If you apply the logic of your comment's parent to your suggestion you'll discover that banning social media would soon lead to using any and all communication under mandatory supervision and only after an application and a written permission for every individual act of communication.
Did banning heroin soon lead to consuming any and all substances under mandatory supervision and only after an application and written permission for every individual act of consumption?
No, but they issued an umbrella ban on anabolic steroids of any kind, regardless of chemistry, even on those not invented yet. FDA criminalizes or makes prescription-only whatever they want, willy-nilly and without any consequences - drug enforcement opened the door for that.
I'm not saying that drugs should be legal, only that given perverse intensives, legitimate problems are routinely used as a Trojan horse to sneak in oppressive regulations.
In the case of communications and speech, the government's incentives for censorship, eavesdropping and control are enormous - otherwise there wouldn't be a Constitution, 1st amendment or the entire Bill of Rights that depends on it. Once the routine circumvention of these becomes acceptable, any kind of true but inconvenient for Big Brother speech will become impossible - with or without a written permit.
The manner of doing it doesn't matter, the permit was a figure of speech, kind of telling that I have to state it explicitly.
I don't think social media needs to be banned, but maybe using complex algorithms to drive attention should be. Even Facebook was pretty good back when its feed was a simple, chronological display of all your friends posts and nothing else. It went down the tubes as they moved away from that.
Here in the UK we require cigarette suppliers to advertise the dangers of smoking on every package.
I'd mandate that every social media platform is required to advertise the dangers on every page, and also give a very visible option to reveal the workings of the algorithm that is feeding you the pages.
Put together, it’s likely most people’s friends wouldn’t produce enough content to drive engagement, at least in ‘public’ social media like Facebook.
I remember this phenomenon back when Facebook was less algorithmic — some days there’d just be no new content at all. Especially I’m guessing if you limit adding friends to actually just the people you’d be happy to grab lunch with.
Severely disabled people need social media to get any form of communication with others. It is a key mechanism of infrastructure that provides connection for those limit to their homes and bed, which nowadays is an increasing amount of people with Long Covid and ME/CFS patients. We are talking about 10s of millions of people here that you would cut off from each other and the wider world.
Social media isn't just bad interactions, there isn't just one twitter or reddit, its about what you choose to read and interact with and most of its not toxic its just people talking on the same topic.
It's not strange at all. We grow what we eat, humans didn't start by eating insects. Plus growing plants specifically to feed livestock is an extremely recent development.
Plus ants can't provide all the nutrients we need.
Argentina is an outlier as their economy is in the dumps, for the rest of SA food is much cheaper than in Europe. But in general you are right that food prices in some countries in SA are artificially high because most of our food is exported, so the domestic market has to pay a premium. We also export the highest quality food. If we fed the domestic market first and exported the surplus food prices would be a fraction of what they are today.
Soybeans have probably a worse impact on the environment than beef. Most of the deforestation in SA in the past couple of decades was for soybean farms.
According to this source, 77% of soy production is used for animal feed. That only a small percentage of it goes to cattle is irrelevant in terms of the damage caused.
From a pragmatic perspective it’s just common sense. Europe cannot produce food at prices its population expects. It has no cattle herd to speak of yet consumes lots of beef. It wants for multiple commodities which don’t grow there. And as time goes on there’ll be less and less food production in Europe.
And the idea that food products from SA are low quality is a very old and uninformed take. For better or worse SA has invested heavily in technology in the agricultural sector. Researches from Europe go to Brazil to learn about cattle genetic improvement and farming, not the other way around.
Most of the EU economy comes from services and manufacturing. They’re ensuring a market for that larger base. Angering the small percentage of farmers to ensure food supply and manufacturing survival is the trade off.
The prices partially were affected by green deal stuff and other home-grown regulations. Maybe regulations should be lowered instead of letting in cheaper produce from locations where such regulations don’t apply?
Are you commenting on this article? This person is in the UK. You can see it on their domain, their calculations using pounds, and then mention living in the UK multiple times in the "Our setup section".
Unfortunately the rest of the world has no real example of that. Which is more of an issue with imperialism itself than the people trying to escape it.
Most being the operating word here. Economy class tickets still make a profit if the airline wants it, just see the vast majority of regional flights which have zero business class seats. Southwest for instance has single-class layouts.
Some airlines "take" the marginal economy seat loss on larger planes because those are the ones they can fill with business class seats and make an even larger profit.
Even then it's a complex math on whether economy is hurting those flights' profit margins since those people buy things in-flight such as Wi-Fi and extra bags. Base fare is not the only way airlines make money.
Style matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in the 1950s people still make new ones with little style changes for no functional reason.
Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.
Corollary: the extent of fashion-driven variability those "tools" support over generations tells us just how little utility those tools provide.
In actual tools, the form and function are strongly connected. Tools of competing brands look pretty much the same, except for color accents, because they can't look any different without sacrificing functionality, performance and safety characteristics.
You don't see power tool vendors trying to differentiate their impact drivers by replacing rubber handles with flat glass because it's more "modern", because it would compromise safety and make the tool unsuitable for most jobs its competitors fulfill. This happens in software mostly because the tools aren't doing much of anything substantial - they're not powerful enough for design to actually matter.
I do see tool vendors often adding their own logos to the tools. They choose non-functional colors for styling. They'll make something more rounded or more squared for aesthetic reasons. For consumer-facing tools there are lots of little non-functional changes they'll choose to do for their own stylistic and branding purposes. They do want to ultimately differentiate their products from competitors, not just be the exact same as all the others on the shelf.
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