Yeah, foxes are best enjoyed from a distance, in my opinion. I'm perfectly happy with having them visit, but they can stay outside.
To the "they smell bad" bit, I'll add two things:
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I have pictures (maybe I'll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we're not talking pebbles, we're talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing.... I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.
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There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes' diet
Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won't make great pets.
They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.
In reality the dictator you've repeatedly expressed support for here killed thousands, while unlike you I've never supported any oppressive, mass-murdering government of any kind.
Actual murders trumps your fictional head canon any time.
I have never in my life supported any violent coups or putting mass murderers in charge by any means. You have on the other hand repeatedly done so in this thread alone.
I've literally never done anything of the sort, you liar.
"They had the right colour uniform on when they carried out the mass murder, and that makes it better" <- how you come across.
Who? Israel? No, they do not have a legal claim to the occupied areas, or they wouldn't be occupied. Both irrespective of the occupation, the crime of Apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome statute.
The Israeli Supreme Court has ever since 1967 consistently accepted the Israeli government's own contention that the territories are occupied, and not part of Israel proper, because if they were part of Israel, then Palestinians affected by Israeli oppression would have far stronger legal claims.
So if you want to argue that the occupied territories belong to Israel, you're arguing against the position of both Israel the state and the Israeli Supreme Court.
See "The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel", David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012
The sheer number of civilian casaulties makes all of this irrelevant, and makes you an apartheid apologist. I don't engage with supporters of apartheid regimes, so enjoy the block.
It started before that. In '98 I remember having dinner with someone who worked at Netscape before then who told me about how a co-worker had just been fired for living in the office, something they'd apparently decided to do in the first place because they already then had all of these perks designed to keep them in the office.
The Google, Apple etc. collusion certainly was a huge step up in abusive practices, though.
they do focus on vaping, that does not mean they are irrelevant to the question of nicotine. from the cdc link:
To this and your subsequent points, these claims are not backed up by sources in the pages you linked to, and as we've seen from the other paper as well, there's good reason to be cautious about assuming their claims are separating the effects of nicotine from the effects of the delivery method, especially given every single source actually cited by the CDC article is about smoking. Neither the Johns Hopkins or Harvard article cites any sources on nicotine alone that I can see.
i disagree that ignoring delivery methods is “meaningless”. form the johns hopkins article:
And, getting hooked on nicotine often leads to using traditional tobacco products down the road.
A claim that is not backed by sources, and has divorced this from delivery method. E.g. how many people starts with gum or a patch and goes on to tobacco? I can certainly see there being some transfer from vaping to tobacco, but that is very different from the blanket claim and illustrates the problem with these sources that fail to disambiguate and extrapolates very wide claim from sources that looks at specific modes of use.
the part you quoted says that nicotine acts as an accelerator for the development of cancers from other sources, including things like car exhaust. these carcinogens are widespread in the modern world, so accelerating the development of cancer associated with them is a bad thing. eg, car exhaust fumes are everywhere.
Yes, inhaling nicotine is bad. That we can agree on, and the source supports the limited claim that if you get nicotine in a way that binds to cites in your lungs, that is bad. The sources do not provide evidence that this risk is present for other modes of use. Maybe it is, but they've not shown that.
i agree, this is bad. the problem you brought up with the “materials and methods” section is also bad. i’m not trying to defend the article holistically, i’m even particularly attached to that source (which is why i included a few different ones).
But that article is the best of the sources you gave. The others cite nothing of relevance to the claim I made that I can see after going through their links.
the article did this by reviewing “90 relevant articles” from PubMed and Medline, then discussing what those articles found
But the problem is that not nearly all of those "90 relevant articles" are relevant to their claim, and so they start off by misrepresenting what they're about to do. They then fail to quantify their claim in any way that supports their conclusion. They back up some specific claims without quantifying them (e.g. I can back up the claim that apples can be lethal, but you'd need vast quantities to get enough cyanide from an apple to harm you, so a claim they can be lethal in isolation is meaningless) or unpacking whether they are risks from nicotine in general, or nicotine via a specific delivery method. This is an ongoing problem with research on this subject.
