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Quantumfreakonomics
10hr ago
For one thing, the winds at high altitude pretty much always blow from West to East in the mid lattitudes, posing issues if you're Russia in this scenario.
For another, I doubt that big slow balloons are that hard to shoot down, even at 70k feet. Modern multirole fighter planes can get to 55k-60k, and specialized interceptors can get to 80k. You wouldn't need a big fancy missile to get from 60k feet to 70k feet. You might even be able to hit it with an autocannon.
anti_dan
10hr ago
Poors shoplifting for personal consumption happens (particularly for booze) but isn't what is closing grocery stores.
I agree. Tide pods I know are big, as is the alcohol in resale.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Go ahead and start listing them off.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
No. The pope is on summer vacation and unlikely to have been the decision maker on this one, even if it bears his name.
Zephyr
10hr ago
The way you write Hanania reminds me of Sailer’s law of female journalists (https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailers-law-of-female-journalism/) - very low value human capital of him to succumb to the same pressures.
cjet79
10hr ago
As the other commentor pointed out even the nearby tragedy doesn't have any kind of particular flavor. The bully that committed suicide is something I already mentioned.
The other nearby tragedies don't have a flavor other than "random".
A classmate killed on her way to SATs by a truck driver running a red light.
An older swim team friend dying in a car accident.
A swim team coach dying of a sudden heart attack on deck at a swim meet.
A student a few years older burned himself alive outside the school due to bullying.
A friend in his mid thirties dying of a sudden heart attack.
A cousin losing their boyfriend to cancer.
Tragedy has been around, but it's not very violent. And it's definitely not anyone's fault.
I have heard of the civilizational fraying, but I haven't really personally seen it. I don't even disbelieve you or anything. It's just accepting some of your conclusions or policy advice would run heavily counter to my own personal experiences. I don't even have a good way of resolving this dissonance. 5 years ago pre COVID I might have suggested trusting expert opinion and statistics on the topic. Now I'm pretty doubtful on the usefulness of that approach.
anti_dan
10hr ago
That is a fair point. Meat still is harder to fence than booze, and does need to be kept fresh.
anti_dan
10hr ago
The WSJ is going to have a copy of the letter they can carbon date to 2003? Anything less than that with a good COC is useless. Dozens of people have already made convincing hoaxes using the WSJ's piece as source material.
Quantumfreakonomics
10hr ago
My understanding is that the Vatican has been granting exemptions quite freely when the local bishop asks nicely, even under Francis. As far as I can tell, there are no recognized TLM society chapels within 200 miles of San Angelo, so it would be well within the current guidance to grant an exeption.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
It’s not uncommon for people to say “I’m pro-choice, not pro-abortion.” If you are one of those folks or know someone who is, we know your heart is in the right place. But this framing is hurtful to people who’ve had abortions and those who might need abortions in the future. It implies that abortion isn’t a moral good and that while legal abortions are needed, they are somehow bad.
...wow, that's a new one to me. In my experience prior to now, very few activists would say that abortions are actively good. The line I usually heard was indeed that abortions, while unpleasant or even tragic, are sometimes necessary, and that the best person to decide whether or not one is necessary is the woman considering one. That seemed like a more sensible approach if only because there are a great many people who have moral qualms or concerns around abortion who can be persuaded into accepting it sometimes as a lesser evil, and those are the people that pro-choice and pro-life movements fight to sway to their side.
But I'm probably behind the times here. I haven't been following this area closely over the last few years.
cjet79
11hr ago
Yeah that's a good description. Tragedy hasn't impacted me or the people around me.
clo
11hr ago
It just comes down to appreciating the small things.
I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I've had the pleasure to observe some of the senior programmers at work who are deeply in the hole and have hundreds of dollars worth of specialized coffee equipment at the office just for the sake of getting a slightly better cup.
This strikes me as insanity, but over time I've learned to appreciate both the ritual that they go through and also the massive chain of events that led to that equipment being developed, built, procured, the coffee being sourced, grown, packaged - all of it.
Working in logistics has given me a deep appreciation for how the supply chain works at all, given how much of a mess it frequently is. All for the sake of delivering these small miracles we don't even think about.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
Wanderer got there first, I think.
Lower-case 'black lives matter' is a mother statement. Nobody's going to argue that the lives of black people don't matter except the most egregious and nihilistic of racists. The phrase 'black lives matter' is even entirely consistent with believing that black lives are worth less than white lives - if they matter any amount above zero, the statement is true.
