They collect a tithe of 10% of members’ income from the entire congregation. Most people accumulate less than 10% of their income as net worth annually

So yes, quite possibly they do.

Full power 45-70 is extremely punishing to shoot out of a lever action rifle much less a derringer

I don’t think that’s the case at all. Not everything has been successful, and in many cases efforts got watered down so they could pass congress. However, Obama and Biden have pushed for some pretty serious left wing talking points. Some examples off the top of my head:

-Medical reform

-Student loan forgiveness

-Renewable energy initiatives

-Marijuana rescheduling

-Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military

-Immigration clemency with DACA

Compare that with Bill Clinton, whose strategy explicitly was to place himself midway between liberals and conservatives

I’d generally agree, but the problem is that this particular instance is much higher stakes than most elections.

Generally speaking, the worst case scenario would be someone like John McCain taking the reins instead of Obama. I didn’t agree with McCain about a lot of things but he was a generally honorable guy who wanted to do the best for American democracy.

Now we have a group who is polling to win and outright saying “America needs a dictatorship”. If they get their way, it could be the last election we ever have.

The claims aren’t colored by propaganda and misinformation

They sure are. A great example would be the videos making the rounds recently about the Israeli drones supposedly making “crying baby noises” to lure people out. This is a classic propaganda technique, the videos are literally just a black screen with some background sound, the Israeli government could kill those people far more easily without such tactics, and anyone who has spent time around drones regularly knows it’s extremely implausible at best.

It’s a blatantly obvious piece of propaganda that was widely accepted because people can’t pause for five seconds to apply a bit of critical thinking to their conclusions.

Just because they’re capable of doing genocide “better” doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it.

It means exactly this. “Genocide” implies a certain intent and this is a very strong argument of the absence of the requisite intent.

Also, quit implying that my comments are right wing or Russian just because they have opinions that don’t align with yours. That’s such a tired trope. I could imply the same of you, but I’m choosing to engage in good faith.

Well maybe you shouldn’t be pushing an agenda that benefits the Russians and far-right at the expense of the Palestinian people?

Honestly, you’re either a badly intentioned troll, lacking in some basic critical thinking skill, or simply willing to see far more Palestinians die for your ideals while you sit back in safety and watch it happen.

The claims of genocide are colored by propaganda and misinformation. Academic researchers are split on the issue, at best. The fact of the matter is that Israel could swiftly end all life in Gaza through overwhelming military force if that was their goal, and this has not happened.

I’d agree that Israel’s actions in Gaza are unethical but there is a stark difference between acting without regard for civilian casualties and outright ethnic cleansing. The evidence doesn’t seem to support the latter.

A good president would divest and sanction Israel

A good president would prioritize what’s best for America, which means preserving the favorable relationship America has with Israel. Meanwhile, a good president would provide humanitarian aid for Palestine and help negotiate for peace.

That’s exactly what Biden is doing and refusing to vote for him harms almost every party involved, including Palestine. Really, the only groups who would benefit are the far right and Russia… makes you wonder where comments like this come from, doesn’t it?

Biden isn’t “committing genocide” and saying he is amounts to simple propaganda.

The conservatives want to take aid away from Ukraine to deliver it to Israel. If Trump wins, far more weapons will be going to Israel than they are now. Repeating propaganda like this is not helpful for the Palestinian people.

Lastly, Israel is an important ally from a strategic perspective. Not only are they our closest ally in the Middle East, but they have a number of important resources like intel semiconductor facilities. Cutting ties with Israel would be bad for America, and the role of the US government is to put America first. It’s more complex than simply supporting one side or the other and Biden is attempting to balance aid for Palestine with preserving our relationship with Israel. That’s exactly what a good president should be doing.

Starship Troopers

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

Did you know they don’t eat garlic bread in Italy?

Ergo, “Italian Food” in America is better than food in Italy. They have to take us out as a matter of self defense

The US built the XF-85 goblin parasite fighter, which was supposed to be deployed using a robotic arm from the bomb bay of a B-36. The idea came from ww2 when we had escort fighters for most major bombing missions to keep the bombers safe.

It wasn’t practical to build a fighter with enough range to escort strategic bombers into the Soviet Union so they thought, “why not carry the fighter inside the bomber?”

