The claim here from the summary is that the water is more pure than the mineral water. You could also just do distilled water and customize the mineral content with additions like brewers and sparkling water makers do. I just don’t see how it would be cost effective to ship thousands of pounds of glacier ice vs freezing as needed. You could even make a pressurized freezer and probably achieve the same effect.
This business is built on people with more money than sense.
It’s not cost effective nor is it pure. Both mineral water and glacier water are far from pure water. People want them because they’re not pure, in a chemical sense.
That’s just some hocus pocus bullshit marketing. No one would be able to pass a blind taste test on these because the alcohol would overwhelm their taste buds.
Yes but without the alcohol I’m sure you’d taste a difference between ground water and glacial water.Glacier melt has a lot of impurities that gives it a distinctive taste.
I’m an otherwise pretty healthy person who gets knocked out by anything respiratory. My entire life, ever since I was a kid, if I get a cold, the flu, anything, it’s going to be weeks to months of feeling terrible. I always hated how casual everyone around me was with their illness, like oh, it’s just a cold, yeah, well that cold is going to have me unable to sleep for the next 2 weeks and feeling generally awful for at least the next 2 after that, so please wash your hands after you sneeze on them. Twice now I’ve had the flu and taken over 4 months to recover and stop feeling like my lungs were filling with fluid every time I did any type of exercise.
My daughter is in a similar situation. It’s very frustrating to take her to some kids event and have kids around who are coughing and sniffling. I get it, it’s minor and they want to enjoy this event. But if my daughter gets sick, she’ll be nigh incapacitated for the next week or two by this “minor illness”. That “light cough” will have her coughing so hard that she vomits. She’s basically relegated to laying around and reading or watching TV. It makes school tough and is a fairly large part of why we homeschool.
Ugh, that sucks. I suspect I have some underlying condition because whenever I actually stop being lazy and do cardio like running I’ll cough for days afterwards. I love running and used to run almost daily but got sick of constantly having a runner’s cough. But all my medical checkups have been great and I feel like if I complain about the fact that when I get sick it takes forever to recover and cough when I exercise it’s going to be too vague of a complaint for them to do anything about or care.
Heh, that was the first symptom that got me on my very long road to diagnosis. I would cough after strenuous exercise and sex. But that was it. I didn't smoke or engage in anything that should cause a cough, I was young, etc. Took a looong time before I finally saw a pulmonologist who could recognize bronchiectasis on a CT, which I apparently had already had for years at that point. Bronchiectasis, in relatively young people, is almost exclusively caused by cystic fibrosis, so that got the ball rolling on the long path to diagnosis.
Some doctors may not like to know that they are your second opinion or third opinion, but it kind of saved me continuing to go to different doctors.
Not to say that you have anything so serious. It's extremely unlikely that you do. In fact, the most common cause of a mysterious cough is post nasal drip, if I recall correctly. I just think that people are less aware of these sorts of possibilities than they ought to be. I literally laughed when my pulmonologist first suggested I might have CF.
Edit: to be a little more helpful, you might want to try something like an Aerobika flutter device and/or a nebulizer (you'd need a prescription). They're good for helping to clear out the lungs, and you don't need to have some sort of special condition to use them.
Wow, this is interesting! I really need to stop brushing it off and actually do something about it, but it’s just so much easier to ignore things sometimes :)
PCPs replaced an approach called hire purchase (HP), where consumers opting for a car loan would make regular monthly payments until the loan was fully repaid, usually after three or four years. At the end, they would own the car outright. Under PCPs, consumers only pay back around half of the value of the vehicle. The rest of the value is reserved for a “balloon payment” at the end of the contract. The vast majority of consumers don’t make the balloon payment because they can’t afford it or don’t want to incur the expense. Instead, the vast majority swap their vehicle for a new one, and a new PCP deal.
I didn’t know that they have such a complex car debt bubble.
It means a lot are driving cars they can’t really afford.
Say you buy a car for £40k, finance it on PCP and you effectively make payments against a £20k loan. At the end of the agreement, you can buy the car for the remaining £20k, or hand the car back. Often the car will be worth £20k-£25k. Most dealerships will say ‘hey you can just take this new car’ and they get a £25k car for £20k. Dealerships make more sales of new cars and make more on the 2nd hand cars. Meanwhile those paying don’t actually own anything at the end and have continuous payments.
The only saving grace is if the car is worth less than the outstanding amount. If the car is worth £16k and you have £20k outstanding, you can just hand the car back and walk away. You aren’t obliged to buy the car or take out a new loan.
You can also pay off the finance yourself for the £20k, then sell that car on to get the £25k. But no one does because it’s not convenient like just taking a brand new shiny car.
Yeah, which is a generational issue at worst. One guy in my family keeps forgetting his bags and buying new ones, but he also has a mindset where he resists change. The rest of us have gotten into the habit of remembering them, leaving a few in the car, etc.
