Mike Tyson once said “Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” There are things people would only say behind a keyboard.
It can be hard not to get upset over mean comments but I try to remember I have hundreds of pleasant Interactions with people daily and I shouldn’t put so much weight on the few negative interactions with random internet people.
Unfortunately the Jones Act means shipping from Hawaii to the continental US requires the use of a shipping vessel constructed in the US, flying the US flag, and entirely crewed by US citizens which makes the shipping costs expensive as fuck.
It’s the same outcome either way. You don’t have nukes and another country decides to nuke you? Your country doesn’t exist anymore! You do have nukes and another country decides to nukes you? Your country doesn’t exist anymore! What changes?
People say deterrence, but what is the deterrence? You built something that you’ll never use? What’s the point?? Oh you will use it? Great! You’ve decided there’s some event that is so bad you’d end the world if it happened. I’m not sure what event that is. Maybe you have one in mind? China attacks India? The world should surely be destroyed then! No? Too bad! You don’t get a say! China and India decide if humanity gets to continue! They definitely wouldn’t do that though.
They built their nukes to never use them. Which is the same as not having nukes, but having nukes is required so that nobody uses them, which is the same as never building them, but they need to be built so they won’t be used!
No. Nuclear weapons should not exist.
Kurzgesagt recently made a video on the nuclear arms race. The end of the race was when the guy who invented the hydrogen bomb invented a bomb that could destroy the entire planet. The bomb wouldn’t even need to be dropped onto your enemy. It could be built inside your own country and detonated any time at all to end humanity. He thought of it as the biggest deterrent to war. Nobody else did. Politicians and military leaders threw out the idea entirely. Why would anyone detonate a nuclear bomb inside their own country??
The size of that bomb pales in comparison to the size of all nuclear weapons in existence today. We built that bomb. It’s just not one giant bomb, but split into 12,000 parts and spread over the world. Is it any different? If you cannot justify building a nuclear weapon that would destroy your own country to destroy another, how can you justify building any nuclear weapons at all?
The action would have been done as vice-president, not president. Vice-presidents are held accountable. This is why Trump got in trouble for defamation of E. Jean Carroll.
He defamed her as president and called it an official act. The case was put on indefinite hold. Then he said the same things while he wasn’t president. A new case was brought against him and he was found liable. Then, Carroll’s lawyer asked the original case to be resumed arguing that Trump’s statements couldn’t be an official act of the president since he performed the same action while he wasn’t president. The courts agreed and resumed the case and he was found liable again.
The requirement for a steady paycheque is what keeps everyone working in terrible conditions. I’m lucky enough that I’ve always had a lot in savings and it has come in handy a few times. Twice I’ve walked off a job and never went back after failing to negotiate proper working conditions with the boss. Both times I burned through about $10,000 in savings while searching for a new job. Almost nobody has that much saved up. If they did, terrible bosses would lose employees on the regular.
This made me curious as to how many different legal systems there were. This wiki page has a global map of systems. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of variety. Most legal systems tend to be based on legislation (called civil law, originating in Rome), court rulings (called common law, originating in Britain), religious texts (called canon for christian, sharia for muslim, and halakha for jewish), or some mixture of those.
How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices
Wendover Productions has a decent video on John Deere’s market dominance. tl;dw It’s by cutthroat capitalism of course.
John Deere has bought out all their competitors and continues to do so. Every single breakthrough in farming equipment technology in the last decade is owned by John Deere. As a farmer, you either choose to sign a one-sided contract with John Deere or you use outdated inefficient equipment that John Deere hasn’t purchased the patent rights to. Or, of course, you sell your farm all together. Large corporate farms don’t care much about the John Deere contract since they have the power to negotiate a better deal. A lot of small farmers have been making the choice to sell out.
Soon, all farming will be done by one megacorp, buying their seed from Monsanto, using John Deere equipment, and cashing in a ridiculously fat subsidy cheque from the government.
the Pope is infallible
Technically, the pope needs to explicitly invoke infallibility before making a statement if he wants it to be infallible. The last time this was done was 1950 to state Mary, mother of Jesus, had both her body and soul transported to heaven. Other statements are just the pope’s opinion and followers of the faith are allowed to disagree without being heretical.
We already had that. It’s called Azumanga Daioh.
We gotta convince the non-canadians this is how maple syrup is made
I remember an interview with a former NASA engineer that said NASA would never be able to do anything near what SpaceX (or any other private company) can do. The reason given is that SpaceX spent billions after billions on what were essentially very expensive fireworks until they finally achieved a breakthrough. A breakthrough that wasn’t a guarantee. Even Musk himself had said he would have eventually closed SpaceX if they hadn’t achieved something and it would have been a multi billion dollar failure. He, and everyone else really, got very lucky.
Imagine NASA asking taxpayers for another billion dollars after blowing up the last billion with no guarantee this next billion would produce anything but another explosion. How many times would the public foot that bill? Not even once. Not while people don’t have healthcare and homelessness and hunger exist. The government can’t justify it and that’s just how it is. The only way we get space travel, with our current system, is to hope someone with a lot of money is willing to bet it on a breakthrough. It sucks but the problem isn’t Musk, it’s the system that makes us reliant on billionaires for nice things.
It becomes false advertising when you prove them wrong in court. Few people want to do that so most ads are bullshit. Even if they do get proven wrong, the settlement money is typically peanuts to the impact their ads have on sales. Red Bull paid $13 million for their tagline of “red bull gives you wings” while making several billion a year.
I was a funeral director and got this question a lot.
That’s not how vikings had funerals. The only Norse who had that type of send off is Baldr, son of Odin, in Norse mythology. Real Norse were cremated or buried. Important people had huge burial mounds since they’d be buried with a lot of their possessions. In reality, if you burned a boat with a body on it, the result would be a charred decaying corpse floating back to land in a day or two. A ship doesn’t have enough wood to completly burn a body and bacteria in decaying dead bodies produce gas which causes dead bodies to float.
It is possible to “bury at sea” depending on the area. The Canadian government charges a significant amount for a permit to do so and it comes with a lot of conditions like a weighted and sealed casket and being dropped far enough from the shoreline. I’ve heard they make the process as difficult and costly as possible as a way to discourage the practice. However, there are no restrictions on scattering cremated remains at sea!
It’s honestly impressive how we went from “only nerds know tech” in gen x to “everyone knows tech” in millennials to “only nerds know tech” in gen z.
Bags of sand
Steven Hassan was a former member of the Moonies cult who obtained a PhD in psychology after being deprogrammed and has written books on the psychology of cult recruiting. Interestingly, he points out that the same tactics are often used by organizations that aren’t cults. I highly recommend reading one of his books!