What I'm saying is that when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians on October 7th in such a brutal way, then I would fully expect Israel to completely lose their shit and flatten Gaza to make sure it can't happen again, and that's what they're doing. Given that the attack was funded by Iran, I can only assume this is the reaction that Iran was trying to create, since it makes Israel look bad. Mission accomplished. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are in the right here. It's just two groups fighting for their survival and fighting over a really shitty piece of land. It looks to me like a chihuahua picking a fight with a doberman over a bone. Do I care? Not much. Do I think the chihuahua is stupid? Yep.

There was one overarching issue that a majority of swing voters cared about: wages and cost of living. And immigration is perceived to be a big part of that (lower income people believe that immigration pushes their wages down, and that it pushes rents upwards in their neighborhoods). Harris' portfolio under Biden was immigration, and people weren't happy with the progress. There's also the fact that Biden has a bit of credibility with this group because he comes from a working class neighborhood, but Harris doesn't. She doubled down on the abortion issue, and while that had some traction, it took second place in most people's minds to wages and cost of living. That's why she polled well among people who live in gated communities or on college campuses, but nowhere else. She wasn't a good choice for the Democrats to run.

I saw the bodycams of the Hamas fighters who went into Israeli homes and slaughtered family members in front of each other, and then called their mothers to brag about what they'd done. I don't "support" either side or what they're doing. But I will never, ever, have sympathy for Hamas and the population that chose them as their leaders. Oh, and the "Gays for Palestine" signs were hilarious. Do you know what they do to gay people in Gaza? Honestly, you have no credibility.

The universities are hardly blameless in this. After their disgraceful testimony in the House, they can hardly claim to just be supporting free speech. You can't reprimand someone for perceived microaggressions against a black student and then turn a blind eye to someone threatening extermination to Jewish people. The universities lost all credibility.

But there's also something more fundamentally wrong with research. Have you ever listened to academics themselves talking about how science works in universities now? There are serious problems, such as most published academic research being non-reproducible, and a focus on quantity over quality of research papers. Here's a good example of what they're talking about.

What's wrong with just increasing the ticket price to generate enough revenue to pay for the improvements? Wouldn't those riders be the ones to benefit the most from trains being on-time?

The racists definitely voted for Trump. But that's a minority, and they voted Republican in pretty much every election for a few decades. And Americans actually score lower on measures of racism than most places in the world.

There are several reasons why the majority of voters picked Trump, and if you think it's all about racism, then you're deluding yourself. I say this because a lot of the reasons people voted for him were reasons that, until recently, would have made them vote Democrat. There's a sizable group of people who voted Obama, and then wanted to vote Sanders, and then voted Trump. Until he ran, Trump was a life-long Democrat. He's even on record as being pro-choice.

If you actually talked to people, the two main issues that people voted on were cost of living and wages. The former is related to inflation, and is complicated because it involves things like demographics and geopolitics (and bird flu). The latter has to do with immigration. If you're a business owner, then you want high immigration because it both pushes down the cost of one of your main inputs (labor) and it just creates a bigger economy. Also, if you're a successful business owner, then you can probably avoid most of the social problems caused by rapid immigration by simply living in a gated community. On the other hand, if you're an unskilled worker, then immigrants compete directly with you for jobs, and they live in your neighborhoods, which means they push up rent costs. That's why we saw record number of black and hispanic voters actually vote Trump this time. If you poll a legal immigrant, you'll find they're actually not very pro-immigration. It's not in their economic best interest.

Democrats used to be the party of the working class. They were always pro-protectionism (i.e. pro-tariffs) and anti-immigration because that's what the labor component of their party demanded. But during globalization (1990's and 2000's) the party stopped prioritizing these ideas, and that alienated the labor groups within their ranks. That is, until Bernie Sanders came along. But the party wouldn't let him win the nomination (this gets into things like super-delegates, etc., which is coincidentally why Trump ran for the nomination of the Republican party instead of the Democratic party.)

This is more than just a US phenomenon. Even the Liberal party in Canada recently drastically cut back on the immigration rate in Canada because it was no longer politically tenable. And if you follow the politics in the UK (the farmers) and Germany (AfG) you'll notice it has a lot to do with opposing immigration. Some of it is certainly racism, but racism alone won't win you elections. You know what matters more to people than racism? Money in their wallet. "It's the economy, stupid." And until the Democrats learn that lesson again, they can't win.

What you're talking about is called "the myth of average." I applaud the designers for at least taking a first step into ergonomics, even if it was a failure. That early research then led to modern ergonomics, where we design everything for the middle 95% of the population and then create accommodations for the remaining 5%. You'll often hear people mis-use this story now, and say "that means literally nobody is average." There's no stick that's precisely one meter long either. But the point is that humans generally fall within a predictable range, and you can design things with the typical (95%) range of humans in mind, and we do it all the time. If we didn't, then how the heck do we drive cars? And we can make efforts to include the other 5%, which we also do all the time. Except left-handed people, apparently.

I mentor a bunch of high school students on a robotics team. One thing I've noticed, particularly post-COVID, is that the students have a tendency to stand around and tell each other their diagnoses, and each one gets some attention for it from their peers. If you're the only one in the group who doesn't have a diagnosis (even a self-diagnosis) then you can either stand there and be quiet (and watch while everyone else gets attention), or you can say you're "just normal" (which kind of comes off like an a-hole and gets you labeled an able-ist), or you can just say you're neurodivergent too, and join in with the fun. I do appreciate that mental health doesn't carry the stigma it once did, but it's clearly swung crazy in the other direction now.

It reminds me... in recent years in Hollywood, production companies apparently had a diversity quota on the films they were making. There's a story from a cameraman who said when the diversity person comes around on set and asks him if he's a part of any marginalized group, he just says he's "non-binary." It's impossible to prove otherwise, and doesn't require you to act any differently. He said he thinks it's stupid, but this makes sure he's not at the bottom of the list when they start calling people for the next production.

Its become pretty clear that this has all peaked with Gen Z and it's starting to wane. It's pretty easy to buy into that stuff when you're 14 years old, but a few years later in your 20's it's pretty easy to look around and roll your eyes at anyone still playing up their neurodiversity as a badge of honor. It doesn't garner as much attention once you're in adulthood.

This is an interesting experiment to find out what happens when you just continually affirm whatever a person says, regardless if what they say is true. Is it any surprise that this leads to worse mental health outcomes?

Imagine how big it is if it's 300 light years away and takes up an area of our sky that's the same width as if you put the moon beside itself (in the sky) 40 times. It's just an area of space with a very thin amount of material in it (probably mostly hydrogen). But it's such a large area that if you added it all up, there's 3400 solar masses of material.

Yes, that's true. Of course it's possible that decoherence is just the splitting off of this universe from the other one where the cat is in the other state.

When cell phones first became ubiquitous, it was shocking how often you'd be interrupted by a cell phone ring while watching a movie at a theatre. It was easily multiple times per movie. Then after years of societal pressure to silence your phone, I find it's pretty rare to ever hear a cell phone ring in a theatre anymore. It just takes many years for social norms to adapt to new technology.

If that's true, then why did the summary say "a capability conventional uranium reactors lack" (emphasis mine)?

demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack

CANDU uranium fission reactors support on power refueling allowing them to be refueled without being shutdown. This is a capability that has existed for a long time.

I'm not that familiar with this product. Does it also record other people around you? If so, what steps do you have to take to make it legal? Obviously out in public you're probably OK, but in a private residence, or a hotel room, I can see it being a legal problem.