Optometrists believe that the reason for this is that we’re tending to be inside more than we used to be, rather than going outside as much, so our eyes basically aren’t getting as much exercise in looking at stuff far away.
You mean to tell me, that in this day and age, with half a zillion cars out on the road damn near every day, that people don’t go outside as much as they used to? Let alone have to look half a mile down the road to find the exit sign on the highway?..
Oh, I’ve got myopia, like -5 vision, and yes I was born with it. That’s why I ain’t buying that whole ‘we don’t go outside as much’ theory for even a second.
I grew up on a 40 acre horse ranch and had to walk about a quarter mile to even catch the school bus, yet couldn’t see a pile of horse shit until I accidentally stepped in it.
So still, I ain’t buying that whole ‘spending more time indoors causes myopia’ thing, I was literally born with it.
Yes, you’re right. I can’t see my own fingerprints (without my glasses), past about 1 foot (~30.5 centimeters) in front of my face.
I didn’t even get glasses until I was 8 years old, which basically meant I was running around legally blind until the age of 8, when they finally stopped punishing me for not being able to see shit and actually took me to an optometrist.
There’s a difference between seeing your dick versus seeing your pubic hairs clearly. Whether you take my word on it or not, my member is of a decent size, I just can’t see the hairs without my glasses or contact lenses.
Did everyone miss my point? I didn’t grow up stuck inside so often, I spent a LOT of time outdoors. Hell, the first book I ever read was a survival manual.
I even learned to drive a stick shift at age 7, before I even got glasses. So I still stand by the opinion that indoor vs outdoor environment makes fuckall nothing to do with nearsightedness.
You’re either born with it or you aren’t. It’s all about the shape of the eye.
I mean, I don’t know how much simpler I can make it. You can be born without a hand or lose it in an accident, same as you, you can be born with bad eyesight or develop it because of external factors, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t mitigate the external factors.
Again, did you miss my point? Apparently so, I grew up outdoors. I learned to drive a stick shift and learned how to shoot a gun before I even had glasses.
That doesn’t mean it was appropriate the ways they taught me, but still I was an outdoors kid, I wasn’t stuck in a fucking room…
Do you even know what causes myopia at birth? The eyes aren’t properly spherical, they’re elongated. This doesn’t tend to change all that much over one’s lifetime either.
You aren’t born with adult sized eyes. Your eyes grow as you grow, and their growth appears to be regulated by how they’re used. It’s covered in the article, maybe read it?
No shit Watson. It’s still all about the shape and proportions of the eye, not the size. Anyone with myopia can literally push their eyes in gently via the eyelids and see a bit better.
Your eyes don’t get longer from being indoors, you’re either born with longer than normal eyes or you aren’t. Some are even born with shorter eyes, called hyperopia (also better known as farsightedness).
And yes, I also have 42 years of actual real life experience with myopia. What the fuck a scientist gonna tell you if they haven’t literally lived and experienced bad nearsighted eyes?
Would you like some more actual life experience? I became more nearsighted over time as my eyes developed. Rather than concluding that it’s impossible for you to have it at birth (which is what I could reasonably conclude using a sample of me alone), I recognize that there are multiple possible ways for someone to become nearsighted. And scientists are finding that people who spend more time looking at screens are more likely to develop myopia after birth
Maynarkh said that Cuba has been under US sanctions, and also that US sanctions started the Japan-US conflict during WWII. Gravitas has misinterpreted it, intentionally or not, for it to mean that US sanctions on Cuba started the Japan-US war.
The person said Cuba being under US sanctions is what caused the Pacific side of WWII. What they were TRYING to say is that Cuba has been under sanctions, and that OTHER, unrelated sanctions were the cause of the Pacific side of WWII; but they used indefinite pronouns and therefor had a confusing sentence.
The joke is about the unintended interpretation of the sentence.
Mmm… sort of, but that telling of the situation also skips over a ton of context.
