"This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking."
That is very well put. This should be added to the general list of fallacies in argument, and like the other ones (the slippery slope, hasty generalization, Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.) more general awareness should exist about these.
The current wave of anti-science, anti-logic, rejection of objective data, etc. is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. This is a subjective observation, maybe it has always been this way and I never paid attention because I was caught up in whatever I used to be caught up in.
Different domains. Admiral Rickover focused on the nuclear propulsion aspect of the navy. Its like comparing the CEO of a company with one of the heads of engineering.
It my impression that most people in the EU and outside of it think the citizens of the member countries can vote to replace that or change things, so its ok.
Seems like something I'd be afraid of though if I were a EU citizen, or in a neighboring country the EU wants to absorb next.
If you are trying to create satellite internet in low earth orbit (for reduced ping/latency) the satellite moves faster than the earth spins, and the user on the ground loses point to point contact. So there has to be another satellite already over the horizon before the first one goes out of view. Wiki says Starlink sats travel at about 340 miles above the ground.
The easiest alternative to implement is having the satellites in a geostationary orbit so that they are always above a single spot. The altitude necessary for this is higher than 20k miles, and results in very bad ping/latency. Inmarsat is one of these, and I had a chance to use it in the past. It was slow and laggy, as the realities of physics would suggest.
So more satellites means more potential coverage of the globe, or increased capacity over existing coverage regions, or both. It seems very important.
The Indian satellites in the article weighed on average around 6 kilograms. A starlink satellite weighs 227 kg. You can put more telecom equipment in 227 kg than in 6kg. A better metric than #of satellites is probably total mass of satellites, to make broad comparisons more meaningful.
All I know is I moved to the Dallas area 4 years ago, and I'm still shocked at the housing affordability compared to where I moved from. Both in terms of absolute price and general overall cost of living.
If she likes to hold them to expiry like you pointed out, then isn’t it odd to not have let the nvidia options expire? I’d need to see her full trading history to make sense of whether or not she is using insider information to influence her trading patterns. Given her net worth of over 100 million dollars I am a little suspicious, but lacking details it’s hard for me to make a judgement and I assume you are correct.
Or we can ban members of the government from trading stocks and investing while they hold office and then not have to have this discussion. I hate all politicians republicans democrats and Bernie’s (not picking on Mr. Sanders but I don’t know if there’s another registered independent in high level government) if they even have a sniff of engaging in fuckery, the job should be too important to show any possible signs of impartiality. That boat seems to have sailed away though minus their being an actual grassroots populist movement to overhaul government. And those keep seeming to dissipate or get co-opted when they do start to foment, like the occupy Wall Street type things that in my life seem to keep popping up, gaining traction, and then becoming something no one hardly talks about anymore.
Singapore has high politicians salaries and low corruption as measured by international standards. They also have extremely strict anti-lobbying or to use the sane word anti-corruption laws. Their reasoning as I understand it is to attract and keep good people in government, competing with the public sector, instead of attracting what amounts to an endless stream of grifters that work for lobbyists and not the government.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 Singapore is number 3 for the most recent report. USA by comparison is number 28. It’s an apples and oranges comparison given the vast differences in the two countries of course, and raising politician’s salaries isn’t a black and white fix for the problems in the USA.
Pix is an instant payment platform created and managed by the monetary authority of Brazil, the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB).[1] It enables instantaneous payments and transfers in Brazilian real, even outside banking hours or on weekends, with no fees.
Pix was announced in February 2019 and became fully operational on 16 November 2020. It rapidly became the main payment system in the country; by July 2024, Pix transactions had reached almost R$2.5 trillion per month, with more than 70% of the country (over 150 million people) actively using it.
It seems like it is not available outside Brazil and their currency, but is wildly successful (70% adoption in 4 years) and anecdotally on other forum discussions I've heard the people like it.
Also from the article itself
"Pix reached 63.8 billion transactions in 2024 — a 52% increase from the previous year, according to a recent survey by the Brazilian Federation of Banks. Pix overtook debit card transactions in January 2022 and credit cards in February 2022; it now dwarfs transactions via credit cards, debit cards, bank slips, wire transfers, prepaid cards, and checks combined."
It seems like a smashing success, and maybe Visa and Mastercard are trying to pressure the government of the USA to get them back on their rails (that they collect fees on for usage.)
I looked at the uses and it seems like the guy was using the term crazy to describe ideas and things being done, not as a negative label for a human being.
Splitting hairs? Maybe but I understand where the OP is coming from. Here's the 8 times (7 because one of them is the post we are discussing)
What a crazy thing to be doing, the mad situations companies get themselves into when they should just have networked cameras and VPNs or at the very least distributed ingress machines!
