Presumably this hypothesis is meant to explain why there is this observed asymmetry in the type of Neanderthal DNA we find in modern human populations that contain them, which is entirely autosomal. With none in the mitochondrial form, which is exclusively passed down along the female line, and also none in the Y-chromosome form, which is exclusively passed down along the male line.
Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.
> Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”
I get that it's survivor bias and all, but modern racial preference also paints a clear picture, I don't understand why we are so against this hypothesis that male homo sapiens did not particularly like the female neanderthal (I can clearly see why as any modern male would).
We found neanderthal fossils with sapiens DNA (afir it was something like 7% so not sterile hybrids, but a few generations after the hybridisation).
I don't think we have ANY evidence for non viability of male sapiens + female neanderthal non-viability, we just don't like the fact that this viability proves the asymetri.
Perhaps because modern psyche loves to picture males as sexual brutes and women as these higher wonderful rosy elves and this "shocking" neanderthal(i.e. "beastly") preference goes strongly against this meme?
Why would it be so inconcievable that the male part of homo sapiens drove the sexual selection for the more "refined" features of the species and the preference for intelligence of women was not intrinsic but partially "forced" -- i.e. warbrides and all -- so it would make perfect sense that some homo sapiens women would be attracted to the physical strength cues of male neanderthals, just like... gasp... modern women are?
Ancestral Neanderthal Y-DNA was completely replaced by an incursion of Sapiens Y-DNA long before they(/we?) went extinct, so your whole theory of "we ain’t hitting that" is not very convincing to say the least.
"DNA deserts" likely indicate spots where there were issues with hybrid viability and not some half-disguised fantasy.
Because these hybrids would contain mtDNA from their human female line. Neanderthal mtDNA could only be passed down by Neanderthal females.
And because none of those are found in any modern human populations, we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals. Though whether hybridized descendants from male-sapiens female-Neanderthal pairings never existed, or they did exist for some time then eventually went extinct, we cannot currently say with certainty.
Strictly speaking we don't know that. It may always turn up an extremely rare Y or mtdna variant which was thought to be extinct. Ötzi's mt like was thought to be extinct (Wikipedia page even still says so) but very recently a North African man took a full mtdna test and it turned out he had the same. That could happen with neanderthal variants too for all we know.
> we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals.
that looks worded wrong, strictly speaking. if there's a male neanderthal ancestor, then he very likely has a neanderthal mom or grandma or ... great^N grandma for some N.
We don't know that. I cannot imagine we have a perfectly accurate mapping of all mDNA neanderthals had. All current mDNA could actually have been neanderthal at one point in history.
How would we know otherwise? With absolute accuracy?
We certainly don't have access to thousands upon thousands of samples. Do we?
The most effective air force in the world is almost certainly the American one. The second most effective air force in the world may well be the American Navy.
So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users, or imply they’re no longer using this 3rd party service (Persona) to do it? The article wasn’t too clear on that.
> So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users,
No, they’re outsourcing the verification to an external company. Just not this one.
Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use voice then no verification is required.
Well, until the upcoming batch of laws goes through classifying discussion of lgbtq people as inherently mature content. This is one half of a two part strategy by the american right to make queer content de facto illegal again without running into first amendment protections. Getting the payment processors banning "mature" content is the other leg of this stool.
Yeah I'm not sure many of the commenters realize that this is the targeted plan. They're already succeeding with over 20 (mostly Republican) states requiring age verification to access pornography.
The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the age gates.
It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in public schools".
No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's health, including birthing and abortion information.
Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so they can strip away your right to vote in the process.
I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam sites will also be outlawed.
I think it's possible if not probable you are correct, but a lot of this is not as coordinated as you might think. Religious conservatives just think porn is the devil, and more and more, I find non-religious people that view it as such, too, without some wider plot to take rights away from gay people. They're just prudes and they're happy to remove those rights when given the chance. This certainly is the average conservative, it's not a top-down marching order, it's just how they view things.
To back this up, you suggest that Bush's Child was part of a larger plan to get rid of education, but this is not an accurate assessment of Bush, Bush was a traditionalist in favor of traditional education, he's not of the Trump ilk, and Child was very much a Bush keystone. The push to eliminate the Dept of Education is 20 years farther down the road and pushed by very different people.
