While any aircraft sent to ukrane is nice, I sure hope they aren’t paying much for them. That airframe is about 60 years old with the last major design overhaul in 1990 and its last electronics upgrade in 2000. They would be better off buying F15e’s or even the new f15ex. He’ll, even getting some last Gen f16’s or f18’s over there would be as good or better, but cost probably more. The f15 though is probably the best multiroll jet for the cost.

Now, if we are talking about sending some OG Mirage 2000 fighters over there, then that sounds like the ultimate white elephant gift France could give. The US could sent some F4 phantoms over while we are at it.

The big news I the training of 4500 pilots. That is huge. If they could do that, then the mirage 2000 could basically turn into their base fighter trainer and use it as the training wheels to get the new pilots experience and into bigger and better things.

I never felt so more attacked, but also related to at the same time.

I had a CPT like that during my second deployment. He was out in 60 seconds and in the funniest positions. The team made an entire photo album of him sleeping. MK19 range included.

I have an honors minor in medical humanities and took several medical policy courses. We looked at this exact graph from previous years as well as several other huge sets of data/graphs/studies and anything else related to insurance you can imagine. Insurance is not a standard market commodity and does not follow the same trend or logic. The only way you can lower premiums in insurance is by reducing the risk in the pool, or increasing the pool size to dilute the risk. This is either increasing the total pool size by increasing premiums, getting more people, or being selective about who joins the risk pool. The third one was what was called “preexisting conditions” and kept high cost people from entering the risk pool and draining the funds. This got banned and increased premiums. By increasing competition you end up splitting up the pools, making everyone’s premiums go up. This happened multiple times post ACA after the GOP started stripping out the funding and safeguards to prevent this. More and more competition opened up with artificially low premiums being subsidized by federal dollars, but then when the subsidies ended the premiums started jumping. Then when the premiums were jumping, new companies opened up to make more competition advertising lower rates, but then further fractured to pool sizes, leading to premiums skyrocketing. If you look back just 10 years ago there was a 3-5 year stretch of premiums increasing almost 30% year after year. It was due to all the competition opening up every year. This is why single payer systems have the lowest rates. If you have even one private company monopoly with a regulated cap on profits you would still end up with lower premiums. Then, if this single paying company was nationalized to take out the profit making middle man, the premiums are that much lower because your risk is spread across a massive pool. More competition in insurance makes the problem worse. I would agree with your stronger regulation though. There is a lot that can be done there.

One man’s terrorist group is another man’s freedom fighter. This is why many new organizations that are big on neutrality normally shy away from calling anyone terrorist groups. You could just as easily frame Israel as a terrorist group with the same justifications listed above.

Let me just point this out- this was the exact same argument by many intellectuals back in the 1950’s about segregation/integration and blacks in science. Why should we care about their color? If they are good scientists with great original ideas and experiments, then surely they will get published and get their positions commensurate to their merit. This is also ignoring their segregated schooling being underfunded, not being welcomed into higher ed unless at specific ‘negro’ universities, and the crippled career paths because of it. But sure, even with their second rate primary education due to their skin color, and their second rate secondary education due to their skin color, and then their crippled career prospects due to their skin color- why don’t we then measure them on merit? The black man never amounted to what out nice ivy league educated white man has done, so why take a risk on them? And again, should we not just judge them on merit? Ignore that if a black man has a novel idea then they must then have the idea reviewed into perpetuity while one of the white reviewers just so happens to come up with the same idea then publishes before the black man.

So to sit here and still argue that merit alone while disregarding the person is only progress is actually quite regressive.

Now, beyond that- modern publishing is blind in most every respectable journal because of this issue. It is only after being accepted is the author identity revealed to the reviewers.

The pyramids are made of granite. It has a density/weight of approximately 165 lb/cubic ft. As in, a 1x1x1 block weighs about 165 lbs. This block, assuming the standard person in this picture is about 5 ft (people have been getting taller over time) this block is maybe 20 ft cubed. Just an eyeball guess. That would put it at about 1,320,000 lbs.

The picture has 6 people deep carrying the first stone with what looks like maybe 4 people across? Hard to tell. But going off 6x4 people, that would mean that each person would have to carry 55,000 lbs each.

Would it be possible? I will let you guess from that. Next question, how many eggs to support it? After some google searches the textbook theoretical best an egg can support is some 300 lbs, but in practice is closer to 120-130 with support/positioning in place (think egg cartons holding them vs just on the ground). This would mean our 1,320,000 lb stone would take between 10,000 to 11,000 eggs to support it.

How long would it take to get that many eggs??? Good question. Chicken normally lay about an egg a day. So 10,000 chicken take 1 day, or 1 chicken would take about 10,000 days. But what is a realistic amount? Well, let me tell you. In the rabbit hole I found myself in of jokingly replying to this, I found an entire dissertation on “THE EXPLOITATION OF LIVE AVIAN RESOURCES IN PHARAONIC EGYPT: A SOCIO-ECONOMIC STUDY” BY ROZENN F. BAILLEUL-LESUER (JUNE 2016)

Captivating. Would recommend rabbiting down that hole. And on page 299 we can see that a Pharoah size flock would be about 2,000 Eurasia cranes or geese. So it would take us about a week to put that block in the picture on a bunch of eggs.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I always know someone doesn’t know anything about Afghanistan and its people when they refer to them as Afghani’s.

