If you drank the unpasteurized mixed breast milk of a hundred human women I almost guarantee you will get sick. Any body fluid, from both humans and mammals, is a huge health risk in its raw form. Infants are OK because they only drink from one and whatever disease the mom has, the baby is almost guaranteed to have already got anyway from the constant close contact.

That would not be good. However the more common case of using raw flour is eating raw cookie dough. It’s not safe.

Having blood and puss in milk is surprisingly OK. That’s not an industrial problem, that’s just biological reality. However the amount is very low and not a health concern. There are just as much of those components in raw and pasteurized. The problem is that in the raw milk the bacteria still lives on.

It’s like how there is an acceptable limit to how many ground up cockroaches and mouse shits you’re allowed to have in wheat flour. If the level is low enough and you don’t eat the flour raw, there is no problem.

Don’t you have low temperature pasteurization in the US? It tastes basically the same as raw milk and has nowhere near the mailiard reaction impact that UHT has, meaning it should have basically the same nutrition as raw milk. Never understood the raw milk craze.

If I’m to pay more for retirement because I don’t have kids, then why shouldn’t parents pay more for the education of their offspring?

You could absolutely argue that childcare and kindergarten are chiefly to the parents benefits but school is not. In fact when school was first made mandatory it was a huge blow to many parents as they lost another worker at home/ their farm. School is for the benefit of the children themselves and as a society at large. You benefit from kids being in school because you can live in a more educated society, also you yourself went to school so it’s only fair you pay for others to also go to school.

No that’s not what this is about. The government assumes that every child will pay taxes. Every less child born means a lesser future tax base for the future retired. In effect if you don’t have kids yourself you are relying on the taxes of other people’s kids to pay for your retirement.

That could also work but then we still have to increase the elder care tax as a whole. In the end the result is the same. Childless people pay more effective tax (taxes - benefits) than parents.

If the purpose of the law is strictly to compensate from the strain a childless person puts on the pension system, and not to simply punish them for not having kids. Then I don’t see the problem of involuntarily childless people getting taxed. The involuntarily and the voluntarily childless both get the same benefit of not having to pay for their kids and therefore would have the same ability to pay. And they both put the same strain on the pension system.

Taxing the rich is always good I agree. But regarding having kids only to avoid taxes. Do the pension payments really scale up to super rich level? Or do they have a max ceiling. I don’t know exactly how Germany does it. But yes if the pension payments scale linearly with income that could be a major issue that’s true.

Maybe I’m gonna be bashed for this but isn’t this a good solution? We can all agree that forcing people to have children is a bad idea. Most would also argue that the state has no role whatsoever in deciding if people have kids, they should merely make it possible for those who want to have kids, to have as many children that they want. A policy punishing those without kids could be unethical for many reasons.

However that’s not what this is about. This is merely about childless people contributing more to their pensions. Which I think is fair since by not having kids they put pressure on the pension system. Childless people also have more disposable income on average meaning they have the ability to pay this. However those childless people who are actually poor are not unfairly affected since this is paid on their income. Low income low pension payment. Isn’t this the least worst of all possible solutions? I would love a discussion on this because I find this topic very interesting. Please disagree with me on this and let me hear your thoughts!

I was thinking of doing beets, pumpkins, celeriac, carrots, parsnips, zucchini, Jerusalem artichoke and ornamental gourds. They are not vegetables but I’m also planning on growing melons.

I know two local small scale vegetable growers. One grows exclusively brassicas. The other grows exclusively brassicas plus carrots. I’m planning to start a small scale vegetable business myself and honestly thinking of just straight not growing a single brassica to have zero local competition in the local farmers market.

I have a degree in agricultural science and work with farmers on a daily basis. I’m far from ignorant on this topic. However from your post history I see you are Canadian and that gives me a bit more understanding of your perspective. I know in Canada (at least when I was last updated on your regulations) you use GMO roundup ready crops where you spray glyphosphate in growing crops. It’s also legal to spray glyphosphate on crops to kill and dry them before harvest. That increases the risks enormously. You may not know this but both of these uses of glyphosphate are not legal in the EU. I would absolutely support Canada banning use of glyphosphate on living crops.

Yeah great argument…

In the EU some varieties of potato are sprayed with known carcinogen fungicides on a regular schedule of every 10 days, in the actual growing crop. THAT is insane. Somehow no environmentalist focuses on that even though the environmental and health impact is unbelievably worse than using a pre-sowing glyphosphate application. If you want to ban every single pesticide, including glyphosphate, I would say fair enough. But singling out glyphosphate while ignoring the rest is uneducated at best and actively damaging the goals of the environmentalist cause at worst.

Roundup is a carcinogen the same way household bleach is a carcinogen. If you spray it in your face it’s a health risk. Show me any science that says that glyphosphate, as used in the EU, is any risk to public health. It’s one of the most well studied chemicals on the planet, up there with artificial sweeteners. And don’t bring up studies where they spray rats in the face with it. As used in the EU today it’s used before planting on bare ground to clear up weeds, not in growing crops. The amount left in the actual produce is absolutely miniscule. At the same time we have fungicides out there that are sprayed just weeks before harvest and have a much higher risk. Start with those. The focus on glyphosphate is absolutely ridiculous and I think the whole issue is glyphosphate is the only pesticide that people know the name of, and therefore it gets all the attention. But I can assure you it’s pretty much the safest one. I sometimes wonder if the focus on glyphosphate is a diversion made by the manufacturers of the actually questionable Agro chemicals.

Insecticides are actually the least of the big three. Herbicides are by far the most used followed by fungicides against fungal disease. So insects disappearing wont nudge the pesticide use that much. In addition to that the insect pests are really not that affected by the insect decline. In many ways it’s the other way around. When all the other insects and birds disappear the agricultural pest insects lose their natural predators and they turn into an even larger problem.

The binding target of cutting pesticides use by 50% was opposed by my own country Sweden even though we are at the bottom of pesticides use per hectare in the EU. Why? Because the proposal was for every country to halve their pesticide use individually. We have countries like Cyprus and Hungary that use over 10x the amount we use per hectare. They had to halve their use from that amount. While we who use barely anything had to halve from our originally low amount. This meant that the countries that were abusing pesticides historically were grandfathered into being able to keep abusing them at a crazy high level, even if lower than before. While we who have already reduced pesticides use enormously to where most of the pesticides use left is that which is close to absolutely necessary, and we still have to halve.

The proposal was entirely unfair and hurt the countries which have done well and benefited the historically largest polluters. Mainstream media doesn’t understand this though and seems to spin it as the EU abandoning promises to reduce pesticides, that’s not necessarily true. It’s just that this specific proposal was very unfortunately designed.

The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.

However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.

They don’t do that because they physically can’t. If they could they would. If you have two starving bears and throw them one carcass. Only one will eat because they will fight and scream away the weaker one.

Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.

We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.