Its been getting crazy expensive for decent GPUs for a while for gaming and I can't see the next generation doing anything but being much higher due to the AI boom.
Makes you wonder how it is that power from the grid is so ludicrously above its actual capitol cost of production, the systems getting that power to places must be crazy expensive.
I sure hope it turns around at some point and it doesn't become C-AIDS, but it explains why Flu and RSV and sepsis et el are going crazy at the moment, immune systems are in bad shape.
It is no more crazy than telling them to diet given that is shown not to actually work.
People do some crazy things with Spring and interface injections in Java and it can get really Opaque quickly but also often it really is just 1 class implementing an interface and there are no tests using the interface at all.
There is a bug in the update process that can cause the phone to slow and drain battery like crazy.
So maybe it is that serious for a user with a 9 year history that used the term not once in the manner he is advocating against.
To add to that, I was shopping for a car last fall and did research to compare small suv type cars and I found Tesla’s to be surprisingly affordable - or another way to put it I was shocked by how expensive new cars are today in general. I was going to get a conventional vehicle but it wouldn’t have been that much less. With notably inferior performance and lacking the tech, some of which I find really useful.
I looked at other ev manufacturers in the USA and saw no one is competitive with Tesla on price and performance and ended up getting a model y. If I was someone that lived my life attempting to align my purchasing choices with my political identity I see how I could be discouraged from buying any ev in the USA at the present time.
I gotta add that when I bought the Tesla the price of BYD’s cheapest model, the seagull, was 12,500 at the lot in South American countries. If that model was available in the USA (thanks, auto industry lobbyists) I would have just bought that as a beater instead. But it isn’t. So I got the expensive but hopefully long term reliable more expensive thing.
My cousin in Europe drinks milk from one of his neighbors everyday. He does heat it first, I don't know how hot it gets and if it kills as much as the pasteurization process.
The benefit is you get the freshest milk possible less than a day old, from a cow you can visit and see that it is being treated well. And since its your neighbor you can ask what they feed the cow and say no if they are feeding them newspaper or other shit.
The downside of course is you have to live on or close to a farm, or in my cousin's case be in a country where its totally normal to have animals in your yard in the city. (City outskirts to be clear, 10 minute drive to the city center from his house if that.) I got on the roof once when I visited and saw over the wall his immediately next door neighbor's hogs.
About the risk: yeah its risky but humans have always drank raw milk until very recent times and still do in many parts of the world. You don't drink or sell milk from a sick cow or if the milk doesnt pass the smell test. Drinking raw milk is risky for most people because we live in packed cities and get our milk from factory dairy farms that could be hundreds of miles away or more, and the industry has evolved around the idea of let the animal be unclean, let the animal products be unclean, and then deal with sanitizing the dirty animal products. Milk gets aggressively pasteurized killing the bad bacteria but also the good. Meat (chicken mostly) gets bleached with chlorine. And there's color preserving injections all over to both make the meat heavier by volume and keep it from changing color through natural processes like oxidation. Have you ever seen natural pork be pink for more than a few hours after its been exposed to the air? The ham is a sham.
They are using the lightning network or some other "2nd layer" network that makes the transactions follow a different protocol that can include near instant settlement vs the 10 minutes per block and the payment only settles six blocks after it was written into the blockchain history. The protocol on the 2nd layer is different, but the units or tokens being transferred are indistinguishable from the tokens on the main blockchain, meaning the protocol for transferring to/from layer 1 to layer 2 do no allow for a coin to be minted out of thin air on the layer 2 protocol and then transferred to layer 1. It only allows for tokens minted on the main chain that were "transferred" to the 2nd layer to change hands between users (meaning addresses) on the 2nd layer.
There is a way to transfer a balance on the second layer back to the main chain, so as a merchant or user you can "withdraw" from the layer 2 to the main network whenever. There is a fee to transfer from the 1st layer to the second layer, and a fee to transfer back to the 1st layer, this is the regular fee that is imposed to do any transaction on the main chain since from the point of view of the bitcoin blockchain, "withdrawing" to a 2nd layer chain is just a special case of a regular transaction between two addresses on the main blockchain.
The very obvious downside that everyone knows and talks about is that the 2nd layer network is not at all decentralized, and as a user that "moves" tokens from the main layer to the second layer you are taking on the risk of the 2nd layer operator stealing all of your money.
Late (born in 79) gen-x here. I learned early on that I wouldn't have a reliable pension or retirement, I would not have the same level of upward mobility that previous generations would have, and that I had to think of my future and plan for it in a different way.
