This article does a lot of speculation from few facts but is truly compelling.

I appreciate the clarity the article uses in the factual support for the ultimate theory, building on each inferential step that seems pretty obviously correct. The stuff that’s actually presented as being fairly certain:

• The fossil record shows many lines of archaic homo sapiens whose physical features don’t share modern homo sapiens’ “juvenile” baby face characteristics.
• The dating of those fossils and the migration patterns of our known ancestors suggests that these archaic homo sapiens aren’t actually our ancestors, but were outcompeted by our branch.
• The anthropological record shows that these archaic homo sapiens weren’t as dominant as our ancestor branch, but were close and could hold their own. Apparently the ancestors of modern humans never lost territory, even if it took millennia to displace other hominids.
• These archaic branches had some limited tool use, and some evidence of trade and ceremonial burial.

The article presents theories about our branch being less violent, having less aggression, able to build lasting alliances with larger groups of tribes. But it’s grounded in some interesting facts that are interesting, in themselves.

Looking around the article actually posted, I’d place my bets on more control/restraint on violence, for the coordination to be able to form social networks that could overcome any threats of skirmish level, inter-tribal violence:

Paradoxically, low aggression may have been a massive advantage in intertribal warfare. Low aggression could have helped us to form big social groups – tribes of hundreds and thousands. And modern humans don’t just form huge groups, we’re unique among animals in being able to form peace treaties between different groups, and alliances between groups to defend or attack territory. What made modern Homo sapiens so uniquely dangerous might not have been a tendency towards violence and aggression, but friendliness, and the ability to forge alliances. The ability to create groups and social networks, and hold off fighting – at least, until we’re in a position to win – could have given us a decisive edge.

It’s an interesting article, worth reading in its entirety.

Copyright is for written, filmed, or musical work, as well at its derivatives.

It’s a little bit more than that. There are 8 categories:

1. literary works;
2. musical works, including any accompanying words;
3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
4. pantomimes and choreographic works;
5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
7. sound recordings; and
8. architectural works.

Sculpture is a type of visual work that can be copyrighted. So are architectural works. Not that a bar of soap would likely qualify as a sculpture, but there are 3 dimensional shapes that can be copyrighted.

Shapes can be trademarked, but an oval is not trademarkable because it is a very generic shape.

If it’s not already in common use when trademarked, even simple shapes can be trademarked. Simple colors can be trademarked as well: UPS trademarked its shade of brown, Tiffany has trademarked its shade of blue. Specific design elements can be trademarked as well, like the recognizable Burberry check pattern, the iconic glass bottle shape of Coca Cola, etc.

And the Dove soap bar shape isn’t just a generic oval. It’s a precise 3 dimensional shape, with a raised center and a gradual taper to the vertical edges all around.

I couldn’t find a registered trademark, but the shape is distinctive enough that they probably would be able to trademark it if they wanted to (or even enforce an unregistered trademark in that shape, at least in the U.S.).

Instead of blaming a victim, why don’t you get on the case of whoever made the post, for having an incomplete summary instead.

The summary contained what the person who posted it thought was important. You thought something else was important and then started making up conjecture about that, instead of looking it up yourself.

This is clown behavior. You’re not a victim of anything but your own ignorance. Digging in your heels, intentionally obtuse to the facts of the story you want to speculate about, is not productive. If you didn’t know, you’re welcome to look up the facts yourself, instead of claiming in multiple comments throughout this thread that this lady was a midwife performing surgical abortions, and that the actual charged conduct compares to the days of back alley abortions.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/houston-texas-midwife-arrested-abortions-clinics/285-b028b728-0db8-4e4f-9255-7f6f11c77f47

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/17/texas-abortion-midwife-arrested/

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/texas-midwife-abortion-investigation-update-20227667.php

https://www.thecut.com/article/texas-abortion-arrest-maria-margarita-rojas-midwife.html

You’re welcome.

The article is paywalled, and I cannot read it, so I’m determining my opinion based on what I read in the summary of this post

Here’s a suggestion: how about instead of forming your opinion based on known incomplete data, you decide instead to just, like, not form an opinion at all until you get that information, much less spout off based on your own speculation.

