Toxins exist in the water you drink and the air you breathe, unless you distill the water to the point of actually being dangerous to consume.

A small concentration of toxins is absolutely unavoidable. The presence in potato skins is pretty negligible.

To the extent that you’re not a dick about it.

Don’t be too confident in something you didn’t research enough. Don’t be too loud about shit you don’t understand.

Don’t be haphazard with the truth about things that can put peoples’ lives at risk. Don’t make shit up about vaccines.

Don’t lie on purpose. Don’t lie or bullshit for attention. Bullshitting with friends for fun is obviously fine if they know you’re not serious.

If somebody points out your mistake, understand what they’re saying, learn from it, and be gracious about it. Don’t double down just to save face, that’ll only ever make things worse.

Yes, it is casually connected. Child labor causes time that would spent learning to instead be spent related to labor and recovering from labor. This in turn causes reduced academic performance, increasing the likelihood of poverty, which in turn causes increase in criminal behavior.

Ah, you meant in the long run, yeah, fair.

I agree that labor by minors is should only be allowed in very specific cases and highly regulated. I’m not sure if I’d limit entirely to non-profit organizations, or entirely to the summer, or whatever, but yeah, it’s not something to take lightly.

Growing up in suburbia, the labor we did have wasn’t a problem… Is the general regulatory scheme around child labor in the US deeply problematic in some way I don’t know about? Are there a lot of states that are way too permissive?

Well, let me play devil’s advocate.

• You don’t need a two-way binding contract to form a labor relationship. You could have a relationship where an employer offers a child some terms, and the child can work whenever they want, leave whenever they want, and get paid for the time they work, or for their output, or something.
• Does the labor cause the poverty, abuse, and crime? I’d imagine that the poverty causes the labor, and the poverty also causes the crime. Abuse might also cause the labor, as parents could force their kids to work, but you could create systems at certified child employers to interview Children and see how their home lives are going. The children might also be using work as an escape—either a temporary one, or a way to save up money to move out as soon as possible.
• Generally, when people talk about the age of meaningful consent, there’s a clear line at or near the age of majority. Where’s the line where you can meaningfully consent to labor? Does it depend on the job? Sure, five year olds shouldn’t be allowed to work at all, but what about a fourteen year old who really wants to be a camp counselor during the summer? I worked at a park when I was 16, I mostly sat around all day. I read three books (the ones I had to read for school and one more), I went for a walk every day, I got fresh air, I talked to people. Surely we can agree that that was fine.
• We should definitely talk about the types of job. No kid should be a factory worker or an accountant or a dentist. But working in a park, being a camp counselor, babysitting… There are many traditional jobs that apply to children with no risk of physical injury, jobs that don’t conflict with schoolwork, etc. Do those studies address each form of labor?

I do not use “whatsapp business,” no idea why I would.

I do not seek to use a service and then interact with the people who happen to be on that service, I seek to interact with people and meet them on the service they’re using. The fediverse is an exception, because I believe in the principles, but the experience sucks because it’s all tech with no real community (Lemmy/Kbin) and none of the people I want to follow (Mastodon).

the phrase you’re looking for is “positive network effects.” The large network is a killer feature.

people have explained a dozen reasons why a. telegram is not better and b. nobody cares which is better anyway.

I mean, Telegram is the worst of the bunch, but putting that aside, the point is that people aren’t comparing telegram and whatsapp, they’re comparing telegram, whatsapp, signal, matrix, sms, imessage, facebook messenger, instagram messenger, session, wire, wechat, the crypto ones, kik, and a dozen other chat clients you’ve never heard of. And most people are not actually making those comparisons, most people just use the one their friends use, or the one that their phone came with. Nobody, anywhere, is pretending there are only two options and picking one of them.

Convince some non-nerds to give it a try. I haven’t managed to. Therefore, telegram.

Your logic does not check out.

Telegram gives me:

• Roll-their-own encryption off-by-default without cross-device support or group chat available.
• The ability to talk to strangers I don’t want to talk to
• An open source client, but a proprietary, non-federated server
• An unmoderated social network that’s a free-for-all for crypto scammers, extremists, and other nuts

WhatsApp gives me:

• Signal’s encryption algorithm on all chats
• Whatsapp web (still with encryption)
• Encrypted group chats
• The ability to talk to human beings I actually know and want to talk to

Neither respects my privacy.

