I had the same thought, but I’m to lazy to put together a meme

I was joking that there’s literally about 10 trans athletes in college sports out of a couple hundred thousand total, it’s crazy how much of a non-issue it really is

You want us to name all 10?

I mean… They’re not exactly hiding it. The expressed purpose of belts and roads is to invest in their infrastructure and partner with them to build industrial capacity. Conveyer belts and roads. They openly state they’re doing it to build up trading partners and global influence

It’s literally the same thing… Will they be better partners? Hopefully, it’s not exactly a high bar

They’re not Marxist-Leninists at all though… They’re just a highly regulated form of capitalism.

The government doesn’t own Tencent, they just keep a strong grip on them. They have their own billionaires, the factories have owners, companies bid to fulfill government contracts, you apply for a job and get paid what they offer. It’s just capitalism

Their government does a lot more than in the US and has a lot more influence, and they do influence the market more… But that’s just regulation and public services

They basically do what we did to tik tok. The US government can revoke a corporate charter for any or no reason, China just actually uses this authority actively

Yes, the World Bank and the IMF. I’ve even seen it personally, which is what led me to dig down the rabbit hole - I got interviewed by a world Bank employee to explain why I was installing a system for an airport, and they kept trying to guide me to explain why it was helpful…I couldn’t, because it was only useful if the Internet is down, and if that happens it’s probably not useful because the system had to be taken down if there’s bad weather, and the airport regularly flooded during storms anyways

They were constant protests and news coverage of projects being pushed on them, and it was an open secret for the airport workers. It was for things they didn’t need or want, even though they had plenty of infrastructure in disrepair already

Argentina is the classic example, they resisted and had their currency destroyed, which makes international trade hard. Other countries go so deep in debt they have IMF officials installed in their government to implement austerity measures, some even are forced to hand over their currency printing powers

Sometimes countries get into our good graces, like Peru, and they are let off the treadmill in exchange for beneficial trade deals. That’s after having their resource rights sold off and letting in foreign investments to extract wealth moving forward, but mostly they’re kept in perpetual debt as leverage

It’s a wild and very deep rabbit hole. The information isn’t hidden, it’s just spun in a positive light

Belt and roads is China’s attempt to do exactly what we’ve been doing with the global south, invest for influence and put them on a debt treadmill. Build infrastructure, pressure them to take on more debt with new projects, say it’s time for austerity, open up more foreign investments, use pressure to buy up raw resources, etc

It’s worth mentioning Coca-Cola… You can get American products everywhere, opening them up as a new market isn’t a different strategy, it’s part of the process

Interestingly, evolution doesn’t seem like it’s actually random. There’s mechanisms to it we’re only beginning to understand

It seems to only improve in a single area (genetically) so much before switching, it doesn’t optimize, it is focused, and the rate of evolution is driven by stress.

My theory is that too much success would cause a population boom and bust, and so it’s encoded into terrestrial life very early on - the studies come from bacteria genetically edited to break respiration pathways, and all the evolution was focused there before the evolution moved to a different area - but they didn’t even recover their original efficiency, possibly because they just reached a comfortable point without competition

So in this case, I think the female hyenas were probably being killed opportunistically, which led to evolutions related to size and dominance. Bigger females that fuck the males in dominance rituals are enough to relieve the evolutionary stress, and so evolution slowed and they reached “good enough”

Aren’t they scavengers and opportunistic hunters though? They tend to be much easier to convince to fuck off, there’s a lot of weaker bite forces that wouldn’t let go

No, make the story even more ridiculous. Tell them how you mistook lube for body wash at the store, and while cleaning your ass in the shower your finger accidentally slid inside, surprising you and causing you to slip on the lube, kicking the shampoo bottle into the center of the shower. And in desperately acting to remove your fingers, your stretched your butt cheeks right as you came down on the bottle

Yes, they know what happened. But the least you can do is give them an absurd story, really play it up. Bonus points for giving them all relevant information as another unlikely accident leading up to the event

They’ll eat it up, they’ve seen enough of this to not really care. But a great story will give them joy for years to come

Days after exposing himself as a fake poser of a gamer, Elon has conveniently (again) reminded us he’s also a fake poser of a programmer

It’s a legit problem… You have tops and bottoms in straight relationships too, it’s not about parts or gender, it’s about relationship dynamics

But we’ve partially tied it up with gender, which really fucks with all these people who don’t understand why their sex lives suck, no matter how hard they try

