Youtube comments of Ralphie Raccoon (@Croz89).

  1. It's interesting that Milk talked about the dangers of assassination due to his sexuality, but in the end he was murdered over plain old dirty politics.
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  2. I can picture a long line of architectural engineers, seismic engineers and geotechnical engineers, among others, just saying "no" to all of these plans.
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  3. You know if a farmer shows up to the emergency room, they are at death's door.
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  4. I work in a building where there is no drop ceiling, because it's the faculty of engineering, they decided to show off all the HVAC and piping and whatnot. It makes you acutely aware of all the rather heavy looking stuff bolted to the ceiling above your head with rather thin threaded rods.
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  5. There's an important lesson to learn here. Just because someone is an expert in one scientific field does not mean they are an expert in another. If a physicist is making strong claims about biology, treat them with the same suspicion as you would for any other unqualified person.
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  6. Honestly, I see this as a win-win. Even if the AI bubble pops, we'll have lots of clean, reliable baseload energy to put to better use.
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  7. Even if the man is guilty of everything the Japanese accuse him of, they treated him horribly as a suspect and I wouldn't be confident he'd receive a fair trial in the country under those circumstances.
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  8. If the subject matter wasn't Australia, it could easily be an Irish folk song. Ned's heritage really shines through here.
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  9. Singapore loves building new metro lines. I have a friend who visits every few years, and there's always a new metro line or extension built when he goes. The ground must resemble swiss cheese.
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  10.  @Heroasaurus  Yeah, but that's Saudi Arabia, what the crown prince wants the crown prince gets, one way or another.
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  11. HART is interesting because you see an elevated rapid transit line going over farmland and low density development, and it was the section that was built first instead of airport to downtown which would have made more sense. Makes you wonder if there are big development plans for much of the land west of Honolulu.
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  12. I think one thing in the video was very telling here, and that was the overwhelming public support for gun control measures that existed in Australia before the legislation was enacted. While there was some resistance, the critical mass of voters in favour was clearly a strong enough bulwark to pacify them. If we're making the obvious comparison here, I really don't think said country has nearly that level of support.
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  13. In the UK at least, there is one important benefit of credit cards over debit cards: chargebacks. If a merchant screws you over you can initiate a chargeback and get your money refunded quickly. It is then up to the merchant to prove they provided the goods or services promised. Yes, this can be used maliciously, but it's a useful defence against dishonest companies, big and small. It can also protect you against companies that go bankrupt before delivering you the goods or services as the credit card issuer will refund you and become the creditor. Some debit cards do have similar protections, but generally they have a lower limit of £100, whereas credit cards have no lower limit, and they can be more restrictive in their terms.
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  14. I remember a BBC journalist who did two documentaries, one on Scientology and one on Mormonism. With Scientology he experienced secrecy, mistrust and sometimes hostility, this was a religion (or cult if you prefer) which didn't really care about public relations and tried at every turn to discourage him from digging any deeper, right up to having someone film him to intimidate him, and it kinda worked, he infamously lost his temper during one interview and again during a radio broadcast when famous Scientologist Tom Cruise was mentioned. Investigating Scientology basically traumatised him. So he was understandably nervous when doing a similar documentary on a controversial religion a year or so later. But he found Mormons to be almost the opposite of Scientologists, very keen to talk to him, happy to let him into their temples and show him around, and very transparent about their culture and beliefs. There was a clear desire to present a positive image to the media and pressure to maintain good public relations with outsiders.
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  15. It would be ironic if the human race wasn't destroyed by a super intelligent AI who sees us a a threat, but a super dumb AI doing the AI equivalent of "ooh...what does this button do?".
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  16. AFAIK most actors negotiate an upfront fee nowadays because of these accounting tricks.
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  17. One advantage of ordering from the manufacturer is you can often customise down to an insane level since it's mostly build to order, right down to the colour of the stitching on the seats. The disadvantage is you might have to wait a few weeks, or even months if its a popular model.
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  18. Fun thing about this was it was before the Horikuriku Shikansen was extended to Kanazawa, hence the rather convoluted route. If they repeated this now Clarkson would have had no chance, it wouldn't have been remotely fair!
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  19. Part of the problem is the potential time lag between improvements to public transportation and introduction of the fees. When London introduced congestion pricing, TfL was in pretty good shape so nearly everyone affected already had a good public transport alternative to driving (many might still drive, but park at the railway station instead of central London). NYC, it might be argued, is not in such a great position, there are still gaps in high quality coverage especially outside of NYC proper. So for a few years a significant number of people will probably have to choose between spending more money or enduring a significantly longer commute, and I can sympathise with that. Though I think there might still be challenges as improvements to complete coverage will likely need to include new subway lines especially to places like New Jersey, which is notoriously expensive in that region.
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  20. I've posted in github issues and not only got a solution to the problem, but was asked to suggest how the error message might be improved to make the solution more obvious.
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  21. One of the problems is a lot of heavy industry is not only energy hungry, but requires an extremely reliable source. An aluminium smelter can't just turn itself off for a few hours a day to save energy, it costs a lot of time and money to shut down and a lot of time and money to start back up again. That generally means coal, gas, hydro or nuclear are the only feasible options, not unless you install a massive battery that can cope with any variation in renewable output.
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  22. The traditional superpowers may be considering a "let it burn" strategy, in the hope that nations will pull a Rwanda and emerge a stronger phoenix from the ashes. However that's going to result in a lot of human suffering, but since intervention doesn't seem to prevent suffering anyways, maybe it's a better option long term. It will mean dealing with a lot more refugees in the near term though, which is a problem for many developed countries.
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  23. The odd thing is Iran does shine a bit with its transport infrastructure. Tehran has a subway system to rival many East Asian or European cities, and is also building out more subway and light rail systems outside the capital. It's also constructing high speed rail and building new airports and road infrastructure. It gets around sanctions by using a lot of Chinese technology and labour.
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  24. I think the pro palestinian side have been very good at playing into the anti-colonial sentiments of the younger generations in the west, who are far more likely to see something like the british empire as a definitively bad thing for the world. Israel is often seen as a product of the final decades of imperial rule in the middle east, an country willed into existence through treaties and mandates by the british, who were infamously one half of Sykes-Picot. While Palestine itself is also a colonial product, it's seen more as a natural successor nation than Israel is, where the natives take over the land the british once controlled. Israel is seen as almost a form of settler colonialism, a country of outsiders who in the eyes of many don't really belong there.
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  25. I think in some ways we approach what kind of foods are "bland" from a western centric perspective. An excellent example of this is dairy, particularly cheese. Thanks to pervasive lactose tolerance, europeans have gotten very used to consuming dairy. We don't tend to think of dairy products, save for the most pungent of cheeses, to be particularly strong or flavourful. But to a Chinese person, as was explained to me, a lot of european food has this strong "dairy" or "cheesy" flavour that most europeans just don't notice because we are so used to it. Even when it comes to bad breath, while a european may complain that a Chinese person's breath is too garlicky, for example, a Chinese person will complain that a westerner's breath smells too "milky".
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  26. Obama and Vance are politicians of different eras, and I think the rhetoric shows. Vance is campaigning in an environment of far more divisive and identity focused politics, and he's constructing an identity for the voters he hopes to persuade, working class, traditional values, feeling left behind. He doesn't see the point in trying to unite everyone because he doesn't think that will work anymore. I think he's far less optimistic and far more cynical than Obama. It will be interesting to see how he compares to Walz, because the two aren't that different, mainly in terms of age but both are supposed to appeal to working class Americans.
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  27. Part of the problem is a lot of the UK housing stock is really old even by European standards. Cities are still full of endless rows of tiny terraced homes many of which are now over 100 years old, and some significantly older than that. It's a legacy of its industrial past when many people worked at a local factory and lived very close by. Practically all of the urban industry is gone now, but many of the houses remain. The first attempt to renew housing stock after WWII was partly successful but also resulted in a lot of ugly concrete tower blocks built on a very tight budget, looking quite similar to the soviet "commie blocks" being built on the other side of the iron curtain. Most of these were not built to last and are gone now. That reputation pretty much killed off the desire for high density living among the working and middle classes, as something only for the very rich or very poor. You don't see a lot of modern European style apartment blocks in the UK because of that experience. So people look to the suburbs, but unlike in some parts of the US there isn't endless land to build on so suburban homes have been shrinking and shrinking until they're nearly as small as those urban terraces that remain. There's no easy answers, whatever you do is going to piss someone off. People living in those tiny terraces still generally need a lot of persuading to move out so density can be increased, and you'll get cries of gentrification as the new apartments inevitably end up being sold to rich yuppies while most of the locals are banished to the outskirts. Conversely, people living in the suburbs and countryside don't want to see it concreted over with more Barratt boxes, and don't want their narrow roads snarled up with traffic and local services overwhelmed with new arrivals.
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  28. I think the extensiveness of the HSR network in China is due to a lot of speculation about the future. Richer citizens who travel more often and whose time is more valuable are not going to be content with slow trains or buses (high quality sleeper services tend to cost more per passenger than the equivalent HSR journey + hotel, so the advantage is mostly lost there). So what would happen without HSR would be a massive increase in domestic air travel. China would be a lot like the US in this regard, the default option for most journeys over 4-6 hours would be a plane, with multi-day road or rail journeys mostly only for the poor (who likely won't travel as much anyway). But you can imagine with all the extra people, the sky would be filled with aircraft. This isn't without costs, the US government subsidizes many small regional airports and even the flights that go to them, in order to prevent whole swaths of the US becoming economically isolated. But, it is certainly a lot cheaper than building 1000's of km of HSR to all medium and large cities and then having to subsidise most of the network... for now. If environmental taxes or supply chain issues make aviation fuel much more expensive, then the nation who built all the HSR is going to be in much better shape than the one who is now facing a larger and larger proportion of their population who now cannot afford regular fast, convenient long distance travel. So it's a bet on if air travel will become more cost prohibitive in future. It might not, electric short haul and more fuel efficiency combined with bio or synthetic fuels might keep domestic air travel accessible to the masses. But if that doesn't happen, countries like China will have a major advantage.
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  29. That's generally pretty standard in most compulsory voting countries. You can also legally spoil your ballot by filling it out incorrectly in some places. The difference being while spoiling your ballot means it is simply not counted, a NOTA vote is often still counted, if NOTA "wins" the election it has to be run again with new candidates.
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  30. I think China does want world domination. Now, that term sounds scary, but obviously we're not talking about holding the world to ransom with a giant laser on the moon, we're talking about having the power and influence to dominate global trade and politics, not some evil conspiracy. Back in the day, the best way you could do that was by conquest, as we saw in the days of European empires. As time moved on the world changed, and directly taking land from less developed nations was no longer acceptable, or in many cases economically the best option. So countries like the USA instead focused on trade, corporations, and cultural and political influence. I think China sees itself as Britain expanding its empire, or the USA spreading its money and culture. And it's hard to argue they are doing anything wrong when you are speaking from a country whose wealth was built on global domination. How is it fair to deny them the opportunity to become the next Britain or USA? But on the other hand, today we perceive many of the methods that Britain and the USA used to achieve world domination were by today's standards immoral or outright criminal (and some argue many current practices of these nations still are). It's a difficult balance to prevent exploitation or so-called "neo-colonialism" from new superpowers like China without looking like we're pulling up the ladder and being massive hypocrites.
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  31. I think for those who still want an urban setting, "second tier" cities are definitely worth a look. In many parts of the world you're still going to get the majority of the things you want, parks, nice restaurants, etc. but the homes are usually a fraction of the cost of "first tier" cities. The UK, for example, is so economically unbalanced it only really has one first tier city, the big smoke itself. Second tier includes Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and so on (you might consider Birmingham and Manchester in an upper sub tier due to having metro areas of over 2 million people, which doesn't come close to London's 11 million). $1 million in any of these could probably net you a penthouse in one of the most prestigious residential skyscrapers, rather than a pokey flat above a shop. There are some compromises, you won't have the famous attractions on your doorstep and particularly in the UK public transport is considerably worse than in the first tier city, not as bad as the US perhaps, where you might be lucky to find a regular bus service, but if you compare Paris to Lyon, both have underground systems with multiple lines, whereas the only true underground metro outside of London is in Glasgow, and it consists of only a rather small loop line around the city center. Though it's worth pointing out that that $1 million will get you a nice residence smack dab in the city center or pretty close to it, so you can probably walk or cycle to most places you want to go anyway, or take a short taxi or bus/tram ride, whereas in London you'd probably need to take the tube.
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  32. That does often bring up a dilemma, how do you approach a cultural practice that is clearly harmful to the population (open latrines or worse, human waste all over the place is an awful vector for all kinds of disease, no matter how natural it may seem). Do you ignore it, knowing that you are perpetuating harm, try and work around it even if it's nowhere near as effective as the ideal solution, or try to get them to change their practices, and risk being seen as the arrogant westerner imposing their culture on the developing world. Of course a combined effort to get in roofing materials at the same time as building the toilets would have helped, but that still leaves the issue above.
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  33. I think a lot of actions taken during COVID pushed the negative consequences of the pandemic into the future. Governments borrowed a lot of money just to keep their economy from imploding. And it worked, for the most part, but now we're having to face some of those negative consequences. That's affecting developed economies significantly, as we have seen, but their overall resilience means you might have a few protests, even some riots, but the government doesn't collapse. In developing economies there isn't so much resilience.
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  34. Police reform is always a tricky one when there is so much mistrust between the police and citizens. It often means well meaning attempts to adopt a softer approach simply get taken advantage of. We've seen this in the US post 2020, police adopt a less intensive approach in some impoverished areas, criminal activity goes up, and the citizens of that area who months before were in support of reducing police presence now want them back, because while the police make them feel unsafe, violent criminals make them feel even more unsafe. For police reform to work there has to be a stronger social contract between officer and citizen, and if either breaks it, it all falls apart.
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  35. I suspect the "Buy American" requirement does contribute quite a bit to the cost. The US rarely buys military equipment from foreign defence companies. Other militaries aren't generally so picky, so can "shop around" and negotiate deals from any contractors from a friendly country, many of which specialise in a particular industry like shipbuilding, aviation or armoured vehicles, and many also have sizable civilian divisions which allow them to share innovation and economies of scale. Also if you don't need the absolute bleeding edge of military technology and are willing to settle for something still sophisticated but more tried and tested, you can save a lot of money buying a prexisting design and customising it to meet your needs.
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  36. It would have likely happened under any Prime Minister. Churchill may have tried a little harder and kept them a little longer, but the writing was on the wall. Britain was broke, and India had long since turned from an asset to a liability, along with nearly everywhere else in the Empire. Britain needed to rebuild itself, and it couldn't afford to prop up what was quickly becoming a Victorian relic of the past.
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  37. Why not use a graph break symbol? That's what it's there for.
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  38. Co-working spaces have been touted as a solution for small town economies. Instead of everyone commuting to one office, people commute to a co-working space near where they live and interact together remotely. This would then attract cafe's, restaurants and shops where these people would buy lunch or go shopping after work, and would also provide a place outside the home for work, without the long commute.
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  39. Sprawling suburbs are less common in Europe (not to say they don't exist though). City residents are more likely to live in high density apartment blocks within walking or cycling distance of the pedestrian areas, or near frequent public transit that will get them there.
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  40. The thing that irks me about the service fee the most is that it's often used to skirt around consumer rights legislation. If, for whatever reason, a concert is cancelled by the artist/agent, then since ticketmaster has already provided their service to the customer, by selling them a ticket, they do not have to refund the service fee, potentially leaving the buyer out of pocket through no fault of their own if they can't accept a rescheduled concert (if one is offered at all). Now this may or may not be a way to strongarm customers into purchasing additional insurance which is usually offered through a partner during sale, though of course the customer still ends up out of pocket with the insurance premium.
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  41. Turks are also quite moderate Muslims, to the point where many drink alcohol. they don't necessarily get on well with the generally more devout Arabs.
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  42. Maybe that might explain the prudentness of some European nations like Sweden and Finland. Culturally it's considered rude to flash the cash, so even rich people will not show off their lifestyle, they might have a nicer car and a bigger summer cabin but they aren't so in your face about their wealth. Inequality in these countries is lower than in the US, but there's still a sizeable gap between the rich and poor yet we don't see so much financial strife caused by aspiration.
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  43. The EU is going to have to decide how much of its soul it wants to keep to remain competitive. The egalitarian and risk averse culture is part of its identity, but it can be a millstone around its neck in the world of business.
