How recently were you in Vegas? I was blown away by how little smoking there was post pandemic even compared to 2018. Like, most casinos no longer reek of cigarette smoke. I'm sure that's partly explained by better air circulation installed to reopen sooner post-COVID, and probably taking the closures as an opportunity to replace some seriously steeped carpet, but the amount of smoking was way, way down. It used to be if you saddled up to craps table, at least one, if not two people would be actively smoking. Now you can look around the entire pit and not even see one. The combination of anti-smoking measures in broader society, and the uptake of vaping has wildly reduced the amount of smokers. We're talking a 60% reduction since 2000, and that was after the trend was already heading that direction.
Compare that to most places internationally, and the contrast is stark. The US has less than half the cigarette consumption per capita than the EU, with only the U.K., Norway, and Sweden having lower rates. China has a similar rate to the EU.
Just to drive that point home a little harder, the state with the highest number of smokers is West Virginia, sitting at 21% (the national average is 9.6%). That would be middle of the pack in Europe, similar to Italy.
I was in Vegas in August for Def-Con and there was a ton of smoking. Our hotel’s casino/lobby was disgusting. The smokers area outside the convention was plenty busy. Walking to the monorail there were people outside most hotel back doors smoking.
Which reminds me: Also, the smoking area of every airport I’ve been to in the last 2 years has been thick with smokers.
I know it’s better than the 80s. I was there. But I don’t think it’s rare in the US at all.
Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.
If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".
It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".
Smart people know that "the law" has little to do with morality, and vastly more to do with power. When evil people are in power, they make evil laws, and when you have evil laws, it is immoral to follow them. Following the law is never moral in it's own right; Legality, even in the best of times, only strives to shadow morality.
I've never met someone who wouldn't prefer to change the law rather than be forced to violate them. But only cowards and the intellectually incapable think that supporting the enforcement of an unjust law while campaigning for it's fix is someone a morally superior stance.
And to answer why America? Because if we can't do it, nobody can. What kind of yellow-bellied, unpatriotic attitude can you have to think "oh, let's just let some better country solve the problems we've created in the world through prolonged geopolitical control over the 20th century". Fuck that. If America is great enough to conquer the world, it should be great enough to solve the side effects that come with it.
If you want to ignore legality, then you need to keep a rifle for every man, woman, and child in your home strong enough to shoulder one, and enough black-tips to ensure the cops bring a chaplain along for the raid.
The whole point of the double slit experiment is that you get the interference patterns you'd expect from double slits, even when there is no more than one photon in the chamber at a time. One photon enters, one photon hits the detector, it's probability distribution suggests it's being interfered with.
The one-two punch of the photoelectric effect and the double slit experiment (the classic first two labs of QM) force you to accept that photons behave both like waves, and like particles.
There is no interference pattern from a single photon as it hits the registration device at a particular place. But collect a big enough sequence of single photon measurements and it emerges.
This is the reason for statistical interpretation of QM that states that a wave function is just a way to calculate probability with no inherent meaning.
So wave-particle duality is just an artifact of Copenhagen interpretation of QM, not something that one can observe. What one clearly observes that photons travel through a region where they should not classically be and never appear in the region where they should be classically.
Note that even classically waves does not exist as they are just an artifact of motion of collection of molecules that on average can be described by wave-like equations.
> There is no interference pattern from a single photon as it hits the registration device at a particular place. But collect a big enough sequence of single photon measurements and it emerges.
The same could be said of the entirely unsurprising many-photon case. The individual photons aren't demonstrating the interference pattern, just the "big enough sequence of single photon measurements". Again, that's not the interesting part of the double slit experiment. We're perfectly used to the concept of a collection of many interacting particles having wave-like properties.
The double slit experiment has non-interacting photons demonstrating wave-like properties.
The experiment does not demonstrate wave-like properties. It can be interpreted that way, but purely from experimental properties one can also interpret the result that photon traveled by curved path which brings path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics when there is nothing wave-like but there are just probabilities of a particular path.
The photon travels a path, with a probability distribution that results in behavior that is identical to a wave, complete with interference. That's wave like.
Weak measurement experiments have shown that one can observe the whole path of a particle in a double-slit experiment and there is nothing wave-like in the results.
Specifically, non-violent protest works by demonstrating your ability to organize large groups of people in defiance of obstacles put in your way, very much including the law. It carries with it the implied threat that some non-trivial subset of that group would take up arms if asked.
Legal, peaceful protests really only demonstrate that your opinion has some level of popularity. Which can be useful for winning over the merely apathetic, but it does nothing against the outright opposed.
Sure, but the probability of getting "4" as opposed to some number that might as as well be equivalent to latter as far as a causal reader is concerned is insanely small.
I think pass two is intended to introduce additional regions of concavity (mostly by replacing straight lines), which in effect introduces a bunch of inflection points, helping creating the organic "spiny" feel, as opposed to a "bubbly" feel. Without it, the resulting caves look a bit more like if you spilled liquid on a waxy surface, and less like thorns.