She wouldn’t have been arrested for dispensing legally obtainable pills, normaly.

???

They made abortion illegal in Texas. She performed abortions in the manner that is legal elsewhere, using a procedure that matches the standard of care where it is legal, under training and qualifications that are sufficient elsewhere. So she was arrested for dispensing pills normally and in the manner that they are regulated elsewhere. This is the safe and legal method elsewhere, and was the safe and legal method in Texas until recently.

Comparing it to back alley abortions is intentionally misleading to the point of dishonesty.

There’s no surgery involved.

Not for the mid/late-term ones.

She…didn’t perform any of those. I’m going off of the facts of what she is being accused of doing in the criminal charges.

You’re up and down this thread misrepresenting the facts here.

These are medication abortions, and the safety of those procedures is pretty well established, especially when supervised at a clinic. There’s no surgery involved.

I love that the question doesn’t specify what “better” means, and we’re all interpreting it in our own ways. Healthier? More enjoyable?

I think this article could be a little bit more precise with its reporting.

The Washington Post reported in April 2022 that Musk had already used more than half of his more than 170 million Tesla shares as collateral to acquire loans, and planned to do so again to borrow more money to buy Twitter, now X.

This was before a 3:1 stock split, so would represent 510 million shares today. Back then, those shares were worth $62 billion. Today, it’s more than doubled. So even if he’s done nothing with his debt or his shares, all the gains of the past few years would serve to give him a lot more cushion, to where he’d be safe even if the stock price plummets further, to around half of what it is today. More likely, though, he’s used some of the money from selling some of the shares to pay down his debt.

Musk acquired X for $44 billion in October 2022, borrowing roughly $13 billion from several banks

Unfortunately, that $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter itself, not by Musk. If the corporation defaults on the loans, the banks can force the sale of Twitter’s assets and wipe out the value of the shares (destroying the value of Musk’s investment). But that’s not debt that could be called and somehow jump over to Tesla share prices.

So it is true that a tanking Tesla stock price can cascade into a bankruptcy for him. But it needs to fall a lot more than where it’s fallen today. Probably needs to lose another half of its value, at a minimum, maybe more, before it actually triggers a cascading failure.

No.

Autocracy moves faster at marshaling the resources it has, but is significantly worse at accumulating resources than what economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson describes as inclusive political and economic institutions, which broadly allow members of the public to engage in political and economic activity. (Note that their work on these things won them the Economics Nobel last year.)

Distributed, decentralized power is important for maximizing the potential of a population.

Autocratic political systems are brittle. They’re also poor. They tend not to survive more than a decade or two before the strongman is deposed, one way or another, whether from internal coup or revolution, or simply external invasion of a weakened state. And a successor strongman might be weaker. All the while, the inclusive states continue to grow in their own power and influence.

So any short term gain in consolidating power into smaller groups is going to be up against time, and the fragility of the whole arrangement as the autocratic country falls behind its competition.

It is very clear you and your best friend HylicManoeuvre are one and the same person

I dunno, I think our comment histories are pretty distinct, in both our views/preferences and the topics we’re comfortable discussing. I think that’s pretty clear for anyone who just wants to take a look. Again, by insisting that we must be alts for the same person with a secret vegan agenda comes off as paranoid and delusional.

You are the only one implying preference

Third party here, jumping into this thread. It’s pretty clear that OP didn’t say, or even imply, anything about preference, and even put scare quotes around “preference” when responding to you bringing it up. You come off as paranoid and bizarrely defensive in this thread, and it’s a bad look.

I’m going to answer from the perspective of U.S. law, because that’s what I know.

age is a protected class

The idea of protected classes comes from whether Congress or a state legislature protected that class by passing a valid law prohibiting that kind of discrimination. We can describe that generally with protected classes, as a broad summary, but if you’re actually going to get into the weeds of whether some kind of discrimination is legal or not you have to figure out the specific laws.

