There are about 18,000 species of wasps in North America. Roughly 20 of them can hurt you.
The wasps people fear are all from one family: Vespidae. They make up less than 1% of wasp species on the continent. They build the visible nests, they defend them aggressively, and they're the ones you remember from a bad encounter.
The other 99% live solitary lives and ignore humans entirely. Many can't sting at all. Many more have stingers but never use them on people because they don't have a nest to defend.
What they do instead is hunt other insects. A single mud dauber stocks her nest with paralyzed spiders, including widows and recluses. A braconid wasp lays eggs in tomato hornworms. An ichneumon wasp parasitizes wood-boring beetles that kill ash trees. A cuckoo wasp infiltrates the nests of other wasps and bees. Some species control aphids; others control caterpillars, beetle grubs, or flies.
Most agricultural pest insects in North America are controlled, in part, by parasitic wasps that almost no human ever sees. There are over 25,000 species of ichneumon wasps alone, and they keep entire orders of insects in check.
The five or so wasp species that ruin a picnic in late August are real. The 17,995 species that are running the pest control infrastructure of an entire continent get almost none.
The Venn diagram between people who think you should get fired for using the R word and people who think you should be able to euthanize your child if it has Down syndrome is almost a circle
Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.
"White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19," they wrote.
https://t.co/EewPNgDSu3
"apart from generating housing shortages...rent control produces black markets...In fact, next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities.” https://t.co/WqSElySfn2
I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.
Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...
The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.
That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.
Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.
Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.
In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy.
Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service.
They seized stablecoins in Tether accounts.
The use of the term “crypto” is a psyop to blur the lines with bitcoin.
They can’t seize self-custodied bitcoin without forcing the holder to turn over their keys.
They want the whole world to operate on seizable stablecoins because this introduces the back door to private companies creating CBDCs, just like Palantir set up a privatized version of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, seed funded by CIA, groomed by TIA architect John Pointdexter, and now half funded by government contract half by corporate customers.
They want all the bitcoin in ETFs, treasury companies, and borrow-against-your-bitcoin companies, so the amount available for unseizable self-custody gets mopped up.
Tether, which is currently the privatized arm of the Treasury’s “crypto-seizing” power, is a cofounder and majority shareholder of Jack Maller’s 21 Capital, for example, which moves bitcoin into the Tether-connected seizability landscape.
“Crypto” is a term they use to confuse you while they mop up all the unseizable bitcoin into seizable channels and propagate seizable stablecoins across the world that will eventually be hitched to the privatized-but-not-really-privatized surveillance state to roll out full-blown “Not-CBDC-CBDCs .”
Genesis 6 describes the Nephilim as demonic hybrids who occupy positions of authority in human society. They’re entirely real, says Father Stephen De Young.
0:00 What Are the Nephilim?
3:40 The Advanced Civilization Before the Flood
12:14 Was Human Lifespan Longer Before the Flood Than It Is Now?
15:55 Was Technology Given to Us by Demons?
22:53 How Does Someone Become Demonized?
26:37 Gilgamesh and the Book of the Giants
36:38 Is Japan Still Producing Nephilim?
42:19 Why Did God Create Humanity?
46:09 Are the Nephilim Still Among Us?
53:36 The Ongoing Ritual of Human Sacrifice
59:11 Is There Fossil Evidence of Giants?
1:00:20 Who Is Goliath?
1:09:48 Epstein, AI, and the Destruction of the Earth
1:11:31 When Will Christ Return?
1:19:33 Why Every Civilization Is Centered Around Religion
1:21:40 The Gods of War and Money
1:23:08 How Should Christians Respond to War?
1:30:02 The Failures of Evangelical Christian Leadership
1:31:24 What Does It Mean to Truly Experience God's Work?
1:35:42 The Evils of Pornography
1:43:13 The One Unforgivable Sin
Lee Kuan Yew abolished trial by jury in Singapore after determining that it was too easy for defence lawyers to appeal to racial and religious biases of juries in multicultural Singapore.
He writes in his memoirs how as a young lawyer he was able to get three clients acquitted who he was sure did commit murder. LKY writes that he "worked on the weaknesses of the jury -- their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Muslims guilty of killing in cold blood or in a heat of great passion, religious passion, an RAF officer, his wife and child."
He writes "The judge was thoroughly disgusted. I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I'd discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong.”
Study after study shows that in multi ethnic societies, there is significant in-group bias on juries.
I talked with @jgreenhall about the scaffolding of his worldview.
We discussed the waking-up scenario as a window into consciousness and personal identity, Jordan’s phenomenology of waking and the “latent potential of all possible memory,” the soul as the binding of finite and infinite, my counter-framing of consciousness as a fusion of perception, interoception, and unconscious memory, the infinite as genuinely real, the Platonic triangle as a concrete example of transcendentals that have no particular location in the causal field, Forrest Landry’s distinction between being and existence, knowing with confidence vs. knowing with certainty, Jordan’s basic ontological commitment to realism, the incoherence of simulation theory, my “Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” the incoherence of unmediated access as the meaning of the word reality, Father Stephen DeYoung’s critique of Western substantive essentialism, Bonitta Roy’s idea that reality is shareable and participatory, Michael Levin’s pragmatic epistemology, how purpose collapses reality to a tractable slice, “begottenness” in Christian metaphysics and the generativity of relationships, Jordan’s onto-epistemology as the register before ontology and epistemology are distinguishable, Jordan’s recent adoption of “smorthodox” Christianity, the phenomenology of waking as evidence that space-time is secondary, prioritizing meaningfulness over causation as a metaphysical commitment, Updike as “still alive” in the realization of his work, the Greek preoccupation with legacy and honor after death, Eric Weinstein’s desire for Einsteinian legacy as a category error, love as the real currency of legacy, the Mark Twain reading as an example of a soul genuinely present in a room, my father as an ongoing example of realization twenty-six years after his death, noticing a parent’s turn of phrase in oneself, the sweetness of impermanence, the good vs. abusive father and different relationships to a parent’s memory, values and virtues as real, the distinction between courage and bravery, culture as the progressive discovery and embodiment of virtue space, the crab-in-the-bucket problem, fallenness as local optimization, and much more.
Mason Home Builder is an incredibly hilarious parody account.
While the account posts absolutely absurd takes like this, they really get to the point and describe accurately what people are actually getting when they call the suburban experiment "freedom".
“Reverse causality” is an incredibly hubristic term.
Causality doesn’t operate “in reverse.”
Your hypothesis was backwards.
Your hypothesis is not the center of the universe.
Neither are you.
If your hypothesis is backwards, it isn’t “causality’s” fault.
It’s yours.