People are scared that if you acknowledge the fact that Biden is concerning as a presidential candidate in any way, people will be less likely to vote for him; the sad state of the matter is that Biden is the only candidate who has a chance to beat Trump at this late of a stage in the game. The reasoning that we need to avoid criticizing him as a result of that is bullshit though, since if you’re closing your eyes and voting for your default color, then such discussion won’t affect to your vote, and if you’re actually paying attention to the state of our upcoming election, then you’ll already be well aware that being against Trump forces you to vote Biden, so your vote is locked in, regardless of how depressing it is. Nobody’s still hemming and hawing at this point, and even if some are, some random meme on Lemmy isn’t going to be the thing that finally gets them to make up their mind.

There’s no reason we can’t acknowledge the fact that, while being better than Donald Trump should win Biden the presidential election, it’s not an accomplishment, and in a vacuum he’s a terrible candidate. In fact, we specifically need to point out that we knew this scenario was coming for the past 4 years, and have organized no major uprisings, or even major educational movements to try to get people to force out a different Democratic candidate in the primaries; we’ve sat on our asses ever since the last election, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do the same going into the next election unless we start forcing a change in the DNC right now.

These “both sides” discussions aren’t about whether or not to choose to vote for Biden, they’re about getting people to notice the fact that we vote for the “lesser evil” every 4 years, saying that the time to make a change is after we’re solidified our candidate’s victory, but then once we’ve done that we do nothing until we’re in the same “lesser evil” situation again 4 years later. If we want to ever have a situation where we’re voting for a president we’d actually like, we need to start planning out how to force that to happen now, because even 4 whole years isn’t a very long time frame to for us to push such a large change.

I can understand some people are scared that Trump is going to win because too many people chose to vote 3rd party, or choose not to vote, but everyone who’s paying attention enough to be swayed by political discussion is already aware that we specifically need to vote for Biden in order for Trump to lose, so at this point the fanatical drive to quash any criticism of him as a presidential candidate seems nearly tailor-made to sow even more apathy among the voting population, making them feel not only forced into voting for Biden, but forced into liking it as well. In the end I think the efforts to prevent discussion about how neither candidate is an objectively good candidate is going to ultimately cause fewer people to vote at all, since they’ll feel as though they can’t even air out their grievances with the candidate they’d already begrudgingly chosen to vote for.

Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.

This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!

Keep it around so you can stick it on any particularly stubborn bananas or oranges later on.

The issue with the high-paying medical profession is that it attracts 2 kinds of people: nice people who want to do good and help people, and self-centered people who want to feel powerful and in-control while making a bunch of money. The latter are the reason for shit like this. I’d bet that she doesn’t care about children at all, and just wants to feel powerful, while raking in the cash from rich people looking to use her license to validate their terrible behavior.

My country was invaded by terrorists on September 11th, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. We waged war on the entire region the terrorists came from, eventually killing the leader of the group, and nothing changed. All our bombing did nothing, all our sacrifices of innocent people were for naught.

Amazingly, killing a bunch of people who had nothing to do with the terrorists that attacked your country is a bad move, and only serves to create more terrorists as people watch their loved ones die by your hand and grow to hate you.

If your takeaway from America’s terrible actions post-9/11 is that we should’ve been even more brutal and wiped out the entire mostly-innocent population of the middle east, you’ve got the wrong takeaway.

You’d think so, right?

Negative change worms it’s way in through small defeats. The first DLC’s were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what’s 3 seconds? What’s 4, 5, 6? What’s 30 seconds? What’s 2 minutes? We’ve seen examples of this all throughout capitalism’s history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.

I’m not discouraging at home novelty tests like ancestry and 23andme, I’m discouraging their use in the situation you’ve described, because that’s not what they’re intended for. I’m very sorry for your situation, and I hope that you find the information that you’re looking for, but you’re more likely to find it with actual paternity tests than trying to glean information from a test that’s not meant for that.

