Here in Georgia (US), as recently as last summer, there was tons of wildlife noise when I’d open my windows at night. I couldn’t Identify most of it…just your usual call-and-response mating behavior, an owl once in a while. This year, it’s just dead silent. Daytime is almost as striking, but that’s because last year was locusts.

The US spent a lot of money on soft power, essentially bribing countries to go along with their agenda. Much of that money did actually improve people’s lives, whether it was food aid, vaccinations, or AIDS care. Sure, it was to further their own objectives. Sure, it’s mostly because it’s cheaper to buy compliance than to bomb people into compliance. Humanitarian aid with strings attached is still humanitarian aid, though, or the collapse of USAID wouldn’t be such a problem.

In Alabama, when they were considering bans on youth transgender therapy, one of the GOP senators made them do a study. It turned out that over the past decade there were, on average, something like 5 minors undergoing any kind of gender-affirming treatment. 5. In the whole state of Alabama. They decided it wasn’t worth implementing a whole government oversight system to oppress that few people.

Now think about how many of the people, under 18, are both self-aware enough to realize they’re trans-fem (because no one raises a fuss about trans-masc athletes) and super excited about competing in women’s sports. We are talking about a handful of people across the whole country.

And that’s what makes them such a great wedge issue for the right. Essentially no one has personally encountered a transgender youth athlete, so they can make up whatever stories they like, based on “sounds reasonable.”

Meanwhile, competitive sport is essentially all about rewarding genetic freaks. People with some gene mutation that lets their muscles work faster, lets their blood carry more oxygen, lets the build mass faster. If you worry about the biological advantage that a chemically suppressed hormone might have, you’re starting down a path where you have to police what other biological traits might give someone advantage. It’ll be “too tall to compete in basketball.”

The very broad funds definitely will - VTI/VTSAX - but at lower weights and under less time pressure than the rigid index funds (VOO/VFIAX). That takes off a lot of the liquidity squeeze and (presumably) reduces their loss.

But you have to remember that people who use these funds intentionally invest in obvious losers and willingly overpay for hyped stocks because they believe, in the long run, that buying obvious losers is more than balanced by also buying the unexpected winners.

SpaceX is just the first time an oligarch tried so obviously to rig the passive investor structure to his favor, and I’m glad the S&P people didn’t cave.

When it comes to general elections, even the corporate Dems tend to be better than the Republicans. I mean, if the corpos are out there avoiding any solutions, the GOP is actively trying to harm people, and “nothing” is better than “more boots to the ass.” If the last three Presidential elections show anything, it is that the Democratic party will not be fixed by withholding general election votes in protest, and third parties are still irrelevant.

The time to fix the Democrats is in the primaries. The people to fix those primaries are people who would really rather vote for a radical 3rd party candidate. Many states have open primaries, so third party voters can just go vote in the Dem primary. Treat it like sabotage. The right-wing nutjobs took over the republican party. Left wing nutjobs can take over the democrats, if they show up. Mamdani doesn’t have to be a black swan.

My question for the Democratic leadership is: Why can’t they find any decent candidates? Seriously: the Senate race against Susan Collins ought to be a Dem gimmie, and the best they can do is Graham Platner? I don’t even care if the dude is fully reformed and now a shining beacon of progressivism, there’s literally millions of alternatives without questionable histories. Where are all these angry pro-social, anti-war, climate enthusiasts when it’s time to put in the work to run against some Republican shitbird?

Where are all the Zihran Mamdanis and Kat Abughazalehs? Why wouldn’t Dan Osborn run as a Democrat?

No doubt. Retired gamer here: I play so much Valheim, Saints’ Row 3, and Fallouts. No way I’m forking out $70 for some new wannabe, unless you pry the .comfort games from my arthritic fingers.

Doesn’t work that way on lemmy: if they delete the post, then the alt’s shilling disappears, too.

or at least change the title to [solved] with a link to the comment that worked.

Uncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.

Could they be astroturfing, looking for a specific solution to fill search engines with their own product placement, then deleting because most of the comments are other FOSS solutions?

What I’ve seen indicates SpaceX will become something like 0.1% of S&P and 0.5% of Nasdaq. If a retirement fund is one of those indexes, and they get ‘forced’ to buy at 2x SpaceX’s eventual value, then that’s a loss of 0.05-0.2%. $50-200 on $100,000 principal.

Most normal people won’t notice that among the usual stock market noise. Over a hundred million account, though, it’s a huge amount of money getting funneled into the thousands accounts able to front-run the index inclusion, which means, in turn, a huge amount of money getting funneled into the dozens of VCs who got into SpaceX pre-IPO.

It’s like the scam from Office Space where they collect the rounding errors on interest.

According to the IPO docs, something like 90% of SpaceX’s future earnings are from its AI business, which it projects to have trillions of annual revenue. It’s a mystery to me why so many apparently serious investors are treating it like anything other than a scam.

I had a…call? survey? at some point from an entity that probably gave rise to this data. It was basically a push-poll that used question order and positive reinforcement to try to get people to agree that abortion is murder.

Mostly, it tried to conflate “human” with “a human,” starting out with things like “are cells isolated from humans still human?” “Can cultured cells be called ‘viable?’” “So would you agree that tissue cultured from a human donor is viable, human tissue?”

A kg of almonds takes 3000 liters of water, so that’s 1.9 calories per liter.

Near as I can tell water cost of meat ranges from 2000 l/kg for chicken to maybe 15,000 l/kg for beef. That’s 0.09-0.6 calories/liter. So, 3-20x more people can eat almonds than meat.

As near as I can tell, the proposed data center is 40,000 acres and 9 GW. 9 GW continuous supply would need something like 90 GW peak solar panels and maybe 650 GWh of batteries (3 days, for nights & storms). That’s another 300,000 acres just for the panels.

Not saying it can’t be done, but you have to find a lot more land. If you’re just trying to scam investors, it’s way easier to wave your hand and say ‘gas pipeline’ than to invite criticism of a massive solar project in addition to the massive data center project.

The Radiance of God.

Not a farmer, but my romanticized view of “proper” farming is a partnership with nature to get the whole ecosystem to focus on human-useful products. Apparently, that’s not particularly profitable to the person trying to single-handedly farm a square mile or more, and discoveries like this seem one more way to decouple food production from natural processes. One more step in converting farms into factories.

I added homeassistant and some power monitors to my stack, and the IT rack comes in around 1.5 kWh/day - one of the biggest power budgets in the house, even with a low-power CPU, after adding in a few HDDs, a couple switches, and the cable modem. I’m also in a cheap power state, so it’s not a financial pressure, just surprising how quickly 10W here, 10W there…add up. At $0.50/kWh, I’d think solar would be a no-brainer.

If you can master the card/cabinet scraper, it’s much safer that a paint scraper - much more of a finishing tool than a stripping tool. Straight BLO, with no varnish, isn’t going to be a film amenable to paint scraper, anyway: you’ll need to remove some wood to get the contaminated finish out, and a card scraper will do that thousandth-of-an-inch at a time, without kicking up the dust that sandpaper would.

eg: https://taytools.com/taytools-3-piece-set-with-rectangle-gooseneck-and-curved-cabinet-scrapers

Stumpy Nubs’ howto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ZyFT24oOc