I’ve been looking at this data for reference:

https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/2021_anti-doping_testing_figures_en.pdf

Where do you get your claims?

Either way, as another guy pointed out US athletes have a really quite absurdly high rate of TUEs. Maybe that’s just because the average American is unhealthy, maybe that’s just because the US healthcare system catches more of those things, but it’s still odd that those athletes coincidentally take performance-enhancing drugs as medication for their medical condition. It’s also odd how low the TUE rate is in other countries in comparison - WADA seems more willing to approve requests from the US, which maybe explains part of the discrepancy.

Flagrant violation of the rules knowing that the US national agencies won’t give a fuck. The rules themselves might be questionable (but really, cannabinoids are still illegal in most of the world…), but it demonstrates that US athletes feel like they can basically ignore the rules because nobody will enforce them.

Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.

The US just can’t accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn’t biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/

But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there’s no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn’t a system to encourage it).

Default incoming?

Ok but they’re so cute it’s amazing

no, clearly it must have been a 50kg warhead

people have no grasp on the scale of high explosives and it shows

Exit polls run by US actors and by the opposition

Ah yes, my favourite. It’s been a while since we had a good old colour revolution. The CIA’s getting their mojo back.

Increased use of Mandarin, however, obviously infringes of Chinese minority rights.

Edit: just to be clear, many Chinese dialects have a lower lexical similarity than European languages. The standardization of Mandarin in education has had impacts on these dialects as well.

BYD already has plants in Canada. I’d really appreciate if they just expanded their Canadian footprint - good Canadian jobs, cheap EVs, win-win-win.

China eats more poultry and fish. This was bound to happen. Poultry and fish are very calorie-efficient sources of protein.

60 million people is almost no one?

Geez it’s like you people want poor people to stay poor. There’s more than enough capacity for solar deployments in the nations East - it’s explicit policy that’s put deployments further West. Beijing is happy to build some UHV lines if it means that prosperity can be driven into the West - it’s the same argument as for the HSR line to Lanzhou and then to Urumqi. It’s the same argument as for the HSR line to Hohhot and the HrSR from Chengdu to Lhasa. Beijing knows that these infrastructure projects are inefficient, but Beijing is more concerned with equity of growth than the growth itself - they’d rather see 10% growth in the West and 3% growth in the East for 5% growth nationally than 6% growth nationally, but coming entirely from already established tier 1 population centers.

It’s not only mutual prosperity, but also an effort to reduce internal migration towards tier 1 cities.

The lack of promises with regards to abortion and same-sex marriage is huge. It’s a colossal shift. Trump has always been more of a traditional Jeffersonian Republican than a Federalist - he’s in favour of shifting power from the federal government to the states. This is an increasing indicator that the states will be what decides on these social topics, not the feds.

That also explains why he’s getting so much funding and support from the elite in Silicon Valley - they would like nothing more than for California to decide legislation rather than DC.

It’s increasingly apparent that Trump views the role of the federal government as an arbiter of the economy and the role of the United States (as a concept) as a way of unifying the disparate interests of different states with regards to foreign policy. By gutting federal agencies, the only logical result is pushing power down to the individual states.

This is a huge paradigm shift. The Republican party went from being an evangelical Christian, tax-cut whackoparty into…

well, without the platform, nobody knows.

The new platform softened language on abortion, excised old language referring obliquely to gay conversion therapy and culled a section about reducing a national debt that Mr. Trump had increased by nearly $8 trillion during his term in office.

Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone. He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler — and, in some cases, vaguer. He was especially focused on the language about abortion, which he recognized was a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He wanted nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to attack him, and he made clear to aides that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives, for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority.

Mr. Trump also stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation: “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage.”

One person involved in the process recalled Mr. Trump saying privately: “Sanctity of marriage. Don’t define it.”

Do you see the shit going on in the Yuan? The DPP is corrupt and sabotaging Taiwan’s economic growth for no good reason.

Young people want money. A nice house, good food, travel. It’s not that complicated.

Gansu, the poorest province in China, a province where “almost no one is living.” Qinghai, Xinjiang… Same story. Together, they have almost 60 million people. Many of them are minorities with historically poor job prospects due to their distance from economic centers.

By building energy installations in the middle of the country, they’re providing jobs to a group that’s been left behind by the rapid industrialization of the country’s East. Providing them with a surplus of electricity. Driving investment in the region. Moreover, this group of people is more than the population of New York and Texas… Combined.

How about you take your racism and your classism and shove it up your ass?

These are factories in the US. The worst case is, the US seizes and nationalizes them. Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Heavily subsidized supply chains”

Let’s just call it what it is: economies of scale. China makes up 80% of the polysilicon market. The US? Barely 5%. Scale is the strongest subsidy of them all.

Taiwan’s current government is incredibly pro-US. Trump understands that the DPP’s days are numbered given the rise of the KMT/TPP (which only lost the election because of a last second collapse of coalition). Taiwan’s government is pro-US in spite of the public’s interest, not because of it.

After all, Taiwan’s trade with the mainland and Hong Kong make up almost 50% of all exports. The bulk of this is in basic goods across the Taiwanese economy, not the product of one company.

In the past, Taiwan’s frigid relations with the mainland were due to sour memories (losing the civil war, getting kicked out, etc.) Today? Young people just want a prosperous life, and China is absurdly prosperous - especially for young engineers in tech. The US can either recognize that fact, or drag another country into war.

It’s pretty funny when foreigners care more about your own sovereignty.

Does it sound like a suppressed .22 to anyone else?