Always was

Jesus was so fucking based. Literally my only hero. Read the gospels… You can go it in a few hours, and it hits very different without any commentary

I mean, beyond that, the practice is still around to this day

Here’s an article on chacas. They’re more local and personally managed, but they’re a textbook example of agroforestry

Here’s an article about the evidence the Amazon was intentionally cultivated

He’s an excerpt:

In 2013, community ecologist Hans ter Steege and colleagues were taking inventory of the vast diversity of the Amazon’s trees. The team sampled 1,170 scattered plots far from modern human inhabitants to identify more than 16,000 different species among those 390 billion individual plants. Then they noticed something odd: Despite that broad diversity, over half of the total trees were made up of just over 1 percent (227) of the species.

About 20 of these “hyperdominant” plants were domesticated species such as the Brazil nut, the Amazon tree grape and the ice cream bean tree. That was five times the amount researchers expected if chance were the only factor. “The hypothesis came up that perhaps people might have domesticated these species a lot […] which would have helped their abundance in the Amazon,” says ter Steege says, who is the lead author of the recent study.

To test this hypothesis, ter Steege teamed up with archaeologists to look more closely at the number of domesticated species in proximity to where there was evidence of pre-Columbian communities. “Indeed, the distance to these archaeological sites has an effect on the abundance and richness of domesticated species in the Amazon,” ter Steege says, noting that he and his team were able to plot a decrease in the number of domesticated species as the distance from archaeological sites increased.

The researchers also found that many of these domesticated species were identified far from the areas where they first arose, leading to speculation that humans transported them to cultivate elsewhere. Cocoa, used by some native peoples for beverages and in religious ceremonies, was first domesticated in the northwestern region of the Amazon, where researchers today have identified a larger genetic diversity reflecting more time established there. But today the species is most prevalent in the southern areas of the rainforest.

It’s not a particularly new theory, and the evidence fits the claims and practices of the surviving cultures - I think it just hasn’t caught on because of cultural bias. The Americas have a long history of sprawling empires and evidence of trade from Washington State to the Andes mountains.

Disease and outright genocide just destroyed most of these cultures, not because they were primitive (we have no problem praising their math and astronomy), but because they developed down a very different path

There’s also this idea that maybe the Amazon was a food forest, like many places in the Americas

It’s not a regression, it’s an objectively better form of farming. Instead of cultivating the land, you cultivate the ecosystem. You plant the things you want frequently and cull the plants you don’t like over generations, and you have food everywhere all the time. The extra food supports critters and prey animals, giving you easy hunting. It’s a minimal work high reward farming style

The downside is you don’t get a lot of easily stored crops you need for cities and armies. And so you see both side by side - for example, the Inca would farm potatoes as taxes, which would be stored for traveling armies or disasters and sent back to the capital to support their higher population density

I’m going to go out on a limb and say fedora silverblue or bazzite

Basic user? Use flat packs and enjoy easy graphics support, as well as all of the windows compatibility for gaming

Advanced user? Learn to do things in pods/containers or distrobox, it’s easy even if the quick start docs aren’t great (I can find my cheat sheets if anyone is going down that road)

Pro: most stuff just works, and it’s harder to config yourself into a corner you have to research your way out of

Cons: normal Linux install guides need to be modified a bit, it’s not hard but you do have to learn how to do it

The Germans, circa '40 FTFY

It could also be not be him, and some deal was made with a lookalike to close the case quickly, or to avoid giving the adjuster a platform to tell his story

You bring up an interesting point, but there’s a bit more to it that has been downplayed in most history books

They were two sides of the same coin

MLK did not protest for support or to display their convictions - it was done to fight the legal system. They staged events to get arrested and charged for crimes relating to segregation and rights denied to them - then the lawyers came into play. They challenged the constitutionality of the laws, over and over. They overwhelmed the courts so much it hampered their ability to function. They lost plenty, but every small win persisted and chipped the laws down little by little

The black Panthers were an implied threat - “were watching, and we’re armed too. We’ll play by the rules if you do”. They primarily upheld the rule of law, by limiting extra-legal punitive crackdowns on Black communities. There was some less reactive violence, but that wasn’t their purpose

Civil disobedience wasn’t peaceful for optics, it was a third path strategy to turn the system against itself. Returning the violence would defeat the primary purpose, because it would weaken the legal challenge

All that being said, the two organizations were separate wings of the same movement. They both played important roles, one faught for fair laws, the other for fair application of the law. Their methods were incompatible though, so they needed strong separation