Capital-letter 'Black Lives Matter' refers to a movement that makes specific, potentially false claims around police violence, structural racism, and so on. I fully sympathise with not wanting to endorse those claims, since many of them are false. But I don't see how naming the movement constitutes endorsing it, no more than saying the words 'Human Rights Campaign' implies that I agree with the specific, potentially false claims made by the HRC.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11hr ago
Claude tells me it's basically 'self-sustaining fusion reactor +++' since you have hundreds of tonnes of high-temperature, enriched mercury and lithium in there too somehow being restrained by a material under intense neutron bombardment. It needs months and years of sustained neutron production to work.
Probably easier to do the 'we made like 6 atoms of gold in a particle accelerator' thing in a lab.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine)
I think this still counts as things happening to you "personally". A series of mishaps and disasters affected your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors, and this gave you a subjective sense that civilization was falling apart blah blah blah. @cjet79 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I parsed "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy" as very much including "my friends and relatives and neighbors have rarely if ever suffered life-ruining events of the kind you described as having affected your family, neighbors, etc.".
SnapDragon
11hr ago
I'm reminded of the Obamacare debacle, which still fills me with rage. People (correctly) pointed out that women pay more for health insurance, and (incorrectly) said that this was an unfair "woman tax". It was politically brilliant, reframing the fact that women live longer as a societal injustice - against women! And it was 100% successful; Obamacare made gender-based pricing illegal, and now every man in the country is subsidizing the health care of every woman in the country. Forever.
birb_cromble
11hr ago
Southerners who didn't care about good food.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
Rape is more sensitive, I guess.
Especially with regards to CSA, it definitely leads to a lack of clarity at times. If someone tells me "oh, Alice was abused as a child" it can be pretty tricky to decipher if they're telling me her parents used to beat her, or that she was groomed by a creepy uncle - even when I am actually intended to take the hint by the speaker (as distinct from them deliberately obscuring the facts to protect Alice's privacy).
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
11hr ago
IIRC, the basis for the argument that high fructose corn syrup being worse than cane sugar comes down to fructose needing to be converted to glucose in the liver, as opposed to glucose, which does not. Sucrose is essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose, so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking. Proponents allege that too much HFCS in the diet leads to more visceral fat and even metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The counterargument is that the difference in metabolic pathways is relatively minor, that if caloric sweeteners are that much a part of any diet, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can result, and that the bigger issue is a diet heavy in processed foods in general.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
No_one
11hr ago
Maybe you should give it a try, no? I mean, same tribe, even vaguely similar social circle.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11hr ago
Yeah, I recall it was an explicit point among some pro-choicers to “own” the abortion activism in the aftermath of Dobbs. Maybe the larger ecosystem has rejected that take. But it was a thing at the time, and I respected the candor and straightforwardness of the view. I get that the point is “women should have the right to choose” and that it’s not “abortion is the greatest thing ever!” but the shift has been from “safe, legal, and rare” to “safe, legal, and none of your damn business how rare it is.” It’s more of a change in tone than a change in view point.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
I'd argue "passed away" is a more precise term than "died". "Passed away" means died peacefully. If I get a call that tells me my father passed away last night, I instantly parse it as: ah, he died in his sleep, guess age caught up with him at last. If the call instead tells me that my father died last night, I'm as likely to imagine that he had a car accident as anything else.
No_one
11hr ago
No, he's not wrong. They were generally older. The youngest girl ever mentioned was 12, and seeing how they were generally older, she probably looked older than she actually was.
Girls start puberty, on average, around 11 in late 20th century America. So, odds are, while this was obviously very wrong that she was not, biologically, a child.
Daily Mail is not the best sort of news outlet, but they are serving as additional confirmation that the birthday book exists and that the Trump letter is real. Also that Bill Clinton sent one as well. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14921905/Donald-Trump-sues-Wall-Street-Journal-MoS-reveals-Bill-Clinton-letter-Jeffrey-Epstein-birthday.html
Important parts
A lot of other people wrote letters
We don't know where the original book is at now.
The source says the book is real, the letters are real, but the evidence files themselves used contain facsimiles of them
This could be one of the funniest ways to confirm that the Trump letter is a real thing, a retaliatory leak against Clinton. Also suggesting that the Epstein files are a bit of a MAD situation going on with the parties and perhaps even other elites.
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