Ok, I’ve done some double checking: The Bantu expansion is approximately what I thought it was. I believe the language group I was thinking about that survived the Bantu expansion was the Khoisan.

My (very coarse) knowledge of this comes from a mixture of reading Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) and from following it up with some Wikipedia. In short: The genetic makeup in a lot of the world is relatively dominated by the groups that were the first to adopt agriculture in their respective regions. Before the Bantu expansion, phenotypes south of Sahara were more varied, just like the phenotypes in the Americas were more varied before the corresponding “European expansion”, or the equivalent expansion that happened in South-East Asia (I don’t remember which society stood behind that one).

According to Diamond, we can trace a lot of (most?) surviving human phenotypes and languages back to relatively few societies, which after adopting agriculture, more or less wiped out / displaced neighbouring cultures due to increased resistance to a lot of infectious diseases and massively increased food production / need for land. This mostly happened less than 10 000 years ago, i.e. far too recently for natural selection to have a major impact on things like skin colour, hair type, height, facial features, etc. afterwards.

So: While major trends in phenotypes are of course a result of natural selection / evolutionary pressure in specific regions (resistance to skin cancer / sunburn vs. vitamin D production, or cooling down more efficiently with a wider nose vs. retaining heat with a slimmer one, or having an eye-shape that lets in more light vs. provides more shade), a lot of what we see today is simply a result of what phenotype the first group a given region that adopted agriculture had. This means that looking at the dominant phenotype in a region today will not necessarily give a good impression of what phenotype that is “optimally designed” to survive in the conditions of that region.

I seem to remember that the majority traits south of Sahara (black/very dark skin, and curly hair) can be traced back to something called the “great Bantu expansion”, which was essentially the result of a group of people with these traits developing agriculture and wiping out most other peoples south of Sahara, much like the Europeans did to the Americas.

Some cultures south of Sahara did survive, which can be seen both genetically, and in some languages that are completely from other languages in the area (I believe the family of languages with “clicking” sounds is an example).

I’m on my phone now, but I’ll have a double check and come back.

If there’s any American reading this: Please vote. The world needs you and all your friends to vote. I’m begging you, please get out and vote.

I didn’t say that. I’m pointing out that we spent shitloads of money that could have gone to out own schools and healthcare, and a dozens of young soldiers lives (I’m not American), and we were clearly told by both the local population and a bunch of other countries to fuck off.

So yes. I’ll say it. Fuck em. We don’t owe them shit. We came down there, suppressed the Taliban, built s schools and hospitals, and secured elections, and when we left, the Afghan army, which we had trained and supplied, folded immediately.

We can’t be held responsible for them not revolting against a suppressive regime. We gave them all the tools to keep the taliban out, but they chose to fold. That’s on them.

It’s tragic, but that’s how it is. If they’re not willing to fight for their own rights, they won’t get to enjoy them.

I’ve heard this explanation before as well, that essentially nobody felt any loyalty to the national government. You could kind of tell why when the whole government just evacuated the country when the west left.

Are you suggesting that a new coalition goes back to Afghanistan to throw out the Taliban again? Remember how popular that was last time?

It just doesn’t stop baffling me how quickly the Afghan army folded to these people and accepted this as their future… just tragic all around

I’ve been wondering for a while: What is preventing a bunch of not-drowning-in-corruption countries from just not recognising FIFA any more, saying they’re sick of the blatant corruption, and starting their own international association? I would think you could get a lot of the major football nations to support something like that, because it looks like it’s mostly Quatar, Saudi-Arabia and the likes which benefit from the current system…

I mean, it’s no secret that a bunch of countries are running massive disinformation campaigns in order to divide the populations of western countries. Attempting to destabilise another country by propping up certain political factions is a tactic that has been employed across the world for at least the past century (see: Lenin, and how he got in power).

Of course, we are responsible for ensuring that we do not become fascist states, but acting like theres no outside influence propping up the fascists is naive at best.

I guess, but the again, pretty much any sentient creature could tell you that drinking the marshy water with dead stuff in it is a bad idea. That’s a pretty basic survival instinct that I think we had figured out well before we had modern science.

