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.

Nono, not acknowledging the sacrifices of the first people to forage a wild hot pocket and try it, blind to the knowledge of if it was edible or thermally safe is immoral.

When you eat a bowl of berries you’re relying on the sacrifices of unpaid and forgotten people who tried them first and didn’t die.
When you eat a heaping bowl of pop tarts ™ you’re relying on the sacrifices of paid and forgotten people who tried them first and didn’t die in legally actionable numbers.

The key to solving the immorality of exploiting these people is money, because money solves morality.

Much like the image, my comment is a joke, so I’d be genuinely worried if it held up particularly well.

Okay?

People disagreeing on the boundaries or details of a definition doesn’t make it not an objective definition.

It seems pretty clear to me that tea would fall into the ultra processed category, since it’s an extraction of a highly processed ingredient. Home baking, fermentation and cheese making would all be processed because they’re a transformation of unprocessed foods or processed food ingredients like flour. I’m not incredibly familiar with the classification system so I’m not sure where a piece of uncured beef, an unprocessed food, cooked with salt, a processed food ingredient, would go. I’m thinking it would be processed, like bread, but I’m not sure where seasoning falls.

Disagreement in the boundary conditions is pretty normal. Geologists disagree on exactly where different types of rock fall on the classification scales. Biologists disagree on a wide array of animal taxonomic boundaries.
You wouldn’t say that geology lacks an objective definition of what is or isn’t limestone, you’d just note that some people would disagree with the classification of some samples.

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.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/

Cheese, fermented and baked goods are typically processed, but can be ultra processed depending on the specifics of production.

The image should provide a more concise feel.
Basically:

• pick it up off the ground and wash it.
• crush it, chop it, toast it
• crush, chop, toast and mix things from the previous two categories
• the refined or reconstituted constituent portions of the above, optionally with other addictive not typically considered food in isolation.

Unprocessed, minimally processed, processed and ultra processed, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

It’s not like this is a weird health nutter concept. It’s also not like these foods are necessarily as bad as some people like to act. But it is definitively objectively definable.

Yes. People have conflated the term “processed food” with the higher end processing that some foods get, more correctly called ultra processed foods.

Processing food is transforming it from one state to another. Bread is a processed food because you’ve milled the wheat. Acme® Fued lewps™ are ultra processed because the corn was dissolved in acid, reconstituted into a fiberless slurry, fortified with enough vitamins to be legally referred to as nutrition, fortified with enough sugar, salt and fats to make your body demand you eat more, then bulked with milk protein concentrates to make you feel like you’re eating something substantial and also qualify as a dairy product for tax purposes.

The conversation would often be much clearer if people didn’t use the term for “almost all food” when thet mean the more chemistry oriented type of food.

Even within the category of ultra processed foods there are items that are perfectly benign. Breakfast cereals can be perfectly healthy, but they’re necessarily ultra processed since you need at least minimal shelf stability.

Processing isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s just that the worst foods are ultra processed because that’s how they did the things that make them bad, and every transformation destroys some portion of the food, and eventually you need to start adding things back in to make it keep being food, or at least appearing to be food.

Unprocessed food is food we concluded was okay after desperate people were forced to eat it long ago and didn’t die.
Processed food is food we concluded was okay after desperate people were paid to eat it recently and didn’t die.

Unprocessed food is more exploitative and erases the suffering of the past. Processed food compensates people for their exploitation, and there’s no erasure of the suffering it causes.

Didn’t know anyone was doing it at scale. Neat.

In any case, retrofitting most municipal systems just to protect against a non-existent danger just isn’t feasible.

Looking a bit more into the process in the Netherlands, it looks like it’s not just UV light. It looks like it’s also aggressive filtration, and treatment with lye and hydrogen peroxide. Also benign, but not quite in line with the “nothing that seems toxic in the water” story.

Nope, they don’t treat the cisterns because the water has been treated at the conditioning plant. Part of the reason for treatment is because holding reservoirs pose a significant risk for contamination.
In my municipality there aren’t enough cisterns that there’s a significant risk of undetected damage, but larger cities, particularly with tall buildings, will have enough that contamination is able to go longer without detection. It’s why major cities treat their water more aggressively.