To have a basic skepticism or distrust of any promises made to me that came from either the government or any medium to large corporation. To save aggressively from an early age, and most importantly to educate myself on finance and finance related topics.
The most important thing I learned or made myself do is to get out of the mindset of spending more money to match the rise of income I experienced as I got older, basically to live below my means and evaluate really really hard if I need to buy the latest tech, or fashion, or transportation, or trendy food, or clubs, etc. etc. etc.
Also to have my credit card paid off in full each month every month. The only exception to that rule I've made in the last 20 years was when I bought a house and built up a balance I couldn't pay off right away.
To summarize, what I learned is to direct my life as much as possible so my future well being is, as much as possible, not reliant on the government being able to take care of me, or my job at Corp X or even small or medium business Y being a certain thing. Or that the skillset I had which was in demand in the job market would be in demand forever.
I completely understand the pessimism of generations after me, from my point of view they are facing the same thing but worse. The general situation is seemingly going to be harder for them than Gen-x.
(Disclaimer: I’m not trying to make an argument that there is a link between vaccines and autism, I’m trying to understand a research paper and its methodology and conclusions)
They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison. They looked at how many vaccinations each subject had and tabulated the total amount of aluminum they received (they have good records) in their vaccinations prior to age 2, and then looked for a correlation between higher amounts of aluminum adjutants and higher instances of all the conditions they reported on (the study does not focus on autism but many things, see figure 3 of the study)
There wasn’t a sizable aluminum free cohort because most children in Denmark got vaccinated for the data set they have to work with (figure 2). Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children? (I don’t know where in the world you would find that cohort except in countries that don’t have good healthcare systems which implies they don’t have solid tracking of health outcomes in general, or maybe the USA in the last 5-10 years.)
The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (figure 1, right column) before age 2. Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
So to my laymen’s mind it doesn’t seem like they in any way ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. At the very best, they saw no relationship with the amount of aluminum a child received before 2 and the rate of chronic disease (figure 1). The numbers correspond to “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s, but with the data they have the confidence interval is not small enough to be sure one way or the other.
But it does not seem to me that they proved what the article and submission title states. I would appreciate someone that is familiar with biomedical research that can elaborate on whether my conclusion is sound or faulty.
Also, as I understand it aluminum is one of about 5 or so adjuvants used in vaccines at the present time, so what about the other adjuvants?
-I don’t see how a lobby group in the USA has any influence over countries in the Middle East.
The USA has a bigger military than all the countries in the Middle East Combined. And uses it on the regular. (Israel also has a bigger military than all its neighbors, the only one that has a larger or comparable military is Iran, which is about 1000 miles away to the border.)
-I’ve been doing some research and it seems like half the countries in the Middle East marginalize or have completely expelled Palestinians.
Which ones? Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, three of the immediate neighbors of Israel, have 2.3million, 560k, and 480k registered palestinian refugees. Registered means being tracked by UN agency that tracks these things, its possible they missed a few hundred thousand or million.
There was a change of policy in these countries as well as in Gaza when it was noticed that palestinians that left as refugees have no legal route to going back to their country of origin, because Israel does not consider their claims valid and its 10x easier to keep them out of the country once they leave than it is to force them to leave.
The Gaza Strip itself was the host to some 1 million+ refugees prior to the outbreak of the war. That is 1 million people that used to have a home in Israel proper that now do not, and its the official policy of Israel that they can never return under any circumstances. It remains for the conflict to end to get an updated count with the new, lower number.
The countries in the middle east have collectively made the game theory decision that the best chance for Palestinians to gain real independence and be someday allowed to return to the land they lived in for centuries is to stop taking refugees. Its a heartbreakingly sad situation on many levels.
-If that’s the case, there’s a lot of complex and ugly history no one wants to get involved with.
It is likely uglier than you know. I encourage anyone that is interest to learn more of the history of events, from multiple sources. You might appreciate this interview with a Rabbi who opposes not just Zionism but the creation of Israel itself, from mainly a religious doctrinal point of view but also as a condemnation of what it has done so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhnIZTMM2-w
The main lobbying group in the USA in this area posted a tweet after the 2024 democratic primaries, to brag about how they achieved a 100% success rate in getting candidates they endorse to win the primary elections.
That is very well put. This should be added to the general list of fallacies in argument, and like the other ones (the slippery slope, hasty generalization, Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.) more general awareness should exist about these.
The current wave of anti-science, anti-logic, rejection of objective data, etc. is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. This is a subjective observation, maybe it has always been this way and I never paid attention because I was caught up in whatever I used to be caught up in.