If you go into the javascript and replace "for(let p=0;p<3;p++)" with "for(let p=1;p<3;p++)", and then re-execute the block in the console, you can generate run through a bunch of generations without step 2
If he's the GABA Labs guy, then I'm pretty sure the pitch was basically designer GHB. Which really is a fantastic substitute for alcohol. Very similar intoxication effects, with far fewer downsides. My buddy took that approach to still be able to enjoy social drinking despite gastrointestinal issues preventing the consumption of alcohol. No hangovers, either.
GHB gets a bad rep because it's extremely potent (imagine the same intoxication level as a shot of liquor from 1/3ml of GHB), so it gets used to drug people surreptitiously, and most people aren't good at controlling dosages of liquids like that. Sold pre-diluted, it really wouldn't be much different safety-wise than alcohol.
They did make peace with the US. It was a whole thing, papers were signed, agreements were made, they pinky-promised to not make nukes, everyone walked away happy. Except the Israelis, who don't like their regional power status being challenged, and apparently Trump, who... didn't like that the Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?
Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.
Yep. They "pinky-promised" and continued enriching Uranium to 60%, which is completely unnecessary for any civilian use of nuclear power. Not only has the IAEA openly called it out, but actual officials of the occupying Islamic regime in Iran have now pretty much admitted that they have always been going for nukes. [1] [2]
The only thing JCPOA did was funnel billions into their hands so they could continue oppressing their own population within their own borders, and destabilizing the entire region outside of them.
It is simply common sense for any country not America to build powerful nukes and defenses against America. America has a habit of randomly attacking countries for imaginary or greedy reasons.
> Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?
They never gave up. The plan was always to lie and get sanction relief from the West, in order to to sell oil and fund Islamist terrorism throughout the region and the world. It isn't only about the nukes. Fundamentally, this is about containment of a dangerous anti-Western ideology. Same thing in Cuba.
Because Israel isn't the one who, I don't know, has been in open declared war on the US for 47 years ago and has turned "death to America" into its official stated policy. The Islamic Republic is.
Your only defense of the astounding level of evil represented by the occupying regime in Iran is to keep frothing at the mouth about Israel? That shows quite a lot. Try again.
Iran hasn't killed innocent British cizitens and officers in terrorist attacks continually for years. Iran hasn't attacked America. Iranian citizens haven't been as a trend found spying on America and funneling documents to their country for years. Iran isn't randomly expanding into other sovereign countries lands. Iran is shit to its people but it doesn't start random wars into random countries for no reason. Israel does all of the above.
All I see there is either allegations, mischaracterizations, goalposts moving at supersonic speeds, and a wilful ignorance of what the Iranian regime has done re: killing Americans (Beirut 1983? TWA 1985? Dhahran 1996?) and civilians in other countries (Buenos Aires 1992 and 1994, everything Hezbollah has been doing in Lebanon and Syria, etc).
But from the rest of your messages here, it's clear that you despise the US as well, so there are natural ulterior motives to any arguments you make about other countries aligning with or against US interests. When you're hoping for someone to be damaged, then of course you'd try to manipulate them into mistaking enemies for friends and vice versa.
You love lying and putting words into my peoples mouth. I don't despise the USA. I like the USA's ideals, it has to held to the fire to remind itself of its ideals. The US military has after all killed millions of innocents for all its talk of supporting democracy and peace.
How is it not common sense to develop nukes and study American military weak points and develop defenses against American military if you are not America? Especially if you have oil. Either you live a free life and get bombed by America or you become an American slave if you failed to do your homework. American gets weird whims and tends to start bombing random countries whenever they smell oil or a government that wants to go independent. Its healthier for both America and that country that they be independent and not a vassal state or one kowtowing to random American demands.
I looked up Beirut, the so called neutral peacekeeping force was trying to create a theocratic/Christian military entity in Lebanon, in which case its natural to think they are liars and actually invaders pretending to be peacekeepers. The attack hit marines and military people which are all valid targets. Americans killed the entire leadership of Iran so it doesn't seem there is anything wrong in Iran hitting political agents in the embassy either.
Bombing places of worship is evil, you won't have me arguing that. Which is why I find it strange you are not complaining about Israel bombing various churches and Israeli soldiers desecrating Christian icons or Americans countless bombings and "collateral damages".
TWA 1985 isn't Iran, its a Lebanese terror attack. If you want to say Iran pulled the strings, then great, there are countless excellent reasons to target Americans given the endless barrage of proxy forces and bases they have all over the world.
The Dhahran case against seems to have targeted military personnel only which is perfectly valid given American actions in Iran such as the treasonous coup.
I hate Iran, I don't like Iran at all. Unfortunately the problem is Israel, and the actions of American military make Iran look marginally better than either.
Compare that to most places internationally, and the contrast is stark. The US has less than half the cigarette consumption per capita than the EU, with only the U.K., Norway, and Sweden having lower rates. China has a similar rate to the EU.
Just to drive that point home a little harder, the state with the highest number of smokers is West Virginia, sitting at 21% (the national average is 9.6%). That would be middle of the pack in Europe, similar to Italy.
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