France has become the first country in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food, forcing them instead to donate it to charities and food banks.
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I pray to dog they’re not the last
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So, when French cheese, for example, starts to smell bad…
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Giving le finger to the American way; sweet 
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You spread it on toast 
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France: legislates common sense, saves billions of dollars, feeds hungry, enjoys 30 hour work week and the benefits of a decent civilization.
America: legislates against common sense, endures astounding rates of violence, has no healthcare system but a healthcare market, has worst internet of any developed country besides Australia, enjoys sugar and fat based diet.
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From what I gather, we don’t have nearly as much reason to despise telcos as USAnians. It’s kinda crappy for a lot of regional folks, but not as bad as the US I’m tipping, and more of our populace is in metropolitan centres. I get 100GB a month @ 2Mb/s for AU$70, about US$50.
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That rate is worse than most urban areas in the US. But not by much.
Pretty sure we have something resembling actual competition everywhere; Telstra’s network covers like 97% of the population or something, and Optus’ one is 90%+, with Vodaphone having some amount of coverage too. Those are the three wholesalers IIRC, with numerous third-party mobs reselling access to those networks under their own names.
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That is much better. I have 2 ISP choices where I live. Which is a dancing plethora of variety and competition compared to the quite literal market segmentation and collusion done almost everywhere.
Nearly everywhere in the US is under monopoly ISP, and we also have a lot of states that have laws specifically banning municipal WIFI or municipally operated ISPs. Yay neoliberalism: “The government can’t do anything right, so we’ll just grant monopolies to companies that have no incentive to do anything right either.”
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I buy soft cheese only at the end of the best before date when the price is reduced - eating it earlier is a sin
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I prefer the Dylan Moran method, dunking bread into anything runnier than bread.
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Australia’s internet problems are rather different to the US. The issues here are mosly about coverage and quality rather than pricing.
Thanks to the extreme level of urbanisation, “covers 90% of the population” is a very different thing than covering 90% of the country. Rural internet is diabolically shitty; even when it is available, it tends to be so slow and unreliable as to make much of the modern 'net inaccessible.
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A gizmodo article about this law includes this sentence
In the United States, 40 percent of all food that’s produced goes uneaten.
Is this true? The number is shocking.
[hectic googling]
The global volume of food wastage is estimated to be 1.6 Gtonnes of “primary product equivalents”, while the total wastage for the edible part of food is 1.3 Gtonnes. This amount can be weighed against total agricultural production (for food and non-food uses), which is about 6 Gtonnes.(FAO: Food wastage footprint, 2013)
Fuck.
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Dang.
Mexico: Two ISP’s competing everywhere. I get up to 8Mb/s unlimited bandwidth, about 20 bucks a month (Includes landline with local and long distance minutes).
I’ve only been to the USA once, but one of the striking impressions I had of the place was the constant, extreme, gratuitous waste of resources everywhere.
Insanely oversized meals, gigantic vehicles, universal aircon, toilets that use a bathtub full of water to flush, showers like a firehose, etc etc etc
My home (Australia) isn’t in any way a paragon of prudent restraint itself, but y’all are in a different league on that stuff.
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Made a comment, then realised it was a five-month old necropost, decided it wasn’t an important enough comment to reanimate a dead discussion.
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I don’t mind zombies and resurrections, so here’s an update: the French example was not too dissuasive. The European parliament started an initiative to ban food waste all over Europe
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That’s disturbing but not hard to believe. And yet when I saw the headline I immediately thought of a restaurant just a stone’s throw from where I work that used to give free meals to the homeless.
It made me feel good about eating there but sadly it’s now shut down.
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