Child does not want to eat more -> parent asks child to eat one more bite -> child says they can eat two bites -> parent asks child to eat two bites -> child learns to only tell parent they can eat two bites if they want to deal with a parent asking them to eat two bites -> child learns to only tell parent they can do X if they want to deal with being asked to do X -> child learns to only tell parent what they can do if they can deal with being asked to do it -> child learns to only tell parent things if the parent will handle it in a way that helps them.

To be fair, this is a good life lesson to learn with employers, cops, judges, inspectors, teachers and other unilateral authorities, but it would be nice if a child can trust their parents with anything.

Ah yes, teaching your child not to trust you with information about what they can do. Classic!

The Dutch postal service treats letters and packages differently, and electronic greeting cards are processed as letters. They probably didn’t formally recognize letters could contain electronics.

Dutch bureaucracy also tends to have a lot of tolerance/leeway (gedoogbeleid), where rather than fix bad policies everybody just sort of agrees to do things a “reasonable” way. Attempting to fix bad policies can be seen as an expression of mistrust, a threat to whatever people have been getting away with so far, or general narc/snitch behavior. So even if someone realized that electronic greeting cards could be a threat vector, it would have been rude/socially isolating of them to bring it up and deny everybody on board their cute electronic greeting cards from back home.

3One of the heads of the beast appeared to have been mortally wounded. But the mortal wound was healed, and the whole world marveled and followed the beast. 4They worshiped the dragon who had given authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can wage war against it?”

5The beast was given a mouth to speak arrogant and blasphemous words, and authority to act for 42 months. 6And the beast opened its mouth to speak blasphemies against God and to slander His name and His tabernacle—those who dwell in heaven.

7Then the beast was permitted to wage war against the saints and to conquer them, and it was given authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation.

- Book of Revelations chapter 13, verse 3-7

Now, I’m not saying that Saint John received divine inspiration. I’m saying that the well-known and well-funded US-based Christian death cult that wants to make the Rapture happen as soon as possible by meeting the conditions of the End Times might be happy to see things going according to (their reading of the) plan.

A friend of mine studied theology and said (when I remarked something similar) that that’s a very Protestant perspective.

Catholicism has had a long history of people disagreeing with the pope. There have been antipopes, wars between Catholics and the Papal State, theological factions where the Pope is just one participant, etc. . Papal infallibility is a very recent doctrine, and it only applies when he is speaking ex cathedra, which is rarely. Many Catholics don’t adhere to it, and many only consider it a matter of worldly convenience against schisms.

That said, there are no AI generated images of Trump wearing Papal vestments or overseeing the holy mass. Trump is not presented as an anti-Pope, but as an anti-Christ.

One of the benefits of having social democrats in government, I suppose.

(I forget sometimes that “101” is literally a USAmerican college thing and not just international shorthand for “introductory”).

Economics 101 predicts scalping and surge pricing but people still act like it’s some weird abberation rather than the free market actually being free.

It also predicts that Keynesian economics lead to a more prosperous nation than neoliberal austerity because the diminishing returns of capital investment make “high highs and low lows” worse on average than stability; which explains why gdps of the western world have grown so little compared to China’s in the past 20 years.

It also predicts tragedies of the commons, i.e. how capitalism will always ruin everything for everyone, even the people that “win”, and the only solution is to make sure capitalism doesn’t touch the commons because it will find a way to murder them; which explains why the Earth is becoming uninhabitable.

Fun fact: As a grandmother, she could have been 16 when the first Call of Duty came out without her or her children having an underage pregnancy.

You would have to be intentionally consuming a LOT of Sodium Flouride to cause issues.

- The person I first replied to

I wouldn’t call a chemical that kills you if you eat a teaspoon of it “safe”. It literally has a H301 “acutely toxic chemical” rating.

I believe it is what they meant to say, but it is simply not what they said.

The big issue is that the process to make ground water safe to drink removes the Sodium Flouride from it. We have to add it back in, unless you live in a town like mine where they decided to stop flouridating the water because they believe in conspiracy theories and Facebook science.

The levels you need to consume to cause harm are pretty substantial. You would have to be intentionally consuming a LOT of Sodium Flouride to cause issues. It’s almost on the level of “how many bananas do you need to eat to get radiation poisoning”.

The bolded sentence is unambiguous. It uses no prepositions, no context-dependent phrases, no complex punctuation. It is a simple sentence ending in a full stop. How can you deny this is what they said?

Daily reminder to prepare for war. Not necessarily as a soldier. Have supplies, a bug-out bag, a community, and an escape route. This can only end in violence, and there is a good chance that violence will affect you, where-ever you are.

Depends on the role he is fulfilling. “President Leo” or “Pope Leo XIV” in the shortest forms, “President Pope Leo XIV” and “Pope Leo XIV, President of the USA” in slightly longer forms.

Critically judging authorial intent is a 6th grade reading level, and 54% of USAmerican adults have a 5th grade reading level or below. I could have written it more for my audience, the sort of person that needs to hear that pure sodium fluoride is unsafe to ingest.

That’s cool, but kind of irrelevant to their remark that sodium fluoride is safe.

Look, I’m not saying the average consumer will ever run into this risk, I’m saying that you shouldn’t go around saying H301 acutely toxic chemicals are as safe to ingest as bananas. You’re not the president of the United States.

That’s not what they said, though. What they said is that “you would have to be intentionally consuming a LOT of sodium fluoride to cause issues”. Not fluorinated water, sodium fluoride. The actual salt that kills you if you eat a teaspoon of it.

That is dangerous misinformation. With an LD50 of 0.052 grams per kilogram of body weight, swallowing a teaspoon of sodium fluoride will kill most people (if they aren’t induced to vomit or receive emergency medical attention). It’s harmless in the dosage put in tap water, but if you have a tub of pure sodium fluoride it is similarly toxic to bleach or moth balls.

Meanwhile you physically can’t eat enough bananas to get radiation poisoning. Bananas are less radioactive than human flesh, less radioactive than hotdogs, less radioactive than potatoes. You can swim in liquefied banana and be exposed to less radiation than walking outside on a cloudy day without sunscreen.

The EU keeps coming within inches of voting for making secure encryption impossible. Chat Control would have been worse for privacy than anything the US has.

That’s valid for workers in a capitalist system or for capitalists trying to scam people. But why would someone sign their real name to unchecked AI slop for an open source project? It would risk ruining their reputation for little personal gain.