False in theory, true in practice. It is rare for the political landscape and a majority vote to align in such a way that it really has a disruptive effect. And in those instances wherein it happened, wasn’t uncommon to see a coup afterwards.

So, Russia is effectively endorsing Trump? Or just trying to destabilize as much as possible?

Countries anger and provoke each others’ populations by pointing out the bad stuff, and defend against that by censoring or otherwise cracking down on dissent. Articles like this are just attacks against us in this process, true, but I think specific ones like this are still useful, when critically understood, to help us realize that not only the countries we don’t like use those authoritarian tricks, but more or less every one (and those countries that don’t are couped by one or another who does).

I don’t really think the Russian economy is any real bottleneck here; they have abundant natural resources, a densely-knit industry and even now still many trading partners. Ultimately the only realistic way to stop the war is a peace agreement, which is why people voted for Zelenskyy in the first place.

Human embryos do have immature gills, but they are reused to create ears, jaw, tonsils, thymus, parathyroids and the large arteries in the neck and upper chest. We could add extra pairs and try to turn them into actual gills, although that would require removing the aortic arch and forcing all blood through the gills. Connecting them to the pulmonary system is not possible, as lungs and gills need different pressures (that’s the whole reason we have two circuits). Maybe we could connect them in parallel to the aorta? That would only work as a backup, but with an adequate vasomotor system could do a nice job!

Nah we are basically immersed in a housing crisis, so no right to that. And every time an actual leftist party succeeds, our media basically unite against it while pretending to accept them. You can call it a “lesser evil”, but I would even doubt that, since China is probably talking about us the same way we talk about them.

Depends a lot on where you live. In many countries, communism is simply considered “radical/violent” rather than “authoritarian”, and one is not considered a leftist of any sort unless they defend a leftist stance on the economy (progressive views on social issues may not be described as leftist everywhere).

I wouldn’t consider it an ideological thing, but more of a strategic decision by Xi et al.

Linux (windows at work tho).

Late-Permian extinction. Not very imaginative, but I find it cool that there are so many hypotheses even about the largest mass extinction ever.

I’d say it’s too soon to see if China will take an imperialist approach. The US and Europe seem to be decoupling from them, so they are in desperate need of well-developed markets that will buy their products. It’s in their own best interest that African nations develop quickly (which also hurts the US and Europe, making it harder to get cheap raw materials, thus doubly good for China).

It would be a win definitely, but unfortunately resolutions made by the General Assembly are not binding.

I used to be afraid of looking at mirrors at night. Idk what it’s called, spectrophobia maybe? Well, anyway, one night I took acid and happened to look at a mirror while blasted off my mind. Staring at it felt so disappointingly mundane that I laughed at myself for expecting anything to go wrong. Lost my fear permanently.

When returning from kernel code, one should issue Drop Execution Ring Privileges, of course.

Very interesting. I’d say China will only increase and cheapen its production even more, which will allow them to push their influence. They have been focusing on doing exactly that, by building efficient transportation networks, putting increasingly more companies’ equities in the hands of the state (and therefore sidestepping investors), and, recently, setting up abundant facilities for cheap, green energy production. All three of those policies rely for their swift and massive realization on what US policymakers nowadays seem to refer to as “non-market” dynamics, which are basically out of the question for them.

Imagine a situation wherein everyone has more or less the same amount of money. They can afford the same number of houses, let’s say, two small, or one larger house. Even if there’s some inequality, it’s not hard to imagine people buying larger or smaller homes and yet everyone being able to afford one. Renting is an afterthought in this scenario.

If inequality grows larger, some people will not be able to afford ownership, and then renting becomes profitable; those who can afford more than one house will buy more than they need, increasing demand and then offering those homes for renting and getting profit. This in turn increases inequality, but as long as the forces pushing it down prevail, this state can last for long.

The crisis breaks out when these mechanisms eventually come out of balance, pushing a large share of people out of the market, and homeownership starts concentrating.

The idea is that investing is only profitable when people don’t have what they need; any solution that gives them that (increasing public housing is a popular proposal here) will reduce profit. In fact, profitability is at a maximum now because of the housing crisis, and even just going back to step 2 would reduce it. A “perfect” solution would give everyone homes at the best price physically possible and with full liquidity, which would sink renting yields to basically zero.

Objectively, yes. But it was polarizing at the time because some of the people present were investing heavily in real estate.

You can imagine ;)

Seriously, though, I said (irl) the home affordability crisis in my country can’t be truly solved in any way that simultaneously still allows people to invest in homes (rent them out, sell them at higher prices, do business with tourism, etc) to any meaningful degree. Everyone around had very strong, diverse opinions on that.

Well, not really an issue with the existing paragraph being hard to understand, but I would suggest more explicitly stating which symbol from the “math” section corresponds to each variable from the “code” section, at the beginning of the latter.

Hugely cool! Very clearly written too.