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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Even if risks are under-reported (plausible, but unlikely, given the amount of scrutiny), it’s definitely the case that the risks from getting COVID are still not fully understood. Long COVID is a major issue that is still under investigation. So by your own metric - “highly reluctant to try the new possibly risky thing” - the vaccine is important. Because “the new possibly risky thing” in this case is getting COVID. You definitely don’t want to “try” that.





  • Under many sane readings of the constitution, this isn’t a power congress has.

    The constitution only explicitly articulates the process for establishing treaties, not ending them. So it’s a bit of a gray area as to whether the president can end them by himself, since he can’t establish them by himself.

    To my mind, it would seem exceedingly weird if establishing a treaty required the consent of the Senate but breaking one didn’t. What’s the argument to be made that the two aspects (establish/break) are so fundamentally different that the rules for the first aren’t also the rules for the second? Why does the president need consent to say yes but does not need consent to say no?

    It’s definitely been done before, but also never directly contested. (In previous cases SCOTUS has avoided answering the question by saying they didn’t have jurisdiction.)





  • At what point does the world look at this and say that enough is enough.

    Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it’s economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it’s not exceptional in any way. There’s an ongoing nightmare in DRC that’s orders of magnitude worse than what’s happening in Gaza and… no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.

    The thing is, it doesn’t even matter if we “condemn this behavior.” We could do that all we want and it wouldn’t make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there’s too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from “domestic issues” that always seem to matter more.

    We’ve got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.


  • Duct. Duck is a brand name

    Yes. But also mostly no.

    Wikipedia:

    “Duck tape” is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as having been in use since 1899 and “duct tape” (described as “perhaps an alteration of earlier duck tape”) since 1965

    and:

    In 1971, Jack Kahl bought the Anderson firm and renamed it Manco. In 1975, Kahl rebranded the duct tape made by his company. Because the previously used generic term “duck tape” had fallen out of use, he was able to trademark the brand “Duck Tape” and market his product complete with a yellow cartoon duck logo. Manco chose the term “Duck”, the tape’s original name, as “a play on the fact that people often refer to duct tape as ‘duck tape’”, and as a marketing differentiation to stand out against other sellers of duct tape.

    People should really do the bare minimum double-check before showing their whole ass.

    As others have noted, “duct tape” is the last thing you want to use on ducts. Better to actually call it “duck tape,” as it was for the first 65 years of its existence.