Yep! This is the secret to happiness in life. Helping other people! Plus it doesn’t take huge amounts of time either. A couple of hours per week can have carryover effects that last a long time.

Hobbies are also great. The big hobby I’m learning is gardening. Planting seeds, taking care of them, watching them grow: somehow this activity is just immensely satisfying for me. Plus I get to try some delicious food (which probably tastes even better due to the emotional investment). It’s also really cool because seeds are quite cheap and you can grow varieties that you’ll never see in a grocery store.

If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative to human-sacrificing Bronze Age god-kings, I’m going to call you out as being a little bit unrealistic. Government isn’t just an idea, it’s a technology, and it relies on other technologies (communication, record-keeping, organization) to function.

The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other. Where things started getting difficult is when agriculture paved the way for population explosions.

Millions of deaths compared to what alternative? The difficulty with attributing causes in history is that we have no ability to conduct controlled experiments.

Did they test the soil and plant a control crop of corn only in nearby similar conditions?

When it comes to gardening I’ve heard countless stories of people trying some intervention and declaring “it works for me” without ever having tested the conditions or using a control. Those kinds of results can be safely ignored as unscientific.

Heck, one thing I’ve noticed with gardening is that even if you attempt to plant a bunch of crops under identical conditions (as best as you can manage) there’s so much variability that you get widely varying yields from one plant to another for completely unknown reasons.

There is no Biden election gamble. US presidential elections happen every 4 years whether Biden (or any other president) likes it or not.

It’s a Macron election gamble because he actually called the election himself to try to benefit himself. This might turn out to backfire.

Is there any evidence that living legumes make the nitrogen they fix available to other plants nearby? I thought they locked it up in root nodules and it only becomes bioavailable if you chop and drop the legumes so that the nodules break down and release nitrogen into the surrounding soil. Otherwise the legumes are just going to use the nitrogen for their own growth.

Yes, it’s actually huge. Especially for maintaining a weapon as complicated as an Abrams tank. If it can be repaired close to the front lines then that has the potential to cut days off the turnaround time compared to towing it over to Poland.

That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, since it’s by definition beyond the ability of science to answer. It suffers from the infinite regress problem which many people invoke God to solve (the uncaused cause) but that’s not very satisfying, is it?

It makes me so depressed thinking about how many thousands of Ukrainian lives could’ve been saved by just giving Ukraine full and enthusiastic support immediately instead of dragging it out this long.

I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.

The guy gets booed by the home team’s fans for presenting their team with the Stanley Cup! It happens every single year, no matter who wins! It’s the most awkward trophy presentation in all of sports!

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.

It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.

Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.

If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.

How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).

Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).

There’s a ton of functionality in Photoshop that even pros never use. Every user of Photoshop needs something different from it. Sure, there’s a core of features that everyone uses (and which the Gimp also has) but there’s also countless other niche features that are a crucial part of the workflow for tons of users and they won’t give them up. This is one of the reasons Photoshop is so hard to replace.

It’s also the reason Latex is tough to replace as well. It’s a phenomenon which is not limited to commercial software, that’s for sure.

Yes. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. Former cop. Alleged to have perpetrated massacres against the public killing dozens of people and burning down hundreds of homes. As a leader of G9 he publicly threatened genocide unless the prime minister of Haiti stepped down.

This is all information I got from Wikipedia. I don’t know the veracity of any of it. I don’t live in Haiti and don’t really follow the situation there. Whoever Jimmy is, he doesn’t have very good PR. That’s all I can say for sure about him!

Sounds like your oven could use a cleaning! Fire up the self-clean and burn all that stuff off, setting off the smoke alarm one last time!

But how do you change the diapers inside the bottle?!

It’s all the smells they encounter on the job! Gets them super hungry!