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Russell Jones's avatar

Dipshits wanna drink "raw milk"? Fine, whatever. Nothing of value will be lost. But de-balling the FDA to the point where there's no more inspections of food processing plants? Fuck that. Private companies will NOT keep their plants pristine because it's in their "rational self-interest" not to poison their customers. The will cut corners for short-term gain at every opportunity, regardless of what happens. As evidence, I offer the entire fucking history of the food processing industry.

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Aquaman, Real Estate Investor.'s avatar

On sunscreen:

Dear fellow white people.

As a very very white person myself the question of sunscreen has come up many times. Usually when I tell people that I can burn in under 20 minutes.

But there's some important stuff going on here, so take a second and learn something cool.

You know how lactose intolerance is way more common in Asia? Well, turns out that in Europe we domesticated different cattle and decided to drink milk. So we evolved the ability to tolerate milk from cows. Its basically the most recent way that humans have had an evolutionary change, cool right?

But there's been another change that's not that much older.

See, humans started off in Africa, and its really sunny there and the sun damages skin really badly (seriously, all the old pop stars look like well used leather handbags). So basically anything that lives that close to the equator has a ton of sun protection. For a lot of animals that's hair. Humans overheat if we are that hairy so we have melanin instead.

One problem though, humans need certain nutrients that our bodies can't make. You remember vitamins? Well, vitamin D we do make, but we need sunlight exposure to make it.

What happens when you take people with tons of melanin, make them live really far north were there isn't much sun and nutrition isn't as good?

Rickets. You get things like rickets where bones don't form correctly because we need sun to make vitamin D and vitamin D is critical to calcium uptake and without enough calcium we get wonky bones.

So what happens? Well, evolution means that up north in places like europe, pale skin has a significant advantage (when it comes to vitamin D). So give it a hundred thousand years or so and the people living in a place with less sunlight are more pale. Yeah, ok they have lost their natural protection from the sun, but they have less risk of rickets. Which isn't a bad trade back when nobody had any concept of what a vitamin was.

But it also means that anyone who's white and lives further south than... roughly Kansas City, is living too far south and should be obsessive about protecting their skin (unless they really like the elderly leather handbag look). Just like people with really dark skin who live in Canada should make sure they buy the Milk with the added Vitamin D.

I don't know where I was going with this and I imagine many people here were already aware. I'm mostly just writing to make myself feel better.

Also, who the fuck looks at RFKJr and thinks "Hmmmm, yes, the guy who looks like he bathes paint stripper is the guy to take advice from on skin care. I wonder what his thoughts are on vocal warmup techniques?"

Oh, and like, half of the USA is further south than all of Europe. All ya'll crackers decided to go live in a place where god is trying to give you skin cancer. What the fuck is up with that?

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