5,967 karma · joined April 24, 2014
Archer was quite explicit in his testimony that if anything, Hunter was basically scamming them with the illusion of access.
Which, well, is bad, but if anything, the situation reflects that Joe never let his son influence him to do anything corrupt, which turns it entirely into a bunch of TMZ level drama about Hunter's drug and prostitution habits.
And I still heard about the laptop plenty before the election. If that is a buried story, then plenty of widely published and discussed stories would be buried by your definition.
The amount of attention it has received has always been silly.
Meanwhile Trump and plenty of others have also practiced extremely poor email hygiene using non-official emails for all sorts of stuff. You don't hear about that from the Left because, well, there's all sorts of far more concerning shit happening.
Then, on the other hand, there's staggeringly large and previously unprecedented levels of corruption with this administration. We've never seen anything remotely like it, unless your argument is just that the Democrats are just vastly more competent at hiding it, despite constantly having all sorts of shit leak and just generally being totally incompetent at managing the party itself.
But if you don't understand the difference between the Hillary email situation and the staggering amount of blatantly illegal and massively corrupt things coming out of the Trump administration basically every single day, I don't know that there's any level of proof or any argument that could be made to change your mind.
I've not done any real research here - it didn't seem odd to me that I could see them, so I haven't done any investigation at all here until these comments.
But even if it is true and we do need light, it does need to be stark white LEDs shining with huge intensity while unshielded.
Shielding prevents light from going directly into useless places for your purpose (e.g. up into the air, when you are trying to secure the parking lot or road or whatever) and polluting things. Not using bright white LEDs helps reduce the spectrum usage and also is just better for human night vision on top of being better for light pollution.
If an area is not basically universally lit, using stark bright lights to light what you can see actually reduces the amount you can see at night in total - those dark spots that under better (not brighter!) lighting would be able for you to look into and see end up becoming too dark because your eyes have had to adjust to expose for much brighter lighting.
So even if the premise is true - and it might not be - there are still huge huge huge improvements to be made on how it is implemented in most of the world.
If you go talk to professional astronomers about this, they're pretty practical, and thankfully, they can be. The single biggest improvement we can make is shielding the directionality of the lights - and not using harsh bright white lights. Thankfully, doing both of these actually improves the usability for the lights for their intended purposes.
Down at the Macdonald Observatory in Ft. Davis they have worked with surrounding cities, industrial compounds, etc., to get light pollution down. I was watching a presentation they gave on the subject and a large industrial complex moved from fairly un-targeted bright white floodlights to the more yellow/amber lights that shielded upwards reflection - the peak brightness was lower, but it covered things much more evenly, didn't impact your night vision as much when working in it, which then kept darker spots from being pitch black holes like they were with the bright white floodlights. They improved safety for their workers - measurably! - and significantly reduced the amount of light being polluted back up into the sky.
And no, the loss of dark skies is a real issue. The article points out multiple issues not even related to human enjoyment of dark skies, but literally impacting our ecosystems. These are real and measured and not debated. If you are going to accuse this of being clickbait, perhaps engage with the actual points in the article and point out how they aren't actually of concern and why?
The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.
The precedent, if anything, is that we will tolerate people upending the whole public discourse and portions of the government for years over nonsense that never had any evidence of anything occurring on a level that would impact the elections.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent the entire administration trying to restrict the ability for demographics that won't vote for him from being able to vote. Openly. Sometimes honestly, but mostly also blaming all of it on the election he lost and claiming it's to stop the voter fraud that never actually occurred.
The precedent that was set is that questioning the election can become dogma for a political party no matter if there is absolutely zero evidence of what they are saying happened.
Now obviously, hell is more likely than a utopia, but this is the sort of advancement that would be required for us to reach that point. Something has to do the work.
But let's say you invested in the NASDAQ at it's peak during the bubble - late 2010s you're whole, inflation adjusted. Obviously, not ideal, but a decade and a half isn't the worst turnaround to make your money back if you just sit. Lots of trades that have gone far, far, far worse.
Smartphones overtook regular cell phones ~2013-2014 as the majority of owned cell phones in the US.
But the NASDAQ started on clear trajectory up and up since 08, several years before smartphones became big.
