Even if their military is a cesspool of corruption and incompetence that lacks the real-world capacity to invade a wet paper sack (something that I wouldn’t take for granted even if the rumors and reports about it are true, given the sheer volume of men and materiel China has to throw at an enemy nation regardless of quality), China at war with Taiwan would create a global economic crisis, between shipping disruptions in the Pacific and the knock-on effects of isolating China economically in retaliation.

Really, the best thing for everyone would be for Xi exit stage left somehow and be replaced by someone with less imperialistic ambition, but for the moment he seems fairly secure in power, which is why we’ve seen Western nations making efforts to decouple their economies from China, and more overtly signal their support for Taiwanese independence.

They say the building code is written in blood, and hoo boy did Vlad Tepes leave a mark in that part of the world.

As an architectural professional, I kinda want to skim over Russian building codes on the off-chance that they just have really shitty practice around fall protection at windows, and all of our jokes about it misunderstand the situtation after all.

Cats don’t have the metabolic pathways that dogs and humans have that process and neutralize many common insecticides belonging to a class called pyrethroids. For cat flea control meds, these are substituted with fipronil, which is (less) toxic and doesn’t get absorbed through the skin, though when we were dealing with a flea infestation a few years back we still had problems when one of our cats ended up being flexible enough to scrape the gel off its neck and lick it off its paw. Bottom line, though, cats tend to have a lot more trouble with metabolizing medications generally, and tend to encounter problems with “cat safe” meds more often than you’d expect. You have to be careful about monitoring your cat after starting a medication generally.