I did human intelligence. It was literally my job to interact with the people. And we did. And not just to hear what they say to our face, but to get sources and find out what people say behind our backs too. I can, with high confidence, say that close to 90% of the population wanted the taliban gone. It was the other 10% that were the issue. And they were the very loud minority that news stations loved to interview just to claim “accurately showing both sides”.

Under taliban rule Afghanistan was economically devastated and the second poorest country in the world. They had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. And they had no healthcare system to speak of other than what was gifted to them from Iran or Pakistan depending of what half of the country you were in. No to mention their lack of infrastructure with the not even completed one highway ring around the country.

That all changed under ISAF and the people noticed. And now their past is about to become their future.

Lol. I did two tours over there. The people loved us. They loved the government. They loved the schools for women. The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy. They figured “ISAF was always going to be here, so why need to fight for ourselves? And is ISAF isn’t here anymore, then we can’t support our selves, so why try?” As far as the schools go, they are voluntary. There are no truancy laws. They don’t even take attendance at most of the schools. It was completely up to the family if they wanted to send their boys OR their girls. Under pre-ISAF taliban the literacy rate was about 15% and at the time of withdrawal it was almost 40%. The people wanted to go to school, the taliban just didn’t let most of them or the schools that they did keep open were so severely limited in what they could teach.

The biggest red flag of this post, to me, is the use of the word Afghani. Any time someone says it with an ‘i’ at the end, you know they don’t know what they are talking about. Afghani is a currency, Afghan is a person.

Look up TASS news. That is all.

To be fair, gas stoves put out a lot of benzene and are known to increase cancer rates in those who live in homes with natural gas stoves. If anything they should be taxed to pay into cancer healthcare costs.

Increases in other contracts that funnel tax money into oligarc pockets but provide no value to tax payers, decrease in revenue collected to offset expenses due to IRS cuts and tax code changes, and the other big one is from judicial fund settlements that have already surpassed pre trump levels.

I would also encourage people to go to midnight showings of Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’ and watch as people throw handfuls of plastic spoons at the screen. Also fun.

I have a bunch of coworkers who were contractors in a position for about a decade, then transitioned over to GS employees doing the same job. They were classified as probationary due to being “new” to their positions and were put on notice.

You were so right, let me tell you about it. If you can’t stop the entire genocide, then don’t stop it at all. If you can’t stop all of climate change, then don’t take any steps to stop any of it. If you can’t end poverty or income inequality then you shouldn’t even help the starving.

What a cunt.

Also up vote because obviously the only correct answer. It was based on golden source material. Therefore could not fail.

You would be surprised. If you worked a decent job early in life, moved up the ladder, retired as upper middle class making $250k-ish, it is kind of expected to have about 2-3 mil in your retirement. Hell, if you work a half way decent government job and invested wisely your entire life and didn’t have stupid amounts of debt, you should have about a mil in retirement.

1 mil in retirement gives you about 5,500 per month at a growth rate of 6%, withdraw rate of 3%, and annual inflation at 3%. The current recommended retirement is a little under a mil.

As far as retirement funds counting as tradable assets, that is how your 401k accounts work. It is literally a stock market account. The question comes down to when the tax is paid, pre or post withdrawal. In a roth IRA you pay the tax coming in. In a traditional IRA you pay tax when the money comes out. Either way, as long as the money stays in the account you can make it liquid, put it in a stock, bond, mutual fund, whatever you want as long as the account can do it; but in the end it is in a trading account and short of the cash in there, it is a tradable asset.

Biggest argument people are going to have against this is reading the headline and then realizing most their retirement is in the form of unrealized gains. But if you then just read the qualifier of $100 million, you will quickly realize we are not talking about normal people here. We aren’t even talking about normal rich people. We are talking about the 1% of 1% people.

I never felt so more attacked, but also related to at the same time.

The pyramids are made of granite. It has a density/weight of approximately 165 lb/cubic ft. As in, a 1x1x1 block weighs about 165 lbs. This block, assuming the standard person in this picture is about 5 ft (people have been getting taller over time) this block is maybe 20 ft cubed. Just an eyeball guess. That would put it at about 1,320,000 lbs.

The picture has 6 people deep carrying the first stone with what looks like maybe 4 people across? Hard to tell. But going off 6x4 people, that would mean that each person would have to carry 55,000 lbs each.

Would it be possible? I will let you guess from that. Next question, how many eggs to support it? After some google searches the textbook theoretical best an egg can support is some 300 lbs, but in practice is closer to 120-130 with support/positioning in place (think egg cartons holding them vs just on the ground). This would mean our 1,320,000 lb stone would take between 10,000 to 11,000 eggs to support it.

How long would it take to get that many eggs??? Good question. Chicken normally lay about an egg a day. So 10,000 chicken take 1 day, or 1 chicken would take about 10,000 days. But what is a realistic amount? Well, let me tell you. In the rabbit hole I found myself in of jokingly replying to this, I found an entire dissertation on “THE EXPLOITATION OF LIVE AVIAN RESOURCES IN PHARAONIC EGYPT: A SOCIO-ECONOMIC STUDY” BY ROZENN F. BAILLEUL-LESUER (JUNE 2016)

Captivating. Would recommend rabbiting down that hole. And on page 299 we can see that a Pharoah size flock would be about 2,000 Eurasia cranes or geese. So it would take us about a week to put that block in the picture on a bunch of eggs.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Shitty paywall. Even through 12ft.io

But about the content- he isn’t wrong, but people also need to know there is a bit of self interest in there too. France has a huge military industrial complex (outside of the massive one the US has) and is one of Europe’s biggest domestic military suppliers.

Evey time I hear about the evil big pharma funding all the studies out there to influence them in they favor, I immediately ask, “where is this funding and how can I get it?”

Because let’s be honest, unless the leg work is already done, they aren’t funding shit.

On the flip side of that, I did do a study for 3M and their hearing protection devices (I am an audiology/PhD student) and the funding was great. There were also basically no strings attached other than “use this product, study workplace noise, be able to publish it”.

Turkey 🇹🇷.

/s

I have learned that stats for research is a dark box that you put numbers into, shake it up, and then record the numbers that come out. I use SPSS, my advisor uses SigmaPlot, and another PhD student in my lab uses R. Sometimes I’m not even sure if we are getting the same numbers out of the shaken black box and I am too afraid to ask…

ANOVA? Sure, it is those clicks in that menu. ANCOVA? MANOVA? sure, there is some thing I check off or some other spot I click on. What do they do? The computer prays to the number gods with a different accent, then I shake the ritual box and read the numbers that come out.