Absolutely! I mean, it's not as if modern Russia is a security state and both the state itself and the chief religion are run by KGB guys. Also not as if they're assassinating people in foreign countries, sabotaging things like undersea cables, interfering in foreign elections, running state hacking and political influence operations, or starting wars with, among their expressly stated goals, preventing other nations in the "Russian Mir" from joining western alliances or financial blocs. Why, if they were doing any of that stuff, it would be almost like you actually were ignorant of history and geopolitics, but surely that couldn't be the case.

As another poster has pointed out, this is not actually true. Congress decides these things and its decisions are law.

Ugh. This reminds me of various executives at various companies who are always naming departments in sectors like IT, R&D, Customer support, security, or really just non-sales payroll in general (because these guys almost always seem to come out of sales or finance) are just leeches to them.

Understanding why USAID is not a total cash sink involves a two pronged perspective. Some people agree with one prong, others agree with the other prong, and a lot of people agree with both, because they are not mutually exclusive. The prongs are aligned with an axis. At one extreme end of this axis is soulless ghouls sitting on a pile of money and children's skulls and jealously guarding it. The children's skulls are there for convenience as containers for some of the money since they are cheap and disposable. From their view, nothing matters but the accumulation of wealth, and suffering is irrelevant or even desirable, because it means that other people are losing, and therefore the ghoul is winning by comparison. At the other end of the spectrum are summer children with flowers in their hair who dance and sing and weep for any hint of sadness in the world. Their hearts bleed for the merest hint of suffering of the smallest of living things. Heck, their hearts weep for the imagined suffering of inanimate objects. Somewhere in the middle is where you find most people. Certainly leaning to one side or the other. The point is that one prong of the argument for organizations like USAID is that if we can reduce human suffering by spending so relatively little, we have a moral obligation to.

I think that prong is the one you're thinking of, and it disgusts you. All those flower children who are simultaneously sappy bleeding heart simps and also blood sucking monsters stealing from you and sapping and impurifying your precious bodily fluids. You're ignoring the other prong though. That prong is that organizations like USAID have always been an important part of US soft power. They are the sort of thing that, when people criticize the US about all the crappy things it absolutely does, they can look at things like USAID and say "yes, but...". So many people can be helped with so little. Many of them have their lives saved by the aid and many of them aren't blind to the US flags on those packages of food or on the medical supplies, etc. Time passes, and they live their lives and, whether it's considered a debt, or gratitude, or a simple positive mental association, someday the US needs some good will in an area and some people say "we must oppose the the US imperialist swine!" or something to that effect, but some of the people remember that aid and say: "yes, but...".

So, consider it an advertising budget, or a bribe, or whatever you want but, even if your attitude is soulless pragmatism, there's a soulless, pragmatic reason for it too. It sits there right alongside the sappy, bleeding heart reason

And? How is that incompatible with USAID saving lives? The top causes of death in most wars are disease and famine. USAID fought disease and famine. What short circuit is preventing this for computing for you?

It's an autonomous territory of Denmark, which is one of the reasons Denmark doesn't want to sell it. They recognize that they can't. As for Greenland itself, the people there don't want to sell either.

Since you pointed this out, I have to point out the amazing hypocrisy. The purchase you're talking about is the Treaty of the Danish West Indies. Note: "Danish". As in the country that Greenland is an autonomous territory of. In that treaty, the US very explicitly gave up any potential claim to Greenland and recognized Danish sovereignty. Yet, somehow, we're still in a place where the US has already reneged on that treaty. Trump has already repeatedly questioned the idea that the US does not have a claim to Greenland.

I'm curious about the "OBK performance is double that of ALIS.". What performance metric is that? Sounds like 'executive summary" material to me.

Generally, media published by the company should also count. Pamphlets and brochures, language on their website, language in recorded phone messages, things expressed by voice or in pictorial form in videos, etc. In theory, AI interactions should absolutely count. Though, I am getting the feeling that AI won't count any more because... AI. Also, any of those former things that would count can then be laundered through AI since it's a magical gray area that no-one can be accountable for.

Like many posts from people inside echo chambers, this contained a reference that is generally only familiar to people inside the echo chamber. The people inside the echo chamber think that it's a big deal and everyone should know what it's about and the people outside tend to have no idea what they are talking about. The item in question was the "infamous travel app" which is apparently infamous inside the echo chamber, but not outside it. I looked it up and it's apparently an app from the Trump administration that started out for partially automating cargo inspections and then was expanded in the Biden administration to help automate scheduling appointments for migrants. Naturally right wing conspiracy theorists claimed it was a "concierge service for illegal aliens" (with the nut in question being senator Josh Hawley) following the Republican theme of treating all immigration processes as illegal. This is basically a straight up tin foil hat conspiracy.

Please, go ahead and define what a woman is.

Yeah, but sometimes you can take a look at something like this and it looks like projects to try and store power by building towers and raising weights up them. Sure, it can't store any practical amount of power, but they're working the basics out. But some easy back of the envelope math shows that it is utterly impossible for it to be viable technically or economically. Now, admittedly, you can't say the same 100% on this sort of project, but the fact is that what is described in the headline would be a new kind of power generating nuclear reactor. That is really unlikely to happen here. At best, it would be like regenerative braking or a combined cycle thermal plant, where a fraction of the total energy is recovered under certain circumstances.

