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If the obscenely wealthy benefit most from having Republicans in power; and collectively they have disproportionate control over the economy; wouldn't they use that power to sabotage Democrats?
  • we're in agreement :-) what I said is an Orwell's 1984 quote. My overly simplified explanation of the quote is that the governmental entities in the novel were able to maintain absolute authority because of a manufactured conflict. In essence, two sides intentionally maintained a stalemate at war so that each of them could keep absolute control over their populace using fear of the other. In reality, both groups were controlled by the same people-- an autocratic ruling class.

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    Sad plant giving up on life - a call for help
  • also... if it dies anyway and you're heartbroken, dm me and maybe I can send you a cutting from mine :-) cheers!

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    Sad plant giving up on life - a call for help
  • So the plant you have there is a Maranta leuconeura. I have one that looks just like it!

    There's a couple things that could be going wrong. In general, here are the conditions it likes:

    1. It likes indirect light. I keep mine by a south facing window that has an awning cutting the harsh light outside. Additionally, I have it behind a sheer curtain.

    2. It likes to be kept in moist soil, and in a humid place. I don't let mine fully dry out before rewatering it, and I live in a place where the ambient humidity is often 60-80%. If you live in a dry place, water it often and maybe keep it in the most humid place with enough light (kitchen or bathroom is usually more humid)

    3. and this is key, it does NOT like hard water. I honestly think this could be the problem with yours given what you said. Hard water has a lot of minerals, and over time, they build up in the soil. The plant might have been fine with tap for months, but now the soil could effectively be too "salty" for it.

    If I had this plant, I'd do one of two things.

    Option 1:

    • buy fresh potting soil
    • gently remove the plant from its pot
    • shake off the soil from the roots
    • rinse and scrape off any residue on the inside of the pot
    • replant in fresh soil
    • water with RO/soft water from now on (see note below), keeping it moist, in whatever spot it already lives

    Option 2:

    • buy or obtain real reverse osmosis (RO) water (see note below)
    • water the plant so thoroughly with RO that the mineral salts dissolve and are carried away. This means soaking the pot in a large volume (like more than a gallon) of RO water for an hour or so, or watering it so water flushes out the bottom 5+ times in a row. You can tell if you flush the minerals out because there should be no grey dusty residue left on the soil or sides of the pot!
    • add a small amount of balanced fertilizer (like follow miracle grow instructions or something)
    • water with RO/soft water from now on (see note below), keeping it moist, in whatever spot it already lives

    As backup, I might also try and root a cutting (again, in RO water) just in case it still dies anyway. Hopefully with these efforts it will revive, though!

    Note on soft/RO water:

    If you are looking for soft water, don't use water from a water softener (confusing, I know). This is because water softeners for humans replace the minerals with sodium ions. In essence, water softener water is just as "salty" as hard water, it's just different salts.

    Instead, try and get deionized (DI) or reverse osmosis (RO) water.

    Ideally, this would come from an RO system, which is a common kind of in-house water filter. If you live by a college, you could maybe ask for some from their science departments (especially biology or chemistry). You can also buy it online and have it shipped to you, but this is really expensive, especially considering that the maranta needs so much water.

    Instead, I would buy a TDS meter (available on Amazon for like $7). It's a little stick device that you put in the water and it tells you how hard it is. With this, you could test a few brands of bottled water (avoid "spring water", or "remineralized" water-- go for "filtered" or "purified") until you find one with less than ~30 ppm / ~75 µS/cm dissolved solids. My grocery store sells water in big machines out front that reads 15 µS/cm, and it costs $2.50/5 gallons!

    Honestly, I cheat and get lazy sometimes with mine and water it with tap. You saw yourself how long it takes for the solids to build up, and watering it with RO dissolves some of those over time. It's not like tap will kill it right away, but these guys sure are picky! :)

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    me when- when tall women
  • I like how the artist included the one cyclone turning the opposite direction (on the right, hair blowing the other way)

    ... if you know you know 😎

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    ‘Help us’: Guam's nuclear radiation survivors’ plea to the United States
  • ... their government IS our government. Guam is a US territory.

