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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • While I understand the sentiment, US veterans are in many ways victims of the capitalist system themselves. At 18 years old, they’re pressured by family or school administration to go into the military. They may have grown up poor and have no viable career path once they leave high school. College is a pipe dream. Combine that with recruiters who will use every high pressure tactic in the book and outright lie to get you to sign (“sure, you can get leave later on to be the best man at your friend’s wedding”). All this is happening before they’re legally allowed to drink, and they certainly haven’t finished developing into their adult self.

    They go off to the military. Most will get through with nothing more traumatic than boot camp (which can be pretty traumatic) and some shitty food, but some will die, and others will be injured or have PTSD.

    Keeping those services and improving them is part of cleaning up our mess. So is dismantling the capitalist system that creates more of those veterans.



  • The DoD itself spent $820B in 2023. To get over $1T, you also have to include veterans benefits, like the VA hospital system.

    The full bill for Vietnam started coming 20 years after the fact as all those veterans got older and started heavily using the benefits they were promised. From the start of the War on Terror, we’re about at that same point right now. So unless the plan is to rug pull those benefits from people who really need them, then there’s going to be a huge bill coming that no amount of efficiency trimming can ignore.

    If Democrats did the rug pull, Republicans would cry bloody murder. If Trump did it, they will cheer him on while veterans suffer.


  • frezik@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBut yes.
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    3 days ago

    Given that the first commercial nuclear power plants in the US were coming online in the late 1950s, that’s entirely possible. Steam trains were well on their way out by then, but there were still a few hauling freight around.

    Fun adjacent fact: even when the British Empire had moved off of wind sails and into coal, those coal ships didn’t have the range to possibly cover the entire Empire. Coal stations were setup around the world, and the coal had to be transported by sail. The previous technology helps get the next generation technology going.










  • Had an armchair hypothesis last night. Yeast makes alcohol, and we basically domesticated it on accident. Beer/wine making goes back to the neolithic (at least), and we’re in a symbiotic relationship with it.

    That part is pretty well established science, but the the hypothesis goes that alcohol reduces human inhibitions, which makes us fuck more, which means more humans who want to continue making beer and wine with the secret helper, yeast.

    But maybe that’s not right and verging on evo psych territory of a hypothesis that has no strong evidence beyond fitting some known facts.