Kids growing up after the ban are just gonna see it as normal. You go buy groceries? You bring your bags, just like you need to remember to bring your wallet.
The issue is we have something that was complimentary which is now being charged a marked up price to generate further profit, at further expense to the customer. All the while we’re being told this change is for the environment, rather than for profit. It’s the deceit that annoys people.
It’s sad that kids growing up today will see it as normal. People shouldn’t be conditioned to serve profiteering corporations, we should be teaching people to demand better terms.
Why can’t something be both for profit and for the environment? Because frankly, after living with a plastic bag ban for years (Canada started the process in 2020), I haven’t seen random nasty plastic bags being blown around on the street. So it’s helped my immediate environment.
I feel we gotta reduce plastic use on all fronts. Yes, individual consumers pollute less than corps, but that doesn’t mean that consumerism as a culture doesn’t produce unnecessary waste. Think about a single store and just how much packaging there is in that one place, and where all of that will ultimately end up.
So like, I’m personally for bringing reusable containers to stores to fill up on things like say, shampoo or milk. Milk delivery was a thing for a long time, so there’s nothing saying our cultural approach to these things can’t or shouldn’t change, especially if it means less waste is generated.
And if reusable containers become a thing, I promise you there will be people whinging that it’s profitable for the groceries that they’re selling bottles that you used to get for free with the soap or whatever.
Why can’t something be both for profit and for the environment?
Because inevitably the pursuit of profit takes priority over better solutions. Case in point, recycling has also reduced the amount of plastic waste around, however really that’s just fuelling a waste processing industry that opposes re-using of materials - not without reprocessing through their business. Meanwhile, if you look to countries like Germany they’ve put business profits to the side and created a system that re-uses glass for almost all drinks, all now completely maintained by the income of its deposit system.
And if reusable containers become a thing, I promise you there will be people whinging that it’s profitable for the groceries that they’re selling bottles that you used to get for free with the soap or whatever.
Well, if they were charging you for the use, then yes that would be reasonable to complain about. They should be providing them with a fully refundable deposit - you return them, you get your money back. If you look at re-usable water bottles, that market has exploded with a bunch of over-priced crap, rather than the best solution being mass produced and distributed with the product.
They do make a profit. A plastic bag does not cost 20-45p to make. Instead of the business providing the bags complimentarily, instead of the customer paying for the cost of the old plastic bag, the businesses are selling a slightly nicer plastic bag for profit.
The reason they weren’t priced from the beginning is because plastic bags are ridiculously cheap, so they could afford to do it as a complimentary item. The reason they introduced them was to get people to shop more, as people would buy less when they didn’t have bags. So the business could write off the cost of cheap bags for the extra profit from increased sales.
Then, after a few decades’ conditioning, the businesses have taken what was complimentary and started charging a marked up price for it. People now know that it’s better for them to shop with bags, so businesses are taking advantage of that, all while pretending that they’re “doing the green thing”.
What the fuck kind of prices are you guys paying for plastic bags!? At my local grocery store they charge 5 cents for a plastic bag, and the other nearby one gives you recyclable paper bags for free. I thought about this for a bit but at a whole nickel per bag it’s probably not worth profiting off of, or if it is profitable, not enough for anyone to care.
Exactly. People bought far less when they didn’t have a bag to put their stuff in, so the shops started offering free bags so that people could buy more. Now, they’ve wrangled a way of getting the customer to pay for what was complimentary, and what’s more the business profits significantly from the sale of bags. It’s exploitative capitalism under the guise of environmentalism.
lol sure, some have. How many bike thieves are there in a small city of about a little more than 100k, and who is buying those stolen bikes? I imagine he has regulars he’s visiting now when a bike is stolen xd
see “begpacking.” it drives me mad when i see western travelers treating asia as a playground where they can do whatever the hell they want and thinking they can get away with it.
After reading that article, I have mixed feelings on it. The people who busk for money are okay imo (they’re giving music for free, you don’t have to tip them). The ones who try to sell crafts are kinda eh… I don’t think it’s terrible, but I don’t think it’s good either. The ones who just beg are kinda shitty. The ones like in OP’s article are just straight-up criminal.
Kind of sucks because I think busking is fine, if your actually a decent musician but it’s mostly people who aren’t even very good at playing instruments which is just silly.
Meanwhile aircraft fly overhead burning jet fuel with no emissions controls. Chinese factory’s have no or little emissions controls. Gulf war oil well fires.
Hot take: the onus should be on everyone - both industry and people. Single use plastics is a real, very serious issue. It may be relatively small regarding global warming, but it’s not small at all regarding other serious problems we’re making for our planet.
Additionally if no one is buying products from heavy polluters then it doesn’t make sense to burn the fuels. It either requires people to take action and change their buying habits or for governments to tax carbon to both make the environmentally friendly options economically viable to most people and to get companies to reduce emissions so they can stay competitive.
