More name calling...

Complete sidestep, no refutation of statistics at all. Check. Call objectioner a name. Check.

All that sweet Humboldt green bud around you, and you choose violence. Go have another bong hit. You seem to need it.

Cute progressive word play. Check. Message implying Nazi's were right wing. Check. Implication that gun violence is a right wing phenomenon. Check.

None of this is true of course. Nazi's were socialists, a mere step away from Communism. Communists killed over 100 million people over the last century, and the actual German Nazi's another 60m+. Violence to meet their goals is part of their creed.

Polling from the Democracy Institute just in the last month has Democrats in the US approving of violence up to and including assassination as high as 30%, and they're willing to admit that openly when asked in a poll. So just fuck right off. While you're doing so, ask yourself what has gotten into your head and hardened you heart. Because those polling number are obscene, and completely unacceptable in a civilized society.

The real crux of the problem is the '10s were not great for CPU performance increases. They shipped like 7 (?) generations of CPU's with basically the same single thread speed, and a bunch of horrible security issues like spectre & meltdown, etc... All you got were more cores, useless instruction sets, more memory, and near the end of the '10s NVMe & finally some better single thread speeds. Windows 10 was advertised as the "last version of Windows", etc... Win 7 to Win 10 was free for existing COA's... Expectations were set. Bargains were plenty...

I actually ran an old Dell T3500 (circa 2011) as a gaming rig until '22. I picked it up used for $75. I swapped out the HDD for an SSD, put a modern GPU in it, and swapped the 4 core workstation CPU for a 6c/12t server Xeon. 48Gb of interleaved triple channel DDR3 gets close to early dual channel DDR4 speeds, not really but close enough... The Win 7 COA allowed me to update to Win 10. I got 99fps on most of the games I play. The only downsides was no microcode updates, and the 130+ watt TDP. Otherwise it was a tank.

In the end I bit the bullet and built a replacement rig from new parts. The newer Ryzen 7's, PCIe4 GPU's and faster DDR4 memory finally made it worth the trouble. I did what I could to de-fang Windows 11, and I do most of my important work on Linux via my homelab cluster. The money I saved skipping several generations of PC's was used to build a homelab, and take some training. And that's the crux here... They forced customers to spend money that didn't land in M$'s pocket. That's a bad precedent to set. I've been assuming the Spectre/Meltdown stuff was some of the motivation, but the newer CPU's don't seem to have fully closed the hole.

T

I don't have DirecTV, and for the most part... I don't watch TV.

Problem solved!

T

Have you read up on the Federal Reserve Bank? :)

Irrelevant. The point is he was shot for his speech. He was trying to persuade people, for whatever motivation, and someone got mad an killed him.

The "hate speech" trope is disgusting. Hate speech is free speech. The revisionism around that is absurd. Once you justify violence over speech, you've lost everything we've gained over the last 250 years.

T

I live in a state with a "homestead" protection. It's kind of an odd provision. I can declare bankruptcy and keep my homestead. I'd lose other property, but not my primary residence. The only way I lose my house is to not pay the mortgage or my federal income & state property taxes.

As for safety nets... I think it's long past time we couple unemployment and COBRA coverage in some fashion. This would roughly double the amount needed to provide unemployment benefits, but provide a much needed safety net. Structured correctly, it could alter the layoff calculus for corporations. The benefits having a limited period & termination date make's sure it's a safety net and not a hammock.

T

Except... The only way it continues to exist is if it generates a profit. It's there's no profit, it stops happening.

Hospitals close, doctor's/nurses/techs leave, etc... Say I was a doctor (I'm not)... You call out the indifference, but you're indifferent to my needs. I'm not working for free. My college cost a lot of money.

As for socialism, it always fails. Always. People hold up Canada and England's public health service, but omit that you can wait a year or more for a simple MRI, and die in the queue. When you look at full blown socialism, that too always fails, from the Mayflower compact to Venezuela...

We need safety nets in society. Some of these are socialistic in nature, unemployment, medicare, etc... Some are regulatory, like making it illegal to hold cancer patients hostage to contract negotiations. Violence only leads to more violence.

T

How'd that work out for Charlie Kirk?

T

Someone please tell the AI filters in HR....

This might not be such a good idea as Vegas was begging Canada to come back. Their tourism isnâ(TM)t what it used to be and talk of 51st state has turned off Canadian tourism.

OK, so much for that theory because I went ahead and searched the full text for wine and got this:

Mosquitoes showed a clear preference for the well-hydrated, on hops and grapes, that is. Arm landings were significantly higher in beer drinkers compared to those who had nobly abstained for at least 12 hours (FC 1.44, 95% CI 1.20-1.74, PFDR < 0.001, Figure 3C). Mosquitoes seemed to have a taste for wine drinkers too (FC 1.39, 95% CI 1.02-1.88, P = 0.035), but this effect sobered up after correcting for multiple testing (PFDR = 0.103). Measured blood alcohol concentration ranged from to 1.82â and positively correlated with the self-reported consumed number of beers (Spear-man rho = 0.46, P < 0.001) and glasses of wine (Spearman rho = 0.12, P = 0.011). No statistically significant effect of alcohol concentration was observed on mosquito attraction when included as a continuous variable (FC 1.04, PFDR = 0.853) nor as a binned variable using the concentration of approximately two units as a threshold (< 0.5â versus 0.5â, FC 1.21, PFDR = 0.344). Individuals reported to have smoked cannabis in the past 48 hours were more attractive to mosquitoes than individuals that did not smoke cannabis (FC 1.35, 95% CI 1.09-1.66, PFDR = 0.017, Figure 3D). Cannabis was the only substance for which an effect on mosquito arm-landings was found, the effects of other substances were statistically not significant (all PFDR > 0.569). There was no indication that the presence of a cannabis user made mosquitoes fly at higher altitudes or made them less aggressive.

Now I'm on to a new idea. Since hops and cannabis are related, there may be some aromatic compound common to both of them.

The drug companies didn't invent dementia. Alzheimer's was described in1906 and named in 1910, but there was a broad understanding before of older people going in to mental decline--even in ancient times. There's always going to be a leading cause of death. Increased health will lead to increased life spans and reveal new problems. That's what happened with senile dementia. More old people, so more people get it. Those same doctors and drug companies are working on cures and treatments ad yes treatments are more likely to come before cures. Take HIV for example. I'm pretty sure the people maintained at undetectable levels, leading near normal life spans are happier than when they got full-blown AIDS and it was a death sentence. Yes. There's still no cure and the drugs cost money; but they haven't stopped work on a cure. Any researcher in the field would be absolutely THRILLED beyond belief to have their name attached to that, or a cure for Alzheimer's. It's just that it's a really hard thing to do.

Yes. Alcohol. It's on their breath, and insects are attracted to it in general. Googling around, that includes mosquitos but I've heard of people using it to attract wasps and kill them even though it's probably counter-productive since you're attracting the very thing you don't want and the outdoors have a very large supply that your bug zapper or dish of beer is not going to exhaust.