US sanctions against Imperial Japan were the proximate casus belli for the IJN attack Pearl Harbor and causing the US to actually join the war, but the sanctions were absolutely precipitated by other things Japan was doing in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. The trade sanctions were enacted in more or less direct response to Imperial Japanese military adventurism and rather flagrant violations of the Washington Naval Treaty (though it is definitely fair to say that the force limitations imposed by the treaty were somewhat onerous and biased towards established powers, if considered in a geopolitical vacuum).
Not one downvoter has explained how you can have privately and corporate-owned luxury resorts in a non-capitalist country. Can’t imagine why.
Oooh I love this false dichotomy because if every government that allows for any form of corporate owned private property to exist is capitalist then we can ascribe basically all evil to capitalism. Heck even the USSR was capitalist by your logic. Capitalists did the holodomor.
That is in no way the same. Have you even read Capital or the Communist Manifesto?
Getting pissed off at me that private ownership and profit are not things that belong in communism is silly. Based on that argument, the U.S. isn’t a socialist country, it’s a communist one.
I’m a different person. I’m not pissed, I’m just making casual conversation.
Communism and capitalism as they were described in the literature both died in 93 and 08 respectively.
Just like the current capitalist system in the US cannot function without massive subsidies and bailouts, I’d imagine the current communist systems require private enterprises to keep parts of their system functioning.
Every mode of production contains elements of its former, according to Marx, exactly because we have to understand human development and our current paradigm through historical materialism.
To say that a communist nation cannot contain capitalist components as its non fundamental mode of production is as stupid as saying Britain is not capitalist because they have a king.
That is not in any way the same. Either there are hierarchies of power and the people at the top get rich and corporations make profits or it’s a communist country. You can’t have it both ways no matter how much you want to take the concept of communality from communism.
You need to be able to distinguish between a country’s primary mode of production versus the scope of its total. A “perfect” capitalist or communist one will likely never exist, at least not any time soon. You cannot ignore the aspects of the basis on which development happens.
And yet there were plenty of other communist countries in the 20th century that did not have any corporations making profits. Why is Cuba special in this regard?
Well I sure as hell know that corporations and profit don’t belong with whatever definition of communism you seem to be suggestion.
The very idea that allowing corporate profits are still communist as long as it’s not the primary mode of production is nonsense. If every single thing in Cuba was privatized apart from its tobacco industry, its largest export, would you say it was still a communist country?
I’m also curious how you’ll defend Cuba’s three largest exports being addictive, carcinogenic substances. And yes, to pre-empt the whataboutism, I know the U.S. exports a whole lot of toxic shit, but we’re not talking about the U.S.
I never said anything about Cuba specifically. I made a general remark that an analysis of whether a country is socialist or not has to concern itself with what is the primary mode of production. I also wanted to bring in historical materialism because you seemed to talk about Marx without (seemingly) understanding this very important part of his contributions.
To be clear, my position was, and still is, that I find your analysis faulty, regardless of what I think would be the right conclusion on Cuba being communist.
Pretty easily, actually. Socialist states don’t exist in a vacuum, they need money for trade and resources like every one else. This reality is why all actual socialist ideologies are globalist in ambition btw. It doesn’t do your socialized industry any good if you have to buy your materials from a slave mine.
Ideology alone won’t buy Cuba medicine, or industrial tools. The fact is that the hemisphere they’re in is dominated by America and capitalism is something you either work around or starve under.
It’d be nice if Cuba could have afforded to build the resorts as worker co-ops or whatever but it’s an economic miracle that they exist as a nation at all with the eternal enmity of America trying to choke them to death for seventy years.
Only a delusional purist won’t acknowledge that it takes money and resources to build things, and all the foreign investors want a, you know, investment. Socialism is almost always considered a goal to transition to, and not an absolute requirement to be enacted day one.
Unless you want to live on an anarcho-primitavist farm somewhere anyways, and, honestly, they’re the ones most likely to survive this coming collapse so I guess they’ll either get the last laugh or die to the raiders like everyone else.
And yet private industry which enriched corporations was not a feature of communist countries in the 20th century. They didn’t need to enrich individuals and create profit for private businesses.
Those aren’t nationalized resort hotels. Nationalized resort hotels could make lots of money from tourists too.