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  44. They've also built their country like a fortress, including booby trapping their road and rail entrances.
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  45. Knowing Germany, the cleaning and maintenance contracts are so complex it's not worth the effort to cancel them.
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  46. Extremely cold climates do seem to have a similar dampening on economic activity though. Canada and Finland both have most of their big cities in the very south, where the climate is its mildest. I think the correlation is probably less of a linear trend and more of a "Goldilocks zone" where a coldish temperate climate is the best. And I've heard another explanation for this theory, people are more productive when they are comfortable. Workers work harder, be it in offices, factories, or outdoors, when they aren't drenched in sweat or shivering like mad. If the body has to divert energy to thermal regulation, energy for other tasks, be they physical or mental, are going to suffer. Since cold can be somewhat alleviated with the rather primitive technology of warm clothing and fireplaces compared to air conditioning, it's much easier to make workers comfortable in a cold climate than a warm one, but this does have its limits, at -50 it's very hard to stay warm even with the most insulating of clothing or hottest of bonfires.
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  47. I think ground based delivery drones have a lot of issues as well. The problem with those are not the last metre, but the whole journey. They've got the same issues as self driving cars, but typically with a far more cluttered environment, with more obstacles, and more opportunities for damage or sabotage.
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  48. I like this, gets the question answered and sounds badass.
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  49. ​ @MrMarinus18 I think you're seeing something that isn't there. Spotted Hyenas have an equally bad reputation among Indigenous Africans as they were portrayed in The Lion King.
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  50. I'd say in the future if the AF1 and entourage wants to land at a commercial airport, they are on the hook for any compensation that would be due to passengers, airports and airlines for any other foreseeable disruption. So that'll probably be a couple million at least for Heathrow. Might make an RAF base a more attractive option.
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  51. I think there's certainly scope for some large marshall plan esque recovery loans from the EU and further afield. It would be more politically palatable than grants, and it would give the EU an interest in growing the Ukrainian economy since then they would be able to pay them back, even if it took until 2100.
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  52. It does seem like one of those jobs you do while you're young for a few years, then settle down for something more sedate after you can't take it anymore.
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  53. The issue with cast iron is twofold. First it's really heavy and takes ages to heat up. Second is they rust if not stored properly. Carbon steel is lighter but has the same rust problem. For someone who cooks as a hobby, cast iron makes sense, but it's likely way too much hassle for someone just wanting to fry something from time to time. Then the choice is between teflon, bare stainless steel (not non-stick) or ceramic (scratches incredibly easily and very difficult to clean, unless you get some expensive high end ceramic cookware). So it's not a surprise people pick teflon.
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  54.  @peluso4oso  Even so, "safely" is a relative term here. Burying human waste in the woods is better than leaving it out on the ground or in an open pit, but it's not ideal, there's a risk of contaminating water sources (which is why you have to be careful doing it when hiking). A small population might be able to get away with it, but it would certainly be more of an issue if the population grows. Some might argue that while leaky roofs are a problem, sanitation is more important than comfort, even if the community values it the other way around. It's a tricky balance between giving a community agency and preventing it from harming itself through bad decisions (even in the developed world we often have to deal with this!). This is compounded in the developing world with the usual accusations of westerners being paternalistic and "knowing what's best" for developing world communities. Of course the best thing is to do both at the same time, and in this case it seems like those who constructed the toilets could have left some roofing materials behind if they'd asked and known about the issue. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and budgets don't always stretch as far as we'd want them to.
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  55.  @raynemichelle2996  Then perhaps don't post your opinion on a comment section to a YouTube video. If you don't want to be challenged on your views, then use a personal blog and turn off the comments...
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  56. Yeah, in middle income countries OLPC was a lot more successful.
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  57. I think this is something a lot of commenters are missing, too many people have this knee-jerk anti-car response whenever there is any new road construction. It's same idea for the road tunnel in Antwerp, route lorries around the city (in that case to get to the docks). Even if it doesn't help with congestion that much, fewer lorries in urban areas that don't need to be there is always a good thing for both air quality and safety.
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  58. Sometimes it does seem the only way to be sustainable is to be miserable. To live a stunted, unfulfilling existence without many of the joys the modern world allows us to experience, from the tropical vacation, to, as you say, the simple candy bar. It's the "hair shirt" mentality.
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  59. Damn, when you've got Tucker Carlson and Jeremy Corbyn singing your praises, you've achieved true centrism.
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  60. Botswana also took a pragmatic approach to independence, which I think helped it quite a lot in the post colonial era. Some african nations wanted a "clean start" (and in many cases you can't exactly blame them) and upon independence purged the government of all colonial politicians and civil servants in order to install their own african replacements. A couple even began expelling europeans from their country, or worse. Again, somewhat understandable in a lot of cases, but it often resulted in a government and civil service full of novices even in quite senior positions, which was a recipe for mismanagement and corruption. Botswana avoided that by allowing many colonial era politicians and civil servants to remain in their posts until retirement or election. They provided the expertise for a stable transition, and were also able to train the people that would replace them so they would have the skills to run a stable, functioning democracy.
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  61. I used to think the US long distance rail system was universally rubbish, but I've realised it works pretty well for what it's designed for, and that is not for passengers, but freight. The US moves more goods by rail than anywhere else on earth, but that's come at the cost of terrible passenger service. In places like Europe and the Far East, the rail system is built around passengers, while there is some freight it's always a lesser priority, and as such more cargo does end up going by road, or in cases where there are navigable rivers, by boat. The ideal solution is to have space for both fast passenger services and slow freight, but that of course means essentially building two rail networks that need to be kept as separate as possible. That's expensive and difficult though.
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  62. So much of the BAC is still a complete mystery as well. We still don't really know what caused it and why.
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  63. Someone give this man some Air-Raid/Tornado sirens.
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  64. A PPP adjusted figure would have been more appropriate there.
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  65. I think part of the issue is the effects of migration, both positive and negative, are unevenly distributed. For some citizens additional migration would improve their lives, such as cheaper goods and a larger economy, whereas for others it would make them worse, such as increased pressures on housing and services or competition for jobs (not all migrants do farm work, some do displace jobs that would otherwise be taken by citizens). Even if said migration is an overall net benefit to the economy as a whole, some citizens will suffer more because of it, and they tend to be those on low incomes who live in the same areas the immigrants do, and that's how you see the rise of anti-immigrant right wing political parties in these areas.
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  66. Some are, others have bigger plots to compensate. The worst I saw was in New Zealand, there were bungalows with a 1 metre strip of lawn around them on a new development. Why they couldn't put an extra floor on top and give everyone a decent garden I don't know.
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  67. Waiting to see how long it takes Genshin Impact to move its studio to Korea or Japan. Even excluding the obvious femboys like Venti, the rest of the male cast aren't exactly grizzled manly men.
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  68. Meh, can hardly claim LSD was "colonised", it was made in a lab. THC is so widespread I don't think anyone can claim cultural ownership of it, same with Psilocybin. There's not that many psychedelics that anyone can claim cultural ownership of, though Ayahuasca may be one of them.
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  69. I remember when somebody asked what happens to luggage after an accident, and it was explained while complex recovery operations do happen for sentimental possessions (even from the bottom of a river in one famous case), for most items where baggage is not trivial to recover the airline will just give them a brand new replacement for anything the passenger claims was in their possession within a reasonable value (clothes, cameras, sporting equipment etc). The 2-3 hundred dollars per passenger on average will likely dwarf any later settlement so in most cases it's not worth the airline's time and risk to reputation to quibble over the ownership of a few personal effects.
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  70. Fundamentally I think we have much higher standards for raising children than we did in the past. Some of what boomer and gen-x children would have experienced would be decried as child abuse or neglect today. It was once normal to leave children to their own devices from morning until evening, have older siblings take much more caring responsibilities for younger ones, and so on. This made it easier for dual income parents to have children and manage their time without burning out. Now the options are pay enormous sums for professional childcare or supervise your kids constantly when not at school. There's also a lot of social pressure to ferry them around to clubs and other activities rather than just let them entertain themselves. Perhaps that's how it should be, certainly there were problems with the old way of doing things, but it's no wonder people aren't having so many children, apart from how expensive it all is, it just sucks away all the free time parents have. You basically have to have no life away from your children unless you're very rich, and a lot of adults, rather understandably, don't want to do that.
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  71. Yes, gen ed requirements seem to be much more extensive in US universities. I think in the UK I had to take a couple of bullshit "core skills" courses for undergraduate and one in my masters for about 10 credits each, but that was it. I wasn't required to "minor" in anything or take a load of classes in a completely irrelevant field.
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  72. I think energy security concerns will usually plague big single point inter-connector projects like this. The EU's idea for solar from the Sahara was even more risky considering the political instability in the region. It's one thing for friendly neighbors to synchronize their grids and send a couple GW back and forth as needed, but this is on another level. Hydrogen is one option, perhaps even synthetic hydrocarbons to take advantage of better energy density. Countries will want a strategic reserve of energy that can keep things going for a few weeks in case of disruption. That could be a massive battery or pumped storage facility, but then you're losing a lot of the cost advantages of a more stable renewable energy source than what can be produced domestically.
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  73. It does seem an odd claim to make considering the wind usually blows in the other direction.
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  74. I think realistically, the fall of the Ottoman Empire was going to result in bloody conflict regardless of the interference of the French and British. Whether it made things worse is a difficult question to answer, perhaps letting them duke it out by themselves for a decade or so would have resulted in a new era of stability, or maybe they'd be just as much as war in the modern day in this alternate timeline as they are in ours.
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  75. Your phone notification sound is making me miss air travel :(
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  76. ​ @konfunable  It's easier to start with a clean sheet. The Baltics, particularly Estonia, pretty much swept away their old soviet bureaucracy and built a new one from scratch, leaner and meaner incorporating digital technology. The other side of the iron curtain is trying to change systems that have been around before computers even existed in some cases, and at least when they were too large and expensive to be used for everything.
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  77. It would be too slow for most to tolerate. A lot of freight trains run at an average speed of around 22mph. They also spend hours waiting at stations and in sidings. You could probably get to your destination faster on a bicycle if you were in good shape.
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  78. I think while we praise the Nordic model a lot, we find it hard it replicate outside of said countries. And I think there's a number of reasons for that. Some of those are structural or economic, such as small, wealthy populations meaning you can have a high tax burden and your institutions are fairly agile because you've not got to manage tens or even hundreds of millions of citizens. But there's also cultural aspects, you need a high trust society that also shuns ostentatious displays of wealth, and I think that is very important. Countries with lower trust have to spend more money on security and enforcement, because if they ran things like the Nordics did they'd be robbed blind by grifters and fraudsters (not that there aren't such people in the Nordics, just not so many). Social shame over flaunting your wealth also discourages greed, because what's the point of hoarding money if you can't do anything with it? A lot of what rich people spend their money on, or even the amount they earn in the first place, is to impress other rich people, and if that doesn't earn you social kudos, or even does the opposite, then you don't need so much money anymore. I just don't think you can turn the US, or even the UK or Germany into Sweden or Finland. It wouldn't work because those countries are just fundamentally too different. Whatever better model there is, if it exists, won't look like that.
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  79. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those buildings were government owned and leased out. Probably made the whole process a lot smoother than it would be in other countries, no building owners or insurance companies to drag out compensation claims through the courts.
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  80. I think the hardest thing to forecast in these models is the future capital and operational costs of different kinds of energy generation. I don't know what these models used, but I would assume they are either assuming the costs are the same in the future as they are now, or are using some kind of forecast model that may not be terribly accurate. In all the scenarios nuclear remains pretty flat or grows only slightly, but it's possible it could grow a lot more if SMR or Generation IV technology slashes costs and construction time, or the opposite, new plants become so expensive to construct that it shrinks down to nothing as reactors reach the end of their lives. Even with the more understood areas of renewables and gas, there still a lot of uncertainty. Cheaper storage would allow for more renewables in the mix, but if it remains expensive (which is possible, for example a shortage of lithium ore would probably make lithium battery grid storage economically unviable), then gas will stick around for longer as the backup for their intermittency. There's also the question of quite how expensive CCS will be at scale.
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  81. I think there're two types of users on LinkedIn, those that put up a profile and maybe use it to search for jobs or post job openings, and almost never engage with any of the social networking features (other than maybe congratulating the odd colleague), and, well, those that do. And the former half sees the latter half as, quite frankly, mostly a bunch of corporate culture obsessed weirdos.
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  82.  @raynemichelle2996  I'd disagree. Empires are a natural part of human history. Most have enabled an age of scientific and technological advancement, see the Chinese, the Romans, the Ottomans, and indeed the British. Of course, these emipres came along with a lot of conquest and subjugation, but that was always going to be necessary to amass enough wealth and power to maintain a vast scientific and engineering social class. It perhaps depends on what you would prefer, a world of tribes filled with peaceful but primitive peoples, or a world of nations and occasionally, empires with people that have a much higher standard of living.
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  83. I've seen quizzes like that, but their selection is often very limited (a "good enough for BuzzFeed" standard). It would be nice to have something with a much broader scope.
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  84. I think the issue is partly cultural. Europeans, and european businesses in particular, are more risk averse than their US counterparts. Many would rather stagnate and survive than risk their company for a chance to out-compete their rivals. That means the enormous investments into productivity growth are less common in Europe than the US.
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  85.  @itamar5109  Israel as a region of the Levant has existed for a long time, of course, but as a formal nation state it is pretty new.
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  86. Being protected from being drained of all your money via lawsuits seems like a fairly reasonable strategy. On the one hand I don't want to see such a scheme used to shirk liability for when a rich person genuinely does something bad through themselves or their company, but on the other, I can see how you could end up as a scapegoat or buried under frivolous lawsuits by other people or companies seeing you as a cash cow.
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  87. ​ @MannIchFindKeinName Restaurants can often end up in a death spiral when they raise wages unfortunately, as demand is typically fairly elastic. They raise wages, menu prices go up, so customers either order less or don't visit so often and profits disappear anyway, and the restaurant closes. But then again I guess that just proves that many restaurants are passion projects that are financially unsustainable long term.
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  88. Australia does have a far more diverse economy than Nauru. At worst it could end up in a similar position to New Zealand, which isn't that bad.
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  89. This video remimded me of a discussion (really more of a passionate argument) I had with a marine archaeologist on one of Rare Earth's videos, talking about how the Azores basically banned treasure hunting in their waters, despite it having one of the highest concentrations of valuable shipwrecks in the world. They were passionate about how much they hated treasure hunters, because in their eyes they destroyed historical artifacts for financial gain. I did try to argue the approach the British took here, that a collaborative effort could be a win win for both sides, because marine archeology is so expensive it would help to have a sponsor, but they seemed unconvinced, I think they envisioned that it's better it sits undisturbed on the bottom alone for another century while they scrape together the funding themselves. I retorted that the reality would be that there majority of these wrecks would never be examined unless there was more funding available, and that wasn't going to happen through public funding, but they seemed convinced they'd get round to all of them eventually, before they were buried or crumbled away to nothing. How I'm not sure, but still. That seems to be the mindset of the most vocal opponents in academia.
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  90. Well, a hospital can still be poor value for money even under a universal system, as budgets for healthcare are always finite, and maximising the benefit of every euro/pound/dollar/whatever spent is still important.
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  91. Generally universities want something that's standardised. GPA is unreliable because different schools may interpret the same work differently. One school may grade an A+, another an A- for the same piece of work. They like tests like the SAT because everybody has done the same thing more or less. Interviews and custom exams can be another option, but they don't have the ability to test or interview that many, and besides, the stress of taking different exams for each university is surely going to overwhelm the student. As for improving social mobility, you can do it one of two ways, affirmative action which handicaps students from wealthier backgrounds, or subsidies which allow poorer students to improve their score. Personally I think option B is going to be a lot less controversial.
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  92.  @cco53587  JR has a virtual monopoly on most of the major lines though. Most other private operators (apart from the odd charter train) seem to be on isolated routes that don't connect to the rest of the network. The UK doesn't have many of these disconnected local lines like Japan does.
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  93. "Another problem is that in Europe he has to wait in line at every border which is sometimes up to 12 hours." Maybe in the past, but most of the EU is effectively borderless nowadays. There are no customs checks between most countries, just a road sign.
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  94.  @abbofun9022  AC is best for "medium distance" transmission, very short or very long DC is better.
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  95. He's fairly economically left wing I think. Socially he's more to the centre.
