It’s not just the oil, and this is kind of the key point. It’s also the defense contracts. SA is a huge buyer of American weapons. So the back door deal making has always been a thing. Selling them arms has always been a thing. There’s actually almost nothing that SA and the US agree on ideologically. Of course Trump inserted his own interests into the picture and found a way to enrich himself, and that is truly a new low, and utterly despicable. But let’s not knock him for giving arms to the Saudis as if that’s some new thing. Look, he’s arming a Chinese ally! I mean, come on.

Kind of ironic too because as evil as they are, SA are absolutely an American ally as well.

Hey this isn’t the YMCA

Yep folks. Filter out the bullshit. 🙄👆

The “French Paradox” also played into this. We love the idea that some group of special people have had all this figured out for centuries and if we just follow their traditional ways, we’ll live forever. But if they happen to exhibit longevity, it’s more often genetics or other factors besides something we desperately want to believe, like booze is healthy. I wonder if the French Paradox was amplified by the oldest person in the world being, for years, a French woman who smoked like a chimney.

If you ignore the fad diets, it’s not that bad. Science can change on specific points over time but it’s been pretty uncontroversial for many decades that a diet of fresh foods with plenty of fruits and vegetables and a moderate intake of meat and fish, with a minimum of sugar and junk food, is good for you.

It’s just that occasionally something comes along that we really want to be true, like wine is healthy or all-meat is actually good because the cavemen did it. When the finding is something we want to be true, we’ll blow a minor, flawed study all out of proportion and keep talking about it years after it’s debunked.

There was a little back and forth between different studies on that which is the way science is supposed to work, but every twist and turn was dragged out and amplified by the fact that we WANT to believe 2 glasses of wine a day is good for us. That kind of finding gets spread far and wide. And when other scientists try to replicate the studies and find they are exaggerated, we give them a hard time for flip flopping.

Also works for “person.” 👍

Here you are, doing the same thing. Ask yourself.

I see brown and tan herringbone with paisley patterns blooming through it.

Exactly one comment earlier, we have you stating your case as a broad generalization:

Lots of homes are *easily* affordable with that income. Buy elsewhere.

Now you want to claim that as long as the 99.99th percentile can satisfy your claim, it’s valid. Who’s moving the goalposts, here?

Seriously. How many ways are there to make an humanoid robot out of stainless steel and aluminium?

They tried AI the nice way and nobody gives a shit about it but billions have been spent already so they are tightening the screws to make you use it. This is late stage fuckery and hopefully the whole thing will collapse soon.

You’re attempting to make a long and carefully formatted post look like a convincing argument, but all you’ve done is cherry pick high wage occupations. You are simply showing again and again that you cannot contend with a topic in terms of aggregate metrics and will do anything to skew the picture to match some picture you have an emotional attachment to.

If we’re going to cherry pick, shit, I earn over $500k in one of these HCOL areas you say are such pressure cookers. My house is nearly paid off. I guess this is a great area for families to move to, right???

I’ll say one thing… I never have to work so hard to justify where I live as you have here.

And the third is broken into two pieces

Because the US health care system already serves the wealthy and abandons the poor, any expensive treatments are seen as just further steps into a Gattaca future of even more dystopian disparity, especially when driven by a rich asshole personally.

Universal negativity is also kind of the norm around here. A lot of folks on Lemmy believe we are slaves sucking Satan’s cock for breakfast, and anything that isn’t a complete burn down of our system and way of life is a negative.

Yeah, that’s closer to the mark. It’s so subtle. Can you call it a window-adjacent seat if it isn’t adjacent to a window? I’m sure a marketer somewhere can find the right weasel-word :D

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they have a standard discount they’ll offer to anyone who complains about this. But if they get dragged into court over it, they’ll fight it in principle.

“Outer seat” is good. Of course I think that after reading this whole article and having all the nuances in my head. Anyone who sees that term in a booking interface will not know what it means.

The reality is that yes they are “against fuselage” seats which almost always means a window, but due to aircraft design, has a small chance of being up against a solid wall. They are saying that “window seat” is a descriptive term but not a guarantee because of this. I’m sure that in most cases where this has ever caused real concern, flight crews were able to reseat people to adjust or airlines compensated the aggrieved flyers or I don’t know people fucking sucked it up and moved on with their lives.