I floss and brush religiously every night, have for many years. I had a cavity when I was young and the whole experience was terrible.

I still ended up with multiple cavities as an adult.

Not an excuse, but an explanation: ignorance.

Most people don’t know how ads or data collection works beyond the obvious uptick in a product after you search for it. They don’t know what impact it might have.

Full disclosure: I’m mostly in this camp. I only recently started using firefox over chrome, for example. I know that big tech collects obscene amounts of data, and monetizes it by targeted advertisements, but…beyond that, I don’t know what FAANG can do with the data collected on me. I only have a vague idea of what’s being collected.

Fundamental rights

Lmao you absolutely can.

I was working at a grocery store, stocking food in the freezer aisle. Along comes a customer, passing by on the other side of the waist-level coolers that divide the aisle in half. She’s unremarkable: middle-aged, white, obese. Indistinguishable from the thousands of other customers I saw in my years there.

So this woman passes me, just looking at the frozen foods. And there, hanging on the back of her shirt, is a lizard. And not just a common garden-variety lizard, but a bearded dragon.

A live adult bearded dragon is just chilling on the back of this customer’s shirt as she does her grocery shopping.

Just. What.

I had so many questions. But I was a socially awkward teenager so I said nothing and never saw the lizard lady again.

Lemmy already has jerboa.

I was homeschooled. Never went to public school. And my parents were christians, so naturally they bought christian apologetic textbooks.

One science (biology I think, high school level) textbook had most of a chapter discussing why the “theory of evolution” was “wrong”. Another book from the same publisher discussed at length why global warming (and the ozone-thinning effect of certain chemicals) was untrue.

My chemistry professor in college, wonderful man that he was, was the first person to explain divergent and convergent evolution to me.