4 ms·

I think you need to explain why in the United States chocolate is shitty and meat is toxic, as well as why Germany doesn't have regions with poisonous drinking

I think you need to explain why in the United States chocolate is shitty and meat is toxic, as well as why Germany doesn't have regions with poisonous drinking water, nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription.

eru 3y ago
American mainstream consumers have weird preferences, I would guess? It's perfectly possible to buy decent chocolate in the US. Eg Lindt and Ritter Sport seem to be widely available. (They are far from the best chocolate, they are just decent-enough brands that I remembered at the top of my head, and could verify with a quick web search are available in the US.) How toxic is that meat actually? What are your sources? How do you know it's more of a problem in the US than in Germany? (Americans like to complain about their products. But we get American beef here in Singapore, and it's generally ok. Typically not as good as the Japanese or even Australian stuff, but good enough.) > [...] nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription. The stories I heard are rather the opposite: the political and regulatory backlash against the alleged 'opioid epidemic' has been so bad, that it's hard for people who legitimately need painkillers to get a prescription. I suspect the US is a big country, so both accusations can be true at the same time. Even if the problem is tiny in relative terms, because of the size of the country, in absolute terms you will find plenty of cases of both failure modes.
- hathchip 3y ago
  You seem very in denial about a lot of this. Obviously 'weird preferences' do not really explain these issues (I note you completely ignored the case of heavy metals in drinking water, hard to explain as a 'consumer preference' for cheaper but unusable water.) So you've chosen to pretend that well documented things do not exist or are trivial.. Libertarian Germans often have to tie themselves in knots to pretend that all the elements of their high-trust society would exist without paternalistic government, when it's enough to compare their society to most others in the world to establish the opposite! What country does Ritter Sport come from? Is it considered luxury chocolate in that country? The huge differences between husbandry and meatpacking standards in the United States and Western Europe are extremely well known. Most US meat products are not allowed to be imported to the EU because of this. I'm surprised you need a 'source' for this widely known fact pattern (which in fact, you yourself mentioned in your comment above - pork in the US can not be eaten rare). What US meat is exported is generally a completely different standard than what's sold domestically. The ready availability and aggressive marketing of opiate painkillers in the US continued for around twenty years, many of it based in 'pain clinics' whose only service was writing scripts for pills. Such clinics do not exist in Western Europe. The govt cracked down on these at a point where addiction was endemic in some regions. The problem was demonstrably not 'tiny in relative terms'.
  - eru 3y ago
    I put my money where my mouth is, and moved to Singapore. The government here takes a much smaller share of GDP as taxes than Germany does.
    - hathchip 3y ago
      [flagged]
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > They are far from the best chocolate Lindt? There may be better brands, and I've actually seen someone gag on the 70% dark Lindt that I favour; but "far from the best" seems to me an idiosyncratic view.
  - eru 3y ago
    Lindt is perfectly acceptable. It's just not gourmet quality nor 'great'.

eru 3y ago

American mainstream consumers have weird preferences, I would guess? It's perfectly possible to buy decent chocolate in the US. Eg Lindt and Ritter Sport seem to be widely available. (They are far from the best chocolate, they are just decent-enough brands that I remembered at the top of my head, and could verify with a quick web search are available in the US.) How toxic is that meat actually? What are your sources? How do you know it's more of a problem in the US than in Germany? (Americans like to complain about their products. But we get American beef here in Singapore, and it's generally ok. Typically not as good as the Japanese or even Australian stuff, but good enough.) > [...] nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription. The stories I heard are rather the opposite: the political and regulatory backlash against the alleged 'opioid epidemic' has been so bad, that it's hard for people who legitimately need painkillers to get a prescription. I suspect the US is a big country, so both accusations can be true at the same time. Even if the problem is tiny in relative terms, because of the size of the country, in absolute terms you will find plenty of cases of both failure modes.

hathchip 3y ago
You seem very in denial about a lot of this. Obviously 'weird preferences' do not really explain these issues (I note you completely ignored the case of heavy metals in drinking water, hard to explain as a 'consumer preference' for cheaper but unusable water.) So you've chosen to pretend that well documented things do not exist or are trivial.. Libertarian Germans often have to tie themselves in knots to pretend that all the elements of their high-trust society would exist without paternalistic government, when it's enough to compare their society to most others in the world to establish the opposite! What country does Ritter Sport come from? Is it considered luxury chocolate in that country? The huge differences between husbandry and meatpacking standards in the United States and Western Europe are extremely well known. Most US meat products are not allowed to be imported to the EU because of this. I'm surprised you need a 'source' for this widely known fact pattern (which in fact, you yourself mentioned in your comment above - pork in the US can not be eaten rare). What US meat is exported is generally a completely different standard than what's sold domestically. The ready availability and aggressive marketing of opiate painkillers in the US continued for around twenty years, many of it based in 'pain clinics' whose only service was writing scripts for pills. Such clinics do not exist in Western Europe. The govt cracked down on these at a point where addiction was endemic in some regions. The problem was demonstrably not 'tiny in relative terms'.
- eru 3y ago
  I put my money where my mouth is, and moved to Singapore. The government here takes a much smaller share of GDP as taxes than Germany does.
  - hathchip 3y ago
    [flagged]
denton-scratch 3y ago
> They are far from the best chocolate Lindt? There may be better brands, and I've actually seen someone gag on the 70% dark Lindt that I favour; but "far from the best" seems to me an idiosyncratic view.
- eru 3y ago
  Lindt is perfectly acceptable. It's just not gourmet quality nor 'great'.