I say this because you should know your enemies, viewing everything as part of an elaborate top-down plan often gets you nowhere.
I think you're the one not knowing your enemies here. There is a plan to strip queer people of rights, it is already well underway. You cannot possibly have an effective plan of opposition if you don't acknowledge the incredible economic, social, and technological resources that have been spent spreading and nurturing the prejudices that you can now call "uncoordinated." A lot of the individuals furthering these measures do not identify themselves with "a plot," sure, but it doesn't mean they don't have a role in it.
It's certainly amped up in coordination over the last decade with the mixing of the tech oligarchs and the traditional religious oligarchs.
What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia. The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of the politics and economics of the government so as long as the religious elite have the ability to enforce religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of church and state and this marrying of those two in the United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.
There was a constellation of political groups who were internally coordinated weren't coordinated with one another because they wanted slightly different outcomes or had different motivations. The absolutely massive success of the coordination behind the LGBT political movement and refusal to be broken up
and picked off piecemeal is what made various oppositions more bark than bite. But that isn't true anymore, as you and others have recognized. I mean the plan is outlined in Project 2025, we're well beyond small organizations screaming into the void and skulking around the political periphery. It's just out in the open which makes it a lot easier to rally around.
And now, to my view, it's basically a race. The very well coordinated political opposition laser targeting transgender people as the weak link has to push them back into the closet before too many people know someone trans personally and realize they aren't scary monsters with pointed teeth. They failed with the gays but they were about an order of magnitude larger and so got more exposure.
You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized group, but very loosely organized with people continually carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster than the previous one, but they're still running in the same direction.
A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for Charter Schools across the United States (rather than fund public education). And while these schools are supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB allowed parents to choose private, religious options if their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian testing expectations, made it pretty easy).
So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get where we're at today, but it was still always headed in this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a funded alternative to public school, rather than investing in our public schools with our public funds.
On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be difficult to distill the information down in a way that makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of people and power and ideaologies.
At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in every direction, is what made this happen.
I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they will continue to push where they can until they figure out ways in which they can succeed.
It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the other side of this definitely need to recognize the threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single headed hydra.
Giving the overprudish religious fanatics what they want to earn their support has actually been an open plan of the right wing in the US since at least Reagan.
Reagan chose not to do anything about the AIDS crisis partially because it was a "gay" disease, and the religious right was openly happy and proud that the gays were dying.
Discord isn't scrapping its plans, just assuring people that one of the vendors they trialed in a sub-market they aren't moving forward with globally. They've been trying for a multi-vendor solution from the beginning and k-ID is the vendor they've been much more publicly happy with than Persona.
(Also, from that post most notably mentioned about the global rollout is delayed in light of some of these vendor verification issues and also hoping to rollout a few more features to even further lesson the need for age verification by many users. One such feature being first-class opt-in "spoiler channels", which some servers had been using age restricted channels for that rather than opt-in roles and somewhat more complex role-based permissions.)
K-id is the vendor they were proposing which did on device processing. They were trying to downplay the initiative by saying all the k-id data stayed on device.
This was undermined by the fact they were also trialling a switch to Persona (the vendor in the story), which did not uphold that guarantee. It was horrific optics to be reassuring people that it was ok because you didn’t save data but also be trialling a switch to a vendor which did save data, which I guess is a lot of the reason this vendor switch was cancelled. (Though it does call into question discord’s judgment that they thought this was a good idea).
Anyway, Persona was also breached which is how the government links were discovered and also probably a part of this decision. This is not to be confused with the breach in November of 5CA, _another_ vendor they used in the initial UK and Australia roll outs. The fact that two vendors were breached in four months is a good example of why this is a bad idea
I don't think you can ever trust closed source software that also requires network for other features that it really does on-device processing for something specific.
It might not even send the sensitive data immediately but bundle it with other traffic once it goes online.
It really depends on what you want to do. By the nature of being self-directed, you elect what roles you want to play. I personally don't love the marketing and sales cycles, so my current business is B2C and I don't do any marketing.