I tend to agree, but there’s a pretty large difference in the resources available to China, Russia, and even Vietnam and North Korea and those available to the island nation of Cuba.
I don’t like it, but I also don’t like dictatorships, so they’re going to do what they’re going to do. It’s not there isn’t plenty of socialist theory that revolves around the idea of transitionary states and regulated liberalization.
They need to trade with people for money and food. If their closest neighbor let them trade, I guarantee Cuba would be saying the opposite to stay on the good side of them. But since they can’t, and Russia was iced out of the world economy pretty much, of course they’d extend a hand to Cuba, which is similarly iced out. And of course they’d accept for the good of their people. Who knows if they actually care how that war goes, they’re just a tiny island nation that wants to be able to eat and survive. We can’t blame them for making decisions under this kind of duress.
Even your own article shows how bad faith that argument is, but it’s from the US so it makes sense. The US media loves their propaganda. It points out that US laws makes it impossible for a ship to dock at the US for 180 days after docking at Cuba. They regularly fine and sanction foreign countries and foreign companies when dealing with Cubans. A ton of banks have stopped dealing with Cuba because of this. They also prevent US used goods from being traded to Cuba when it is a part of a bigger thing, so if any part of a foreign made product has something from the US, it can’t be traded over. This ends up including tons of medical equipment, farming equipment, scientific equipment, etc. There’s a bunch of other laws, too. Family members can’t even wire over remittances any more without paying tons of money.
Of course they can’t force other companies but they make it nearly impossible for companies to trade with the US and Cuba if they want to make a profit. Especially considering the power of the dollar in the US market. That’s what makes it a blockade. Saying a bunch of these facts while giving a “false” is extremely bad faith. It’s like saying Trump didn’t cause January 6th because he didn’t tell people directly to riot. It’s a very surface reading.
The Cuban government of course isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t detract from the power the US has on them. Plus, when the Republicans went to protest on January 6th it was against their own government, but that doesn’t mean they had a point. Most of the protests were from power failures, long food and medicine lines, and Covid lock downs, which is partly the government’s fault and partly the US’s for making them a poor country and restricting their ability to get medicine and make food through the sanctions I mentioned above. And partly just Covid’s fault, every country dealt with that. But the President went out and talked with them, and the country ended up making some economic reforms recently. That’s more than I’ve seen the US ever do in response to protests lol. If we really want to know if the Cuban government is so terrible, you should support the US lifting the embargo so the government can ruin itself. It obviously hasn’t destroyed the government over the last 60 years anyway.
By the same logic the entire planet should’ve already sanctioned and embargoed Israel and the US for doing the exact same thing as Russia but I don’t see that happening.
Cuba is saying these things because Russia is one of the few countries still willing to trade with them. They’ve been hit by crippling sanctions for decades for doing nothing wrong and they’re trying to find ways to survive. End the embargo and you’ll see that change quite quickly.
In the study, Professor Henneberg and colleagues aimed to investigate the prevalence of persistent median arteries in postnatal humans over the last 250 years and to test the hypothesis that a secular trend of increase in its prevalence has occurred.
I was reading over the paper and found the source of that particular usage:
Furthermore, in a study by Henneberg and George (1995; Am J Phys Anthropol 96, 329–334), has suggested that increasing prevalence of the median artery during the 20th century was a ‘possible secular trend’.
LOL. I kinda want to follow that citation for the full quote.
Edit: I found the original source that gives some further context:
The occurrence in historical times of changes in human body size and in the timing of events in postnatal development, such as, for instance, sexual maturation, is well known and documented. Such changes occurring from century to century or decade to decade are known as “secular trends.”
You won’t see evolutionary changes in only 2 generations. That’s not how evolution works. Also you’re assuming because more humans are born with x thing, it’s an evolutionary change. Again that’s not how evolution works.
