Donating blood is good for other people regardless of the profit motive from the company.

And if you're talking about the Red Cross, their CEO is reported to make less than 700k/year.

That's not bad for running one of the largest medical non-profits in the world.

you're correct. I mistakenly thought it was only carbon coming off the tires. So yeah, EVs have a significantly lower carbon output that ICE vehicles. My point still stands but thanks for the callout.

I live "in" a major American city. Well, a reasonably major Midwestern city. It's roughly a third the size of Rhode Island. It has half a million people in it.

The paper isn't clear what they mean when they said "~25% within-sample coefficient of variation", so I can't directly address what you're asking, but it's tangential to the point I'm making. My naïve interpretation is that they did an ANOVA, and reported the within-group variance, or something similar.

All I'm saying in my footnote is that, whatever the final point estimate, scaling it by a factor of C will affect the variance of the final sample distribution by C^2. So for example, if you have an 8% variance on the measurement at ug/g, and you scale it by 1300 (for 1300g; what the interwebs tells me is the mass of a standard human brain), then you'd expect the variance of the scaled measurement to be 1300^2 * 8%.

That makes a ton of assumptions that probably don't hold in practice -- and I expect the real error to be larger -- but illustrates the point.

The end of the Pacific Electric system was not a conspiracy theory by tire companies or anything like that; the price of the cars dropped and that's what consumers preferred, i.m.o.

Pretty much any major American city is less dense than it was 100 years ago. It was cheaper to build out than it was to build up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41193531

Relatively? The same. Yes it scales quadratically, but that is just because variance has such a weird unit.

Just consider standard deviation (which has the same physical unit as what you are measuring, and can be substituted for variance conceptually): This increases linearly when you scale up the sample.

An example: Say you take 20 blood samples (5 ml), and find that they contain 4.5 ml water, with a standard deviation of 0.1 ml over your samples.

From that, your best guess for the whole human (5 liters, i.e. x1000) has to be 4.5 liters water, with standard deviation scaled up to 0.1 liters (or what would you argue for, and why?)

In this country we have this ideal of a rugged individualist whose out there living off the land and making his own way. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that he's dependent on 10x as many miles of roads as his urban counterpart. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that providing him with internet access on the state's dollar costs orders of magnitude more than someone living in a sustainable location. Same with delivery costs and literally every other thing this person consumes. They get to pretend to be a self-reliant individualist while leaching off of the tax dollars of urban residents who cost a fraction of the amount to support.

And for what it is worth, the paper itself has plenty of other interesting findings that OP fails to discuss or rebut at all. OP asks an LLM some very basic statistics questions, putting into question their ability to credibly apply and interpret the LLM's findings.

My interpretation of that evidence is that OP, a random internet commenter, just doesn't think it is credible that plastics are harmful to humans, and is grasping at plastic straws with cherry picked evidence and poor rebuttals to reach that "fact based" conclusion.

That means, all else being equal, a car company makes more profit selling a vehicle that has a higher profit margin. The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X. This means the dealer/manufacturer just outright make more money if a higher percentage of people buy trucks instead of small cars.

Consumers have "signaled" that they will be fine paying three times as much for the same exact feature set (no, they are not hauling anything, and there certainly isn't a massively higher percentage of Americans doing truck things than 50 years ago), even using longer term loans to make it happen.

When the car market has been basically saturated for decades, how else do you "make line go up" than selling the same product (transportation) for more money?

I lived that life in my 20s

Turns out I don't actually want to go to the grocery store every day. I want to go once a week and stock up, which I can do thanks to inventions like the refrigerator and the automobile

I’d wait until somebody can clearly state what the demonstrated harms of microplastics are before you conclude that there’s nothing you can do. An EV reduces emissions that we KNOW are bad, and over their lifetimes, the reduction is huge compared to an ICE vehicle. If you’re worried, though, walk or bike whenever you can.

Biking to grocery store is not an option for you, but you can still make a difference if you think about it. Eg, go to the store less frequently. Switch to a chest freezer for perishables. And so on. Draw up an energy budget and do the math.

There is a cost to human life, sure. But you can make it work if you really care enough. You are definitely not screwed.