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  96. In my country, you can buy Sildenafil over the counter in most large pharmacies. But they don't market it as some kind of sexual performance booster or anything like.
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  97. There's a tug of war between genetic diversity and optimisation. From a financial perspective farmers want to grow the most profitable cultivars and nothing else. This means lower yield, difficult to harvest, difficult to transport or less tasty cultivars are often just not grown. Bananas are a good example. One of the reasons that other cultivars are not grown is down to taste, consumers like the Cavendish, other varieties are not as sweet and can even have a bitter taste. These probably wouldn't sell well so there's little incentive to grow them. So everyone grows the Cavendish even though it puts the whole crop at risk, because the alternatives just aren't any good. As with many things, it's a complex problem with no simple solutions.
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  98.  @HazmatPyro  Some are ridiculous as a form of sanity check, to make sure the hotel/venue has actually bothered to read the rider in full and hasn't just ignored it or skimmed it.
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  99.  @JonHayes1  To be fair, "affordable flats" in the UK have an absolutely awful reputation, thanks to huge numbers of them being built very cheaply after WWII and basically becoming dumping grounds for the very poor with a similar reputation for crime as project housing in the US. Most poor people in the UK would rather remain in 200 year old Victorian terraces than one of those.
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  100. It seems to me those export tariffs are the biggest millstone around Argentina's neck. Scrapping them or reducing them drastically is definitely needed, since it would take far too long to hash out free trade agreements if it's possible at all. Argentina needs to export as much lithium, copper and grass-fed beef as it can, all products that fetch good prices on world markets so could still generate plenty of taxable profits. With that initial boost it can then focus on investing in long term sustainable growth.
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  101.  @boh365  Well yes, evolutionary speaking, but I think the meaning is obvious here. Lactose tolerance is what allows europeans to continue consuming so much dairy, otherwise it wouldn't be very pleasant.
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  102. It reminds me of the broads in East Anglia. For decades people thought they were a natural feature, then after some excavation and historical research, turns out the area is one giant series of abandoned peat quarries, which quickly flooded once extraction stopped. It has at least resulted in a pretty biodiverse ecosystem, known for its rare birds, insects and amphibians.
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  103. In terms of the US stock market being overvalued, I wonder how much of that is tied up with a small minority of tech megacorporations and silicon valley unicorns where investors seem to believe they can put the moon on a stick as a long term goal. A correction in that regard might not be all that damaging to the US economy as a whole. A few companies in the tech bubble get brought down to earth, but they won't collapse or anything, and while a few investors will lose their shirts, long term investments are still going to be up from their initial investment.
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  104. I think part of the NIMBY issue is cultural. Some cultures venerate quiet rural lifestyles where beautiful views of unspoiled nature (or at least traditional agriculture) are prized. This can make it harder to build stuff especially in places like the UK which is already quite densely populated because you're always going to ruin a lot of people's preferred lifestyle wherever you go, and there aren't that many options for people to relocate to a like for like residence. I think that's partly why even in democratic east Asian countries it's easier to build, there's no veneration for the rural lifestyle, that's for poor peasants. Living in a massive tower block in a city is seen as a sign of progress and success. In the UK it's almost the opposite, I think because the poor rural peasant is more of a distant memory, whereas there it's far more recent or even a current reality.
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  105. I think it's reasonable to request that US presidential flights (and those of other nations) land at military airbases wherever possible to minimise disruption. I'm sure most countries militaries would be happy to provide a very secure runway and aircraft storage location for visiting heads of state, and it saves busy civilian airports a whole lot of stress and bother. Sure, I get the optics of landing at a civilian airport is nicer, but I bet if the US government had to pay millions in compensation to all the inconvenienced passengers they would reconsider.
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  106. Pronunciation does certainly make a difference in English. I've came across people that had very good grammar but whenever they spoke I just heard gibberish as they pronounced every word incorrectly.
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  107. I guess it wouldn't be too much to ask to extend out one of the tram lines to the factory, if it's going to be one of Magdeburg's biggest employers.
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  108. Interesting we call Kabelsalat "Rat's Nest" in English, far more metaphorical.
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  109.  @renegadeblob  That's also generally true of scientists. Unless they're under NDA or racing to publish they'll usually happily talk about their research.
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  110.  @vandeheyeric  There really is a lot of gaps in Tolkien's lore that you can use diversity to fill. How about a civilisation of black elves from rainforests far to the south? Maybe some dwarves chose to leave the caves, and over time their exposure to the sun darkened their skin. Even if they want to still set it in Middle Earth, by explaining the origins of these groups, perhaps a mercantile class or refugees displaced from conflicts in the south, you establish a way to introduce lots of diversity while seeming realistic and grounded.
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  111.  @raynemichelle2996  Then don't complain when somebody disagrees with you. So what do you think the world would be like if no group of humans ever conquered another? If no land or resources were ever taken by force, no empires, big and small, ever created? No nations, no countries, only small tribes of humans somehow managing to not step on each others toes?
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  112.  @fernbedek6302  Sweden is fairly sparsely populated outside of a few major cities, the rail network isn't extensive enough and mills and factories are too spread out to make a large amount of rail freight economic.
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  113.  @jibril2473  That argument doesn't work for Zimbabwe. They hated their former colonists so much they practically destroyed their agricultural sector to get rid of any settlers left.
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  114. @shelletonianhuman  For minor roles and extras I believe that is the case.
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  115. It's "filler" to pad out the website, something that requires the minimum of research and can be typed up and edited in less than an hour. Lots of tabloids do the same thing.
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  116. rickenfatania in the UK. Gibraltar is not in the UK. It's an overseas territory, a bit like Guam is to the US.
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  117. Nothing has really changed on the surface anyway. What will be interesting is what happens after COVID. Will trains keep their liveries or will there be a unified design?
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  118. I guess it's just a case of reprogramming the FPGA to remove the limits.
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  119. Back in the 90's there was no fence around the temple doorway and you could just go up and touch it. I suspect my parents have quite a few photos of me doing so! Naxos is much more of a tourist trap than it used to be, back then it was mostly a family destination for Europeans and generally wasn't seen as one of the popular islands like Mykonos or Corfu, a bit of a hidden gem (it helped that it wasn't that easy to get to, even now there are no charter flights to its tiny little airport). I visited a few years ago in September, after the schools restarted, and it was still heaving, and many of the tourists were from all over the world. Seems like it's a lot more well known now than it was back then. It is considered to have some of the best cuisine in the area, particularly the local potatoes grown on the island are supposed to be special.
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  120. The struggles of standard size nuclear reactors makes me understand why SMR has been the focus for the future in the west. On paper, bigger is better when it comes to nuclear energy, bigger reactors are a more efficient use of resources and in theory should be cheaper per MW than an SMR. But the political and bureaucratic reality means they are too slow to build and the way they are built causes costs to balloon. And because they are built so slowly snd infrequently the technology has moved on so much that it's like starting all over again when building the next batch of reactors decades later. The west is banking on SMR to be built much faster and with fewer bureaucratic hurdles, more like a CCGT plant in time and planning. If that happens remains to be seen. And while the nuclear renaissance in the US is down to energy hungry AI, in Europe it's more stark, the end of cheap russian natural gas and increasing pressure to phase out coal, which is already leading to increased deindustrialization as energy prices rise. Solar slso works poorly here, there is some wind capacity but not enough and it's not reliable enough.
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  121. Finding new uses for existing chemicals is kind of how research works after all.
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  122. That's not uncommon in older buildings. Back in the day they would have been nearly all men's toilets, since there weren't a lot of women in the building's workforce, perhaps a couple of secretaries and receptionists. Later on as more women entered the workforce and building codes were updated, there was a need for both genders to have roughly equal access to toilets, and instead of creating two tiny washrooms on each floor, it's cheaper and more accessible, if slightly less convenient, to alternate genders between floors.
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  123. The fact that no other company is even close to a production hydrogen or even BEV semi-truck should warrant extra scrutiny. Doesn't mean it's impossible for them to have made some breakthrough, but the further ahead than their competitors they seem to be, the more likely it is to be on shaky ground.
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  124. I must admit the suburb idea confuses me. Low density suburbs in the US aren't new, they've been ubiquitous since the 50's. This was also the period of a massive expansion in road infrastructure. Cars were cheap and the domestic industry was at a high point around the middle of the century. Kids still rode their bikes around the neighborhood though, and took the bus to school or walked/biked if they were close enough. So what really changed, the suburbs themselves or the culture around them?
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  125. There's an even crazier canal proposed, the Danube-Aegean canal, which would allow ships going between the black sea and the med to completely bypass Turkey by using the existing Danube-Black Sea canal, basically taking a detour through Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia and Greece.
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  126.  @Kyiwa  Well arguably that could apply to anyone in a scientific discipline, or even a bright high school student if you want to only include the basics. Generally the knowledge isn't going to be that in depth, probably not anything detailed enough to understand the complexities of micronutrient metabolism. Unless that person has proven cross-disciplinary experience beyond what they might have learned as an undergraduate or in general education, then I would not trust their claims.
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  127.  @fernbedek6302  Canada has the US freight rail network to connect to, plus it has ports on both coasts and a lot of low value bulk goods to move. Sweden's railway doesn't really connect much to much outside Sweden, only Copenhagen via the Oresund and a couple of connections to Norway (Finland is a break of gauge). Sweden's rail network isn't much less extensive really, it's just more passenger focused. Unless you're dealing with containers off ships, higher value lower volume goods are generally going to be moved by road, it just doesn't make sense to build a railway spur to every factory, mill or refinery, or even a loading station in the local area.
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  128. The M&A strategy doesn't seem sustainable to me. Disney is starting to run out of companies to acquire in some sectors already, and I can imagine the FTC is going to put its foot down at some point (the new chair seems especially keen on tightening up antitrust laws and isn't afraid to take on big corporations to enforce it, see Microsoft trying to buy Activision). Eventually they're going to have to consider a new strategy.
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  129. Also Socialism back then was less well defined than it is now. Part of the reason National Socialism was able to exist as a phrase was because there wasn't such a concrete ideology attached to the term.
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  130. 9:40 I'd disagree that standard speed rail is all that cheaper, if you're building new lines. Typically the cost of infrastructure is an additional 5-10% at most, and the capacity bump and reduced journey times you get usually means if you're building a new long distance line, building it to high speed standards is a no-brainer. Really, the more economic alternative for passengers is often air travel, not slow trains or buses. That might not make a lot of sense on an initial glance, but airplanes have one big advantage over trains: they only need major infrastructure at their origin and destination. All a city has to do is build an airport and that's it, now it's connected to the rest of the country and beyond. Planes are also much more flexible, if a route isn't as popular, you can move aircraft onto busier routes. There's no "tracks in the sky" to maintain whether planes fly on them or not. Even if you added a hefty carbon tax onto jet fuel, in many cases it would still be cheaper to have a once or twice a day flight than a long distance train service.
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  131.  @ethanyoung.  His background is still working class, even if he isn't any more. Really no politician in the US can be.
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  132. I wonder about the non-investment effects that such a stock concentration may be having on the wider economy. It suggests to me that most small to medium sized businesses in the US, those that employ the bulk of the population, are not really growing at all in aggregate. What it may be showing is the vast majority of the US economy, as measured by workers, is stagnating while a tiny minority of top performers, tech companies that employ relatively few people for their size, are going into the stratosphere and pushing the needle up. I'm not one to say if this is a good or bad thing, I'm not a hardline capitalist or radical socialist, but it does make we wonder if such concentration is sustainable long term and if there might be negative consequences down the line that will need to be managed one way or another.
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  133. I must admit, there is something alluring about the unabashed tackiness of many parts of the US. Europe can feel a bit uptight and stuffy sometimes, obsessed with authenticity and heritage. Sometimes you want to eat OK-ish food in a themed restaurant with colourful plastic decor and visit a bonkers museum about some bizarre alien conspiracy theory. It's just a bit of fun.
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  134. I think federalisation might have a better shot if it was seen as a more centrist position, both economically and socially. If it's only a policy of the middle to far left, I don't think it'll get enough support.
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  135. It's kind of the counterpart to "Here's one I made earlier" (a classic phrase that I'm sure all Brits are familiar with).
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  136. @SteamedBunX I'm not sure how exactly that would change the narrative. More likely I think an "Americanised" narrative would focus far too much on Apartheid and not consider the complex tribal politics within the black South African population.
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  137.  @ZacharyDussault  Thing is, people want a car that covers all use cases, including infrequent ones. If someone does a long road trip 2-3 times a year they're going to want a car that can do that conveniently even if 99% of the time they only drive to work and the supermarket.
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  138. It didn't privatise the same way the UK did. JR Group controls the lion's share of passenger rail. It's like if one TOC owned all the franchises in the UK under subsidiaries and provided nearly all passenger rail services, apart from a few urban networks and Grand Central style niche franchises.
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  139. For those who don't want to be managers but want to make more money, there's always consulting!
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  140.  @gmcnewlook  If I'll be honest, I think a TC episode on how all sorts of sirens and alarms work would be quite fun and informative.
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  141.  @dhess34  I don't know about the US, but in the UK it's an honorary title. Not all academics become professors but they still get paid the same.
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  142. Soaring property prices in London probably helped too. People started moving further out and commuting by train.
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  143. Thankfully I don't think anything like that happened on "You Bet!" which was the UK version of Wetten Dass. Though I think our version was a bit more tame than yours!
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  144. I think one major issue with the idea at the end can be seen in the sorts of small internet communities that do exist today, like subreddits and discord servers. The difference between now and then is that now everyone is generally aware of the existence of everyone else. Everyone on reddit is aware of other subreddits, and that leads to some more extreme subreddits basically going to war with each other, with users "invading" their opponents subreddit and spamming, trolling, mass reporting and mass downvoting to disrupt that subreddit, or at the very least stirring up drama and controversy. Not that that didn't sometimes happen in the past, but because there was less awareness of each other it wasn't so easy, plus the lack of unified platforms and accounts also made it more difficult.
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  145. I think the Canadian west joining the US would be about as likely to happen as northern Mexico doing the same. As in it seems kind of silly at first glance, but reading into it, it doesn't seem quite so ridiculous.
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  146. The odd thing is some eastern bloc nations are actually improving rapidly. Poland and Estonia are two that stand out, in the near future Poland may be wealthier than former east Germany (though not Germany as a whole, that's a much bigger hill to climb!)
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  147. Not as much as you'd think. The biggest company by revenue in the US, Walmart, only comprises about 2.4% of GDP. Samsung is a staggering 22%. The US has some enormous companies, sure, but it has such an enormous economy you can fit so many of them in and still have plenty of room for everyone else. In SK, the Chaebols and mini-Chaebols pretty much are the economy, to the point where the collective value of everyone else barely matters.
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  148. ​ @olas3154  That's absolutely true, but location really matters. The US economy, among many others, is increasingly concentrated in a few urban areas. Houses that might sell for half a million in a small town or rural area can cost a million or more in these cities, even out in the distant suburbs.
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  149. I think the reason for that is more economic than political. Puerto Rico would be, by far, the poorest state in the union, meaning other poor US states would see less federal income, or rich US states would have to pay more federal tax.
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  150. I imagine it is a problem from cultures like Germany and the Nordic countries, where being very open and direct is the norm.
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  151. I suspect at least 90% of LinkedIn users never post anything. For them, it's basically a job hunting site and nothing more. You might go in and update your details every so often, but that's generally it most of the time.
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  152.  @wgowshipping  The EU mostly focuses on cruise ships nowadays.
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  153. Japan, like a lot of countries with a reputation for efficiency, isn't as efficient as it seems. Like Germany it has an overbearing and incredibly rigid state bureaucracy. It also has fallen behind technologically in some service industries, and a culture that values in person meetings as a mark of respect means there's a lot of "this could have been an email" that wastes time and money. Really the reputation for efficiency comes from manufacturing and isn't reflected in the wider economy as a whole.
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  154. British tourists can really be sorted into two groups, polite and quiet or drunk and loud. There's not a whole lot in between.
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  155. This isn't a new thing. They pump out increasing quantities of content and the proofing slips. Hopefully with a larger staff they can have a copyeditor review the videos, but at the moment it's so prevalent it's basically a meme.
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  156. To be fair, a "panel of experts" can be a way to waste a load of money on consultancy fees while getting nothing done.