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    Wells Fargo employee found dead in cubicle 4 days after she clocked in: ‘She was just lying on her desk’
  • Dude, what? I might be misunderstanding but there's a huge difference between 15 minutes and four days? Or even between "hands off" supervision and no one looking to see why she hadn't clocked in or out for DAYS? Or even just looking in the cubical?

    Like... The employer definitely bears responsibility for being this neglectful. It goes way beyond "hands off" lol

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    Autocorrect Rule
  • Women are not included in those polls

    ... accurate

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    There has to be another way
  • Whack. The only thing I can think of is if your base activity level has never been low enough in that several year period, you might not know what it feels like to be completely sedentary by comparison?

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    Android games for girls?
  • Oooooh I have some ideas! Some of these are paid/premium (but NOT micro transactions) and some have mild ads. But I share the distaste for data-mining, money grubbing, brain-melting-ad-ridden games, so I'm certain they are on the least intrusive end of the spectrum.

    I really love biology (I'm a biologist...) so these are both pet games and usually breeding/evolution games!

    • Fish Tycoon -- This one specifically. A classic! Breed and care for cute fish!
    • Niche breed and evolve -- so neat and pretty educational about evolution/genetics. There's a slightly more complicated/difficult pc game if she decides she likes the nichelings/universe.
    • Pocket Frogs -- Simple, low stress collecting game. it would take years to collect all the frogs, and there's a relatively active community of people who trade sets of frogs to other people to help them complete collections. Would be fun to play with her friends at school!
    • Reigns Her Majesty -- a game about running a kingdom as a queen. When you die, you become your heir and retain some progress from your last lives. It doesn't fit the exact criteria you mentioned, but I think she might like it anyway!
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    Support for LGBTQ+ equality has decreased: GLAAD study
  • GLAAD's Accelerating Acceptance is the most comprehensive survey we have to determine changes in public sentiment about LGBTQ+ acceptance. It's literally what I cite when writing research papers about queer issues. The difference is absolutely believable, and they validated the results with sampling bias in mind. There is no reason for you to cast doubt on the result like this, and it reads as disengenuine for you to do so.

    Also, you don't get to decide what queer lives deserve to be in articles about LGBTQ+ people. Thankfully.

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    Are you a Cash App user? You may be eligible for a piece of this $15 million settlement
  • I don't think that's how this usually works?

    IANAL and also I'm a dumbass but from when I've participated in these things in the past (and therefore when I've read the fine print), by the time they're soliciting claims they have already gone through the entire process of confirming that the lawsuit is valid and deciding how much the company owes as a settlement. So once it reaches this point, the amount the company pays is already known, and it's just equally divided among all the people with standing who file a claim.

    So yeah, file a claim, because that's your money that you deserve because you have standing. But if you don't file a claim, everyone who did will just get a slightly larger amount of money

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    'How could I have become so evil': Jewish-French director grapples with antisemitism
  • The point this guy is trying to make is that people are conflating Israel, Judaism, and Zionism in ways that don't always make sense

    Like, the polls you're quoting are sentiments of Israelis, so this guy (and the vast majority of Jewish people in the world) are not included in those polls.

    Even within Israel, that's, what, 3-4 million people that disagree with that sentiment? And Israelis are only ~73% Jewish anyway?

    On top of that, tons of zionists arent even Jewish, they are even likely to be antisemitic tbh.

    So.. what you said sounds a lot like "I don't have anything against one particular group, but the sentiment of the citizens of this one country makes me second guess the perspective of a person in a totally different country just because they share one dimension of identity"... In essence, it sounds a lot like prejudice

    (free palestine, in case that isn't obvious)

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    YSK Americans, check to see if you can vote. Its real quick.
  • because the very first thing you say in this post basically amounts to "I think I have the authority to decide the basis on which we determine who deserves to vote"

    like, yeah, most people can navigate to their secretary of state websites. And it's not really your responsibility to have to link the pages anyway.

