Alright, well, I don’t believe in ghost stories.

Yep. I don’t want to but there’s nothing particularly distressing about the idea. I’ve never felt “existential angst” or anything like that.

European settlers hated pretty much everything about the New World and tried to replace local flora and fauna with things they recognized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatisation_society

Nuts? No. It’s logical when the entire system is built to the benefit of heartless capitalists. What it is is enraging.

I just have no interest in being polite, permissive, or accepting of pseudoscience.

My intuition about souls is that they’re nonsense.

“La la la I make up my own facts” is an embarrassing stance to upvote, let alone put forth as an honest argument.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7015476/

There’s ongoing study about safe exposure levels, but the usefulness of animal studies is limited (mice are a poor metabolic analogue). The World Health Organization stands by 0.7mg/liter in water for chlorate and the key thing being looked at is how much remains on food as residue.

Regulations are only as good as their enforcement. The US has pretty good food safety laws (the discrepancies with the EU tend to be our “prove it’s bad” rather than “prove it’s not bad” stance on common-use ingredients and additives.) particularly with labeling. We don’t have fresh raw cheeses because we decided the best Brie wasn’t worth occasional listeria outbreaks.

Had cheap goods. With the way our food costs have exploded in the last five years we almost certainly wouldn’t have leverage over local production.

Ignoring that, the behavior that protectionist trade laws are avoiding is: Country A using tax subsidies to artifically deflate the cost of a good, flooding the market of Country B where it isn’t subsidized and eventually putting the producers there out of business so they become reliant on trade with Country A. Protectionism like this isn’t wrong, but people generally don’t like being told that they’re being barred from less expensive options so it gets dressed up in nationalism.

The USDA has banned hormones and steroids since the 50s and like 5% of chicken gets the (perfectly safe) chlorine rinse. European countries use the same rinse on leafy vegetables, they just banned it on poultry because they thought it would make processors complacent.

Only a small portion of US chicken gets the chlorine rinse, a practice that the EU recognized as perfectly safe by the way. They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices. They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.

Having a gun can turn that fleeting ideation into a permanent decision real quick.

Statistically speaking, buying that handgun is going to dramatically increase your odds of dying by firearm.

It has influence disproportionate to the number of followers. (But Hinduism and Buddhism should be ahead of it anyway, this is a very Western perspective)

Yeah but he can’t taint the sun.

The comics were pretty good too.

Team Fortress was not an “extremely popular existing franchise” even among dedicated PC gamers. What the Orange Box did was let Valve experiment with marketing materials like the teaser videos for Portal and “Meet the Heavy.”

People are naturally curious but we live in a system that punishes curiosity.

Because solid state drives can look like anything but a hard drive has the distinct arm and platter.

Assuming an equation with no context is anything but standard mathematics is peak “well, technically”