nfh

Not my country, but what immediately came to mind was one that has global name recognition, and minimal population: Chernobyl.

It used to have around 12,000 population, but now it’s technically illegal to live nearby, and up to 150 people are estimated to live there today. It’s famous for being toxically irradiated as a result of the worst nuclear disaster in human history

Sturgis also has a population of around 7,000, and has a pretty significant cultural awareness because of its annual motorbiking event

It looks like they tried to change it in 2017 and the bill got compromised down to some safeguards that don’t amount to much.

I found some articles characterizing ACLU’s position as viewing it as a slippery slope to taking away access to abortion or other reproductive healthcare. I get why that kind of thing is something they’re worried about, but I really don’t see how it applies in this situation.

It’s still causing harm, and I really don’t see who it’s helping. Pair the law with strong protections for reproductive rights for people of all ages, maybe even as a proposition. It’d probably be pretty popular, though I also expected the proposition to ban prison slavery to be popular too.

if Pablo Escobar was still alive, he’d probably have been appointed head of the DEA

Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.

Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.

I think both can be true. That she cleaned up the situation is a testament to her skill as a candidate, and the fact this situation happened is in no small part an indictment of the Democratic party, in which she’s among its most senior leaders

I’m excited for the fun gopher hole you’re gonna go down

Alright folks, in 2025 we’re bringing Gopher back

I’ll be honest, I never cared for him, and it was clear to me from the start that his optimized to maximize engagement with his target demographic vs being personally authentic.

He’s revealed himself to be worse than I’d ever expected.

Opposition to genocide isn’t an option on the ballot, you can’t vote for it, especially not for president. And not voting sends a very clear message whether you intend it or not: “I don’t care”.

Do you value minimizing harm? If you care most about genocide, Harris seems to be the least-worst option. But if you care more about ideological purity than harm reduction, you can vote for a non-serious candidate like Stein, or none at all. Nobody will ever solve this kind of problem at the ballot box, that isn’t how democracies work, but if letting things happen instead of exerting what little power you have eases your conscience, that’s your right. Doing so does mean a greater risk of a Trump presidency, especially if you live in a swing state.

I would rather minimize harm, so I’m voting for Harris, and encourage others to do the same.

maybe some quokkapox blankets for good measure

We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.

Hasbro announces Magic the Gathering’s latest expansion, Universes Beyond: World War II!

I knew about ad blockers before I started using one. Small sidebar or header ads weren’t really enough to convince me I needed one.

Now the Internet has so many popups, ads, aggressive video players, requests to accept cookies, all because some people figured out how to make websites more profitable by making them worse. It’s sad, really. The Internet of old was great.

And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.

If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.

Andrew Conru, founder of AdultFriendFinder, apparently.

Not well known, but good to name and shame anyway.

First result? I couldn’t get it as a result at all. I get a bunch of quora threads and articles from really low profile news outlets.

Yeah that is troubling, even if the cause of it is corruption as the second article implies. I understand the draft given the circumstances of the invasion, but sneaking people into vans, beating them, and asking questions later isn’t justified at all. Becoming a brutal authoritarian in order to repel the invading forces of another is kinda futile.

I can only find reports of Russian soldiers kidnapping people in Ukraine, reports of things that seem clearly like conscription and not kidnapping, and things from sources that aren’t credible.

Do you have a credible source that shows that this is a real phenomenon? I can’t find one

Except Putin is actually doing those things. Ukraine has a draft, which is not great, but isn’t kidnapping people off the streets. That’s completely disingenuous at best.

It’s a state elections law, Supreme Court of Georgia is the ultimate authority on what it says. States have a lot of leeway to determine their own election laws, so it’s hard to mount a federal law challenge to them in the first place. The RNC voter suppression consent decree was a rare exception.

IANAL, but it’s hard to imagine an opposition to this where federal courts even have jurisdiction, much less a path to SCOTUS.