Did you read the paper from my 2nd link? There seems to be a growing body of evidence that suggests that is indeed possible:
Similar to the increase in the prevalence of persistent median arteries of the forearms, the prevalence of other anatomical features such as spina bifida occulta (Henneberg & Henneberg 1999; Solomon et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2010), tarsal coalitions (Solomon et al., 2003) and fabella (Berthaume et al., 2019) has increased over the last 2–3 centuries. Evidence indicates that changes in the natural selection pressures acting on these specific anatomical features could have caused microevolutionary processes, leading to the observed increases in prevalence rates (Henneberg and Henneberg 1999; Solomon et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2010; Rühli and Henneberg, 2013; Berthaume et al., 2019).
Obviously actual research would have to be done to confirm or deny it in this case, and I probably should have stated my original thought a bit more skeptically.
People with worse vision still have a higher chance to die due to poor vision related deaths, (for example not seeing a car coming) than people with perfect eyesight. Not everyone with bad eyesight wears glasses.
Sounds like that covid bullshit. The reason more people have it is because there have been incredible advances in technology and it’s easier to diagnose as well as more people going to get tested thanks to education.
I don’t think that strategy for testing is purely a Chinese thing. When my kids were little and before they could read, they did eye tests with those same characters. And I’m in America.
As a mexican living in Mexico, the struggle is real. What is not real is the OP in bold letters. The so called “specialists” are usually a bunch of so-called activists campaigning in the election against the party in power.
There’s also the magnitude of the election not being accounted for. These elections are the biggest in history. It’s only logical that, assuming the high homicide rate in the country, the absolute numbers will be higher. It really sounds like another article trying to tie our president with the organized crime, something that has been shyly thrown at the average citizen several times now. If there was any evidence of this “blurry” line between government and cartels, the opposition to the President and his party would have already use it, since there’s only one month left for campaigning. Instead, we have a paid bot campaign in X/Twitter, a millionaire one, financed by who knows whose money, trying to portray the president as a cartel boss or something. A failing campaign, if we look at the numbers.
I don’t know enough about the situation to make an informed opinion, but let’s make a hypothetical:
A government regime cannot be complicit in crimes because if they were then an investigation would have found them complicit in crimes?
That sounds insane. That sounds like a crazy person’s opinion. These deaths and kidnappings aren’t natural. Who stands to benefit from all of this? The answer from where I’m standing seems pretty clear.
It’s late so don’t mind me, but I didn’t get your point. They’re killing candidates from all factions, all parties. Perhaps different people are killing independently for different reasons. Mega corporations killing the candidates that want regulations on their use of water, deforestation, etc. Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and others are devastating the lands and I’m sure they’re profiting nicely from that and don’t want to stop. Organized crime. Corrupt politicians. It’s not simple (or clear) to me, why do you say it is?
Again, you’re claiming that these killings are spontaneous and only coincidentally helps the incumbents or the party leadership positions maintain authority. That doesn’t track. This isn’t normal. This doesn’t happen in other places of the world. For this to not somehow be organized or orchestrated would be completely illogical, because then it would be occurring elsewhere as well.
you’re claiming that these killings are spontaneous and only coincidentally helps the incumbents or the party leadership positions maintain authority.
I don’t believe it benefits the party that today is dominant, not only because they are getting killed too but also because they are being accused of making Mexico violent and it is super important for them to prove that things are getting better.
This is not the same as saying that the killings are spontaneous, on the contrary, it is an unstable game of power grabbing because of very special circumstances in Mexico that allow this uncertainty of who is getting what in 2024. This in itself lets us see that there are powerful groups fighting and not a tyranny from the current government nor them only silencing opponents.
This isn’t normal. This doesn’t happen in other places of the world.
I don’t know about normal; it isn’t desirable, but perhaps it was to be expected. Why Mexico and not other countries? I think this is an oversimplification.
First, it does happen in other countries, but differently. Some have coup d’États, revolutions, extremist terrorism, etc. Of course if you compare Mexico to Germany, Germans are playing chess under the table. Compare Mexico to Arab countries, African countries, and even violent Latin American countries. Violence exists in many other places. Yet, secondly, you can only see similarities when comparing social circumstances, never mirrors. You won’t find another Mexico in its details because no other country has Mexico’s history. I repeat: it does happen in other countries, but differently. And that’s why what you said was too simple.
