Skua

It’s because the Australian constitution requires a referendum to amend

To be fair I have absolutely woken up because my cat was asleep on my face and was making breathing difficult. Little dude just likes to cuddle up and get cosy. I have no idea if kids are actually ever accidentally suffocated by cats, but I can totally see how the concern would get started

You misunderstand. Assuming you’re buying 200 of product A or 750 of product A, you should expect the same proportion to be defective. Nobody’s suggesting two entirely separate products should have the same failure rate, but the question is also not about comparing two entirely separate products

Yes, it can, but my point was that it used to only mean multiple people and we don’t have any trouble using it to refer to just one

It’s the country codes for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Deutschland for the D, Confederation Helvetica for the CH). Those are the three countries with a majority of their people speaking German other than Liechtenstein, which is extremely small

Singular they goes back at least as far as Shakespeare. Also, “you” was originally a plural pronoun.

The Brave browser is based on Google’s Chromium. Presumably they thought you meant the browser and not the search engine

There’s gyro as in gyroscope, where the Y vowel sound is like the word “eye”, and there’s gyro as in the Greek sandwich where the Y vowel is more like the vowel sound in “sea”. The latter is often seen only as “gyros” because that’s what the actual Greek word is, but because that seems like a plural in English the S is sometimes dropped.

Especially when ISRO’s entire budget is less than half of one per cent of India’s federal government budget. Uttar Pradesh’s government budget alone is fifty times ISRO’s.

Congratulations India! I had never considered that the moon’s poles would be good for solar energy. My brain was stuck in the thinking of Earth’s poles, but of course the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to get in the way of the light and make the poles colder and darker

I’m just going to put the text and images here because the ads on that website are repulsive. They’re hotlinking all of the article images anyway.

A Central African lyre made from a human skull, antelope horns, skin, gut, and hair. 19th century CE

Some musical instrument origin myths reference human or animal remains and skulls and bones are sometimes used as decoration or as an instrument’s key component.

The oldest playable instruments are red-crowned crane-bone flutes from China’s Neolithic Age and in Tibet thigh-bone trumpets (rkangling) and skull drums (damaru) were used.

Skull lyres, thought to be from Ethiopia, are rare, scarcely documented and found only in museums. While some have suggested a symbolic or clandestine ritual use for these lyres, there is no known tradition. Most likely it is a sensational item made for the nineteenth-century European market.

Images one, two, three, and four

Getting crucified made hammering nails in to wood a bit of an uncomfortable process for him, so he needed a change of career away from carpentry. Maybe the reason a Middle Eastern guy gets depicted as blonde so often is that he practiced bleaching his own hair

Well kbin’s thumbnail was, uhh, a little misleading. NSFW.

With that many dice you’re as well to just take the average of dice. You’ve got roughly even odds of it being within 5 damage of the mean.

Then again you have a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002% of rolling 224 damage and maybe it’s your day

Inflation is complex, but are you really arguing the war is unrelated?

I’m arguing that the US is largely isolated from the economic effects of the war, and that this is evidenced by the lesser inflation spike in the US compared to Europe. America is barely exposed to the Russian and Ukrainian markets and is even a net exporter of some highly impacted commodities like natural gas.

That doesn’t undo the inflation that already happened! The sanctions are priced in.

Nobody said it undid anything. If what you said was right, though, then surely the rates would stay high given that the circumstances you claim are causing them haven’t changed? Since they haven’t, it seems unreasonable to pin the blame there with no further justification.

It is, but I just wanted to highlight the multifaceted ways the burning money pile in Ukraine is causing inflation.

I think that actually you just started with a conclusion you wanted to reach - that whatever America is doing is bad in all situations - and said whatever came to mind to get there. The war in Ukraine does drive some inflation, but the US is largely isolated from it, and this is further evidenced by the fact that American inflation was already high before the Russian military movements in late February 2022. I mean really, can you think of nothing else that happened in the past few years that might perhaps have reduced production and trade across the world, thereby increasing prices? Something that has, unlike the Russian invasion, become less of a problem in the past year?

I’m sure that choosing a 0.4% decrease in government spending over equipping millions of people to defend their homes from a militaristic empire is somehow a move for human rights in your eyes, though.

Is dedollarisation why inflation rates were similar across Europe over the past year? Have the sanctions ended without me noticing and that’s why the rates are now pretty much back down to normal in the US? And what happened to aid to Ukraine being the cause of inflation a moment ago?

Ukrainians sure as hell seem to feel otherwise. I’ll also note that you lumped in $28 billion of non-military financial and humanitarian aid from America as “throwing money into the war machine”, and America’s aid is proportionally more military than most countries. Eight million Ukrainian refugees displaced by the war are being housed across Europe, and that is counted in the assistance figures too. If you don’t think housing refugees counts as helping, then frankly go fuck yourself.

Where do you think inflation comes from?

It does not come from half a percent of the federal budget. The amount is simply nowhere near big enough. If all of the American spending on assistance to Ukraine was actual new money printed, it would increase the money supply in the US by a grand total of 0.35%. Hell even if the entire US military budget was new printed money it’d still only add 4%, and that’s a ludicrously unrealistic scenario

Depends on what the countries sending it can afford and what it would take for Russia to stop invading. That’s not the point I’m making. The point is that the none of the countries aiding Ukraine are currently spending anything anywhere close to enough of their budgets to significantly affect any other spending they do. If you’re unhappy with how your government directs the other 99.6% of its budget, yeah, I get that. I am at mine too. But helping Ukraine is not the problem there.

About 24 billion is non-military financial aid and 4 billion more is humanitarian, so that’s a big chunk not being spent on bombs. Slightly more than half of the remainder is the estimated value of old stock being sent over and therefore could not be “spent” on assistance for Americans anyway. The remaining 23 billion that is actually money spent on equipment and training is less than half of one percent of annual federal government expenditure. Weapons for Ukraine are not the reason money isn’t being spent on what you want it to be spent on.

A strict application of this definition makes Switzerland and Sweden third world countries throughout the Cold War, so it’s not really something you can use to describe modern usage of the term