Not sure why I would bother attempting to use Telegram again.

You mean the circle-jerk of six tankies talking about how the West is the definition of evil? Is that the former Lemmy culture you’re talking about? I don’t remember there being anything worth mourning.

cocaine sales would go up. People would try microdosing. Some of those people would end up regular dosing.

There would be a black market, not only for coffee and tea, but also for caffeine powder, which people would sprinkle into anything.

Peoples’ overall caffeine consumption would go down. That girl from my high school who got the shakes every afternoon would probably have been better off.

ah, yeah, I tried disabling and replacing one app, I can’t remember which, but it caused weird problems…

Does it only work on a custom rom?

This is not legal advice and I am not your attorney.

I doubt anybody would prosecute you, but on a practical level…

I mean, you need to find a place to do it, and… I don’t think any states have homestead acts in 2023, so you’d probably need to buy some kind of land somewhere. Maybe you could manage in Texas, but I doubt it. You could also attempt to petition your state to give you some kind of interest in some unincorporated land… But you can’t do it in a national park, and even if you could find land nobody owns, you’d want to own it yourself to prevent others from building society over the land.

You couldn’t hunt endangered species, and you’d need to own your weapons and hunt according to whatever law the state has… many require you to get a license to hunt… You don’t necessarily need a gun to hunt, and you don’t necessarily need to hunt after your garden starts working… Same with any potential environmental regulation, if you’re chopping down trees or something, some states might require you to plant new ones…

And theoretically, all your hunting + farming could amount to income, but probably nowhere near enough to actually incur tax liability, and no tax agency is ever going to enforce that against you.

How can a person “rejection-proof” their life?

Stop living it.

How could one set up their life such that it would be impossible for people like that to rob one of their livelihood? How could one make it impossible for others to shun or ostracize them?

You could probably go into the woods and live alone for a while. Pollution would reach you eventually, but as long as you’re good at hunting, butchering, and cooking meat, you could last until your garden starts producing. If you have money now, you probably want to spend it on a cabin and a whole lot of non-perishable food and a wood-burning stove and as much buy-it-for-life cookwear as you can get. Your mattress will eventually break, but oh well.

If this answer sounds ridiculous, I want you to take that to heart. Your question is just as ridiculous. If you’re going to be a part of society, society might reject you. Just be as decent a person as you can be and hope people appreciate you.

I feel like this is probably a short-term technical problem, it seems like it should be solvable as more people start to use it.

One way monopolies form is through economic efficiency. One major cause of that efficiency is positive network effects. Network effects are the economic effects multiple people gain when they use the same product as one another; this is particularly obvious in social networks, which get to be more fun when your friends use them, or when cool, smart people use them to create guides, stories, videos, music, etc. that you can enjoy. Social media tends to suck when there aren’t many people on it, since nobody’s really talking about anything you want to talk about, and if you post a lot, you feel like you’re shouting into the wind.

However, competition and variety are still good things. They still help advance technology, and help keep firms honest. Monopolies take advantage of their consumers, because they can. Because they have no competition.

Is there a way we can have competition and variety while still taking advantage of positive network effects?

Yeah, federation. Extend one network across any number of services that want to participate in the network. The network can grow arbitrarily big, while the market remains competitive.

I’m generally opposed to spambots and unnecessary bots.

If these bots are just, like, CNN wrote a bot to post every CNN article to a news community, that’s annoying.

But as long as the bots aren’t spammers / advertisers / just annoying as shit, it seems like they’re doing something pretty useful without causing any harm. Not opposed to it.

Oh, and the other problem on reddit ends up being that these bots farm karma to make themselves look more legitimate, as though they’re people. That’s probably something we should keep an eye on long-term.

let them offer. Ask for roughly 10% more than that, as long as it’s also a fair bit more than you’re making now.

jobs asking you your salary expectations is a fucking scam. Your expectation is to be treated with respect and paid the salary they’re willing to offer. Avoid answering that question.