There’s a couple of things going on.

The big one is just a massive selection bias in what people take pictures of. I know how to do a functional tie to restrain someone’s hands and feet. I do it plenty. But if there’s going to be pictures, I’m going to go for something more visually impressive.

There is also a constraint aspect in addition to the restraint. A common type of tie is a rope harness that goes around your torso without actually restraining any of your limbs. In addition to the aesthetic, it also squeezes you, which is kind of like wearing a hug.

As far as restraints go, it is surprisingly difficult to fully restrain arms/hands. A simple binding of the wrists leaves a lot of room to maneuver; and unless you are actively trying to pull your hands apart, barely feels like you are restrained at all. Finding a tie that really restraining and holds up [0] against all the wiggling your subject will do is difficult and tends to follow one of a few forms.

Other people don’t particularly care for the being tied part as much as the getting tied part. It can be a rather intimate experience with how close the top needs to be to your body, and the constant tension they maintain through the rope across your body.

And, of course, there are the type of people who are interested in the aesthetics. They tend to be the ones most interested in pictures.

[0] I almost include safe in this list. But given that the tie shown in this picture is probably the most popular, I cannot in good conscience say that.

Words are cheap. Defense lawyers are supposed to make every plausible argument, even if they know it will be rejected. This is mostly for appeal purposes. They don’t want their client to be in a position 20 years from now where the Supreme Court overturns the dual sovereign doctrine; but their client cannot take advantage of it because his trial lawyers failed to preserve the issue.

Also, as the Judge points out, there is state double jeopardy law that is stronger. However, it is procedurally too early to attempt to invoke it.

Under current law, you would need to kill 22 people before replacements can be appointed. Possibly less if some of them are not constitutionally eligible to be president; but if it ever got to that point, I suspect we would ignore that provision.

Pulling this off is made even more difficult by both the heightened security given to everyone in the line of succession; and the fact that under our continuity of government plans, those people are deliberately never all in the same place at the same time.

Anything that could accomplish a full decapitation strike would likely require marshall law anyway, and would likely make the conditions for an election difficult.

New hires are often worse than useless. The effort that experienced developers spend assisting them is more than it would take those developers to do the work themselves.

If you are running an AC, you might be able modify it to reduce the humidity.

AC units naturally dehumidify (as TC points out, they are essentially the same thing as traditional dehumidifiers). However, the amount of moisture they pull out is mostly related to how long they are running, not how cold they can get. This means that if you have an overpowered AC, you get less dehumidifying effect because the AC is on less.

Some ACs let you reduce their power, which will increase their duty cycle and increase the amount of water they pull out of the air. It also helps improve their lifespan as they need to cycle less.

The Westbank is part of Israel. Various parties have their own motivations for pretending otherwise. But the facts on the ground are a one state reality. And that singular state is an Apartheid one.

“Calories” is actually two different things. The first thing is a unit of energy. In this sense, calories are very much interchangeable. Wood has calories, which is why we use it for fire. However, if you tried eating wood, you would mostly just be increasing the caloric value of your poop. This is not inherent to wood; if you were a termite and tried eating wood, you would actually get nutritionally relevant calories from it.

For nutritional purposes, we generally use some variant of the Atwater system. The core idea was to measure the caloric value of food, as well as the caloric value of the subjects feces and urine. This gives you a better estimate of how many nutritionally relevant calories there are.

Nowadays, we have standard values various core food components (e.g various fats, proteins, etc). By breaking down a food into its components, we can apply the standard conversion for each component and add up the results to get a value for the food as a whole.

This process is actually pretty bad. The digestibility of individual components does not perfectly predict the digestibility of a whole food. The measure of individual components is not perfect. The actual digestibility of some foods can vary significantly between people.

As a practical matter, “counting calories”, really just means eating less in a way that roughly measures food by effective energy content. It turns out that an accurate accounting of calories just isn’t super important or useful for this. There is even bigger variance in the “calories out” department (including the annoying tendency of bodies to become more energy efficient when less energy is available). Further, all of the errors in calorie counting tend to be consistent. If you reduce calories by reducing the quantity of food you eat, you are reducing actual metabolized calories, even in the exact measurement is wrong.

It is a little more complicated if you reduce calories by changing the composition of the food you eat, but broadly speaking lower reported calories are actually lower effective calories there as well. Further, if you are adjusting the composition of your food specifically enough for this to be a problem, then you are well past the point where you should be caring about other nutritional factors.

The headline reads as if by voting against the embargo, they were recognizing a Palestinian state. Of course, with a bit of general knowledge about the situation, it should be clear that that is not the correct reading.

The trusty 4 stage strategy.

Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = 0∗ = 0 {0 0 } is not a number? No where, that’s where!

The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the “numbers” of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.

I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.

<s> Getting back to my original point; this distinction just goes to show how small minded mathematicians are! Under Conway’s supposed “reasonable” definition of a number, nimbers are merely games, not proper numbers. However, the nimbers are a perfectly good infinite field of characteristic 2. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that those are not numbers! </s>

I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

I find this outrageous. Why can’t ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?

And people do not simply die of hunger. A healthy human can go about a month without food. Granted, your body will start eating itself, and you’ll be more likely to die to all the other things that can kill in a warzone. But starvation itself takes ages to kill; and will do massive damage to you prior to being lethal.

As far as I’m concerned they’re there the same reason; ethnonationalism is a coherent ideology. But explaining that to them is not going to get me anywhere.

It’s possible that his views were conflicted.

I have family whose politics I understand pretty well, and I don’t know who they voted for. What I do know is that they were torn between: “Trump’s blatant antisemitism is a danger to us here in America” and “Trump is good for Israel”.

Cat tax

The problem in Gaza is not a lack of money; or even a lack of food. It is the regional superpower using its overwhelming military support to block food entry and distribution. While explicitly blocking all organizations with a history and track record of successful aid provisioning in challenging war zones. Then replacing it with their own potenkin aid agency as members of their senior leadership talk openly about using starvation as a weapon of war.

Even in the most charitable reading, donations like this do nothing to help on net. Assuming it is not an outright scam, you are just giving this one family some of the limited supply of food in Gaza. That means that you are depriving someone else in Gaza that food; because you did not actually introduce more food; and, one way or another, that food was going to get eaten.

Adding more money to the equation does help fund the gangs running the food black market. I don’t mean to imply that such gangs are responsible for the crisis (they are not), or even that they are inherently bad (in a well run system, profit oriented local groups providing last mile distribution can be helpful). But, in this case, they are at best neutral.

If by “Nazi”, you mean the ~8 million registered members of the Nazi party, then to a first approximation, we left them alone.

We kind of do that with ballot measures. Wel end up with a big fight over the text that gets put on the ballot. And people still leave the voting booth having completely crazy ideas about what some of them do.

And what is the EU going to do about it? Governing bodies can declare extraterritorial laws all they want, but they are meaningless unless they have a way to enforce them.

Russia’s invasion didn’t help, but hasn’t seemed to trigger major proliferation concerns. In particular, Ukraine has no given any indication of pursuing nuclear development as a result. Indeed, doing so would put their much needed military aid at risk. All indications is that other countries that feel threatened by Russia are making similar calculations.

In contrast, Iran pursuing a nuclear strategy is very much on the table. We’ve established that their ability for conventional self defense is woefully inadequate; their proxy network has been severely degraded; and their prospect for a diplomatic solution has been repeatedly undermined.

If Iran does get nukes, that could be a catalyst for others in the region to do so as well.