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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)LE
Posts
8
Comments
129
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • We used to have laws that decentralized control of media. An entity could only own a certain number of newspapers, tv stations, or radio stations. There were incentives for smaller news companies to insure that there was competition in each market. Congress kept chipping away at those laws letting larger companies buy up more and more of the market, allowing mergers that restricted competition. Now radio is nearly a monopoly, TV and newspapers are oligarchies. The Internet fell into an oligarchy disturbingly quickly.

    The only way to get the media serving the people again is to break up the big companies and restore the guardrails that protected and supported small local companies.

  • Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, did not have wmd's, and was the only major Sunni power in the region. Saddam Hussain was not a good guy by any means but he actively worked against Iranian influence and was a stabilizing presence on the middle east after the first Gulf War. Pre-invasion Iraq was good for US policy. The invasion led to the growth of Iranian influence in the region and the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization. We should not have attacked Iraq.

    I was in support of attacking Afghanistan at the time and still think military action to go after Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin was warranted. The diversion of resources from that conflict is another reason we shouldn't have attacked Iraq. We probably should have extended that conflict into northern Pakistan where we knew Al-Qaeda's leadership and the bulk of their fighters were hiding.

    We definitely should have invaded Saudi Arabia. They provided training, equipment, travel, and money to enable the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 would not have been possible without Saudi Arabia's support. Saudi Arabia was(is) in the curious position of publicly allying with us while plotting terrorism against us. Curious because by siding with us publicly they gave up Iran's advantage of attacks against them potentially leading to conflict with Russia. Iran had some part in 9/11 but between their having a lesser role and the risk of Russia coming to their defense it would not have been worth it to attack Iran. Saudi Arabia had our backing instead of Russia's. When they used proxies to attack us we should have leveled their royal palace. So far we haven't even pulled our support.

  • I've never been much of a social media user outside of reddit and lemmy and I've never had an Instagram account so maybe it's my lack of familiarity but does that page list some really unimpressive stats? The original post had "more than 3,000 likes in less than three years" and for the second Instagram post it says"Within seven months, the post gained over 4,000 likes." Do Instagram posts continue active participation for years? I felt pretty good the few times I've posted something that got thousands of likes but it's more personal achievement 'than this is going to be bigger than two broken arms".

  • The Vice President doesn't certify the vote count, the Senate does. The VP usually presides over the counting because the VP is the head of the Senate but if the office of the VP is vacant or the VP chooses not to preside over the vote count then the president pro tempore or the Senate leader elected under SR1 is the presiding officer.

  • I started on kbin.world and really liked it, there are several features I much prefer on Kbin vs Lemmy like being able to see the activity log for comments and posts. Unfortunately I wouldn't recommend new users start there anymore. Ernest is awesome but it seems like he's got some stuff going on IRL and he doesn't seem to want to share development responsibilities. He was accepting some more help and putting together a small team so maybe it's gotten better since I switched to lemm.ee but especially back around December and January there were periods where he was absent for extended periods and issues weren't getting fixed until they had some time to snowball into big issues and he was stuck spending more time on playing catchup from that than working on improvements. I didn't try Mbin but it seems like that might be the better choice for the time being if someone wanted to start using that part of the fediverse.

  • The city requires people wanting to access IVF services to be infertile, which it defines as an inability to conceive through heterosexual sex or intrauterine insemination—a set of criteria which disqualifies only gay men.

    It's the first sentence of the fifth paragraph, the article writes it out instead of abbreviating.

    Yeah the procedure would be performed on the surrogate either way. Something's just not making sense to me. Since the couple the article is about have been to Drs and are living it and the complaint has already gone through a 2 year review process I assume that the article is just missing some important piece of info.

  • I'm confused about what's presented in the article. The article says that to qualify for IVF the couple must be unable to conceive through IUI and that this requirement prevents gay men from accessing IVF. In the article's conclusion it says that gay men can only have biological children through IVF. That doesn't appear to be true.

    https://www.scrcivf.com/lgbtq-fertility-faq/

    That organization says that it is an option for gay men to use a surrogate and have a biological child through IUI. It wasn't the only one I found when I searched, "can a gay male couple use IUI with a surrogate".

    Gay couples should have insurance coverage for and access to infertility care but is it unreasonable for an insurance company to say that a simpler cheaper alternative that produces an equivalent result (IUI) must be ruled out before it will cover the more complex procedure (IVF)?

    Where is the disconnect? Will the insurance not cover IUI unless the procedure is preformed on the insured? Why jump to IVF and dismiss the simpler procedure? Why make IVF specifically the center of the argument instead of infertility treatment in general?

  • Egypt has the longest unbroken record of it's history. It may or may not have been the first civilization to begin keeping a written record of it's major events. The other 2 contenders are Mesopotamia and Sumer but most records from those are lost. Egypt's records were also lost but large portions have been rediscovered in burial tombs. Egypt began it's chronology (3500BCE) at least a thousand years before China(2500BCE).