Currently between olives

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Surprisingly enough, some essential oils do have research-based actual uses, such as topical antibacterials, antifungals and antiparasitics.

    While there’s quite a bit of woo woo around them, there’s also a lot of interesting research into phytochemicals like essential oils. Same with a few other “plant-based” things like pine resin; there’s even a clinically tested pine resin salve that helps with wound healing and is used for treating difficult wounds in some hospitals in Finland.

    The problem with essential oils is trying to filter out the snake oil claims from the actual research-based claims. Most vendors tend to have pretty, well, wild claims about what their products can do, so your best bet is scholar.google.com or www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and the like


  • no one ever tactfully includes ads

    This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.

    Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.

    While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not