Smartphones accelerated it, but obviously the internet was going to keep growing and growing and everyone could see where it was heading well before smartphones. A huge amount of the value generated by the internet is on the business side. The amount of productivity from making it basically frictionless to collaborate from anywhere in the world is hard to understate.
It is exactly as dumb as you are fearing.
My comment is almost entirely about the court of public opinion side of things, though, not what happens in the courts themselves - because the topic is about a list as an alternative to the prosecution of these people.
But yes, if we could actually make going to the police an effective, safe, and as painless as can be process for the victims, it would solve a whole whole lot of this, and we really could go 'well why are you putting it on a list instead of going to the police and getting the scumbag put behind bars,' whereas there's a billion and a half legitimate reasons someone might not want to go to the police today.
... but yes it's still weird from an objective standpoint and only makes sense when you insert yourself into the bizzaro world bubble of SV.
Sure. But there's a variety of tones discussing this - there are some that are quite expressly political in nature of a certain bent, and those I would be skeptical of. There's more than one comment in here that gives me the ick. But that's not everyone, and lumping them in together isn't productive.
> And given how abysmally low the rate of false allegations is maybe we should all do a bit better and stop running interference for our oligarch class, especially since sexual impropriety seems to be how they operate in a lot of domains, not just with adult women.
How low do you think the rate is? Because its' hard to pin down, but ~10% seems to be a pretty defensible number based on the data we do have. That's definitely a minority, but 10% is enough that I am going to consider it every time. If 1 out of 10 times I lit my stove it would explode if not examined, I am still checking my stove every single time I use it.
I don't disagree that we have a lot of sick fuck oligarchs. I don't disagree that sexual assault is one of the things the ultra rich and powerful turn to for a variety of reasons.
But a rational position is a rational position. I'm not going to abandon it because some people will misuse it to cast aspersions on people. I don't think women are inherently more moral than men, and we have many many many examples of men using deception to harm others for their own advantage. I don't think women are incapable of doing the same.
I would also never suggest that the default is to assume every accusation is a lie. My general assumption is that any given accusation is probably true, but that if you're going to have an opinion on which way the outcome is, it's best to have as informed of an opinion as you can, rather than just assuming anything one way or the other. And in a court of law, presumed innocent, because that's a whole different thing than public opinion.
But sexual assault is the one area that is almost always taking two parties at their word, and very very frequently, the only court is the court of public opinion. That makes it rife for abuse in both directions - people doing it believing they'll get away with it because it comes down to their word vs. someone else's if it ever even comes out, since so few people go to the police, and people know they can lob an accusation out there and do a lot of damage without having to prove anything.
I think the former happens far far more than the latter, but I'm also not going to wonder why people discuss the latter - it's real, and it happens. People discuss getting attacked by sharks whenever sharks come up, too, even though that's almost certainly not going to be something they need to worry about, either.
This sort of list is exactly the sort of place where those false accusations can be really easily inserted with minimal vetting. I'd also bet it is an almost entirely accurate list.
All these things can be true at once.
As for Japan, uh, I love Japan, but you have a.... very interesting... view of it. No litter? Walk off the main streets, go down some back alleys. Tokyo is a big city. Japanese people aren't so inhuman compared to the rest of the world as to be perfect. Hell, go have some great craft beer at the Mikkeller bar in Shibuya or literally anything down one of those alleys. You'll find trash, you'll find garbage sitting out, you'll see rats. New Yorkers will stop feeling so claustrophobically clean and start feeling at home.
You're right about DEI, but it's also one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world, the poor treatment of women in the workforce for so long directly lead to a backlash that has precipitated and massively contributed their birth rate issues, and racism against people of Korean descent is still massive.
And the entire salaryman system is literally a "the vast majority of you will get promoted in near lockstep for time served" celebration of mediocrity.
Japan is a wonderful country. There's plenty of things they do better than anyone else. There's plenty of things they are awful at or about, too. Go look at their legal system - they have an absurd conviction rate of nearly 100%. And it's not because they're doing that much better of a job investigating, or having better prosecution, or only charge people they've got definitive proof. And there's a million things they are just as bad at.
Korea is just a perfect counterexample because they also are huge on accountability and personal responsibility, the cleanliness level is similar to Japan, they don't have DEI, and they celebrate mediocrity far less than Japan does.... and yet, still getting fat.
