With not voting, you are forfeiting your right to influence the outcome. Therefore, whatever the outcome, you blindly have agreed to it. You can try to be rabulistic about it, but there is no difference in the outcome if you are not voting because you were lazy, indifferent or enthusiastic about it. All three non-votes count exactly the same: zero.

How do you prove a negative? If you have no Instagram account, how do you prove it? By not knowing your Instagram password?

How does it work then with people posting stuff in the name of organizations?

That's the "foreign agent" argument of every dictatorial regime right now.

I was paid $35 per donation, and was allowed to donate up to three times per week.

So, $105 / week or $5,460 / year.

That would be about $10k / year in 2025 dollars.

The clinic was a ten minute walk from my workplace, so I'd walk there and back on my MWF lunch breaks.

In my book, everyone absent from voting is voting for whatever the outcome.

Was the test available at the time? Did other sperm banks check for this mutation?

Way more than that. It was 200 babies, not 200 attempts. The success rate of artificial insemination is about 20%, so that's 1000 squirts.

I was a sperm donor back in the 1990s.

The donors aren't "random".

They are screened for general health, genetic defects, and academic achievement. I had to show my college transcripts, provide a blood sample, and have a medical examination.

TFA describes a screwup that only happened because a test for the condition wasn't available. But many other tests were done, so the odds were still better than an old-fashioned insemination.

Many of the recipients are women in nuclear families, whose husbands have fertility problems.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

The funny bit is that the climate models contained in the 1990 IPPC report have been spot on (after 35 years, we are right in the middle of their prediction range), and all subsequent climate models were underestimating the effects. Apparently exactly those politicians you accuse of hysteria for personal gain were in fact pressuring climate scientist to modify their models and give less hysterical predictions - and they have been wrong, because they systematically underestimated the change.

But that's no wonder. While the amount of money spend on climate science is about 5 billion dollar a year, just the amount of subsidies given to oil, gas and coal is about 500 billion dollars a year, and no industry wants to lose half a trillion.

AI strongly favors some phrases over others, though. I have a Google news watch on the name "Gamesurge", and for 15+ years Google has matched that against news that uses phrases like "late-game surge". This year, the frequency of those hits has gone up by about an order of magnitude. I don't think that was organic in origin.

It's like if you suddenly had a zillion people asking "doubts" about how to do the needful: you could be pretty sure which dialect of English influenced their word choices.

That's why I differentiated between Chinese made cars and Chinese brands.

no problem.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Unless you are at the North or South Pole or on top of one of the highest mountains, you are unlikely to be getting an average of one SEU per week in one computer due to cosmic rays. I would attribute most of the errors you see to other causes: marginal timing compatibility, power glitches, an overburdened fan, a leaky microwave nearby, several of these in combination, etc. Cosmic rays sound cool, but most bit flips have more boring causes.

In my case, I saw a lot more errors when I was running compute-intensive jobs: read files, decompress them, run a domain specific compression to text, generate SHA-256, compress using a general purpose compression, in parallel on 24 cores. The location of errors was random like in your system, but the correlation with processor load convinced me it wasn't caused by cosmic rays.