For this to not somehow be organized or orchestrated would be completely illogical, because then it would be occurring elsewhere as well.
Following the last part, no, this can perfectly be complex. ‘Heterogenous’ is the word that is coming to my mind.
To me, it’s more illogical to believe a single force is orchestrating this violence (which, again, is getting people from different groups killed) than to believe it is power grabbing from many sources. The first option even sounds a little conspiracy-theorish or paranoid, if I’m being frank.
I agree on your comment about the current situation. It is very violent. Either it’s getting more reporting than previous years or it actually is as bad as it seems. But I might be misunderstanding the tone of your comment here, it reads very apologetic of the current government to me:
It really sounds like another article trying to tie our president with the organized crime, something that has been shyly thrown at the average citizen several times now.
Maybe because it’s true? As another mexican, I have absolutely no doubt the government is working with cartels in different regions in exchange of more control, both ways. And I’m not saying it happened just in this administration, it’s been happening for at least 20 years.
My take is that some regions where the government wants bigger control are currently controlled by rival cartels where the government currently has bigger control in.
I also find it a bit cynical so write that this fact is being “shyly thrown around”, why are there so many articles about it then? The current president –the face of the government– had been seen multiple times visiting el Chapo’s mom. Very shy of him.
The articles are based on no evidence whatsoever. They cite each other and ultimately cite a dropped DEA investigation from 2006.
I find stupid to call the president a cartel asset, yes, I guess that’s cynical. And I’m cynical because everyone knows the president visits every locality of the country. He won’t skip that place only because a cartel leader grew up there. He didn’t go there to visit the old lady, he did visit the locality. As I said before, that woman is already dead, her son and one of her grandsons are in prison. It’s okay if you take it as proof, that’s you, just don’t try to make it pass as undeniable evidence of the president working for some cartel.
Again, it’s not only the current administration, it’s been happening for decades already. They’re not (all) working for the cartels, but with them. If AMLO (initials of the current prez, for anyone reading) is an asset or not is in anyones judgement, I find it more of a “teamwork kinda thing, but what I find most appalling is his shamelesness of this interaction, hell, he even doubled down on it in one of his morning speeches after media called him out on it.
It’s a fact that local governments are more vulnerable to be corrupted by cartels. It’s been a fact for decades, as we know. We also know now that ex-president Calderon’s federal government was colluded with the Sinaloa Cartel, but we were talking about the president in charge. Maybe his shamelessness comes from the fact that he didn’t do anything wrong and she was not accused of doing anything illegal? After everything you may think you know about her, she was also an old lady probably worried about her son.
Oh, it is a fact that governments are more vulnerable to corruption as there is a power imbalance. Municipal administrations are the more obvious victims of corruption, but some rich powerful municipalities can combat corruption and drug cartels. You can add some other legally condemned names at state-level and the most egregious case of Genaro Garcia Luna. But the case on point was AMLO. I don’t think it’s a problem to talk about a public act if journalists question him, I share his “shamelessness” since he is not hiding and she was not accused of anything, not even publicly accused. She was, as far as we know, the old mother of a drug lord, worried about her son, probably because she wouldn’t see him before her death.
I have absolutely no doubt the government is working with cartels in different regions in exchange of more control
Which government?
PAN controls 20 of the 32 state governments of Mexico and is in deep with the cartel-infested national military.
The current president –the face of the government– had been seen multiple times visiting el Chapo’s mom.
You really need to check your sources. El Pais was taken over by vulture capitalist Joseph Oughourlian nearly a decade ago and has gone the same direction as the WSJ and WaPo after they got bought out by plutocrats.
I’m saying it’s false that they did have dinner. At least, it’s as false as it’s true. I’m not saying that, because she is dead now, then they couldn’t have had dinner while she was alive. In any case, to make such a bold accusation you sure can post some sound evidence. But you can’t, because there is no evidence of that.