In a prewar US mid sized city, the density supports multiple grocery stores I can reach in about the same time as driving and finding parking.

Specifically produce, however we grow most of what we eat. We pressure can, dehydrate and ferment to preserve. I have background and decades of experience in growing, which is to say it's more than just standard hobby garden level.

The RO water is not to avoid microplastics (although that might a side benefit) but rather that the water is highly mineralized. It would be a long post to explain why I do this. Some is theoretical health concerns, some is more practical.

If microplastics are making our lives 10% worse in some dimension, we will have to stumble onto what that dimension would be basically by luck and then spend at least a decade rigorously studying it before we could make useful assertions.

The hubub about microplastics is that, we don't have great civilization wide health data on most health dimensions, so we don't even have good baselines to figure whether we have regressed in many ways. IF there is a negative effect, it will effect everyone all over the planet and there is no escape

It's an extreme corner of the likelihood/amount of harm graph, and some people think that corner of the graph warrants caution even before harm is proven.

It's the same situation we faced with leaded gasoline, and the US is pretty bad when it comes to those kinds of "mild, diffuse harm that mostly affects people who can't afford whatever system the wealthy use to avoid the harm" problems.

It's not fearmongering, we are literally gambling that microplastics have minimal harm right now.

We don't have control groups, they're found in virtually every complex organism on Earth, including (best we can tell) all humans, so we can't form a control group. We've only recently really started to notice, care, or study them, so we don't have strong historical data to compare against. We don't have many isolated populations (especially of large enough size) where microplastic bioaccumulation is the only major difference in how their lives have changed in biologically relevant ways over the decades, so we can't effectively isolate the effects of microplastics from other confounding factors.

So you have these things that basically became completely ubiquitous--an unavoidable fact of not just human life, but all complex life on Earth--before anyone realized, with several other major global factors shifting concurrently. The end result is that, by the tools and methods with which we perform science, it's nearly impossible to study their exact effects. Maybe they're a slow-burning apocalypse subtly disrupting the mechanisms of life at their most fundamental levels and only getting worse with time, or maybe they do nothing or next to nothing like having a glass of sherry with your Sunday brunch once a week, or maybe they're somewhere in that vast, murky expanse in between the two extremes. Hell, there might even be a net benefit somehow. We just plain don't know, and don't know how we could know, so speculation is just about all we've got at present, and without knowing it's really hard to say if the messaging and literature surrounding the subject is aggressively over-alarmist or recklessly under-alarmist. The best we've really got is the simple fact that we notice them now, and thus have the chance to pay close attention, part of which is regularly taking basic measurements like these to try and correlate trends.

About all we do know is that they weren't here before, and "before" encompasses 99.9999% of all life that we know to have ever existed, so it's definitely weird and maybe probably bad.

There's definitely criticism to be had with the broader state of public health and science communication that harm, or at least the understanding that "we have literally no idea what the broader implications of this are but they're maybe probably not good", are considered to be implicit, either due to fallacious appeal to nature or the simple fact that alarmist headlines catch more attention, generating more traffic and revenue, and thus acceptance rates and grant money downstream. Which is, I think, the real core of the issue.

I agree, it’s not a magic fix for all issues! But it does address one major component, the physical activity part. The other is diet, which is a separate issue of course.

This depends on a) what you want, and b) the apartment. If you want a garden, then an apartment is a non-starter, obviously. Also if you care about what the exterior of the building looks like that you'll want a house. But other than it doesn't make much difference.

The main difference for me is insulation from your neighbours. I've lived in good apartments and bad ones. The best ones you simply forget that you even have neighbours. The worst ones you can't forget because you can hear their conversations and them locking doors etc. The trouble is it's hard to tell what it's going to be like before you move in and this isn't the kind of thing that has standards or that anyone seems to think about. So for someone sensitive to noise, but also likes to make a lot of noise (I'm a musician), I'm resigned to living in a house too. But I'm not sure it has to be this way.

They're incredibly popular here, and yes, all supermarkets will have a lock stand near the checkout area so you can leave them there and easily reach for them as you're bagging your groceries. They're also foldable and/or small enough to fit in almost any closet.