Almost all growth was done via word of mouth. There are business models whose network effects lean in this direction. In order to use my product, you must bring along peers so it's inherently 'viral'. I fell into this by accident rather than by some grand design, but it became obvious to me after I saw it happen. Design a business in which the flywheel can spin without you, if you don't want to spend your time marketing.
My next business that I'm working on is B2B, so I'll have to have a much stronger handle on marketing and sales. But I'm more ready for that now, after a decade of running a B2C business.
In general, most firms form relationships with marketing lead generation companies. i.e. you pay for customers interested in buying something, and pay a reward if a sale is made.
Don't bother spamming with FAANG, as the conversion rates are still hypothetical for many. Go to trade shows, and note how sales people operate with the public... hint, the big deals are never done on the floor area.
The sales conversion rates and tax postures will determine if this type of business is viable in your area. =3
The dissonance between this comment and the one above is striking really :) . One user asks for non-China countries to intervene in China or the occupied territories, and another user is outraged that the same has actually happened in Venezuela, despite that the only person to suffer had been one of the top-10 worst alive humans in the world (per millions humans harmed directly).
Pray tell me, how exactly do you see international law intervening in Chinese crimes, so that it won't look like ops in Venezuela (at minimum)? Issuing a strongly worded letter and Xi would comply?
You're misunderstanding the analogy. The US's operation in Venezuela was itself a violation of international law, which the international community widely condemned and many countries wish they could have stopped. But there's no button they can push to make the US return Maduro, just as there's no button anyone can push to make China free Jimmy Lai. The only options are a variety of escalatory steps which implicate the relationship between one's own country and China as a whole.
> Which ratified treaty did the US's operation in Venezuela violate?
Even if it hadn't violated a ratified treaty (it did violate several, starting with the UN Charter and OAS Charter), it would still violate international law; the US has recognized (among other places, in the London Charter of 1945 establishing the International Military Tribunal) that the crime of aggressive war exists independently of the crime of waging war in violation of international treaties.
E.g. at least 2 children were executed by Maduro for protesting against him, along with at least hundreds of adults. Mass political arrests by masked men have been common since Chavez came to power, there have been executions of entire families. Torture of prisoners. It goes on and on and on and on, and all of it violates the core of international law: the Geneva convention.
Maduro's violations of international treaties include attacks on neighboring states (Maduro's "war on terror" (yes, really) included raids on Columbian territory, plus his promise to attack Guyana). Maduro's violations of international treaties includes, ironically, abducting foreign nationals.
And before you say "but ICE". First, this started more than a decade before ICE, it is actually about far more people than ICE, and with ICE there is at least the allegation that those people violated US law (immigration law). So no, it is not the same. ICE comes disturbingly close, true, but this is still a LOT worse.
So what is your point? Obviously Venezuela since more than a decade did not respect international law. Is your point that since international law exists, Venezuela should have been attacked way sooner, in fact as soon as it became clear what Chavez was doing? Or do you argue that US/Trump's attack is fine since international law can be ignored anyway?
Including Maduro's abduction I think it's very easy to argue that the US behavior is much more in line with international law than Venezuela's. So what is your point?
I mean, what reasoning, exactly, leads to your conclusion that Venezuela/Maduro is the victim here? Or should I put it differently and state the obvious: that your reasoning only makes sense if it defends the idea that Maduro's regime is allowed to kill and attack, and the US is not.
I would hazard to say that most people are upset because a single person decided the fate of our country, and in a manner contrary to the outlines defined in the constitution. And your description of the events there really do clarify just how awful things here are as well - executions in broad daylight, masked men kidnapping people extrajudicially, allegations of laws being violated as a pretext to detail lawful citizens.
It's all horrible and shocking to say the least. And it makes people question whether our actions are justified or the outright thuggery of a wanna-be dictator.
> Next time Putin will kidnap Zelenskyy with the exact same reasoning.
Putin DID do that. He ordered him kidnapped. And it wasn't international law stopping him, it was the Ukrainian army and apparently some regular Ukrainians.
Putin has tried to kidnap him at least twice, and sent out murder squads for him probably several dozen times now.
Putin did not face consequences for this, in fact a number of countries that profess to respect international law protected him against International law: South Africa, China, Mongolia, Belarus, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Azerbeidjan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and India.
