So in terms a biologist can understand: If it’s not charge what is the difference between normal and negative matter?

Would negative mass be the same as antimatter?

It’s pretty simple.

Shipping the vectors of madcow disease over the ocean was unprofitable.

My wife has a chronic illness with expensive drugs.

Healthcare is around 35% of our families gross income when you include in the cost my employer pays, what I pay, plus deductable and copays.

I avoid going to the Dr as much as possible because I have a separate deductible. If I went for everything I should it would be closer to 40% of our gross income.

Strange that dynamic system that has to adapt to a wide selection of rapidly changing pathogens under various environmental conditions would be extremely complicated.

Go figure…

The Jordanian military has quite a bit of U.S. military equipment like F-16’s and Blackhawks.

They also have 3000 troops stationed. Mainly for support roles and cooperative efforts.

Jordan is a long term ally of the U.S. and honestly not a bad spot to visit if you have a chance. I’ve been there probably a dozen times on business.

You basically just described every rural town, anyplace in the world I have traveled to.

The younger generation leaves the rural communities for the opportunities found in larger cities and towns. What is left behind is 50+ year olds with no-one to pass the farm onto. Eventually they sell out to someone or go bankrupt. The consolidation of land resources continues.

My wife and I are some of those the fled the rural hellscape. Those that stayed behind have spent their lives in poverty and ignorance. Both of my grandparents went bankrupt farming and died living with some of their kids in a city.

They originally theorized it was the antioxidants 30+ years ago. However more recent papers have shown that it’s the alcohol itself that has the benefits, at the right dosage.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2007.04.089

Here is one of the better writups I have found on the subject.

The author of the article took bit of liberty with a “even a small amount”. 0.08 BAC is around 2-3 drinks for most people depending on sex and weight. It’s also legally drunk in most places.

So what the study is slowing us yet more proof why overuse of alcohol is detrimental to a person’s health. The only thing interesting in this study is it shows possible evidence of the mechanism that causes the harm.

Studies have consistently shown that anything above 1-2 drinks daily or 0.04-0.06 BAC is bad for your health. As with any other drug, the correct dosage is key.

Now why the study authors decided not to include a 0.04 BAC level control in their study is beyond me. The lower dose repeatedly shows benefits in large scale population studies.

In evolutionary time 20,000 years is not long. With a 25 year average generation time, that’s 800 generations. At an estimated average rate of mutation of 64 per generation that would be 51,200 mutations in that amount of time across 3,117,275,501 base pairs (female).

This might sound like a lot but only 2% of the human genome encodes proteins. So approximately 1,024 mutations to encoding proteins are possible across 62,345,510 base pairs. However we know that many changes to encoding proteins are conserved so the true number is less.

This is really a tiny number of mutations. It may take out a few viruses but most of them will still easily infect humans today. The difference between the mutation rate of viruses and our own generation time is why dynamic immune systems have evolved. This allows an organism to develop immunity to the rapidly mutating pathogens without waiting for changes to the DNA.

As for if this is fear mongering or not: It’s a real probability because of the degree of preservation we have found on carcases in the permafrost. As the permafrost melts these carcases are exposed and transmission is possible.

Honestly the largest worry would for something like influenza. Able to jump multiple species and recombine into novel new types. We also don’t know how long influenza has been around.

Many pathogenic viruses have multiple species as hosts. For example Covid has a long list of species it infects from mink to deer as well a humans. In plants cucumber mosaic virus has over 1200 species it infects and is transmitted by more that 80 aphid species. These are the generally ones we should be the most concerned with emerging from the artic.

There are viruses that are limited to one species. The only reason we were able to eliminate smallpox was because it was human specific. If it had retained it’s ability to transmit via rodents (it evolve from infecting African rodents) it would likely still be around today.

Many viruses have many different hosts.

The original vaccine was created for smallpox after observing that dairymaids who contracted cowpox (infected their herd) did not get smallpox.

Another good example is influenza. It attacks birds, swine, cows, horses, bats plus many others. Some strains are species specific, other can jump host easily.

Covid showed itself to have a wide host range.

All it would take is a snow goose picking up the disease in the artic and transmitting it to a pig, and we’d be in trouble.

Resistance to pathogens is often quickly lost in a few generations without the organism being exposed to the pathogen.

This is expecially true if the resistance costs the organism in some way.

For example antibiotic resistance in bacteria is slows down the generation time. In the absence of the antibiotic, the majority of the bacteria lose the resistance as they reproduce faster than those that carry the resistance.

Most companies don’t bother to setup a shell company. International businesses often have an existing distributors in several different countries.

When one country gets sanctioned a distributor in a neutral country suddenly increases their local sales by the same amount that the one in the sanctioned company used to have.

I used to work in international business a decade ago. I learned about a customer on the Saudi peninsula who purchased a huge amount of product (1,000x more than their entire market). It was strangely enough to cover Iran not that far away across the Persian Gulf.

Not quite, in my experience on really cold days my heat pump struggles to keep up. This is expecially true when the outside unit is frosting up. The unit has to reverse and pump heat out of the house.

That’s one of the reasons i run my wood pellet stove on those days. The secondary source of heat takes the load off the heat pump.

Human intelligence is segmented and specialized. People who are smart at few things are usually very dumb at others. A person who can speak 9 languages can’t do more than basic math. An expert computer programmer, who can’t figure out how to keep a plant alive. Etc…

Polymaths are very rare. Very few people have advanced understanding and skills in multiple areas.

Just some basics about the company.

Revenue Income US$8.93 billion (2022)

Operating income US$4.31 billion (2022)

Net income US$3.32 billion (2022)

The bulk of the difference between operating income and net income in a research driven company is the R&D. They are running at 11% just under $1 billion per year. A publically traded company can’t really hide their research costs, only obscure it for the uniformed.

Their net income is 37% of revenue. So they are paying for over 4 years of research for every year (3 past years plus current gear). So their argument they need the high prices to cover past research costs is pure bullshit. I’d give them the current year and one past year. But 4 years?

This is pure price gouging for profit over people’s lives. Invalidating their patent is fully justified.

Current copyright law is ridiculously long. Life +70 years in many countries. So my grandfather’s books who passed away last year, will be locked up until most of his great grandchildren are in their 80’s or older.

It should be moved to a flat 45 years, the expected career length of a working person.

The amount the company must maintain on hand depends on the state. In some states it’s less than 1% of the policies written. Most of the time they only hold enough out of their premiums to cover an average of 2-3 years of claims.

The reason it’s so low is because of federal disaster relief when something big happens. The insurance companies advocate for it to be called a federal disaster. Then the government steps in and foots part of the bill. The poor are usually left losing everything.

My wife worked for an insurance company for most of a decade as the complaint liaison with the states regulating body on insurance.

Insurance companies in the U.S. come in two types.

Type A: Rely on repeat business and word of mouth to slowly grow their business. They pay out reasonable and fair amounts based upon the loss. They follow all applicable laws/regulations and operate in good faith. These companies are quick to reject people who have bad histories.

Type B: Rely on recruiting new customers constantly by excessive advertising or purchasing other smaller companies. Pay out well below the market on anything they can and flat out refuse claims until lawsuits start. These companies routinely break state and federal laws because the fines are less than the profits. These companies prey on the lower income, elderly, and poorly informed. The larger companies have hundreds of brands to give the illusion of choice to the consumer.

Any amounts of excessive marketing by and insurance company indicates that they are shit. Also research into who owns any the brand they are are marketing. If you recognize the parent company as advertising, they are shit.