The primary reason an MRI is expensive to run is that it has this magnetic field that must be maintained. This is a cost that is irrespective of whether they are running a scan.

So if you have an MRI for small animals and it’s not being used, you might use it for a hamster.

Really, there’s nothing specifically wrong with having a low birth rate. On a large scale, we have an overpopulation problem, and there’s not really a negative for each person having fewer children. Of course, smarter people will decide to have fewer kids. But eventually, it will all balance out.

This idea is a complete non-starter from a practical standpoint. Parents would complain about it either way. Either they wouldn’t want girls in school early or they’d want boys in school early, too.

It’s just much easier to treat children all the same.

Also, I personally think this plan would backfire. Girls graduating wouldn’t want to have to be adults earlier than boys, so they’d stay in school longer. And from what I’ve heard, the most reliable way to reduce birth rates is to educate women more.

I think everyone also knows how to ethically increase the birth rate. Make having children easy and affordable. Lots of government assistance. Make sure everybody has access to cheap or free childcare.

And there’s also the generational problems. Young adults can see the problems that the previous generations caused. You can’t go back in time to fix those. It will be expensive to change this sort of thing.

But quick fixes aren’t going to change the underlying problems.

Yeah, it was almost wasted hitting some shitty pavement and causing even more of a heat island problem in this city. But instead, it not only gets the honor of interacting with me, it even serves a useful biological purpose.

LAKE 5: I’ll be Gichi-gami

Also, strange to bring up name order at all when it has nothing to do with the joke they presented.

It makes me wonder if they badly retold a joke they heard where the original punchline was that his name was Mario Itsumi.

In Japan, Itsumi is actually a common name, either as a family name or as a girl’s given name.

Passenger compartment is even more wrong than glove box, though, isn’t it?

That compartment is used by the driver. I’ve never seen a passenger use it. And obviously, the driver doesn’t keep passengers in that compartment.

It’s got nothing to do with passengers, other than being on the passenger’s side. And if it’s really just because it’s on the passenger’s side, “passenger compartment” is an unusual way to say that in English. It sounds like what you’d call the main cabin.

On the other hand, if you have gloves that you keep in the car, at least it’s possible to keep them in that compartment.

The Vatican said Pope Francis had approved the document, which also reaffirms its condemnation of surrogacy, saying the practice represents “a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child”.

“A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract,” the document says. “Every human life, beginning with that of the unborn child in its mother’s womb, cannot be suppressed, nor become an object of commodity.”

The ethical problems with surrogacy are real, but they’re not about the child. They’re about income inequality and putting adult women through a physically traumatic, dangerous, and possibly life-changing experience for money. If we were able to use artificial wombs for “surrogacy” (I know, it’s technically not the same thing), I think people would see it as nothing but a new type of fertility medicine.

The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.

Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.

Those splice type of cheats require a highly skilled player who can play well for short amounts of time.

They literally have this tag No2NatoNo2War. “No to NATO” right when Russia is invading Ukraine and threatening nearby NATO members? They’re giving their entire game away.

Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.

Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.

At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.

All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.

Yes, why is it that religious people aren’t completely logical?

I wouldn’t even try to defend OP, but I once heard someone say that if you have more than four apples, then it is also definitely true that you have four apples.

This is an old tactic, and it’s been used by the oil industry before.

Plastics are polluting our environment? “It’s not the industry’s fault. It’s because individuals litter and don’t recycle. No need to have the government regulate the industry.”

If they can convince people that it’s their fault, then there is no need for industry to change.

I would say that he’s probably mostly in touch with reality. He just doesn’t care that he’s hurting people and destroying the planet because he personally profits from it.

The thing about a cat, it’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.

Cats have very expressive colorful eyes. “Lifeless black doll’s eyes,” would be a better description of rabbit eyes.

A while ago, there was a story about a man who made pretty good money from filing lawsuits against companies that ignored his do-not-call requests. If the laws still allow it, it might be a good way to make them stop.

I believe that all he had to do was to keep notes about the businesses and numbers that called him and when he asked them to add him to their do-not-call lists.

My computer is good enough to run any games I want to play, even recently released FPS types of games at reasonably high settings. Still not good enough for Win11. My weak-ass tablet, though, was upgraded straight away.

Are new instances automatically federated? If not, then it seems like making an instance, then hosting content enough to be federated, would be an awful waste of time and money, as I’d expect an instance like that would be quickly defederated.