Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.

There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.

The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.

I found this good review article based on a study commissioned by the Canadian government.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408444.2023.2295338

It seems like potential IQ effects are still difficult to distinguish as a dose response, so they weren’t able to come up with a point of departure. It doesn’t help that in a lot of studies comparing “high” and “low” fluoridation effects on IQ, the “low” is still higher than the WHO recommended level of 1.5 mg/L, and the US recommended level of 0.75.

I think the optimal level is likely going to vary by municipality based on the quality of dental care and the use of fluoridated toothpaste (that everyone overuses), and consumption of high fluoride beverages like tea. I guess my main takeaway is that people need to read their local water quality report, and do what they will with that information

Do not obey in advance. The only way fascists succeed is by people chosing to appease them.

The UK largely doesn’t fluoridate, so this is one of the (few) areas where the US actually does better than the UK. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country

The UK does generally have better tooth health in the grand scheme of things, but it’s actually pretty close, and the US is still really high on the list.

https://www.yongeeglintondental.com/blog/healthy-primary-teeth/

Without checking, I suspect the US’s slightly higher cavity rate is more down to sugar consumption than received dental care.

It basically says you can’t add anything to water except for “water quality additives” and has a fuzzy definitely of water quality additive.

403.859 Prohibited acts.—The following acts and the causing thereof are prohibited and are violations of this act: (8) The use of any additive in a public water system whichdoes not meet the definition of a water quality additive as defined in s. 403.852(19)

And then 403.852(19) has

“Water quality additive” means any chemical, additive, or substance that is used in a public water system for the purpose of: (a) Meeting or surpassing primary or secondary drinking water standards; (b) Preventing, reducing, or removing contaminants; or © Improving water quality.

Bold are the additions. The “primary and secondary drinking water standards” are legally defined terms where the EPA sets limits on maximum allowable amounts of stuff in water.

https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/how-epa-regulates-drinking-water-contaminants-documents

Personally, I would argue that fluoride is added to water for the purpose of “improving water quality” because water that protects people’s teeth is higher quality than water that doesn’t. If I were someone from a municipality whose job was ensuring water quality, I would read this as still allowing the addition of fluoride. If anyone doesn’t like that, let them try to prove in a court that fluoridated water is lower quality.

Reject bartering, embrace gift economy

I just do not know what to think about outfits like this. On the one hand, it’s hilarious that they are using the exact same compound that is released by fossil fuel companies, so any attempts to regulate its release will effect fossil fuel burners more than them. Some states have already banned the intentional release of anything designed for positive effects on the climate, though (i think Tennessee was the first).

On the other hand, the carbon credit economy is largely a sham and a fake fix for our woes, and only really serves to facilitate companies to wash their hands of environmental impacts. Solar geoengineering introduced to this system is destined for failure as well, I believe. We may need to resort to solar geoengineering to preserve what we can of our world, but it will have to be through international cooperation and study combined with reduction of carbon pollution, not by two dudes in a fly-by-night operation releasing balloons.

brings back a good degree of manufacturing

The idea that manufacturing ever “left” is propaganda. Union factory jobs have gone down, but the US is producing more than ever. They just want to dangle the carrot of good jobs over people who don’t realize those jobs have been automated.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-historical-chart

Married women would have a tougher time meeting proof-of-citizenship requirements if they took their husbands’ name

Yeah, that all definitely sounds reasonable to me. It’s just weird that if that’s the point the article was trying to make, they should have supported it a bit.

This article mentions that they are trying to disenfranchise people with the citizenship proof requirements, and it also mentions that they specifically want to disenfranchise women, but it doesn’t draw a connection between the two. In order for those to be connected, women would have to have more difficulty in producing that proof than men (which may be the case, but the article doesn’t show that).

To actually answer your question, though, at least from the conservative women I’ve talked to, they are fine with that. The conservative women I know are weak, and they essentially want to give up responsibility in exchange for freedoms. They actually want women to be second class citizens because it means that they don’t have to worry about anything (but they do have to just do what they are told).

There are old, conservative women who spent their lives as housewives who feel threatened by working women, so they want to maintain/go back to the status quo of women staying in the home (ignoring the fact that working class women have always worked). On the other hand, there are young, conservative women who do work, who yearn for the pretend vision of white, upper-middle class 1950s, where they get to just stay home and do what they want all day.

TL; DR: They essentially want to be like children, worry-free in exchange for less freedom.

P.s., there are definitely plenty of conservative women too stupid or unwilling to admit to themselves that the conservative position is women as second class citizens, but I wanted to respond with the perspective I’ve heard from people who seemed to be more honest.

The district as a whole voted republican, but the attendees are just whoever showed up to the town hall to air grievances, which sounds like it was not republicans.

I don’t think he himself is necessarily doing it as part of a strategy; i think it’s really the people around him. He’s basically a loose cannon with a bunch of idiots dancing around with matches trying to light the fuse while it’s pointed where they want to hit.

Plenty of federal facilities have garbage reception. I think it’s probably due to the bureaucracy involved in telecoms installing their hardware on sensitive property. The White House in particular probably has lots of thick walls/armor attenuating signals, too.

It’s not really confusing. His whole strategy, as we saw during his first term, is to do and say so much outrageous stuff that no particular scandal can stick with him. He also thinks being a bully is being a good businessman.

I doubt he would actually want to annex anywhere, but it’s easy ragebait that he can keep bringing up to keep news on that and off of his crimes.

If they are re-investing revenue, it’s not profit. I would want them to be able to expand, pay employees better, etc. What I wouldn’t want is for them to make money and just pay dividends to shareholders.

It’s like these people forget they have to breath the same air as us.

It’s quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don’t think it’s even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.

I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.

I haven’t read the exact statutes, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Some compounds, like phosphates and nitrates, are well studied, and so experts can put limits in place that they know will result in good outcomes. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of potential contaminates someone could dump into a body of water, so for anything less well studied, it’s really hard to make limits. The EPA apparently just set a backstop that said something along the lines of “whatever you put in the water has to still result in good water quality”.

Now that the Supreme Court has shut that down, a polluter can put anything in the water that isn’t specifically disallowed. For a (fake) example, maybe Forever Chemical x2357-A is shown to hurt wildlife at concentrations over 2 parts per billion (after lots of expensive, taxpayer funded research), so the EPA rules that they have to keep it below 2 ppb. The company could adjust their process so their waste is Forever Chemical x2357-B instead, and they can release as much as they want.

The EPA basically just gets forced to play whack-a-mole spending lots of money to come up with specific rules to the point that they can’t actually do their jobs.

Yeah, and it can be defeated with elementary school level math, so anyone in government who agreed to fund it should be brought back to school (though they are probably just more corrupt than stupid).

Everyone in the industry tries to focus on how fast a hyperloop can go, and tries to keep any criticism focused on the engineering challenges (and to be clear, there are many, many engineering and safety challenges).

It should never be discussed as “LA to the Bay in X minutes”, it needs to be discussed in terms of passengers per hour.

Given that these vehicles travel very fast, passengers will need to remain seated while the vehicle is in motion. Let’s pretend that the occupants of each vehicle are capable of leaving the vehicle with their luggage in under the FAA’s targeted evacuation time of 90 seconds (even though luggage makes it take like 10x that). That’s 40 loads per hour, and let’s be generous and say they fit 40 people, that’s 1600 people per hour.

That puts it on par with a lane of car traffic. Maybe you can squeeze some more people in there, or really crack a whip to get people out quick, but you won’t be able to get to a fraction of the passengers per hour of high speed rail at ~20,000.

When you actually do calculations with all the other factors, you get ~350 passengers per hour.