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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • It’s absolutely not. There used to be right to trial by jury in all cases in Hong Kong before China took it away, which is what this article is about. So already it’s clearly not the “world standard.” Another example, United States routinely holds jury trials with classified national defense information and goes to great lengths to create a system to do this, since there is a constitutional guarantee to a trial by Jury. Process explained in this article: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/trump-trial-classified-documents-public-00102023 in regards to the trump case, which is a great example involving highly sensitive national security information. And that involves a jury too. I’d say you could just search online yourself and find out how wrong you are, but i doubt you’re arguing in good faith. So as you can see, the standard in China is not the same thing as the standard “the world over.” This was a right forcibly removed from the people of Hong Kong by China.

    Take your authoritarian apologist made up nonsense elsewhere.


  • Taking these medicines in the forms they are found in nature is a horrible idea. Most of the plants they come from are poisonous because the therapeutic index of most of the drugs here are low, meaning the line between medicine and poison is very fine. Purifying the ingredient and allowing tight control of the dosage is the reason any of these are able to be used safely. Please don’t go around eating bits of foxglove or belladonna.

    As you’ve seen, modern medicine is not shy about taking ingredients found in nature when they actually have a useful purpose in medicine, and enabling them to be actually used safely instead of taking some random unknown dosage of a potentially deadly drug and hoping for the best.

    Except for fixing vitamin and mineral deficiencies, supplements are ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. They’re in desperate need of better regulation in the United States. They scam tons of people and get away with ridiculous claims like fighting dementia based on no evidence that would be totally illegal for any actual pharmaceutical company to claim, all while selling bottles of stuff with “proprietary formulas” or claiming to have plants that aren’t even in there when independent researchers look at them. All totally legal by the way, no requirement for ingredients listed on a supplement to reflect reality. Stay away if you value your health or your money. Not saying pharmaceutical companies are always shining beacons of beneficence here, obviously I have many problems with them as well, but they at least have some sort of regulated evidence base for the most part.



  • This is a huge bummer. I wonder if maybe a consortium of some of the biggest library systems in the country could band together and make a platform that they control to use instead. It seems like libby/overdrive is only going to keep getting worse and more predatory.

    Something has to be done to regulate these leveraged buyouts too. Providing no real value and then just vandalizing and destroying companies.



  • Yeah the article is a little rosy and overstating things by using words like carbon free which obviously isn’t the case, but fta:

    “Retrofitting a propeller plane with fuel cells and liquid-hydrogen tanks would result in a nearly 90 percent reduction in life-cycle emissions, compared to the original aircraft, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit think tank. That’s assuming the hydrogen is made using only renewable electricity —not with fossil fuels, the way the vast majority of hydrogen is produced today.”

    Battery powered commercial airplanes are a pipe dream right now, batteries are just too heavy for anything practical with flight. Solid state batteries might reduce it some but probably not enough. We’ll still need some kind of mass long distance travel in the future. Once they’re able to scale up renewable energy sources even more, hydrogen made with those sources could become an important storage medium for getting that energy to power planes or other things where batteries are impractical. So it makes sense to at least be exploring these technologies.

    Even for right now natural gas has a higher energy to co2 ratio than other types of fuels, so it’s possible there may even be a current efficiency boost, though I don’t know that off the top of my head.

    If every new technology was attacked saying, well it’s not perfect right now so don’t even bother trying, we wouldn’t have electric cars or all sorts of other innovations. I agree with you on the article though, I hate when they say stuff like “look we have carbon free airplanes now” when obviously we don’t.


  • As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.

    This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.