Revengers, resemble!

Indeed, it was a really clear case of election interference through the falsification of business records. It is a good result and now we just have to wait and see how people react. Will he beat Biden in the election? Will he be clearly rejected? I hope things end with him not being in office, but no matter what happens he cannot pardon himself for state crimes and if he wins the election and New York sentences him to prison time then there will be a novel set of issues to resolve from there. Ideally he loses, is sentenced to prison, and spends the remainder of his life offline.

To be fair, it would only have taken one jury to hang it and worrying about that makes sense. Happily thus has worked out in favour of justice, but it was not a given and people were right to fear that outcome. Hopefully we will see the predicted change in likely voting outcomes from unaffiliated voters and thus can be the end of MAGA over the next couple of election cycles.

The payment of hush money would have counted as a campaign contribution regardless of the source. If he paid it personally it would have been reportable. If Cohen paid it it would have been reportable. If a third party paid it it would have been reportable.

The reason it would have been reportable is because it provided benefit to the campaign. Covering up negative news is a benefit to the campaign, so if he paid it himself it would still have been a campaign contribution he would have to report.

By covering up the payment he is taking or making a campaign contribution in violation of FEC rules. By suppressing the story of his affair with Stormy Daniels he is contributing to his campaign and failure to disclose makes this a crime.

The fact that he committed a crime by failing to report a campaign contribution is what makes the payment itself part of a felony rather than a misdemeanor. In New York law they do not have to prove the specific electoral crime itself for this set of falsifications of business records to be related to a felony level crime and therefore felonious. The jury instructions approved by the judge specifically say that the jurors can find that he violated one of several options of law for raising this to a felony.

To be clear, it is not a hush money trial. It is an election interference trial. Hush money is not actually criminal in and if itself, the fact that it was used in relation to influencing an election is what makes it a crime. It is election interference.

I agree with many of these points, but have two thoughts here. First, the same was true of many items being produced in China in the past, but quality control got better and honestly most of the products you can buy for a reasonable price are partly or wholly made in China. Second, Tesla is a good example of a US based company with many of the same issues. Loose panels, door handles that fall off, accelerators that get stuck, and so on. Bad engineering is not only available in Mandarin.

I hope they can produce a good quality electric car and help accelerate the transition.

Man, it looks like AI art the spelling is so bad. Impressive.

I think the mistake we make is thinking that people are better than they are. I probably have some hidden bigotry that I am unaware of right now but given a space to be exposed to it someone would notice and point it out. If you only know of someone from one thing they did you can form an opinion of them based on very limited information. Get to know them better and you find that hidden awful. Twitter is a tool of constant broad interaction and it preserves bad takes long enough to see them. Add a culture of never admiting to being wrong and filtering by who you agree with and you have a cycle of awful that turns perfectly boringly not great but OK people into monsters defending genocide. Maybe we shouldn’t know anything about the author, replace their name with a serial number or pseudonym and let the art stand on it’s own. Though the racist jewish, wait no goblin, bankers was fairly intense tbh.

Is one of them going to hurt you more than the other?

I’m not an American so I’m not invested in the same way, but if you don’t want Biden because of his actions with respect to the Gaza genocide can I ask about your thought process regarding what happens if he does not get in? If he loses the only possible winner is Trump because he is the Republican nominie, so is a vote not for Biden basically a vote for Trump? Or do you see it some other way?

Yes, correct, so a smaller portion is fat loss but not the full 5.7kg average. I should have been clearer, they did lose a meaningful amount of weight and it does seem to be beneficial, but it is not 5.7kg of fat loss per person on average, it is a loss of 5.7kg average mass with a portion of that being actual body fat.

You will drop a bunch of water at the start if you are eating carbs beforehand because of the water holding the glycogen in your muscles. As you use the glycogen the water holding it also goes, so it isn’t fat loss, just water weight.

Ok, so there are a few problems with this study which make it unfit to rely on.