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  157. One answer could simply be that it does work, but it's much more expensive and the effects take decades to show. Because taken as an average, extreme poverty rates have crashed over the last half century. The vast majority of people in the developing world are significantly better off now than they were only 20-30 years ago. It's a quiet achievement that rarely gets noticed, because journalism is attracted to the events which make a country poorer, not those that make it richer, civil wars, natural disasters, extreme civil unrest. We have, quite rightly, been moving the goalposts as conditions have improved, and it's reasonable to be frustrated by the glacial progress an enormous expense of this aid. But perhaps we just have to be in it for the long haul, and not expect miraculous results overnight.
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  158. I think in a lot of these cases there's such a complicated web of overlapping responsibility and blame that it becomes nigh on impossible to get a clear legal outcome and the case just falls apart. Clear lines of responsibility can be drawn but these don't always hold up in court.
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  159. The 2 hour wait at the carousel should be factored into the delay for compensation claims.
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  160. ​ @tortellinifettuccine No, that's definitely not true. There are plenty of places in Europe where non white people are rare, mainly rural areas just like the US.
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  161. Talk softly and carry a big stick.
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  162.  @runajain5773  Well the Roman empire was extractive too, vassals had to pay tribute. It was just a bit more straightforward back then, pay us or we come and sack you!
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  163. I just can't see Jaguar competing in the luxury sector against its more well established rivals. At the high end you've got Rolls and Bentley, and I don't think think they're going to succeed making a cut price imitator to those. But even at the $120,000 price point you've got reasonably well specced EV's coming out from Audi, BMW and Mercedes. In the end I wonder, who is this car (or whatever makes it to production) for? Who is the target customer for this new Jaguar brand and why would they buy one of its cars over a rivals?
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  164. Probably because he doesn't make reaching claims like "city grids are racist" (looking at you, Cheddar). He acknowledges that from a purely city design perspective, these colonists had some good ideas. He doesn't criticise the way colonists did something just because they were colonists.
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  165. Blame the city really. Britain worked out you can make more money moving other people's money around rather than making stuff. Ireland did the same, just a decade or so later.
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  166.  @tortellinifettuccine  No it isn't. Go to many smaller Eastern and Northern European cities and you'd struggle to find a non white person who isn't a tourist.
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  167. I guess with really expensive restaurants it's not the cost of the food that concerns people (they won't pay a penny for anything in that situation) but the rarity of the occasion. When there's a waiting list of several months and it's a really prestigious restaurant, people don't want anything to ruin it. That said, in most cases with restaurant fires, I've known the staff to move to temporary premises while the restaurant is refurbished, and I'm sure the patrons on that night would be first in the queue for reservations.
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  168. Not long ago you could get houses for about £60,000 in the UK. You wouldn't really want them as they weren't in good condition and usually in a rough area.
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  169. Maybe it was a percentage of those who answered "yes" to "Do you know what an ESG score is?"
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  170. It occupies the same niche as the Chubbyemu intro music. You know some shit is going down.
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  171.  @---l---  Is that what those grey rectangular panels hanging beneath everything on wires are?
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  172. I think there's one country in Africa which did manage to resist the resource curse to some extent, and that's Botswana. I think that was primarily because said resources (mainly high quality diamonds) were discovered when Botswana already had a stable government, just after independence.
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  173. I can imagine a discussion between some engineers. "Hey, how can we test this nuclear fuel flask for required impact strength?" "Well, we could do some very boring static tests dropping big weights on to it in a lab, or we could drive a 140 ton train into it and see who comes off worse".
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  174. I bet he has a huge shutterstock video bundle or something and just picks out a few each time. You can often get big packs of rather random stuff for a few tens of dollars.
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  175. And, surprisingly, vegan meat substitutes. They can make little spheres of fat to make them taste better.
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  176. You'd think having a broken windscreen wiper in monsoon season would pretty much ground the aircraft! Though I guess if it breaks mid-flight and it's raining heavily at all your potential airports, what can you do?
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  177. Surprised Biomed doesn't get you something, it's supposed to be an in demand field.
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  178. National marine salvage laws do generally allow the salvage company to charge a fee proportional to the value of the item, generally this is agreed in advance but I think in most cases it's around 10%. If the items don't have an owner, they could be treasure instead of salvage, which generally means the government can require it to be handed over but they must compensate at an independently appraised value. But it really does vary between nations.
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  179. I was reading an article about how India is a potential location for new cocoa plantations, quite a lot of the more humid parts of the country have conditions suitable for growing it but it only makes up a tiny percentage of the world market. Hopefully spreading cultivation out to more parts of the world will reduce the risk if there's problems in one part. It's also clear production will have to increase to keep up with global demand.
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  180. ​ @adamk.7177  I think you both sort of have a point. There are cheaper cities in the US with more affordable housing. But nearly all the science and tech jobs are clustered in a few really expensive cities. So highly educated people end up having to live in the highest cost of living areas.
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  181.  @nickl5658  That doesn't stop us from providing healthy food, gyms and parks though. And in this case, it seems like a much easier change.
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  182. Unless you're an ice cream van. That's a fight even Disney doesn't want to bother with.
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  183. I'd be interested to see how well this works for reverse auctions, since those are very common in the engineering and service sector (bidding to build a bridge or administer a hospital for example). Intuitively it seems like it would work just as well, but perhaps there's something that might be different.
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  184. One interesting idea from an economic perspective is to just have pretty much the entire global population own shares in these corporations. Some will own bigger numbers of shares than others, so there will still be inequality, and a minority will own no shares for whatever reason and will be on welfare. That's what supposedly happened in the WALL-E universe with Buy n Large, because nearly the entire global population is a shareholder, the company can continue to make profits, even if those profits just go back to the consumers through dividends in an endless cycle. It's a rather bizarre idea, but perhaps it would work.
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  185. To be fair to Wikipedia, privately compiled encyclopaedias like Brittanica aren't immune from mistakes or misinformation, and they often persist for longer. So you can't really rely on those either.
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  186. Though in some cases Hawai'i doesn't help itself, like closing hiking trails without opening others, which leads to the few that do exist becoming even more overcrowded and damaged, which then forces their closure and puts even more stress on the ones that remain. You'd think a state that is constantly complaining about overtourism would be keen to open more trails to spread hikers out.
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  187. There's also one obvious solution to the capacity problem: make the cells smaller. We've been building more and more low power base stations in heavily populated areas for this reason. Mobile phones also adjust their transmission power once they know the distance to the nearest base station, to make it less likely another nearby station on the same frequency will detect the signal. Spatial Multiplexing using arrays of small antennas is also pretty fascinating. I'm not sure exactly how it works, you can use beamforming to transmit two data streams on the same frequency in different directions at the same time, but I'm not sure if it can receive two data streams at the same time if they aren't beamformed themselves.
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  188. Unless you have a medical condition, I don't see why you shouldn't just drink when you're thirsty. We've gotten so obsessed about dehydration as if not drinking water constantly is going to lead to kidney stones.
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  189. Certainly there's a significant economic and cultural argument in favour of beef production in some parts of the world, northern Britain and Ireland being a good example. Here there's huge amounts of otherwise unproductive grassland, and the agricultural economy is almost exclusively livestock, cattle in the valleys and sheep on the hills. Abandoning that land would be very costly, you'd either have the government buy all the land at market price at a cost of at least 80-100 billion pounds and be saddled with millions of hectares of money draining grassland, or they can permanently subsidise farmers to basically do nothing with their land, which would be even more expensive in the long run and even more unpopular. Telling the farmers to lump it isn't politically viable, they're a very vociferous minority with the power to cause a lot of disruption. It would also have an enormous cultural impact. Some villages and small settlements owe their entire existence to livestock farming, without it there would be little reason for anyone to live there, other than perhaps a few retirees and hotel owners. They're often a long way away from towns, so have already experienced a population drain as agriculture has become less labour intensive. This would probably be enough to be a final nail in the coffin for some of the most isolated places. I don't have a good answer to this really, in an ideal world we could just leave the land to nature and every government would have enough income to sustain over a fifth of their land being a money sink. But farmers need to be placated and a historical agricultural culture needs to be preserved, or at least able to adapt without losing its essence.
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  190.  @alexven92  Foods with a lot of water tend to be where stainless has the most trouble.
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  191.  @julm7744  That's a nice idea in theory, but when half the global south piles into Europe and North America, things would quickly fall apart.
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  192. With arguments like colonialism and exploitation, you get into a chicken and egg problem. Sure, you can argue the these factors made poor countries poorer, but they rarely made these countries poor in the first place, because in order to be colonised there needs to be a significant gap in technological development and/or standard of living, and both of those correlate pretty well with wealth.
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  193.  @thebarkingmouse  I think 99% is an exaggeration. Engineering firms absolutely do need people to travel, you can't do that much remotely. Same with factory inspections and trade shows and conventions (yes you can do the latter remotely, but it's no substitute for being there in person). Covid put a lot of projects on ice, inspections were delayed or cancelled and installations of equipment pushed back. I think in a few months things will pick back up to 70-80% of normal.
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  194.  @markofsaltburn  Well perhaps you can find the passage. I actually found my inspiration from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, so I guess he's not far off Hitler... I think one of our greatest achievements in recent years has been our ability to lower the barriers to scientific and technological advancement. No longer do we need empires to amass the resources required to engage in serious progress. But it's been a long time coming. But it's true what you describe about how empires fall. Empires without rivalry can often stagnate, as the Chinese famously did and it resulted in their century of humiliation. Great advancement and innovation often come from competition, but you need enough resources to do anything more than fight for survival. So the best situation for that is multiple powers that are at least cordial rivals. One power growing too large can cause them to sit on their laurels. It's interesting you talk about European rivals, which usually had their own empires. Sure, they were smaller, but size isn't everything, just look at the Dutch.
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  195.  @markofsaltburn  That was imperialism! Britain wasn't the only player in the Empire game, other European countries, especially the French, were rivals. And this rivalry created the Industrial Revolution, to make far more efficient use of the resources the British Empire had access to. You're can't just increase the number of players to prevent stagnation. Eventually each group doesn't have access to enough resources to do any kind of complex innovation, they're too preoccupied with just staying alive. I'm not denying the horrible things that happen with emipres. It enables subjugation and destruction on much larger scale. But really, if we'll be honest, these are mostly atrocities committed by one nation instead of several. If we really think about it, how small can an empire be before it's not an empire? Most nations of the world did not coalesce entirely peacefully, are they not really little emipres that simply dissolved through the assimilating effects of time? So if someone says that empires are evil, should they also believe countries are evil? To be honest you seem to be using empire as an excuse to beat the UK over Brexit more than anything else.
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  196. I think the Germans and Nordics are a little more lenient with timekeeping. You can be 5 minutes or so late, but no more than that, and you'd better be sweaty and apologetic to show you made an effort. In Germany you can also blame Deutsche Bahn and generally be forgiven, but of course that doesn't work in Japan.
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  197.  @brunsy1990  It's for reducing the iron oxide ore into elemental iron. As long as you use the right amount all the hydrogen is consumed in the reaction, combining with the oxygen to form dry steam as an exhaust gas. The resulting elemental iron then goes into the EAF along with other feedstocks for steelmaking.
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  198. I think part of it is the more fractured nature of the EU. Each country is far more different in regulation, culture and business policy than between any U.S. states. This makes doing cross border business in the EU far more challenging than between, say, Nebraska and California in the US. The EU is currently struggling between a future of an ever closer union, closer to the federal system of the US, and countries wanting to maintain far more of their independence (one already decided to leave after all!). More unified business regulations and capital markets would really help encourage investment, and there are plans for both, but I'm sceptical how far the EU can take this sort of thing before several countries decide enough is enough.
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  199. Especially compared to Malaysia, who has raced up to the top of middle income countries and is pretty much considered on the verge of being "developed".
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  200. Freemasonry strikes me as one of those organisations that's cloaked in a lot more mystique than it perhaps deserves. It seems to me to be one of those weird clubs that rich and powerful people seem to belong to, mainly for social reasons but also to gain influence. A bit like a college fraternity.
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  201.  @cco53587  The physical design of Japan's rail network arguably makes privatisation of some lines easier. Japan isn't that far off somewhere like Germany. You have JR, a quasi monopoly made up of regional subsidiaries and long distance services, not far off from DB. Then you have a smattering of private companies running relatively short commuter and rural lines which aren't integrated with the wider network, as you mentioned. The AKN north of Hamburg is like this, as are many of the mountain railways in the south of Germany. The UK rail network doesn't really look like this. Outside of a couple of narrow gauge tourist attractions, the entire network is connected together. There's no big quasi monopoly that runs the majority of services, mostly regional fiefdoms where each franchise monoplises their patch. Only on intercity routes do you see any competition. Metro systems don't really count as those are often owned either privately or by local government.
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  202. While I think it is true the music industry is more balanced between Europe and the US, I think at least part of that is down to the UK's incredibly outsized influence on the global music industry. While other European bands do achieve international fame from time to time, it is the UK and US that still dominate the industry internationally.
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  203. As long as it's not too close to the coast and buried deep enough, it would probably not end up back in the environment very quickly. You can do two other things to non recyclable plastic, burn it (very dirty) or crack it into shorter chains, which can be burned as fuel (less dirty but cracking is energy intensive). Chemical recycling could be done if you can get it all the way back to monomers, but that's really energy intensive.
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  204. Regional public transport is way better than the US, you can get between the vast majority of major settlements by train, and even many small towns and villages if you're willing to make a few transfers. Commuter rail is also generally pretty good, though coverage is limited in many cities. Where the UK does lag pretty badly even behind the US in some cases is public transport in major cities outside the capital. There are only two real subway systems, and one is a single loop line around the city centre. There are a few light rail/tram systems but most only have two or three lines, only Manchester has anything extensive and much of that runs on old railway lines which basically replaced existing commuter routes.
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  205.  @fetchstixRHD  Not in my experience, the WCML services between Euston and the North West got painted from red to green (Virgin to Avanti) about 2 years ago. I think a unified livery would look better. In my experience the colour of the train doesn't really factor in for deciding what train to get for most journeys, and the trains need to be repainted every few years anyway, just move to the unified livery gradually. Or maybe if they're owned by local government, we might get different liveries for different regions, plus an intercity livery.
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  206. There's been a controversial plan to drop most of the long distance sleeper services in favour of improving regional connectivity between large cities. And I can see where it's coming from. Realistically, Chicago to LA doesn't attract that many riders, and arguably never will. There would probably be a lot more benefit to increasing frequency and decreasing journey time between LA and San Diego, or Dallas and Houston, which could pull thousands or even tens of thousands off congested highways every day, rather than take a few dozen off a plane.
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  207. Reducing cattle herd size is always going to be difficult, as farmers can then get undercut by imports. At the moment a steak from Argentina is more expensive than one from the UK or Ireland, but if the price went up that could change. Sure, there would be those who would pay the premium, but I don't think there would be enough demand for all farmers to survive. We kind of had this problem with New Zealand lamb, though British and Irish lamb have just about managed to keep parity.
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  208.  @frikitiki  Light rail is an extremely nebulous term, it can mean anything from a glorified tram to a fully grade separated light metro like HART, Skytrain or REM. At grade light rail might have worked for the suburbs, but probably would have been inadequate between the airport and downtown, not enough capacity. So you build two systems or one, and one is probably cheaper in the long run.
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  209. Going into the trades isn't as easy as it sounds. You might get paid reasonably well with no college debt but you'll have worse job security, you'll be first in line for redundancy at a company and if you're self employed you'll see fewer customers every time there's a recession. Many also take a toll on your body, you won't be working into your 60's like many white collar workers. Finally it can be a lot harder to get a foot in the door than it seems, some trades are highly fraternalistic, you need to know someone to get hired.
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  210. Japan and Argentina are sometimes seen as opposing economic paradoxes. Japan as a rich country that should be poor, and Argentina as a poor country that should be rich.
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  211. The problem is the more dishonest people there are, the more those honest people are tempted into corruption and fraud. After all, if nobody else is playing by the rules, why should I? You work hard to be a productive member of society and you see others getting rich through deception, it makes you wonder why you bother.
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  212. In the UK, you can avoid a lot of IHT by gifting money to your children 7 years before you die. I'd possibly take this even further, encourage boomers to transfer more wealth to their children earlier on, maybe through similar tax incentives. We also have Junior ISA's, investment accounts specifically designed for parents to transfer wealth to minors, where they gain full access to the funds at 18, handy for higher education expenses. It's not going to solve generational inequality, but it might go some way to improve things.
