Yes, it was a joke, please don’t take health advice from memes and don’t try to loose weight by donating blood. While it allegedly has some health benefits, your main motivation should be to help people who need the blood.

The only problem is, that it takes your body 1-2 months to rebuild the lost blood cells. So, daily bloodletting will definitely cause weight loss, but probably more permanently than you’re intending. ☠️

My dad was born in 49, he never had to fight in a war. On the other hand it would have been a hell of a ride for him to tramp to Woodstock from western Europe.

You can change the system all the way you want. But even a co-operative insurance in a communist society will have to spend money on other things beyond damage claims. Thus even they will take more money from the insuree, than they pay out.

Even if your insurance is only a pot where everyone throws their money in, and takes it back out when they need to, someone still had to buy the pot.

It doesn’t matter how you organise it, paying insurance premiums will – on average – always be a loss. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it’s just a fact. The important part of insurances is the “on average”: The vast majority of people will never cause a million dollar damage, so they can pay a tiny share of the damages caused by the one unlucky person who does.

Instead of being mad that you paid for the car insurance and never needed it, you should be happy that you didn’t end up in a car crash, destroying someones life. Instead of being sad that you paid for your health insurance for 90 years without ever needing it, you should be happy that you aren’t the one who had to spend years in hospitals fighting cancer. And instead of paying an insurance premium for your phone, you should put that money in a piggy bank and take it out if your phone ever gets stolen.

Nobody’s talking about wedding insurance.

I am. You know that topics can change or broaden during a conversation? I was explicitly talking about existential and non-existential insurances, and buttnugget responded with

Insurance should always be public.

which then would also include non-existentials. Also, car insurance in its broader sense is neither existential, nor is it legally required. What is required, is liability insurance for your car, because not having it and causing an accident could destroy the existences of you and your victim, by putting you into bankruptcy and your victim unable to realise their claims against a bankrupt person.

You can also insure your own car against all kinds of damages, from theft to engine failure, from collision to hailstorms. But that is not legally required, and usually it’s also not existential, unless your existence was threatened by loosing your car. Even the OP talks about non-existential car insurance, as they want their insurance to pay for their check engine light.

Why should a travel cancellation insurance or a mobile phone insurance be public? You can take out an insurance for almost everything, from wedding insurances for when your spouse gets cold feed to alien abduction insurances. I don’t see why the state should be involved in that.

And of cause companies need to pay their shareholders. That’s how our economy works. Even if an insurance is state funded, it needs seed money, and that money costs interest. Either the state (i.e. you) pays the interest, or the insuree (i.e. you) pays the interest, but it has to be paid for either way.

It’s not a scam, it’s just how companies work. By definition, every insurance will pay out less than they collected in payments. They have to pay their employees, their offices, taxes an yes, also their shareholders. That’s why, on average, insuring something is always a loosing bet.

You should only insure yourself against things that are potentially threatening your or your family’s existence: Liability, health, home, occupational disability, survivor benefits. For everything else it’s almost always better to just put the money into an account to have it at hand in case.

In reasonable countries they do exactly that. The health insurance ensures that your victim gets the required treatment. But they also ensure, that in the end the damages you caused aren’t paid for by the public.

They don’t need to drive a 180,000$ car for your insurance being important. They don’t need a car at all.

If you hit a cyclist and after a lot of expensive medical care they end up in a wheelchair, unable to work their old job, required to move or rebuild their home to be wheelchair-accessible, you might owe them millions, even though the bike was only 300$.

To be clear, you need liability insurance for your vehicle, so if you cause harm to someone else their claims are covered. You don’t need to have insurance for your own damages. The state doesn’t really care about your solvency, only for the solvency of your potential victims.

Me, having the same hobbies since 30 years: Maybe it’s because I’m learning-disabled 🤔

The revised version is also great. Most of the content is still the same, a nuclear reactor works just the same way as it did in 1995. But most of the IT topics are updated. Instead of a ball mouse you’ll find an optical one, instead of the CRT they explain LCD screens etc.

There’s also a “new”(2016) book in the same style but for science instead of technology. It’s just as good as you’d expect it to be.

tickets in my queue

sounds like you are not working in social services, where you could be guilt tripped into working your ass off so innocent people don’t suffer. Just do your work as you’ve always done and drop the pencil after eight hours or whatever your contract says. It is not your problem if 3/4 of the work is not done. When the customers wait long enough they will make it your bosses problem.

And probably use your spare time to look out for another job, sounds like a company you would rather not work with.

At least Denmark and Canada had Leopard 2s in Afghanistan that were involved in combat. So maybe the “Brits” were just fancy Canadians.

It’s the other way round: I don’t know if it applies to this fella, but /we/ used ** // and __ long before applications knew what that’s supposed to mean. We’ve been using it even on devices that are _physically_ incapable of producing formatted text, so it was the readers responsibility to parse and understand what it’s supposed to mean. Back in those days we’d also type :'-( instead of 😢.

It actually annoys me that markdown got it all wrong, and thus applications using markdown do it all wrong as well:

*foo* should be bold, not italic
/foo/ should be italic, not just /slashes/
_foo_ should be underlined, but for lemmy that’s just another way of saying italic, underlining seems to be outright impossible.

Why? :'-(

Oz or whatever strange body part comparison you guys prefer would also be fine for me. As long as it’s standardized between products.

With 100 gramms/millilitres it’s a simple guideline:

• <100 kcal: probably healthy
• 100-200 kcal: mostly ok
• >200 kcal: consume carefully

Of cause it’s fine to consume oils (~700kcal/100ml) but they shouldn’t be the major part of your meal. And sugary drinks are obviously bad for you, even though they’ve got less than 100kcal/100ml.

Not so hard to calculate. It’s still stupid though, that they don’t have to print the values per 100g, as they do in Europe. That makes it really easy to compare two products with different package sizes.

The value per serving is mostly useless, as a serving is just some made up amount, usually tiny to make the product look healthier. For example, a serving size of crisps could be 20g, which is not even a handful.

Man, these pesky doctors. They always forbid the fun stuff.

That’s why I always use password hashes as my passwords. So when some hacker steals the database, with all the clear text passwords, and look at my account they think somehow this password is still hashed and don’t try using it directly. My current lemmy-password is $argon2d$v=19$m=16,t=2,p=1$Mk9RTWNESzMyWVljUGo5RA$BiGKlhzFuiWA0N78KzEmCQ