Air travel is more difficult to get environmentally friendly at this time due to the limited options as electric consumer planes are still in the testing and development stage and would struggle with international flights however train travel in Europe can be a solid option over plane travel but from a US perspective air travel is still generally the best way to go as trains are just not the best in the US and a car trip will take longer then both planes and trains and emit more fossil fuels per trip per person.
Would many straight men even read this fabled column? Again, I asked some friends. “I probably wouldn’t be interested in reading a column by some dude cos I’d just think, well, that’s him I guess. I can’t imagine finding it useful or applying it to me in any way.”
I think this is it for me. Women vary, and what works for some dude’s woman probably won’t work for mine.
I think that is true for most advice columns. I think it would need to a hook (bi, kinky, poly etc.) of some kind as well. It is interesting that it doesn't exist
I think the snag is that “talk to your partner” is a boring, factual, real-world response to most questions – which is very, very good advice… that nobody wants to hear.
That is true. You could spruce it up about specifics about how to talk about it but you are right. Most relationship problems are boring and that is the boring answer. You need some advice about the interesting parts of sex and relationships where there are a focus on the sex especially non PIV sex.
Meh. Both people not understanding what they want or how to solve a problem is entirely possible, but the solution to that is to try a few different things and talk some more. Maybe that could be the hook… Talking to couples instead of just one person. Anyway. As much as I’d love for someone to pay me to talk about sex all day, it’s not happening.
A lot of the time that is the response after someone says that they did try to talk to their partner too. It is both true and a non-helpful answer in a lot of cases because the problems to discuss are caused by underlying communication problems.
I am not a fan of the Guardian, but according to the subject of the article (they call him Li), he is a dissident and was under active investigation. I don’t think they would have just let him leave
thats fair, but from an outside perspective (from either country) it looks exactly like how the US treats its dissidents. i doubt someone like julian assange would get better treatment.
also, i dont know how they defined “dissident” in this case but its vague enough that i wont judge too hastily.
Just because one state is also shitty to dissenters does not mean another state isn’t. They don’t cancel each other out.
Dissident is pretty vague, probably on purpose. As much as I dislike the US government, I can say the government here is shit and not get hauled to jail for the most part. The same is not necessarily true in China
how is the us treating communists, smaller trade unionists, palestine supporters, blm people and such over there? those people have sharp criticism and are the true dissenters to varying degrees.
ask one of those what could happen to them if they get singled out as a leader or something. i judge by actions not words.
I did imply the US is better, and I probably should not have. And even in that I did not mean the government doesn’t do horrific things. Probably should not have made the comparison TBH. That doesn’t mean China doesn’t also do horrific shit, even if the way they do it is different
While I personally don’t think Julian Assange did anything ethically or morally wrong, and the US government’s dogged pursuit of him was unjust, he did leak military intel which is much more serious and legally significant than what people often get jailed and harassed for in China. Like, I would not expect to leak info about the military in any country and just walk away as if nothing happened.
People have literally been jailed for making Tweets in China, people have been punished as retaliation against someone in their family being a dissident, we really shouldn’t be comparing the two countries as if they’re the same, regardless of the numerous major issues the US has. And even if they were the same, it doesn’t make anything China does even slightly more justifiable.
The US tortures its dissidents. Just look at how they treated War on Terror whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Even the UN special rapporteur on torture spoke up about her treatment. She was driven to attempt suicide in prison multiple times. Including when she refused to cooperate with the secret Grand Jury investigating WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
Julian Assange is about to be buried in a US prison and get a taste of that same medicine. Where are the Guardian outrage-articles on that? Oh, wait, that’s right. They threw him under the bus as soon as he’d given them access to the best scoops of the century (US diplomatic cables). The Guardian journos divulged the pass phrase to the unredacted cables in their book giving anyone who could locate the files online access. Cryptome published the unredacted cables before WL did while Assange called the State Department trying to warn them of the bad news. The Guardian then tried to make out like WL had acted irresponsibly in publishing the unredacted cables, when in reality the cat was already out of the bag and WL was doing harm-minimization. The Guardian’s blame-shifting makes my blood boil.
The ‘Guardian’ has no ethics and can’t be trusted on anything political imo.
China is pretty egregious about taking away passports/not letting its own nationals leave its borders. Sometimes because they are political dissidents, sometimes because they are being retaliated against in some way, etc.
There is ample evidence that China is suppressing its own people, including prohibiting emigration. One good source among many is the Safeguard Defenders, an NGO focusing on China.
You’ll find many good sources, including here on Lemmy. The situation has even been getting worse in recent years.
<a href="">@Bartsbigbugbag </a>What’s a good source on that issue in your opinion? I know a lot more, but would like to learn new ones if possible. Would be great if you posted a link.
Don’t ban them, that’ll just start up a black market for them which way less safe and also makes sure the government doesn’t get any portion of the sales to fund healthcare.
I say slowly ramp up the tax on them, incentiving smokers to quit. The higher price would also help prevent future smokers from picking up the habit since they’ll be so expensive, for pretty much no gain.
theguardian.com
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