This is a NATO proxy war in that NATO, an organization created to provide European countries protection from Russia's territorial ambitions, is providing assistance to a European country to help protect them from Russia's territorial ambitions.

I can't get over the circular logic of thinking Russia is justified in its invasion of another country by the fact that the other country wanted to be better prepared to defend against Russia invading it.

"I need to beat up my neighbor for trying to take a self defense class, because if he takes the class I won't be able to beat him up."

Dude, it only comes up if you're trying to beat up your neighbor. just don't do that.

Capitalism isn't the "best system we've got", though... it isn't even the system we are all using right now.

We've never operated in anything like a "purely" capitalist economy, and the socialist policies most western countries have put in place are wildly popular and few people would want to live without them.

Countries that intelligently choose when and where and what things should be operated on a capitalist basis, have better outcomes.

Healthcare? Not something anyone should make money off of. Basic housing, food, water, power... these should be immune to market forces.

At the same time, capitalism drives fantastic technological and social innovation within its swimlane. We just have to pre-define what things people should be able to make money doing.

I hate this term ... giving your kids money to help them start out on their own isn't nepotism, it's parenting.

Nepotism is when you violate a responsibility you have to a third party (e.g., your employer) to act impartially in their interests, in order to benefit your family.

Is the idea that parents should donate their money equally to everyone's kids? This makes no sense.

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it's a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes' ingredients aren't a taxonomic thing, they're a probabilistic thing. In other words, there's no such thing as "not salad" or "salad", only shades of saladness.

• Serve it cold? Ok it's saladier

• It's made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

• Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

• They're mixed together? Even more salad like

• They've got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it's very likely a salad!

... and so on. To me, your SO'a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

In this case, the franchisees (small business owners) are saying the big business (McDonalds, which makes its money off of real estate and franchise fees) is going to be fine but they (the people that make money from owning a restaurant) are in trouble.

For many of them, it's true; they didn't consider whether they could open this business if they had to pay a living wage. Unfortunately, that's not our problem, but it won't be a problem for McDonalds either.

Science and religion are two entirely separate things. Treating religion like science is bad, but treating science like religion is worse.

You cannot "believe in" science; it is not intended to tell you how to live a moral life or provide meaning to your existence, etc. If you try and make it do that, you are not being scientific, you're being dogmatic.

These concepts aren't related to each other, and shouldn't be compared.

The tablet is written in proto cuneiform, the earliest format of real writing -- its basically got numbers, nouns and a limited list of verbs, but no grammatical elements... so we don't know that it was past tense, it's just a guess -- but a reasonable one:

• We know Kushim signed about a dozen other tablets listing various transactions, which were always either receiving, or disbursing grain. Proto debits and credits, if you will.

• The distribution of grain has a recipient and a purpose (e.g., to four different people to make beer), and usually does not have a time frame.

• The receipts have a time frame, and sometimes a source (sort of a "tax receipt").

The thought is that basically, when the grain came in it'd be tallied, then tablets would be added noting recipients and purpose until it had been disbursed.

It's also worth noting that clay tablets are challenging to date, and there's an (as far as I know, ongoing) debate about whether "kushim" was an individual, or an office (e.g., "grain wrangler").

The rationale is: profit. Ultimately reddit relies on users for content, and they're hoping if the remove the organisers of the strike (the mods) and replace them with scabs, that the users will stop striking.

Genuinely surprised Sherlock Holmes was rated that low, I really enjoyed it.

Where are you getting that 90% figure? I'm seeing stratospherically higher activity than I was a week ago, I'm willing to buy half to 2/3 of those accounts being a combination of alt accounts, duplicate accounts (e.g., people moving off beehaw) and bot accounts, but 90% bots sounds implausible.

Nobody is making 1.6 million bots to target 100,000 users.

Eh, I don't mind.

Edit: thanks for the gold kind sir

Edit: wow who would have thought such a simple comment would blow up?

You're confusing cause and effect, mostly.

If you've:

• Met a bunch of people that don't look like you or live like you

• Have a high paying job that requires a good education

• Encountered a ton of new concepts and ideas frequently

You're more likely to be a liberal. These things also tend to occur at much greater frequencies in cities.

I mean... I can't see any issue with NATO not stopping Ukraine from invading its own territory... the territory the UN recognizes as part of Ukraine... and which Russia signed three separate treaties promising to respect as part of Ukraine.

In my 20s, I always pointed out that the empirical evidence shows that, as people get older, their political positions generally just... become harder-line versions of the positions they held in their 20s.

As time has passed, that's born out. I'm still a leftie, just a franker and more ticked off one.

Hey, to be fair at the time the Exodus story was synthesized, it was a henotheistic religion, monotheism didn't show up for another couple hundred years!

So at the time, nobody thought of Yahweh as all knowing or all powerful, just possessed of "god-like" knowledge and power, and clearly tougher than the Egyptian gods (which were assumdd to be real, but you just weren't supposed to worship them) because he was able to kill all them Egyptian babies.

The blood-over-the-door was basically proof you were a paid-up subscriber to the Yahweh sacrifice plan. "Ah sweet you sacrificed a lamb, no baby murder for you fam."

Thanks, now I have clinical depression

It's a 750 ml. It refers to the size in ounces (more accurately, to the size of similar bottles before metric was adopted; a 750 is actually around 25.5 oz).

Yes of course... Russia acknowledged Ukraine's borders and territorial integrity when:

• Ukraine was admitted to the UN in 1945 with its current borders (which Russia could have vetoed).

• Ukraine's sovereign status and territorial integrity were guaranteed in the Belovezha Accords in 1991, which recognized the dissolution of the USSR and the borders and sovereignty of the former member states.

• Ukraine agreed to transfer control of its 4,700 nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation in exchange for guarantees by the US, UK, and Russian Federation that they would not threaten to use (or use) military force against Ukraine... in the Budapest Memorandum in 1996.

• Russia specifically recognized Ukraine's sovereignty in Crimea when Ukraine agreed to lease it military bases there (and split the Black Sea fleet, stationed in Crimea, 50/50 in 1997) in the Partition Treaty.

• The two countries agreed not to declare war on one another, to treat each other's territory as inviolable and to prohibit the use of military force to resolve any future territorial disputes in the same year's Treaty of Friendship.

• Russia agreed to "final borders" in January 2003 (which include Crimea, Kherson, etc)

• As you know, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014; they signed a ceasefire in 2015 once again confirming Ukraine's territorial integrity, but this was almost immediately violated, so I'm not sure I'd even count it.

Hope it helps. The three that were top of mind for me were 1991, 1996, and 2003.

Not me, I thought he was going to be overtaken with remorse and bludgeon himself to death from behind in a tragic suicide.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I think the karma system has value and I'd like to see us keep it. I did time as a moderator on a fairly busy subreddit, and requiring accounts to be >30 days old and have >100 or so karma saved us a lot of work. E.g., it made ban evasion a little harder to do, and reduced brigading.

It also helped to keep folks fairly civil and promoted considering perspective when posting, which I think is valuable.

With that said, I'd LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes... it's a missing feature in reddit, and if you are trying to promote discussion of a divisive topic, or to actively suppress an echo chamber, I think down votes are counter productive.