TheChurn

American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.

Sun Tzu isn’t in that story, it is a tale about Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi from the Three Kingdoms period.

enough men exhibit predatory behaviour to the extent that a decently large percentage of women fear the average man more than the average bear.

Women should fear the average man far more than the average bear because they will almost certainly never encounter the average bear, but will encounter thousands of men.

That said, the entire argument belies a deep misunderstanding of statistics. Many women, perhaps most women, have experienced trauma at the hands of men. Many men, perhaps most men, have not been perpetrators of that trauma. There is not a 1-1 relationship between victimized women and guilty men - there is a minority of men who negatively affect many women.

The entire thing has become flamebait and it is impossible to have an actual discussion about it. The point is to start a conversation about how women feel unsafe in society - not to talk about bear attacks and incels.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/support/account/age-verification-faq/

In the UK, you have the choice between giving them a picture of your ID or doing a facial scan to complete the age verification requirement.

Lolz just give them a fake email…

Again, it doesn’t matter whether you find the argument about compelling.

If care cannot be provided profitably, it won’t be provided at all. That is reality. Somehow, the care must be paid for.

Those who need care are not better off if these facilities close.

The businesses are hardly profitable. For every dollar they get from housing a resident, they get just above half a penny of profit.

As I showed above, you can take the entire profit and put it into hiring more staff and it won’t actually make a difference. They either need to raise prices, cut costs elsewhere (maybe administration? I’m not familiar enough to know), or pay people less.

That’s what the numbers say.

We get it, you don’t like nursing homes.

You don’t seem to be engaging with the substance of the matter, so I’ll leave it here.

And that is a valid opinion. Unfortunately what do you do with all these people if the homes close because they can’t afford staff?

The intent of the bill is to prevent neglect in nursing homes - that is a worthy and important goal. The mandate doesn’t actually help make that happen.

It doesn’t provide funding the care providers to increase staff, it doesn’t add incentives for individuals to get certified and help address the personnel shortage, it doesn’t put a cap on administrative costs for care facilities, it doesn’t actually DO anything to help solve the problem.

Good mandates also provide an avenue to meet them.

That is an insanely small margin, and directly contradicts your claim that they can staff properly.

Let’s take the entire profit for the industry and hire nurses. Let’s say reach nurse costs $80K ( $60K salary, $20K for taxes/insurance/other benefits).

That pays for 9600 more nurses. Which, given the nursing requirements in the bill (3.48 hours per day per resident), only covers staffing for 22K residents… a rounding error to the more than 1.2 million nursing home residents in the country.

There are ~15K nursing homes in the US, each of them getting 0.6 more nurses doesn’t help anything.

The $94/hr isn’t a salary, it’s the cost to the business. Employees generally cost a business 1.3-1.5X their salary - since insurance, payroll taxes, PTO, etc. all also need to be paid for.

Again this is not considering any other cost for the facility: utilities, food, other staff, medical equipment, maintenance, insurance, rent…

3.5 hours of nurse care per resident per day (from the bill).

Resident pays $120K per year to stay at the facility.

There are 365*3.5 hours in a year they need nursing care = 1277 hours of nursing care per year per client.

$120K per year / 1277 hours per year = $94/ hr maximum cost for each nurse - assuming there are no other expenses for the facility.

Must have mistyped to get $95, but that is the math.

$120K per year per resident isn’t that much revenue to cover 24 hour availability of care, food, lease, etc.

I’m not saying it is unworkable, but with the requirement for 3.5 hours of nurse care or resident per day, that means the maximum total cost of a Nurse is $95 per hour, or about $190K.

That really isn’t much - typically employees cost a business twice their base salary. So the nurses can be paid $100K per year while leaving almost $0 for any other expenses…

While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn’t as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.

The law doesn’t matter, it doesn’t enforce itself.

The judges wanted it lowered for reasons, and so they lowered it.

The entire system is a lot more about people than most want to admit. The magic words on a page somewhere only exist to serve those in power, never to force them to do something they don’t want to do.

Windshields have been laminated for decades. Side windows were tempered glass for decades, and since 2020 are mandated to be laminated glass.

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

The short answer is it depends.

The long answer is that treaties and international law are pretty window dressing around the utterly anarchic reality of geopolitics. If states saw it as in their best interest to allow Poland to fall to Russia, they would allow it regardless of whatever treaties they previously signed.

Article 5 provides that the alliance must support a member after an armed attack against them on their territory in Europe or North America. In plain reading, this would apply should Russia attack Polish soil regardless of who started the war. In reality, it really depends.

No one (in the west) wants a ‘real’ war. War is a distraction from making money. If Poland expanded the war by joining in, I doubt they would receive the full support of the alliance.

Romney was wrong then and he is wrong now.

The greatest threat is and was China. Russia does not have the means to directly compete with the United States.

With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

To make a crude concrete example:

Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.