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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The US doesn’t really chlorinate chicken anymore, and it never did in the way “chlorinated chicken” implies.
    It was common and is still permitted to wash chicken in the processing plant using a diluted bleach solution to eliminate any microbe contamination followed by a water rinse.
    This is very similar to the sanitizer solution used in restaurants in both the US and Europe to clean the plates you eat off of.
    No one in the EU ever claimed that it was a harmful practice on it’s own. The solution has also been replaced basically everywhere with a solution of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide, since it’s comparably effective and breaks down to water and oxygen relatively quickly. It’s also extremely diluted. (0.2%)

    The EUs concerns are that an antimicrobial wash is masking unsanitary practices further up the supply line, and that better results are achieved by maintaining hygiene throughout the entire supply chain.

    It’s just as accurate to say that most Europeans are drinking chlorinated water, and eating chlorinated seafood. (Drinking water is usually treated to around 1ppm, with food sanitizer being recommended to aim for 50 ppm and then holding at 5ppm. Wild caught seafood can’t meet the end to end hygiene requirements the EU aims for, so processing with a sanitizer rinse is permitted)

    It’s another case of people simplifying the nuance of the disagreement, because it’s harder to discuss when there’s no clear better answer.



  • Rebuilding could take 10 to 20 years. If he’s shit enough it could take two to six.

    If he does Herbert Hoover levels of damage there’s likely to be broad motivation to take heavy handed action to fix it. Re-nationalizing land, nullifying contracts, and disregarding the impact it has on those who invested money or otherwise relied on the changes. Some of the programs being torn apart today are direct responses to trying to fix the problems Hoover caused.

    It’s not a lot, but it’s worth remembering that Hoover had a lot of similar stances to Trump. He made things so bad that America elected the closest thing we’ve ever had to democratic socialism, and people liked it so much that they elected him four times and Congress changed the Constitution out of spite.


  • among newborns (0–2 months), RSV hospitalizations fell 52 percent

    there was a 71 percent decline in hospitalizations in NVSN

    0 to 7 months old—RSV-NET showed a 43 percent drop in hospitalizations

    NVSN data, there was a 56 percent drop.

    Shit like that is fucking huge, and makes me get some happy misty eyes thinking of the people whose lives have just been made better because of this.
    30 to 40 thousand kids kept out of the hospital. Some heart wrenching portion of that as lives saved.
    Every year. And that’s in the US alone!

    I hope the researchers who worked on this feel appropriately proud.


  • Suggest she talk to her OB sooner rather than later. The window for the maternal vaccination is reasonably narrow, and some places where you might routinely get a vaccine aren’t accustomed to it yet and might take longer than expected to work through it. (If they give the vaccine too early the antibodies don’t transfer as helpfully, and too late and they don’t have enough time to develop and transfer)

    My wife had a hell of a time getting it from the usual place we get flu and COVID shots because it was a more nuanced criteria and they, reasonably, didn’t want to give a treatment outside of approved guidelines. Eventually the OB said the back and forth was silly and had someone go get a dose from the hospital pharmacy and just gave it during the office visit.

    It’s literally a lifesaver. We had twins that were born premature, which is a major risk factor. At six months we all got it, and one was miserable but fine, and the other required a relatively non-invasive hospital stay for extra monitoring for a few days.
    Given the giant risk factors we had, without the vaccines it would have been a much more scary time, and it was already basically textbook Not-a-great-time.


  • I feel like I could be persuaded either way, but I lean towards allowing them during sentencing.
    I don’t think “it’s an appeal to emotion” is a compelling argument in that context because it’s no longer about establishing truth like the trial is, but about determining punishment and restitution.

    Justice isn’t just about the offender or society, it’s also indelibly tied to the victim. Giving them a voice for how they, as the wronged party, would see justice served seems important for it’s role in providing justice, not just the rote application of law.

    Obviously you can’t just have the victim decide, but the judges entire job is to ensure fairness, often in the face of strong feelings and contentious circumstances.

