Very poor word choice on my part, I will freely admit that. The veg population of inda in is roughly larger than the entire US population, which is the much more useful statistic. I'm also aware that the vast majority of people who eat a vegan diet do so for economic reasons. Sorry about that.

Yeahhhh... I was drunk and I probably could have thought that example through better. My apologies.

This is a very common argument and it's a little shortsighted, because the answer is broadly "yes". Reducing the number of cows/chickens/etc in the world is a net positive, and would only require us to stop force breeding them like it's some kind of degenerate poultry hentai. Allowing the species to reduce in population is only of benefit to the species (cough humans cough) and is overall desirable. Keeping some in zoos would be fine, maintaining the native wild populations is also a good plan, small scale farms ("family" or "hobby") farms where they don't brutalize the animals is also a feature of most vegan utopias. Take india, where most of the population is vegan: there are still cows on farms, cow-derived produce is still available, it's just the cows aren't kept in American-style stock farms.

YMMV, and like any ideology there are other opinions with equally valid outlooks, this is just what I see most often. (full disclosure, I am not a vegan (there's plenty of evidence to that in my post history), I just sleep with a lot of vegans and quite like chana masala)

(There's also a pretty... sane... subgroup that proposes 'corrective breeding'; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their 'natural' state. "Contentious" is probably the best description.)

"It's complicated".

It's the same category of dispute as the "eggs or milk can be vegan under certain circumstances" one. The argument is that rescued farm animals have been so warped by human intervention that it's actively harmful for you to not use their produce - dairy cows can in rare cases die, and otherwise will just be miserable, if left unmilked. Chickens lay too many eggs, and leaving unf. chicken eggs in the coop can lead to the chickens learning to eat their own eggs, so you have to remove them. (I don't hold a position on these claims, I'm just reporting what I see come up in the argument.) Bees fall into the same sort of category, they've been so selectively bred that they now produce far more honey than they can possibly use, so removing and eating some of it helps to mitigate the negative impact that humans have had on the creatures.

Regardless though: cows, chickens and bees are all still animals. I don't think any vegans are gonna argue that one.

I think in this case it's not exceptionally nefarious, just greedy. They'll save boatloads of money (and be able to centralize their facilities) if these reactors get approved, instead of being forced to pay to upgrade the municipal infrastructure because of the terrific strain they're placing on it. A massive power source, all for them? Hot diggity.

I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

(I made "false landings" up.)

No, it's not unique to the US. But we're by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.

Yeah... this is an example of what I'm talking about. It's the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you're subjected to a propaganda lecture (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they're used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don't even realize it's an issue that could be discussed.

So lets be clear here, while you're absolutely correct about what you're saying, that's not related to what I was saying.

The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It's an area where the US isn't even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven't figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It's so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

That's just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic...)). There's no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it's embarrassing, we don't even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it's just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

Its just... we've got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they'll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

I'm glad we've been able to find this common ground.

You're... not very good at this, are you.

Hush.

But neither Poland nor Lithuania... are doing that. And they totally could be doing that. And if we're ignoring the political feasibility of deploying a THAAD, why wouldn't we just put it in Ukraine? Or, hell, why not just send US forces into ukraine, since it's pretty clear we could roflstomp russia in a couple days? A couple carrier groups in the black sea and this conflict would be over comically fast.

Look you make a point, but I'm not sure what you're actually trying to say with it. Do the now years of financial, humanitarian, political and military aid the US has given Ukraine count for nothing? The fact that we're getting our dicks stuck in the middle east again (and chugging so much Israeli Genocide Bathwater we're at risk of succumbing to zionist water toxemia while we do it) has very little to do with the continuing support the US is giving Ukraine. It's still a damn hard battle, but the US has been giving them tools that they are using incredibly effectively. A THAAD system being deployed to Ukraine would be: a serious escalation with russia (who will not be happy with US anti-ballistic missile systems on the border, a point they've made clear for years), an astounding investment of an incredibly expensive and very limited-scope platform that is vulnerable without the supporting military ecosystem, and minimally effective since the kinds of missiles THAAD was designed to counter (realistically just SBMs) are barely being used by russia in this conflict.

There are real, credible reasons why the US has not done this, and I sure was sarcastic at you about your suggestion. I'm sorry about that, I kinda assumed you were a troll. If you're serious about this, you should stop and consider that a war can't be separated from the political realities that surround it, not least because if we could do that wars would be rendered pointless and we'd never have them and raytheon would go out of business.
...
Hang on what am I saying that sounds great, I'm gonna start saying it too. Maybe if we convince enough people it'll actually happen. I mean, it's a better plan than being shitty at random well-meaning-but-off-the-mark-on-some-obscure-details internet commenters on a niche social media website like I'm doing right now.

"Alright, thank you for attending this meeting of the Member States of the NATO Alliance Countries Which Border Ukraine, which of you would like to be the first one to base an active combat emplacement (and 100% viable military target) on their soil? Did I mention it wasn't going to be very effective, and costs $12 Million per missile?"
"..."
"Anyone? "

Look I'm clearly being sarcastic, but out of Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary or Poland, which one is your pick to throw themselves into a meatgrinder war of attrition all while the US is split 50/50 on electing someone who has actively called for the US to back out of NATO?

God I hope so.

I could care less about league of legends is an understatement

Couldn't. Couldn't care less about league.

But the burning fires of my grammatical pet peeve aside its a damned reasonable choice to not care about it. My worry is how other esports companies will react to this. It's still such a tenuous sport even with the crazy viewer numbers the League world championships bring in, and if the biggest name in esports is about to start jettisoning actual production staff from the biggest title in the room... Idk, I can see other companies overreacting.

It's a good strategy for her here, because what can be said to criticize her on it? "Ah, but you shouldn't follow the law"?
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Wait shit it's fox, they actually think the president doesn't have to follow the law. Okay maybe it wasn't the best answer. The best answer would have been for her to pull out a baseball bat and go all daffy duck on the set.

Nnno, he was shot with an (intentionally) misleadingly named munition while being gassed out of cover, and put into critical condition because of it. He wasn't shot with what you could nebulously call a "live round". That awkward to articulate distinction is the probable reason for the headline in question. I'm not sure what part of that wasn't explicit or clear.

FWIW, I've been unable to find out if he died from the injury, though I wouldn't be surprised if he did - Israeli baton rounds are notoriously brutal, even by 'rubber bullet' standards.

I am under no illusions that in fact I am the one being kept, but you're very kind nontheless.

If you’ll allow an interpetation of their comment

How dare you offer a counter interpretation to my interpretation you terrible person (I wish I didn't need to include this but /s, you are not a terrible person)

Taken on it's own that's a fair and totally valid criticism, I think the pushback is just due to conflating the two experiences as equally out of touch. Anyone who is 59 and has had a steady white collar career is going to lack first-hand experience with the current minimum wage work life, but Harris is a great deal more likely to be able to at least accurately conceptualize and empathize with what it's like vs. someone who's never worked a day in their life and was given $419 million dollars by their father.

Conflating the two as the same is the issue, not casting skepticism on the impact of Harris' teen summer job on her understanding of the challenges facing modern American families, and that's the reason they're being downvoted (imo).

If I had to guess, it's both because their comment can be read as them asserting that someone who worked at McDonald's... doesn't know what working at McDonald's is like, and because they're asserting that the there's no realistic difference in life experience between the white male child of a corrupt multigagillionaire and the black-indian female child of a research oncologist and an economics professor.

Were either of them poor growing up? No. Are there many steps between "poor" and "having a gold toilet" that a person can be at? Oh you betcha, and suggesting there isn't is either myopic or intentionally deceptive.