ricecake @ ricecake @sh.itjust.works

Posts

4

Comments

1,553

Joined

2 yr. ago

Unprocessed food is food we concluded was okay after desperate people were forced to eat it long ago and didn't die.
Processed food is food we concluded was okay after desperate people were paid to eat it recently and didn't die.

Unprocessed food is more exploitative and erases the suffering of the past. Processed food compensates people for their exploitation, and there's no erasure of the suffering it causes.

Didn't know anyone was doing it at scale. Neat.

In any case, retrofitting most municipal systems just to protect against a non-existent danger just isn't feasible.

Looking a bit more into the process in the Netherlands, it looks like it's not just UV light. It looks like it's also aggressive filtration, and treatment with lye and hydrogen peroxide. Also benign, but not quite in line with the "nothing that seems toxic in the water" story.

Nope, they don't treat the cisterns because the water has been treated at the conditioning plant. Part of the reason for treatment is because holding reservoirs pose a significant risk for contamination.
In my municipality there aren't enough cisterns that there's a significant risk of undetected damage, but larger cities, particularly with tall buildings, will have enough that contamination is able to go longer without detection. It's why major cities treat their water more aggressively.

Salt is poison. It's also a disinfectant antimicrobial. You also die unless you get a quantity of it.
Ethanol is a disinfectant poison, and so is lye/sodium hydroxide. Having a pretzel and a beer every now and then is also harmless, despite being cooked in disinfectant, topped with disinfectant, and washed down with yet another disinfectant.

You die unless you get enough water, and you die if you get too much.
Foxglove can kill you, or correct dangerous heart conditions.
Apples contain trace amounts of cyanide. Pears have formaldehyde in them because it's part of natural biological processes. (Your body actually has special processes for handling the formaldehyde it produces. You still shouldn't drink it, but pears are fine)

The dose makes the poison. That's not just a phrase meaning that sometimes you can avoid toxicity, it's quite literal. A poison is a chemical that disrupts normal bodily processes. Every chemical can do that with the correct (incorrect?) concentration.
If you choose to point to a chemical and say it shouldn't be consumed because there's a dose that can be harmful, it's worth remembering that every substance has that limit.

that doesn't mean chemical build up or other toxicity related illnesses cannot occur

And that's the type of question you need to ask, not "is it poisonous at some dosage". You might be shocked to learn that that's actually part of what we look at when deciding if a chemical is safe to use in some context.

Also, I don't drink the pool water because it's a taboo in my culture to drink water that has had people in it. Doesn't mean it's unsafe to drink, since getting some in your mouth is inevitable when swimming. It's treated much more aggressively because "people are in it" and communal things like that are risks for disease spread.
Kinda like why I don't sterilize my scissors at home, but my barber does. The public health aspect is why they need a license and training that covers sanitation and the basics of skin diseases.
Also, the pool inevitably has pee in it. at a significantly higher concentration than the chlorine in drinking water, as an aside.

Chlorine gas was actually used in world war 1. It's still a massive stretch to invoke that in relation to water treatment.

It's like invoking water boarding to say we shouldn't have a water supply.

You think chlorine is mostly known for being used as a chemical weapon? Not, you know... Swimming pools?

You're a good example of why people make bad choices about science related public policy.
First, the poison is in the dose. There's a big difference between inhaling concentrated chlorine gas and drinking trace quantities.
Second, how do you propose we uv sterilize the water? We'd need to do so at the plant, but also at any holding cisterns. Or were you thinking of retrofit for houses? And not all microorganisms are strongly impacted by UV. It's tricky to find legitimate research, since the people who sell them say they work great, but what's out there paints a different picture of efficacy.

Eh, AP is a wire service. They report on the basics of events so other news agencies don't need to.
They reported why they were arrested, according to the affidavit, and basic description of the interaction between the judge and law enforcement.
They also reported statements from people defending the judge, but none of them brought up the details of the cops being cruddy.

The relevant facts of the story are that a judge was arrested for showing someone through a door they usually wouldn't use, the high court put them on indefinite leave for the duration of the case, and these people say it's a breach of separation of power.

Until someone connected to the story in some way actually makes the argument that the cops weren't impacted by the door choice, it would be editorializing to add that question.

"these days"? I take it you weren't paying attention during the whole "explorative credit" thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they've been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?

Have they ever been better than "kinda bad" at best?

Anyway, I didn't specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.

By who? And under what authority?

The rules governing international conflict either aren't ratified by the US, or allow the UN security council to declare a war illegal. Given the US has a permanent veto, it's shockingly unlikely the security council would ever do that.

It's a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn't change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

They also don't actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn't really special. If you can't put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

If you've decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn't need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)

They're not mandatory if they're attached. It's not gonna jump out and douse your butt without you asking.

Feh, you vastly underestimate how crap I am at plumbing.

Like the comic relief janitor of old, I have a gift for picking up every wrong part before I find the one I need.

But they also work for the bad company, so my sympathy is limited. Not super limited, else I wouldn't point out that they're inevitably hourly employees, and a long day cleaning glitter creates an annoying backlog that creates even more overtime.
Punishing the worker for working for spammers, but also putting money in their pocket at the cost of the people making choices.

Biggest issue is the cost of glitter. Easier to get dirt or rocks.

Cool. We've entirely stopped talking about what I cared about, which was "man, this article sure has a misleading headline", so you can keep sharing your feelings about different Democrats if you want but I honestly don't really care.