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  213. Great idea in principle, but from a distance it may just look like a standard human figure. Needs to be easily readable from far away.
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  214. I think much of the UK's lack of productivity can be down to inefficient internal bureaucracy. A lot of time is wasted waiting for approval or action from other departments, often resulting in multiple emails or phone calls that can stretch over weeks. Particularly in research and development, this can be a massive drag on productivity and can lead to missed deadlines and lower quality output.
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  215. I can see why police forces don't want to do it, it's expensive even if they are fired in the end, they lose manpower and in some places officers are hard to replace.
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  216. ​ @Ascensionist_RS  I think part of the problem is that reform might mean spending more money on police forces, not less. If you want to attract better officers with more training and replace "bad apples" quickly, you might need to pay higher salaries. Which is going to piss off the "defund the police" people.
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  217. Wheat is probably going to be quite attractive to grow, since Ukraine is one of the largest wheat exporters in the world. There are countries where the people's primary source of carbohydrates is imported Ukranian wheat.
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  218. ​ @bokonoo77 Why exactly?
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  219. It does require some sacrifice though. Living without a car in suburbia, even in Europe, means you have fewer options and less choice for shopping and other activites. Most suburbanites in Europe do still have a car, even if it's just a weekend runabout to go to the supermarket and the hardware store. But you do still save on fuel and (sometimes) insurance costs.
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  220. The problem there is it creates an incentive for rent seeking. You can imagine some corporation just reselling goods from China and tacking on their own markup.
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  221.  @beauwille2294  Well nobody said it was cheap to customise! And it's not just the luxury brands that offer fine grained customisation. It is absolutely possible. Most car manufacturers operate on a JIT model, so very little is built in advance. Obviously they can't make major changes, but colour of seats and trim aren't major. In terms of waiting time, it really depends on how long the queue is. For a very exclusive luxury model it can be many months or even years, but more common cars can be shorter.
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  222. There's a fine line between a union that serves its members, and a union that serves its leaders. Don't even need the Mafia for that, look at the NUM under Scargill.
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  223. ​ @MrSchmallz  Money isn't always the best option. If you give economies money but no additional access to goods and services, you just create inflation. In highly corrupt societies, the money is likely to be stolen or siphoned off somehow. Direct money transfers can help in some situations, but it doesn't help everywhere.
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  224. There's a lot of people out there who desperately do not want to believe that socialism can exist within an authoritarian and malevolent society. They want to believe that there is something so inherently virtuous about the ideology that it is impossible for evil to be done under its name. I do understand that some may feel linking nazism with socialism will be used as a kind of "gotcha" against socialism, which would be short sighted, great evils have been committed under pretty much every shade of political ideology that has been popular in history. It's certainly not fair to say socialism or communism are evil just because Hitler or Stalin were subscribed to those ideologies.
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  225. ​ @spectacles-dm I could certainly understand how White may have seen it as a betrayal, after holding out an olive branch to Milk on the understanding he would help him in return, only to be figuratively stabbed in the back.
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  226. But globally, you're probably one of them, so better get your head on the block!
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  227. ​@buttersofi Specifically American touristy. European tourists tend to go to only one or two places, often for an entire fortnight instead of 9 days. Some even go to the same place over and over every year. But thats no different from the Europeans who try to speedrun the entire US in 3-4 weeks of course!
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  228.  @adrianbradley3765  Ukraine would certainly upset the Russians, they like their buffer zone between the EU and themselves, they're going to resist any attempt to make the Russia/EU border longer.
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  229.  @hackel137  I disagree. Home working can be very isolating and not everyone copes well with it. Having a "work place" and a "home place" can help people be more productive, and it also allows for in person socialisation which has mental health benefits. Also, as you say, not everyone wants to live in a mixed use area, it will be busier and less peaceful than a purely residential area. A co-working space allows for a shorter commute while also getting people out of their homes.
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  230. Those near retirement who have paid off their mortgage are probably the least fucked, unless they planned on equity release their asset might have tanked in value, but if everyone else's houses has, they are really no worse off, since everyone still needs a home to live in. It's those at the start of paying their mortgage that are the most fucked, people probably only a few years older, or the same age, as yourself. They are now deep underwater, and quite possibly cannot afford to sell, since they would have to pay any difference between the mortgage and sale price out of pocket, and even if they can, they might have no money left to afford a deposit on a new property anyway. Plus now they are pretty much junk in the eyes of most mortgage providers, a major default risk, so they end up stuck on high variable interest rates. Both of these would have a significant impact on the economy, as millions of people cut spending to pay the mortgage and decline opportunities to improve their income because it would cost too much to move. First time homebuyers may find a market in some places where they are unable to find a home, because nobody is selling.
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  231.  @toyotaprius79  There's no need for conditionality. Very low interest rates mean they could take their time paying them off, much like western Europe did with their marshall loans. It's not supposed to be a debt trap. In fact the low interest rates are kind of indirect grant since they'll likely trail inflation. And with that attitude the marshall plan shouldn't have been done because some people thought we'd all perish in nuclear hellfire before 1980.
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  232. It's not uncommon in SE Asia, where the attitude to PPE is... well practically non existent.
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  233. Please tell me there's a pair of funeral directors called that.
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  234. ​​ @hoogyoutube My personal theory about why the Dutch like cycling is so they don't get fat eating their cuisine. So much Dutch food seems to be deep fried, covered in sugar, or both! EDIT: This was supposed to be a light hearted comment on the reputation of Dutch cuisine, not that the Dutch diet is extremely unhealthy in general. Yes, I know most of the famous foods are not eaten everyday, that the Dutch also eat a wide variety of foods from other cultures. So I believe this reputation is reflected in diet, as to make the Dutch diet slightly less healthy than its peers? Yes I do, disagree with me on that if you must. But that's it, no more than that. I'll accept my own shortcomings in articulating that position. This joke has been completely ruined anyway. I've learned my lesson to not be so flippant about this in the future, it's a topic that must be taken seriously. Perhaps it wasn't funny in the first place and I should be ashamed about making such a terrible joke. Fair enough, I guess.
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  235. It might be controversial to say, but I don't see starting a business as an unalloyed good. A poorly thought out business that never breaks even and crashes and burns, or worse, becomes a zombie, is arguably a drag on the economy. It would have been more economically efficient for them to do nothing (though working for an economically productive business would be better). And with full UBI in a highly automated society, the market will simply not be big enough to support more than a tiny fraction of people starting their own businesses. In other words, if UBI encourages the creation of "zombie companies" who are basically only propped up by the economic conditions UBI creates, or quickly fall apart at the first contact with the market, that's not a good thing.
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  236. States and countries do have another incentive for MPI's: A location heavy blockbuster can act as basically a 2 hour long tourism advert. A lot of New Zealand's increase in tourism can be attributed to Lord of the Rings. So if you incentivise movies to shoot at stunning locations in your country or state, and then make sure everyone who sees the movie knows where it was filmed, you can have a lasting legacy of increased tourism, especially if the movie is a massive hit. Though to be fair there are a lot of cases where the location isn't disclosed or is even hidden to pretend it is somewhere else.
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  237. Perhaps banks can be treated like energy companies, if one fails the accounts are then offered up to a competitor on a like for like basis, and customers have all their money transferred to a new bank. It could mean they lose high interest payments they got from the previous bank, but that was probably unsustainable to begin with.
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  238. When it comes to cutting regulation, often the wrong ones get cut, ones that ensure people's safety. Then something bad happens, like a train crash or a tower block fire, a lot of people are killed and injured, and they get reintroduced. This has happened a number of times in the UK.
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  239. I think part of the issue is there been a gradual middle class flight from SA over the decades, leaving a tiny upper class mostly white minority and a large lower class mostly black majority. Initially post-apartheid it was mainly the white population, 20% migrated from 1995 to 2008, for a number of reasons though some did feel the ANC really wanted them to leave. But they have been increasingly joined by other racial groups sick of the crime, economic instability and corruption. The inequality we see today is partly because the middle is leaving the country, the upper class can use their wealth to protect their lifestyle with generators, razor wire and armed guards, and the lower class can't afford to leave.
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  240. You can see why residential conversion works in an old fashioned shopping arcade but not a giant mall. Quite simply, windows, nobody would want to live in a windowless apartment. And they are really really small, probably only going to appeal to students and extroverted young singles who don't spend a lot of time at home anyway and prefer to eat out. Converting mall land into mixed use is probably going to be the way forward with full or partial demolition of the existing structure.
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  241.  @chrisw443  That's easier said than done if the bus takes an extra hour and doesn't sync with their shift, effectively you've added 2+ hours on to their workday which might mean they don't have any time left to do other important things, like cook a meal or put their kids to bed.
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  242.  @beback_  I also love the logo, it looks like some alien sigil out of an 80’s sci-fi film!
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  243. +Novusod Water and air are both fluids, the maths isn't that different.
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  244. ​ @HonuFlight The EU does impose more financial responsibility on airlines for delays and cancellations though.
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  245. True, the AP1000 may have been a better choice. Though it seems a lot of the expense of the reactor is where it's built, the two EPR's built in China have seen much shorter delays than in Europe. Even with the AP1000, the two built in the US were so overbudget and delayed they bankrupted Westinghouse.
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  246. Darn sight better than lot of journalists working for some gaming magazines!
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  247. ​​ @Levkin It's a bit better on the continent, though places like Germany have more first tier cities so you're probably going to be looking at cities like Hannover, Leipzig or Karlsruhe rather than Hamburg, Dusseldorf or Stuttgart if you want cheaper housing.
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  248. Not helped when some UK apprenticeships are menial labour disguised as such in order to pay below minimum wage. Supermarket shelf stackers and fish and chip shop fryers are not jobs which should have apprenticeships. Only a skilled job which can't be fully learned in a few hours should qualify.
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  249. Probably not possible in India, there's just too many people. Europe has 2/3 the population and 3x the landmass.
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  250. It's also not just the hours but what you do with them. Japan has a highly presentist work culture, so even though you might be at work late you won't necessarily be doing anything productive, a lot of hours are filled by inefficient processes or pointless make work, or even no work at all, it's not uncommon for Japanese employees to play games or watch videos while at work waiting for the boss to leave. Contrast that with the US, which still works long hours but has a far more output driven work culture, so those long hours are filled with mostly productive tasks.
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  251. I'm personally waiting for the Inverse Monkey Dart ETF. Short everything the monkey hits.
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  252.  @haroldsandahl6408  The answer is we don't know. Fusion could be 50 years away or 10 years away. There were people in the 19th century who thought fixed wing aircraft were never going to happen, but they did.
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  253. I think the fundamental issue behind all of this is the power and control platforms like Nexus, Steam Workshop and similar have over the modding community. They often offer the simplest and most streamlined way to modify a game, to the point where any mods that lie outside these ecosystems are simply ignored, since players dont want to read through a readme and modify multiple game files manually in order to run a mod, and then undo those operations if they want to remove it, like in the old days. They want Vortex or Steam Workshop where they can just click a couple of buttons and it's all done for them. They want automatic updates, essentials when mod breaking updates are common, dependency management, and repository search, something which is present in some mod managers for specific games but none have the breadth and scope of Steam Workshop or Vortex. This means as much as Nexus might say that users are still free to install the mod from other sources, by excluding it from their ecosystem they are effectively giving it the kiss of death, and they know it. If we want to be free of this censorship, an open source alternative to Vortex or Workshop is needed where nobody can dictate which mods are allowed.
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  254. That's why oversight systems are important. Even the best civil engineer will make mistakes, the important thing is to have someone, or maybe several people, who can review your work and check it.
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  255. It does seem that the UK might end up in the same place if it can't make the same investment now. Munich is building a second cross city tunnel when cities like Birmingham and Manchester don't even have one (Manchester in particular needs something to reduce congestion on the Castlefield corridor which is one of the busiest sections of railway in the country).
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  256. I think a good idea for any lottery win is to immediately set aside a small percentage and just blow it on something ridiculous (but crucially something that does not require a lot of upkeep, so no luxury yachts!) That way you can get that excitement out of your system so you aren't tempted to spend more.
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  257. I'm pretty anti-woke by most standards, but even I recognise that going woke can pay off if you have the right customer base. If most of your customers are liberals living in progressive US cities, then going woke is probably going to help your brand. But if they're suburban or rural conservatives, then it's probably going to do harm. In the latter case doing the opposite will probably help your brand. Companies who want to jump off the fence and take a stance need to make sure they do their research first. You're going to lose some customers, but you should make up for that by gaining customers or increasing sales from existing customers through increased brand loyalty. But that's only going to work if your stance aligns with most of your existing customers. If it doesn't, you're probably not going to be able to switch customer base fast enough, if at all, to avoid losing out to your competition.
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  258.  @mrmarecki1  My debit card (which I only use for withdrawing cash) does have a £100 minimum for chargebacks, and I believe the terms are less favourable than my basic credit card. My credit card also allows for fee free overseas transactions at market exchange rates, which is useful for people who pay in foreign currency when on holiday (obviously not an issue for most people in the EU, and the US because they don't vacation outside their country nearly as much).
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  259. Part of the problem is farm labour work is usually short term and migratory. You have to move to where the work is and you'll probably only be working a couple of months or less at each location, maybe 3-6 months every year (no harvest, no work). That's often not conducive to the local population, who want something year round and near their home. Then there's the PPP difference to consider, these migrant workers often do these jobs for a couple of years, save every penny by living in overcrowded accommodation and eating tinned food, and then buy a house in cash back in their home country and get a more cushy job. Local workers would barely be able to afford a decent standard of living on such a salary, and certainly couldn't buy a home with any savings, there's just no incentive when for the same salary they could stack shelves in the local Tesco.
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  260.  @konfunable  I'm not so sure. Baltic countries still have a welfare state. Perhaps western Europe is a bit more risk averse, having more to lose if things go wrong.
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  261. It's not really a subway, it's an extension of the regional rail network. More of an S-Bahn/Crossrail situation. That said, there are plans for auckland to build a subway to the airport, someday.
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  262.  @theendurance  I'm not sure the US military needs to for everything. The headline items like the F35 might be worth the money, but there's a lot of less sexy equipment out there that could be bought for cheaper from one of the many allies the US has. And I'm not talking about places like Mexico either, South Korea, Japan, France, Germany all have more cost effective military equipment. It's not quite as fancy, but the prices can be nearly half the US equivalent sometimes.
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  263. I think it might also be down to the use of travel adaptors. The extra mass, bulk and sometimes poor design of adaptors (many "universal" ones have rotating flat prongs designed for both US and AU/NZ sockets, the latter of which don't have different widths for the live and neutral pins) combined with a heavier plug can make it more prone to pulling away from the wall when jostled.
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  264. Personally as long as I can control the water myself, and the pressure is not trying to give me a colonic irrigation, I can see the benefits. Less TP used and you get cleaner quicker. I kinda prefer the Finnish way where you get a little miniature shower head on a hose next to the toilet, gives you more control over where the water goes.
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  265. I think its price is way more than bullish, it's stratospherically ridiculous. To live up to the speculators, Tesla would pretty much have to be the most successful company since the EIC back in the 17th century. It has to grow to a corporation who warrants entire chapters in history books. And that just seems really really unlikely, worse odds than winning the lottery.
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  266.  @paxundpeace9970  You might be able to do that, a co-working space can have 25-50 members so a few of them downtown could probably support a couple of cafes or restaurants.
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  267. I do kinda wonder if he's in over his head. It seems like he does have some experience running a game studio and managing people, but he might not be particularly adept at development himself. There are people out there who aren't malicious but have incredible overconfidence in their abilities, and it isn't always possible to differentiate on the surface.
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  268. To be fair, I don't think batteries have been a free market for a while. China subsidizes the hell out of the industry amongst many others. If Europe wants to compete, they have to understand the market isn't fair so they can't expect to succeed playing by the rules.
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  269. Before CFC's ammonia was often used, with regularly lethal results when it leaked. I'm sure HFC's and hydrocarbon based systems would have eventually arrived, but might have prolonged the use of ammonia. As for leaded petrol, there were alternative additives such as ethanol. But they were more expensive, some required extensive modifications to existing vehicles, and in some cases significantly increased fuel consumption compared to TEL. So we'd probably see a greater drive for efficiency and possibly slower car adoption over the decades, which I'm sure some people would see as a good thing. Of course eventually more precise engine technology allowed us to forgo TEL without these downsides.
