It’s a bit ridiculous to say the only obstacle between us and “monstrous behemoths created in labs” is some sports regulations ^^'. Luckily there are already laws that severely restrict what you’re allowed to do with genetic engineering, so don’t you worry.

But coming back to your “monstrous behemoths”, wouldn’t some basketball players for example already fall in that category ? How tall is too tall? When it’s about basketball, you could be 8 feet 1 (2.46 m for my metric brethren) and no-one would try to have you banned from the game, they would probably congratulate you on your lucky genetics instead. Similarly, I’ve never heard of any suggestion of, say, enforcing a minimum resting heart rate for endurance based sports.

Yet if you’re a woman and too muscular for some obscure regulatory body’s liking, you face the risk of being ostracized and banned from competing. The same genetic lottery winning ticket would in this case be considered an unfair advantage. This goes to show that unfairness is not rooted in any hard, undeniable, mesurable quantity, but is at its root a cultural phenomenon. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder, there can be no objective measure for it, -which is why I’m say it simply doesn’t truly exist in sports.

The people clamoring against the inclusion of biological outliers are operating under the false -and frankly poorly thought out- idea that sports are fair and that it’s only by training the hardest that you can and will achieve victory, shonen style.

Ultimately the only completely fair-ish competition is the one where you try to outdo your previous best performance and beat your own records. Otherwise, there are so many other variables you’d have to correct for to level the playing field (and testosterone levels is not a great pick for that anyway) that you might as well have single athlete categories.

Both Ground News and Media Bias are tuned to a very US-centric vision of what is left or right, which means that thanks to this right biased Overton window, anything they classify as left would probably be considered center in Europe. Unfortunately, said window is also slinding to the right in Europe under the influence of European right leaders calling anything left of center “far-left”, see for example : Macron.

Donald wants everyone to pay for their own defence yet will also charge the taxpayer extra for this own protection (while not paying taxes himself).

Oh I agree with you, but I wanted to alude to what’s going on in other parts of the world as well, where it’s not at the outright fascist stage. Yet. (I also called it dictatorial, so…)

There’s really not much hope for humanity. Everywhere people are falling again and again for slightly different flavors of populist conservative corrupt assholes with a dictatorial liking. Like it’s ever done the world any good before.

I understand the sentiment, although I still do have sympathy for them. The thing is, everyone knows by now that any westerner will likely be arrested by the Iranians on bogus pretext, and then used as a bargaining chip to alleviate some of the international sanctions. In the meantime, you’re pretty much guaranteed to spend a couple years in prison, and probably be raped too if you’re a woman.

Jeebus ! The number of people commenting here who don’t have any knowledge of the situation is annoying.

France vowed in the Noumea Accord of 1998 to gradually give more political power to New Caledonia. Since, under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, ALL rejecting independence. Now, the last referendum in 2021 had something like 94% people voting to stay French BUT the independentists had called for a boycott of the referendum, and so turnout was only about 44%. In 2018, New Caledonians rejected independence at 57%. In 2020 it was 53%. In both these votes, the turnout was 80+% .

So this is not a case of France imposing control on the local population, there seems to be at least a small majority of people who wish to stay French.

New Caledonians have French nationality, they vote in all french national elections (presidential, parliament, etc. ) and could absolutely vote in local elections if they moved to say Paris or Marseille.

The thing is, the electoral lists in New Caledonia were frozen in 1998, and so anyone who came to live there legally after that still can’t vote in local elections. This is now being reversed, allowing citizens who have lived there for at least 10 years to vote, and that’s why the independentist party is rioting. They fear the independentist vote would be diluted by these newcomers, which presumably would vote to stay French.

Edit : To add some context on the independentists, they are mostly of the Kanak people, the aboriginal population of the islands. Today, they represent about 41% of the ~300k people living in New Caledonia.They are usually poorer and benefit from a lesser level of education than Neocaledonians of European or mixed descent.

…following “a complaint made by a female member of the production crew after an incident following his performance in Thursday night’s Semi Final.”

Fat is usually stored in the body in the form of triglycerids. When fat is used, it’s usually not turned into glucose, but rather into fatty acids, that are then released in the blood and reach the cells that need extra energy, where they are used by the mitochondria to power said cells. The signaling that triggers this is in fact done by a bunch of hormones that do indeed circulate in the blood to reach the cells specialized in storing fat, called adipocytes.

Depending of what triggers the transformation of fat into fatty acids( a process called lipolysis), those hormones could be insulin, epinephrin, growth hormone, etc.

You could extend that remark to any clothes prominently displaying pretty much any brand as far as I’m concerned. You’re paying extra for the privilege of being a walking advertisement.

So they made his birthplace a police station, which I guess is not the worse idea if you don’t want to take it down. But as long as it’s there, you know it’s going to be used as a symbol and a place of remembrance for the idiots who are nostalgic of the good ol’ fascist times.

What are they gonna do ? Finance far-right parties in all of Europe to sow discord ? Oh wait.

Both France and the UK have sent SCALP/ Shadowstorm cruise missiles to Ukraine, so I don’t get what you’re referring to. The Taurus would be interesting for Ukraine because of the longer range this weapon system has.

I think it mostly comes down to increasingly unfair distribution of wealth, which leaves people with no hope to better their standards of living.

Our civilization creates things with constantly increasing productivity, which should lead to better pay and less time spent working, and more time to live a fulfilling life. Instead, all this added wealth is funneled towards a few mindbogglingly rich individuals.

This happens with the help of a sizable fraction of the population, which has become convinced that their mediocre situation is in fact caused by even poorer and more miserable people, rather than the assholes siphoning everything and everyone from the top of their already obscene piles of riches. And there’s no sign of this changing anytime soon. No wonder people are desperate.

You’re probably right, I have edited my comment to reflect this. source

I think it has to do with atmospheric diffusion of the sunlight. Even if the photons coming straight down at you are blocked by the moon, a lot of them bounce around in the atmosphere and end up reaching your eyes. Kinda like when it’s not complete darkness at sunset even after the sun has gone over the horizon. Also explains why the sky is blue, since “blue photons” are better at bouncing around on the atmosphere molecules. See : diffuse sky radiation

Quoting form the Wikipedia article: Approximately 23% of direct incident radiation of total sunlight is removed from the direct solar beam by scattering into the atmosphere; of this amount (of incident radiation) about two-thirds ultimately reaches the earth as photon diffused skylight radiation.

Edit : probably mostly has to do with your eyes adapting to the luminosity and non linearity of light intensity perception by our eyes. See posts below about Weber-Fechner law of perception.

Edit Edit : This is an intersting read. The TLDR is it mostly has to do with our eyes slowly adapting to the amount of light they receive, and during totality, light bouncing from beyond the umbra comes into play.

You realize that the court is not saying no one else is to blame right? This case was brought on by 2000 swiss women, they are suing their own country for failing to take action as a way to force the hands of their government.

Could you elaborate on why zero-k is better than BAR in your opinion?

I don’t even understand how you end up with tarmac instead of pavement in the type of street pictured in the illustration. I mean isn’t it just faster and easier to put the block of pavement back into the hole it left once you’re done ??