This system is fundamentally broken. In Australia there is no path by which people on Centrelink would not have their payments processed for more than a few days. I remember a bank issue which caused a bunch of people to not get their payments on time and it was a major issue, people were absolutely livid. That was only a couple of days late and was resolved promptly with hardship temporary support available for those who really needed it.

For the system to be able to fail like this means those who designed the system want it to fail this way. They could change the funding mechanism to make sure SNAP is immune to government shutdowns if they wanted to. They have chosen not to so that they can use hurting poor people as a political weapon. Removing this weapon should be the goal of any reasonable party and it should be urgent. There are many similar funding holes that can be closed with reasonable legislation and would take away the impact of political dysfunction from the poorest and most vulnerable of society. Choosing to do otherwise is choosing that harm.

As a fellow Aussie I share your conclusion, though the Made in Australia plan from the Albanese government seems like it could change the game. Producing solar panels here would make purchasing them cheaper even if just from the shipping costs. Add the federal investment and the creation of demand and it should get cheaper again.

Now I do worry about things going the way of the NBN, starting with a goal of future proof fibre to the home being chipped away by the LNP until it was a small upgrade on internet service funded by the government but not anything like the goal. I want good green tech, not just barely solar sometimes.

Coal is dying as an investment but existing coal plants will likely run for a long while. Overall demand for energy is rising, the new demand is being met mostly with renewables, but there is a small amount of that increase that is being met by a small increase in coal usage. As renewable manufacture gets faster and more efficient I expect the coal growth will reverse, but it is all about when. If it happens quickly we have less apocalyptic damage. If it happens slowly then we will be more fucked.

Solar is far and say the cheapest form of new energy to roll out. Wind is a not so close second. Coal is getting more expensive by the day. The only reason to roll out coal is insufficient production of solar and wind. It takes time to increase manufacturing capacity but we are getting there and we can do this.

No, but you also don’t need to blame the cholesterol. Cholesterol is a marker we can easily test, so we use that to measure things, but blaming cholesterol is like blaming fire fighters for fires. Cholesterol levels go up when you have damage to your blood vessel walls because LDL covers damage like a scab covers a wound, then once the damage is healed HDL removes the LDL and leaves repaired vessel wall. If you try to lower LDL artificially you can reduce the blood levels and think things are better but really damage is just not being repaired as well as it should be. A better option is to reduce the initial cause of the damage and let the repair process happen more efficiently.

Don’t smoke, don’t drink as much as possible, avoid huge amounts of sugar, exercise, sleep, and try to reduce stress. And then you can worry about not eating a credit card worth of plastic.

So to clarify for those who don’t want to read the article and a few supporting pieces, this is talking about the presence of plastic micro particles in plaques removed from patients.

Removing the plaque can reduce the risk of stroke so it is done fairly frequently. When they took out the plaque they checked for polyethylene, common plastic for bottles, plastic containers, and similar uses, and for PVC, famous for pipes and incredibly sweaty pants.

In both cases microplastics were found in the plaque. Both of these plastics have been shown to cause inflammation in other experiments where the plastic is introduced into the body.

What they seem to be suggesting is that some amount of the inflammation around a plaque could be caused or enhanced by these microplastics.

This study shows that in some plaques, about half of those examined, these two plastics were present. Previous studies have shown plastics can cause or enhance inflammation.

This study does not show that plastics are the primary cause of heart disease. It also does not show how much of an impact microplastics have on the formation of plaques, how dangerous they are, or whether they grow.

Because of the lack of information on how impactful microplastics are and the difficulty of reducing exposure the best evidence currently suggests focussing on removing the big known risks for heart disease. Those are smoking, alcohol, excessive sugar, burned or oxidised fats and oils, and a lack of physical activity. It would be wise to focus on those factors which we know cause heart disease rather than worrying about this small to nonexistent factor.

Just to clarify, it would be wise to avoid a lot of the language around scores and so on. Many of the mass shooters over the last few years have been related to the Terrorgram group, a bunch of idiots who glorify violence in the language of video games. They include the Christchurch shooter who live streamed his attack on a mosque in New Zealand. If you want to use the phrasing around a high score it would be a good idea to be very clear about what you mean as those idiots have a tendency to see anything that is not outright against them as probably in favour. If you are interested a podcast called Weird Little Guys is great for learning more about far right weirdos.

It is more than that. In previous studies from the authors they have controlled for the nutritional content and the processing and found that the content itself, so carbs fats etc, have a certain amount of causal influence on health, but the processing also has a separate and significant effect. Just having less processing seems to have a meaningful effect. This means less of the additives like milk powder, xanthan gum, sweeteners, flavourings, extracts, and so on. The exact mechanism seems to vary depending on the specific case, but separating components of food and then remixing them as well as adding non food components and processing with heat and pressure seems to make these things no longer digestible and safe.