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  270. I would argue it's not car centric design that creates this kind of architecture, because modern construction in places that are not car centric still look the same, in fact often they look more like you describe because you need to fit more people into a smaller space, so simple modular forms are more common.
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  271. It's so sensitive that there are regular "false alarms" from radon leaking out of the bedrock.
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  272.  @HoaxW  It's not a slur in this use though. British people still call cigarettes "fags" for example. It does mean you have to be careful when you use it so your context is clear.
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  273. Seawater environment are challenging, so I expect not as long as you'd expect.
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  274. I guess one of the downsides of some of these rules is it likely generates pretty inflexible code, where even a small change to functionality may require a lot of lines of code to be rewritten. This is probably fine when you're creating a very conservative program with limited functionality that's unlikely to be regularly updated if at all, and especially if you've got a lot of time with a small team with extremely close collaboration and aren't working on too may things in parallel.
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  275.  @olympia5758  I think if you combine a lot of people squeezed onto a tiny landmass with neighbours too powerful to expand into, and the first continent to develop technological advances that allowed for really long sea voyages, and I really don't think it's any surprise European countries started to take territory from far and wide in order to sustain their growth. Other parts of the world could, and did, expand by conquering their neighbours, european nations were too well matched to do that to each other sustainably, so you ended up with an endless cycle of wars, where territory would get passed between nations over and over, and short lived internal empires would rise and fall. Honestly, I do think that without colonialism, there is good chance europe would have destroyed itself through war, the growth in population and resource demand with the technology available at the time would have been unsustainable without expansion.
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  276. ​​​ @AidanMyne Plus the fact that the additional weight of batteries means that small, light cars are no longer practical, the range is too low for long distance journeys.
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  277. Hmm... I don't usually think of fascism as an economic system, unlike communism or capitalism. I would think that of all the fascist governments that have ever existed throughout history, each one probably had quite different economies. So you could do Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, or Franco's Spain (and all the other examples outside of Europe) but not all together. But maybe there is something that economically links them, I'd be curious to find out.
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  278. Also votes of no confidence tend to have a long cooldown period, if you call for one and it fails you might not be able to invoke it again for a year or two, or until after another general election. This is obviously done to prevent opposition frustrating government with repeated no confidence votes. One way or another the process is designed so it's not invoked on a whim.
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  279. I think we're seeing a lot more competition in the gaming industry. Digital distribution and crowdfunding models have dramatically lowered barriers to entry. There are far more games now for niche audiences made on smaller budgets, but there's enough money sloshing around that even a small studio can produce something that only a AAA studio would have been able to manage 10-15 years ago. So now these AAA games have to compete for customers who now have a lot more choice in what they play. It's like buying food at a supermarket, back then you'd only have a few varieties of each product, mostly by big name brands. Now you have dozens more by smaller producers, and you have more new products catering for niche tastes. The existing products are going to lose market share.
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  280. Singapore is perhaps an extreme example of traffic restriction. They don't just make it expensive to drive a car, they make it expensive to own a car. It helps if you're a city state with the 3rd highest population density on earth where practically everyone lives in high density tower blocks a short walk from a metro station. As such they have one of the lowest levels of vehicle ownership in the developed world.
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  281. To be fair, the biggest projects like the Grand Paris Express were planned well before the bid.
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  282. Realistically I can't imagine anyone would agree to pay upkeep for a frozen asset. If they know the government who confiscated it will pay whatever the outcome, why bother?
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  283. I want to play a game...
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  284. Oil is used for vehicles because it's energy dense and portable. If we can replicate those qualities we'll be fine.
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  285. Agreed. Driving an unfair bargain is not the same as theft. If I pressure you into selling your house at a bargain price to me, I haven't stolen your house, I've just got a potentially unfair deal.
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  286. I don't really understand why all EV's didn't go in for a standard two wire CAN interface from the get go (do they still use other protocols in new vehicles outside of NA/Europe?). It would only need one extra pin on the connector and would have been using an extremely common standard that's been in existence for around 30 years without much modification, and works just as well for modern cars as it did for those back in the 90's.
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  287.  @nicholaspostlethwaite9554  I think there's a balance. I'd argue houses in the UK are often too small, at an average of 100m^2, but many are little as 50m^2. And the data backs this up, we have some of the smallest homes in the developed world outside of East Asia. Bear in mind that 100m^2 is often housing entire families, not just single people. Most of the houses are quite old and are divided into at least half a dozen rooms, so each room can be really quite small. Honestly something around 150m^2 might be a good ideal for families, about the size of most detached single family homes here. Though 170-200m^2, while on the larger side, probably isn't excessive. Even an extra 30m^2 or so in the house I currently have would be useful, I could have a dining room, an office or a workshop for example.
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  288.  @briancops3798  Finland might be the trickiest one. They won't want to upset Russia by joining any military alliance that would clearly see Russia as an adversary. It's not so easy when you share a long border with the country.
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  289. I doubt it. Polymer science might advance to the point where we have more biodegradable packaging and the like, but we're not going back to the era of glass, metal and paper, there's far too many drawbacks. Plastic will still be around, and still very common, even if it's not longer used for some applications.
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  290. I don't think we'll ever run out of oil for plastic. We don't need a whole lot. A lot of plastics can be made from plant sources as well, or from synthetic hydrocarbons. We've got options.
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  291.  @nntflow7058  Still, saves waiting outside in the awfully humid Singaporean climate! Plus correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the bus routes designed to feed into MRT stations?
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  292. That's always something to bear in mind when comparing European rail to the US. The distances in Europe, even for sleeper services, are generally so much smaller. I don't think Americans should beat themselves up because they can't cross half the country by rail in a timely fashion, neither could the Europeans given the same distance! In the end, there's plenty of room for improvement on populous corridors, but the reality is connecting the whole country with fast, efficient, affordable rail is a very long way off, if it's ever viable. Having to fly from Chicago to LA isn't down to an inadequate rail network, having to drive between Dallas and Houston perhaps is.
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  293.  @TheJayjayforce  Botswana is one of the most developed countries in Africa, and has been a remarkable island of stability in an otherwise turbulent region pretty much since its independence. It's very understandable they want to keep it that way.
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  294. I think there's a bit of a concern in the west that we don't want to be seen as treating poor people in the developing world like idiots who need to be educated on what we in the west might see as something very simple and basic. It's an understandable reaction to older paternalistic "white man's burden" attitudes that were present during the imperial era, westerners don't want to give any impression of superiority. But that can perhaps go too far, where we just assume they'll pick it up because they're smart and resourceful people. And they are, but perhaps not as much as we like to hope.
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  295.  @OriginalStachuJones  The PTFE itself isn't toxic or carcinogenic, the coating isn't nice to ingest but it won't harm you. It's the PFOA byproduct in manufacture that's the problem.
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  296. Some people make the mistake of thinking going to Mars is like going to the Moon. It is way, way more challenging. There are a lot of things you need to consider on a much longer Mars mission that you don't on a Moon mission. Launching it into space is the easy bit. There's radiation shielding, advanced life support, off world habitation (no mission to Mars will stay for a just a few days, astronauts will be there for months, so you'd need more than a small lander to live in). We might even need to consider things like agriculture to generate oxygen and provide food for the astronauts. In short, we would need to be halfway to a Mars colony to go to Mars, unlike the Moon where a flying visit is doable with a small self contained lander. Not that I don't think we shouldn't pursue a Mars mission, with a concerted effort from a coalition of space agencies (perhaps NASA, ESA, JAXA and perhaps CNSA can team up) and a few hundred billion in R&D, we could probably do it by 2040 or 2050. But I don't think we have any chance until at least 2035. There's just too many problems to solve first.
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  297. It reminded me a little of the disaster that happened when KFC in the UK switched their food delivery contract from Bidfood to DHL. For those that don't know, Bidfood is a logistics company that specialises in food delivery to restaurants. They have a huge catalogue of wholesale products that independent restaurants can purchase and get delivered, but they also provide many chains with storage and delivery of their own exclusive products, like KFC chicken. Moving from a company that is designed around on demand delivery of a huge array of perishable goods from centralised warehouses, to a company that mainly dealt with non-perishable goods from point to point was a disaster. Franchises were regularly running out of chicken as DHL couldn't adapt to the centralised rapid on-demand system that is required for delivering food. A restaurant that runs low after one busy day needs to be resupplied by tomorrow morning, preferably before they open, and it can be hard to predict precisely when they'll run low on a particular item, since they don't know what customers will order in advance. In the, KFC dropped DHL like a warm dog turd, and went back to Bidfood having learnt their lesson.
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  298.  @GTAVictor9128  It was pretty informative. Shame the show went downhill about a season later. It really seemed to lose its objectivity and became another sensationalized piece of watchbait.
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  299. It does seem rather odd. Canadian winters aren't that harsh along the southern border, certainly no worse than many US cities like Chicago have, and in places like Vancouver, it's pretty mild.
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  300. I think Japan's system has its flaws. Sometimes you end up with a hodge podge of uses which cause problems, and I really think they need to implement some better minimum size standards (I appreciate land is expensive, but some residences, or even commercial buildings, are ridiculously small). Plus you have Japan's topsy turvy real estate market to deal with, where houses depreciate like cars, so are often poorly built and wastefully demolished.
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  301. Environmental protection is generally not the argument for green belts (and if it is, it is generally pretty weak as you say), it's food security and preserving rural character (which in the UK is something of big cultural importance). Personally I think the UK has a problem with overconcentration of the economy in the south east, which puts a lot of pressure on London and surrounding areas and greatly exacerbates the housing issue. It would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have to keep building homes in areas that have already nearly been completely filled up.
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  302. It's certainly not just the difficulty of starting a business mind you. In the UK it's incredibly easy, about 50 quid and an online application, a few checks and you're done. Compliance, especially for a small business, isn't terribly burdensome, generally you just need to file accounts (though things get a little more complicated if you employ anyone). And yet the UK still struggles to nurture new successful businesses.
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  303. Isn't there like 300 of them?
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  304. I'm not so sure. 100 years from now conditions like paralysis are likely to be much rarer then they are today, and advances in robotics and exoskeleton technology may mean things like wheelchairs may become unnecessary, since everyone has working legs, be they mechanical or biological, or both. Similarly for sight and hearing impairments, artificial eyes, ears and advanced medical techniques may also mean there are far fewer blind or deaf people. Disability in general might be seen as a problem of the past, something rendered mostly obsolete by technology.
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  305. Japan does have land, it's just they are a hyper urban society. You can find abandoned villages dotting the countryside.
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  306. Honestly quite surprised they didn't consider arranging ground transportation after arriving in KIX, be it tickets on a night train or some coaches. Would have probably gotten the passengers to their destination much quicker and saved a ton of fuel and cost for the airline, even if they had to deadhead back to HND. Japan has a very high quality motorway and rail network after all. Though it's interesting how strict Japan is for airport curfews. Generally in other countries you aren't allowed to schedule flights to arrive after curfew, but a delayed flight is still allowed to land.
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  307. Short answer is, huge upfront costs but is a profit making machine after a decade or two.
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  308.  @youngnope4664  It's really not that complicated. Those who are wealthier and more technologically developed will be able to conquer less wealthy countries, and/or defend themselves against invasion by less or comparatively wealthy countries. You need to have a certain amount of disparity present for colonisation to be possible in the first place. That's why the British failed to hold on to France, and France failed to hold on to continental Europe, but both succeeded in holding on to parts of Africa. If wealth didn't matter Europe would have seen just as much colonisation as Africa and Asia.
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  309.  @jenniferryersejones9876  It's difficult to make that distinction. There are many hybrid parks in the world, either zoos who decided to add some rides or vice versa. Chessington World of Adventures is a good example, it was a zoo originally and then added a theme park later on to boost attendance. The zoo is still a big part of the park and to have to ditch the rides would probably make it harder to maintain the zoo.
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  310.  @EvanBoyar  For jet aircraft, I don't think that would make sense. It's easier to just burn the hydrogen, which would only produce water vapour. It's certainly doable with a few modifications.
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  311. Yeah, developers will always try to skirt round these regulations, and in a high demand market they can always play hardball with the city, basically threatening to go build their apartment block elsewhere if the city doesn't relax affordable housing requirements. 17m^2 though, that's barely a hotel room. I wouldn't want to in something that small!
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  312. Interestingly, one bad decision that seemed like a good idea at the time was the British recycling nuclear fuel that led to a huge stockpile of reactor grade plutonium at significant cost. The UK in the early days took the conservative assumption that uranium ore was not plentiful, and there would eventually be a supply crunch and prices would skyrocket. Therefore, they began to reprocess the spent fuel to extract plutonium, which they intended to use in as yet to be fully developed fast reactors. Of course, it turned out that uranium ore was pretty plentiful, and the supply crunch never came. Many countries use a once through fuel cycle and just consider spent fuel as 100% waste. Recycling, as it turns out, just isn't economic at current uranium prices. The fast reactors that the British were expecting never really got past the prototype phase, since PWR's and BWR's did the job fine and the conservative and heavily regulated nuclear industry doesn't like to fix what isn't broken, it's not like a silicon valley tech company. In the end, the UK has been trying to chip away at the stockpile with MOX fuel which can go in existing reactors, but it'll take decades to get rid of it at current rates of consumption, and it's very expensive stuff to keep around. Some think it'll be cheaper to just dispose of it rather than wait for it to be used up. Anyway, I think the UK nuclear industry might not be completely dead yet. Rolls Royce is one of the frontrunners in the SMR field, and they've taken the rather sensible approach at seeing how big you can make an SMR while still being able to qualify as an SMR (can be assembled in a factory and shipped to the site in mostly one piece). This could be a good balance between the costs saved by factory assembly and the fixed overheads every nuclear power plant has. If the whole SMR thing takes off, Britain could be in a good position to capitalise on it.
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  313. ​ @TechnologyConnextras Not sure it's all that odd, lot of creators I watch rent out a cheap industrial unit to do their videos in.
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  314. What's strange is in the UK it's incredibly easy to start a corporation, fill in a web form, pay a small fee and file accounts every year and that's it. But there's clearly some other issues.
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  315. Indeed, look at some shikansen lines in Japan and there's parts where there's more tunnels than exposed track.
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  316. I think this is one of those problems that falls into a "global government" conundrum, i.e. it's something a global government would be able to solve, but it won't be solved any time soon because global government isn't a remotely popular idea (for good reason I'm sure many would argue).
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  317.  @muradm7748  Our ancestors also had half of their children die off before their 5th birthday and didn't care so much about education or buying them nice Christmas presents. Once they were old enough to hold a tool, they were put to work in the fields, mines and later factories.
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  318. Otherwise known as the "BBC News" impartiality test, if both the left and the right think you're biased towards the other side, then you're impartial.
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  319. ​ @PandaMonium92827  Some might argue Scott peaked with Alien way back in '79.
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  320. All those builders of five over ones probably. That's the epitome of modern efficient construction. People seem to hate those even more for their genericness.
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  321. ​@pooroldnostradamus I think an important part of that is keeping things clean and tidy. London has the oldest underground system in the world, but it still goes to great lengths to keep everything clean and to fix things that are broken. You'd be surprised how much of a difference that makes to how safe people feel.
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  322. +Dankfin It's not always about creating space, but getting people to live there. Many people like suburban life, despite how much people try to demonise it.
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  323.  @leliberabeur572  Compared to Turks, they absolutely are.
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  324.  @jbird4478  Are they? One could argue subsidies keep food in the developing world, it stops farmers from selling their crop to the highest bidder for export, and therefore their country runs out of food. The US might survive without subsidies, but Europe? With their high wage, small scale farms, they could never compete with cheap imports with most crops.
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  325. I don't think that will happen, that sort of living style is for socialists and hippies. The US follows most Anglosphere countries in placing a lot of importance on private space.
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  326. Usually most recipes round that up to 180 C, since most ovens won't be that accurate.
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  327. I think the Dutch have a rather odd mortgage market which might partly explain their extremely high ratio. I think it was Economics Explained that mentioned it (yeah I know some people on here really don't like that video, but I'm going to take his word for it on the mortgage situation), something to do with LTV rates well in excess of 100% being allowed and the government insuring mortgages, plus mortgage payments being tax deductible. I could see how that might push up house prices.
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  328.  @ivanivanovic5857  Yoghurt is low in lactose mind you.
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  329. In the end people are lazy and don't want to make more work for themselves. Update my device? No, I don't want my computer unusable for the next 30 minutes so I have to stay late to finish up work. Multiple complex passwords? No, I'll just end up forgetting them and have to spend ages resetting them every so often. Does this attachment look legit? Sure, it's from someone I know and the title looks real enough, I'll just read it and get on with my day.
