I don’t think that’s the way that labs generally work. The lab needs a specific type of sample, like spit or blood. If it’s too contaminated or otherwise not of sufficient mass or purity, they’ll reject it. If it’s a murder case or something similar, the police might pay to use more advanced techniques to try to get…

Actually no. From my understanding, federal law is pretty protective of military DNA samples and they are destroyed a certain number of years after you ETS. That doesn’t mean that the police can’t access them, but I don’t think they can just troll through them like they can with their own sample databases. 

They can, although I’m kind of dubious about the claims made in this article. Like, a cheek swab is a legitimate way to collect a good DNA sample and store it on record. Drawing blood is too.

You know, all these things are pretty minor in the grand scheme of privilege. If you look specifically at the African-American community and compare it to the white community, the biggest advantage that white parents have is their socioeconomic status. And this is purely correlative. Not every white parent has it and…

I’d just like to point out, that as far as I know, Sickle Cell anemia has no direct relationship to skin color. There are “white” population (like Greeks, Turks, and North Africans) and light-skinned Asian population with high incidence of sickle-cell. There are also very dark-skinned populations (like people in…

I mean, if it were “completely bankrupt,” I don’t think you would see it so widely used in published social science and medical studies. Take sickle cell anemia, for instance. It has a higher occurrence in black populations than white populations, even though some white populations are high risk and some black…

Shakespeare back in the 1600s refers to Ethiopians as black and the concept of black and white races is much older. For instance, early Christian churches distinguished white peoples from blacks, whom they taught were the racial decedents of Ham, bearing his curse of darkness.

Yeah, I’m all for removing actual words that today have a bigoted connotation or history (like paddy wagon), but this seems like an attempt to remove all color from fields that are in no way related to race. Calling a black hat something else is akin to astronomers renaming black holes.

150% change = 50% increase. It’s a tautology.

I admit that I know nothing about “foam grenades”, but I have fired a grenade launcher on many occasions, and I honestly don’t understand how it’s supposed to be used to strike someone directly, but not the ground or the head. It’s not like firing a shotgun where you can just aim where you want it to hit on someone’s…

Maybe, although I kind of feel that it would be more useful if it were listed as a total percentage of their congressional donations. A company like Google is going to broadly donate to politicians on both sides of the aisle because their interests don’t really align with one party whereas a fossil fuel company is…

Yeah, I feel like they kind of buried the lead here. It’s probably more realistically: Many of the Largest Corporations Gave the Most Money to a Very Diverse Group of Politicians to Ensure that their Interests are Broadly Represented.

It’s not something do intentionally. In fact, many times low-income schools are actually the best-funded. But funding from the state is not even necessarily the most important factor in affecting quality of education. Having educated parents and a stable home is extremely important. Schools in wealthy areas have…

A lot of these “black bloc” (anarchists, ANTIFA, whatever name they’re going by now) punks gather and instigate violence and property destruction and then leave before the police get there. Of course, the police catch the guy looting the shop of the windows they broke.

Raise your hand if you actually think things will significantly change because of the protests and riots . . .

Yeah, I think we discussed option two and I gave you my opinion as to why I dislike it, but I’ll go over it again and add some more reasons for you to at least consider.

I think the point here is, you usually are going to want to pay for medical expenses from tax-advantaged accounts if at all possible. If you’re using after-tax dollars to pay for healthcare expenses, you’re losing money.

I think you’re focusing on the trees and missing the forest. You’re almost always going to be better off paying for medical expenses with before-tax money. Think of it this way, if your total income tax rate is 30%, then if you pay for a $100 medical expense out of pocket, you’re paying about $43 extra on taxes versus…

Because of the tax benefit of an HSA, paying for medical expenses out of pocket doesn’t make a lot of sense. It shouldn’t matter how you invest your HSA as long as those investments are relatively liquid (e.g. can be converted to cash easily).

I mean, it’s really not that hard. You simply ask some simple questions like: what is your relationship to each other and why are you outside of your home.