• Take time off from social media once in a while, or at least avoid doomscrolling all day. Bad stories generate FAR more engagement than good stories, and every form of media knows this. If 100,000 people in your area have an average-to-good day and 5 people have terrible days, all 5 stories presented to you will detail how things are in your area are terrible.

• Physical health affects mental health and vice versa. Eat healthy (or healthier). Stay hydrated. Get 7-9 hours of sleep regularly and use sleep hygeine. Get 90+ minutes of exercise (anything that raises your heartrate) a week which is like 15 minutes/day. Don’t worry about doing it all immediately - if you try to change everything at once you’re more likely to get overwhelmed and burn out. It’s way better to make slow, sustainable changes over months than it is to do a difficult crash course for a short time and get fed up with the process.

• Do thankfulness exercises. When I go to bed at night I think of 3 things I’m thankful for in the day. On average or bad days it may be that I wasn’t in constant/chronic pain, that I got to eat and drink, and that I’m in a safe place and a soft bed. Just remembering those basics (that many of us take for granted) helps keep me aware of good things in my life.

• Find ways to enjoy hobbies that require participation - arts, sports, board/video games, whatever. Just something other than passively taking in TV/online media. This will help you feel engaged and double points if it’s something that allows for improvement because you’ll feel rewarded as you get better.

Good luck getting ring-laden sweets away from invisible kids.

I’m surprised it’s that low. In the first several weeks alone Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000lb bombs. “The heavy munitions, mostly manufactured by the US, can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” That doesn’t even count all the other munitions used.

Worked through my obsessions a bit and let go of them. In the following weeks I asked three women out and got shot down each time instead of thinking about doing so for a month and being a creep.

Unironically, good on you. That’s character progress and it takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to accept rejection in a mature way and keep trying regardless. For what it’s worth I as an Internet stranger think we should help more people do the same sort of things.

Her name is [kept to myself because I’m a gentleman who doesn’t kiss and tell]. I hope I, in turn, am not someone’s most alarming thing but it’s possible :P

For a moment I thought it was Columbia University and was a little shocked by the reversal. After correcting myself: it’s good to hear another nation is drawing some lines in the sand regarding behavior. Rules of war should mean something.

Can I get a courtesy indictment?

I have previously wondered what scientists like Nile from the YouTube channels NileRed and NileBlue or Styropyro could do if they wanted to.

Nile is a chemist does things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce or making super-reactive chemicals that really don’t want to exist. In some of his videos he’ll be making an intermediary chemical and say stuff along the lines of, “If I drop this we all die”.

Styropyro is legitimately like a mad scientist without the evil, and deals mainly with huge amounts of electricity and military-grade laser builds. He flat-out tells people that if they try to reproduce his experiments there’s a very good chance they’ll die or be seriously injured. In that military-grade laser video he burns a hole through a steel truck door from hundreds of feet away.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
― Epicurus

It’s one of my go-to arguments against intelligent design.

The footage of the premature baby born to a dead mother killed in a bombing, who then followed her into death moments later, was especially chilling. Can you imagine the outrage if that happened to someone from New York, or Britain, or Germany? But because they’re Palestinians the mother and newborn, both killed inside a “safe zone”, will be just a footnote.

There are no safe zones for Palestinians as far as Israel is concerned. Just in the last day Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich has called for the “complete destruction” of Gaza and stopping peace talks with Hamas. "He said Israel needed to attack Rafah “as fast and as strongly as possible, and then continue with the strip until its complete destruction”.

Heat stress is estimated to have killed about 61,000 Europeans in 2022. If Western wealth and healthcare can’t keep up with increasing heat then these countries have no chance.

“Human calls lowered 3 octaves might be what dinosaurs actually sounded like. Haunting yet beautiful!”

Any peace deal that doesn’t involve Russia leaving behind all Ukrainian territory rewards Putin’s Russia for their invasion. IMO Russia should have to at least pull back to the borders that existed before the 2022 offensive. Of course I’m not in a position to make decisions if it’s a bitter pill that must be taken, but real gains for Russia will be proof that aggression worked.

Also, peace doesn’t need a specific broker. If an international effort including China, or even led by them, can broker a good deal then so be it. Maybe China’s relationship with Russia makes talks more likely to be productive. I can’t think of an explanation as to why a US-led deal with the same terms would be inherently better (that isn’t just nationalism/pride and much less important than halting war).

I don’t have a source for the drones or missiles used in this recent attack, but Forbes has an article from February titled, “$375,000 - The Sticker Price For An Iranian Shahed Drone”. “Its delta-winged Shahed-131/136 variants are believed to have a range of approximately 500 to 900 miles.” and “The documents show that a single Shahed costs $375,000 to produce.” I’m not sure that’s long enough of a range to make it to the Israeli targets though, so take it with a grain of salt.

The New Arab’s article today about cost reports, “It is not known how much Iran spent on its attacks, though ballistic missiles in the country can cost up to $99,937 (₤80,000), The Guardian said.”

Politico has an article from December called “A $2M missile vs. a $2,000 drone: Pentagon worried over cost of Houthi attacks”. “The cost of using expensive naval missiles — which can run up to $2.1 million a shot — to destroy unsophisticated Houthi drones — estimated at a few thousand dollars each — is a growing concern, according to three other DOD officials.” and “The cost offset is not on our side,” said one DOD official." I’m guessing those are the bottom end drones and likely not capable of crossing the distance between Iran and Israel. It does give an idea of how much it might cost for Iranian-backed groups closer to Israel to use drones in the future though.

According to Israeli sources, the defense was very costly for Israel. "Israel’s interception of hundreds of Iranian missiles and drones overnight has cost Tel Aviv around $1.35 billion (up to 5 billion shekels), Israeli media reported. On Sunday, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Brig. Gen. Ram Aminach, the former financial advisor to the Israeli chief of staff, as saying that “the cost of defence last night was estimated at between 4-5 billion shekels ($1.08-1.35B).”

What I’m wondering is: if the US did most of the interception, is the price tag for that to US taxpayers included in that quote or did they pay even more? The USA pays for a lot of Israel’s Iron Dome defense to start, so what’s the final price tag for Americans?

Edit: I kept looking but couldn’t find any info beyond different versions of what I already linked. I guess it’s just a question to think about for now. For me, the large expense is yet another reason among several why Israel should let not continue this back-and-forth with Iran.

Given the medical/psychological benefits being explored, it could even be “Your resistance only makes me stronger”.

Going to guess you mean John Bolton, the infamous warmonger who loudly started calling for immediate, “far stronger” US response yesterday. He’s a draft dodger who has admitted he joined the National Guard and then went to law school just to avoid going to Vietnam. “I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle,” he has written, adding “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy… I considered the war in Vietnam already lost”. Yet the whole time he advocated for keeping other US soldiers fighting in the war. He didn’t fight in the war of his time, he won’t ever go to war now that he’s old, but by damn is he ever sure that the US should send people to fight everywhere from Iran to Cuba.

In 2019, Democrat Seth Moulton, who actually served 4 tours in Iraq, called both Bolton and Trump “chickenhawks” because they’re hawkish for war but completely unwilling to fight it themselves. (Trump reportedly “avoided service in the Vietnam War after his father called in a favor with a doctor, who wrote a note saying that Trump had bone spurs on his feet, making him ineligible for the draft.”) To use the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt quote - “War is young men dying and old men talking.”

For what it’s worth, it’s been reported that Iranian officials consider the attack “concluded”. They have said if Israel attacks again the next Iranian response will be considerably more severe, and have warned the US to keep out of this conflict. I guess we’ll have to see what each country does in the next little while.