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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • France, Germany and the ECB worry about Russian retaliation targeting European assets, and also the potential impact on financial stability and the euro’s status as a reserve currency. There’s concern that depositors from emerging economies may be encouraged to pull money out of western banks, fragmenting the global financial system.

    US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen downplayed such risks in February, arguing that “there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro, yen.” She said that if the G-7 acted together then the group would be representing half of the global economy and all of the currencies that really have the capacity at this point to serve as reserve currencies.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-seizing-russian-assets-to-fund-ukraine-is-fraught/ar-BB1jHeKz

    I agree with you, they should just be able to tap the assets directly. Basically some European countries are worried about the effects seizing assets could have on the Euro. Most of these assets are held in Europe as euros. The loan is actually an improvement over the original proposal though. Originally France Germany, etc were pushing only for the 3 billion in interest a year on the assets to be given to Ukraine. The loan solution was pushed by other countries who wanted to give them more cash from the Russian assets as a way to give $50 billion in cash immediately, with those yearly interest payments from Russian assets being used to pay off the loan.



  • Sure there’s economies of scale, but that is an absolutely ridiculous mind boggling number of a single surface to air missile system. Even Ukraine at it’s highest ask says 25 (though they estimate all major cities would be covered by 7), and you think they should make 100,000 batteries?! Every year?! What would be the point of that? Who on earth would buy that many and why?

    Even if they were manufactured at 20% of their current cost, a massive markdown, that would be $20 trillion a year dedicated to a single kind of a single weapon type, nearly as much as the entire gdp of the United States, and you still need the entire rest of your military paid for! They going to make 100,000 f35s and train 50,000 pilots too or something?

    I’m gonna stop, this must be trolling.




  • Millions even, we haven’t been this warm in millions of years! And same for our co2 concentrations. All done in the blink of an eye geologically speaking. We’ve reversed a natural Co2 trend in only 0.004% of the time!

    The commenter above you and anyone in doubt desperately needs to see these graphs:

    https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

    If we follow projections and do nothing to change our behavior we’ll get to levels and temperatures not seen in hundreds of millions of years, all bascially instantly when compared to the the ability of life to evolve and adapt. Earth will survive, it’s been through worse. Gonna be rough on the humans though. We were 10c temperature above where we were then, but it would be even worse now of we got back to those co2 levels, becaue of differences in orbit and solar activity.


  • Yes. By all means primary one of those democrats who voted for this out if you can, but if you got to the general election and the choice was between a pro Israel Republican and pro Israel Democrat, it would still be way better to pick the dem.

    100% of house Republicans voted for this, while only 20% of house Democrats did. Right now the Republicans control what bills come to the floor for a vote since they have a majority. If Democrats had the majority and controlled the speakership, this bill never would have even come up for a vote in the first place since so few in their caucus support it overall. A pro Israel dem is not ideal, but at least helps ensure the 100% pro Israel (and a bajillion other reasons for being horrible besides this issue) Republicans don’t control the agenda for what bills come up in the house and senate.


  • Oh yes absolutely op’s x chromosome is expressed. I just meant unlike all the other chromosomes where in general both gene copies on both chromosomes are expressed, in xx individuals usually one of the x chromomes is inactivated and only one of them is being expressed at a time. The x chromosome has many essential genes. This is why we have x linked genetic diseases as well. Often xx individuals are just carriers or more mildly affected since they have two x chromosomes, and xy individuals are more severely affected since they have no backup copies of that gene.


  • Thank you for clarifying those misconceptions about what recessive and dominant are getting at. A gene isn’t really dominant or recessive. A phenotype (some trait in the organism like blue eyes or a certain disease) can be dominant or recessive though and results from changes in a gene. The same gene could have many different possible mutations, some with dominant effects, some with recessive effects, or some with no effects, depending on the change in the gene and the phenotype.

    To go further on that, many recessive diseases are because just one functional copy of many genes are fine from your body’s perspective. Many recessive diseases are due to loss of function of a gene or its protein product, a gene that for a variety of potential reasons no longer leads to a functional protein. Often your body can get by with just one working gene making protein, though both gene copies are generally always being transcribed and trying to be turned into functional protein.

    One big exception to this is the x chromosome. Males only have one x and have a y instead of a second x. The y is very tiny and has very few genes compared to the x, quite different from other chromosome pairs which generally just have copies of all the same genes on each other. Early in embryo development for xx individuals, one of the x chromosomes is generally inactivated and not expressed very much, otherwise xx individuals would have double the gene products of all those different genes compared to males, which the body is not expecting for x genes like it does for all the other genes that have a second copy.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation

    If you go even further you also get into the idea of penetrance. A gene codes for a protein, but that protein doesn’t exist in isolation, it interacts with lots of other proteins coded by other genes in the body, plus the environment. So for some genetic changes it might be a 100% chance at leading to a certain phenotype (like a disease or a specific trait), or it could be less, like only 70% or 30% chance or something of someone with that change getting that trait, even if it’s still “dominant” (meaning only one gene copy with that change is needed to express the trait).




  • What I mean is even now these sporadic cases happen every once in a rare while and always will as long as beef is farmed. It is impossible for cases to go to 0 anywhere because very rarely a cow can spontaneously develop prions. Like the last case in the UK detected two years ago didn’t result in massive culls and restrictions and things. A prion case in a cow was found in the US just last year as another example.

    The 90s were a bit different because it was very widespread due to feeding of animals to other animals, and it was hard to track exactly how far it would have got. Same for humans, most human prion disease is extremely rare and sporadic, but if humans start consuming each other it can become common. In humans the sporadic form is called CJD (creutzfeld jakub disease), the kind believed to be transmitted by cows is called variant CJD, and there was a kind that developed due to a funerary cannabilism practice in a certain tribe in papau new Guinea called Kuru. Because of the cannibalism practices it was able to become very common, similar to what happened in cows when they were fed waste products from other cows.


  • This probably won’t affect beef prices. Rare isolated cases of prion disease in cows happen and can develop spontaneously. The epidemic resulted when the remains of cows/sheep with it were fed to other cows allowing it to propogate.

    The surveillance systems that are used to make sure cases don’t get into the human food supply though do cost something and contribute some to beef prices, but those systems are always going on, so no change.

    Bird flu on the other hand is super contagious and spreads like wildfire, especially in factory farming conditions, resulting in the need for culls of large amounts of birds, that can very quickly affect prices.





  • It’s not a new disease at all, headline is slightly misleading. It’s a well known type of herpes virus that circulates in rhesus monkeys wherever they’re found. It’s similar to the human herpes virus that causes cold sores, but is far more dangerous in a human than a monkey, because it’s much more likely to travel to the brain (human herpes viruses can do this too, just not as commonly). It’s been known of since at least 1932. It can be spread by close contact with rhesus monkeys. Lab workers have died from this when working with them in animal experiments, and personal protective equipment is worn when interacting with rhesus monkeys now. It doesn’t really spread human to human, partly because if you get it you have an 80% chance of death. For monkeys, it’s much more benign and usually just causes cold sore type things.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_virus

    This is just the first time it’s been seen in a human in Hong Kong specifically, not the first time in a human in general, not even close. So if anything kind of the opposite of what you’re thinking. Anyways, just don’t touch rhesus monkeys and you’ll be fine. And if one ever bites or scratches you somehow get that thoroughly cleaned immediately and talk to a doctor. Herpes antivirals like acyclovir might be partially effective for it.