The problem is that it’s easy for the interested parties to equate it to antisemitism when intermixed with legitimate protest of Israel’s horrendous actions are actual antisemites coopting the conversation for their own purposes. Antisemitism is at it’s highest point in my entire lifetime. Things to note: Muslim Israelis (about 20% of their population) support Israel’s wartime actions at about the same rate as Jewish Israelis. Also, the language used in opposition to, or in support of, Israel in this conflict is different than in comparable one sided wars.

To be clear I want to reiterate that i think what Israel is doing is undeniably awful, but I think antisemitism, and anti Muslim sentiments, color how people interpret and talk about what is happening irrespective of government officials agendas. It’s absolutely part of the conversation whether we like it or not, and we have to navigate that as part of the larger conversation. This isn’t to say I don’t agree with you, it is bullshit to just paint everything as antisemitism.

Presuming of course that they absolutely weren’t going to replace those microscopes without that endowment.

In many, if not most, cases there would never be room in a budget for an electron microscope at your average mid sized or small school. Keep in mind we’re talking about a million+ dollar expenditure.

In many cases improvements like a building or an electron microscope absolutely hinge almost entirely on donations, that’s why they are so attractive to a donor. They can make real lasting improvements to a college or university that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Even the endowed scholarships that go to assist with tuition are never as big as people think. If you have a $100,000 endowed scholarship. The school is likely only giving $4,500 of that out each year so they can grow the endowment at the same rate they give out money, thereby ensuring future students get more help.

I’ll paraphrase a real world example. School X has a $100 million dollar endowment, with $65 million going to endowed scholarships, that’s only ~$3 million a year for tuition relief. That same school is looking at a $45 million a year budget. Certainly they could chose to spend down their endowment and give their students 2 years of free school… And then what? Pass on the 3 million a year budget shortfall to future students?

I work in higher Ed, I agree the system is broken, but most schools endowments come no where near being able to give free tuition.

Adobe Scan works as good as a scanner if you use their cropping system to square up the page afterwards.

Most donations are restricted to the purpose of the donation. You’d need to know how much of the endowment is for scholarships. Sometimes schools will have an immense amount of money, but can’t actually lower tuition because the money is tied up in other things. If I give money for an endowment that supports future replacement of electron microscopes, that does fuck all for your tuition.

You’re worried about kids seeing a nipple while they watch a streamer turn their enemy into a bloody mess. If we can accept kids seeing constant violence in their media, I really don’t think nudity is a big deal. We have our priorities all messed up.

Also remove the restrictions on multi use zoning. Housing scarcity is entirely artificial in most locations. If the pressure valve was released prices would stabilize.

My parents were both vaccine skeptics. Covid, and all of public consciousness and education about vaccines, convinced them both that vaccines are important. They got the shot and every booster available. Contrary to the common stereotype of vaccine skeptics, they are both highly educated successful people and when presented with solid evidence that their beliefs were moronic, they changed their thinking. It’s not helpful to be so cynical, because people do change. I see people change their minds about things all of the time. Sometimes for the better and sometimes worse. As long as we remain cynical and unmotivated, the morons win.

I’ve known people, myself included, that have had negative health impacts from coffee, so that could be biasing my perspective. My father nearly died from heart complications after coffee, I bleed at the exit 100% of the time I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I can’t drink it. There’s probably something genetic that makes my line intolerant. I know people that end up in a migraine caffeine withdrawal cycle on a regular basis. Obviously these are person specific, so you really just need to know your body and act accordingly.

I was going to link the same wiki to argue the opposite. Twice as much as tiny is still small. What that wiki article shows to me is that tobacco use is way way down, the 12th country on that list only has double the tobacco use of the US. Considering 60 years ago about half of adults smoked in the westernized world it’s way down and it’s been on a constant decline. Several European countries are only marginally higher than the US and ~4 are lower.

Though I must admit, looking at more data, it’s still higher than I would have guessed, about 12% in the USA when I would have guessed 5%. I live in a city.

I mean lets not pretend it’s risk free, it raises blood pressure, causes headaches, can trigger arrhythmia in those at risk, etc. As far as drugs go it is probably the least risky, but it’s not like it comes with zero health impacts.

I think people want to do things they are not allowed to. They will go through the effort to find a way. In a lot of states that legalized Marijuana, its use went down after legalization. Once it was normalized, some people lost interest. I think the opposite happens when you make it illegal, you’re basically making it cool again. This isn’t just drug use, it’s with a lot of things, if you forbid it, people will suddenly want that thing more than they did before. Religion comes to mind. Authoritarian countries that want to stamp out a religion or all religion often cause a religious resurgence. There’s nothing quite like being told you can’t do something to make you want to do it or visa versa. People are naturally oppositional.

I keep hearing this and yet when I’m in Europe the amount of people smoking seems to go from tiny to slightly less tiny. Sure there are more smokers, but it’s not a significant portion of the population anymore in most places. I just traveled all over France, which I thought was famous for being a smoking country and I noticed how seldom I was even around a smoker. Outside of Belarus  I don’t think smoking is even that significant anymore in Europe.

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Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.

The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.

I own a gasoline car. I was being too flippant. I would point out that our car centric culture is inefficient no matter how you swing it. I agree it’s a part of solving climate change, but cars of any type are still a problem, we need to massively overhaul our urban transit and get away from cars in urban areas.

In the end all transit only accounts for 15% of the overall problem. Our spread out infrastructure caused by car convenience has many other negative externalities though, like the increased need to maintain more roads, electric loss over longer distribution, heating and cooling in large single family homes made possible by cars bringing you to your job while living way out in the suburbs (arguably way more serious than the cars themselves), etc. The suburban experiment was an environmental disaster, and I say this as someone that lives in a large house in the suburbs currently pumping out AC, so I’m not judging.

But plugging in your personal tank isn’t really solving the problem. It’s just ignoring it. Cars are the problem no matter the fuel source, because of the impact they have had on how we spread out and grow our consumption… We need multi use zoning, dozens of train lines in every city, bike infrastructure, work at home, massive reduction in fossil fuel based power plants… A reordering of society around alternatives to spreading out, a massive worldwide effort of urban densification. As well as a massive effort to hold corporations accountable for their energy use as well. That and we need to stop having so many fucking kids, the world can’t support this level of consumption forever.