I can definitively tell you that anyone I know who I could ask that question of would be able to say Richard, George or Luis with a random number afterwards, at least knows king George due to musical theater, and would be able to give a more detailed breakdown of the factors behind the revolution than the vaguely conceptual, although I'm not sure what level of granularity you need for it to be the "real" reasons. (You'd get taxation without representation, quartering troops, Boston massacre, and probably some that i can't recall and a "the rich white ruling class resented being governed and seized an opportunity for justifiable rebellion and the cause was just pretext")

My brother in law would be the most uncertain. He almost certainly doesn't know what an oligarch is, but he has enough 'murika to him to be resentful of royalty. From the kids most royalty he could name would be animated I think. Probably hand wave the essentials of the revolution without getting names right, and I have a sneaking suspicion he'd call the Boston tea party a cause.

There's a lot of variety in what you find in people.

that's what the lady in the article talked about the whole time.

No, that's what this article quoted her about for their entire article.
Clearly my first statement didn't land the way intended, since you missed me calling it "silly" immediately afterwards.
Criticizing you for failing to talk about policy in a conversation that isn't about that is silly. Much like I think it's silly to criticize someone for not talking about policy because in a particular context they're talking about something else.

Did she call it "the plan", or was that the article, which is an article about an article about an interview about an upcoming speech?
From the actual interview, she refers to a set of speeches directed at party volunteers and organizers as a "war plan", and indicated they will cover many topics, including messaging. Not quite the same as "the plan" being a change in messaging.

They're perceived as all talk because that's all most of them do

That's what politicians do. Most of the politicians you went on to say you liked just ... Talk. They talk until people do what they're talking about.

I feel like the thread of this conversation has been lost. I don't actually care to have a referendum on the Democrats or their strategy, and I'm relatively neutral towards slotkin.

I still disagree that saying Democrats have a perception problem they need to work on is being a "Republican lite", and think it's odd to criticize both for being passive and not doing anything, but also for saying they should stop being passive and do something.

It really feels like you're just looking for a reason to be angry, and it doesn't actually matter if it's here or not, since you already have a notion of what you're angry about.

Clearly you think it's a perception problem, since all you're doing is talking about perception. Why haven't you been talking about policy this entire time?

Isn't that a silly statement?

Making a statement about messaging isn't the same as saying the only thing that matters is messaging.
I think that there is a perception problem, but that doesn't mean I think that there's nothing else. And weirdly, I can talk about the one without denying the other exists.

For context, it was part of a speech to party volunteers , so it follows that it would be more "method" than "content". She also said that we should start picking the 2028 candidates and having that conversation now rather than waiting until 2027 since it will plainly be a very contested primary.
That part wasn't able to be construed in an unflattering way though, so it didn't make it into the headline or conversation.

Our country was also founded on saying fuck off to a king. It's part of the foundational mythology of the country. To a lot of people the word oligarchy means precisely nothing.
Rule by powerful elites isn't unamarican. It's actually kinda the opposite, given the caveats on our democratic system and it's history.
A king however is actually one of the few unambiguously unamerican things out there.

This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that it's not without room for debate.

As for the "weak and woke" bit, I'm gonna disagree. That one read to me as a need to address public perception, not criticism from the right. Backing down from a bully is different from trying to change public perception. I didn't see it as a statement of needing to be less woke, but of needing to be perceived as being effective and concerned about things other than the most pejorative senses of the term woke.
That political parties need to be viewed in a positive light by the public to be effective is inescapable.

I'm not trying to frame it narrowly. The headline is misleading click bait. Everything you say could be 100% true and it wouldn't change that she didn't say what you're saying she said.

I really don't care if you want to make it about segments of the democratic party. You're going to be hard pressed to convince me that suggesting a different word for criticism inverts the criticism, even if they are already on an intelligence and terrorism committee (which I have no idea how that relevant to anything).

Argue she's awful if you want, I honestly don't care, but that doesn't make her statements in this case pro business, pro oligarchy, or anything particularly interesting.

And yes, I've looked at her voting records and donors. I don't like everything I see, but it's mostly fine, and definitively better than the other candidates.

You literally criticized her for saying the democratic party needs to work on being seen as weak, and then a paragraph later criticized them for being weak.
Do you disagree that the perception of the Democrats as weak hurts them? Do you think it's wrong to frame opposition to trump as supporting the country?

I don't think you're saying that only Republicans can say they care about the country, have an assertive plan, or be proactive and energetic.

I think letting the Republicans own national pride and define what a "real American" is has been a major loss, and finding a way to say to voters that you have a patriotic duty to resist fascists is correct.
That your response to someone saying we need to use "caring about the country" to try to get people to stop fascists from tearing it apart is "This shit is something you'd hear at a fucking Trump rally" is exactly the problem.

This is seriously just looking for a reason to be mad at the Democrats. You're clearly upset at them for their failures, but you're also seemingly upset at those amongst them saying they should work on their failings that helped create those failures?

Even if meaningful policy changes could be enacted anytime in the next decade, do you think it has a chance of happening if the people in front of it are seen as meek, deferential, and not caring about the country?

And yeah, it's a set of remarks pertaining to part of a speech, one of the topics of which is a change in messaging strategy. I don't think every set of remarks made by a politician needs to be entirely focused on policy. It's a speech that was given to party volunteers about the need to change strategy because what they've been doing hasn't been working.