Who is Rand Paul?

"Given the severity of what we’ve already seen and the uncertainty of where we might be headed, the prudent approach is most definitely not to wait to sharpen our estimates. "

I think I'm spending too much time on Reddit. I watched the video and I was like any second now... something is going to happen.... any second now... Omg, the waiting is killing me!

And, like the title clearly explained, it was all about "Just a sand lizard in Black Forest, Germany".

>the California-based business only made a fraction of the 17,000 generators it claimed to have built, and paid back old investors with new investors' money.

I have some uncles that use the same stupid scheme. Of course, at a waaaay lower level. They never have money so they borrow from friends and family and give the money back, you guessed it by borrowing from other friends and family.

Rolex says that its watches “are known to retain and/or increase in value [after purchase],” making the purchase of a new or “a pre-owned/vintage Rolex watch highly regarded in the watch industry as a smart and reliable investment”. I wouldn't say reliable investment, it depends. But sure Rolex is made of expensive materials, and I think that's why when you sell even an old one, it still be considered very valuable.

>We can no longer pretend that Google is a positive force in the world.

Nobody is pretending. We are just ignorant. I'm pretty sure that 90% of the people who use Chrome don't care that much about privacy.

>The study, which looked only at larger industrial catches, says we're pulling nearly 6 million metric tons of tuna from the oceans each year.

I remember a few years ago reading another article with another "new" study saying that we could run out of fish by 2048... :/

Human culture and cognition evolved through emotions.

Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more.

"Federal prosecutors have charged a former president of a major pharmaceutical distributor with flooding parts of Appalachia with millions of opioid pills while ignoring evidence they were driving addiction and death."

It's all about the money.

From 1999 to 2017, 218,000 people died in the United States from overdoses related to prescription opioids, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... I guess nothing matters as long as you get paid and no member of your family or friends is involved (in consumption of opioids).

"There are four core problems with Facebook’s new currency. The first, and perhaps the simplest, is that organizing a payments system is a complicated and difficult task, one that requires enormous investment in compliance systems. Banks pay attention to details, complying with regulations to prevent money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting. Recreating such a complex system is not a project that an institution with the level of privacy and technical problems like Facebook should be leading. (Or worse, failing to recreate such safeguards could facilitate money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting.)"

I couldn't agree more with that, but people worrying more about the personal data that Facebook could take advantage of, omitting the other possible problems.

President Trump said Friday that he called off the strike when he was told 150 people would die. :/

I tried The Beyond Burgers and I loved them. Plus the satisfaction they gave me knowing that no animal was harmed in the process, it was worth it. They are loaded with 20 grams of protein, are free of soy and gluten, “bleed” pulverized beet juice, and have the look, smell, and taste of meat. I ate a few of those, threw them on the grill and cooked them up just like their meaty brothers. Satisfied.

Back in January, I read something about tens of thousands of low-income renters nationwide could lose housing assistance, including many seniors and people with disabilities.

The world is a sad place for many of us.

Urban agriculture can help to solve such problems by turning urban wastes into a productive resource.

They fled the scene in two luxury cars... That moment when you commit a bold robbery in daylight, with style and extravaganza, just because. :|

Interesting article. The general culture portion for today. What intrigued the most was the Statue of Peace which made me read its entire Wikipedia page.

"The issue of comfort women and the Statue of Peace has inspired other such statues to be built in Seoul and in cities around the world with sizable Korean populations.

In May 2012, officials in the borough of Palisades Park in Bergen County, New Jersey, rejected requests by two diplomatic delegations from Japan to remove a small monument from a public park, a brass plaque on a block of stone, dedicated in 2010 to the memory of so-called comfort women, tens of thousands of women and girls, many Korean, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Days later, a South Korean delegation endorsed the borough's decision. However, in neighboring Fort Lee, New Jersey, various Korean American groups could not reach consensus on the design and wording for such a monument as of early April 2013.

In October 2012, a similar memorial was announced in nearby Hackensack, New Jersey, to be raised behind the Bergen County Courthouse, alongside memorials to the Holocaust, the Irish Potato Famine, and the Armenian Genocide, and was unveiled in March 2013.

An apology and monetary compensation of roughly US$8 million by Japan to South Korea in December 2015 for these transgressions largely fell flat in Bergen County, where the first U.S. monument to pay respects to comfort women was erected. However, the controversial Japanese comfort women foundation which was launched to July 2016 to finance this settlement was shut down by South Korea on November 21, 2018, effectively bringing an end to the 2015 agreement."

Source: Wikipedia

Reddit is blocked in China, but that isn’t stopping one of the country’s largest technology firms, Tencent from making a massive investment to help keep the “Internet’s front page,” moving full speed ahead.

Well, I find this a bit odd... I read that the company also owns a stake in Snapchat, another service that is blocked by China’s Great Firewall.

A friendship no one asked for but eager to maintain it for the sake of "likes".

Speaking of great books of holocaust, if anyone is interested, you should definitely take a look at these particular books:

- The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman

- Rena’s Promise by Rena Kornreich Gelissen and ‎Heather Dune Macadam

- Irena’s Children by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Back to this article, emotional and scary at the same time.

The most successful campaigns are by people who have existing audiences. In other words, they have created a following and content before beginning a Patreon.

But, for those who are just starting out, the key is to Find the people who will want to consume, share and support their content. I'll say it's pretty tough.

I remember I read how Lyft used to accuse Uber of sabotaging. Something about Uber's employees have ordered and cancelled thousands of rides... The dark side of capitalism.

Google Analytics is one of the most known and used tools to track Digital Analytics. There are definitely a lot of pros to using it but there are also some drawbacks.

Facebook’s interest into the financial service markets may have been orchestrated long before now, possibly highlighted when David Marcus, a former PayPal president, joined Facebook’s messaging app Messenger in 2014 as its vice president. More so, Marcus’s experience as once serving board member with Coinbase becomes invaluable in the new direction Facebook is headed when it launched its blockchain initiative early this year.

Ok,ok, ok, my turn :D

I finished: "You are not so smart" by David McRaney. This is a life changer book! I can't recommend it more. It has a second part - "You are now less dumb". I already read half of it. Biases, fallacies, entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise.

Do yourself a gift and read these books. You'll be learning so many great life lessons and how your brain works, not always in your favor.

Interesting fact: Ian Fleming named James Bond after an ornithologist because it was the ‘dullest name’ he’d ever heard. The original name for James Bond was ‘James Secretan’; Ian Fleming took the eventual name from the author of a book on birds.

I read the article, and it disturbed me a bit when I read that part when her brother blames her for their parents breakup. I mean, you are siblings! You were give birth by the same mother, how could he blame his sister for his mother infidelity?!

Everything in this video is hilarious.

"Blink motherfucker!" and then the cat goes straight to him, more careless than ever.

I could have sworn the origin of the alien neopet (cannot remember the name for the life of me) was rumored to be a reference or based on Scientology, but I feel like he would have mentioned it if it was.

Definitely was an odd lore inclusion lol

Many people think that normal means having one bowel movement every day, but that's not always true. People are different, and so are their bowels. Normal for one person might be three bowel movements a day, and normal for another might be three bowel movements a week. If your bowel movements fit somewhere in that range, then you're on a normal schedule.

The FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they had narrowed down the suspect lettuce to lettuce harvested in northern and central California. They still don’t have enough information to name a specific grower or distributor, but said consumers can begin to look for the popular lettuce again.

I usually look at the label of where the products come from, so I guess as long as my lettuce doesn't come from California, I'm all good. Or consume other green salads instead. :D