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  330. Investing in a startup company or product has a bad track record in general. There are plenty of failures for the successes.
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  331. Toronto is good, there's just not enough metro lines for a city that size. They really should have twice as many.
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  332.  @MrMarinus18  Well if it was supposed to reference that it was an extremely poor choice of characters for it.
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  333. I was told the incredibly long working hours were one of the main reasons for low fertility. Hard to raise children when you're spending all your time at work.
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  334. I think part of it is the west's view of Ethiopia as a stabilizing force in the region, and the reluctance to weaken the country lest it causes a wider conflict. Ethiopia is actually pretty special as African nations go, it's a very old country with a long history that was never truly colonised by any european power (Italy did occupy it for a few short years but the British and Ethiopians kicked them out and they became independent again). This is in contrast to many of its neighbours who are at least partially colonial constructs. So the west could be very reluctant to put too much focus on the war lest public pressure from their citizens forces their hand into sanctions or even direct intervention.
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  335. Parenting standards 100 years ago were very different, especially with the working class. Children were expected to enter the labour force and contribute to family finances much earlier, they became an economic asset in a more often multigenerational household. They were also treated in ways we'd outright consider neglect or even abuse today, older siblings would care for younger ones, kids would play out on the street or in the woods all day when not in school while the parents worked. Children were not only easier to care for, they were far less of an economic burden, and could even be an asset when they were older.
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  336. From what I can see, Russia armed forces are still somewhat stuck in the cold war, with outdated equipment and tactics suitable for a war from a bygone era. Ukraine, on the other hand, is clearly keen to use the latest technology and has spent time modernising its military. It's still not as up to date as more westerly european and US forces (though it wouldn't take much for it to be so), but compared to Russia it's still a lot more progressive.
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  337.  @Aaron_We  I believe soil liquefaction is the main risk, as it can cause uplift damage. But that's mainly going to a problem with cut and cover tunnels in sandy soil, deeper bored tunnels are unlikely to be affected.
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  338.  @canto_v12  I think it might be an assumption that because HK is rich, it was democratic. People tend to think the ex-colonies in better shape had more democratic governance and those in worse shape had more authoritarian governance. Certainly it's hard to argue that what Britain was doing was morally right, but it's pretty obvious that if HK has been handed over to the Chinese earlier, things would've likely been worse.
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  339. You should read/listen to "At Home" by Bill Bryson. It's theme is sort of the history of the mundane.
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  340. This probably generates less controversy than the betting and gambling sponsors. So many UK teams now have betting shops and online casinos emblazoned on their kit.
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  341. The history of the UK and France can be compared to two siblings competing with each other and occasionally having a brawl.
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  342.  @erongi233  UK GDP per capita PPP adjusted is about $57,400. The US I believe is unchanged as it's the benchmark. So just below Kentucky and above Idaho. Mississippi would be just below Spain. So it's better, but not as better as you might think, places like Portugal and Greece are still well below any US state. The European countries closest to the US as a whole are Denmark and The Netherlands (Switzerland is somewhat higher, and Norway is stratospheric). However, what the OP was probably referring to is a chart by the Economist, which did show that UK PPP adjusted GDP per capita would drop below Mississippi if London was removed from the economy. Though some have questioned how that chart was constructed since measuring subnational GDP is tricky.
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  343. I think the main problem with the neocolonialism argument is in the name, it's trying to see through a lens from the 18th and 19th centuries in the 21st century. There's a reason the Empires of Europe fell in the mid 20th century, they had become economically and politically inviable. China has no good reason to "colonise" anywhere, because the benefits are far outweighed by the costs. Europe had their colonies when it made a lot more sense to own other countries to enrich yourself. That just doesn't work anymore. What China does want is dependency and soft power, and it can absolutely do that by building infrastructure in developing countries. It doesn't really matter if the project succeeds or not, these countries still learn to be nice to China and buy their stuff if you want lots of money and your projects built.
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  344.  @goste4  The fact that patent trolls can still cause headaches for companies shows that no, even tenuous lawsuits can be a problem for you. Remember, the other side also have teams of highly paid lawyers too, and they can construct a case on sand. Any anything that goes after your personal wealth, well you have to get involved there. Even with your company you have to sign off on any decision you legal team makes. It's a case of prevention being better than cure.
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  345. They're both city-states (or quasi city-states) that were both part of the British Empire but diverged somewhat from there. Both have quite a few similarities, but also a few big differences, especially under the surface.
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  346. I'm generally not a fan of economic "shock therapy", I think it tends to create instability and cause long term harm, a gradual transition is always better. But in the case of Argentina, attempts at gradual transition have all failed, so perhaps this is the only option left.
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  347. Well, what do you expect them to do? Unless you want to pay banks a sizeable fee to keep your money with no interest or benefits beyond basic banking, so much so that you'd be better off hoarding it under your mattress (security implications aside), they have to loan out or invest the money to make a profit, even the most angelic credit union needs to do this to balance the books. If the number of people and corporations taking out loans shrinks dramatically and the deposit amount also increases substantially, then the loan and investment risk pool really has to expand, there no other realistic option unless you want to start charging your savers to keep their money.
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  348.  @sneauxday7002  It's hard to say who the "historical caretakers" are a in most places in the EU. There's no distinctive indigenous people, everyone is mixed up with various settlers over the millennia. Most people in the UK probably have some Celtic DNA, and Ireland will have a bit more. But there's going to be Anglo-Saxon, Pictish, Norman, Roman, Norse and whatever else in there too.
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  349. ​ @MattBarnes-r3c To some extent that is true, but then you've got things like infrastructure spending, and London sucks up a lot of that. Public transport quality difference between London and any second tier city is massive.
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  350. I've been told that for computer modelling, GPU's aren't always a good solution. I've been told that for certain kinds of Finite Element Analysis, you can generally only calculate one step at a time, one node at a time, as the result of one node can affect the calculation required for all the other nodes it influences, and the same is true for those nodes at each time step. So these still need high speed CPU's to do the grunt work, as the task isn't easy to parallelize.
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  351. Slightly unfortunate timing considering there was a fatal rail crash yesterday (and fatal rail crashes in the UK are pretty rare, there's usually only 1-2 a decade if that, unless you count people being hit by a train of course). But I guess it's topical! UPDATE: The cause of death for the single fatality may not be directly related to the crash itself. But still, it's a train crash.
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  352. ​ @EmptyWasabi The problem is people very much disagree on what is egalitarian or fair. Plus many attempts to do so have just made things worse.
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  353. Perhaps, but somebody always has to do those jobs (unless you get robots to do them). Not everybody has the intellectual means to escape the working class, and even then, there are only so many middle class jobs to go around as we've seen recently.
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  354.  @nlwilson4892  In my experience most clubs will have "tiers" of hikes (for day hikes at least) which are different lengths and difficulties, you are generally expected to judge your own ability, if you fail to keep up you won't be left behind, but you won't be invited on that tier again until you improve your pace. It's good manners not to be a burden on the rest of your group. That said, it wasn't uncommon for tiers to be merged when there wasn't enough people in my club, which did cause pacing issues on occasion. We never hiked in weather this bad mind you, though there were a couple of occasions when it was pretty nasty.
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  355.  @Azivegu  I think the US overuses STOP signs where YIELD would be far more appropriate.
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  356. I mean, we're comparing it to Chernobyl here, an accident that definitely didn't occur under Capitalism.
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  357.  @djsiii4737  If farm land was the factor Calgary would be a lot bigger than it is. Both Toronto and Vancouver are practically spitting distance from the border. Vancouver has some of the mildest weather in all of Canada due to the Oceanic climate. And that doesn't explain why Nordic countries also follow a similar pattern. Cities in frigid climates also find it harder to trade, rivers and seas are iced up for more of the year, roads are difficult to travel on or completely impassable for more of the year. All of this holds local economies back.
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  358. If there was a revolution you'd find most billionaires would no longer be so by the time you sharpened your guillotine blades, since the economic instability would wipe out vast amounts of wealth in corporations and assets.
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  359.  @benjaminmee3751  That can help with the cultural aspect, yes. It depends on how well immigrants assimilate.
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  360. Pure cocoa is pretty bitter though, why we add fat and sugar to make it more palatable.
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  361. My experience in the UK is chains are more common here. My local city airport (Manchester) is probably 70% chains (though some are smaller chains that are only in the North West). The rest are a couple of pubs and unique Restaurants.
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  362. Pretty much all new metro lines that don't need to interoperate with existing vehicles or track are going to be automated, it just doesn't make sense not to, the tech is mature enough and you can have things like platform screen doors as standard.
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  363. In the end, the only practical alternative for big, bulky items like TV's or furniture is home delivery. Few people want to carry a heavy expensive item on public transport, even using something like an Uber or a taxi can be expensive and difficult if you have a lot of stuff. Perhaps the way forward to reduce car use is more of a "showroom" model, smaller stores where only display items are stocked and customers order for delivery in a day or so. That said, I can imagine there are still plenty of situations where you need the item immediately.
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  364.  @andrewarnold9818  I think that line of argument might have made sense 50-60 years ago when most of the USA's allies were either dirt poor or still recovering from WWII. Back then as was pointed out the US was so dominant in the defence industry that there practically was no allied competition the US could choose from. But things have changed, Europe, Japan, South Korea, all have well developed defence industries of their own, not to mention many middle income allies like Turkey and Mexico which are building simpler and cheaper designs for the more budget conscious militaries of the world (though I don't think the US should be that cheap). The US doesn't need to give up its shiniest of military toys from its home grown defence industry, but being more flexible to foreign procurement for more mundane stuff, from trusted allied sources, could save a packet and still preserve enough defence capability to keep the world safe many times over even if the entire allied defence industry vanished overnight.
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  365.  @justinwatson1510  I'm arguing that Teflon pans don't just exist so DuPont can make money. They do offer a genuine improvement over existing products, and there's a reason they are popular especially among people who aren't massively interested in cooking.
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  366. I wonder how the CCS and NACS DC pin cross sections compare? One thing that did look promising with CCS was just how chunky the pins were, allowing for higher current charging in future.
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  367. Interestingly fracking won't go away with oil and gas, lithium salt extraction for batteries involves a similar process.
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  368. There are some Gen 4 designs that operate at high enough temperatures for superheated steam, molten salt probably being the most well known.
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  369. It's worth pointing out that MSR's are not the only kind of Gen IV reactors that do this, there are other reactor types that can also breed more fuel out of waste.
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  370.  @JL1  It's a bit of an unknown, based on the sluggish progress over the last couple of decades, it might take a very long time. There's also going to be some opposition from NYC residents who don't want money spent so commuters can afford to live in bigger houses in leafy NJ suburbs over spending on transport within the city itself.
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  371. From my understanding the illegal fishing vessels were mainly from Asia. And really the international community only started paying attention once legally operating vessels were attacked.
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  372. +stockart whiteman From a European perspective, I think one of the reasons why so many US drivers don't stop at stop signs is because they are often overused where a yield would be perfectly safe. Here stop signs are fairly rare, only used where drivers have a severely obstructed view or there is a high speed differential between the roads.
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  373. The UK didn't feel it was in control of the EU. It felt like it was playing second fiddle to the Franco-Germanic core that it felt was calling most of the shots. The UK does have wealth built on trade, but that was as part of an empire where it was at the top. It's not happy if its not in charge.
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  374.  @hackel137  I think the WeWork model was flawed, but I don't think co-working is dead. You'd have the same groups frequenting a space day in day out, so there's certainly the opportunity for long term friendships, you don't have to be working for the same employer. Covid created a situation where there wasn't much else to do but stay in your home, most shops and restaurants were closed. Now people have the opportunity to do things outside the home, I think the idea of a local co-working space will seem more attractive. It's not just about the space itself, but what's around it.
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  375.  @KainYusanagi  Sand is an essential component of concrete, you can't just swap it out. You can partially replace some of the other aggregates like gravel with things like fly ash, but these do affect the properties of the concrete so have to be incorporated carefully. Mixing concrete is like mixing cake batter, if you adjust your ingredients even slightly it can significantly affect the final product. As for aerated concrete, that already exists, look up RAAC and you'll realise why we don't use it any more (in short, it breaks apart when it gets wet).
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  376. Rail pretty much displaced most waterway freight in the US. It's faster, and unless you are carrying low density aggregate goods, most likely cheaper. Even in Europe you tend to mostly get waterway traffic on natural rivers, because building a canal of the same width would be much more expensive than a road or railway line.
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  377. @SteamedBunX It's the "entitled white person who thinks resources grow on trees" bit I don't get.
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  378. There seems to be a lot of these concepts floating around, but personally I don't see them taking off (pun intended). By the time they're fully designed, certified and marketed, it's going to be 2022-23 at least and unless things go really badly COVID is not going to be such a threat any more, due to falling numbers of severe cases and/or widespread immunisation, therefore people are less likely to be so concerned about hygiene and human contact. Airlines are probably not going to be in the mood to invest in refurbishments either, they'll want to shift as many people as possible to aid their recovery.
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  379.  @TwistersSK8  Looks like SimCity to me. The UI looks different to Skylines.
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  380. The fact that the CDU considers this a bad result shows just how powerful they are.
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  381. Immigration is one of those things where the net effect can be positive, but the effect on certain individuals and communities can be negative. Telling the unemployed unskilled or semi-skilled native pushed out by cheap immigrant labour, or the long time citizen of an overcrowded city where public services are being strained and housing space is getting smaller and smaller, that their suffering will allow the economy to grow by an extra 2%, is obviously going to met with anger rather than acceptance. In the end, in a democracy, if you want people to accept the best policies for economic growth, everyone has to see the benefits.
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  382.  @SamyasaSwi  I don't think they nessecarily meant that as a compliment. I think they're saying that NJB is such a massive Dutchophile that he's unwilling to acknowledge their shortcomings. For the record, I think Hoog has a more self critical view, though it's clear he still loves his country and is proud of it, which is honestly fair enough.
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  383. I do remember reporters covering Katrina were rescuing people from homes with the boats they had hired.
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  384. The problem there is you've robbed Peter to pay Paul, literally. The owners of those frozen assets will almost certainly bear no culpability of the actions of Russian airlines, unless they happen to be airline executives. It's a huge moral hazard.
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  385.  @annasolovyeva1013  I'm really not convinced with defaecation. With urination, I can see how that's possible, especially for men to just go up against the nearest wall and not be used to going in a toilet or urinal, and aim can be tricky. Urine is unpleasant and smelly but unless allowed to pool in one place generally isn't a health hazard. Humans have been defecating in latrines for thousands of years, and some other animals do the same as well. Babies and toddlers have incomplete control of their bowels, there's some learning involved but much of it is about physical development. This group in particular seemed perfectly capable of disposing of their faeces by burying it in the woods, which would entail digging a hole and squatting over it. If they can do that they can do it over a squat toilet with no alterations to technique, it's literally just changing the location they do it in. It's not like you have to teach them how to use a western style flush toilet if that's not what they're used to.
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  386.  @AfrinonM  Well that's the issue, at what point do you put your foot down and be paternalistic because the community is causing themselves more harm to solve an objectively less serious problem? Sure, it's important not to have roofs that leak but if you destroy something that is preventing the spread of disease to do so, you've bought immediate comfort for a significantly increased risk of potentially fatal diseases. This isn't just a problem for western charities either, well meaning governments in developing nations have the same issues (India has famously been trying to install toilets in all homes).
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  387. ​​ @lumoneko299 That's only a problem in ecologically sensitive areas (and there you can't bury it, you have to bag it up and dispose of it elsewhere). Fundamentally it's about contaminating water sources that people use for drinking and bathing.
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  388. I think you need a 2x "fuck up/shit happens margin" so you can forget to charge your EV one night, or your charger breaks, or you have a power cut, or whatever.
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  389. I think if the Jan 6th event is included, we must also include the 2022 Sri Lanka protests, who also stormed a government building (the presidential residence). It was also more violent and bloody than Jan 6th, an MP was killed along with their security guard, and a police officer and 10 protestors were killed too.
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  390. To be fair to Frontex, making "pushbacks" illegal and then condemning them for outsourcing border enforcement to foreign coastguards is putting them in a bit of a catch 22 situation.
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  391. To be fair, the auto-generated ones are pretty good thanks to the clear voice. Would probably be nice if there were proper subtitles, but it would probably be difficult to get them done manually as fast as the videos are created, you might have to wait a few days for them to be added.