An Afghan is a person. Afghani is a currency. Anyone who calls them Afghani doesn’t even know the right term to call the people. It is a giveaway to how little you know about them when you don’t even know what to call them.

Meanwhile all the Chineses and Viet Congs are turning in their graves right next to the Afgani.

Evey time I hear about the evil big pharma funding all the studies out there to influence them in they favor, I immediately ask, “where is this funding and how can I get it?”

Because let’s be honest, unless the leg work is already done, they aren’t funding shit.

On the flip side of that, I did do a study for 3M and their hearing protection devices (I am an audiology/PhD student) and the funding was great. There were also basically no strings attached other than “use this product, study workplace noise, be able to publish it”.

I am on the lemmy Sync app. Select the post and tap in the profile icon. Then, on their profile page, at the top, under their name is a selection of other links. Scroll to the right and you will see an option to block the user. Refresh the page and this will all be gone, including your post and mine.

Thanks for the reply, I was hoping to generate more discussion. It looks like you were the only one…

Hot take here and I would love discussion- but this is a small reason why I am against a full UBI in cash, but want UBI in voucher form with only a small portion in cash. Vouchers limit potential inflation spill over from sectors and you can now control how much people are getting depending on factors to better and more fairly suit their situations. This is also why I am a huge fan of “food stamps” or food welfare programs. This is essentialy what they are doing already, just make it universal. Then we look at things like housing vouchers, another great program that we can now just scale up and make universal as well. Then you only need to give a smaller cash handout for incidental spending. You know people are going to have to spend money on housing and food, so make those the priorities for funding vouchers and you can put rules in place to minimize inflation within those industries. Then if you have people who are well of enough to not need the full voucher, let them convert the voucher over to cash at a penalty rate, say 2 to 1 for cash, or some progressive scale for remaining money. They don’t need the money as much, but you also don’t want them to be completely left out unfairly and have them resentful of the system. This could even expand into other industries or normal costs. Transportation, cable/internet, cell service, even some insurance (like car, rental, umbrella- assuming that if you are at a level of providing UBI, you are already providing universal health care). Now for each voucher you can make it needs and situation based and evaluate a fair amount for each person through an automated system depending on some quick metrics of their life. Each voucher system is also industry specific with its own oversight and regulations and inflation reductions built into it. I think it would be a better system and am open to others thoughts.

I have learned that stats for research is a dark box that you put numbers into, shake it up, and then record the numbers that come out. I use SPSS, my advisor uses SigmaPlot, and another PhD student in my lab uses R. Sometimes I’m not even sure if we are getting the same numbers out of the shaken black box and I am too afraid to ask…

ANOVA? Sure, it is those clicks in that menu. ANCOVA? MANOVA? sure, there is some thing I check off or some other spot I click on. What do they do? The computer prays to the number gods with a different accent, then I shake the ritual box and read the numbers that come out.

It isn’t just about the pumping. You can pump crude all day and still be broke. Look at several of the middle east smaller countries or even most south America pumpers. The refining is where the industry and money is really at. Cars don’t burn crude oil, it has to get refined. Plastics don’t come out of the ground, they have to get refined. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest crude oil exporter and they still have to rely on others to refine.

In fact, here is a direct quote from OEC-

“In 2021, Saudi Arabia imported $7.43B in Refined Petroleum, becoming the 27th largest importer of Refined Petroleum in the world. At the same year, Refined Petroleum was the 2nd most imported product in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia imports Refined Petroleum primarily from: India ($2.17B), Greece ($1.09B), Russia ($892M), United Arab Emirates ($835M), and Egypt ($689M).”

This is a huge deal for India. They are the world’s second largest exporter of refined oil, and the largest in asia. This means a lot of buisness is about to shift to them. This is also after India has been negotiating cheap raw oil off Russia due to a combination of sanctions and the occasional case of exploding refineries leading to excess raw oil in Russia

Some say “tricked” others say “activity plotted treason” but I guess we will never know…

I guess we have no way to investigate this and find out. If only we had some department in the government that was made to investigate into law stuff, you know, for justice.

Maybe we could also have a bureau, but on the federal level, that only helped investigate things for the law. Some kind of federal bureau that investigates. That would be nice. Then maybe some department that followed through with their investigations with Justice, and the two could work together.

But you know, that is all made up wishing on the internet. In the end we will never know if they were tricked like a toddler on Halloween, or plotted treason in meetings that lasted entire days that we have logs for and that their political party supported. We will never know…

To be fair, they are talking about a triplex, as in 3 units. But still, 10,000 each (if it really was 30,000 sq/ft) is still massive.

Real context-

That dess/suit was made by the designer (Mugler) she has been wearing for a small series of outfits she has been wearing. This particular one was brought out of a museum just for this premiere and she even had to change out of it after doing the carpet walk. It was made in 1995, inspired by and modeled after the robot from Metropolis.

I know it is odd to have a bunch of nerds try and read about fashion, but it is interesting. It wasn’t some “look at me not be a disney kid” thing.

https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/zendaya-mugler-robot-suit-dune-two-london-premiere

In Florida you misspelled ‘dummer’. You can only sound out the words now.

Read the book! It was so good as well. Not entirely the same as the movie. The movie was more of the premise with book plus some exerpts, but still amazing in its own way. I really enjoy both. Really easy read because of how it is written, and so much fun as well.