I would also like to note the evidence about employee efficiency being decreased from them being given vacations is simply not there, in the longterm vacations improve the performance of employees, thus taking them away and overworking employees is done out of spiritual and ideological belief not out of any actual pursuit of efficiency.

This ideology is deranged and unsupported by the science, even if you don’t care about the dumpster ethics of it, which you also should too.

It’s like crime or homelessness- the best thing to do is to give people homes and actually rehabilitate them, respectively, but we don’t do those because they’re not punitive enough.

Give it twenty minutes

They’re accelerating the spread of major foodborne diseases, generally, actually.

It’s good to get the ball rolling on scientific research though.

It’s hard for me to know whether I am dealing with people who are genuinely misunderstanding my arguments, or if they are simply trying to cast doubt on my conclusions by pretending to misunderstand how I arrived at them.

That’s hard for me too, but if you start out by assuming both, you’re going to offend people.

I’m trying to do you a favor by telling you. I’m no longer trying to discuss the original thing at all, because I don’t feel like you’re going to engage well with the conversation. I get the sense that you’ll continue to try and cover all your bases with one comment, starting off seemingly genuine and then ending with passive aggression.

I will make better use of my time going forward, so I won’t be engaging further, but I hope you realize that I have been genuine with you.

The tone switch makes it obvious that the initial comment wasn’t genuine, which makes me feel like I’m being sold something.

You seem to be confused about how my two arms point relates to the rest of my comment. It is somewhat confusing tbf, especially if you have a reason to misinterpret it in a specific way.

…

It has nothing to do with making sweeping claims about all 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet, it has to do with probability and risk, and I think deep down you probably already knew that.

Well, hey! That seems ideologically consistent and all, but the swing in angle hits me as creepy, so sorry.

This is more like asserting that humans are generally otherkin, proportionally. There are 1.5 billion Muslims.

So we’re basically all fucked, compared to what we’ve seen so far. I definitely ate more sugar as a young child than my grandmother, born just before WWI. My parents might have had more than me (though almost certainly not), but lots of places still had food rations for much of the baby boomers’ early childhood.

Solar energy is called “renewable” but ultimately the sun will burn out. What then?

I can’t speak to physics, but have you read The Last Question?

You should read the article.

Pancreatic cancer forms on and is generally preceded by a series of pancreatic lesions, and the participants were only people with a history of medically concerning pancreatic lesions and a genetic predisposition to pancreatic cancer.

It’s also a cure- that was how it was (so far successfully) first tested, and they’re only now testing it as a vaccine.

Holy shit that’s dystopian. I can’t watch a video right now, but does anyone have the name of the bill that passed or something to reference to look this up in text?

My dad’s MAGA, and I live in Germany. He was initially very pro Ukraine, then fox news got to him and he supported Russia (quietly) for a while. Recently he’s begun supporting Ukraine again.

He loves me and doesn’t want the war to spill over into central/western Europe because of me, so he’s not representative of all of MAGA, but he tends to just be quiet about things when he disagrees with the party line. The fact that he made a joke recently about how fucked Russia would be if they somehow managed to push through Ukraine and attacked Poland is a small pinprick of hope that MAGA is now at least divided about Russia.

It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.

I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).

My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.

That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.

Averin grew up in an orphanage in eastern Siberia until he was taken into foster care aged 11. By the time he was recruited into the army he was in his final year at the Buryat Republican Technical School of Construction.

Early in April, he called his foster mother to say he was being sent somewhere “with no [phone] signal”, and that she should not worry.

Initially he said he had gone away to earn money at Wildberries, a Russian online retailer, and she was shocked to find out he had signed a military contract and had completed training as a drone operator.

“He told me: ‘Nothing will happen to me, everything will be fine.’”

A week later, on 8 April, she learned he had been killed in a mortar strike near Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

I go back and forth with sympathy for the soldiers themselves (it gets harder to feel nothing for a dumb, scared 18 year old who signed up for something they didn’t understand, the further from 18 I get), but what a horrible thing for that foster mother. She must have wanted to have a child to take care of for so long, and she thought he was safe as a student and about to become qualified for a good job that supports his community, but he’s just suddenly gone.

It took a really big mustache to unify Germany.

I read through many of these and felt a little hope, but this one perfectly captured the bleakness I worry is too common in Russia:

Sergei

Moscow

I don’t care anymore. The world has shrunk to the size of my family. Didn’t get hit today — great. We hope it won’t hit us tomorrow. No regret, no compassion, no reflection, not after listening to the insane crap about a “righteous war” from the people around me.

My behavior is like a cockroach’s: survive and keep my family alive. Keep my head down, don’t stick my neck out. Heroism is a sign of desperation, when normal human principles stop working. And right now, heroism — like criticizing the authorities or sabotage — is a road to nowhere.

They killed my emotions, killed my hopes, killed my joy. And it wasn’t only, or even mainly, the authorities that did it. It was also the wretched mindset of Russian citizens, who cling in a frenzy to ideas of being chosen, of being unique, of some God-given historical role. So you live for the handful of people right next to you.

Burn in hell, all of you.

I don’t know if this is actually a representative perspective or just confirms my bias, but I worry too many Russians will just keep their heads down and worry about their own families instead of taking the risk to trust each other to stand together against their government.

Do only two pumps work or would they just prefer to let frustration and impatience thin the crowd at the cost of actually wasting gas (all those idling cars)?

Right, but it’s not a choice, it’s mandatory conscription. It’s hard to find sources, but this makes it seem like it’s not easy in metropolitan areas, but it’s way, way more difficult in rural areas.

Isn’t there a draft? Why weren’t the missing able bodied men a big enough sign? Like, I get that she’s a woman, but surely she has a father, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, or romantic partners who have either disappeared or come back broken, no?

Or is it easy for cosmopolitan Russians to get exempted from the draft?

Edit: It’s hard to find sources, but this makes it seem like it’s not easy in metropolitan areas, but it’s way, way more difficult in rural areas.

Lots of ways