I feel I can explain this discrepancy with a bit of history.
TL;DR in the last paragraph.
The EU has a numbering system for additives, preservatives, colourings etc that have been tested and approved for human consumption, so instead of putting Sodium Sulphite, you can put E221. They used to be very very commonly listed in ingredients in the UK. The difference between Sodium Sulphite (E221) and Sodium Hydrogen Sulphite (E222) is unclear and unimportant to most consumers, so manufacturers just listed the “E numbers” instead.
In the UK, when it was discovered that certain food additives can trigger conditions such as ADHD, instead of naming the specific chemicals that were causing the problem, the British media just called them E numbers.
Cue a fair bit of hysteria about how E numbers are harmful and some legitimate concerns, and suddenly the public start checking their food to see if it has any of those nasty E numbers, and they find to their horror that a lot of processed food contains a lot of E numbers, because preservatives, flavour enhancers, food colourings, sweeteners make food more appealing, and people re-buy appealing food. Suddenly it’s very much in the manufacturers’ interests to name the chemicals instead of the shorter E number so even today in the UK it’s more common to name the chemical than the E number, which was never required anyway. To prevent hysteria over “chemicals” in food and to inform, it’s become common to label then with their purposes - flavour enhancers, colours, preservatives etc.
There’s still some really quite noxious chemicals that are perfectly legal to put in food. My son’s A-level chemistry teacher saw him drinking the same brand of squash every day and commented “You drink a lot of that. Are you sure there’s no aspartame in it? There’s no way I would deliberately put aspartame inside my body.” Make of that what you will.
Anyway, the media storm around E numbers dies down because the manufacturers largely just avoid naming them that way, and carry on pretty much as before. Some kids have had reactions and occasionally news stories come out, but the media persist in avoiding using chemical names.
There’s some perfectly sensible advice that says that it you eat less processed food, and especially less “hyper-processed” food, and instead eat more food made from more natural ingredients, you get a more balanced diet with better vitamin and mineral intake, thus feeling feeling fuller for longer. (If the food is designed, with proper experimental testing, to get you to buy it more, it is inevitably also designed to get you to eat it more than you need to.)
But how can you tell if the food is processed or not? What’s the difference between me spending half an hour mixing the ingredients and then mixing them for me and precooking it so I just bung it in the pan? Well, a random member of the public almost certainly has salt and pepper, maybe even a few herbs and spices, but probably not any L-alanine. Look out for ingredients that you wouldn’t use at home, they’re probably a sign that it’s highly processed.
Hence the nearly good information that there aren’t any artificial flavours or colours. Nearly good, because it doesn’t mention preservatives and nearly good because it is definitely and certainly processed food designed to maximise profits rather than health.
So the UK food processing industries continue to aim naturally for maximising re-buying which includes reassuring the consumers that this is the healthiest (pre-prepared, highly processed, addictively tasty) low-priced convenience food they can, whilst being attractive to supermarket profits with longer shelf lives. If the bacteria and mold-killing preservatives aren’t as kind to human biology as just making it yourself and eating it sooner, and a few people have had reactions, it’s just not obviously bad enough for it to be something people will do anything about.
**TL;DR ** So, my understanding is that the hysteria about artifical flavours and colours was highest in the UK and the folks from the other countries aren’t looking for technicalities to reassure them about the ingredients because they were never trained by their media to hunt for nasties in the small print - those that care can see straight away this is very firmly in the processed food category, and those that don’t, don’t.
Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.
But if prices don’t go up, the profits won’t increase! Why doesn’t anybody think of the poor shareholders, trying to barely eke out an income from their holdings?
The pedantic nerd in me wants to compare half of the building with the woman, or just the bit right next to the heart to the bit right next to the cabinet.
It’s symptomatic. Symptomatic of the abandonment of all that is proper and decent. Would our great grandparents have eaten candy like this? Would they have celebrated their rebellious ways so boldly? No, they’d have been ashamed. Ashamed of their wicked rule breaking. Rule breaking just for the sake of it. Rule breaking, not for mercy, not in exceptional circumstances, not out of desperation or having no other options, but role breaking just to show off how little respect they have in their hearts.
So yes, yes, people are eating bad candy so incorrectly that you can TELL society is on the point OF COLLAPSE.
This is indicative of a terrible malaise in education, in parenting, in intergenerational transfer of values, in respect and in good manners. No wonder the far right are on the rise, that Naziism is again celebrated. These edgelords will be the first to join the SS, just to shamelessly show off how wicked they are. Have we learned nothing? Are we so quick to repeat history’s darkest mistakes?
Why can’t you use it? Because your web designer isn’t designing for the possibility that people use a phone to access the Web, but it’s not 2004 any more and they’re living in the past.
You showed your colours when you assumed that portrait video is of lower quality. It’s only of lower quality if you’ve padded it out and are watching it on a landscape screen!
Technology to detect whether your webpage is being viewed landscape has existed for a long time, and takes very simple calculations indeed or just a splash or two of css to maximise the video size for whatever screen it’s being viewed on. It’s design laziness and wasted bandwidth to put the silly blurry bars or even black bars down the side of the video. But don’t force landscape on everyone. Smart phones aren’t new and they aren’t going away.
I suspect that the majority of people who spend even a tiny bit more than half of their recreational screen time looking at a fixed landscape screen are well over thirty.
You have the right to be an asshole. Mods have the right to ban you for being an asshole.
Making out that they’re nasty for having some standards of behaviour in their area is calling good bad and bad good.
(Censorship is when local or national government put you in prison for protesting or ban your book or ban your ideas. That’s when your free speech rights are being infringed.)
Alright, you win, I’ll never use my phone in portrait ever again, especially not to film my dog in a storm. I’ll make sure I turn that baby right to your preferred orientation and I’ll stop complaining about pointless bars at the side of other people’s portrait content.
If you want, I can go back through my canara roll and delete everything that’s in portrait just in case I’m ever tempted to sell it to a news organisation. I’ll make sure to only ever post landscape content to whatsapp, signal and especially tiktok and instagram, because otherwise some relative, friend or random Internet user might share it in portrait.
You’re right. That’s definitely a better solution than not putting annoying fuzzy bars on portrait content.