partial_accumen

there’s a TON of hate/distrust for asexual people. “you are just ugly” “you just haven’t met the right person” “why are you celebrating that you don’t have sex? that’s weird” etc.

What kind of conversations are you having with people that would respond like this where they’re learning about how much sex or not-sex you’re having?

Fact:

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to European diplomats: “China cannot afford a Russian defeat in Ukraine”.

Supposition:

The reason? Beijing reportedly fears that a vanquished Russia would allow the United States to shift its entire strategic focus onto China, a fear which is probably not unfounded given US President Trump’s openly anti-China rhetoric and policies.

I fully support Ukraine, but I don’t agree with their guess at a reason for the statement from Minister Wang Yi. I’m thinking that China needs to cement the legitimacy of invading sovereign territories with ethnically similar populations so that China can get political cover when it wants to invade Taiwan. If China is successful in getting the world to accept some or all of Ukraine being held by Russia, then there will be no grounds for the world to oppose the invasion and capture of Taiwan by China.

“trump is the highest scoring individual in a number of areas. As an example, trump is the national all-time leader in being impeached as President.”

100% agree. The biggest overlooked benefit of immigrant culture is the mirror it offers us on our own practices and beliefs. When seeing what others do it gives us the chance to reaffirm that our actions are correct, or even more important, modify our actions for the better by adopting their view on something. We get to cherry pick the best parts of cultures around the world and discard bad practices that are perhaps “traditional” because we see our immigrants have a better approach. In the end of either we get the chance to be the best versions of ourselves with constant exposure to new ideas and ways of doing things.

Its not inherently bad, but when 15-20% of the countries population is below the poverty line,

By 15-20% you mean 11.1% (or possibly a bit higher)?

source

then yes, it is a very bad idea.

Further, your response sounds like its just to my rhetorical question of “is it?” without any recognition of the future policy you’re implying of banning paying for blood. Let say you get your way and paying for blood products in the USA is banned as it is in most other countries immediately. More than 70 percent of the entire world’s plasma used for plasma therapies is now gone. How many lives has your policy cost in the weeks and months from patients around the world going without these and dying? What is your plan to not only deal with aftermath of your policy, but create an alternative that would prevent future suffering and fatalities for scarce supplies?

The paper, which I co-authored with Stephen Semler, found that 54% of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 went to military contractors. The top five alone — Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion) – received $771 billion in Pentagon contracts over that five year period.

…

It would be one thing if all of the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on weapons contractors were being well spent in service of a better defense. But they are not.

This article loses credibility to me because the author cites these dollar figures spent on defense contractors, but then only talks about the weapon systems spending. “Contractors” from these companies and others (that the headline speaks to) are doing far more than building weapons. They’re running logistics systems coordinating shipping of supplies, they’re serving food in mess halls, and staffing lots of regular office jobs all over the military.

Contractors are hired for a couple reasons over using employees (or service members in this case). A contractor could be hired to service a general labor role or possibly a highly skilled specialty unrelated to war fighting. When staff reductions are needed, they are easy to stop that spending by firing the contractors.

I widely agree with the authors that cuts to VA benefits and many expensive weapon systems are bad use of the funds, but completely ignoring where a large chunk of the money is going and cherry picking the most decisive point to disingenuously support a headline does the good reasons for the argument a disservice.

There are troubles in Russo-Armenian relations, but there’s no details of Azerbaijan distancing themselves from Russia. If anyone knows more, please let me know.

There’s a good chunk of evidence of Azerbaijan distancing themselves from Russia. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Azerbaijan is equally embracing the West though. source

Paying people for donating parts of their body is obviously a recipe for disaster.

Is it? The alternative is domestic shortages. In fact, while most of the rest of the world doesn’t pay its donors, but it happily accepts blood products derived from US donors (paid or not).

“The US, with 5 percent of the world’s population, supplies more than 70 percent of the entire world’s plasma used for plasma therapies, and over 80 percent of ours. It is able to do this because in the US, donors are paid.”

