• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Okay, but the ruling is totally sensible inasmuch as it applies to “purposes of tariffs, imports and customs”. Tomatoes by and large aren’t being imported for their botanical value; they’re being used for food. This ruling exists so corporations can’t “um ackshually” their way out of paying their fair share.

    But that’s too sensible; in reality, this unanimous ruling that I never bothered to spend five seconds researching independently (I am very intellectually superior) was just “le Americans uneducated ecksdee”.

    (And before you point it out: yes, an “um ackshually” definition of vegetables includes fruits, although this is using a culinary one. So indeed, the original post can’t even pedant right.)

    Edit: to totally gild the lily, imagine your country adds a tax to crab meat because overfishing for a luxury good is destroying the Earth’s oceans. Someone sells Alaskan king crab, and they go to the courts demanding their taxes back because “um, ackshually, crabs are infraorder Brachyura, but king crabs are nested cladistically inside the hermit crab superfamily”. You would hope the court would tell them to get lost, because for the environmental impact and culinary uses that the bill is targeting, it’s a crab.

  • vane@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Not unique because EU also classifies tomatoes as vegetables.

    Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
    The classification of fruit and vegetables can be based
    on various approaches — botanical, agronomical,
    culinary — thus resulting in different definitions. For
    example, the tomato is botanically a fruit, but it is
    commonly considered a vegetable from both the
    agronomical and the culinary points of view.
    The facts and figures presented in this briefing follow
    Eurostat’s definitions based on the farm management
    and agronomical practices, according to which the
    term ‘fresh vegetable’ refers to annual (or, rarely,
    biennial) horticultural crops, and the term ‘fruit’ refers
    to perennial crops.
    Following this approach, tomatoes are included in the
    main statistical aggregate of vegetables, as well as
    melons, water melons and strawberries, which are
    commonly considered and consumed as fruit.

    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/635563/EPRS_BRI(2019)635563_EN.pdf

  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That’s just how language works.

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.

      My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.

  • homura1650@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I’m going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.

    • SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      You weren’t kidding!

      California enforces many wildlife regulations. CESA, or the California Endangered Species Act, is designed to keep animal and plant life from extinction. The law covers any threatened “bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant.”

      Insects weren’t mentioned in the specific act’s wording. However, a separate California regulation legally defines fish as “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”
      So, are bees actually fish? Yes, because all invertebrates are according to California law. The broad definition of fish allows activists to fight for insect survival.
      The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has clarified that “It was not believed necessary to include the term invertebrate in the original legislation because ‘fish’ is defined in the Fish and Game Code to include ‘invertebrates’…”

      Talk about by-the-book!

  • foggianism@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I remember watching a YT video once about a legislative move of a US county to declare the number Pi to be exactly 3.