans have been tricked and mislead by marketing and conglomerate, some of which is European.
There was a constraint - since 2009, the Joint Photographic Experts Group had published JPEG XR, JPEG XT and JPEG XS, and they were probably reluctant to break that naming scheme.
They're running out of good options, but I hope they stick with it long enough to release "JPEG XP" :-)
In the photography world it's shorthand for "photo unedited straight from the camera". Popular with Fujifilm cameras especially due to their 'film simulation' modes which apply basically a filter to the image.
What makes jpeg compression bad isn’t low bandwidth. It’s really good at compressing an image for that.
What makes jpeg bad is that the compression artifacts multiply when a jpeg gets screen captured and then re-encoded as a jpeg, or automatically resized and recompressed by a social media platform. And that definitely isn’t a problem that has gone away since dialup, people do that more than ever.
I'm not saying it's true, I obviously understand that not all jpegs are low quality and over compressed. That's just how the word is generally used by people, especially those outside of tech who aren't well versed in different image formats.
It seems to me this point of discussion always tends to get way too much focus. Should it really raise concern?
Of all the people who interact with image formats in some way, how many do even know what an image format is? How many even notice they’ve got different names? How many even give them any consideration? And out of those, how many are immediately going to think JPEG XL must be big, heavy and inefficient? And out of those, how many are going to stop there without considering that maybe the new image format could actually be pretty good? Sure, there might be some, but I really don’t think it’s a fraction of a significant size.
Moreover, how many people in said fraction are going to remember the name (and thus perhaps the format) far more easily by remembering it’s got such a stupid name?
Actually, I remember when JPEG XL came out, and I just thought: cool, file that one away for when I have a really big image I need to display. Which turned out to be never.
I regularly work with images larger than 65,535px per side.
WEBP can only do 16,383px per side and the AVIF spec can technically do 65,535, but encoders tap out far before then. Even TIFF uses 32-bit file offsets so can't go above 4GB without custom extensions.
Guess which format, true to its name, happens to support 1,073,741,823px per side? :-)
Honestly, that's exactly what it sounds like to me too. I know it's not, but it's still what it sounds like. And it's just way too many letters total. When we have "giff" and "ping" as one-syllable names, "jay-peg-ex-ell" is unfortunate.
Really should have been an entirely new name, rather than extending what is already an ugly acronym.
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