“The only countries that don’t rely on American plasma donors are countries that also pay donors for plasma, including Germany, Austria, Czechia (the Czech Republic), and Hungary. The commercial plasma sector in these five countries together makes up more than 90 percent of the entire world’s supply of plasma for plasma therapies.”

source

Many countries have laws preventing offering money for blood donations. Canada, for example, is one. Knowing this, as an American, Canada is where I donate blood to help our Canadian brothers and sisters. I’ll say that this has been more difficult that I expected though. The Canadian Blood Services location in the border town I’m closest to in Ontario stopped taking whole blood donation and only does apheresis, which I’m not interested in. In Quebec, I had some troubles donating at Héma-Québec as the questionnaire required name and address, but only listed Canadian provinces. The helpful worker there put in her own address under my name so I could donate.

Superman isn’t just an immigrant. He’s a refugee when his home was destroyed by civil war. He came to the USA and made it better because he’s an immigrant.

This is heartwarming news that two nations which have been such bitter enemies are looking to a long term peaceful coexistence. This can only benefit both nations and their citizens.

I’ve burned many optical media discs, but never made use of packet writing.

Its old magic. Back when CD-R media was expensive ($20 USD per disc) “closing the disc” meant never writing to the disc again. If you only put a few megabytes on the disc might mean wasting a lot of money. Instead you could “close the session” which would cost you some capacity on the disc but let you write more to it in the future. Sometimes you would want to write the same filename (but a revised file) to the disc later, but because the file was already there, you’d need to “delete” the original before writing the new version. I think this is where this packet writing mode would come into play.

Within a few years Re-writable CD-R (CDR-W) came out and most of this wasn’t needed anymore. You could wipe the whole disc and start fresh.

I’d also think that birth rates are higher for those at lower incomes. Meaning that Medicaid recipients would also be the largest demographic of domestic births. So instead of incentivizing more births by ensuring solid healthcare for families that want to grow, the GOP kneecaps them and blames them for fewer births.

Services that aren’t traditionally profitable — such as women’s health and pediatric care — will be the hardest to sustain, Anderson said.

Yet the GOP continually claims that the falling birth rate is a huge problem that should be corrected then they pass the legislation that does this.

I don’t know if its possible, but when reading instead of focusing on the pronunciation of a word (because its not needed at that time when you’re just reading), I skip right to determining the meaning or the concept the word describes. The only time this gives me difficulty is when the author of what I’m reading is trying to do word play or make something rhyme. Since I don’t “hear” it, I don’t get those meanings. This is rare though. Other then that, this gives me the most comprehension when I’m reading in my non-native language.

TSA logic:

If you’re not willing to concede that a future state of people skipping beef meals does lower demand compared to those same people choosing to eat beef instead, then I don’t think we have any basis for continuing to have a discussion.

I couldn’t figure out what pedantry you’re trying to play at, nor any value for it. The best I could guess is you like dancing around on word play for some reason. That is not an interest of mine. Then I looked at your post history and see this behavior is entirely on-brand for you with your conversations with most folks. Feel free to reply to the void. I’m not interested in your games and won’t be interacting with you anymore.

some people are eating fewer beef meals

And for those people that eat fewer beef meals that does help. That is unambiguous. We’re talking about choices individuals can make for themselves to affect positive change. Those that eat fewer beef meals remove themselves as demand drivers of beef for those beef skipped meals. Were those individuals that would have eaten beef chose to eat beef for those future meals, then demand would be even higher with even higher climate impacts.

Do you disagree?

I was thinking this pullback wouldn’t have occurred until someone made an asbestos t-shirt and wore it on a tour of a government building, then casually mentioned the shirt materials on the way out. If the trump administration would have said asbestos was safe, then this wouldn’t have been a problem right? I’m glad cooler heads prevailed and asbestos ban is still on.

I’m sorry to see you go. If you change your mind, we’ll be here to welcome you back with open arms. Be safe.

it’s not theoretical. plenty of people (claim to) have cut back on beef, but production continues to rise.

Then you skipped the entire first half of my statement where I said “If people are eating fewer beef meals,” So sure, if you ignore half of what I said then you can say I am wrong. At that point what are we even talking about?