From speaking to Russians the overwhelming majority of people, especially in rural areas but also to a great extent in cities, probably correctly believe that elections are a waste of time because they're not going to change the status quo or I guess if someone else is elected create a power struggle, so people just vote for the incumbent as they don't want to cause trouble - the national attitude is "there's nothing you can do about it"
While that's very different from supporting Putin, it's still intending to vote for him from a pollster's point of view, so even in third party polls his "support" is going to appear higher than it is as they're not measuring that, they're measuring number of votes
I'm not sure, if you're racing me in a 100m sprint and you do it in 15 seconds, that's pretty useless information depending on whether I'm at the 90m mark or beyond the finish at that point, so it's primarily a race against the speed I travelled at
Sure taking gold out of a hole to put it in a different hole is a waste of resources but there's kind of a driving force towards that because if the currency is actually useful then people aren't going to use it as currency and if it's easy to produce they're going to counterfeit it
Same with cryptocurrencies, they're hard to produce and functionless, so a huge waste of resources, and frankly same with (high frequency) trading of stocks, as you don't own them when the dividends are paid yet you put huge resources into them because other people want them because of their inherent value
You can't back something with a lack of something, that's just a scheme to reward actions if the actions are performed by others, or nonsensical if they're performed by you; you know the government's just going to produce more cheaper and low quality weapons especially for destroying if that's how the value of the dollar works.
You also need to have two way exchange of the same material - if you give the government 1 dollar they'll destroy weapons for you, but in that situation you should be able to exchange that one dollar for your thing back, but what do you get? Do they reproduce the weapons? Do you have to destroy your own weapons? What if you don't have any?
I mean the hack which leads to the best result would be pegging it to the Euro, Pound or Yen as a strong currency controlled by a US ally
That said, backing it with recaptured pollutants or something would be interesting as although it has no inherent value, that's no different to how it is currently and it'd be interesting to see the mechanics of how people act
Moderation is literally the opposite of addiction so what you say is fine. What I'm talking about is drinking sweetened drinks with every meal and/or eating sweetened snacks inbetween every meal and/or having every meal be over sweet... Even eating dessert daily after your main meal of the day is fine as the biggest issue is eating sweetened food when you intend to eat after, so as snacks or during the main parts of the meal
Eating sweet things triggers a subconscious urge in the brain to eat more regardless of whether what you're eating next is sweet in the hope that you get to eat more sugar for energy. This is seen with both sugar and sweeteners, so eating or drinking sweetened things make your appetite significantly bigger and so you eat more energy than you use and gain weight... Sounds like a mechanism for harm to occur to me, but whatever
I mean the cancer ones are, loads of things are a carcinogen in high enough quantities, but that doesn't mean they're healthy, eg. there's a fair few studies that show that overconsumption of sugar and the equivalent with sweeteners lead to similar levels of obesity
How about rather than being addicted to oversweetened trash and (likely unsuccessfully) trying to cheat the side effects people just eat a healthy diet?
Icy roads are generally ok if you have a front or 4 wheel drive and you know they're icy so are on high alert and ready to deal with other motorists doing reckless shit which is 99% of the issues you'll face (like driving their rear wheel drive car round a corner up a hill, then spinning out as they accelerated too hard and ending up sliding back down the road towards you, which happened to me but as I was driving reasonably I just pulled over to the side)
What you've gotta watch out for is wet leaves though... Sounds innocent enough but in the wrong conditions they're as slippy as if not more than ice and because usually they're fine your brain just dismisses them until the day you slide/spin on them
Yeah, like the others here I don't see it for German (just see !ich_iel@feddit.de, posts there go hard & into all feed pretty regularly) but I only really see German and English posts... I can't remember my filter settings, but I think I set them to allow all languages so that could be due to other languages being downvoted, the instance that I'm on or the biggest general use/non-specialised instances being English and German
Issue is if he's paying himself with the charity's money he'd have to pay tax on that, and if he wrote that off with a donation and paid himself again then it'd reset the loop - there's no loophole there, literally, as it'd be an endless closed loop of transferring money.
Given the best interests of the US government are destabilising other countries and supporting unfair healthcare companies, and given what is known about Bill Gates' charity spending I think a higher proportion actually goes to the betterment of society than would if it went to the US government
I believe none except colonising space... The others are so far off that we don't even know for sure if they're even possible, what's going to go wrong or whether we're looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you're dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we're close enough that we actually know how hard it is.
There's something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I'm not enough of a philosopher for that.
Yeah, the opening weekend I think is an indication of how good your marketing was, and sustained performance is an indication of how good the actual film is
I mean once you get beyond bash-like scripts python is esoteric as fuck, adding oop to what is essentially a shell is a terrible idea
That said, there's plenty of languages with good syntax that is still good when you get into more complex stuff (modern C#, scala, kotlin and more)