The Red Sea is actually just another rift valley along the same edge of the plate. It just filled in with water first.

A friend of mine went from a school in the US to a French school, and when she said there were 7 continents, everyone including the teacher made fun of her.

Dogmatism goes both ways.

We separate Europe, Asia, and Africa because the Ancient Greeks invented the boundaries and terms, and the Romans kept them up.

They lived in the area, so for them, these boundaries were just names given to land on either side of major bodies of water: the Nile, the Black Sea and Rioni river, and the Mediterranean.

They considered Egypt part of Asia for a while, and anything south of the Med as the landmass “Libya.” The Romans kept up the same definitions as maps expanded, and just extrapolated from there.

Well, I’m here now. So there’s that.

You’re welcome. /s

There’s a few other categories to consider.

Of small niche subs I’ve moderated, there’s maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.

I saw on a couple of the sub’s metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.

A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you’re comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.

And let’s not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There’s likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.

As for actual malicious bots posting, it’s likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don’t mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.

Globally, this is becoming a thing. Many states have digital IDs already.

Realistically, both paper with a chip or QR code should be valid for a while.

Yes, I understand the difference between communicable and noncommunicable disease.

The point is that media also rarely talk about these things, and people are not great at taking steps to mitigate their risk. Lots of things we can prevent, or not, still cause us lasting harm. But because those things are mundane, they are not clickbait-y enough to warrant regular coverage.

I made the same journey during COVID, ultimately arriving at a similar place that the Nicene Creed was the first in a long line of obvious retconned political and human decisions. For what is worth, I also feel like it’s in the same vein as most of what Paul did, codifying and standardizing to the detriment of the source material and to the benefit of anyone willing to take charge.

I’m still genuinely shocked that anyone can read the Gospels and then not see the record-scratch pivot in tone for everything else afterwards. Well, shocked in as far as to then be disappointed at how easily a mess of addenda created something antithetical to a bunch of nebulous good vibes with no clear avenue to monetize it all.

Which, oddly enough, Buddhism does as well, but owns it as part of the process.

Yeah, but so can alcohol, smoking, microplastics, and red meat. Heart disease is back to being the #1 killer of Americans, and humans still prioritize fear over serial killers and Bird Flu rather than heart disease and car accidents.

Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. It’s a lot of work to overcome our cognitive biases.

The easiest shot to take is against one’s own team.

What if we just re-name breakfast “Wokemeal”?