Like 70% of Ukraines rare earth minerals are on land occupied by Russia. If the US wants those, it needs to get Russia out of Ukraine entirely. Also, it’ll take probably 1-2 decades before any operation to extract the minerals is underway. Future presidents who aren’t major pieces of shit can rip up the deal.

If I were rich, I would support congestion pricing. I could sell my helicopter. Who needs to fly over traffic when there is no traffic?

He did pay for his greed. When he failed in his campaign in Parthia, the parthians put him to death by pouring molten gold down his throat.

What monitor is this?

Women are better at being friends to each other. I’ve basically given up on trying to make friends with other men because they are terrible friends. At best, they make no effort at all at friendship and are completely passive, requiring you to call and make all the plans. At worst, they are hostile in various ways when you try to befriend them. It is very rare to meet another dude that makes effort to be a friend.

Edit: it’s soooo funny to see this comment being downvoted because it will only perpetuate your loneliness. You deserve it.

Right? I honestly wonder if the future of war will be to see who kills the other sides robots first. And, who can produce the most robots.

It’s good, prefer lime and pamplemousse

It’s been a natural progression. First the drones target humans, then the drones target drones. Ukraine is taking us into the future of warfare. The pentagon is watching closely and investing heavily in this space.

What’s yikes? Too real for most of Lemmy apparently — mostly in white dude, Asian girl relationships.

Yeah, should tell you it’s unlocked at checkout. Just don’t select a provider. Then, contact yours and ask for instructions to set it up.

I don’t think it’s “yellow fever.” I think there are power dynamics at play that both sides are happy to participate in.

It’s so funny because he actually explains why Elon isn’t the president as opposed to just dismissing the idea outright. It makes the idea that Elon is president more convincing.

A lot of these differences are regional and industry specific. I worked on the east coast in more traditional industries and 9am on the dot was expected. Moved west and switched to tech and I was the only one in the office at 9am. I had coworkers showing up at 11 and noon. Despite the late arrival, people would still leave at 3 and 4pm. Were they working any less hard? No, in tech people are online til midnight and 2 am regularly. Tech attracts a lot of folks with night owl chronotypes. Their brains are literally not functioning optimally until 7pm rolls around. Boomer work ethic doesn’t have a lot of understanding of this fact.

God parents are supposed to care for the children, if the parents die. I think you shouldn’t overthink it. If you’re willing to fill that role, then raise the kids however you think is best. Accept the role gracefully as it is an honor and your sister is showing she loves and trusts you. Leave it at that.

As atheists, we have to acknowledge that most of the world isn’t yet on our level of thinking, but also that we don’t really have similar “concepts” for religious traditions that serve certain societal needs. God parents do serve a societal function. As an atheist, I can acknowledge that, accept that role, and play the part for those I love.

Yeah higher wages would be great, but it doesn’t happen because the media loves to rake the government over the coals for such things. But, you know whose salaries don’t get scrutinized? Lobbyists.

You want to pay people enough to be able to resist these influences. Doing the actual work of governing should pay better than lobbying.

We should even pay congresspeople more. They make $174,000/year. But, when you adjust for inflation, that’s a lot less than they used to make.

Yeah — pretty much this. Most people answering phones are interns. They’re given instructions to listen and be non-confrontational. They also won’t tell you what the congressperson’s view on the matter is. Ultimately, they have no power and just try to summarize what you said and put it in a computer program with your address so the office can mail you a letter from the Congressperson about the issue. These letters are generic to the topic you called about and generally try to say nothing controversial.

On rare occasions for really contentious issues, I saw them split the topic buckets into pro and con and send letters for each depending on whether you were for or against the thing you called about.

Mostly, I didn’t get the impression that Congress people pay much attention to phone calls. If the issue is contentious enough to divide the caller pool into pro/con, they might check a tally of the totals in each pool. But, for 99% of topics, they just send you a generic letter.

Also, a lot of these letters are full of bs. Congress people will often propose nice sounding bill names or cosponsor others that they can cite in these letters as evidence that they care. However, 99% of these bills go no where and often the congresspeople don’t even want them to. You’re upset about airplane noise over your city? “Well, I agree, that’s why I cosponsored the airplane noise reduction act.” Meanwhile, if that bill ever picked up steam the airline lobby would crush it and your congressperson would help them.

So, I don’t call my congressperson because I don’t really get the sense that it makes a difference. One thing I did see make a difference though was lobbyists. You see, they live right in Washington DC and rather than call, they schedule meetings with the actual paid staff or congressperson, not interns. They go right in their office and sit down and have a long chat. And, the staff have a big incentive to listen to them.

Most congressional staff are paid peanuts. They try to live off $25-45k/year in an expensive city and have 2 or 3 roommates. Some of them are often overqualified, holding law degrees and masters in their interest areas. So, once they get some experience and burn out of this life of poverty, guess who is happy to scoop them up? Yep, they go running right into the arms of those lobbyists and gladly take that $200k salary to go about fighting insulin price caps or defeating environmental regulations. It doesn’t even matter if they came into Washington, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to take on these big corporate interests. By the time they’re 3-4 years in, realize they’re sick of eating ramen noodles, and the easiest way out is to call up some of those lobbyists and ask for a job, they do it. Oh you have a masters in agricultural policy with a specialization in organic farming? McDonald’s federal affairs office will hire you. I’ve seen it happen.

Do Putin next

US is sadly not in a place to benefit with Trump coming to office. If Russia collapses and sees unrest, I’m guessing China will gain the most.

There is a reason though. It’s because you probably want to put dates in order and when you ask a computer to sort things for you, it will automatically order things correctly when the date follows this format. If you put the month first, then the day, then the year, the default sorting behavior will order things incorrectly chronologically speaking.