More worryingly: if Santa knows who's been naughty and who's been nice, he would necessarily have been aware that the other reindeer had been mobbing Rudolph, but did nothing about it until circumstances made Rudolph's talents useful to the North Pole.
The good kids get to enjoy the worsened global warming, lower air quality, and radioactive fallout from all the coal Santa distributes to the bad kids.
Given that Der Krampus arrives Dec. 6, he's probably just playing bad cop to St. Nick's good cop. According to traditional theology, animals don't have souls, so they don't have much to do with religion, and believers had better be satisfied spending an eternity strumming their harps with neither Fido nor Kat Vonnegut Jr. for company.
(does Dante mention any animals in the 1st circle? Non-philospher non-featherless non-biped animals, that is...)
Animals have stood trial for their actions since the time of the Greeks, and have undergone shifts of being intentional criminals, to automatons of Nature who can't be judged, to self-aware beings with rich inner lives who should stand trial for their actions, but Animal Trials were out of vogue by then.
That's just rude. Using children's entertainment to push geopolitical narratives about mineral rights.
- "Still, the Canadian government was careful to drive home the point that it believes Santa's workshop lies within this country's territory. [...] As The Globe and Mail first reported earlier in the month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a last-minute intervention in Canada's planned submission to the United Nations commission that is accepting claims for seabed rights in regions such as the Arctic. Mr. Harper asked Canadian bureaucrats to go back to the drawing board and craft a more expansive claim for ocean-floor resources in the polar region after the proposed submission they showed him failed to include the geographic North Pole."
He runs a massive unregulated surveillance apparatus with no opt out and forces adults to accept it by buying the good will of children with goods made by his stable of captive unpaid workers
Are we still talking about the guys who think they that laws don't apply to them if they claim to be "traveling in a conveyance" rather than driving a car? Or is there some other meaning?
Are the cookies you leave out for Santa "strictly necessary"? They might be a species of marketing: you're trying to convince him to give you more gifts.
I would assume that tradition derives from similar offerings being made to faeries or hearth deities in return for their favor, in which case you're not trying to convince Santa to give you more gifts but rather to not to steal your children and replace them with changelings or lumps of coal because you offended his weird elf sense of hospitality.
My 3 year old asked me how Santa knows when you are sleeping and I told him “metadata” - he asked how he knows if you’ve been bad or good, and I told him, intelligence sharing agreements between five eyes nations. I hope he has a sense of humor about this when he gets older (but he probably won’t remember it)
Yes, do be careful with cunning quips to young 'uns! There are lots of legitimate "lies to children" as Terry Pratchet used to say but they can come back to bite you later.
One of those euphemisms for a while, in the UK, was "gone to Devon". I think it arose naturally from gone to heaven being miss-heard. Devon is a popular holiday destination, so going to Devon is a reasonably often heard phrase. Even young enough Devonian (1) children could probably manage to accept that as an explanation!
I can remember being aged around six in an infant school in West Germany. I'm a British Army brat, this was around 1976. We were sat in a circle around the teacher and assistant towards the end of the day and they were asking questions like what were we going to do for the holidays. Several kids responded that they were going to the UK. I had no idea what they were on about. It wasn't important enough to me at the time to ask and I obviously found out later. Even later on, I discovered just how complicated "the UK" really is as a group of entities!
(1) I have ancestry going back sixteen generations in Devon and Cornwall, a thicket in Northants, and a direct male line that vanishes into Hanover. Oh and possibly a C18 serial killer from near Devizes.
Obviously, Santa is a timelord who has assumed the identity of Saint Nicholas of Myra. This explains why he can live forever, why he appears differently to different children using psychic paper (skin color, clothing, shape, different names, etc), can enter homes without chimneys (Tardis disguised as a sleigh) and why his sack is bigger on the inside than the outside. The Doctor isn't the only timelord who has an affinity for earthlings.
At least one time lord claims the name. Although that one probably should not be believed.
Santa does definitely know how to get sonic screwdrivers though.
I'm asking my children every time, whether they consent to giving the Santa their list of actions. If they don't consent, they won't be receiving any gifts at all. It's that simple.
But you can't say "in order to use this service you have to accept tracking". That's not a freely given consent, if the service would work fine without.
But perhaps it's hard to santa to do his job without this data.
My main metaphor I guess is that I like to be annoying to my children, but I don't really have children yet, so I'm just looking forwards to annoying my children. It's just the most exciting part of potentially having children - having unlimited power and time to be able to troll them. And seeing how these great neural networks try to adapt to it. I will do my best to keep them guessing for sure.
- color was invented in the mid 20th century, "back in the black & white days"
- giving random sounds to toys (trex goes neigh)
- he told my sister he could fly. She believed it was happening for a moment when he slowly flapped his hands & went up on tippy toes
- accidentally he explained to her a scifi short story where martian colonies seek indepence by collecting water from Saturn's rings. She wasn't corrected until she brought it up at school, where her real father was a bit annoyed about my father feeding her nonsense all the time
Overall good upbringing & it's good to teach kid's not to be so gullible
I really hope you change your outlook on children development by the time you get to having them, unless you're talking about kids older than 7 y.o. If you really want to, you can make kids think whatever you want, that's why religious brainwashing is so effective.
Trolling, as it may make children not trust your words if what you say is consistently a lie/joke. The children may be also laughed at by their colleagues if they repeat your words at kindergarden/early school.
It is a fair point as people have told me before, but I will show this thread to my children as I get them and ask what is their opinion on the matter before choosing my final outlook as well.
He does not need consent because of Article 6 (e), which says that "to perform a task in the public interest or in official authority" is a lawful purpose.
Also people always forget that the scope of the GDPR is limited. The following three areas are generally exempt:
I guess it becomes household activities the moment he gets into the chimney. Big tech should try to exploit this loophole too, somehow. Maybe make Alexa part of your household?
Santa literally performs breaking and entering in every home and nation in the world. He's an international criminal. I don't think he's losing sleep over GDPR.
Honestly EU doesn't have to change a single thing. All compliance exists already.
The trick is to not track good children at all, only those bad ones. I'd you leverage sanction lists (that exist already) to track the bad children, you have all cases covered.
Any Santa related contractor (Santa helpers, elves, etc) have to check a sanction list to see if they can finalize a transaction with said child.
As for lists: when a child sends a request for particular gift, it starts a formal transaction. The other entity is legally allowed to process said child's data to provide the service they agreed upon.
Kids that have not sent a letter to Santa and are not mentioned in sanction lists, can still get gifts but Santa lacks profiling metadata and can only provide generic, unprofiled gifts. Which is good as already have sufficient amount of Bluetooth speakers and Paw Patrol toys.
Wait, how would tracking bad kids be less illegal? I think putting bad children on state sanctions list might very well be deserved for some of them, but a bit overkill... Imagine not doing your homework leading to being officially sanctioned by EU governments or the UN... though I'm sure that's a pretty convincing way to make someone do their homework.
I would not optimise for performance yo early. All the building blocks are here. Let's leave "scaling issues" to the Christmas OPS team! Some cloud provider must have a North Pole region, right?
I mean, NORAD keeps an eye on him, just in case he gets rooted by North Korea and heads for the White House or the Carriers. But they don't have jurisdiction to enforce GDPR.
Nah. Making a request of Santa is, by custom, explicily authorizing him to enter make the delivery. Putting out the cookies and milk for Santa, is extra confirmation.
