It’s also because salt is heavy as fuck, so transporting it from coasts and places with salt mines was expensive.

Oh shit, I actually have ten on my head alone, good call.

Pssh, I’ve got seven on my head alone. Everyone forgets about the ears, but who doesn’t like aural sex?

I once wondered aloud how they get tanning beds to emit vitamin D. I then immediately corrected myself by saying that it was photosynthesis, which is technically correct, but doesn’t sound right in the context of animals. I did not feel smart.

That was true for Iran in the 70s, too.

That’s what I meant by not that it really matters. I’m just curious

Does a presidential pardon clear you for a background check? Not that it really matters.

I had almost the opposite experience.

I used to do a lot of community folk dance (the median age was at least 70), and I dated a guy who was somewhat cocky about inviting me to his kickboxing class. I was down, but a little concerned about embarrassing myself, especially because it was at a very intimidating boxing gym.

I didn’t even break a sweat until 20 minutes in. It turns out, jumping up and down in place for ninety minutes several times a week is really good conditioning for basically any cardio.

I don’t feel dumb, lol. It’s very far from my areas of interest. I’m sure I’ve got more incorrect opinions about all sorts of fields I don’t think much about. The important thing is, I know how to research.

That’s what I thought. I figured things like the original garmins had a quantity unlimited but very narrowly usable data plan, like old kindles. I did know that gps was invented before the internet was widespread, but I figured that today it was like fax machines, where the vast majority don’t actually have a landline connection anymore and use the internet instead.

Based on this comment section, I gathered that it was something else, but still didn’t expect it to be fucking radio.

My first thought: wow, the PPE for the people making road signs must be so involved!

My second thought: unfortunately, probably not at all.

That’s fair, and also why I hedged about participants in society, because maybe ChatGPT could? But I don’t think ChatGPT can really write fiction, for the same reason my cat sitting on a keyboard can’t write fiction- the end product has nothing to do with intention or communication

Show me a piece of fiction which has nothing to say about societal issues and I’ll show you an author or reader who doesn’t understand literature.

I don’t think it’s even possible for a participant in society to write something that has nothing to do with society. We are all affected by our environments. Fish might not notice the ocean, but it doesn’t mean that they could write something that doesn’t involve the ocean, to really stretch a metaphor.

If there were a crime which deserved the death penalty (there isn’t), intentionally poisoning more than 200 children would be it. It’s technically possible that they’re really negligent and stupid, but hiding the paint was definitely intentional and probably caused additional harm by delaying treatment.

I don’t think it’s very simple at all.

According to the CBS, about 40% of Jews in Israel were born to a father also born in Israel. Given the relative youth of the Israeli population and the fact that it’s been nearly 80 years since Mandatory Palestine existed, the number is probably quite a bit higher (especially because that number only relates to the fathers, not the mothers), but even if only 60% of Israeli Jews are descendants of settlers, that’s nearly 5 million people. Out of a total population of about 15 million people living in Israel and Palestine combined.

A poll published in may showed that more than 80% and more than half of all Israelis support forced expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel, respectively. That’s five and eight million people. (The poll itself was only published in Hebrew, but I think this is the link).

How can a unified, peaceful country actually be created without “giving into their sentimentality” when somewhere between a third and over half of them feel that way? What is additional punishment? A country cannot afford to imprison that large a proportion of its population, and fines would exacerbate the resentment. I could see some form of community service in the form of war cleanup and having to physically, literally deal with the results of a genocide working to reset people’s perspective on it, but it’s not as though they’re not aware of what’s happening. I don’t know that simply being confronted with the viscerality of the genocide they knowingly support would do much, especially with such a high proportion of the population who do support it.

I’m not saying that the answer is to just give in to the demands of genocide supporters. I’m saying that it’s hard to imagine a workable solution and simply evicting and heavily taxing a whole bunch of people is going to lead to resentment.

One tricky bit is, if you’re declared legally dead, you immediately become an illegal resident if you’re still alive. And DOGE has already declared a number of people dead by misinterpreting a few databases.

I can almost imagine this being written by Douglas adams, but the consequences a little too depressing. You know, in contrast to the complete destruction of the earth

I can’t see descendants of settlers who are en masse being kicked out of their homes and heavily taxed coming together to peacefully build a society with the people whom they ceded their homes to and whom they’re paying those reparations. Can you? How would you go about it without making them so resentful that they either refuse to help rebuild or start attacking the institutions of the new single state?

I see the philosophical balance your solution would bring and it’s what I would want to do if I suddenly found myself a settler/settler’s descendant, but I don’t think enforcing it will lead to lasting peace. Perhaps with an education system that truly integrates children and teaches all of their history, without whitewashing any of it. But I think there’s a very strong cultural attachment in Israel to homeschooling, and don’t know if enforcing public schooling would create further resentment.

Oh, there are a thousand ways they could improve their current way of handling it. I just don’t know what the best way would be, though it would definitely involve eminent domain. I guess a lottery system for determining which families get the ancestral home?

I used to take solace in the fact that people smarter than I were in charge of this, so they could do better than that as a solution, but I’m increasingly skeptical that they actually will.

Yeah, I don’t know how to solve the issues of two separate families feeling ownership for the same location (fifty years ago, a Palestinian family including several living members was evicted from a home, and an Israeli couple moved in and then died, leaving their property to their children who played no role in taking the property from the Palestinians), but the solution is not to deport all of the Israelis from the region.

My first instinct would be that the government would need to build a LOT of desirable housing and offer a cash incentive to all current and former residents to cede ownership claims to other properties in exchange for the deed to one of the newer properties, but it immediately occurs to me that the wealth difference between the average Palestinian family and the average Israeli family is probably large enough that there would essentially be a self-selection bias. Especially given the fact that poverty and food insecurity reduce our ability to make good financial decisions.

I can’t think of a resolution for that situation that doesn’t involve someone feeling resentful. I’m not saying they have equal claim- but I know that the descendants of settlers are also people, who don’t want to be evicted from the (stolen) houses in which they were raised, and sowing resentment has not helped the region in the past.

He estimated in 2014 that Liverpool’s boycott of The Sun had cost its owners £15 million per month since the disaster, in 1989 prices.

Heartwarming