I could not find the information about the dinner thing, I could be mistaken about that but this shows he has relations to her/his family. www.bbc.com/…/noticias-america-latina-52100264
Mas alla de que sea cierto lo que decis, me sigue pareciendo una locura pensar en que rapten o asesinen candidatos por una eleccion. Hay alguna tendencia entre las victimas? Son de algun partido en particular?
Sí es una locura. Son cosas que no deberían pasar. En 1994, incluso asesinaron a un candidato presidencial. Siempre se ha asumido que la motivación fue política en ese caso, pero nunca fue realmente resuelto, todo mundo aquí cree que se usó un chivo expiatorio y nadie piensa que el mismo individuo fue autor intelectual.
Pero no es el único caso, en el pasado también se ha asesinado a candidatos, claros favoritos a ser gobernadores de un estado. Los más vulnerables son los candidatos a presidir municipios y existen mecanismos para su protección que a veces no se aplican con suficiente rapidez o fuerza. Las víctimas son de todo el espectro político, a los carteles no les importa la ideología, sólo el poder. Los estados más afectados también son de todo el espectro político, por ahora.
En cuanto a la violencia en general, creo que la gente de fuera de México, que no está tan influida por los medios de comunicación locales y con suficiente educación para leer gráficas, encontrará interesante este estudio de INEGI, que aunque no contiene los datos más recientes, sí son los más precisos sobre homicidios dolosos.
EDIT: Este mes de abril ha sido particularmente violento en México. No teníamos un mes tan violento desde 2022 y espero que no sea el mes que inicie una tendencia al alza de homicidios dolosos.
Es una barbaridad y algo que no debería pasar. No, no existe una tendencia en ese sentido, hay víctimas en todo el espectro político y en estados gobernados por partidos de todas las ideologías. Si lo que te esperas es que el partido en el gobierno tenga menos víctimas por sus supuestos vínculos con el narcotráfico, es completamente al revés: es el partido que hasta hace un par de semanas tenia mas víctimas. También es algo dirigido, pues la tasa de estos homicidios es mucho mayor a la nacional. Existen mecanismos de protección para los candidatos que a veces se activan torpemente o no se activan en absoluto a pesar de ser pedidos, asumo que sí hay casos en los que funcionan esos mecanismos de protección. Casi todas las víctimas son del nivel municipal, que es más vulnerable a la corrupción de los carteles por asimetría de poder.
Lithium batteries are old news and this market is going to crash. China is already selling two EVs using sodium ion batteries. It’s only a matter of time before such technology can be used at smaller scales.
China is already selling two EVs using sodium ion batteries.
Sodium ion batteries won’t be a general drop-in substitute in vehicles for lithium.
It might be possible to use sodium-ion batteries in place of some not-energy-density critical lithium-ion applications (the way lead-acid is currently used for some lithium-ion applications), and that’d free up some materials for EV use.
However, sodium and lithium atoms have differences, two of which are relevant for battery performance. The first difference is in the so-called redox potential, which characterizes the tendency for an atom or molecule to gain or lose electrons in a chemical reaction. The redox potential of sodium is 2.71 V, about 10% lower than that of lithium, which means sodium-ion batteries supply less energy—for each ion that arrives in the cathode—than lithium-ion batteries. The second difference is that the mass of sodium is 3 times that of lithium.
Together these differences result in an energy density for sodium-ion batteries that is at least 30% lower than that of lithium-ion batteries [1]. When considering electric vehicle applications, this lower energy density means that a person can’t drive as far with a sodium-ion battery as with a similarly sized lithium-ion battery. In terms of this driving range, “sodium can’t beat lithium,” Tarascon says.
In time, sodium-ion batteries will improve, but their driving range will never surpass the top-of-the-line lithium-ion batteries, Tarascon says. He imagines instead that sodium-ion technology will fill specific niches, such as batteries for smaller, single-person electric vehicles or for vehicles that have a range of only 30–50 miles (50–80 km). Weil agrees, but he says that society may have to change the way it views automobiles. “We cannot only point to the technology developers and say, ‘We need more efficiency.’ It’s even more important to stress that we need more ‘sufficiency,’ which is people being satisfied with a small car,” he says.
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