Our points were the same? The meme states that phytoestrogens “don’t effect the body because you aren’t a plant”, which is absolutely false.

(Not to be confused with monkey hangers/ape hangers/monkey bars, which are also terms for excessively tall handle bars on motorcycles.)

Phytoestrogens absolutely bind to estrogen receptors and do affect the body. While not as potent, it still mimics estrogen.

The comparison here is like saying psilocin doesn’t bind to serotonin receptors because it isn’t serotonin.

Since any other reference probably wouldn’t work here, have one from one of those holistic medicine places: https://denverholisticmedicine.com/blog/2018/5/17/phytoestrogens-friend-or-foe

You shouldn’t need to spread misinformation to promote a hobby.

Who the fuck calls french monkeys? Frogs maybe, but not a monkey. It’s slightly derogatory in some cases, but not the way I think of it, and for a very good reason. (I still probably wouldn’t go out of my way to call a French person a frog.)

I learned the French being referenced as frogs from Art Spiegelman’s Maus when I was a kid and it was in a positive context. The way he used animals in his books was brilliant. While the trend obviously started from cats and mice (Nazis and Jews), the use of other animals was super interesting. It kinda flipped the meaning of the terms in a very somber way.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, or even put words to it, but expressing the slang as actual characters is something to take very seriously in its underlying meaning. Regardless, Spiegelman didn’t pull any punches when it came to showing how nasty people could actually be.

It… it was a thing: https://blog.trekcore.com/2017/09/beam-down-in-style-with-this-homemade-star-trek-spock-helmet/

The only emojis I usually see now are exclusively in slop posts.

The turret on those things will fall straight up, too. The engineering on T-72’s is absolutely astounding, but why they put the anti-grav plates on the turret is beyond me.

I don’t think you know how nicotine/tobacco products are used for money laundering. Just Google it.

You seem hell bent on trying to prove these are pointless raids. Maybe they are, but your arguments are just bad.

The core of this is anti money laundering and that, in many cases, is not victimless. You also point out that they have limited resources, but try to roll into an argument about how trying to preserve those resources is pointless?

Also, law enforcement isn’t exactly a “massive resource” spend when the cost of that should already be baked into yearly country expenses. The only real expenditure is time for investigation. If this really is tied into luxury construction money laundering, we could he talking about hundreds of millions of dollars saved or recovered by only paying the salaries of a few law enforcement officers that will need to work anyway.

Again, I think you missed a few words in the article. It’s an article about black market nicotine and the issues most countries have with controlling substances that are regulated.

Careful online though! With your interpretation of this news article, it seems you might easily be swayed by heavily biased or misleading information sources. Here is a good explainer of how to spot such things: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20250227STO27081/spotting-disinformation-six-tactics-used-to-fool-us

No, they aren’t. OP even copied the summary for you.

It’s called an Arūsat al-Burqa, from what I could find.

https://thezay.org/28457

Most of TNG painted a picture of a perfect utopian Starfleet and how humans had grown up, like you say . (Obviously, humanity is never perfect but the messaging is fairly clear: They try.)

I can chime in more about VOY and ENT though…

VOY is my favorite and also when you start to see a little more of humanity in Starfleet. We learned a few things like: The Prime Directive/Temporal Prime Directives were always just suggestions, murder could actually be justified, you will never get promoted past ensign if you play the clarinet and chemical addiction is still a key driver in human decisions and behavior.

ENT is just the human transition out of a military focused race to a race focused on exploration. (I am not sure why Archer always seems to have serious case of constipation, but it is what it is.)

I would go to that shoe market just to ask about where to get those sick umbrella hats.

What exact is the goal here? You kinda just rolled right into install instructions without context…

Not trying to justify anything here, but if anything is a constant with politicians is that lying is part of that game. I don’t agree with it, but it’s probably the only way to secure votes from many different types of people simultaneously. More importantly, it completely obscures any actual truth and nullifies the worst bits of most scandals. (The latter being more applicable today.)

Racism and inequality was likely common place back then. Slavery was bad, without a doubt, and being anti-slavery was an easier position to support. Racial and social equality was probably much more difficult to support and probably were still radical concepts. (I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to be gay back then, which was still mostly illegal.) Media, for what it was then, could be blatantly racist and sexist. Even through the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s Disney was still full-bore racist and sexist. (Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp come to mind). Media, for better or for worse, shapes the views of the people.

Fast forward to today, we still have issues: Politicians still campaign on lies, racism and sexism. The bluntness of it all is just just tweaked for current times.

The meat of all of this is that I believe people haven’t really changed much. Slavery is gone thankfully, and equality is more of a thing. However, we just use new words and terms for racism or suppression of the people that some believe are “less than human”. Today, it’s not profitable to throw around the “n word” in media these days. Back then, it was just… normal. I suspect even more liberal papers weren’t immune to talking about “the negros” as a different class of person entirely.

Banning slavery has a huge step forward, but it should have been easy to understand that complete and total integration of everyone into “normal” society was going to take a long time. Like, a fuck ton of time. Does that excuse even “moderate racism” back then? Fuck no it doesn’t. Quite literally, people need to die off for some old beliefs and practices to also die off.

Times were different back then and that is about the only justification there is to be had in that regard. It wasn’t right, but in context of the times, it wasn’t completely wrong either. Any politician must at least seem to hold the values and beliefs of their constituents or they won’t get elected. I would like to assume that post-civil was America was a truly a strange time for many people and any equality discussions were still a long way away. It was just too complicated for people to handle.

They aren’t. Best case, it’s silver plated.

Moissanite is a good lab grade alternative and has a much higher brilliance. It’s not cheap, so if the symbolism of price is what you are after without most of the diamond bullshit, it’s got you covered. (It’s silicon carbine and rare in nature; still much cheaper than diamonds though.)

Stay away from natural ones (if you can even get them?) as they may be found as a byproduct of diamond mining. Otherwise, you are just going to find grains of it from meteorites. (That’s just a quick summary; there is a bit more to them so do your research.)

Super shitty paywall.

I am staunchly anti-hype and a firm “whatevers” on the rest of AI. Like you said, it has its place. The biggest issue I have is that it is being pushed as another dopamine fix. I ain’t gonna lie, turning an idea into code in 5 mins is really fucking cool. Unfortunately, its really fucking addictive so I give myself multi-day breaks after a day or two of coding and fucking around with my homelab.

(Tinfoil hat time) If anyone hasn’t noticed, there are some clear distinctions between enterprise LLM tools and regular consumer LLM tools. The consumer-grade plans are more prone to random mistakes and forgetfulness. My theory is that more “mistakes” and resulting fixes not only burn more tokens, but also push dopamine levels higher and lower. Aside from coding blatantly obvious security issues, enterprise LLMs are much more reliable.

LLMs are a tools. You solve problems. If an LLM is solving all of your problems, you are the tool.