Nothing wrong with it as a method, so long as it makes some predictions we can then test for.

No, it cannot. I was talking about the strategic importance of the Suwalki Gap though. Russian aggression is not overblown whatsoever.

Catching corruption in your investigations is a good thing. When you don’t seem to regularly catch anyone, that’s the bad sign.

This is the Suwałki Gap, described as “most dangerous place in the world”.

This narrow strip of land, just 65 kilometres long, connects the Baltic states with Poland and thus also with the other NATO countries. To the west of it lies the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, to the east, Moscow-loyal Belarus. If Putin were to strike here, it would be relatively easy for him to cut the Baltic states off from their allies.

This is a little overblown.

The plan was never to try to dig in and hold the borders of the Baltics, that’s not feasible. They’re just too small, there isn’t enough depth. In any kind of large war, they would almost certainly be occupied, at least mostly. The question is, for how long, and how painful and resource-intensive would the process be for Russia? Once NATO mobilized, there would be a significant counterattack coming from the west. The Baltics wouldn’t be that much easier to hold for Russia, being in range of naval power and such a ridiculous number of NATO airbases.

That said, this is why a full scale attack is unlikely, at least at first. Putin knows a massive invasion, like what Ukraine faced, would bring almost all of Europe into a war with him in a completely unwinnable situation. Instead, it’s much more likely for him to try incremental escalations, testing Article 5 with small scale incursions and attacks, hoping he can drive wedges between the alliance members while leaning on nuclear saber rattling to deter a large retaliation. Ideally, NATO retains the ability to retaliate in kind to avoid escalation. While they don’t have as many undersea cables as we have, there are multiple other avenues for delivering smaller-scale retributions. Cyber, sabotage, diplomatic/legal, economic, etc.

an audience including JD Vance

Really shouldn’t be taking such dangerous risks like that so early in your tenure, the fatality rate for Popes meeting Vance was estimated to be 100%.

Despite all the fearmongering, it’s so far proved unnecessary. Ji is going to look at it in terms of cost/benefit, and as things sit, the costs are high and the benefit of getting a leveled Taiwan is minimal. The diplomatic costs in particular are fairly prohibitive, with China investing so much recently in trying to be a predictable, stable and peaceful world power that other countries can feel good partnering with.

It would be vastly preferable for all parties involved to maintain the status quo and continue to work towards peaceful reunification in the future. Assuming Taiwan doesn’t do anything stupid, this patient approach has no real drawbacks. It did work several times in the past, after all.

Only place I’ve occasionally run into metric prefixes above km is in astronomy within proximity to our planet. You just don’t need them for most terrestrial applications, and as soon as you get out of the solar system people switch to parsecs and light years.

I suppose people also have a basic sense of how long a km is, where that goes out the window with anything bigger. Especially anyone who has gone through the military, has an intuitive feel for how distant a “klick” is.

Not off the top of my head. Cooking is frequently a recreational hobby though, it’s essentially an art form. So I think it’s about equally likely that dancing, painting or making music fade away.

But, y’know, in case anyone wants to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax

Worth noting that it is illegal in Russia to criticize the war, so saying you don’t support it is probably a good way to get yourself sent to the front lines in an infantry uniform. So, it’s difficult to gauge how many people actually genuinely support it or not.

Yeah, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up a little bit. The fridge door would function here as a large lever, and a cat’s arm is not particularly sturdy.

There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

Is there thinking among the locals that a big war might break out? Or do more people think it will just be small border skirmishes?

Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: https://youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.

Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.

But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?

You can’t look only at the propagation side of things.

Another thing, stress isn’t event based per se. It’s more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we’d really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.

Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it’d be far, far higher than 10%.

Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.

Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don’t. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.

Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.

One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn’t surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.

Meh. Let me just ask my buddy Pete what’s going on, he’ll have all the details.

So let me get this straight, you think some hitman posed, as a school bus driver of all things, to assassinate her, and that failing, she’s so important that someone else gets sent in to get her?

Occam’s Razor is dead.