They have not provided an argument for how any of those "90 relevant articles" supports their conclusion.
i think the second statement was thoroughly debunked by the sources i’ve included: they all say nicotine is highly addictive, and one of them says it’s “as addictive as heroin and cocaine”. i think the sources i’ve shared also discredit the idea that nicotine is “up there with caffeine in terms of safety”. i’m not trying to say nicotine is extremely dangerous, but rather that its danger is underestimated.
The say that, but they don't back it up. Ironically, pointing to heroin is interesting, because the addiction potential of heroin has also been subject to a lot of fearmongering and notoriously exaggerated, and we've known this for nearly half a century -- a seminal study of addiction in Vietnam war vets found the vast majority of those with extensive heroin use in Vietnam just stopped cold turkey when they returned to the US and the vast majority didn't relapse, the opposite of what the authors assumed going into the study. A study that was commissioned as part of Nixons then-newly started politically motivated and racist War of Drugs with the intent of providing evidence of how bad it was.
(see https://www.mayooshin.com/heroin-vietnam-war-veterans-addiction which gives a reasonable account of Robins study, and gives full reference to the paper)
That's also not to say that heroin isn't dangerous or seriously addictive because it is. Nobody should use heroin. But it's also frequently used as a means of exaggerating by implication because peoples idea of the addiction potential of heroin is largely way out of whack with reality and heavily context-dependent. So when someone drags out a heroin comparison without heavy caveats, that's reason to assume there is a good chance they're full of bullshit.
In other words: It's perfectly possible that some ways of taking nicotine can be as addictive as heroin, but that doesn't tell us what most people think it does. E.g. UK hospitals sometimes use heroin (as diamorphine; its generic name) for post-op pain management because it's far better than many alternatives.
The sources you've given do not present any support for claims that nicotine considered separate from delivery methods is particularly risky. They do provide support for claims it's dangerous when smoked, and possibly dangerous when inhaled even via vaping, and the takeaway that you should generally avoid inhaling stuff other than clean air without good reason is good. The other claims about nicotine in general do not appear to be backed up at all.
i’m not trying to say nicotine is extremely dangerous, but rather that its danger is underestimated.
I find the notion that the danger is underestimated hilarious when one of the claims used a comparison with heroin to fearmonger.
Your source, if anything, is evidence to me of the opposite.
The numbers I gave are entirely independent of social security. They presume a far below average stock market return. You're right they'll need to be a 401k millionaire, and per the numbers I gave, to achieve that will take around ~9k/year in pension investments if they intend to retire at 65. A lot obviously can not afford that, especially not early in their career, and will need to compensate accordingly later in their career to the extent they want.
But that wasn't really my point. My point is that the number of extra years - irrespective of your current pension situation - you need to work in order to maintain the same financial outlook is far lower than the number of additional years of retirement you can cover. Whether or not you're able to get to a sufficient pension level in the first place is a separate issue.
To how the stock market will fare, the big challenge there is whether or not automation will keep up or not, and frankly I think the biggest social upheaval over the next century will not be that it can't keep up, but that automation will outpace the proportional decline in the potential labour pool.
Yes: Train on more images processed by this.
In other words: If the tool becomes popular it will be self-defeating by producing a large corpus of images teaching future models to ignore the noise it introduces.
There are likely easier "quick fixes" while waiting for new models, but this is the general fix that will work against almost any adversarial attack like this.
There might be theoretical attacks that'd be somewhat more difficult to overcome to the extent of requiring tweaks to the models, but given that there demonstrably exists a way of translating text to images that overcomes any such adversarial method that isn't noticeable to humans, given that humans can, there will inherently always be a way to beat them.