I am prepared to be downvoted for this, but I believe in Occam’s razor here: do not attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity
I think it is much more likely that nobody bothered to check their background until it was too late.
I am prepared to be downvoted for this, but I believe in Occam’s razor here: do not attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity
I think it is much more likely that nobody bothered to check their background until it was too late.
To be franc (or to be billion francs), France has enough money, guns, and United Nations Security Council seats to give Haiti the middle finger
If they nuke Ukraine into oblivion, they’re not spending a single kopeck building it back. They’ll engineer a second Holodomor to “get their money’s worth” before that.
Interestingly, this law also paid the newly freedmen $100 to fuck off to Haiti
It’s easy when you only pay workers five dollars a day, work them like mules for twelve hours a day, are building in the open desert, don’t need to do environmental impact surveys, and use cheap building materials and workmanship that starts to fall apart after ten years
The Yakuza in Japan in past decades are a great example of what happens when organised crime does hire lobbyists
It was the UK that did that. In the US, slavery was abolished through straight up “property confiscation” (from the perspective of slaveholders)
France doesn’t have “trillions”. There is nothing that can be done to force France to pay, so demanding too large of a sum, even if justified, is a good way to get them to say “fuck that” and you get nothing.
It’s a nuke threat. Again.
This comment is shockingly bad taste on a post about innocent civilians being bombed to death in a war zone.
There almost certainly one incident where that happened.
…and sadly, probably one where the person shot wasn’t a mass shooter.
China isn’t doing this for the money. They do it to keep those countries under their thumb. It’s more like, “Yeah, you owe us a billion dollars, but we’ll forgive half of it and give you a fifty-year extension on the rest because we’re just the best of pals!” And then your country is expected to vote with China in the UN for the next three decades. On top of that, it makes the Chinese government seem really rich and powerful, which is helpful for both its internal and external politics.
China is trying to buy its way to the top like the US did in the mid-twentieth century.
Other people have described the health effects, so I’ll describe the chemistry. Fats are made of long chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms attached to a “head”, which is made of other elements or structures. Carbon atoms normally can make a total of 4 bonds. Hydrogen atoms can make 1 bond.
Carbon being able to make 4 bonds means that in the chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms in fat molecules, each carbon atom makes a bond with the carbon atom before it in the chain, a bond with the carbon atom after it in the chain, and then bonds with two hydrogen atoms separately off to the side. This makes a total of 4 bonds. If all of the carbon atoms in the chain are like this, that’s “saturated fat”, because the chain of carbon is completely “saturated” with hydrogen atoms.
(Hydrogen atoms are white, carbon atoms are black, oxygen atoms are red)
Saturated fats have the often desirable property of being able to be tightly packed together, and thus are typically solid at room temperature. Butterfat is mostly saturated fat.
However, carbon atoms can also make a double bond with other carbon atoms. If a particular carbon atom in the chain makes a double bond with the carbon atom before it, it could cause a bend in the chain of carbon atoms. In that case, it also means that those particular carbon atoms in the chain that have formed a double bond with each other only have 1 available bond left (after also forming a separate single bond with the carbon atom before or after it), so it can only bond with one hydrogen atom. These are, therefore, called “unsaturated fats”, and because they don’t pack together easily, they are typically liquid at room temperature.
If there is a single double bond in the chain, it’s a monounsaturated fat.
If there are two or more double bonds, it’s a polyunsaturated fat.
Notice how the hydrogen atoms connected to the double-bonded carbon atoms in unsaturated fats can be connected to either the same side or the opposite sides of the two hydrogen atoms. If they’re on the same side, they are called cis-unsaturated fats. If they’re on opposite sides, they are trans-unsaturated fats, or trans fats in short.
This is oleic acid, a cis monounsaturated fat commonly found in many vegetable oils:
While this is vaccenic acid, a trans-monounsaturated fat. It is found naturally in butter and human milk and is not particularly bad for you:
Note that this is NOT the same picture as the one I showed for saturated fat. The 7th and 8th carbon atoms from the left are double-bonded and, therefore, are each missing a hydrogen atom. The one remaining hydrogen atom on each is bonded on opposite sides.
Note that trans-unsaturated fats are also pretty straight. This means that they can also pack together with saturated fats to make a solid product at room temperature.
“Hydrogenation” is the process of adding hydrogen to unsaturated fats to saturate them. This means that liquid oil can be processed into a solid product. That’s how margarine and shortening are made. In previous years, partially hydrogenated oils that weren’t fully hydrogenated could leave substantial quantities of trans-unsaturated fats left in the product, but after health concerns, many countries’ food safety authorities banned these artificial trans fats. Fully hydrogenated fats consist of only saturated fats since they have been “fully” hydrogenated, and that is what food manufacturers have been doing instead.
The exact data is Figure 1, chart A. It seems the mean is around 4,000-5,000 μg/g, which is indeed 0.4-0.5%
I really had to run a fact check on this but it really does seem to be true.
Brains are 0.5% plastic by weight and with an average human brain mass of 1.3 kg, that means humans, on average, have 6.5 g of plastic in their brain
For what it’s worth, English Wikipedia editors reached a consensus to deprecate (ban) it for unrealiability last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_424#RFC:_The_Cradle
The following notes are present:
The Cradle is an online magazine focusing on West Asia/Middle East-related topics. It was deprecated in the 2024 RfC due to a history of publishing conspiracy theories and wide referencing of other deprecated sources while doing so. Editors consider The Cradle to have a poor reputation for fact-checking.
Those last three words of the headline are doing some heavy lifting here
Password is necessary for two-factor authentication. The factors of authentication are something you know (like a password), something you have (like a cell phone), and something you are (like a biometric).
An example of three-factor authentication would be this—imagine a spy going into a secret bunker. They need to scan their iris, insert a key card, and then enter a passcode before the door opens. This has all three factors of authentication; the passcode is something they know, the key card is something they have, the iris scan is something they are.
If it just sends a code to your phone, that’s one-factor authentication (something you have). Anyone with your phone can get into your account. Unless, of course, your phone hides its notifications and you have a screen lock. Then that’s actually two-factor authentication because you also need to know the phone PIN or have the biometric.
If it just asks for a password, that’s one-factor authentication (something you know).
If it asks for your password and then sends a code to your phone, which you need a fingerprint or face scan to unlock, you have achieved three-factor authentication.
Edit: Interesting tidbit—in the USA, you can rent a mailbox at the post office to receive mail when you don’t want to give out your real address. Useful for privacy reasons. I’m sure they have similar things in other countries. These mailboxes come with a key. This is actually two-factor authentication, because the keys usually don’t have the mailbox number written on them! So you have to have the key and also have to know which mailbox among the hundreds at the post office it opens.
It is a war crime to intentionally attack non-combatants.