I can't explain Japan. But the explanations people give always have plenty of counterexamples.
If other countries avoid getting as fat as America was at her fattest, it will be because of GLP-1 medications, not because they are morally superior with a better work ethic.
They used the software in a way that complied with the license. When the license changed to no longer suit them for future releases, they forked from the original license.
Remove the names here, and in context, every single person familiar with open source projects and licensing would think this is a nonissue. They used the software as the license was intended, and exercised the rights given to them by that license. That freedom to fork if they don't like where the project is going, or things change and the project is no longer viable for them with the new license, is one of the key freedoms enshrined in the whole FOSS movement.
Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.
In general? Yes. For this specific thing? We haven't even really shown the effects matter for humans.
> If this is caused by the weight loss, it is a little disappointing that public health didn't act quicker - lots of people have been overweight for a century now, so literally 10's of millions of people could have been saved from dementia had action been taken 100 years ago.
Public health has been banging the drum on obesity for decades now. But humans on the whole aren't built to be able to resist hyper palatable calorie dense cheap foods.
There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...
"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.
But go look at the conviction rate in Japan - it's not because their police are just so much better than ours that they just never get the wrong person. I would never argue for the Japanese legal and police system in America.
5 years studies show minimal or no benefit for people in low-risk groups. High-risk groups see significant benefit Follow up/longer term studies show increased benefit in low-risk groups but obviously not matching the high risk groups.
If your LDL is in the 80s, you are almost certainly progressing plaque buildup regardless of all other factors. It won't be particularly fast in most people, maybe not even enough to matter over your lifespan unless you have other risk factors. If everything is favorable, you might see a halt or slow regression in the 70s, but this is like perfect storm levels of factors.
Most people need to be below 60 to start see soft plaque begin to retreat, with under 55 being the general target for high-risk individuals that need regression.
Your endo is right that basically no one gets there without some form of medication. It sucks, but it's also reality.
> my dentist, who also has a bit of a fixation on cholesterol on a personal level and is educated on the matter, has said that a heart calcium scan is the best way to determine what someone's target cholesterol number should actually be, and that it should not be the same from person to person.
Your dentist is an idiot and very much obviously not educated on the matter and should stick to teeth. CAC is a huge trailing indicator because it shows only calcified plaque. Plaque exists and blocks arteries long before it is calcified. 5+ years. People regularly have massive arterial soft plaque buildup with minimal or 0 calcium scores. And soft plaque is almost always the part that ruptures and breaks away and you throw a clot resulting in a heart attack or stroke.
A CCTA will let you see soft plaque which could potentially help give you a better understanding of just how aggressive you need to be... But the problem there is that the target for everyone should still be keeping their LDL as lower than we have been targeting for years. And if they have other atherogenic particle load, like high Lp(a), then that numbers needs to be commensurately lower to account for the combined load.
I'm not telling you to go on statins. I'm not your doctor. I'm not a doctor at all. But I do have risk factors that require I pay careful attention to this sort of thing, and I spend a lot of time reading research here because I like being alive and want to stay alive in a generally healthy state for as long as I can. And if you are the same, then, well, I would suggest listening to your doctors. They're telling you to get your LDL to that level because they think it will improve your health outcomes, and the vast, huge, overwhelming majority of research over the past decades points towards lowering LDL as being hugely important for improving ASCVD outcomes in at-risk populations across a wide variety of study types, including MR genetic studies looking at health outcomes in people that effectively do not produce LDL in their liver (in fact these studies are what really inspired the class of medicine in the article to begin with) and they basically just don't die of ASCVD. You have other options besides statins, too. Ezetimibe. These new inhibitors - hopefully the small molecule version will be more accessible than the MAB version.
Another is that they help stabilize plaque - by calcifying it. Which sounds like a bad thing, until you realize some of the greatest risks here come from plaque breaking off, which soft plaque is way more likely to do. Calcified plaque restricts bloodflow, but doesn't throw bits of it off to cause even bigger issues.
If anything, the data we have is suggesting we've gotten wrong what the upper limits should be for what is considered OK.
https://www.lipidjournal.com/article/S1933-2874(25)00317-4/f...