    Legitimately interested to hear why your opinion is what it is in more detail.


  • Hearsay is allowed in sentencing statements, and Arizona allows those statements to be in a format of their choice.

    It’s the phase of the process where the judge hears opinions on what he should sentence the culprit to, so none of it is evidence or treated as anything other than an emotive statement.

    In this case, the sister made two statements: one in the form of a letter where she asked for the maximum sentence, and another in the form of this animation of her brother where she said that he wouldn’t want that and would ask for leniency.

    It’s gross, but it’s not the miscarriage of justice that it seems like from first glance. It was accepted in the same way a poem titled “what my brother would say to you” would be.


  • Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it’s entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn’t actually have grounds to deny it.
    No jury during that phase, so it’s just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions.

    It’s gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted.


  • Jessica Gattuso, the victim’s right attorney that worked with Pelkey’s family, told 404 Media that Arizona’s laws made the AI testimony possible. “We have a victim’s bill of rights,” she said. “[Victims] have the discretion to pick what format they’d like to give the statement. So I didn’t see any issues with the AI and there was no objection. I don’t believe anyone thought there was an issue with it.”

    Gattuso said she understood the concerns, but felt that Pelkey’s AI avatar was handled deftly. “Stacey was up front and the video itself…said it was AI generated. We were very careful to make sure it was clear that these were the words that the family believed Christopher would have to say,” she said. “At no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chris’ own words.”

    The prosecution against Horcasitas was only seeking nine years for the killing. The maximum was 10 and a half years. Stacey had asked the judge for the full sentence during her own impact statement. The judge granted her request, something Stacey credits—in part—to the AI video.

    From a different article quoting a former judge in the court:

    “There are going to be critics, but they picked the right forum to do it. In a trial with a jury you couldn’t do it, but with sentencing, everything is open, hearsay is admissible, both sides can get up and express what they want to do,” McDonald said.

    “The power of it was that the judge had to see the gentleness, the kindness, the feeling of sincerity and having his sister say, ‘Well we don’t agree with it, this is what he would’ve wanted the court to know’,” he said.

    I don’t like it, and it feels dirty to me, but since the law allows them to express basically whatever they want in whatever format they want during this phase, it doesn’t seem harmful in this case, just gross.

    I actually think it’s a little more gross that the family was able to be that forthright and say that the victim would not want what they were asking for, and still ask for it.


  • It says in the article that the judge gave the maximum sentence.

    The sister who created the video gave a statement as herself asking for something different from what she believed her brother would have wanted, which she chose to express in this fashion.

    I don’t think it was a good thing to do, but it’s worth noting that the judges statement is basically “that was a beautiful statement, and he seemed like a good man”, not an application of leniency.


  • Chromes decision actually makes a lot of sense, from a security perspective. When we model how people read URLs, they tend to be “lazy” and accept two URLs as equal if they’re similar enough. Removing or taking focus away from less critical parts makes users focus more on the part that matters and helps reduce phishing. It’s easier to miss problems with https://www.bankotamerica.com/login_new/existing/login_portal.asp?etc=etc&etc=etc than it is with bankotamerica, with the com in a subdued grey and the path and subdomain hidden until you click in the address bar.
    It’s the same reason why they ended up moving away from the lock icon. Certs are easy to get now, and every piece that matches makes it more likely for a user to skip a warning sign.


  • The final piece is that often each of those services would be on a different computer entirely, each with a different public IP address. Otherwise the port is sufficient to sperate most services on a common domain.

    There was a good long while where IP addresses were still unutilized enough that there was no reason to even try being conservative.


  • If you had any tact

    Tact? I’ve been extremely tactful you twit. You’ve been obtuse the the point of incredulity.
    Yes, I sent a collection of EPA references. Who do you think oversaw most of the studies?

    My entire point has been the toxicity issue which you seem incapable of understanding. You’ll have to forgive me for invoking the chlorine issue so much, since you started this whole thing with implying I drink pool water and saying that “poison is poison” in contradiction to “dosage matters”.