Salt is poison. It’s also a disinfectant antimicrobial. You also die unless you get a quantity of it.
Ethanol is a disinfectant poison, and so is lye/sodium hydroxide. Having a pretzel and a beer every now and then is also harmless, despite being cooked in disinfectant, topped with disinfectant, and washed down with yet another disinfectant.

You die unless you get enough water, and you die if you get too much.
Foxglove can kill you, or correct dangerous heart conditions.
Apples contain trace amounts of cyanide. Pears have formaldehyde in them because it’s part of natural biological processes. (Your body actually has special processes for handling the formaldehyde it produces. You still shouldn’t drink it, but pears are fine)

The dose makes the poison. That’s not just a phrase meaning that sometimes you can avoid toxicity, it’s quite literal. A poison is a chemical that disrupts normal bodily processes. Every chemical can do that with the correct (incorrect?) concentration.
If you choose to point to a chemical and say it shouldn’t be consumed because there’s a dose that can be harmful, it’s worth remembering that every substance has that limit.

that doesn’t mean chemical build up or other toxicity related illnesses cannot occur

And that’s the type of question you need to ask, not “is it poisonous at some dosage”. You might be shocked to learn that that’s actually part of what we look at when deciding if a chemical is safe to use in some context.

Also, I don’t drink the pool water because it’s a taboo in my culture to drink water that has had people in it. Doesn’t mean it’s unsafe to drink, since getting some in your mouth is inevitable when swimming. It’s treated much more aggressively because “people are in it” and communal things like that are risks for disease spread.
Kinda like why I don’t sterilize my scissors at home, but my barber does. The public health aspect is why they need a license and training that covers sanitation and the basics of skin diseases.
Also, the pool inevitably has pee in it. at a significantly higher concentration than the chlorine in drinking water, as an aside.

Chlorine gas was actually used in world war 1. It’s still a massive stretch to invoke that in relation to water treatment.

It’s like invoking water boarding to say we shouldn’t have a water supply.

You think chlorine is mostly known for being used as a chemical weapon? Not, you know… Swimming pools?

You’re a good example of why people make bad choices about science related public policy.
First, the poison is in the dose. There’s a big difference between inhaling concentrated chlorine gas and drinking trace quantities.
Second, how do you propose we uv sterilize the water? We’d need to do so at the plant, but also at any holding cisterns. Or were you thinking of retrofit for houses? And not all microorganisms are strongly impacted by UV. It’s tricky to find legitimate research, since the people who sell them say they work great, but what’s out there paints a different picture of efficacy.

Eh, AP is a wire service. They report on the basics of events so other news agencies don’t need to.
They reported why they were arrested, according to the affidavit, and basic description of the interaction between the judge and law enforcement.
They also reported statements from people defending the judge, but none of them brought up the details of the cops being cruddy.

The relevant facts of the story are that a judge was arrested for showing someone through a door they usually wouldn’t use, the high court put them on indefinite leave for the duration of the case, and these people say it’s a breach of separation of power.

Until someone connected to the story in some way actually makes the argument that the cops weren’t impacted by the door choice, it would be editorializing to add that question.

Three mile island isn’t comparable to Chernobyl, particularly not in the context of how it impacts a nations stability.

Chernobyl cost around $900 billion, inflation adjusted, and the cost is rising because it’s controlled, not resolved.

Adjusted for inflation, three mile island cost around $5 billion.

To put it in scale, it’d be like the US having a disaster that cost around $7.5 trillion to resolve today. It’s the type of economic shock that can make nations fail.

Bhopal, while a terrible disaster, cost the US nothing beyond the cost of not extraditing someone.

“these days”? I take it you weren’t paying attention during the whole “explorative credit” thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they’ve been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?

Have they ever been better than “kinda bad” at best?

Anyway, I didn’t specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.

By who? And under what authority?

The rules governing international conflict either aren’t ratified by the US, or allow the UN security council to declare a war illegal. Given the US has a permanent veto, it’s shockingly unlikely the security council would ever do that.

It’s a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn’t change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

They also don’t actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn’t really special. If you can’t put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

If you’ve decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn’t need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)

They’re not mandatory if they’re attached. It’s not gonna jump out and douse your butt without you asking.