michaelmrose
@michaelmrose@lemmy.world
- Comment on average red state university 1 week ago:
Only insofar as its too vague to mean anything
- Comment on Wake up sheeple 1 week ago:
You are talking about surface tension. The importance parameter is speed not height and “like concrete” is a drastic simplification as both behave very differently on impact.
Notably whereas high divers have reached speeds of 60 mph the Artemis II splashed down at around 1/4 that speed a speed you too can obtain by jumping from about 10 feet up.
- Comment on Big Sun behind it all 1 week ago:
occrp.org/…/how-to-build-yourself-a-stealth-lobby…
What lawmakers listening to Shaffer didn’t know was that the Caspian Studies Program she headed at Harvard was set up in 1999 through a $1 million grant from the US Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and a consortium of oil and gas companies led by Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron, all of which had commercial interests in the region. The chamber of commerce is a pro-Azerbaijan pressure group whose Board of Directors includes a vice president of SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state-owned energy company, and top lobbyists for BP and Chevron.
Supported by an overseas regime and an assorted network of overt and undercover lobbyists, she used oil money to build her academic credentials, then in turn used those credentials to promote Azerbaijan’s agendas through Congressional testimony, dozens of newspaper op-eds and media appearances, countless think tank events, and even scholarly publications.
She’s still doing it. Brenda Shaffer
Shaffer first walked into Congress in 2001 to testify before the House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations.
She was introduced as “the director of the Caspian Studies Program and a post-doctoral fellow in the international security program at the Belfort [Belfer] Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government”.
Addressing lawmakers, she asked them to repeal a section of the Freedom Support Act that barred direct US aid to the Azerbaijani government. “They have extended their hand to the US. They have huge expectations that the policy of this country is based on some sort of morality and high ideals,” she told them, and reinforced this in written testimony she also submitted.
Challenged about Azerbaijan’s democratic record, she replied: “There is a lot of room for improvement in terms of democratization. However, every six months, every year, things are getting better and better.”
What lawmakers listening to Shaffer didn’t know was that the Caspian Studies Program she headed at Harvard was set up in 1999 through a $1 million grant from the US Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and a consortium of oil and gas companies led by Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron, all of which had commercial interests in the region. The chamber of commerce is a pro-Azerbaijan pressure group whose Board of Directors includes a vice president of SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state-owned energy company, and top lobbyists for BP and Chevron.
- Comment on Big Sun behind it all 1 week ago:
Fossil fuel is incredibly well financed profitable well explored. The tiny modicum of public and private money that went into renewables didn’t stop any otherwise profitable exploration or expansion of fossil fuels.
Iran had leverage since its resources began to be exploited. We could have spent a lot more on renewables decades ago that would in fact have blunted that stick. Instead we worked to make fossil fuels more valuable and thus hand them more leverage then we swung a stick at their head.
- Comment on Full circle. 1 week ago:
- It doesn’t scale. Where the problematic economic demographic is 50%+ percent of the pop and 70% live in cities no substantial portion effected could go live in all the Guthries in the nation. People are concentrated for reasons as old as civilization.
- It often wouldn’t help. Outside of shelter and taxes most goods don’t vary much or all by market and wages do.
One could find yourself spending an overlarge portion of your money on rent in an urban market move for cheaper rent and find the difference in wages makes up the difference in rent and now you need to afford everything else on less total wages.
- Cheaper markets have worse services and safety nets. Those who already rely on good medial benefits in urban centers in blue states would find little savings in moving into the boondocks in their own states and would lose more in health care alone than they gain in rent moving to bumfuck
- Comment on Full circle. 1 week ago:
How can the same folks who can’t afford to live afford to emigrate again?
- Comment on Dumb glasses 4 weeks ago:
why would you make smart glasses across process QR codes automatically? or even at all
- Comment on FADED. 🥴 5 weeks ago:
MAGA just doesn’t think like that. They think putting women in their proper place isn’t anti women its pro women because if they have traditional values imposed upon them then they will have a more happy fulfilled life. For those with minority associates or family members that they don’t silently hate they rationalize that they are among the “good ones” Ask them if they hate black people and wait for them to tell you that they don’t they hate n words which are somehow different than black people. Their compartmentalization is perfect. They see no tension with believing black people in general are bad but the ones THEY know to be good are good.
- Comment on Employa destroya 🫵😫 1 month ago:
Pretty obviously in context Washington state
- Comment on Employa destroya 🫵😫 1 month ago:
We don’t allow this in WA for instance.
- Comment on Employa destroya 🫵😫 1 month ago:
Fast food workers like subsay aren’t generally aren’t tipped or paid under minimum
- Comment on Alabama is forcing incarcerated people to work at hundreds of companies, including McDonald’s & Wendy’s. Unionizing is illegal. The state takes 40% of wages. 2 months ago:
This isn’t how debates work outside of school and the style of argument is basically useful nowhere
- Comment on Taste the flavor 2 months ago:
Its real people both pleasure themselves and destroy their penis sometimes looked it up did not believe it was real
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 months ago:
You can get 2 bottles each of which can be about 4 servings over 3 days per bottle.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 months ago:
Why doesn’t this just have a combined category so we can figure out how many drink rather than what they drink
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 months ago:
Likely you haven’t had anything that doesn’t taste like shit.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 months ago:
Half of gen Z can’t legally drink and 75% of them are broke?