    You still haven’t answered me. If a toxic substance is toxic no matter what, “poison is poison”, would you consider water to be a poison?

    You’ll just have disregard me because we aren’t communicating on the same level.

    Clearly.


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicity

    Maybe reading it somewhere else will help you get it.

    A central concept of toxicology is that the effects of a toxicant are dose-dependent; even water can lead to water intoxication when taken in too high a dose, whereas for even a very toxic substance such as snake venom there is a dose below which there is no detectable toxic effect.

    Yes, lower concentrations of a poison make it not a poison.

    Do you think pure water is toxic because it can kill you if you drink too much?

    https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/dwchloramine.pdf

    The first phase of this study (Zierler et al., 1986) looked at the patterns of cancer mortality among 43 communities using either chlorine or chloramine since 1938. All resident Massachusetts deaths among those 45 years and older and occurring during 1969-1983 were eligible for the study. Deaths were selected for inclusion if the last residence listed on the death certificate was in a community using chlorine or chloramine for disinfection. Cancers of the bladder, colon, kidney, pancreas, rectum, stomach, lung and female breast were thought to be related to chlorinated by-products of disinfection and were therefore treated as cases for a mortality odds ratio (MOR) analysis. Deaths from cardiovascular and cerebravascular disease, chronic obstructive lung disease and lymphatic cancer (N=214,988), considered to be unrelated to chlorinated by-products, were used for comparison. In general, cancer mortality was not associated with type of disinfectant in the MOR analysis. There was a slight association (MOR=1.05) for chlorine use noted only with bladder cancer that increased slightly (MOR=1.15, 95% confidence interval = 1.06-1.26) when lung cancer deaths were used for controls. Standardized mortality ratio analysis of the data set were generally unremarkable. There was a small increase in mortality (SMR=118, 95% confidence interval = 116-120) from influenza and pneumonia in the chloraminated communities. CLORAMIN.6 VI-5 03/08/94

    https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/related-research-chloramines-drinking-water

    That’s from just basic googling, so yeah, I’d say it’s pretty easy to find at least moderately compelling evidence.

    Don’t forget some studies on the benefits:

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15782893/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10176376/

    As well as on general chlorine safety: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK598756/


  • It’s quite inaccurate to say that “poison is poison”, because it’s entirely a matter of the effect it has in the body. Is water poisonous? It doesn’t take a huge amount to disrupt bodily functions and kill you. Ironically for the conversation, one of the key things disrupted by water poisoning is the balance of chlorine ions in nerves.

    So is water poisonous even though we rarely consume it in toxic amounts?
    Is chlorine not poisonous because we require a quantity of it to live?

    Or, maybe, poison is better used for a substance that is or will cause disruption to functions if introduced to the body. A glass of water isn’t poisonous, but a 5 gallon jug is. A full fox glove plant is poisonous, but a trace of the digitalis it contains is medicine.

    I’m not sure why we would need a blind study of chlorine in water. We can just look at aggregate health trends in several populations. A blind is necessary when researchers are performing an intervention, but if you’re not intervening you don’t need one, just a way to deal with possible confounding variables. A typical one is “observational populations large enough to cover almost all variables”, like you get by looking at population aggregated health data across entire countries.
    It how we gauge the effectiveness of things like flossing and brushing your teeth where it’s considered unethical to require a subject to forgo a procedure believed to be beneficial. It’s not like you learn nothing just because your methodology didn’t eliminate every confounder.


  • I don’t know what to say other than, maybe, poison is poison.

    I feel like I was pretty resoundingly disputing that bit, because it’s not a true statement. Concentration matters. A substance not being readily eliminated from the body is just one way for a concentration to become high enough to do harm.

    Yes. Sometimes science misses an outcome. It’s entirely about balancing risks with benefits. The risk of chlorine as a water additive is low, because we’ve studied it, there’s no theoretical mechanism, and it’s been in use for several generations with no ill effects. The benefits are cost effective clean drinking water.