Because this chart includes economic aid and it begins in 1946. America was giving some pretty massive economic aid to help with rebuilding after WW2. There’s very little military aid to the UK in the chart, it’s mostly economic.

Sure I mean give a perfectly normal person a stimulant and they might feel like they have more energy for a bit (though to an observer they might just appear anxious, jittery and amped up even if the person themself feels great). Calling it performance enhancing for something like a debate is a huge stretch. Equally likely to hurt a speaking performance, unless someone maybe actually had true adhd or something.

What I mean is, the narrative being pushed here is Biden is this old man with dementia who can’t string two words together, and then he takes adderral or modafinil and suddenly he’s magically cognitively normal but just for a few hours. Dementia does not work this way, you would just get a very energetic and equally confused person. It’s all a ridiculous fantasy, something for Trump supporters to hold in their heads to help with the cognitive dissonance as they watch the debate. Otherwise they’d be forced to reckon with the fact that Biden speaks like a normal human being with coherent thoughts while Trump sounds like a rambling lunatic on a barely traceable flight of ideas.

I also don’t want this false narrative giving people ideas that force feeding their relatives with dementia stimulants would be a good idea that would improve their cognition for a while or something.

This whole thing is so dumb. Stimulants do not make you smart, and they certainly would not treat or reverse dementia. I mean this guy knows this I’m sure, he’s just an asshole.

Tried to force. That bill was blocked by Democrats in the senate and Biden issued a veto theat to it.

But your point still stands that Netanyahu in no way wants Biden to win this fall. He’s not coming to speak to congress and generally shit all over everything again to help Biden.

Heck, Trump admin people are already doing Nixon style foreign policy interference with Netanyahu ahead of the election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/world/middleeast/trump-officials-israel-netanyahu.html

Or doing it again rather.

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/19/15994924/nixon-trump-vietnam-russia-historical-parallels

Absolutely, on so many levels.

And so many wasted constructions that were only used for a brief time: https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/abandoned-olympic-venues-sites/

I have a wild idea here. What if, they didn’t build an entire Olympic sports complex with multiple stadiums and other infrastructure every 2 years around the globe? Maybe that would save a bit on carbon emissions. And hey, the billions that would have gone to building that complex? Maybe that could go toward building up renewable energy resources instead.

But no that’s crazy, it’s the portable air conditioning units for some athlete’s apartments that are the problem. /s

Though some props to Paris, it sounds like they didn’t have nearly the amount of insane new constructions that some Olympics have had. Sounds like only one major new venue with most venues being used already pre-existing.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2024/02/11/paris-2024-unveils-only-purpose-built-olympics-venue-in-city-five-months-ahead-of-summer-games/72561147007/

I don’t disagree with you. Only stating that he’s less of a piece of shit than every republican senator. Admittedly, an extremely low bar to clear. Like Mariana trench low bar.

There’s summer EBT, available nationwide for states that opt in, bringing eligible families $120 as a summer grocery benefit—which has been found to decrease by a third the number of households with children who sometimes went hungry. (But despite that, 14 states, including Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, have not opted in.)

State governments that would prefer children starve

He did sometimes:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

I mean he made the law worse too let’s not give him too much credit, but a republican wouldn’t have even bargained on it.

The quote gets even crazier.

Really!? You were treated the worst of any president?! Lincoln was assassinated!!

The Moores were backed by anti-regulatory and business groups.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/06/20/supreme-court-decision-trump-tax-on-foreign-earnings/73793041007/

So they weren’t really paying for the case most likely. I’ve also seen some articles mention that the facts of the case as presented to the court may not have been entirely accurate, possible the Moores or their lawyers lied or misrepresented some things in the case. I haven’t been able to find more details on what exactly they’re referencing though.

Since everyone is so obsessed with AI and won’t listen to real people talking about problems, I asked chat gpt if the new york city Ai should remain online:

If a chatbot AI consistently provides incorrect information about New York laws, it could potentially mislead people and cause harm or legal issues. It would be advisable to either improve the chatbot’s accuracy and reliability and suspend its operation until it can provide correct and reliable information. Providing accurate legal information is crucial, especially for those who may rely on it for important decisions.

There, now since AI has said suspend the AI, New York City can suspend the AI.

Person above you either didn’t read the article they posted or is hoping other people won’t. Not that Al Jazeera doesn’t have its own biases and blind spots like any news source, but I don’t see anything incorrect in that article. They even put quotes around the word attack and then say only that Houthis claim they attacked them. It only mentions a sunk ship when it talks about the Houthi attacks on merchant vessels, which is true, they they sunk a Belize flagged ship containing fertilizer and fuel that was on its way from the UAE to Bulgaria.

https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthi-rebels-rubymar-sinks-red-sea-fb64a490ce935756337ee3606e15d093

Churches should be required to have supervising drag queens, would help prevent abuse. Priest you need to meet one on one with a kid? Fine, but only if this fabulous queen here sits in the room with you both.

