You see this in aviation and heavy rail transport as well for a similar reason. The critical items like the engines, control systems and emergency equipment being expensive is obvious, they’ve been heavily tested and made super resilient with very strict certification criteria, but it even extends down to things that has pretty much zero impact on safety. That flimsy seat back table that can barely hold your laptop and that hard as a rock cushion cost the airline far more than you can imagine, costs which are inevetably passed onto you.

Because of the industrialized pet industry, the likes of PetSmart. They’ve convinced people that small pets like fish are products that can be thrown away instead of living individuals. They’d rather your small pet die in two weeks because that just means you’ll be back to buy another one, so they’ve launched a propaganda campaign against any sentiment of responsibly caring for them and fooled the majority of people into thinking that it’s just their normal lifespan and they need way less care, equipment and commitment than they actually do.

If you prefer it then more power to you, certainly not for me though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestlé_brands

https://www.nestle.com/brands

https://www.nestleusa.com/brands

See and avoid.

So are all baby animals. Which is the only life stage of their species you’ve probably ever seen because most pet ones never live even close to their maximum lifespan.

Also, jellyfish are even more fragile looking yet some can theoretically live forever. Looking fragile to humans does not mean they aren’t well adapted to survive for a long time in their natural habitat.

Goldfish are very closely related to koi.

There has never been a labour shortage. There has always been a compensation shortage.

Unpopular opinion: I find simple tagging and non-obscene graffiti in general less offensive than the spam flyers and company logo/QR code stickers everyone sticks everywhere. At least where I live the latter is also way more common.

That’s every large chocolate company though. Nestle just said the quiet part out loud. Even the ones that promise to use “ethical chocolate” are either unverifiable in their claims to begin with and/or have been exposed to be outright lying.

Reminder that their CEO unapologetically said that he doesn’t think water is a human right.

Try night shift for a few months. You will absolutely despise the sun because no matter how tired you are during your shift, as soon as that bastard comes up you will struggle to fall asleep as you become increasingly more frustrated at that fact, leaving you even more fatigued for your next shift and destroying your mental health. Experiencing that has totally cured my disdain for any amount of trouble falling asleep at night, because at least your body kinda knows you’re supposed to be sleeping at night.

Also, the clients you have to deal with at night if you’re in the service industry tends to be 10x more horrible than your average daytime Karen. I legit had someone scream at me for waking them up with an emergency call to them despite them being the ones to pay extra for 24/7 live notifications on the systems we manage for them.

(Obviously not actually saying you should actually try night shift, quite the opposite. It fucking sucks, avoid it like the plague.)

The sadder part of this is that many “pet” parrots live much shorter than their natural life in the wild because their owners don’t know how to care for them. They’re also extremely intelligent, some researchers argue that macaws can be considered sapient for example.

Even more widespread problem with koi and goldfish. They can live well into their 80s and can grow up to many pounds over that time, yet most people have their goldfish die after two weeks and just assume that’s their natural lifespan because they’re irresponsible owners. Hint: that glass bowl is not cutting it, there isn’t a single species of fish that can be healthy in a tank without an active circulation pump and filter. Also fun fact: the Western misconception that goldfish can be kept in bowls comes from the fact that in China and Japan where they originate, owners would sometimes put them in clay bowls to show them off (which were about a meter in diameter BTW, not the soccer ball sized bowls you see nowadays), they were kept in those bowls very rarely, they were traditionally raised in large ponds.

In all seriousness that’s more of a sensory limitation than an intelligence limitation. IIRC birds’ eyes work differently from mammals and they can’t see glass pretty much at all.

Look up the story of how he painted the Sistine Chapel. Madlad legit took no bullshit from the pope despite being commissioned by him, and the pope being the most powerful person in Europe at the time.

It’s also why stores are more and more being designed like mazes, without clear signage, and with related products spread far apart. They inconvenience you specifically to extract money from you.

Canada really stifled its non-car mobility when it basically cut all intercity rail service after WWII though, especially for the interior and west coast. We used to have a pretty good train network for getting between nearby cities like Calgary and Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, Kelowna and Vancouver, and even Victoria and Nanimo. We don’t even have a proper Vancouver to Abbotsford commuter rail despite them being right next to each other. There were obviously even longer routes like Toronto to Vancouver but that can’t really compete with planes so no real surprise they went (I don’t count that one Via Rail tourist service as a proper Vancouver-Toronto line). Pretty much the only remaining part of Canada with decent intercity rail is on the Toronto Ottawa Montreal corridor, and it does get decent ridership because of it.

Also, within many Canadian metro areas, which if you live in one you’ll most likely stay inside of it for the vast majority of your daily travels, you could actually reasonably live without a car depending on where exactly you live and what you have to do. I for one live in the Vancouver area and don’t own a car. I take the bus and metro almost everywhere, and on the rare occasion I need to go somewhere that’s straight up without public transit access I just take an Uber or something. I think the fact that many of the largest Canadian cities are investing now more than ever in building more public transit, and those projects are more often than not praised by residents with high ridership to back it up is a sign that there is a high demand for non-car travel at least within urban areas. And even for smaller towns, the infrastructure is already there for good bus services like most small towns in Europe have, and if we want to go beyond that and upgrade particularly high demand routes, streetcars and tram-trains are also tried and true options for lower density urban areas. Canada even had plenty of streetcars before we decided to rip them up.

I get that this doesn’t really help people in rural or remote Canada but if we can work to reduce the need for cars in a city, where the majority of people live, that’s still a win and sets a precedent for future transit expansion into lower density areas. Non-car dependency isn’t an all or nothing deal for the entire country.

Obviously there are many challenges to Canadians finding car free alternatives. If you’re in a situation where you do need to own a car, then you need to own a car, and you shouldn’t feel bad for that. But I think that simply saying that there is no other way in Canada or that we’re just hopeless and doomed to car dependency forever due to our population density is missing a lot.

I will also recommend the YoyTube channel RMTransit for really good Canadian public transit content.

From the restaurant’s perspective I can kind of understand. They don’t want to serve you a meal that they suspect you won’t be able to eat because it’s a bad look for their business. And if you complain, being too spicy is also way harder to rectify than being not spicy enough so they play it safe initially. Though it obviously sucks if you’re specifically looking for spicy food.

This is why I advocate for chili oil, white pepper, and other condiments at the table or provided on request at Chinese restaurants. As a Chinese person who likes to fine tune the spice level of my food or change the spice level part way through. It also basically means the kitchen doesn’t really have to worry about if something is too mild in the same way they don’t have to worry if it’s not salty enough.

Smh they datamine my entire personal life and they don’t even know what notifications I want the most.

Abolish tipping. Living wages for all, no exceptions.

Breath of the Wild introduced cooking, with the amount of magic involved in that world it’s only a matter of time before it goes wrong.