If only we could take our money elsewhere, but we are mandated to pay with insurance, which makes them the defacto customer, to decide with the doctors, cutting us out of the process (which is handy under circumstances where the patient can't talk; There's a use case for everything, but coercion and blanket enforcement seems to ruin everything)
We can't even choose our insurance - it comes from your employer with no choice (or no real choice - I have two slightly different choices from United Health Care). All the negotiation on how it works is done by HR not me, and HR likes the current rules as it makes it hard for me to leave.
In theory I can bypass my employer insurance - but if I do I throw away thousands of dollars that my employer is paying directly and so anything I find elsewhere either cannot be as good, or is has to cost a lot more money.
Even then, good luck... I couldn't find a personal plan either the Health gov compliant plans or out of pocket that matched my employer insurance... I'm pretty sure if I try again, I'll wind up creating a company again, using one of the HR based collective payroll options just for better Insurance options.
The system sucks a lot, and for a lot of different reasons. Namely is that there's no room for individual negotiation, and there are dozens of pricing models for the same drugs, procedures, etc.
>In the U.S., the FDA refused approval to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed. This reduced the impact of thalidomide in U.S. patients. The refusal was largely due to pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey who withstood pressure from the Richardson-Merrell Pharmaceuticals Co.
>In the United States, the new regulations strengthened the FDA, among other ways, by requiring applicants to prove efficacy and to disclose all side effects encountered in testing. The FDA subsequently initiated the Drug Efficacy Study Implementation to reclassify drugs already on the market.
Nice case of mood affiliation - "FDA bad therefore remember inverse of reality"
There was a swift ban on Thalidomide and the FDA went to the extreme of removing fertile women from all trials for the next 60 years, leading to 2nd order effects like Ambien car crashes.
It would not benefit at all. Zero. It would harm the environment because all the food waste outweighs the energy cost of refrigerators by several orders of magnitude.
Feed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms. Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.
Plants do eat bacteria waste (see aquaponics), rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste, but should of course not solely be fed that, (same with chickens), rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)… There are obviously a few steps I left unmentioned, as I am keeping my comments simplistic for the format.
You seem to have selective comprehension issues.
Recycling is more than just throwing trash into different coloured bins and burning oil to process it; Specifically, recycling in my comment refers to the process of water and air turning into food, and back into water and air, as has been customary for terran life for a few years now.
It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries, vs. an industrial cycle using millions of tons of oil per year.
Sort of. Some bacteria do convert ammonia into a form that plants can eat, but the majority of bacteria waste is just CO2.
> rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste
Very very very little. A couple leaves from romaine lettuce and that's about it. They can not eat vegetable peelings for example.
Chickens can.
> rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)
This is not correct. Rabbit poop is mostly cellulose and chickens can not digest it, nor can most fish except for tilapia. Rabbits do not eat their poop 3x - they have a special partially digested waste that they will eat a second time, sometimes, it depends on their diet. They do not re-eat their regular poop.
> It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries
And it releases lots of CO2. The CO2 the plant absorbed is released when it decays. What's your goal? Reduction of CO2? Less stuff in landfill?
This started with your claim that not refrigerating will reduce CO2 emissions. This is not true. When you "recycle" leftover food, all the CO2 in the food is emitted, and you have to grow more.
The amount of CO2 emitted to recycle food is FAR FAR more than the CO2 from running a refrigerator.
I understand you long for the old days and how we did things, but you are overlooking the downsides. Each person in the past used far more resources than they do today, the world had fewer people and it worked out. It's not possible to support this many people using the inefficient methods of the past.
Before the industrial revolution almost every single tree in Europe was cut down in order to support human life there, it was not sustainable - they ran out of trees.
Using technology the increase in efficiency was so great we also got "treats" other technology we greatly enjoy. There are downsides of course, too much CO2, but going back to the old ways is NOT the solution.
Food production and consumption using the methods by which living beings have consumed each other for the last 3.8 billion years, is emissions neutral, on average.
The argument for CO2 reduction has always been that all the extra carbon released from coal, gas, and petroleum, is bad, as a net increase of emissions, beyond natural processes.
1. https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2014/ursel
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