I will bet nothing, but it is a good idea to make yourself more capable and informed at this time. Good time to learn how to grow food and raise chickens I think.

Hopefully they actually respect his legal rights to some degree and have borked the process enough for him to walk free. It may end up in a total dismissal of all the serious charges with only the possession of a fake ID and so on standing, though given how poorly they handled the evidence maybe not even that.

So far the judiciary has been the most effective bulwark against fascism in the USA. Terribly ineffective, but first prize nonetheless.

Judges don’t like the idea that other branches would have more power because that inherently means they are less important. They want their position to be important and meaningful so if the executive or legislative branch try to take over and ignore them they get pissed.

This has already started happening with the supreme court and some of the Trump executive orders. Some are being overturned, some are being massively narrowed, but few are just moving through without question.

Lots and lots of harm is locked in for the USA. Whether it ends in a full fascist dictatorship or not is still up in the air and one of the things that will decide that is what the judicial branch does. If they say nobody has any protection from law enforcement then they are saying they themselves have no protection.

The Trump administration has already had one judge arrested. More will come. This is where an inflection point will come. Does the judicial branch say no, enough, this is not OK? Or do they cave? In dearly hope the former.

To clarify, murder can be prosecuted at either a state or federal level.

First, from a state perspective, we are definitely dealing with a first degree murder charge. That would meet the requirements of willfull, deliberate, and premeditated murder. They will also likely be aiming for a finding of express malice, meaning they want to prove he had the frame of mind that he wanted to cause the harm as the primary end point, not just as a secondary part of doing something else like robbery or rape.

With regards to a federal charge, I will include the appropriate code.

18 U.S. Code § 1111 – Murder

(a)Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.

Any other murder is murder in the second degree.>

So from a federal perspective the same basic stuff applies. Did he do the act? Was it committed with express intent? If so, first degree. If not, second degree.

Under normal circumstances I do it believe this would merit a federal case, rather it should be a state case. Normally it is federal if it is an interstate hitman, a bank robbery, something that happened on a ship (because it is not in the land of a state), if the murder was drug related, if it was intended to influence a federal case outcome, if it was in the process of some fairly nasty child abuse cases, or if the person targeted was a federal officer or judge. As far as I can tell none of the above hold.

So one of the most important things here is that in both cases the prosecution has to show, with untainted and admissible evidence, the express intention to kill the CEO. This means if that evidence, his supposed manifesto, is not admissible due to failure to obtain a warrant, appropriate procedure for the execution of the search, and maintaining the chain of custody of the evidence, then it may not be admissible. He could completely skate on the first degree charges based purely on their incompetence at doing the search legally.

A second question is whether his initial arrest was valid. If they failed to maintain correct process in the actual arrest, failed to read his rights etc, failed to give him access to a lawyer on his request, that could taint the whole arrest.

The lawyer has already raised numerous issues with his arrest and the conduct after it. The leaking of the “manifesto” may have tainted the jury pool. The jokeresque pictures of Luigi in chains with 30 cops behind him may also have tainted the pool. The sheer amount of coverage may preclude an unbiased jury pool. Not to mention that the odds of finding 12 jurors plus however many alternates who have not been impacted by the USAs dismal healthcare system are pretty freaking slim. It could be a mistrial just from that.

This is a major clusterfuck from start to finish for the police and prosecutors. Nobody did this right, they took shortcuts and got carried away, and the media attention was so intense it could all just fall apart.

Something I do not see discussed enough in this context is the fact that whether or not Trump or any other potential asset is an actual knowing asset or not has no bearing on whether they act in the interests of the Russian government. If he does something in the interests of the Russian government it doesn’t really make that much of a difference if he is doing it knowingly or not. The effect of his actions is the same, the only difference is how likely you think he is to do another thing in the interests of the Russian government.

If he weakens the western alliances, withdraws from NATO, creates economic chaos, and makes everyone poorer then the Russian government benefits. Regardless of the cause of his behaviours they are still damaging, he is still destroying the US government, he is still hurting all sorts of people, and he is still destroying the global economy.

Asset or useful idiot, he is still setting the world on fire.

What is a CHA score? I can’t find something that fits the initialism with any relevance, certainly not a CHADS score (stroke risk).

“It’s basic biology, XX or XY, man or woman!”

“OK, but have you ever looked into intermediate or advanced biology?”

Dawkins is such a disappointing person. He has all the knowledge required to not only understand but also advocate for trans people but instead is defending the Anglican church, “light pedophelia”, and gender essentialism. He wrote a couple of books with some good parts but honestly, he is a sad old man and should be forgotten. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.