So same as always?

Presidents don’t make laws, congress does. There would have to be something in the constitution or in a law already passed that gives the executive branch the power to do that. An executive order is just an enforcement, a more specific guidance of application of already existing laws or powers. If the law the article is talking about is passed, he could issue executive orders to delineate more specific actions to help make sure it is enforced.

If Biden just sat down in a chair one day and wrote “I declare state laws and state constitutions restricting ivf are void!” like some kind of dictator it would do literally nothing.

Go on to the federal register and look at some executive orders. You’ll find most of them pertain to things the president directly controls, like the operations of executive department agencies. When it’s not something the president clearly controls in the constitution, it will cite the authority of which specific laws it’s basing this on.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/12/03/2021-26459/the-national-space-council

Purpose.

The National Space Council (Council), as authorized under Title V of Public Law 100-685, advises and assists the President regarding national space policy and strategy. This order sets forth the Council’s membership, duties, and responsibilities.

So for an example, here’s what law passed by congress this executive order is fulfilling, here are my more specific instructions about how we as the executive branch are going to fulfill that law. Clearly the authority to establish a national space council does not come from the constitution, so it’s a law passed by congress that makes this order possible.

If congress passes a law protecting ivf and gives some power to the executive branch to enforce those protections, then maybe there would be situations where an executive order would be helpful.

And Biden clearly supports this law, has repeatedly urged congress to pass it, and headlined the issue in his state of the union address.

https://time.com/6898688/biden-ivf-abortion-state-of-the-union/

France, Germany and the ECB worry about Russian retaliation targeting European assets, and also the potential impact on financial stability and the euro’s status as a reserve currency. There’s concern that depositors from emerging economies may be encouraged to pull money out of western banks, fragmenting the global financial system.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen downplayed such risks in February, arguing that “there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro, yen.” She said that if the G-7 acted together then the group would be representing half of the global economy and all of the currencies that really have the capacity at this point to serve as reserve currencies.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-seizing-russian-assets-to-fund-ukraine-is-fraught/ar-BB1jHeKz

I agree with you, they should just be able to tap the assets directly. Basically some European countries are worried about the effects seizing assets could have on the Euro. Most of these assets are held in Europe as euros. The loan is actually an improvement over the original proposal though. Originally France Germany, etc were pushing only for the 3 billion in interest a year on the assets to be given to Ukraine. The loan solution was pushed by other countries who wanted to give them more cash from the Russian assets as a way to give $50 billion in cash immediately, with those yearly interest payments from Russian assets being used to pay off the loan.

Or this one:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

Some states have open primaries, you just vote in whatever one you want. Not every state requires registering with a party to vote in the primary.

I get the impression there is not model for why sometimes thousands of base pairs can fuck off with no impact, and sometimes it changes the organism unrecognizably.

No there’s many known reasons that can happen. Here’s just some of them, but in the end it all comes down to understanding that genes code for proteins, little molecular machines. Sometimes there are multiple copies of genes that code for similar proteins or even the same protein, so losing one or even more doesn’t really do anything as there’s more where that came from. Sometimes there are genes that used to be important but no longer have a role or were made redundant, and are free to sedit. If a gene codes for a protein called an enzyme, sometimes a change in the active site that binds the chemicals for the reaction it assists might be catastrophic, but a change elsewhere doesn’t do much because it’s not as necessary to the function of the protein. Sometimes changes even result in the a similar amino acid or the exact same amino acid getting put at thag spot (since the genetic code has some redundancies, a different combo might still end up being the same).

Many genes code for proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors help control expression of many other genes, some of which might also be transcription factors that in turn affect other genes, etc. This can create huge cascades. For instance there are things called hox genes that are very important for creating a cascade that leads to the formation of different body segments, and differentiating the different body segments. Mutations in these genes can be devastating, in some animals leading to the dissappearance or redundant addition of whole body segments.

There is tons more to learn of course on specifics in terms of evolution, genetics, and molecular biology of course. I don’t think it’s comparable to gravity though, which we seem to have a fundamental gap and irreconcilable theories.

At least coming from a background of life sciences personally, it seems to me evolution is probably better understood than gravity. I think a better comparison to gravity in the life sciences might be abiogenesis (how pre life conditions give rise to life to begin with). Once life is going, evolution, that we have a ton on. Not that we know nothing about abiogenesis, but that it’s a difficult outstanding problem.