I’m saying to check theory when and only when you have a problem you don’t have a satisfying answer to. That will happen a lot, but each time you will be motivated by the problem, and eventually you may learn to trust a theory enough to appreciate reading about problems you haven’t faced yet.
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.
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.
Boredom isn’t a lack of entertainment, it’s a lack of interest. Learning something challenging feels frustrating, captivating, even maddening, but never boring.
I can’t really argue with you about this because I’m just pulling from my own personal experiences here.
In the business, that’s called “anecdotal evidence”. The reason you can’t argue with me is because anecdotal evidence is kind of irrelevant compared to the statistical observation that children spend decades reaching a median fifth grade reading level.
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.
I assume you’re talking about
No, I’m talking about you, dear liberal hippie, having a community that can survive a transition away from capitalism. Once you have that you can talk about the finer details like what to do once you’ve survived or what to do with the labor left over after you’ve done what is necessary to survive.
Unlike the USSR, we now live in a world where food production is highly commercialized, globalized, and industrialized. What if John Deere used Starlink to brick every tractor in your revolutionary polity with a malicious software update? What if the same happened with every food processing factory and food warehouse?
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.
I would advise against doing this, but what a criminal would do is go to a website like https://bt4gprx.com/search?q=avatar+aang+2026 and get one of the torrents there. Those bastards would use the reddit /r/piracy wiki to find all the coves and ports, check that the information is legitimate, and use a torrent client like Transmission to parse a magnet link to get the booty.
If they are interested in it, then why is it boring to them? Genuine question.
There is value in learning things that at first glance seem boring or dry.
Is there? If the school system is any indication, people can spend literal years studying things they find boring without retaining them. Plus they can develop a hatred for the subject. Plus all sorts of bad intellectual habits like pretending they know the answer so they’re allowed to move on.
I agree that things that feel boring to someone can turn out to be important to them, but that’s a contextualization issue, not a nose-to-the-grindstone one. As the game design adage goes; you have to show the lock before having them hunt for the key.
Things seeming boring and dry is your mind telling you that you’re trying to learn something that isn’t interesting to you. Fancy tricks to hide that core truth won’t undo it.
Why do you think you want to learn Marxist theory? To have status among leftists? Go punch a Nazi. To understand modern or historical leftists? Their actions aren’t guided by Marxist theory. To have status among political theorists, economists, and liberals? Lol. Lmao even.
To gleam a better way to have a succesful revolution that results in a better society? Okay, cool, do you have a community of people that won’t starve to death within days of trade being cut off? If no, congratulations, now you know all Marxist theory that you need to know until you do have such a community.
The designs are also good, it fits into the lore quite well1, and the characters are hot. But yeah, it’s a pretty generic “defenders of the status quo” macguffin movie without any real character work. It’s safe, satisfying fans who want more ATLA without doing anything new like ATLA did. A solid 6½/10, the worst kind of movie.
If you aren’t a fan, you’ve seen it already. If you are a fan, enjoy your nostalgia slop, I know I did. (And yes, it is available in full on the high seas).
especially if you read “being corrupted by the power” as Vaatu’s influence being described by characters that don’t understand it.
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.
The Artemis program (more specifically the Space Launch System) is kickbacks for senators in the form of a spaceship that uses components manufactured in every congressional district at a massively inflated cost. It has been in the making since before SpaceX launched their first rocket, facing massive cost overruns (more corruption) and delays (more corruption).
The death penalty is a law enforcement weapon. Unless you think you will personally be able to make the laws to serve your interests, you should oppose the death penalty just from a strategic standpoint. The death penalty will be used to execute enemies of the state when the state is unjust.
Death as harm reduction is often good. Killing soldiers from an invading army is good, killing cops is good. But death is only harm reduction if you don’t have better options. A community fighting a state often doesn’t, but anything capable of arranging a death penalty likely does.
Death as punishment is kind of dumb. The person will stop existing so they will stop suffering for their crimes, and everybody who has ever done something similar now knows they should fight to the death to resist you.
Death as an ideological suppressant is even dumber. The people that want people who have done wrong freed won’t go away if you execute the people who have done wrong. Most Nazi leaders died pretty quick but neo-nazis worshipped them anyway. Martyrdom is a real factor, and the dead can’t ruin their own reputation by being embarrassing or changing their minds. In fact people whose heroes are martyred tend to radicalize.
Ross is not the problem here. No amount of punishment for him will change the fact that 90 million people voted for Project 2025 and the US government is becoming fascist. Death is part of the answer, but not for him.
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.