>* Freezing meat twice and eating it will make you sick
Uh, every frozen meal I have ever seen has come with the printed warning not to freeze it again after it has melted?
Freezing does not kill microbes, and additionally formation of ice during the freezing breaks the internal structure of foodstuff making it better medium for bacterial growth. So repeated freezing-unfreezing, especially if the product is taken into room temperature and back allows unwelcome microbes to proliferate. Like with all food poisoning hazards, it will not make you sick with 100% certainty, but increases the risk enough that it is not recommended.
This is near word-by-word translation of the guidelines of Finnish medical society [1] and food safety authority [2].
It is difficult to call "do not freeze stuff again" an unfounded superstition equal to fan death if it is the common recommendation by national authorities.
This piece of information just amplified my depression when I learned about it, because of past not-income-optimized life decisions (okay, probably even more because of limited abilities and capabilities), I know know for sure that with a high probability I won't plausibly have ability to buy my way into that kind of world and yet I'm regularly reminded that it exists and not only that, but how it exactly looks like.
Of course, in the past, the equivalent me still wouldn't have had access to the world of magnificent parties and elite courtesans either. But I believe that the whole of that kind of social strata would have been much more distant, and thus less traumatizing in that particular psychosocial way. Sure, you'd see carriages passing by (or passing over you if unlucky) now and then, and maybe you'd buy a ticket to see the King have his breakfast (and it would be once in a year event to satisfy your curiosity), but that lifestyle wouldn't be marketed to you. There wouldn't be the constant visual reminders that if you'd done something differently, how different your life could be.
Giving it another name ("homophobia", "insecure about their own sexuality") does not make the issue go away for the people who suffer from it.
You don't magically grow more confident about your sexuality (or your whatever) by hearing that you are insecure about it. Or at least, I don't know how.
Elsewhere in the world, FB is assumed as to be the standard. My romantic life has been very disappointing, so some time ago I tried creating a Tinder account (it is the only dating [yes you read it right, dating, not hookup] app that has entered the popular consciousness in this country and thus has a significant amount of female users). Last time I checked, they still required a FB account.
>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status
Of course we do. What does, exactly, the level of wealth and status we are talking about entail?
Owners and executives of a large multinational firm can wield more than enough power to influence governments. Some of these people of wealth and status are the governments. (The names revealed in the Panama papers toppled the government of Iceland.)
That's at least one order of magnitude different power dynamics than in case of your regular person charged with robbery or DUI. (Also, we might view the case of hacker revealing conversations of people charged with DUIs if the conversations constitute evidence about that particular part of machinery of justice system not to be working as intended.)
One fascinating question is which country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen
Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.
Uh, every frozen meal I have ever seen has come with the printed warning not to freeze it again after it has melted?
Freezing does not kill microbes, and additionally formation of ice during the freezing breaks the internal structure of foodstuff making it better medium for bacterial growth. So repeated freezing-unfreezing, especially if the product is taken into room temperature and back allows unwelcome microbes to proliferate. Like with all food poisoning hazards, it will not make you sick with 100% certainty, but increases the risk enough that it is not recommended.
This is near word-by-word translation of the guidelines of Finnish medical society [1] and food safety authority [2].
It is difficult to call "do not freeze stuff again" an unfounded superstition equal to fan death if it is the common recommendation by national authorities.
[1] https://www.terveyskirjasto.fi/terveyskirjasto/tk.koti?p_art...
[2] https://www.evira.fi/elintarvikkeet/valmistus-ja-myynti/elin...