To be clear the guy with the drinking problem who was talking to me wasn’t my dad, he was a colleague and friend of my dad. My dad did drink from time to time but he wasn’t an alcoholic by any means and in recent years my dad gave up drinking entirely anyway whereas the other guy has unfortunately passed away some years back.

I don’t care if other people drink for some reason or other (at least as long as it’s not impacting me… wasn’t fun when a drunk roommate was waving my computer around in the air unsteadily), whatever floats their boat, I just don’t personally.

My dad worked on a project that could have made him and his colleague probably very rich (at least, it was successfully done to great wealth by someone else many years later) but his colleague had problems with alcohol, drunk called the investors and whatever he said made them pull out such that they had to cancel the project.

His drinking got worse from there for him and he spent years in and out of prison. When I was about to go to college and my dad was meeting him after he got back out he took me aside and strictly warned me not to go crazy drinking in college. I truthfully told him that I don’t drink at all and I guess that was inconceivable to him because he started going, “You WILL drink. EVERYBODY drinks. Don’t lie and…” so on so forth.

It never seemed appealing to me what with seeing people ruin their lives and act foolish, the odor, all the money people spend on it etc. I’m sure the taste is fine if you push through and try it a bunch but from seeing the effects I never wanted to. Meanwhile visiting other people’s houses as a kid my friends would be doing stuff like asking his mom if he could sniff her wineglass at dinner. 💀

What a weird way to open a banana. I always open a seam along the back and pop it out of there.

I’m not stroking out in fear wearing a seatbelt? It’s a regular thing I do every time with zero downside.

On the days I got hit I can definitely say I didn’t wake up planning to be hit, I drive like a grandma but just because you’re stopped at a light doesn’t mean the person behind you will care.

Did they? Someone made a graph based on ISW data that showed the last few months as Ukraine gaining on net

I don’t know if there were enough officers who knew Pashto in the coalition (it wasn’t NATO only) well enough to do that. They handled speaking Pashto via native translators generally. Most of whom were men because women were not educated so the overwhelming majority (~80%) were illiterate. It would be hard to be an effective officer to people who don’t understand you.

I think that would have been quite politically difficult also. The idea was to promote a local administration with its own army and offload responsibilities to them while providing assistance as needed as they developed their capabilities. Obviously that did not work out at all as planned and ultimately failed miserably. But, nevertheless, that’s how it was sold to the public and internationally. Taking charge of Afghan people with our forces directly is going in the opposite direction by making us more involved, and would be seen as damaging the credibility of the government when we’re disregarding them to enact measures that the public of Afghanistan see as contrary to their culture. I think to viably do something like this there would have to be significant changes to the entire approach to the war at the earliest stages to not get trapped in that box, which is also the point where there is the least translation capability unfortunately.

Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have meme military governments right now so why not, whatever they can say to shore up whatever support they can as they really need it. Their militaries couped the former civilian governments on the premise that they could then activate full terrorist-shredding force, and for good measure brought in Russia’s Wagner Group (now Africa Corp) to help out. The results speak for themselves…

https://www.wral.com/archive/17902880/

They did do that to some successes like the (very small) Female Tactical Platoon but it was very hard to meet the targets when it’s going directly against the grain of the traditional culture so they had to keep revising them down. In joining they would suffer consistent sexual harassment (which they had no means to report and wasn’t investigated even in a case with video proof released to the public) and be looked down on by the community, they would often be set to make tea and clean whatever their job actually was, no clear paths of advancement and little to no mentors who had paved the way before them, and they were on the Taliban’s kill on sight list. So you had to be in a pretty desperate situation to consider it.

In 1971 there were 1.4x the road deaths as in 2025 despite having the country only having 60% of the 2025 population. I wouldn’t say you have zero control over whether or not you get into an accident but very surprising things can happen suddenly and give you very little time to react. In that situation I’d want to focus on safely maneuvering the car and not be distracted with panic buckling with my life on the line.

I don’t get why people on Lemmy care so much about either of them so passionately, I passively see more Linux vs Windows in a week here than basically the rest of my life before joining this site. Is every other person here some kind of computer science enthusiast or something like that?

U-238 (the most common isotope in natural uranium, present to an even higher degree in depeleted uranium which has had the shorter-lived U-235 removed) has a half life in the billions of years and with such a long half-life life even with a large mass of the material you won’t be getting many radiological decays occurring. Which is not to say it’s good for you to ingest or contact, it’s definitely not, but that’s more due to the chemical properties it has as a heavy metal (think like how lead is bad for you) than its radiological ones.