Also, as I pointed out, "international law" didn't stop Maduro from committing warcrimes, he also sent out murder squads that even killed children, it didn't stop Putin from doing the same. Nothing at all changed for international law at all.
The only thing victimized is people's illusions about international law. Maduro is himself a war criminal! So using international law grounded arguments to protect him ... fuck that, even if you're technically right.
How does any of this make sense? Other than your first sentence (sorry about that, of course you're right, he tried) every claim is bogus.
> The point of international law isn’t protection but to distinguish wrong from right.
It is actually explicitly stated in almost all international law (mostly except human rights/Geneva convention, which would be the one Maduro violated and Trump didn't) that the ONLY point of international law is international cooperation. International law is completely voluntary for states and consists of individual treaties you can join ... or not join. Don't join or decide to leave? That bit of international law doesn't apply to you anymore.
> What do you think why even Putin made some bogus claims why his actions are justified?
Because Putin always does that. Even decades back, when he was backing gangsters, he did that. I'm sure at one point it was necessary, and now the guy is 73. His habits won't change anymore. Besides, his idol, the Soviet Union, also did that.
> In which war did Maduro commit war crimes?
No war required for that. Besides what even is a war? One of the older "international law" treaties which nobody remembers that a war is only a war when declared by at least one state. Very few declared wars in the last decades. Israel-Palestine? Not declared (according to hamas that's just how things are forever and Israel just defended I guess). Sudan? Not declared. The 123818th conflict between India and Pakistan? Not declared. Iran-Israel? Iran-Syria? Iran-Lebanon? (more like Iran-everyone) Turkey-Kurdistan? You get the picture. The only war that was declared was Russia attacking Ukraine.
> Law protects also criminals to a certain degree because the alternative is anarchy, chaos and global wars.
Unless you mean an extremely minimal degree law does not protect criminals against the state. And any amount of force that is required to get a criminal to stop is legally justified essentially everywhere. In fact, in the countries most humans alive live in, no law protects you against the state, criminal or innocent.
> International war was a lesson learned from the world wars.
Actually the history goes back quite a bit further than that. And if you consider international law is just treaties between countries/factions then ... The most famous bit of international law, the convention of Geneva, was a lesson learned in the holocaust.
> Seems like we need to learn again the hard way.
Why? "We"? Venezuela was not respecting international law before this happened. Neither was Russia. Neither was ...
> Tue right way of doing those things is rarely the glorious, it’s bureaucratic
I doubt Ukraine, or any other actual victims of war crimes will agree on that one. For instance, international law is clear that hamas must surrender to Israel, and obviously they should deliver anyone that had anything to do with taking hostages to the ICC (since both hamas and the PA signed the Rome treaty). The ICC doesn't even want that to happen. Could you explain how this can be achieved in a bureaucratic way?
Putin doesn't need the US providing precedent to do that (and even if he was, there was plenty of that before Maduro), killing or capturing Zelenskyy in a decapitation strike was attempted more than once near the beginning of the 2022 escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. He wasn’t stopped by international law.
The US agreed in Article 2 of the UN Charter, which they ratified on July 1945, that they would refrain from the use of force against the political independence of any state.
The reason you rarely see people cite the exact provision is that it's pointless to cite, because the US foreign policy establishment does not care and will not be swayed by persuasive arguments about their treaty obligations.
That's what Trump told you to sound badass and edgy. His advisors might have a more complicated rationale that's harder to explain to the public than a single 3-letter word.
Foreign policy of the US has always been about orchestrating coups to create passive client states for US capitalists more efficiently extract natural resources, going back to 1953 in Iran. Only difference with Trump is he has done away with pretenses. He says the quiet part out loud. He says things like "we want the minerals in Ukraine", and then negotiates a mineral deal. He talks about conquering Panama, Greenland, Canada. He is an unabashed imperialist. It's been at least 70 years of this happening, catch up already. And it goes back even further, to the US controlling the Philippines in 1898, and the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
Venezuela was heavily sanctioned for years before kidnapping Maduro, how about starting there in regards to China/HK? I'm not saying it's realistic or likely but your comparison is flawed. Nothing at all was done for Hong Kong
That's true. But the point still stands. People are outraged even for a small number of cartel criminals shot. Imagine what would happen if someone would try to liberate oppressed people in China. The count would be in millions.
