In US legal stores, you still have to use cash to purchase, as cannabis businesses are locked out of banking. Assuming consumption is unchanged, this is likely mostly due to decreasing prices. As legalization proceeds, the risk premium is coming out of cannabis prices, even for black market providers, who have to compete with the legal sources. Ounces that you might have paid $200 for ten years ago on the black market are now $60-100 in the stores.

AEL is for very short publications.

DiD is the methodology they use, which requires some pretty intricate statistical relationships.

I don’t know what that means?

I think their data could be confused by the concurrent rise in smartphone ownership and apps like Venmo and Cashapp making cash movements in/out of bank accounts no longer as relevant. How much "cash" enters the Venmo/Cashapp environments and just stays there? You wouldn't see as much banking activity around cash and bank transfers because now whole economies exist outside of those institutions, inside untracked apps.

Is this because women are just with eachother?

No way you can determine this in AEL. Especially using a DiD methodology.

Women are better than men at relationships. Men are experiencing a loneliness epidemic because of it.

I sent an email, not sure if they'll read it or reply but here's hoping.

It would be interesting to see how this compares with results for men, given the common belief that in opposite sex relationships, women tend to take on carer roles when their partners develop health problems, while when roles are reversed, men tend to leave the relationship.

Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Would this apply to belief in religion as well?

Thank you for that. I think I misinterpreted some of it.

I appreciate this comment because the headline is really oversimplifying an incredibly complex thing. The use of the term “greenwashing” in contrast to “material change” kind of pushes people to hand wave about “corporate greed” and capitalism as reasons for slow adoption of climate change measures without actually diving into the details of why things are this way. I want to share my experience as a process engineer who works on a system that uses a hazardous chemical and highlight some of the reasons why it’s so complex to make material changes.

So the chemistry on my tool has formaldehyde as a fundamental component. For starters, there doesn’t even exist a formaldehyde-free version of this chemistry that meets our performance specifications, at least to my teams’ knowledge. We’ve asked our chemistry supplier about this due to the environmental and safety concerns, but they don’t even have it on their radar (evidently not enough companies have pushed for it, so it hasn’t been worth their effort to spend resources to develop). Okay, so for argument’s sake let’s assume there is an alternative that meets our technical requirements. First we need to characterize the new chem’s performance with our products at the supplier’s site. Assuming it performs, now we have to bring it on site to test on our equipment, which actually is a massive ask. We need to qualify the chemistry for use on our site, which causes questions like: do we have the systems in place to treat the waste? Exhaust? Is it compatible with the equipment’s materials? All of these questions (and more) require meetings and work from engineers from multiple disciplines to ensure we can even use it a single time. Then we have to ensure that it actually is compatible with our existing process, which means a pretty decent amount of data collection (which means product dedicated specifically to testing this chemistry, manufacturing time, etc). Keep in mind that while we have this chemistry on our tool, we’re impairing our manufacturing capacity since only material dedicated to testing this chemistry can run (which can be hugely expensive depending on the application).

Now you’ve tested it and it meets your technical requirements. Well you might need some changes to your facilities to enable chem delivery to that tool, new safety audits because you’ve fundamentally changed your process, and more logistical hurdles than I even want to list. And I’m just an R&D factory, now we have to push this to all of our manufacturing partners in multiples countries with hundreds of factories to even make a dent in just one process in one part of one industry.

All of what I’ve listed above is just a portion of the work required to make a single material change in my factory. Its honestly so much more considerations and complexities than what I’m listing here. And here’s the sad part. Environmental/sustainability is going to be just one small part of your decision matrix that decides whether to even start evaluating this chemistry. Technical performance and cost are #1 and #2, and with the way corporations are structured, environmental impact probably just isn’t going to be that big of an incentive to put this much work and money into changing your (working) process.

I always hear about how it won’t happen because executives are greedy and want to line their pockets by destroying the world. A lot of executives probably do care and do want to do better for the world and the environment. But corporations are designed with profits, growth, and market share in mind over anything else. And if you’re an executive trying to do your job keeping the company performing to shareholder expectations, “greenwashing” might be the easiest way to make an impact without sacrifices on the financial side of things (which are probably your most important performance metrics).

I’m not trying to defend the rich executives of the world and say they’re guilt free. I’m trying to say that these things are so much more complicated than just pointing at “evil” corporations and saying they need to be less evil without any thought as to how that happens. The reality is that my management won’t green light me pushing for changing this hazardous chemistry if the incentives aren’t there. This is where government regulation needs to come into play, in my opinion. Corporations will push for these things if the government mandates them (which actually is why my team asked about the formaldehyde free chemistry in the first place). Corporations just simply don’t have strong enough incentives to do these things on their own (and yes, I agree that not destroying the planet is the main incentive that matters, but if we’re being honest corporations just aren’t setup in a way that translates into that).

TL;DR: making material changes is way way way harder than it seems and can take years and huge monetary investments, corporations aren’t structured in a way that incentives this work to happen, so “greenwashing” often times is probably the only accessible way of making a positive change.

There’s also that a conspiracy to neglect safety maintenance through attacking unions and profit maximizing are destroying infrastructure and killing communities and individuals.

[removed]

[removed]

And you'll also be living on a planet with 50 billion humans. In a sardine can.

[removed]

There's still some universities - or there were in my day - that gave MAs rather than MScs for natural sciences..

This study shows association, not causation.

Also their participant group is specifically overweight/obese young adults. Would be interesting to see obesity vs. PFAS blood concentrations, since processed food packaging seems to contain PFAS.

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC found that exposure to a mixture of synthetic chemicals found widely in the environment alters several critical biological processes, including the metabolism of fats and amino acids, in both children and young adults. The disruption of these biological processes is connected to an increased risk of a very broad range of diseases, including developmental disorders, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and many types of cancer.

Known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, these man-made chemicals are used in a wide range of consumer and industrial products. PFAS are sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they break down very slowly and accumulate in the environment and human tissue.

Although individual PFAS are known to increase the risk of several types of disease, this study, published February 22 in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to evaluate which biological processes are altered by exposure to a combination of multiple PFAS, which is important because most people carry a mixture of the chemicals in their blood.

“Our findings were surprising and have broad implications for policy makers trying to mitigate risk,” said Jesse A. Goodrich, PhD, assistant professor of population and public health sciences and lead author of the study. “We found that exposure to a combination of PFAS not only disrupted lipid and amino acid metabolism but also altered thyroid hormone function.”

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP11372

Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[removed]

Non-paywall link.

Omega 3 fatty acids, zinc, magnesium, curcumin, vitamin D, regular exercise