Fission products formed in a nuclear reactor on the other hand have half lives all over the place from tiny fractions of a second to days, years, millions of years and so on. So you can get a high dose from short-lived isotopes going through many decays if you happen to be around them while they’re freshly generated, and intermediate life isotopes can persist in the environment for sustained periods while still dosing up the area. So a flying nuclear reactor venting its exhaust over you is quite a lot worse radiologically speaking than some depleted uranium being in your environment, though that said the chemical properties of having uranium in your drinking water or the physical properties of a high density round shot at you are plenty bad regardless of the radiological harm being often overstated.

I’m speaking to radiation since that’s my interest. The specific activity of uranium is generally around 14.8 Bq/mg vs. 25.4 Bq/mg for natural uranium, where one Bq is one nuclear transformation per second. That sounds like a lot but as far as radioactive materials goes is incredibly low. The Americium-241 used in smoke detectors for instance has 127 million Bq/mg.

Incorrect, if anything, understated - but because it’s a bunch of brown people and nobody cares enough to read the research

As I said before there certainly are health impacts but they are largely arising from the chemical toxicity, not the radiological activity. It is ONLY the radiological aspect where I said the risk was overstated, I recognize that the chemical one is very real. For example, the WHO 2001 report on depleted uranium that your second source cites gave a limit on depleted uranium of 0.28 mg/L in drinking water for its radiological toxicity… and a 140x smaller (!) provisional guideline of 0.002 mg/L for the chemical toxicity.

Your third source states this in its summary:

In this report, it is concluded that the radiation doses from DU do not pose a radiological hazard to the population at the four studied locations in southern Iraq. The estimated annual committed effective radiation doses that could arise from exposure to DU residues are low, always less than 100 µSv/a and only to a few, if any, individuals, and therefore of little radiological concern. The estimated radiation doses are less than those received on average by individuals from natural sources of radiation in the environment (worldwide average 2.4 mSv/a), below internationally recommended dose limits for members of the public (1 mSv/a) and below the action level of 10 mSv/a set out in the IAEA Safety Standard on Remediationof Areas Contaminated by Past Activities and Accidents [1] to establish whether remedial actions are necessary.

It’s common for a lot of authoritarian places to have laws that are selectively enforced. Since the enforcement is rare many people don’t bother following them but if someone bothers someone high up for any reason then breaking the law (that tons of other people break all the time anyway) is an easy excuse for the authorities to come down like a sack of bricks with a pretext ready. Being higher profile makes it more likely that you catch the eye of someone who hates you so it can be safer being some random person too low to notice instead. Though higher profile people also have more people ready to defend them generally so if you do get on someone’s list it’s better to have people in your corner who will make noise and maybe get punishment lessened or called off.

Got to hand it to them that their diplomatic block seems to be developing nicely.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar are all working increasingly closer with each other, plus supporting dependents in common like the recognized governments of Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. While most of those outside of Pakistan and Sudan really REALLY don’t have any love for Iran, by positioning as peacemakers they raise their estimation in the world and also shunt more of the Iranian block’s ire towards the other emerging regional block (India, UAE, Israel, Ethiopia and their dependents such as Somaliland in Somalia, RSF in Sudan, Hijri’s National Guard in Syria etc.). Indeed, the UAE was far more heavily bombed by Iran than Qatar or Saudi Arabia even though they all remain at odds with Iran. If by chance it works then that’s economically great for Iran’s neighbors and the nations that export oil by the Gulf. At present it’s not working but that may also yield a dividend if it drives a wedge between Trump and Israel; we’ve already seen J.D. Vance broach the topic by warning Israel to side with Trump and not complain about the deal.

Darn I was always kind of interested in looking at the Snapchat stories in random places in Afghanistan

I was curious and looked up adult women literacy rates for women in Iraq and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category. For female youths aged 15-24 it rose from 80% to 91% over the same time period (though in the intervening period that did indeed drop to 72-73% in their stats during the chaos of the Iraq War).

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.

Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.

There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.

Idk for other ships but their aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov became a meme for always being down for maintenance and/or on fire

All these reports beg the question… have they found a country that ISN’T carrying out covert schemes in Canada?