Sounds like that covid bullshit. The reason more people have it is because there have been incredible advances in technology and it’s easier to diagnose as well as more people going to get tested thanks to education.
They need to trade with people for money and food. If their closest neighbor let them trade, I guarantee Cuba would be saying the opposite to stay on the good side of them. But since they can't, and Russia was iced out of the world economy pretty much, of course they'd extend a hand to Cuba, which is similarly iced out. And of course they'd accept for the good of their people. Who knows if they actually care how that war goes, they're just a tiny island nation that wants to be able to eat and survive. We can't blame them for making decisions under this kind of duress.
Even your own article shows how bad faith that argument is, but it's from the US so it makes sense. The US media loves their propaganda. It points out that US laws makes it impossible for a ship to dock at the US for 180 days after docking at Cuba. They regularly fine and sanction foreign countries and foreign companies when dealing with Cubans. A ton of banks have stopped dealing with Cuba because of this. They also prevent US used goods from being traded to Cuba when it is a part of a bigger thing, so if any part of a foreign made product has something from the US, it can't be traded over. This ends up including tons of medical equipment, farming equipment, scientific equipment, etc. There's a bunch of other laws, too. Family members can't even wire over remittances any more without paying tons of money.
Of course they can't force other companies but they make it nearly impossible for companies to trade with the US and Cuba if they want to make a profit. Especially considering the power of the dollar in the US market. That's what makes it a blockade. Saying a bunch of these facts while giving a "false" is extremely bad faith. It's like saying Trump didn't cause January 6th because he didn't tell people directly to riot. It's a very surface reading.
The Cuban government of course isn't perfect, but that doesn't detract from the power the US has on them. Plus, when the Republicans went to protest on January 6th it was against their own government, but that doesn't mean they had a point. Most of the protests were from power failures, long food and medicine lines, and Covid lock downs, which is partly the government's fault and partly the US's for making them a poor country and restricting their ability to get medicine and make food through the sanctions I mentioned above. And partly just Covid's fault, every country dealt with that. But the President went out and talked with them, and the country ended up making some economic reforms recently. That's more than I've seen the US ever do in response to protests lol. If we really want to know if the Cuban government is so terrible, you should support the US lifting the embargo so the government can ruin itself. It obviously hasn't destroyed the government over the last 60 years anyway.
I don't think that strategy for testing is purely a Chinese thing. When my kids were little and before they could read, they did eye tests with those same characters. And I'm in America.
Maynarkh said that Cuba has been under US sanctions, and also that US sanctions started the Japan-US conflict during WWII. Gravitas has misinterpreted it, intentionally or not, for it to mean that US sanctions on Cuba started the Japan-US war.
The person said Cuba being under US sanctions is what caused the Pacific side of WWII. What they were TRYING to say is that Cuba has been under sanctions, and that OTHER, unrelated sanctions were the cause of the Pacific side of WWII; but they used indefinite pronouns and therefor had a confusing sentence.
The joke is about the unintended interpretation of the sentence.
Mmm… sort of, but that telling of the situation also skips over a ton of context.
US sanctions against Imperial Japan were the proximate casus belli for the IJN attack Pearl Harbor and causing the US to actually join the war, but the sanctions were absolutely precipitated by other things Japan was doing in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. The trade sanctions were enacted in more or less direct response to Imperial Japanese military adventurism and rather flagrant violations of the Washington Naval Treaty (though it is definitely fair to say that the force limitations imposed by the treaty were somewhat onerous and biased towards established powers, if considered in a geopolitical vacuum).
Not one downvoter has explained how you can have privately and corporate-owned luxury resorts in a non-capitalist country. Can't imagine why.
Oooh I love this false dichotomy because if every government that allows for any form of corporate owned private property to exist is capitalist then we can ascribe basically all evil to capitalism. Heck even the USSR was capitalist by your logic. Capitalists did the holodomor.
That is in no way the same. Have you even read Capital or the Communist Manifesto?
Getting pissed off at me that private ownership and profit are not things that belong in communism is silly. Based on that argument, the U.S. isn't a socialist country, it's a communist one.
I'm a different person. I'm not pissed, I'm just making casual conversation.
Communism and capitalism as they were described in the literature both died in 93 and 08 respectively.
Just like the current capitalist system in the US cannot function without massive subsidies and bailouts, I'd imagine the current communist systems require private enterprises to keep parts of their system functioning.
Every mode of production contains elements of its former, according to Marx, exactly because we have to understand human development and our current paradigm through historical materialism.
To say that a communist nation cannot contain capitalist components as its non fundamental mode of production is as stupid as saying Britain is not capitalist because they have a king.
That is not in any way the same. Either there are hierarchies of power and the people at the top get rich and corporations make profits or it’s a communist country. You can’t have it both ways no matter how much you want to take the concept of communality from communism.
You need to be able to distinguish between a country's primary mode of production versus the scope of its total. A "perfect" capitalist or communist one will likely never exist, at least not any time soon. You cannot ignore the aspects of the basis on which development happens.
And yet there were plenty of other communist countries in the 20th century that did not have any corporations making profits. Why is Cuba special in this regard?
Well I sure as hell know that corporations and profit don't belong with whatever definition of communism you seem to be suggestion.
The very idea that allowing corporate profits are still communist as long as it's not the primary mode of production is nonsense. If every single thing in Cuba was privatized apart from its tobacco industry, its largest export, would you say it was still a communist country?
I'm also curious how you'll defend Cuba's three largest exports being addictive, carcinogenic substances. And yes, to pre-empt the whataboutism, I know the U.S. exports a whole lot of toxic shit, but we're not talking about the U.S.
