"We invented a new kind of calculator. It usually returns the correct value for the mathematics you asked it to evaluate! But sometimes it makes up wrong answers for reasons we don't understand. So if it's important to you that you know the actual answer, you should always use a second, better calculator to check our work."

Then what is the point of this new calculator?

Fantastic comment, from the article.

Man in 30s married to a half-Filipina woman here. When we went to visit for our honeymoon it was really gross. LOTS of very, very old men with teenage girls.

I had women falling out of their chairs to look at me.

I had a woman literally fall over while trying to ogle me while walking down the street.

For our goodbye dinner, her Ate toasted us by saying "You have fulfilled all our dreams: you've married a white man."

I had several people say how ugly they were because they were Filipino.

EVERY convenience store and super market had skin whitening creams.

It was my first experience of the Philippines and the first experience I had of racial fetishism. My wife got preferential treatment for being Mestizos.

The Spanish did a real number over there with their racial hierarchy bullshit.

Shower thought: if everyone gives a % of their labour value to the government it's called taxes and is evil communism. If everyone gives a % of their labour value to an individual it's called capitalism and is glorious. How does that mental gymnastics work?

Fun fact! Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer - yes, it works and has been independently verified. No, you can't have it because embargo.

EDIT: vaccine here isn't actually what I thought. In this case it is a treatment to be used for certain kinds of lung cancer, not a preventative measure as we are used to thinking of Vaccine. Thanks to the comment below for going through it and pushing me to do proper research.

While my initial take was a glib link to a wikipedia page and not thoroughly researched, I do sill believe that the embargo has directly caused this treatment to come to market in the west as the levels of cooperation are non-existent. It has been used for 7 years in Cuba but is only now entering Stage 3 trials in the US.

Cuba have also became the first country to have 0 mother-child transmissions of HIV.

But the US has decided that working with Cuba to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (in the States alone) is less important than causing "economic dissatisfaction and hardship" to the Cuban people.

weak aptitude for language learning

This is such bullshit. As a Brit abroad, our problem is weak language education. We are taught to such a poor degree and we are not taught how to learn a language. It's been the biggest struggle of my adult life trying to get conversational and after a year I am still way behind my cohorts - it's not some genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning, but a lack of language infrastructure in childhood.

Your title made me wonder: would NASA get more funding if they strapped AR-15s onto the rovers and called it a liberation mission...

It's not just America though.

Where I'm from:

UK average income before tax) £34,963 - £27,911 after tax (assuming NO student loan and NO pension) (for context: a band 3 nurse with 3 years experience makes £24,336 before tax or £20,631.51 after with no pension)

England average house price: £375,131

Approx ratio after tax: 13:1

Minimum deposit: 5% - £18,756.55

Tax: 0% on first time buyers

Fees: about £1,000 - £5,000

Total cost to get going: Approx £21,750 - nearly a years wage.

Now let's look where I live: Spain!

Turns out Spain really is a load of countries wearing a hat so getting unified stats is not easy. Let's try Barcelona:

Average income before tax: €33,837 - €25,470 after tax

Average house price: €376,399

Approx ratio after tax: 15:1

Minimum deposit: 10% - €37,639.90

Purchase tax: 10% - €37,639.90 (plus 1.5% for new builds)

Fees: 2 - 5% - 7,527.98 - 18,819.95

Total cost to get going: €82,807.78 - €94,099.75

Turns out treating housing as a market to speculate on might just be the problem all along.

Tired of writing this, the hand wringing over university property being compared to ~30k lives and ~600k starving people has to stop.

This painting is not some culturally important piece of art. It’s a little over 100 years old (literally painted the same year my Granddad was born), hanging in a university, of a man that was responsible for massacres in Ireland (Mitchelstown Massacre) which got him the name “Bloody Balfour”, openly said that black people should be treated worse than white people, and was a known anti-semite that brought about the Aliens Act of 1905 to try and keep Jewish people out of Britain & Ireland.

Imagine a group of Princeton students cutting up a minor painting of Jefferson Davies hanging in their halls and you get roughly the same amount of "cultural loss".

As an immigrant living in Spain: Vox make election day terrifying. I just don't leave the house (immigrants can't vote in Spain).

I'm not a small guy, ex-competitve weight lifter and 6'2, but those people are nuts and it isn't worth the risk.

We have to learn from Germany's mistakes: armed resistance is legitimate in the face of fascism.

Ooo something for me!

I am FORMERLY uncircumcised. I have a skin condition which led to phymosis a few years back forcing me to have a medical circumcision this year.

Uncut is superior in every way. Sex is better, it's more comfortable when exercising, it's generally less of a nuisance. And in Europe, I never had an ick reaction.

If I didn't medically need it I wouldn't have done it. That said, it's better than phymosis, I do last longer in bed, and my partner says it's actually a really nice oral experience now.

Remember: most countries don't have a preference for circumcision, and a lot of people outside of America that are circumcised have it done due to medical issues, not moral or religious reasons.

Nah, let's not. Dicking on the unhoused is the very definition of punching down.

Yeah but Charles is suffering from a short reign penalty. He should really execute some prisoners; high dread means fewer factions.

Source: I play a lot of Crusader Kings

No, we are workers exploited by capitalists.

Unless you are not selling your labour and instead living on the profit derived from the workers, you are not a capitalist.

It's a very simple system laid out in Das Kapital and still taught in economics today (at least in the UK):

Aristocrats - people with wealth by virtue of controlling land

Capitalists - people who have wealth by virtue of having wealth (i.e. they can invest/speculate)

Worker (or Proletariat) - people who have to sell their labour to capitalists or aristocrats to survive

Lumpenproletariat - an underclass that has fallen out of society and resort to the black or grey market to survive

Not...really. The racial hierarchy and the self-loathing are really Spain's doing via the Church.

Spain was in control for 400 years and had clear racial caste system. They brought a new religion and used it to justify an incredibly evil rule. Lain America had governors, the Philippines had Friars (read Touch Me Not or Noli Me Tángere).

Compared with America, which in control for around 50 years and about 10% of that was the Japanese invasion. They are seen as liberators and saviours because of how utterly horrific the Japanese were (wasn't just Korea with comfort women). In the early 20th century, a lot of the reforms in the Philippines by America were based around giving land to the farm workers and laying ground work for independence via the Insular government (so the cheap sugar supply could be blocked from entering the US market).

I use mine to freewrite. Just mental dump everything and anything that comes into my mind for three pages. It's cathartic and often comes up with nuggets of useful information I didn't know I was burying.

The privileged Russians, you mean. I know a few people in Russia, good people, that have no prospects of ever getting out.

Being able to pick a country to reside in is a privilege most people can't afford, and that's before you factor in only 5% of Russians can speak English and that's makes up 80% of the foreign language speakers in Russia and you've got yourself a very immobile population.

The idea that a government can instruct the courts to ignore human rights legislation shows how fundamentally broken the liberal "democracy" system is.

This from the government that just made saying "I am intolerant towards the idea of liberal parliamentary democracy" an example of extremism but saying "foreigners don't deserve human rights" is not extremism.

The big thing I will say from my experience there: the people are AMAZING. I didn't get ripped off, everyone was so friendly, got to play basketball with a group of kids and had a blast. And the nature is incredible.

It also had some of the most downtrodden areas I've ever seen, some of the biggest displays of wealth disparity, and after a few weeks on different islands, Manilla felt more like a theme park for the rich than any kind of city.

Overall, really recommend it, but try going off the beaten path!

Water in soil = water in the pores of the soil

Groundwater = water below the water table