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 2 months ago:
I don’t think any credible analyst believes that Russia could take NATO.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 2 months ago:
The logic behind not using them is either they can’t or they can’t. They didn’t kill a million russians and junk a fair chunk of their existing hardware for nothing. The reasonable perception is that they couldn’t take Ukraine and fight NATO at all whereas without NATO assistance historical or current Ukraine would have actually fallen in 3 days. Their ability to take Ukraine is therefore 100% a function of how well they can keep NATO out of it and nuking Ukraine blows that objective.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 months ago:
The stats say that very few kids are hurt by unknown predators but many in fact are hurt on bikes. The stats also say that predators don’t hunt by waiting slavering over facebook waiting for your to post your kids face and tracking them down in real life.
They mostly hunt by ingratiating themselves with the parents. The minority do so by grooming your kid online by direct communication. A VERY VERY tiny amount do so by waiting for your kid to be vulnerable in real space and snatching them. I have literally never in life even heard of someone who got their kids hurt by posting their faces on facebook but there are countless who got groomed by family, priests, teachers,friends who people trusted.
Turn on your brain.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 months ago:
Kids bicycling is perfectly safe around where i live.
No not it isn’t its in fact far more dangerous than your drive to work by the numbers.
Posting kids’ photos on the internet is never safe unless you take serious precautions (like covering the whole face).
There is no reason to believe someone’s face being posted on the internet is a substantial risk because although kids do get hurt or killed the overwhelming factors are trust by kids and family members and in a tiny minority of cases either opportunity created by the kids being unsupervised and perceptibly vulnerable or tricked into communicating with a bad person.
There is no reason to believe any significant number of cases had its genesis in a situation whereby the perp saw the kids face posted on facebook and said that kid that kid is the one I’m going to kidnap whereas cases that had their genesis in physical opportunity or trust are incredibly common.
How in your mind DOES this work. Do you think that snatchers are furiously combing facebook for kid faces and then doing detective work to identify and surveil the location looking for an opportunity to do the snatch? Does this sound real?
Studies show that we are terrible at understanding the magnitude of risk of uncommon events and drastically over estimate uncommon risk and underestimate commonly faced risks. For example the number of kids who were attacked because their face was posted on facebook in 2025 is probably zero but almost a thousand people per year die on bicycles and 400,000 are injured and end up in the emergency room.
Bikes are very dangerous. Posting your tike’s face… not so much. The dangerous people are statistically the perverts you will stupidly trust because you have shitty judgement WHILE obsessing about not posting their face on facebook.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 months ago:
You can’t just call anything a sacrament and it magically becomes a different thing legally. It’s perfectly ok to have standards for medical procedure and have it apply to all.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 2 months ago:
Tactical nukes are relatively new
Like new if you time traveled from the 50s We literally conceived of a bazooka launched personal nuke. Generally speaking not much was actually made by anyone and is unlikely to have been maintained as they would have been deemed basically useless for decades as is very expensive to maintain.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 3 months ago:
You can’t keep such secrets at scale at all. Abortions can be performed by giving someone a couple of pills whilst not being visibly pregnant and thereby avoiding life changing, ruining, or sometimes ending consequences of pregnancy.
It is damn near impossible to keep people from getting abortions because we give women so many reasons to have them. Compared to that almost all circumcisions would stop because it would be impossible to hide any substantial portion of the pop getting or giving them.
You are arguing we shouldn’t enact a policy that would end 99.9% because somewhere someone would be doing 0.1%
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 3 months ago:
No no it doesn’t again outside of your fantasy. Almost all harm that comes to kids unfortunately comes from people who are close to said kid.
Did you think there are random people on facebook waiting for a picture of a kid so they can somehow find that kid? Your perspective is demented.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 3 months ago:
Why would Rabbis be immune from the law again? If you cannot legally perform a procedure then you cannot legally perform a procedure. No this wouldn’t violate freedom of religion because holding them to the same law as everyone else isn’t discrimination.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 3 months ago:
It’s dubious that they have useful nukes available to just drop in an shell to start with. For practical purposes their nukes are fairly large and there are other considerations. Poorly maintained shit may malfunction creating additional doubt as to their military might and it might trigger additional aid by the rest of the world. They can’t actually fight NATO so actions have to be carefully calibrated so as not to bring the rest of the world or even just more of their aid into the fray lest it become even more expensive or even impossible to win.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 3 months ago:
Not using nukes isn’t holding back its not inviting armageddon.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 3 months ago:
Lol why are they ableist again?
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 3 months ago:
How are people going to be dragged to a cell for getting a procedure done that no Dr will do again?