GTFO with that “politics” bullshit. It stopped being a purely political difference when Trump made it about racism, sexism, and all other possible forms of bigotry. It stopped being about purely bigotry when he tried to stage a coup.

Above and beyond, you don’t know their life. Maybe they needed a life-saving abortion and their father gleefully cackled when that right was effectively removed in many states. Maybe they’re black and their father bragged about the shootings of black folks, they’re latin and he chortled over the deportation rhetoric, or they’re Muslim and he rubbed the travel bans in their face. Maybe they have/had long COVID and their father gave it to them because “it’s a hoax.” There are so many reasons for cutting MAGA idiots out of your life and Trump’s political policy is the least of them

Sure, there will be examples of problems in any field that has hundreds of thousands to millions of humans working in it. That doesn’t mean there’s a broad crisis, and it doesn’t mean that most research is faked or fallible. In your 2004 example, all of the data wasn’t faked, some images for publication were doctored. There’s been potential links between alzheimer’s and aBeta amyloids since at least 1991 (1), long before this paper that posited a specific aB variant as a causal target. Additionally, other Alzheimer’s causes and treatments are also under investigation, including gut microbiome studies since at leasg 2017 (2). Finally, drugs targeting aB proteins to remove brain plaques work in preclinical trials, indicating that the 2004 paper was at least on the right track even if they cheated to get their paper published. This showcases science working well: bad-faith actors behaved unethically, but the core parts of their work were replicated and found to be effective, so some groups followed that to clinical trials which are still ongoing, and others followed other leads for a more holistic understanding of the disease.

Also, I’d very much argue that human neurological diseases are both bleeding edge and niche, which inherently means that recognizing problems in studies will take more time than something that is cheaper or faster to test and validate, but problems will eventually be recognized as this one was.

1. Cras P, Kawai M, Lowery D, Gonzalez-DeWhitt P, Greenberg B, Perry G. Senile plaque neurites in Alzheimer disease accumulate amyloid precursor protein. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1991;88:7552–6.
2. Cattaneo, A. et al. Association of brain amyloidosis with pro-inflammatory gut bacterial taxa and peripheral inflammation markers in cognitively impaired elderly. Neurobiol. Aging 49, 60–68 (2017).

I wouldn’t call it a broad crisis, and it isn’t universal. More theoretical sciences or social sciences are more prone to it because the experiments are more expensive and you can’t really control the environment the way you can with e.g. mice or specific chemicals. But most biology, chemistry, etc that isn’t bleeding edge or incredibly niche will be validated dozens to hundreds of times as people build on the work and true retractions are rare

A pride flag pin is not political swag but also correlates very strongly to voting blue, and far-right nutjobs could run with that

No, the Republicans also don’t have the power to fix the system. That’s not their goal. Both parties have the power to completely gum up the works of the government, which is antithetical to fixing the system, but is perfectly acceptable if your goal is to weaken protections to allow a privileged few to gain more power through extragovernmental levers. If we entered a mirror world where the Democratic party were gunning to be a fascist dictatorship and the Republicans were gunning to stop them, but all voters retained their current alliances, not much would change long-term because there are enough people in both parties to obstruct and roadblock, unless the now-pro-civil-rights supreme court kept being radical but in a positive direction

*all new cars

Still a conspiracy if it aims to conspire, if there are receipts it ceases to be a theory and becomes just a true conspiracy

We can trust him to look out for himself as he sees it, not necessarily rationally. And also not to plan long-term if he needs a cash infusion now. Will be interesting (I guess) to see which pressure wins out

Additionally, the raised and blunt hood height makes a full-body impact with no force dissipation much more likely, particularly for shorter people, where a more traditional hood shape allows a struck pedestrian to roll over the top and avert some of the force of the strike

It works great for notes, it’s not great for recording data because if it mishears me/I mumble once an entire set of 500+ observations can be frame shifted away from their identifiers and I have to redo it

Gesture typing is definitely faster, but I find it much less accurate and requires vision. My old sliding phone I could write whole essays in my hoodie pocket while walking home with few to no typos, which was a niche use-case for sure but an existing one. I work outside a fair amount and would love having that back for notetaking in the field

It sounds like British Irish

On Linux at least low enough power chargers will get rejected and won’t do anything. Idk what the cutoff is but USB a phone chargers won’t work.

This premise gets thrown around a lot but I actually disagree. “Every time people turn out” is always also thrown in there like some arbitrary thing–when I think the past several election cycles have shown that when there are younger, more progress candidates who make it past the primaries turnout shoots up. Courting the 3% uninformed flip-floppers by moving right is a losing strategy when you could be motivating your own party to turn out by moving left and driving turnout up. There’s no money in that though, so dumb centrists get wooed

if her resume is anything like any of the well-made mid-career resumes I’ve seen then she’s probably left off a lot of experiences, and she can simply handwaved it with a line like “I didn’t list X law clerk internship or y legal work at a corporation either because they aren’t as relevant as the jobs I chose to list” and move on

Look, I’m with you most of the way in theory, but a lot of rural areas don’t have plumbing and drinking water from public utilities, they have their own septic and water wells. I know it’s pedantic but a lot of parts of the world are so rural that it probably doesn’t make sense to have fully public transport, like it doesn’t make sense to have centralized water. The scope needs to be great systems within towns and cities and lots of park and ride hubs around the perimeter

It’s more like the 30% who always vote R will vote for whoever, the 30% who always vote D will vote for whoever. Kamala’s task is to get the 1-2% independents who always vote, yes, but also convince as many of the 40% who never bother showing up as possible to actually show up like some have started to in the last elections where reproductive healthcare/etc have been on the line. If she can motivate people for herself and simultaneously underscore that trump is an octogenarian with dreams of fascism and Project 2025 is what he would do, I think we’ll have a landslide. That’s a big if though.

I’ve been on the pixel A train the past few years, and wait until they offer me >$300 for a trade in. I got a 3A for I think ~$300 or so in 2020, and a 6A for $150 in 2022. Almost jumped to an 8a which would have been like $200 I think but there’s no reason to really besides shiny new toy so I’m holding out for another year or two in hopes a 4a-style size reduction comes again

It looks like you’re planning on using windows, in which case I would strongly caution against only 8 GB ram. I have a 4 year old windows laptop with 8 GB RAM, and unless you do a lot to optimize things/kill processes it quickly becomes slow to a very frustrating point. The last thing you want is to open a new tab to look up something the professor said while running a note taking app and have the whole thing freeze for a few minutes and not be able to take notes. RAM is relatively cheap, so I would bit the bullet and either get 16 GB or run Linux.

A lot of advanced analytical tools in biotech at least are developed to be compute cluster compatible, and thus work best on unix-like CLI, e.g. Linux (or Mac with a bit of tinkering)