I never said anything about Cuba specifically. I made a general remark that an analysis of whether a country is socialist or not has to concern itself with what is the primary mode of production. I also wanted to bring in historical materialism because you seemed to talk about Marx without (seemingly) understanding this very important part of his contributions.
To be clear, my position was, and still is, that I find your analysis faulty, regardless of what I think would be the right conclusion on Cuba being communist.
Optometrists believe that the reason for this is that we’re tending to be inside more than we used to be, rather than going outside as much, so our eyes basically aren’t getting as much exercise in looking at stuff far away.
You mean to tell me, that in this day and age, with half a zillion cars out on the road damn near every day, that people don't go outside as much as they used to? Let alone have to look half a mile down the road to find the exit sign on the highway?..
Oh, I've got myopia, like -5 vision, and yes I was born with it. That's why I ain't buying that whole 'we don't go outside as much' theory for even a second.
I grew up on a 40 acre horse ranch and had to walk about a quarter mile to even catch the school bus, yet couldn't see a pile of horse shit until I accidentally stepped in it.
So still, I ain't buying that whole 'spending more time indoors causes myopia' thing, I was literally born with it.
Yes, you're right. I can't see my own fingerprints (without my glasses), past about 1 foot (~30.5 centimeters) in front of my face.
I didn't even get glasses until I was 8 years old, which basically meant I was running around legally blind until the age of 8, when they finally stopped punishing me for not being able to see shit and actually took me to an optometrist.
There's a difference between seeing your dick versus seeing your pubic hairs clearly. Whether you take my word on it or not, my member is of a decent size, I just can't see the hairs without my glasses or contact lenses.
Did everyone miss my point? I didn't grow up stuck inside so often, I spent a LOT of time outdoors. Hell, the first book I ever read was a survival manual.
I even learned to drive a stick shift at age 7, before I even got glasses. So I still stand by the opinion that indoor vs outdoor environment makes fuckall nothing to do with nearsightedness.
You're either born with it or you aren't. It's all about the shape of the eye.
Do you even know what causes myopia at birth? The eyes aren't properly spherical, they're elongated. This doesn't tend to change all that much over one's lifetime either.
You aren't born with adult sized eyes. Your eyes grow as you grow, and their growth appears to be regulated by how they're used. It's covered in the article, maybe read it?
No shit Watson. It's still all about the shape and proportions of the eye, not the size. Anyone with myopia can literally push their eyes in gently via the eyelids and see a bit better.
Your eyes don't get longer from being indoors, you're either born with longer than normal eyes or you aren't. Some are even born with shorter eyes, called hyperopia (also better known as farsightedness).
And yes, I also have 42 years of actual real life experience with myopia. What the fuck a scientist gonna tell you if they haven't literally lived and experienced bad nearsighted eyes?
In the study, Professor Henneberg and colleagues aimed to investigate the prevalence of persistent median arteries in postnatal humans over the last 250 years and to test the hypothesis that a secular trend of increase in its prevalence has occurred.
I was reading over the paper and found the source of that particular usage:
Furthermore, in a study by Henneberg and George (1995; Am J Phys Anthropol 96, 329–334), has suggested that increasing prevalence of the median artery during the 20th century was a ‘possible secular trend’.
LOL. I kinda want to follow that citation for the full quote.
Edit: I found the original source that gives some further context:
The occurrence in historical times of changes in human body size and in the timing of events in postnatal development, such as, for instance, sexual maturation, is well known and documented. Such changes occurring from century to century or decade to decade are known as "secular trends."
You won’t see evolutionary changes in only 2 generations. That’s not how evolution works. Also you’re assuming because more humans are born with x thing, it’s an evolutionary change. Again that’s not how evolution works.
People with worse vision still have a higher chance to die due to poor vision related deaths, (for example not seeing a car coming) than people with perfect eyesight. Not everyone with bad eyesight wears glasses.
Lithium batteries are old news and this market is going to crash. China is already selling two EVs using sodium ion batteries. It's only a matter of time before such technology can be used at smaller scales.
China is already selling two EVs using sodium ion batteries.
Sodium ion batteries won't be a general drop-in substitute in vehicles for lithium.
It might be possible to use sodium-ion batteries in place of some not-energy-density critical lithium-ion applications (the way lead-acid is currently used for some lithium-ion applications), and that'd free up some materials for EV use.
However, sodium and lithium atoms have differences, two of which are relevant for battery performance. The first difference is in the so-called redox potential, which characterizes the tendency for an atom or molecule to gain or lose electrons in a chemical reaction. The redox potential of sodium is 2.71 V, about 10% lower than that of lithium, which means sodium-ion batteries supply less energy—for each ion that arrives in the cathode—than lithium-ion batteries. The second difference is that the mass of sodium is 3 times that of lithium.
Together these differences result in an energy density for sodium-ion batteries that is at least 30% lower than that of lithium-ion batteries [1]. When considering electric vehicle applications, this lower energy density means that a person can’t drive as far with a sodium-ion battery as with a similarly sized lithium-ion battery. In terms of this driving range, “sodium can’t beat lithium,” Tarascon says.
In time, sodium-ion batteries will improve, but their driving range will never surpass the top-of-the-line lithium-ion batteries, Tarascon says. He imagines instead that sodium-ion technology will fill specific niches, such as batteries for smaller, single-person electric vehicles or for vehicles that have a range of only 30–50 miles (50–80 km). Weil agrees, but he says that society may have to change the way it views automobiles. “We cannot only point to the technology developers and say, ‘We need more efficiency.’ It’s even more important to stress that we need more ‘sufficiency,’ which is people being satisfied with a small car,” he says.
english.elpais.com
Hot