>Imagine what would happen if someone would try to liberate oppressed people in China.
My original point is very much meant to counter absurd hypotheticals like these. No other sovereign nation on Earth at the current point in time would ever dare to "liberate" China, because this is no longer the 19th century, and so China is no longer weak.
Soft power may buy you hearts and minds; Japan and South Korea are good examples of that in Asia. But hard power is what truly matters at the end of the day when it comes to asserting your geopolitical interests, and that's clearly the philosophy China has decided to operate under.
The U.S. is clearly not oblivious to this reality either. Even if we grant your moral arguments that Maduro was a horrible dictator deserving his fate, the fact that Trump and his administration chose to act when it was geopolitically and domestically convenient strongly suggests that "taking out the big bad Latino dictator for the sake of humanity" was not the primary motivation.
One thing that never ceases to amuse is how people like yourself always inject moralistic prescriptions into what were meant to be purely descriptive commentaries.
My comment on U.S. actions against Venezuela was not a condemnation, but rather just a factual example. Russia's military actions against Ukraine is no different. Nor China's actions towards Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.
Who "they"? If you want to say that this operation was completely botched and there was no quality improvement for the regular Venezuela citizens, then yes, i would agree completely. and international law also suffered as a result. At the same time it is also true that Maduro deserved to be smuggled out, tried and shot. By any possible law or moral standard of any country in the world. He is a horrible criminal even by known public facts. So these things are true at the same time. Same with China, if anyone would decide to intervene there, it would be good and bad simultaneously. There is no easy clear answer to that.
> it would be good and bad simultaneously. There is no easy clear answer to that.
Clearly, a weasel take on the "two wrongs make a right" doctrine. According to that new take two wrongs can be good and bad simultaneously, there is no easy clear answer, so any additional wrongs mustn't be called "wrongs", they must be called "maybe-rights".
Interesting, previous comment downvoted with no explanation. A sitting president can depict a former president and his wife as apes, but comments on HN are held to a much higher standard.
Homework assignment:
What is going to happen if Nazi-like propaganda (for example) can use colorful language but its detractors are only allowed to voice polite disagreement? What would the result of that be?
I think the main issue people have with this comment is the word "recent" and to a lesser degree "U.S.". All countries have done anything to further their goals regardless of any common point of agreement, some times framing within that framework, sometimes not. This is not a recent or US-only phenomenon, it's the definition of geopolitics.
I'm all for an alien invasion uniting us but not sure when that will happen.
They likely will lead in compute power in the medium term future, since they’re definitely the country with the highest energy generation capacity at this point. Now they just need to catch up on the hardware front, which I believe they’ve also made significant progress on over the last few years.
What is the progress on that front? People here on HN are usually saying China is very far away from from progress in competitive cpu/gpu space; I cannot really find objective sources I can read; it is either from China saying it is coming or from the west saying its 10+ years behind.
Genetic diversity within continental races, including that of Sub-Saharan Africans, are mostly a consequence of genetic drift.
While genetic diversity between races are from selection. Thus the inter-racial genetic differences are more likely to manifest in trait differences that humans find more meaningful (which I use purely in a descriptive manner, not prescriptive), such as physiological (medical, metabolic), psychological & behavioral (personality), cognitive (intelligence), and of course physical (appearance, athletic).
The intra-racial differences that arise from genetic drift result in things that are still tangible genetic differences, e.g. ABO blood group frequencies, but don't map well onto characteristics that human societies place emphasis on as much.
And to address your point that:
>The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.
This is because the level of genetic diversity as influenced by genetic drift is primarily a function of population size, and Africa being the origin of the Homo sapien species, and probably the Homo genus as a whole, has always had the highest level of effective population size. Thus genetic drift in Africans is least likely to be able to cause allele fixation on particular genes, and so such diversity is better preserved. But as already mentioned, these forms of genetic diversity is less likely to impact the observed traits that most humans, both academics/social scientists and your average joe, find "meaningful".
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