They made great fidget toys.

I loved my slider as well. They made texting so much easier. I went from one of those to a blackberry bold.

Long range attacks are about knocking out supplies, the ability to produce new supplies, and the ability to get supplies to the front line.

Say Russia is getting more newly made artillery shells to the front line. The best way to fix this is to blow up the factories.

If you can’t take out the factories directly, take out components that the factories need to operate: ore processing, fuel refineries, electricity grid, etc.

The problem is all the critical targets are a long ways from the front line and Ukraine currently has limited capacity to hit them.

Meanwhile Russia is targeting all of Ukraine’s internal infrastructure constantly.

Long wars are won by the production capabilities of the groups involved as much as the front line troops.

First off, your rheumatologist is the most important doctor you will be dealing with. For some reason the field collects some odd ones with poor people skills. You may get lucky and find a good one right off the bat. However if the doctor seems to not be listening to you, understanding and explaining your symptoms, go for a second opinion or a third or a fourth opinion. It took my wife 5 different ones to finally find a good one. It’s a 3 hour one waytrip to see him but it’s worth it. We will likely be moving up closer to him in a few years.

Second be patient with the meds. It will likely take several tries to find something that works. However not too patient, waiting too long can make the disease progress further. However once the right cocktail is found you’ll feel a bunch better, until you don’t. Changing meds is common and normal no matter how long you have it.

Last, if your in the U.S. and have to deal with our shitty system, get ready to fight insurance. It will be a constant battle if you geton one of the criminally prices drugs. Just don’t give up and eventually you will win. One drug refill took my 2 months of twice weekly calls to push it through.

If it ain’t broke …

With a scope an AK style gun is effectively maxed out at 300m. After that their accuracy is too low to reliably hit the target. They are designed to put out a spray of bullets at closer ranges. In WWII most combat occured at ranges under 200m so they are effective for what they were designed for.

Very good for combat, not so good for sniping.

Medical privacy ends when the condition may cause detrimental effects to other people. It’s not that difficult of a concept to understand.

Somebody who has epilepsy is not allowed to drive vehicles or fly a plane. They might have an episode while operating the vehicle and kill/injure others.

Somebody with a confirmed deadly disease is not allowed to wander around spreading it to others. Their decisions to ignore quarantine restrictions will kill/injure others.

I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.

Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.

The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.

I like to hear the howl of the coyotes and the hoot of the great horned owl nearby at night. We have no issues with cats roaming the neighborhood.

PRSV doesn’t immediately kill the plant. It kills it slowly over quite some time. It replicates in the growing point of the plant. This conveniently is the same location where aphids feed.

The aphids then transfer the virus to a new plant. Plant viruses have a wide range of host species and they move around with their vectors.

For more information, Here is an excellent write up on the virus.

https://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/disandpath/viral/pdlessons/Pages/PapayaRingspotvirus.aspx

No it is not harmful to humans. This virus like most others others like it only infect plants. It is transmitted by aphids. So it survives inside of them but doesn’t replicate.

In watermelons it damages the new growth, especially the leaves. This reduces the plants ability to phosynthesize sugars and stops fruit production.

The Wikipedia picture is misidentified, kindof.

So there were two mosaic virus discovered in watermelons. The first one discovered was called watermelon mosaic virus. The second one was called watermelon mosaic virus 2 (WMV-2).

Now as molecular technics advanced it was discovered that the the first WMV virus was the same as Papaya Ring Spot Virus (PRSV)

Since the PRSV name for the virus was older, it was kept. WMV-2 then was renamed to WMV.

So that is most likely PRSV aka the old WMV. WMV (aka WMV-2) rarely causes ringspots.

http://ncsupdicblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/sample-of-week-papaya-ringspot-virus-on.html?m=1

My personal theory:

First off, raw milk does taste noticably different than pasteurized and homogenized milk you find at the store.

Pasteurization: heating the milk triggers the unfolding of proteins (Denaturation). This is what kills the bacteria but can also change the flavor of the milk.

Homogenization. This process breaks up the fat into smaller segments so they stay in solution in the milk. The result is a less creamy flavor.

People instinctually associate flavor with nutritional value. They think that better flavored food = better for you. This sort-of works in tomatoes and a few other fruit/vegetables. However taste perception is a complex blend of genetics, environmental conditions, and psychology. So the results are inherently unpredictable and completely unreliable.

The unpasteurized crowd all fall for the 'it tastes better so it must be better". They then make all sorts of excuses to justify their instinct. " Big corporate milk is evil!!" Blah blah blah.

Terms and conditions are NOT copyright law. They are a separate agreement that is the companies “wishlist” of things they want the consumer to agree too. It’s common for them to spell out terms in direct conflict with copyright law.

The reason that an iTunes video purchase is encrypted is because it is illegal to break the encryption in order to make a copy (DMCA). However capturing the playback and transforming it to another medium is for personal use is fair-use.

There is also no time limit to how long a person can save the copy for. As long as they had legal access to the content at the time of making the copy. For example say I recorded a football game from a streaming service. I can save that copy for personal use for the rest of my life even though I purchased a one time only streaming.

Not an expert, but in the U.S. making a copy of a broadcast for personal use is legal under fair-use. Anything that loads up on your computer screen you can make a copy and save it for personal use. So screen captures are by definition legal.

How exactly you copy the material on your screen gets tricky under the DMCA clusterfuck. Breaking encryption to copy the material is illegal unless there is an valid exception for fair-use. What exactly those valid exceptions are is above my paygrade.

American pizza and Italian pizza are two different animals that share the same name. They both have good, mediocre and shitty examples. I have had all three in both countries.

As to which one I prefer? Ehhh depends on the day.

Other countries also have their unique take on Pizza that I have tried and enjoyed. I had some in Spain and Brazil that were amazing yet very different.

Sometimes they are like that.

Sometimes they are a closet with a dirty diaper can that isn’t emptied frequently. Delightful.

The issue with wine is quality control is dependent many factors, weather, fertilizer management, water management, disease pressure, pest pressure, harvest conditions, unpredictable fermentations and the skill of the winemaker. The more variable the conditions the more unpredictable the finished wine product is.

A good bottle is really tough to make. A mediocre bottle is difficult to make. A poor bottle is what is usually made. I’ve never had an excellent bottle of wine and I think it is a myth. Pricing is mostly unrelated to the quality of the product as well.

When you usually put out a poor product people tend to avoid it unless there is a cultural expectation of low performance. What’s changing is the cultural acceptance of drinking horrible tasting stuff.

The wine industry in needs to adapt and put out a better product or else they will go under.

For many religious groups it’s common for teens and even young adults to not have a clue where babies come from. The biological urge to have sex is still there. So teens experiment around and figure it out but often don’t understand the consequences.

Teens are going to have sex whether you teach them anything about or not. Comprehensive sex ed reduces teen birthrates and STD transmission. It also delays the age when they initiate sex.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.3.18

I am of the opinion that most “supply” issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.

All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.

Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.

With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.

The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.

The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.

Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).