Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

Hehe, what gives me a “high” after a workout is looking at the recording of my heart rate and seeing the peaks and valleys. I do HIIT so there’s a lot of them.

Yes. I can’t think of a better use for them than saving a life (or hopefully lives) at the time when not only they’re not going to be useful to me, but there will actually be no me to even be able to make use of them.

And I live a healthy life, so hopefully some of them might be useful whether I die of old age or any other cause (except falling into a meat grinder of course, then all this gym going and veg eating will be in vein).

Also, fingers crossed they’ll find a dope body who’s my HLA match and will need a brain transplant 🤞

It’s not universal though. I’ve been regularly doing 60-minute cardio workouts for the last 10 years or so. Not once did I experience the “runner’s high”. I’m pretty sure I’m an outlier though.

I honestly have no idea what your first paragraph is about. It might as well be in Chinese.

I’m a molecular biologist. I was recently surprised when I told someone that RNA is a thing that all living thing are brimming with. He thought that RNA was something scientists invented in 2020s to use as COVID vaccines.

I also once worked with someone who had a degree in biological sciences and was shocked to learn that female cows have vaginas. She didn’t explain where she thought baby cows come from, but we decided not to push the matter and changed the subject.

Yup, meaning of a lot of words with similar meaning gets eroded like that these days. I remember a medium sized twitch streamer one day being inundated by his viewers with subscriptions, follows, gifts, and what not, and he kept saying “you guys are actually insane”. And I kept thinking “what would you say if someone actually insane turned up in your chat?”

Can I submit an expression? “Have the work cut out for you”. My thinking was “there was a lot of work, but my boss said I’ll have the work cut out for me. Phew, now there’s less work after some of it being cut out!”

I wouldn’t phrase it in black and white terms (permissible - not permissible), but to answer a question similar to yours - yes, I think it’s normal for people to feel stronger repulsion on the thought of eating animals with which we can form stronger bonds. So I, for example, cringe more at the thought of eating a dog, than eating a cat, than eating a cow, than eating a fish, etc…

I agree that there is something special about every animal, but you seem to be talking about generic specialness, about intelligence and capacity for suffering, but you haven’t really addressed my points, i.e. there are actual biological hallmarks of humans and dogs having forged a stronger mental and emotional connection in the course of evolution than humans and any other animals that we eat.

Edit: clarity

Well, I kinda agree with you, but I also kinda don’t. On one hand, animals are animals, so one should either object to eating all or not object to eating any. And if one is going to make any distinctions, they should be for sentience, the ability to be miserable on a farm, and the ability to feel pain. But that means that even though you found yourself a moral foundation for objecting to dog eating while being ok with fish eating (and possibly bird eating), it’s still hypocritical to object to dog eating, but not cow or pig eating (or kangaroo eating in the Oz).

On the other hand, there are things that do make dogs special. We started domesticating them about twice as long ago as we did pigs and cows. We were domesticating them for companionship, not meat, so the selection pressure favoured different traits in the domesticated wolves than it did in the domesticated auroch or boar. Which, for example, includes a special muscle that evolved in canis familiaris above its eyes to give it the ability of giving you that look that we humans can’t help but interpret as cute. Also, if I recall correctly, human and their pet dog gazing into each others eyes is the only documented instance of cross-spegific interaction that leads to the secretion of oxytocin in the brains of both gazers involved.

All of this to say that, actually, I’m leaning towards the notion that there is something special about dogs, that cows and pigs don’t have.

I don’t watch TV, so I actually use YouTube for a lot of entertainment and education. Veritasium, CGP Grey, Ramblomatic, How to cook that, Kurzgesagt, Numberphile, Agadmator… And more.

Haha two exact opposite answers. From what I remember, the advertiser can chose the payment model. They can either say “I will pay YouTube a tiny amount for every time the ad is shown” or “I will pay YouTube a less tiny amount for every time the ad is clicked”. But it was a few years ago that I read about it so it might have changed since then.

What alternatives are there?

Why? What happens to young murderers in Sweden and what impact does it have on Sweden?

I get the point of your gun analogy, but I don’t think it’s an apt one. It’s not like only people sensitive to gunshot wounds die from gunshot wounds. If you shoot a person with a gun the damage is pretty certain. If cankers were as certain to be caused by SLS then everyone using SLS-containing toothpaste would have cankers. We don’t. The bottom line is that the article linked to by OP is making misleading claims.

But I despite me not agreeing that the gunshot wound analogy is apt here, I get what you mean, so maybe the title of the lemmy post would be better phrased as something like “YSK that SLS […] can be the cause of cankers in sensitive people”. Which is also kinda the point I was trying to make in the last paragraph of my original reply.

Edit: formatting

Garden path sentences. One of my favourite linguistic curiosities. Fat people eat accumulates. Cotton clothing is made of comes from India.

I think cadence refers only to the inflection of the pitch. A better word to describe what you seem to be talking about might be prosody.

I think the article is misleading. The studies don’t seem to show that SLS causes canker sores, but if you do suffer from them, it will exacerbate them or delay their healing. The article says “studies”, while only citing one study, that actually recruited patients who already suffered from the sores. A double blinded cross-over trial concluded that “The number of ulcers and episodes did not differ significantly between SLS-A, SLS-B, and SLS-free. Only duration of ulcers and mean pain score was significantly decreased during the period using SLS-free. Although SLS-free did not reduce the number of ulcers and episodes, it affected the ulcer-healing process and reduces pain in daily lives in patients with [canker sores].” Although I don’t have access to the full version, so I can’t view the details. By the way, SLS-A was an SLS-free toothpaste spiked with 1.5% SLS, and SLS-B was a commercially available toothpaste with 1.5% SLS in it already.

You can tell that the article is trying to sensationalise something by such phrases as:

• “But there’s no reason to accept a hazardous chemical in your toothpaste.” You know what else is in your toothpaste? Sodium fluoride. Which is lethal at high enough dose. It’s all about the concentration.

• “It’s strong stuff — the cleaning solution I use on our garage floor is 50% SLS.” Well, yes, if you use it at concentrations ridiculously above the ones found in a toothpaste, of course it’s going to be “strong stuff”. You know what else is strong stuff? 100% acetic acid. Yet somehow, at 10% we happily consume it as vinegar. By the way, vinegar - great cleaning agent!

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re sensitive to SLS, by all means avoid it. But I’m not a fan of articles that make blanket statements about a chemical that is mostly harmful in the concentration that it’s used in hygiene products. It’s another one of those “aspartame gives you cancer” (which it doesn’t by the way).

But unless you’re drinking moonshine, should the alcohol in alcoholic drinks be ethyl alcohol only?

I read in Why we sleep by Matt Walker that in your sleep, your brain starts experimenting with making connections between concepts it wouldn’t make while awake, i.e. when it’s job is to navigate the real world using logic and sanity (and that apparently is one of the proposed explanation for why dreams get so weird, illogical and random). In the book, he also writes about Thomas Edison’s method for recording the dream induced ideas and novel connections of concepts. Edison would sit in the chair with three metal balls in his hand, the arm on the armrest, such that the hand with balls was hanging off the chair. Directly underneath that hand he would place a pan. Once he fell asleep deep enough to start dreaming, his muscles would relax, release the balls that in turn would make a noise hitting the pan, waking Edison up, giving him the chance to write down whatever he was dreaming about.

I don’t know if you can actually use the technique, but I thought I’d share.

Edit: typo