My favourite bit is when Wikipedia itself is like "the 10,000 claim was made by one dude who basically instantly retracted it and claimed the still unplausibly high number of 2,000".

Also, the Tank Man photographer talks about the protestors throwing molotov cocktails and beating police officers to death.

And the whole "China pretends it didn't happen"...they have official death estimates. 300 people. The US have their own estimate. 900 people. But no matter the number, it was much fewer than the protest leaders had hoped for.

To quote one of the protest leaders "What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes" - Chai Ling

By the way, that person is alive and well running a firm that fires people for not praying at work.

It's not just America though.

Where I'm from:

UK average income before tax) £34,963 - £27,911 after tax (assuming NO student loan and NO pension) (for context: a band 3 nurse with 3 years experience makes £24,336 before tax or £20,631.51 after with no pension)

England average house price: £375,131

Approx ratio after tax: 13:1

Minimum deposit: 5% - £18,756.55

Tax: 0% on first time buyers

Fees: about £1,000 - £5,000

Total cost to get going: Approx £21,750 - nearly a years wage.

Now let's look where I live: Spain!

Turns out Spain really is a load of countries wearing a hat so getting unified stats is not easy. Let's try Barcelona:

Average income before tax: €33,837 - €25,470 after tax

Average house price: €376,399

Approx ratio after tax: 15:1

Minimum deposit: 10% - €37,639.90

Purchase tax: 10% - €37,639.90 (plus 1.5% for new builds)

Fees: 2 - 5% - 7,527.98 - 18,819.95

Total cost to get going: €82,807.78 - €94,099.75

Turns out treating housing as a market to speculate on might just be the problem all along.

"We invented a new kind of calculator. It usually returns the correct value for the mathematics you asked it to evaluate! But sometimes it makes up wrong answers for reasons we don't understand. So if it's important to you that you know the actual answer, you should always use a second, better calculator to check our work."

Then what is the point of this new calculator?

Fantastic comment, from the article.

Fun fact! Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer - ~~yes, it works and has been independently verified. No, you can't have it because embargo.~~

EDIT: vaccine here isn't actually what I thought. In this case it is a treatment to be used for certain kinds of lung cancer, not a preventative measure as we are used to thinking of Vaccine. Thanks to the comment below for going through it and pushing me to do proper research.

While my initial take was a glib link to a wikipedia page and not thoroughly researched, I do sill believe that the embargo has directly caused this treatment to come to market in the west as the levels of cooperation are non-existent. It has been used for 7 years in Cuba but is only now entering Stage 3 trials in the US.

Cuba have also became the first country to have 0 mother-child transmissions of HIV.

But the US has decided that working with Cuba to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (in the States alone) is less important than causing "economic dissatisfaction and hardship" to the Cuban people.

This is basically the argument Castro makes in "My Life" as to why revolutions tend to start with someone that is a descendent of the capitalist class (Castro - father was a plantation owner; Lenin - father was a state councillor and appointed to the hereditary nobility; Mao - father was a moneylender and one of the wealthiest farmers in the region)

weak aptitude for language learning

This is such bullshit. As a Brit abroad, our problem is weak language education. We are taught to such a poor degree and we are not taught how to learn a language. It's been the biggest struggle of my adult life trying to get conversational and after a year I am still way behind my cohorts - it's not some genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning, but a lack of language infrastructure in childhood.

US: Let's send weapons to our allies that are at war! Iran: We'll do the same! US: shocked Pikachu face

Tired of writing this, the hand wringing over university property being compared to ~30k lives and ~600k starving people has to stop.

This painting is not some culturally important piece of art. It’s a little over 100 years old (literally painted the same year my Granddad was born), hanging in a university, of a man that was responsible for massacres in Ireland (Mitchelstown Massacre) which got him the name “Bloody Balfour”, openly said that black people should be treated worse than white people, and was a known anti-semite that brought about the Aliens Act of 1905 to try and keep Jewish people out of Britain & Ireland.

Imagine a group of Princeton students cutting up a minor painting of Jefferson Davies hanging in their halls and you get roughly the same amount of "cultural loss".

Man in 30s married to a half-Filipina woman here. When we went to visit for our honeymoon it was really gross. LOTS of very, very old men with teenage girls.

I had women falling out of their chairs to look at me.

I had a woman literally fall over while trying to ogle me while walking down the street.

For our goodbye dinner, her Ate toasted us by saying "You have fulfilled all our dreams: you've married a white man."

I had several people say how ugly they were because they were Filipino.

EVERY convenience store and super market had skin whitening creams.

It was my first experience of the Philippines and the first experience I had of racial fetishism. My wife got preferential treatment for being Mestizos.

The Spanish did a real number over there with their racial hierarchy bullshit.

Your title made me wonder: would NASA get more funding if they strapped AR-15s onto the rovers and called it a liberation mission...

As an immigrant living in Spain: Vox make election day terrifying. I just don't leave the house (immigrants can't vote in Spain).

I'm not a small guy, ex-competitve weight lifter and 6'2, but those people are nuts and it isn't worth the risk.

Shower thought: if everyone gives a % of their labour value to the government it's called taxes and is evil communism. If everyone gives a % of their labour value to an individual it's called capitalism and is glorious. How does that mental gymnastics work?