Lemmy.ml is the only instance block I have, after seeing too many illiberal shit takes, bad faith arguments and socialist astroturf posts.
My instance quickly defederated from HexBear and LemmyGrad which is just fine by me, it's helpful most of the bad eggs are concentrated in just a few places.
But they're made of the same material so it shouldn't make a difference. They also didn't hit the foam with a hammer in the study, by the way.
To the point of FortNine's accuracy in the figures, Ryan says himself that he's not aware of a proper study performed on used motorcycle helmets and he has his own personal formula, so... reasoned but not a source of scientific truth.
Hitting old foam with a hammer so that it shears apart is dramatic, but that's not the kind of force that it sees in actual use, and not a scientific test.
I still consider them fringe, they're just now much more visible than they were before. I'm not trying to say that it's not an in issue either.
These crackpots have always had an audience when they see returns.
The antidote is going outside, engaging with things and people you disagree with, and being a skeptic of your own beliefs. I was actually an Alex Jones listener way way back when Bush was president. There was this guy who superficially cared about civil rights and was railing against a government that operated in secret, and a lot of the appeals made sense - until you realized that his prophecies failed one after the next, and he was really just on the air to sell dick pills.
This isn't so different from how it always was. Before social media existed in its modern form, Alex Jones used to broadcast from a 100kW shortwave station. The chem trail nonsense goes back almost thirty years. I suspect the spiritual origin is traceable back to 60s counterculture. Snake Oil type scams and witch doctors go back to prehistory.
The biggest difference is that people can now engage directly with these things immediately and worldwide, they don't have to be part of an alternative magazine mailing list.
I don't know if they tell us that just to sell more helmets, but I'm fully convinced there is no such thing as a shelf life for a helmet. That's not to say there aren't good reasons for replacing a helmet in general, like wear and weathering to the shell / visor / pivot points, advances in features and tech. Personally I wouldn't buy a used helmet because it's tough to tell if it took a drop that could have compressed that foam. And yes there are people and curricula that will tell you a helmet lasts only 2-4 years, even the MSF: https://smarter-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/26321_MSF.pdf
I was a RiderCoach myself, and I think that is so dumb. Could you imagine paying $300+ every two years to replace a good helmet with no damage? That's more than than the depreciation my bike has taken while I've owned it.
I'm interested to see the legal reasoning presented for compensation based on helmet age. To me that doesn't make a ton of sense, but a lot of questionable logic has factored into judgments in the past.
Bayeux Tapestry, good vintage