    But doing it for that reason aligns you philosophically with people who think that the illiterate, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the critically ill, etc. somehow don't deserve to vote. It aligns you ideologically with other people who think they can decide who deserves to vote, with people who want to disenfranchise others-- in essence, it aligns you ideologically with many Republicans

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    Is there a scientific calendar which uses a different reference than Jesus?
  • Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.

    Take your pick: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars

    I personally use "2024 CE" for "common era", with BCE referring to "before common era". This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE... A bit of a cop out, but

    Anyway have fun, there are lots of options

    Edit: also the one you're referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar

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    $1 million starter home? It's the norm in 237 cities, according to Zillow
  • I don't think you're wrong, but I think this might be over simplifying.

    For one thing, in the USA, our building codes and standard methods for making apartments makes it very difficult and space inefficient to make apartments with enough bedrooms for families. Affording a SFH is only so desirable because there aren't apartments big enough for families to grow into, and while moving to a rural area might allow for enough living space, now the family has to figure out how to have a job that supports them.

    For another, we don't make as many apartment-like buildings you can own part of. This deincentivizes staying in apartments, because with the way our real estate economy is structured, owning any real property is one of the best ways to secure a spot in the middle class.

    Another aspect-- a lot of desirable places to live have populations that literally and directly state they don't want to build more dense housing, they don't want people who can't afford the sfhs to live there. It's not just about pricing people out of homeownership, it's literally trying to gatekeep access to specific towns by class. Plenty of people would gladly accept living there even without SFHs, so the housing shortage is not caused by the people who want houses, and is instead caused by the people who don't want apartments next to their houses.

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    Bad news for universal basic income.
  • It's also like, if they made $29,000/year before plus $12,000 during the study, they're still making less than someone with a full time job making $20/hour.

    $20/hour felt AMAZING as a promotion to a broke-ass food service 20-something, and is a hell of a lot better than $29,000/year-- but having been in that pay-range before, 100% of that increase is going towards stability and comfort stuff.

    Imagine-- you can afford more than just scraping by on rent! Wow, what if I can buy a video game?! You mean I can actually say yes when my friend invites me out for a drink this month??? I CAN BUY THE NICE CHICKEN NUGGETS???

    Like, damn, of course they aren't like, "starting an entrepreneurial endeavor", they're still broke as hell. The might work a little less, but maybe that's because they're like, taking time off when they're sick, where before they would power through to afford rent? Or maybe they will feel more like they can call off work to help for family or friend emergencies? Like it's pretty obvious that this UBI amount still falls into the category of bringing people out of poverty stress into "normal human decision making" mode, not like into "has the space to be able to dream about visionary possibilities" mode

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    Michigan man kills himself after running over 80-year-old Trump supporter
  • I'm trans

    I don't support murder

    Not of 80 year old Trump supporters, not of anyone

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    Sexual dimorphism rule
  • Absolutely!

    Two eggs:

    Booth et al. (2014). "New insights on facultative parthenogensis in pythons". Biological Journal of Linnean Society, 112(3)461-468

    Two sperm:

    Tinti, F. and Scali, V. (1992). "Genome exclusion and gametic DAPI-DNA content in the hybridogenetic Bacillus rossius-- grandii benazzii complex (Insecta Phasmatodea)". Molecular reproduction and development, 33(3)235-242

    One egg:

    Ryder et al. (2021). "Facultative parthenogensis in California Condors". Journal of Heredity, 112(7)569-574

    One sperm (surprised me too!):

    Heesch et al. (2021). Evolution of life cycles and reproductive traits: insights from the brown algae." Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 34(7)992-1009

    These examples are non-exhaustive (so many parthenogensis examples!) so if you want to know more, or if you're interested in learning about the increased reproductive fitness post-homosexual mating activities, no one primary publication will give you a complete picture. I recommended reading the book I mentioned-- Evolution's Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden-- because it details this in ways I can't summarize in a social media comment.

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