Yeah, that’s fair. They certainly don’t make it easy to vote in USA, which is deliberate to a large extent. Easy to forget.

I think it was the votes of less than a third of eligible voters that made Trump 2.0 a reality, roughly another third just behind it, with the remainder not bothering to vote at all. I would say the often fantasized silent majority is actually not pro Trump.

That means that a third didn’t bother, though, despite Trump very much being a known quantity. The exact reason why they didn’t vote is up to debate and it’s probably several reasons at once (these people are not a monolith), but it doesn’t say any good things about them or the political system.

Anti-intellectualism has a certain tradition in the USA, it’s kind of well-known.

A German perspective: I think Germans have always been this stupid, they’re mostly just more willing to say the quiet part out loud than they were between 1970 and 2014 (rough estimate). The difference is that the far right extremists have a popular platform now, and the mainstream parties refuse to ban either the far right party or all the media (X, Facebook, local tabloid press etc.) that’s pushing them. If this party had been around in 1960, it would definitely have been banned.

That was rather insightful. And I definitely need a primer on writing good commit messages, and possibly on what a good version control commit is in the first place.

And TIL you can actually use some kind of markdown in git commit messages!

I didn’t know I want ducks.

They do it like that in many european countries.

Hydration is probably still a good start. Helps your organs (including kidneys) do their jobs.

I believe that gender is a spectrum and there’s more than two of them

Many bisexuals read “bi” as “homosexual + heterosexual”, where heterosexual includes all genders other than your own.

I’ve seen some pansexuals make that distinction, but most bisexuals are not any less inclusive than pansexuals.

In practical terms, the biggest difference is the flag.

AFAIK, most countries that have elements of direct democracy do exactly that. It’s called a quorum.

I assume that’s supposed to be how it works, but constitutions have limited effect when we get the kinds of politicians who ignore the courts. I’d assume that direct democracies have very similar issues (see the 2024 UK race riots - those were fully illegal and yet they happened anyway).

I think we need to change our societies on a deeper level. Changing the constitution could be a start for that, but in the current political climate it probably wouldn’t really.

It’s too easy to whip up hate against minorities, especially against marginalized minorities (I’m sure the rich would still find a way to profit, despite being a minority themselves). When our western political systems were still working somewhat, minority protections was one of the major arguments for them.

e.g. Brexit was decided via direct democracy.

Seems to work for Switzerland, though Switzerland isn’t exactly a utopia of progressive politics (could be worse, but e.g. AFAIK being poor sucks a lot in CH).

Bet his gut looks way bigger in reality.

You really think he doesn’t have any disorders? He’s a dead ringer for autism.

lacking in social interactions due to lack of empathy and inability to recognize social patterns such as nuanced jokes

Autism.

if there was a stronger signal then epidemiology it would have been stated in the first article.

The site is called “techexplorist”, really doesn’t strike me as the kind of publication to support their medical claims with cited studies.

Considering that alcohol is a drug with severe side effects, I’d be rather surprised if it was part of the “statistically small or not significant results” group. Do you have a paper that specifically discusses the research on alcohol?

Did you read the article? It doesn’t really support your point. Though I agree that illnesses like fatty liver disease are probably a more pressing issue than the increased cancer risk.

Results:
Forty ingredients (80%) had articles reporting on their cancer risk. Of 264 single-study assessments, 191 (72%) concluded that the tested food was associated with an increased (n = 103) or a decreased (n = 88) risk; 75% of the risk estimates had weak (0.05 > P ≥ 0.001) or no statistical (P > 0.05) significance. […] Meta-analyses (n = 36) presented more conservative results; only 13 (26%) reported an increased (n = 4) or a decreased (n = 9) risk (6 had more than weak statistical support).

That 45 kind of looks like a swastika if you squint …

With the low level of detail that’s used for most anime faces and the wild (by Japanese standards, anyway) hair colors, it’s usually pretty much impossible to tell without context whether a character is meant to be asian or european.

On a more ideological level, Japan was allied with Nazi Germany and committed a lot of atrocities back then, and they always had strong anti-immigration policies and an advantageous position to enforce them (island nation, difficult writing system etc.).