Nah, that stuff is made from soft wheat, not durum. I’m not in the USA, it was early evening when I wrote that comment ;)

Wtf is wrong with that “spaghetti”? Why is it that colour? Is that actually some kind of east Asian noodle?

That should obviously be help!! like with sudo

Without units that’s not really clear, could be depth in km

You think normal people are packing papers to read?

The top right corner is supercritical fluid, which is correct, it’s not the same as plasma, which doesn’t really fit neatly on a pressure/temperature phase diagram.

Suits are to keep you safe, glove boxes are to keep the things inside them safe. Also never seen them used together though, you’re right about that.

Can you fiddle up a weird black screen with lots of $ and # symbols? Yes, its a Unix and its probably Linux.

You heard it here first folks, windows is a Unix and probably Linux!

Can you point to any period in history in which empires were just chill and sung kumbaya all day long, though?

Ok, you just keep doubling down on straw men and not actually responding to any points made, so I guess we’re done here.

To be blunt, have you? If you had you would know that even among empires not every one behaved with the same level of bloodthirstiness every time. The leap from “people have been violent forever” to “therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities” is totally unsubstantiated.

Sure, what they can get away with to achieve their goals is one factor in how countries behave. But it is totally absurd to suggest that a country’s culture would have no impact on the approach they take to foreign affairs. It has dramatic impacts on all their other laws and ways of doing things, by what possible crazy coincidence would foreign policy always be totally identical regardless of culture?

So yeah, things would be different. Way back in this discussion you snarkily characterised a straw man arguing that things would be perfect and people singing kumbaya, but nobody (here arguing against you in this thread) thinks that. This meme is about dropping bombs. We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach. The USA absolutely does prefer to take that approach, even when other options would be more successful.

What is your idea that they “can’t get away with dropping bombs” based on? They absolutely could, and they still don’t do it. What it’s based on is that you assume they would if they could, that’s projection, because clearly you like the idea of bombing people for profit.

That’s just a thing you made up to justify not feeling bad, there is no reason to believe that anyone else would act the same way.

Can you be more clear in your question?

No, the arms manufacturers just don’t have the same level of influence over the government and armed forces that they do in America, and the people in the government who decide whether to drop bombs won’t personally get rich if they buy more bombs.

That isn’t something unique to China btw but basically almost every country except USA and a few others.

Idk, they probably have had the opportunity sometimes, but they don’t have the same military industrial complex as the USA pushing for it at every chance. So the cost benefit analysis is different. Quite often it doesn’t benefit “the USA” as much as a few specific people within, and that mechanic doesn’t exist in the same way for China.

*structural biologists

The crystallographer is sitting in the beamline control room at the synchrotron swearing about how this person mounts their crystals right against the metal pin

This is satire for sure

Ehhh that’s likely enough, but Microsoft is also just shit at fixing things

Putin maybe, Kim-Jong definitely not. Just Meta’s net profit (let well alone revenue) is well over NK’s entire GDP. Even if he literally owned the entire country which he certainly does not, he wouldn’t be nearly as wealthy as Musk or Bezos.

Those few top people are assholes who love the enormous power they wield over PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty, and they are usually editors on those big name journals. Unlike the people who actually do the work, they are getting paid from this system.