Copying weapons is a completely different thing from an ethical and technical difficulty standpoint over reselling digital art.

I don’t think that is the case. A stratified fluid, in the absence of continued energy exchange with the outside environment, will eventually reach a homogenous temperature distribution due to diffusion.

That said, even if you are were correct, in the context of brewing tea we would only have a few minutes of brew time in which the stratification would have an impact on the extraction.

Search the literature for thermal stratification. There are many contexts where it is used outside of lakes and other large bodies of water, many of which do not consist of three distinct layers. Hell, the paper I cited SPECIFICALLY refers to the temperature gradient in the microwaved glass as “stratification”.

If you can’t understand the use of a term outside your specific area of expertise then thats honestly a you problem and that’s all I can say on that.

If the heating methods were as similar as you say, there wouldn’t be hundreds of publications accepted to various journals across the past two decades investigating the problem where microwaves produce a strong temperature gradient between the top and bottom of a body of liquid. It’s a well known process control problem.

That’s not really showing temperature stratification which is a more extreme separation of temperature from surface

I think the definition you are using is far too restrictive, in many contexts temperature stratification simply refers to a situation where you get temperature gradients across a fluid with the warmer fluid gathered near the top of the body. For example, in a factory you will often have “destratification” fans operating because warm air from equipment rising to the ceiling results in a temperature gradient from floor the ceiling.

It is not a phenomena exclusive to surface heating.

That’s just showing that the hottest atoms gather to the top, which btw, proves Convection currents.

Yes. My point was not to establish that convection is magically absent from fluids in microwaves, but to establish that it differs significantly from stovetop heating. Convection currents in stovetop heating create a strong stirring action that produces a substantially uniform temperature. Microwaves do not create the same stirring action and this produce a significant nonuniform temperature gradient.

The modified glass is just diverting the hotpots to the bottom to make the convection less “unusual”.

Clearly. They make the heating more akin to a stovetop, which is really the point here.

They aren’t claiming that convection doesn’t accrue, only that it’s “unusual convection” resulting in less even heating like that of thermal stratification, not literal thermal stratification where the layers have separate convection currents that prevent mixing all together.

Once again, you are using a definition of thermal stratification that is far too specific. However, arguing over it is really just being pedantic because the core point at issue here is whether or not heating a cup in a microwave or a stovetop produce the same final product. They do not unless you apply some mechanical agitation to mix it up.

I’m well aware of temperature stratification. It doesn’t happen in a microwave.

It empirically does. We can argue about the theory all day but the research says microwaves produce stratified temperature gradients when heating liquids. However, I’d point out that, in atmosphere, when we have localized hot spots the warm air can effectively travel in bubbles without significant mixing for quite some distance. There seems to be a similar phenomena at work when microwaving liquids.

See the screenshot below.

I pulled this from “Multiphysics analysis for unusual heat convection in microwave heating liquid” published in 2020 in AIP Advances.

Relevant excerpts:

“ Usually, the fluidity of liquids is considered to make the temperature field uniform, when it is heated, because of the heat convection, but there is something different when microwave heating. The temperature of the top is always the highest in the liquid when heated by microwaves.”

“ The experimental results show that when the modified glass cup with 7 cm metal coating is used to heat water in a microwave oven, the temperature difference between the upper and lower parts of the water is reduced from 7.8 °C to 0.5 °C.”

“According to the feedback from Midea (microwave appliance makers), when users use the microwave oven to heat liquids such as milk or water, the temperature at the top of the liquid will be significantly higher than the temperature at the bottom.”

I mean, it’s not really a matter of debate TBH. There are a number of peer reviewed journal articles documenting the temperature stratification. Here is one source, where the authors attempt to create a special cup to heat the water more evenly.

From a utility side perspective it’s true to say 240v is the standard we just wire our outlets to use one of the two hot wires instead of both of them.

Convection currents don’t stir water in a microwave because the heat source isn’t on the bottom. That’s the difference. You get temperature stratified water where the surface is hotter than the bottom of the cup and they don’t naturally mix.

Of course, here in America, we have this incredible technology called a spoon. Pull that bad boy out, give a little stir, problem solved.

Sure thing!

Honestly I wish we didn’t have to design manned spacecraft to be manually pilotable because you have to make design sacrifices to get there. However, that is unlikely to happen in the lunar program anytime soon