No Stupid Questions

A study was conducted that revealed that once a COVID vaccine was available, Republicans were more likely to die than Democrats:

Republicans' excess death rate spiked after COVID-19 vaccines arrived, a study says

Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic

"This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats."

Do you think this will have a significant impact on the election results in states like Ohio and Florida?

I have never heard of Jill Stein until just a few months ago when I saw some article about her on the Lemmy homepage. Then I saw more and more articles about her. However, I don't really know why the media is paying so much attention to her. She is just a third party candidate, right? There are other third party candidates that aren't constantly popping up in the news. So why Jill Stein? I hear its something to do with Russia and a general sense of her goal being to take votes away from Kamala.

It seems deliberately confusing to me since there is no fundamental difference between voting now and voting on the day of the deadline, but the way it's discussed and referred to seems to imply that the correct day to vote would be waiting until the last minute instead of voting just getting it out of the way weeks ahead of time.

Say I go to a restaurant and find a hair in my food. Are there any actual health risks?

Does it make a difference if I:

• Find it in the dish, remove it, and keep eating
• Take a bite, find it in my mouth, and remove it
• Ingest it

This was inspired by a recent news story about a certain authoritarian butthole cosplaying as a food service worker. I did try to look it up (er, search it up?), but the top hits were lengthy meandering articles, or totally off-topic stuff like foods to prevent hair loss. So naturally I gave up and opted to consult the hive mind instead.

I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.

Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, "immature" for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?

If water flowing over continents in rivers is what concentrates salt in our ocean, would a planet that has always been covered in water just be freshwater? The water is just sitting there, not eroding through salts.

Basically, as I understand it, when you eat food it goes through your stomach and then it travels through your bowels where the nutrients and water get gradually absorbed along the way. Coffee, as I understand it, stimulates the muscles in the bowels and causes the contents to move through the intestines more quickly. So if drinking coffee means that food will spend less time in the intestines, does that mean that less nutrients will be absorbed from the food than if no coffee was consumed?

For example if I have a setup like:

 alias llaa = pwd && ll'''

Will the second command work, or would I have to set it up in a more verbose manner (like ```alias llaa = pwd && ls -la```)

Have you noticed? The "realistic" or "realism" AI results for man/woman have apparent big heads (mostly even huge) compared to their own bodies. It's like the camera is close to the face. Even the results in Google Search have such phenomena. The obvious ones are for Asian women. Why as such for perhaps even the different AI's, why the same pattern from them?

Try searching for such now, try something like: "realistic AI Asian woman", and you'll even see ones with actual HUGE heads, most especially the "realistic" ones. Different AI programs and yet the same huge head pattern from them?

Any actual AI users, could you please share your experience too? Thanks in advance for any enlightenment.

Are they breaking Widevine? Are they circumventing it? If the end result is an analog audio signal and (a ton of) RBG on/off signals - why can't I as a normal consumer capture it using some store bought gyzmo?

Native English speakers... I hear the order of adjectives is important, and getting this wrong is jarring to read.

I'm making a pitch to upper management about building a "modular and versatile thingamawidget". Or is it "versatile and modular thingamawidget"?

If it doesn't matter, I think I'll go for the latter, as it abbreviates to something easily pronouncable without sounding like a paramilitary group or a ride sharing business.

I think he'd be great in the cabinet, although I know in the past he said he's not interested in that (president or bust).

*Can someone explain the downvotes?

I don't expect to get one definite answer here, but Google can't give me one either. Some websites say they're your second cousin, and others say they're your first cousin once removed. I'm trying to figure out some family tree stuff so I need to know the difference between the (groups of) terms.

I am traveling from the UK to USA for a few months, my first stop being New York City for a few weeks over Christmas and New Years.

Generally speaking, what is the weather like? What would be appropriate clothing? I think it snows often, so I was assuming some waterproof shoes / boots would be sensible at least.

As in, how do you get better outside of just doing debate, since coordinating practice takes time with the group and you can't do it a lot due to time restraints. That and I don't think I can do it in a manner frequent enough, and focused enough. I assume you just do drills with your role? If so, what would be best?

For context, I got accepted as a 1st speaker for a college debate event in Asian parlament format. Experience wise, I am a beginner. Though I have done adjudications and had some practice with a newly formed club in the last year of high school, it was only isolated to that. No competitions with other schools or anything. Which is why I'm definitely not confident I can match a teammate of mine which has been doing debate for years and got to international level (to my knowledge). I'm not so much worried about my opponents per se, more so just that I don't want to hold my teammate back since as the 1st speaker, you have to set them up. I at least wanna do a somewhat decent job so that they can - to be blunt - "carry" us without worry.

Right now, I've just been dabbling with using ChatGPT as a sort of coach/adjudicator and I think it's pretty effective? If there are other methods I can do alone/in downtime/outside group practice, I would like to try them at least given the short time left until the event.

Sorry if this ended up a bit ramble-y, this was done on a whim and close to midnight, but yeah.

I took the bus like usual today and I was sitting on a side seat. Two cute women enter it and since they couldn't find a seat, they stood next to me. They were engrossed in their conversation so I didnt think much when one of them started leaning on me. But she didnt stop leaning on me, this went on for the next 10 mins. I could feel her hips and stomach on my side.

I was trying to look at my phone to distract myself but I popped a boner. It was very awkward as I couldn't go anywhere and I was starting to panic. I was looking around to see if anyone noticed by thankfully no one did. But wtf bruh. The bus was kinda crowded but she had more than enough space to stand properly.

I got off the bus and holy shit, I felt like a million bucks. I never touched a women or even held hands with one so this was new. This was probably the best day in a long time for me. My depression actually got better for now. Is my reaction weird/creepy?

I have an older phone I can't let break so this is coming from a place of genuine concern heh, don't know if that would constitute a deadly shock to its system

greetings americans, it an honest question.
Outside of america i constantly see, especially recently as your elections are coming up that..well, it looks like a clownshow?

Your recent two contenders where a hugely dept orange clown who can barely keep a coherent thought advertising a product in the whitehows, who had to have his name constantly mention when being talked to or he will be disinterested.
The other one was a senile old fossil who couldnt even say a single sentence without his dementia kicking in.

Now you have trump again as a runner up and he seems so openly incompetently corrupt its almost funny, than we have the senile man who (to my extremely limited knowledge) got replaced by this kamala woman because he was too old, said woman seems to be at least present in mind and appears to see trump as what he really is, a manchild (the famous clip of her basically laguhing at him)

Like, are outside views are just so vehemently skewed by news, people and the like? Or am i just grossly misinformed?

I'm not really looking to hear from people who don't think this way, with answers like "insecurity", "toxic masculinity", etc. I want to hear answers from men who really detest men who sit to pee.

Follow-up questions:

• when you have to piss while shitting, do you stand up turn around and piss on your shit and then sit back down to finish shitting?
• are you ever groggy in the morning?
• how clean is your toilet and surrounding floor, and whose job is cleaning it?
• what are your true passions in life?

its so ubiquitous it feels like it was a requirement..

What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?

I've been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I'd like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.