Fluoridation is most effective at ages where it’s hard for kids to physically hold a toothbrush, much less develop good or effective habits. Especially if they’re in a family that is struggling to regularly provide food, much less worry about long term healthcare. Berating children for not knowing things or having self control is a ridiculous position to take.

The entire point of public fluoridation is that it requires no effort or cost by the people it is most effective for. It’s why some places take excessive natural fluoride out of the water and some places put more in because there isn’t any. It’s how we discovered florid was effective in the first place.

Aspirin is poison, Vitamin C is poison, water is poison. “Poison is in the dosage” isn’t a glib statement, it’s how biology works. Putting an amount of fluoride in the water that is still non-toxic if you severely over-hydrate yourself or regularly swallow a tube toothpaste, is not toxic. And it still has massive lifelong positive health benefits that reduce lifetime medical needs.

Because a lot of those people are children.

Fluoridating water is cheap. If someone is uneducated enough to not know or care about how their dental health affects their overall health, and the same for their child, it matters significantly less because they get a baseline level of care from the public water system. It means they use less medicare/medicaid funds in the years and decades to follow.

The single study cited in a lot of anti-fluoride laws/debates is talking about possible single digit IQ differences from possible overdoses on the scale of countries. That’s smaller than the effect of the same person taking the same test on different days. It’s a textbook example of finding noise in the data, pointing to it, and saying this proves exactly what I want it to. And it’s being used to remove one of the best documented, lowest cost, most effective large scale public health measures of the 20th century. Because it will not impact people with parents who can afford dental care and/or have the education to value it.

Are they ICE agents?

There’s a reason we, in the past, set up things like badges and uniforms to identify agents of the civil authority. It’s so we know there is at least the pretense that the rights of the person being arrested will be respected and that they will go to a location where they can be checked on and communicate with friends/family and receive legal assistance for the charges brought against them.

Masked men with guns shouting “I’m definitely police” and bagging a woman is not that.

Their bosses pretending this is good enough is, at the very very very least, endangering federal agents unnecessarily. To say nothing of the rights of the people they’re disappearing without the pretense of arresting them.

Yea some kind of fork of the torrent protocol where you can advertise “I have X amount of space to donate” and there’s a mechanism to give you the most endangered bytes on the network maybe. Would need to be a lot more granular than torrents to account for the vast majority of nodes not wanting or being capable of getting to “100%”.

I don’t think the technical aspects are insurmountable, and there’s at least some measure of a builtin audience in that a lot of people run archiveteam warrior containers/VMs. But storage is just so many orders of magnitude more expensive than letting a little cpu/bandwidth limited process run in the background. I don’t know that enough people would be willing/able to donate enough to make it viable?

~70 000 data hoarders volunteering 1TB each to be a 1-1 backup of the current archive.org isn’t a small number of people, and that’s only to get a single parity copy. But it also isn’t an outrageously large number of people.

It would be interesting to have encrypted blobs scattered around volunteer computers/servers, like a storage version of BOINC / @HOME.

People tend to have dramatically less spare storage space than space compute time though and it would need to be very redundant to be guaranteed not to lose data.

It’s worse because as described in the largest comment in the thread the Federal Reserve is not the US government’s wallet. And there is no mechanism for them to “just sell gold”.

It’s yet another thing that sounds vaguely feasible only if you know absolutely nothing about any of the systems in place.

Yeah lack of third spaces and class mixing is big. Everyone is segregated into their own existing (shrinking) in groups, that then get concentrated by the webiverse.

The 70s oil crisis was an inflection point for Europe and a lot of cities/countries started moving back away from cars as the sole transportation option but the US didn’t have the same reaction.

IIRC interracial marriage didn’t get more than 50% support until the late 90s. In general public support lags behind progressive lawmaking.

That in addition to more ‘nuanced’ opinions on it. Does “Sure ‘they’ can do whatever they want, but none of my children are allowed!” count as support or not? It probably gets counted as support/opposition depending on what the poll asker wants, if they even get that granular.

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The problem being they’re now attempting anti-fingerprinting tactics. A lot of the AI crawlers used to identify themselves as Amazon/openAI/etc. And aren’t anymore because they were being blocked. Now they’re coming from random IPs with random/obfuscated agent ids.

This is a legal problem not a technological one.

Also, everyone’s solution to a problem is stupid if they’re only given 5 minutes to work on it.

Combine that with it being “free” for them to query the website and expensive to have enough local storage to replicate, even temporarily, all the stuff they want to scrape and it’s kind of a no brainier to ‘just not do that’. The only thing stopping them is morals / whether they want to keep paying rent.

The Garmin Instinct is what I switched to when my Pebble died. Recently upgraded to the Fenix.

You can absolutely skip ahead through ads with the music controls. Automating it would be the job of the app.

Maybe instead of spending hundreds of man-hours and resources to detain someone indefinitely with no charges they could ask her to fill out the form fully instead of arresting her.

“You forgot to fill out these boxes, back of the line.” would surely be more ‘efficient’ if that were the point wouldn’t it?

Chinese stuff has largely reached the same tipping point Japanese/Korean stuff reached in the 80s, where the previous couple decades it was cheap crap and “all of a sudden” it’s on par or better than domestic consumer tech.

The cheap junk is still cheap junk of course but if you look at the middle tier or better they can be very good. DJI is a prime example, there aren’t a lot of alternative drones if you want it to ‘just work’ and work well with decent support. You can also get a drone on Ali-express/TEMU for $20 but it’s going to be cheap crap, but DJI drones you can buy in BestBuy and the bigger/more professional ones get used on movie sets.

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Honestly not sure there’s much of a distinction between those groups anymore.

But the model number isn’t really the “name” either. That would be “Alienware 34-inch Monitor”, from that year, etc. That they don’t call that their “Mars” line of monitors is maybe a marketing issue, but the thing people want to know first/most about a tv/monitor is how big it is.

Cars and Phones have product numbers that break down the same way but like you say the general public doesn’t refer to them that way. Like the Samsung Galaxy S24 instead of “SM-S928U”, which is the North American (T-Mobile?) specific model.

If there is any thought to it, it usually goes something like “Radio is/was fine because it’s kilo/megahertz, Wifi/5G is gigahertz waves of electromagnetic radiation.(?!?!)”

Could always point to the Terahertz electromagnetic radiation source plugged into their nearest lightbulb socket and ask how that doesn’t hurt them.

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Not saying they couldn’t/shouldn’t but printers are a nightmare hellscape and it’s a miracle, mostly of HP’s marketing department, that they’re a household object.