That is interesting information about the geology. I will say though, that while it does show that the rock is not "quiet" from a geological perspective, it also throws a bit of doubt on FeelGood314's premise that the "waste"t from the reaction hasn't moved in all that time. It was dubious to start with given that the whole reason the reaction happened in the first place was uranium dissolving in groundwater in the presence of oxygen. While there are traces left, the fact that it's not "quiet" and that material did dissolve in groundwater suggests that what happened there is very much not what people intend when they consider long-term storage of nuclear waste. Sure, there may be an argument to be made over whether people are overly concerned about such long term storage, but a site where uranium in the ground underwent fission without human intervention seems like the opposite of what people want in nuclear storage.

Sure, and formations like balancing rocks have been standing for geological periods as well. That doesn't mean that you can stack rocks on each other so they are balanced and leave and expect to come back ten thousand years later and they will still be like that. Also, when you look at buildings that have been standing for a thousand years, you could conclude that "they don't build them like they used to" and that any structure built by people back then must also be able to survive a thousand years. That's all just survivor bias though.

While your example might show that something can be done, it doesn't mean that we'll be able to do it. We're probably better off burying it deep in a subduction zone than storage anyway.

That's never been my experience with most of the vegans I've known. Generally, there hasn't really been any functional difference between a straight-up vegan or someone with a functionally similar diet for other reasons such as being Hindu or some other religious reason, or indeed for other reasons like medical restrictions and allergies.

I will point out that I've been on the other side of this. I'm not a vegan, but I did have a medical dietary restriction for years where not just one, but several basic, healthy nutrients found in both meat and all kinds of plants were in fact unhealthy for me. One of them was deadly (and I did almost die from getting too much of it once, even when being strict about my diet). For the most part, I did have to just avoid restaurant food entirely, even the salads, since I had to choose each item of food carefully. It's a real pain in most cases getting the nutritional information for everything on a restaurant menu, especially when some of the things you can't eat aren't listed in standard nutritional information. Then you have to divide it up into items that are an absolute no, items that are a maybe, but you'll have to then do extra restrictions for the next four days or so, and item that are an absolute yes (almost never, btw). When I did eat with other people, I often explained about what I couldn't eat. Not because I'm a "douchebag" but because I had to. I also experienced people who wouldn't believe or accept that I couldn't eat things and seemed to take it personally. Also all of the unsolicited, incorrect, and sometimes deranged nutritional or medical advice I got was, frankly, unnerving. Sometimes the world feels a bit like an open air insane asylum. There were people who told me my technically terminal illness was all in my head, or that, no matter what I ate, I could exercise it away, etc. I remember my now former neighbor, who kept an old chest refrigerator filled with water outside to dunk himself in, trying to convince me I could fix everything by breathing. There seems to be almost a meta-cult in this country (maybe worldwide) of people who, whatever their specific beliefs, all seem to think that actual real physical and medical problems are all in the mind/spirit/soul, whatever and that something like attitude or personal effort, or prayer, or whatever will solve it all. When you're sick, there is no denying that a good attitude definitely helps. It can stop you sinking into depression, help you stick to a proper medical regime, etc. It can even have physiological effects. Those physiological effects are limited though and medical conditions are actually real.

Anyway, that was a bit a digression. The point is though, that people can be pretty weird about it when you won't eat with them, which often forces you to explain why early and often. Not to mention that you need to field all sorts of questions about it. Probably even more when your dietary restriction is by choice rather than medical. So, you should probably consider that maybe the vegans you're complaining about are simply in a catch-22. If they don't make sure everyone knows that they're vegan early they get the third degree and even scolded later, when people find out that they can't eat anything at the restaurant. If they do make sure everyone knows early, they get some people, like yourselves, thinking that they're douchebags.

OK. On the way to the restaurant makes sense too. Or when everyone is making plans to go to the restaurant. Ditto for any medical food restrictions, etc. or for other reasons. I would expect people to also mention it if they were recovering alcoholics and the restaurant serves alcohol. If the plan was to go to Bob's House of Rabbit, I would expect them to mention that they're an observant Jew if that's the case as well. Or, for Justin Wilson's (a Cajun chef noted for his show "Justin Wilson's Louisiana Cooking and for variations on "a little wine for da gumbo... and a little for me") Louisiana Restaurant, I would expect them to mention that they are an observant Muslim. So on and so forth.

They can't charge inside because of the fire hazard. Of course, charging inside is a bit of an odd solution anyway. The exterior temperature shouldn't matter, just the temperature of the battery pack itself. Taking it inside and saying "OK. It's 20 degrees C in here, fine to charge" is checking a box, not making sure that the battery has actually reached the proper temperature. Seems to me like the proper technical solution, whether the battery is inside or outside is some sort of battery heater that measures the temperature of the battery pack somehow (hopefully it has its own internal sensors, but otherwise external sensors could be used) and heats it appropriately.

I mean, obviously the batteries are a total screwup, but it it seems like there should be a workaround to still be able to charge them outside.