X lost half a billion dollars in the first quarter of 2023. Odd that the financial expert didn’t mention this even though it is literally in the same sentence as the “40% drop in revenue” statement in the article.

This article conveniently omits Israel-Palestine relations prior to and during periods of minimal US meddling. Let’s take a look at the prelude to the current conflict to get our bearings.

Obama made statements early on in his presidency about lasting peace in the Middle East. His first meeting with Netanyahu was a disaster, and so he dropped the issue for his entire term. 8 years of pretty much ignoring the Palestinians. Trump enters office and likewise makes public statements supporting lasting peace. His meetings with Netanyahu were a great success…for Israel specifically. The US changed policy to state that illegal Israeli settlements were legal, it recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel with Israel as the sole owner of the city, and it began to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. All of this was a big kick in the pants to Palestine, who were never consulted for any of these policy changes.

Biden entered office and continued to push for normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but let’s be honest, he had a similar do-nothing attitude as Obama had when it comes to lasting peace.

Then Hamas attacks Israel. The US hadn’t engaged them for over a decade and Arab nations were starting to normalize relations with Israel with no regard for Palestine. It is hard to imagine what else Hamas could have done to get the attention of the US and Arab nations.

And that brings us to the present, where Israel’s retaliation has once again captured the attention of the US and Arab nations and put the needs of the Palestinians in the minds of their leaders.

In my opinion, if we had meddled more during peace time and engaged with Palestinians in the absence of conflict, then we could have avoided the current war altogether. The current conflict appears to be the result of the absence of US meddling, or at the very least an unwillingness to recognize the needs of Palestinians during times of relative peace.

Lots of stretching here. The paper uses simulations of microtubules to show quantum effects when tryptophan residues are excited by UV light. The paper only did simulations of microtubules, and those simulations did not include the bends and many many dynein molecules found on microtubules. The reason this is important is that researchers have been hitting every biomolecule with UV excitation for decades, including microtubules, and have never observed this effect.

A key finding missing from this video is that microtubules are dynamic. They are constantly disassembling and reassembling and recycling components. This occurs at very short timescales. Also, they do not bridge cell membranes. If information is passing through networks of microtubules, it is constantly disrupted and not affecting other cells. Synapses do handle cell-cell information transfer (where the role of microtubules is already well studied and not quantum in nature). Why would quantum microtubule information be limited to a single cell? Maybe it could influence coordinated assembly and disassembly at the termini, but the authors offer no evidence that there is any chemical effect of this quantum phenomenon, which would be required to change anything about how those enzymes behave.

We already know of a mechanism by which information is transported across microtubules: physical transport of signalling molecules. They are walked (quite literally, dynein is cool) along the microtubules to different sites in the cell. No quantum effects needed to explain this phenomenon.

They sell CBD oil with this little droppers for dosing, but when you read the studies the dosage is like a mouthful of oil. It’s like the exact opposite problem of melatonin dosing.

For real, we’ve got the first openly pro-union president, we expanded NATO, student loan forgiveness, actual infrastructure funding, the first administration to openly push back against Israel during war time, all of that in only 4 years. He is the most effective president of my lifetime and I am happy to vote for him again.

TikTok enacted a very obvious influence campaign to fight this legislation that resulted in congressional phone lines becoming jammed. So what China can do is directly influence our laws.

It would be if McCarthy’s hearings were full of actual KGB agents.

A similar thing happens with cockroaches where crucial bacteria are absorbed into cells to ensure inheritance in offspring.

Generative AI has the data, and the required data is immense. The challenge for other potential applications is that the data is not there or not available. There are no other aspects of human productivity that are as widely recorded and available as images and text. The next big thing will require an actual data collection effort; you won’t get it from scraping the Internet.

Avoiding advertising is the best way to avoid influence, but remember that pretty much everyone wants you to change your mind ina way that benefits them. Avoiding influence altogether is impossible, and that influence is necessary to stay informed and make good life choices.

My advice is twofold. First, learn the logical fallacies and how to identify them. Second, account for uncertainty in your decisions. The most practical application of this second point is to favor decisions that leave you with more options in the future. This uncertainty should include you. Account for the possibility that your goals and views may change in the future, because they will.

I would never allow my DNA to be characterized or sequenced outside of a medical setting where strict privacy laws are in place.

The real problem with government housing in the US specifically stems from our worship of billionaires, which requires us to demonize the poor. If a rich man is selfmade due to his virtues then poor people must lack virtue. That worldview implies that no amount of help will redeem the poor. Thus safety net programs are half-assed at best, and cut to bare bones or cut entirely at the worst.

The narrative that government-run programs are useless just does not hold up to the evidence. Even the housing program you mentioned is an improvement over nothing. But take a look at some of our programs and imagine the horror of a private alternative: US Postal service (I can send a letter to the smallest town in Alaska with a single stamp), rural electricity, roads (my God could you imagine a private road system), public school. You need to remember that the alternative to any flawed government program is NOTHING.

The old trick of calling any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic doesn’t work anymore. They might need to actually change policy this time.