First, this is observational, not an intervention. Everyone who has kimchi knows they are doing so and has chosen to do so on their own. The direction if causation cannot be established in this case because of this study design.

Second, this relies on food surveys. These are notoriously unreliable for getting true data about what a person has consumed anything more than a day ago. People really do have trouble remembering exactly what they ate yesterday unless they eat a regimented diet and even those people are bad at remembering deviations like incomplete meals or serving a larger size.

Third, what is a serving size? Eating 1-2 serves of kimchi means something very different if it is a 20g or 60g serve.

Fourth, was this the study question at the outset? Were they testing the hypothesis that kimchi consumption is directly tied to waist circumference? Not as far as the study seems to suggest. It seems like the participants did their food surveys and he researchers went through and found anything that stuck out in the data. This is basically a form of p hacking and is a major red flag.

Honestly, this study is trash and should be ignored. They have proven nothing, made no progress for a scientific understanding of diet, and wasted everyone’s time.

Cool, fair enough, I do have a little trouble with spelling and that is fine. Of course it could be software, learning difficulties, or just a bad day, but feel free to discard all the words I spelled correctly. Also, if you are in the US including the full stop in your quotation is typical but in the rest of the world you would keep the punctuation outside the quotes unless it is what you are quoting, otherwise the sentence doesn’t have its own full stop.

I see what you are saying but I disagree. The changes that we would consider important for aspartame should happen over a reasonable period of time. If it takes 100 years to have an impact then we probably don’t care because most people won’t live that long. What we care about is whether it has an impact over meaningful lengths of time in a human life, say over a decade or two.

If I have tobacco every day for a year will I have cancer? Unlikely. But if I give a large number of people who are well randomised tobacco or tobacco substitute I will see changes in their outcomes in a short time, even as little as a year.

So for aspartame, we already know it is not a massive signal. If it were then people who find the taste acrid would be better off than those who do not. But is there a possible issue there? Sure, it is possible, but it will very likely be a mild issue over a long time at a high dose, not at small doses over a short time, so this study design is not fit for purpose and it should be ignored.

Mice lie, monkeys exaggurate.

This is a study on a small number of mice using a measure of anxiety which does not directly map to humans. Using mice for a study like this is fine for a pilot study but this has not clinical significance and can be safely ignored by the scientific press as well as the public. When we see a long term study which is double blinded in humans with reasonable doses, good controls, and hopefully some sort of mechanism of action then we can pay attention. Until then, aspartame has been linked to everything under the sun and yet nothing has been shown to be meaningful yet. It is one of the most well studied substances in the human diet and it seems to be at the very least mostly fine. Worry about lead in your water before you worry about this.

It looks like it is downsampling the video or streaming after converting to another codec. Some codecs are fine for decoding on the server but the app may not support them so the server converts them. Some files are of higher quality than what the server is configured to deliver so it downsamples to stream it.

Check the configuration and look for anything to do with codecs, hardware decoding, streaming quality, and so on. It may also be on the app, so if you can access a different interface then test that to narrow down the issue.

This guy is a bit of a quack TBH. He is a doctor, but of what? Medicine? That is what you would assume from his presentation, but no, he is not a medical doctor. He has also misrepresented data in the past and has a definite pattern of carefully selecting what he presents to support an antivax narrative.

His views before the pandemic were extremely low and his videos mainly focussed on educational material for nurses. Since the pandemic he has gone full antivax and boom, absolutely massive channel growth and monetization. He has a strong financial incentive to keep making videos whether or not there is any actual problem.

Something I have found is missing from both of these suggestions as well as every podcast app on device is transcoding to speed up so it is not sped up on the fly. For a lot of phones and other devices the task of playing back at 2x speed is enough to demand a higher power state than what is required to play a sped up file. For efficiency doing a single pass of speeding up the audio then playing back at that speed would use less power during the playback phase, allowing you to download and speed up all of your podcasts at home while on charge then listen for long periods without completely killing the battery. I have checked with a few if the open source devs and this is not a feature they see utility for so nobody intends to make it.

Project Hail Mary