Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.

That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.

This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.

An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.

Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.

There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.

Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.

What, a ghost choked you in Switzerland?

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Michael Scott : I am a victim of a hate crime. Stanley knows what I’m talking about.

Stanley : That’s not what a hate crime is.

Michael Scott : Well, I hated it, a lot, okay.

The whole conversation from the vegan side has been that those proteins and other substances essential to cats are already commonly synthesized for things like animal feed or even human energy drinks. Your own source says it’s impossible without synthetic supplementation, but the deleted comments from that dumpster fire were specifically about synthetic supplementation.

I’m not an expert in this stuff but I can see when comments aren’t actually engaging with arguments from the other side, which is why I think that the vegans have the better argument in this whole saga.

Realistically, a lot of it could just be continuation of existing Biden policy:

• Aggressive antitrust enforcement from the FTC and DOJ, slowly changing the inertia of the last 40 years of allowing consolidation and the neutering of century-old antitrust laws.
• Continued pro-labor rulings from the NLRB to give workers more bargaining power as we unionize at Starbucks, Amazon, and other major workforces. Big union wins at automakers, airlines, logistics companies have emboldened new unionization drives at places like VW provide the momentum that need to be backed by government. Even places where unions have seen setbacks, like Mercedes Benz in Alabama, management has been running scared and trying to stave off unions with promises of unprecedented raises (which they’ve since reneged on after the union vote failed). We need to keep the pressure on, especially as the business cycle potentially turns to a tougher job market.
• Marijuana rescheduling is proceeding along, and hopefully will be complete by the end of Biden’s term. The next administration will need to defend it in court, and implement the details for things like banking and medical research and licensing.

Some Biden policies need to be bolstered with a combination of both continued executive action and new laws passed through Congress:

• Many of Biden’s environmental regulations have been rolled back in the courts. A Harris admin should keep pushing on these fronts, but with coverage from Congress where possible.
• Same with economic/workplace regs. The Department of Labor’s minimum wage exemption guidelines are being challenged in the courts right now, with Biden trying to push for the minimum salary of overtime-exempt workers to be at least $58k next year (the $44k minimum took effect on July 1, 2024). The FTC’s noncompete regulation, which would prohibit noncompete agreements for almost all workers, is tied up in the courts now.
• Biden’s Department of Education has tried to implement student loan forgiveness, and lost at the Supreme Court. Now their watered down measures (easier repayment plans, interest forgiveness for certain borrowers) are in the courts, too. New legislation could fix this.

Abortion, contraception, and family planning in general needs a combination of both strong executive action and new legislation:

• Biden’s administration has fought, with mixed success, to make sure that state bans on abortion don’t interfere with federal priorities. DoD has official policy that pays for servicemembers and their families to travel to states where abortions are legal, if necessary to get care. DOJ and HHS are fighting to make sure that states can’t prevent life saving care that some extremists believe constitute abortion. The FDA has expanded access and availability of abortion medication through telehealth and prescriptions by mail.
• Legislative areas worth fighting for include bolstering the authority of Medicare and FDA to preserve access to abortion and contraceptive care, including across state lines, removing the ban on federal funding for abortions, etc.

These are all pretty modest, but very important. The actual machinery of government is immensely important, and we need people who are effective at making sure everything is working for the people.

So just fuck the 700,000 who live there, then? Don’t give them the right to political representation that everyone else in the country has?

What “cooking chemicals” are in grains that are harvested from a plant and then dried?

No such thing as an NDA that allows a spouse to work in the same room, and allows the spouse to actually be on video while blurred, but draws the line at not being able to unblur the video.

I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.

I set a simple task to turn off WiFi when my home network is not detected so my phone doesn’t scan and report my location to businesses.

I was under the impression that BSSID scanning was entirely passive, and that a phone that scans for beacons doesn’t actually reveal itself to anyone.

It’s true, but not as much as people seem to believe. US regulations require a minimum of 80% butterfat, and EU regulations require 82%.

Kind of sad that some grade schoolers can do better than a large corporation.

Better at what metric?

The cynical take is that the corporations did optimize for the best butter, only that their definition of “best” is different from yours.