People have genetically different ability to detect flavors. Some people lack the receptors to detect the bitter rindlike taste in todays seedless watermelons.

Close but not quite. 3N plants are sterile. This is because the odd number of chormosomes cannot line up during meiosis and form gametes.

They use diploid pollen 2N pollen to trigger fruit formation but the resulting fruit is parthenocarpic. The white pips and even the occasional colored hard seed coat does not contain an viable embryo.

Crossing of plants with different numbered chormosomes can create fertile offspring if the resulting ploidy is even. For example crossing wheat (6N) with cereal rye (2N) creates Triticale (4N). The Triticale is fertile.

The story of seedless watermelons.

Originally developed by a scientist in Japan pre-WWII, the technology was picked up by watermelon breeding programs at universities in the South-East U.S. Over the next 30 years the university programs worked to develop the technology. Progress was very slow as it takes 15 generations to create a new female line.

Unfortunately for everyone the universities decided to use their tasteless, bland, long distance shipping types to create these females. The most famous of which is Charleston grey.

Finally in the mid-70’s the universities released the female inbreds to private companies to create seedless watermelons. The private companies crossed tasty, elongated allsweet and crimsons sweet types as a diplod male with the bland grey females. What resulted was the bland seedless types with large white pips and bland flavor. After all 2/3rd of the genetics came from those terrible females.

For the next 25 years all of the seedless watermelons used the same terrible female lines with slightly improved male lines.

Then a breeder from originally from China decided to create new females. He used small seeded varieties from China and Thailand with deep red color and much thinner rinds.

The resulting seedless watermelons had dark red color, tiny little pips, and a slightly bitter flavor. You see the breeder from China failed to recognize the different flavor profiles in the gene pools. Asian watermelons often have bitter flavors that are completely acceptable in those markets but not in European ones.

And thus we are stuck with bland or bitter shitty seedless watermelons at the store.

There was once a brave lady who attempted to buck the trend. She bred the most flavorful delicious seedless watermelon ever seen on the planet. It was almost honey sweet with strong aromatics and not a hint of bitterness. It was crisp and juicy without a hint of mealyness. It was large elongated and looked just like the good old seeded ones. Alas the market rejected them because “they look like seeded types”. She retired early with a big FU to them all.

A C-section will run you $60K easy. With the 80:20 insurance thats $12K owed by the parents. . With the federal out of pocket maximum being $9,450 for the mother. The baby also has a $9,450 out of pocket maximum. So the family will likely owe at least $12k before leaving the hospital

$5K handout is seriously ignorant. It will cost a hell of a lot more to reverse the trend

In order to increase the birthrate above replacement level here are a few things that need to happen.

1. Free universal healthcare including dental.

2. Rent control for all apartments locked to single income minimum wage.

3. Ban on investment properties for single family homes. If the house is classified as single family, you can’t rent it out. It must be sold.

4. Free childcare.

5. Free education from pre-K to Graduate levels.

6. Open immigration policies for countries with higher birthrates.

7. Increase minimum wage to make it a livable wage.

8. To pay for it all - Increase corporate taxes to 95% for more than $100million income. Increase personal taxes to 95% for more than 1 million in income.

I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.

Veiwers who have worked with a lot of PhD’s:

So they are going to make a extremely complicated evil plan only to be foiled by obvious oversight that only an idiot would miss.

I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.

Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.

Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.

City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.

My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.

Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.

A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.

The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.

When I was first out of college I used to get 8-10 of pre-payed envelopes every week. I kept a PO box for my mail that I would check weekly.

I would have maybe 1 or two pieces of real mail and a full box of junk.

So I started folding up the junk mail I to the 8-10 prepared envelopes every week. This was all done at the counter next to my PO box and dropped mailed back right then.

It was quite cathartic.

Hey now for every 5,000 “No’s” there’s the coveted 1 “Maybe but more data is required”.

When you work with high value goods long enough in any field you get desensitized to it. However you compartmentalize it in weird ways.

I think nothing of ordering $800K worth of stuff at work. Then I get home and refuse to pay $8 for a fancy coffee because it’s ridiculous.

Russia has a long history of open storage at these sites. They also lost a ton of bunkers a few months ago at other sites. So they likely did not have much of an option, and they chose open store it at their “best defended” base.

I personally would bet that site was overstocked as it was likely the primary ammo dump by default. All of the newly manufactured missiles and shells going there directly from the factories.

First off, your rheumatologist is the most important doctor you will be dealing with. For some reason the field collects some odd ones with poor people skills. You may get lucky and find a good one right off the bat. However if the doctor seems to not be listening to you, understanding and explaining your symptoms, go for a second opinion or a third or a fourth opinion. It took my wife 5 different ones to finally find a good one. It’s a 3 hour one waytrip to see him but it’s worth it. We will likely be moving up closer to him in a few years.

Second be patient with the meds. It will likely take several tries to find something that works. However not too patient, waiting too long can make the disease progress further. However once the right cocktail is found you’ll feel a bunch better, until you don’t. Changing meds is common and normal no matter how long you have it.

Last, if your in the U.S. and have to deal with our shitty system, get ready to fight insurance. It will be a constant battle if you geton one of the criminally prices drugs. Just don’t give up and eventually you will win. One drug refill took my 2 months of twice weekly calls to push it through.