As for the medical comments, ancestry isn’t meant to provide that. It’s not actually sequencing the DNA, it’s just checking for specific sections of DNA that are known to vary between different ethnicities. Some health information can be assessed in that way, but its inclusion in at-home tests was made illegal because those sorts of results need to be handled with a genetics professional so that they can explain the complex results and their impact on the individual and their family. Some at-home tests have added medical information back in, but that’s legally dubious, and considered to be dangerous by genetics professionals.

If there are any medical concerns, a different DNA test should be used, and should be ordered by a genetic counselor or geneticist. Situations like these are one of the reasons why genetic counselors exist - please don’t believe that adding a medical professional to the mix is a bad thing - genetics is a very complex topic, and having someone trained to understand and explain it is invaluable. Please let them help you in your endeavor.

Well, the Ancestry test only really gives stuff like… ancestry. It’s not useful for much else, and for good reason - it’s meant to be a neat novelty, not a medical or paternity test. I’m a former genetic counselor, and we generally don’t suggest getting DNA tests for children unless it’s important for health reasons, or if they’re old enough to give their own consent for it - that sort of information is very personal, and often people don’t want it to be available in their health records.

If you are simply wondering about ancestry, you could always get the test yourself - anything the test shows for you would at least give that side of the kids’ ancestry. Obviously parenthood verification can be useful, but from your other comments you seem to be aware that a mother doesn’t need such a verification, and it’s generally not recommended that you use ancestry tests for that purpose anyway. If you’re concerned about any genetic issues in your family, I’d highly recommend talking to a genetic counselor; they can help organize the family history and see if there’s anything you’ll want to be cognizant of.

You want a DNA test because your kid doesn’t share the same interests in video games that you do? Sure, there’s likely a set of genes somewhat contributing to preferences and interests in humans, but even if we knew them, we’ve already got plenty of evidence that biological children frequently have different hobbies than their parents, so we know things like that are most heavily determined by all of the other things people are influenced by in life, outside of genetics.

Pretty sure they mean one less account someone could track you with, because yeah, staying on top of sending monthly checks for stuff is something I’m very glad I don’t have to do anymore. My credit took multiple hits in my younger days from bills I forgot to pay on time.

Sweet Home Carolina! No, wait…

As much as I personally disagree with you, given that all you’re thinking about is your own benefit, and not any of the myriad of benefits to the city, the world, the people who can’t afford cars, etc, I understand that your outlook is shared by the vast majority of Americans, and can’t be ignored if we ever hope to have an effective public transport system.

We’re going to need to somehow devise a system so convenient that it actually sounds attractive to the huge amount of people who spend 10%+ of their paycheck on car payments not because they have to, but because they want to.

Yeah, if anything, I expect people to book whatever flights they were already going to book, and just crack jokes like “I hope I make it!”

I haven’t heard anyone irl talking about Boeing recently, and barely even saw anything online a week after the initial death. While it pisses me off to no end, this incident will blow over just as easily for Boeing.

Nobody needs a friend so badly that they’re justified in making friends with a genocidal maniac. I understand that Israel has been a long-term investment, but the amount of human suffering going on right now vastly outweighs any lamentations about sunk cost. What this country needs is a president willing to show that he cares about preventing suffering above all else. Doctors take an oath to both do good and do no harm - it’s time for our presidents to do the same, and be held to it to the same degree.

I’m all for kicking both jammed doors and walls.

This is a great point. The results of an IQ test aren’t really measuring a person, they’re measuring a byproduct of that person, which is significantly less informative.

It’s important to define was “equal” is in this context. Some people hear “equal” and think they must measure exactly the same in every test, but that’s not how the word is being used in this context. It’s more that people are so varied from one person to another that no test can truly judge them well enough to differentiate them when it comes to inherent worth.

One person might measure above another in one test, but there are surely many others where the results would be flipped. There are so many different things you could test a person on that in the end none of them really matter; any one measurement is like trying to figure out what an extinct animal looked like from a single tiny piece of a fossil.

That’s what the IQ test is doing - it’s taking one tiny piece of human intelligence, which itself is one tiny piece of what might be said to make up a person’s value, and trying to use that to extrapolate information about them that simply can’t be taken from such a 1-dimensional test. It’s not worthless, but it needs to be paired with a bunch of other tests before it can really say anything, and even then it wouldn’t say much.