I feel like it has something to do with the fact that there’s less content, so when you post something, it’s actually going to be seen by people.

I didn’t post or comment anything the last couple years on Reddit, largely because it increasingly felt like shouting into the void.

This is so facinating! I remember hearing about this around 2016 when they did excavations, but didn’t know they found the guy already in the 1930s. It’s just awesome that the story of how this person died has survived a thousand years through the sagas.

I do think it’s a bit weird that the article focuses on whether he had some disease though- obviously throwing a dead person in the well is going to make the water undrinkable, regardless of whether said person was sick when they died…

I am/was in the same boat as you: For a long time, I just didn’t care that I was giving away a bunch of information in return for convenience, and didn’t get why people cared so much.

I don’t really know what triggered it, but at some point I became painfully aware that the only goal these companies have is to squeeze every possible penny out of selling me. I started noticing that the stuff they ask you to confirm is 95% stuff they want because they can sell it, or use it to get you hooked to their service, and 5% (at best) stuff they need to make the service good for you.

This triggered a change in my perspective: Now it pretty much makes me sick to my stomach to think about all the companies that are drooling over me, trying to make a buck by getting me to click something I’m not actually interested in, or don’t actually need.

These people have a vested interest in manipulating me, and by giving them my data, I’m giving them the tools to do it. I don’t want to be manipulated or sold as a product: That’s what made me start caring about protecting my data.

This will sound dumb, but I’m saying it sincerely.

I’ve had similar issues (without getting into details), but what worked for me was getting outside a couple times a week. By that I mean bringing a tent or hammock + tarp and sleeping outside a couple nights a week on workdays.

To be specific: I sleep outside Monday-Tuesday and Wednesday-Thursday. On those days I also make my dinner at my campsite. What I’ve found is that my brain goes into a much more “primal” state of “monke outside in cold, monke get shit done”, and that it propagates into my day and week.

The barrier to this is of course actually going outside, but I’ve been able to get to a place where I have a “deal with myself” about those two nights a week. I always have my pack ready, so it’s just about grabbing it and heading out- I think that’s key.

I’m not saying this is a solution for everyone, but it’s done wonders for me. As of now, I get restless and feel bad if I’m in a situation where I can’t get outside at least once a week. It brings me a peace of mind and will to get stuff done that nothing else can.

I’ve never had an issue with this before, and as of now, my filter is catching most of these mails, so in that sense it’s not too bad. Unless the topic of the phishing attempts suddenly changes completely, in which case I’ll have to start building the filter again…

Anyway: The scam they’re running is relatively specific (a specific banking-thing that pretty much everyone in my country uses, written in not-English, probably LLM generated). Do you know if there’s any way I could alert my email-provider about this? I can imagine it’s being sent to quite a few people, and should be relatively easy for someone higher up the chain, with more sophisticated tools, to filter out.

Since you chose to point it out: My reason is that I regularly need to be able to log into things on a non-personal machine, sometimes without access to my phone. So no, a password manager for all my accounts is out of the picture. I either write stuff down, remember it, or - sometimes - forget it and need to reset my password.

Thanks! I’ll definitely look into that, though the only issue I can imagine is keeping track of which email that goes to which service (I’m one of those kinds of people that uses “Forgot my password” effectively as a password manager, don’t hate me for it, I have reasons).

Thanks! There was nothing there, so it may be from an older breach like you suggested :/

Holy shit! It looks like a bunch of “gangs” (more like militias) are successfully extorting the entire country…

I would say “debunked” in the sense that quantum mechanics correctly predicts phenomena that don’t exist in classical physics, and relies on the idea that quantum particles obey a probability distribution, rather than deterministic mechanics.

Quantum mechanics appears to work so well for these phenomena compared to deterministic mechanics that it’s tempting to say that the actual universe is in fact governed by probabilities rather than determinism.

I would argue that all physical models of the universe are just that: Models. We can get asymptotically closer to a perfect description of the universe, but no model can ever tell us the true nature of the underlying system it is describing, just be an arbitrarily good description of it.