very_well_lost @ very_well_lost @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Bennett, who is 62, founded the hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. He previously was the chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management, working for George Soros on and off since 1991, per The Advocate.

As George Carlin said, It's a big club and you ain't in it.

Still better looking than the original

One thing you can always count on in cases like this is that people online will find a way to blame the women...

Daughter, I think?

Uday, Qusay and Hatsune.

I think Musk will go after SLS, the only in-house launch platform NASA has left.

Once that's been axed, NASA will have no choice but to rely on SpaceX's Starship launch vehicle for it's prestige missions, include the Artemis Program which is supposed to put Americans back on the moon and establish some permanent infrastructure in lunar orbit before the end of the decade. Those contracts probably won't be as lucrative as routine satellite launches and whatnot, but that doesn't mean Musk won't try to hoard them — if nothing else, landing people on the Moon will still spike his stock price.

My pleasure!

But I'm not sure Merrick Garland's prosecution is going to get much sympathy from the left.

I mean... he'll really only have himself to blame. Garland was better equipped than anyone else in the country to hold Trump and his criminal cohort accountable for their literal treason, but he decided to drag his feet and avoid making waves. And for what? To avoid the appearance of the DOJ being "political"?

Well he's about to find out exactly how political it can be.

It actually is water.

The existence of water on Mars has been completely uncontroversial for decades now — it exists in trace amounts in the Martian atmosphere and in large amounts as permafrost under the top layer of Mars' soil. This particular cloud forms when sunlight causes that permafrost to sublimate into water vapor. As it rises higher into the atmosphere, the temperature drops and that vapor flash freezes back into tiny ice crystals to create the cloud.

What has been speculated for decades is whether or not any liquid water exists on Mars (which we now believe it does, but only in very short-lived seasonal flows that evaporate almost immediately in the extremely low-pressure environment).

One big issue is that the term "free range" is essentially meaningless as defined by the USDA, and often gives consumers the false sense that products marked as "free range" come from animals who had a higher standard of living than non-free range, therefore making their farming more ethical. In reality, this is basically never true.

To qualify as "free range" an animal needs to have "continuous access to the outdoors for 50% of its life". Sounds good on paper, but "outdoors" isn't rigorously defined in this standard. This means that situations that no reasonable person would call "continuous access to the outdoors" still count. For example, you could cram 1000 chickens into a small barn to the point where they barely have space to move, but as long as there's a hole in one wall that opens into a tiny one-foot-by-one-foot pen with no roof, it still counts. If that teeny tiny "outdoor" space can fit at least 1 chicken, then congratulations, all 1000 are now "free range". As long as you cater to some very specific loopholes, you can get away with factory farming while still having the legal right to claim on your packaging that your animals were treated humanely.

Terms like "organic" and "pasture raised" are similarly deceptive to the point of being meaningless, and so it's basically impossible to know what conditions your food was subjected to during it's life based on the packaging alone. Of course you can always try to do your own research about individual companies (or if you're lucky enough to have access, individual farms), but there are lots of laws on the books protecting them from having to disclose specific details to anyone but the USDA, so good luck getting any meaningful information. There have even been cases of farm workers and journalists being prosecuted for things like sharing pictures of farm conditions or publishing personal accounts of how livestock were treated on private farms. Fortunately the "ag gag" laws that allow these whistleblowers to be prosecuted are rarer than they used to be, but there are still a handful of states that have them (if you tried to guess which ones, you'd probably get most of them right).

In reality, the only way to know if an animal was raised to your own standards of ethics is to raise it yourself.

Arsia Mons! One of Mars' largest volcanos, and part of an arc of three known collectively as the Tharsis Montes. The volcano to the top right is Pavonis Mons, and further beyond (past the visible horizon) is Ascraeus Mons. The much more famous Olympus Mons is also found in the same region, to the northeast of the Tharsis Montes (which would be towards the bottom right in this particular image).

Interestingly, that massive cloud formation is a yearly phenomenon that happens right before the start of winter. The size of the cloud trail varies from year to year, but it's not uncommon for it to stretch more than 1000 kilometers.

This has the added benefit of being literally true.

Reinvesting in education is really the only way America is ever going to solve the foundational issues with its democracy. Unfortunately, education is now one of the most highly-politicized topics in American culture, so... yeah, not looking great.

I don't think it's fair to just dump all the blame on corporate media. The news media landscape hasn't meaningfully changed since Trump was first elected, but despite having 8 years to formulate a sound media strategy the DNC is still campaigning like it's 2015.

Like, sure, the Democrats are running with a handicap in the current media landscape, but that isn't new, and it's the responsibility of the DNC to figure out how to overcome that disadvantage — a task that the current leadership has proven itself woefully incompetent at.

I don't think this would have the effect that you want in practice. One of the biggest obstacles Democrats face is getting their own voters to care enough to vote. Republicans, despite being less popular as a percentage of Americans, don't struggle nearly as much getting their supporters to the polls.

Adding additional barriers to voting will decrease voter turnout across the board, and this will absolutely hurt Democrats more than it will hurt Republicans.

That's not a choice any of us have.

Not voting is a choice.

Like it or not, this is what America chose. The only thing left to do is work to mitigate the damage and figure how to make more Americans take that choice seriously in the future.

Unfortunately "highly engaged voters" aren't a large segment of the population. If you want to win elections, you have to cater to the voters who only hear the occasional sound bite and then just make a decision based on vibes and/or what their friends and chosen media propaganda factory tell them.

No, it's not an ideal world, but it's the world we live in, and it's been that way for a long time — more than long enough that the DNC should have gotten it's act together by now. And yet... here we are again...