First, you have to ask what the context is. Is this employment discrimination? Public accommodations discrimination? Housing discrimination? Education discrimination? Each is governed by its own laws. For example Title VII prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Title VI has the same protected classes, but applies in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance (like universities and hospitals and others). The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in providing credit on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex (like the Civil Rights Act) and adds on marital status, age, receipt of public assistance.

The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, or disability.

The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act add protections for discrimination on the basis of disability.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits discrimination against those over 40 on the basis of age.

So if you’re talking about neighborhoods, you’re only looking at housing discrimination, and not public accomodations or employment or schooling or anything like that. The Fair Housing Act doesn’t prohibit housing discrimination on age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act doesn’t apply to housing discrimination (and is one of the few that only goes one way, in protecting only people above 40).

How is that not the same as an “active white living” community that bans other races?

Because the Fair Housing Act prohibits whites-only neighborhoods, or any other kind of race discrimination in housing.

On a side note, there’s also constitutional Equal Protection claims for governmental discrimination that comes from the Constitution rather than any law passed by Congress. Those aren’t discussed in terms of “protected” class, but rather in “suspect class,” where non-equal treatment on the basis of race, color, or religion is reviewed by the courts with “strict scrutiny” (and almost always struck down). Unequal treatment on the basis of sex or citizenship is subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” which sometimes survives court review. Unequal treatment on the basis of pretty much anything else, though, gets “rational basis” review and basically survives if the government can come up with any rational reason for the rule.

They’re killing the middle class though

Some schools might be, but not places like Chicago or Harvard. At least not through their tuition policies. They give financial aid to those up to a pretty high income threshold.

UChicago, for example, gives free tuition to anyone who is the first in their family to attend college, or makes less than $125k a year. Harvard, as I mentioned, essentially gives free tuition up to $150k. MIT’s threshold is $200k. Families in these income ranges are doing pretty well for themselves.

And then when students graduate from these schools they have a pretty easy path to being rich themselves. The degree, the connections, and possibly the education itself provided a pathway towards six figure jobs, maybe $200k+, before the age of 30.

So no, I think these schools are a pretty good value proposition for even the middle class. Upper middle class has to pay the highest percentage of their own income, but it’s still worth the cost for them.

All the schools rip off the rich to subsidize the middle class. You’re essentially subsidizing a bunch of students who are paying close to nothing.m, because you can afford $70k tuition.

As another example, Harvard is free for anyone whose family makes less than $85k per year. Not just the tuition ($56k per year), but also the housing (worth $13k), food ($8k), health insurance ($1600), books, and a modest living stipend designed to cover things like a computer, commuting/travel, other expenses.

And those who make up to $150k per year are capped at 10% of their income to pay for all that. In the end, the average cost of Harvard for the typical student is about $15,000 per year including housing and food.

In other words, attending Harvard is cheaper than not attending school for anyone whose families make less than $150k, which is basically 75% of the nation. So if you’re actually paying full tuition, you’re probably pretty rich.

I think that some people had trouble with the raised angle of the hostel smile photo, and the way that cameras of different focal lengths (technically, more a function of distance between camera and subject) tend to flatten three dimensional features in slightly different ways. The posts where people were saying that various pictures don’t look like the same person, but like you, I think they look pretty similar.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

one that eats sulfur and excretes iron, and one that eats iron and excretes sulfur

Thermodynamically, how could these two cycles sustain metabolism? Were there other processes/species in the mix to introduce chemical compounds that had more energy contained within?

There’s also really tight coordination between sight and proprioception, as our visual processing seamlessly stitches together visual information into a three dimensional model of reality, even if we’re moving while taking in that visual information, through stereoscopic signals from two eyes.

More specifically, the more recent studies analyze non-drinkers in two categories: those who just choose not to drink (generally healthier than even light drinkers), and those who don’t drink because they have serious health conditions incompatible with drinking or people recovering from substance/alcohol abuse issues who (generally much less healthy than light drinkers). By separating those who don’t drink versus those who can’t drink, the studies reverse earlier findings that non-drinkers are less healthy than light drinkers.

It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.

This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.

The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.

In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.