Insurance, especially for rare stuff like 'Your home burned down" is a useful thing. It’s kinda exploititive if multi-million dollar beach rental homes get to cash out frequently while rates for everyone else skyrocket though.

It’s hard to draw a clear line, but I feel like at a certain point beachfront properties will need to kinda be phased out. Would be kinda nice for beaches to be less like amusement parks and more like national parks.

All insurance companies should be member cooperatives or nonprofits, if not just a direct government function.

After banning plastic shopping bags in NJ, I can’t wait for produce bags to go. The amount of random plastic debris has definitely gone down since the ban took affect.

And the monotheistic ones tend to be pretty authoritarian as well.

The Catholic Church in particular comes to mind.

I mean, we’ve always been quite cozy with the Saudis…this is not a new thing. Pretty much since its official inception.

The USA (and its military industrial complex) provide full support in exchange for oil, and more importantly, selling oil in USD.

You’ll notice any oil-producer that threatens to sell oil in other currencies tends to become an enemy state pretty fast.

I firmly believe that marijuana remains illegal Federally primarily because of the devastating hits to opiod usage that would follow full decriminalization.

Gotta make sure the states have onerous legislation in place to insure that only massive corps can fulfill legal requirements…

Key point: “As the sole basis”

So to any fearmongers one would encounter: If the person was already an active suspect and releases a song “How I did it,” that would qualify. Using the song “How I did it” to retroactively build a case would not.

Thing is, it’s not just Whatsapp. It’s literally every single server-based mechanism to exchange data. You have to trust that the server in question wipes logs on the regular and is not under some secret data collection warrant.

And ultimately, anything that you can just sign into another device with and retain your messgae history is not fully e2e encrypted…it means a server holds your encryption key for you.

I recall reading that fast-food places are one of the hardest drivers of industrialized, cheap, unsustainable meat. Banning them from selling it would probably solve a solid chunk of the ‘meat is insanely unsustainable’ problem.

There’s small-scale farms near me that sell whole chickens raised in their fields for $15, which is not that much more than a big-brand whole chicken at a grocer. They eat bugs (reducing pesticide need) and taste better.

Fundementally, yea. Cryptocurrency is really just a public ledger. With enough time and computing power, you can trace every transaction ever made. If you identify a wallet’s owner, you can watch everything they do.

Cryptocurrency is not cash in an envelope.

I love brown paper bags and really hope for a major resurgance. Give paper for free then charge 0.25 a bag for the bioplastic.

Brown paper bags make excellent addition to a compost pile.

I think I might be misunderstanding… Could you explain how the plastic straws benefit disabled people compared to the biodegradabe alternatives?

In my neck of the woods, people lost their minds at having to abandon plastic straws, so I consider it a good stepping stone away from single-use in general.