avoutos

(without paywall)

Even if over 99.99% are wiped out, that still leaves a decent number to figure it out.

It is estimated that human and human ancestor population has dropped as low as a few thousand in the past.

Life would be glum, but causing complete human extinction is not as easy as it sometimes appears.

The first mistake would be Israel's unilateral withdraw from Gaza in 2005, ethnically cleansing its own citizens from the region to make way for the Palestinians.

The population of Gaza has increased by roughly a million since then, which I must say isn't great for the Zionist plot.

The unsettling conclusion is that these nations are willing to let Palestinians live in dire conditions--conditions the world has no reservation against decrying passionately on cable news and social media--so long as Israel does not get a perceived "win." The West has adopted the Hamas mindset.

1. https://www.bbc.com/arabic/articles/c9de3x3g41yo

The Palesinians don't want a state, they want no Israel.

I could on and on with historical examples, but it doesn't seem many here are interested in that sort of thing.

If DOGE is overstating savings, I doubt they are doing so by 900% which is what it would take for savings to dip into negative territory. Either that or losses are severely understated, but again if so probably not by enough.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-09/are-you-...

All UCLA has to do is strike up a deal with the gov't that presumably entails eliminating affirmative action and preventing pro-Hamas factions from taking hold of the university.

Columbia made a deal and they have their funding back now.

> Without a sense of proportionate response, if Hitler did some false flag attacks, do you expect the whole world to be okay with the Holocaust?

Can you explain this point? I don't think I quite understand.

The Haaretz article states it is unclear how many died from IDF fire vs the Abu Shabab group. Husain was not at the aid site and so can't state how they were wounded.

It is also the case that doctors without borders is far from a non-partisan group and has harbored terrorists in the past (e.g. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-slain-gazan-named-as-docto...)

If the soldiers truly fired on those who were only running away, not advancing, this should be investigated and charged as a war crime. However, at this point the evidence is not clear aside from a handful of anonymous sources from a single press release.

I agree that Hamas has no other options now, but Hamas has never had a realistic change of winning the battlefield and so has always fought primarily by tring to erode international support for israel by inflating claims of genocide and human-rights abuses,facilitating their own civilian deaths.

Your wording makes it seem like you sympathize with Hamas.

Forgive me if I am not understanding your question.

Advancement of LLM ability seems to be logarithmic rather than the exponential trend AI doomers fear. Advancement won't continue without a paradigm shift and even then I am not sure we will ever reach ASI.

Aside from radio jamming, I have not seen an actual defense against a strong EMP.

To defend against an EMP wiping out your drone swarm, you would have to invest in shielding etc which would remove them from the class of small cheap drones.

Idk if anyone can speak about this, but to me this doesn't seem like a problem that these types of drones can overcome.

I think many will be surprised by the amount children can learn if you actually test the limit of their capabilities.

I feel the limiting factor when it comes to learning increasingly difficult concepts is not intelligence but effort. Often teachers and parents may mistake the attention-span deficits of kids for a sign that the material is too hard, when the ability is there and only needs to be distilled with discipline.

They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.

It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.

While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.

Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.

To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.

The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.

The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.

Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.

As for the "plastic spoon" claim, it originated from this study -- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12003191 -- in Nature.

The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.

There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.