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  392. Is that deep geothermal or shallow geothermal? Shallow geothermal is otherwise known as a ground source heat pump. It's effectively indirect solar energy (like wind power) as the energy it extracts mainly comes from the sun heating up the ground, not the earth's interior.
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  393.  @reecerox2  Not usually. Chernobyl kept running for 5 years after the accident. A meltdown will definitely destroy one reactor but the rest are isolated enough to remain intact.
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  394. I think this is why SMR development is going to be so important for Europe. If it works out it's a massive win for team low carbon, as now they have something nuclear that can scale far more quickly than traditional reactors, despite some of the compromises on efficiency. Interestingly the most likely front runner for SMR in Europe comes from a country that just decided to leave, Rolls Royce in the UK (who would definitely be on team low carbon if they were still in the EU, despite having a lot of wind power capacity). But that's probably not a major obstacle. Also I'd say the "issues" France are having with nuclear are mainly because some reactors are reaching the end of their lifespan. That's also the case in some other countries too. So replacing them would be the way forward to fix this problem. Another is river based cooling, but again this can be mitigated with the right upgrades and new reactors.
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  395. There is the kind of bad gatekeeping where people decide you must have certain political and ideological beliefs in order to identify with, belong to, or engage in an entire fandom or activity where politics and ideology are not mutually exclusive. For example, obviously you must support gun ownership to be a gun hobbyist, but you could still advocate for stricter gun laws and restrictions and be gun hobbyist. For unrelated issues like abortion and civil rights where there's zero connection to guns, just because you might not have the same position as the majority of gun hobbyists, doesn't mean you can't be a gun hobbyist. Of course individual clubs and groups of people are entitled to set their own political and ideological requirements within reason, you are free to associate with someone else, but what is wrong is anyone who says "you don't belong to X because you believe in Y" when Y doesn't affect your ability to engage in X. Perhaps an example that might be more relevant here would be if a convention you attended started banning people for social media posts espousing certain political and ideological viewpoints that are nothing to do with what the convention is about. And then other conventions began to follow with those same viewpoints. While small group and clubs are one thing, when multiple conventions do it they are effectively excluding people from the fandom, saying they don't belong. Sure, these people can start their own conventions, but the barriers to implementation and loss of social contact means these people are increasingly shut off and isolated, they have been effectively exiled from the rest of the fandom, in the hope that they leave because the message is that you can't be in this fandom and have those views. With all that said, it is a gray area, since no fandom or convention wants political and ideological extremists that will likely cause trouble and endanger other fans. But it can be a slippery slope if you start gatekeeping on how people think rather than how they behave. It may seem okay to ban people with views more extreme than yours until they have pushed that barrier so far towards the middle that now your views are in the crosshairs.
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  396.  @RetsamX  Sure, but they're not going compete with the roster of internationally famous British bands, especially during the 20th century.
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  397. And fusion energy is solar energy when we make our own little sun for convenience.
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  398. The elite of the "coastal elites".
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  399.  @OR10777BE  There are plenty of two storey houses in New Zealand, and more in some cases. This was in Christchurch which is earthquake prone, but there were other estates with a second floor not too far away (and if you look at even more earthquake prone countries like Japan, it doesn't seem to be a barrier to second floors). It could have been for cost reasons, but I can't imagine it would have saved that much. I think it was primarily a cultural thing, like Australia, New Zealand has a tradition of bungalows. They weren't public housing, as a friend of my brothers (who emigrated there over a decade ago) had bought one.
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  400. Denmark benefits from using Sweden's hydro as a giant battery for all its wind turbines, exporting to Sweden when the wind is strong which allows them to build up a larger hydraulic head in their hydro plants, which can then be "spent" later when Denmark imports during periods of slack wind. That's fine for a country with only 6 million people and not a lot of heavy industry, but if Germany also wants in on the deal Sweden's dams aren't going to cope, especially after a dry winter.
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  401. I think there might be legal issues with CVR data. Pilots probably aren't too keen on having all their cockpit conversations permanently recorded, especially if they are badmouthing the airline or colleagues, or even just saying something a little un-PC. Sure, you could take them to court if the airline abuses the CVR data, but your dirty laundry is still aired out in public and that could be damaging regardless of any legal outcome.
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  402. I'd expect the European system to have a superior resolution, considering it's a small, densely populated continent. The weather is possibly also more complex than the US (though generally less extreme).
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  403. Direct air capture relies on incredibly cheap green energy being available before it would be economic. That's not impossible in the future, but right now it is prohibitive.
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  404. ​ @bennettbullock9690 France is... different though. They tend to be more protective of their language than many other European countries. While that's not to say they won't speak English, they're more likely to want to have a conversation in French, compared to say, the Germans who will switch to English at the first hint that it is your mother tongue.
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  405. They just have to finish the line between SF, LA and San Diego first...
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  406. Traditionally wood has been a poor material to construct tall buildings with. It didn't have the structural strength nor the fire resistance. But advances in technology have allowed wood to be used in construction where it was too impractical or too expensive. Honestly it's a pretty positive development. Wood is renewable and emits much less CO2 than concrete, and is lighter and cheaper than steel. Even brick buildings are often just brick veneers, the core is concrete, cinderblock or even just wood frame.
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  407.  @sstills951  It's reverse survivorship bias. The hundreds or thousands of ships that go through multiple name changes and have operational lives without incident don't make headlines.
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  408. I mean, they're two totally different chemicals. You can't just swap one with the other.
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  409.  @KainYusanagi  wherever concrete is used its mechanical properties matter, even in a foundation as a bad mix could subside. As for RAAC only lasting 30 years, well the majority of things we make from concrete are designed to last more than that, so it's fairly useless. We didn't know RAAC had this problem at the time or we would have never used it. And it still degrades much faster when it gets wet.
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  410. It's probably After Effects and Photoshop. Lots of videos use similar graphics.
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  411. You have two choices in that regard. Either a kilt (traditional or a modern plait util-kilt, which actually resembles a knee length skirt in may respects, and is a favourite of the prog rock scene), or a roman/greek solider outfit, which can include a short-ish skirt (even if it's not terribly accurate!). I wouldn't worry too much about getting a boner. Unless it's a really short/tight skirt or you have pervs trying to look up it, no one would see. Of you could come up with your own "manly" skirt if you're up to it. Tanned leather strips with gunmetal trim and a sawtooth hem would probably look manly enough, if not completely badass. There's also several polynesian islands where both men and women wear full length skirts that nearly come down to their feet.
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  412. ​ @fhujf The thing is a high salary can buy a safety net in the US. You'll have top quality health insurance through your employer, you can get income protection insurance and similar. So all the state benefits in Europe can be replicated in the US if you earn enough money. Perhaps the one exception is the paltry annual leave, but often many tech jobs have, at least on paper, generous leave allowances.
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  413. ​​ @xShadowChrisx I'd argue the pseudoscience was an attempt to fit existing racial prejudices into a rational enlightenment framework. It was a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance created when believing something without evidence. In other words, scientific racism wasn't really a new form of racism, just a way to fit an existing form of racism into a new and popular philosophical framework.
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  414. Not the same Republicans. The party has changed.
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  415. In some ways mini mills are like parcel couriers (only parcels) and combined mills are like the postal service (parcels and letters). Mini mills are vastly more profitable by only dealing with the most profitable part of the steel industry (recycling scrap) while leaving the rest (making virgin steel). But like with the postal service, you can't have one without the other, and what they end up doing is making the combined mills less profitable because they lose the most profitable parts of the business that can prop up the least profitable. Some countries heavily subsidise virgin steel production since it is such a critical resource for infrastructure and defence.
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  416. I think it is better regulated here. The UK gambling commission does tend to come down hard when it thinks things are getting out of hand, though it's a bit sluggish. I've noticed sports betting shops like Coral and William Hill are less prevalent than they used to be, though whether that's down to people moving on online betting or increased restrictions on the location and density of such shops, I don't know. I am getting pissed off with the amount of ads though, I'd prefer to go back to the days when alcohol advertising was the norm on football jerseys and at half time. Though crypto companies have now stated showing up, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
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  417. The problem with a lot of these alternatives are a) Getting everyone on board in a globalised world, b) Avoiding creating stagnant inefficient monopolistic economies where competition is very difficult, and c) preventing more suffering from occurring than under the current system.
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  418.  @ayemorelocks  I think it's very rare nowadays to find a credible historian who sees European imperialism from an explicitly positive perspective. There are a few who "fence sit" and don't try to make too many moral judgements, and of course there are plenty of modern historians who see it as an overwhelmingly negative thing for the world as a whole. That may not have been true in the past, but it's definitely the situation today. What I think we often lack in discussions about the atrocities of imperial europe is any non european examples. We talk about slavery in the West in an almost exclusively imperial european context, the Arab slave trade is barely mentioned, and when it's brought up it's seen as a weapon for apologists. Same with colonialism. We shouldn't use non european examples to downplay europe's atrocities, but to some people it is beginning to feel like europe is being singled out. As for scale, I think it's not particularly important from a moral perspective. Europe colonized half the world because it could, other empires never had the technology or financial ability, or simply were better off not expanding too much. It's important to talk about from a historical perspective, but when it comes to empires, I don't think bigger = worse, even if all else is equal. I also think imperial european racial ideology is not as unique as it seems. Scientific racism is really just an attempt to rationalise what many other cultures would ascribe to religious or social customs, the idea that "barbarians" are somehow not deserving of the same rights as citizens, and therefore to justify otherwise immoral behaviour. It's not really any different, it's just because we ascribe such importance to modern science we reel in horror at the idea of it being corrupted with such blatant cultural bias.
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  419.  @cnordegren  It's understandable. Fleet diversity is expensive from a maintenance and pilot management perspective, you need to spend a lot of money type rating your pilots and mechanics and keeping more equipment and spares in your hangars. When times are good and business is booming, consolidation is a good way to shrink costs.
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  420.  @theprettypetard2524  That's harder to argue when the success and wealth of that bigger brother is built on those negative actions. In your example big brother USA is saying "I had to do bad things to get where I am, so don't follow me". Little brother China then responds "So how do I get to be as rich and powerful as you without doing those things?" and there's an awkward silence. It's obvious China can't do all of what the USA or Britain did on their rise to global domination. But you bet they will push right to the limit of acceptability, because otherwise they know they're destined to languish as a second rate superpower.
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  421.  @RetsamX  That doesn't mean the UK and US don't dominate the industry though. German bands generally don't achieve recognition outside of Germany or at least central Europe, whereas British bands regularly achieve international fame all over the world.
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  422. I think ear cleaning comes under the same compulsion as nose picking, some people just do not like the idea of having a lot of wax in there and it makes them uncomfortable. I think in the end the best way forward is to provide the safest tools for ear cleaning to people rather than trying to persuade them to not clean them at all.
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  423. I think it's always good to highlight what might be beneficial for an economy as a whole will still have those who it is detrimental to. If most people are winners but a few are losers it's still going to be a win overall. I think this is what is often missed in the immigration debate as much as it is for offshoring, something I don't think some progressives understand.
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  424. Whalezilla?
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  425. It does kinda show the best way to resist cancel culture, don't try open a dialogue or make any concessions, your cancellers will just demand more and more blood until you are a dried up husk. You stick your middle fingers up at them and spout much more objectionable views. Kind of sad really, it just deepens the political divide.
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  426. Rural Italy might be a good choice in this regard. If you stay away from the holiday home hotspots of places like Tuscany, there are lots of small villages with declining populations keen to attract new residents.
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  427. I think part of the issue of fringe economics is they often require completely alien political structures to our own. State communism can work as you still have a state, whatever the differences between capitalist and communist countries during the Cold War, for example, they all had a central government, civil service bureaucracy, and multi-layered political structure. Anarcho anything basically requires the abolition of the state, at least as we know it. So the answer to most of them would be "not viable unless we all lived in self-governing self-sustaining communes of 30-50 people" or something similar.
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  428.  @WobblyBits_X  I don't mind single family homes, but I like to have a garden, even if it's just a lawn. Having windows that just face the neighbours walk or fence 1m away seems kind of pointless. Though I'm not really surprised by the low density outside of Auckland. There's not exactly a lack of space for a country the size of the UK with less than 1/10th the population.
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  429. Big tour operators have been suffering with the rise of more DIY travellers and cheaper or better quality package holidays from smaller more specialised competitors. They did get a bit of a rebound this year as people who did go on holiday wanted to play it safe with their money, but looking forward I don't see the trend reversing. The days of people being happy being in a big resort hotel in the costa del sol or florida with a breakfast buffet and kids club are going away.
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  430.  @Elementalism  Sure that wasn't the Gendarmerie Nationale? Like Spain and Italy, France has two police forces that have overlapping roles and different origins, the Police Nationale, which is the fully civilian police force, and the Gendarmerie Nationale, which is a branch of the military responsible for civilian law enforcement. Using regular army troops for anything but a catastrophic incident would be frowned upon.
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  431. I believe the plan is still eventually to extend it out to UBC, just they want to open this section first as it's the most overcrowded in terms of buses.
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  432. Thing is, DB used to be good. You speak to millennial and older Germans and they'll say the service in the 00's was much better, not perfect but playing more into the German stereotype. A decade of underinvestment has caused service to decline.
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  433.  @shauncameron8390  Indeed, though a lot of middle class black South Africans who have arisen in recent years are now leaving too.
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  434. Nowadays it's probably a lot easier for artists or venues to sell tickets directly nowadays, just purchase or rent an off the shelf ticketing web service, slap a logo on it and job done. Companies like ticketmaster could end up obsolete.
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  435. ​ @mnm5165 Plus the climate. Dry and arid is more tolerable to Europeans, humid tropical conditions are generally for the more adventurous, plus all the vaccinations needed for tropical diseases.
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  436.  @AloeVeraJuiceJuice  Affirmative action gets all the publicity partly because Universities are far more open about it than legacy admissions. And many cynically surmise that getting rid of legacy admissions but not affirmative action will mean the chances of their own acceptance, as a straight White or east Asian male applicant who isn't rich or well connected won't change, they'll just use the opportunity, as they see it, to tip the scales even more in favour of more diverse applicants.
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  437.  @trevinbeattie4888  To be fair, highly educated people are far more likely to live in urban areas because of job availability.
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  438. India was less to do with agricultural techniques, the British did know how to farm pretty well, and more administration and management which were unable or unwilling to acquire food aid or prevent exports when problems did occur. Kind of like what happened in Ireland. Though in India WWII compounded the problem as Nazi U boats in the Indian Ocean were sinking a lot of supply ships going to India, plus there was a fear the Japanese may invade from the east and seize food stockpiles so a lot of it was transported out of Bengal.
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  439.  @Knight_Kin  Hydro is highly dispatchable, it's very good for load balancing with solar and wind. Currently the only practical alternative to that is gas.
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  440. I was hoping for Shaun.
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  441.  @marcus2251  Yes, Italy is a country with a north/south divide probably even more severe than the UK. The north is quite wealthy.
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  442.  @matthew8153  Job concentration. The cities are overcrowded while whole villages are abandoned in the countryside. It's kind of the opposite problem of the US, overdensification.
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  443.  @KainYusanagi  And it has completely different mechanical properties to silicon dioxide.
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  444.  @schlimmbotg472  HaI will just stand around making ridiculous and nonsensical puns and segways. And then will smash itself in the face with a brick.
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  445. Most trains aren't self-driving though.
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  446.  @NozomuYume  It's a balance. Stop at too many cities and your route becomes longer, slower and more expensive. Stop at too few and you don't get the ridership.
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  447. 1:22 Hold my Fosters? Surely you mean VB?
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  448. I'd argue China doesn't have the same constraints on fossil fuels Europe does. It lacks oil and gas, but not coal, and is also much less heavily burdened with environmental regulation. Europe has some coal, but it's very unpopular to use and it's generally more expensive to extract, most countries have gone through their cheaper deposits during the last 300 years. China has arguably been building out every kind of power station it can use, new coal power stations, massive hydroelectric dams that are the biggest in the world, lots of nuclear reactors including experiments using thorium which is far more abundant in China than uranium, and of course seas of solar panels and wind turbines. Europe is highly resistant to new coal as mentioned previously, it's pretty much run out of new locations for hydro, nuclear is struggling with cost overruns and an ideological split between nations over its use, and dense populations coupled with strong individual rights make renewables on the scale of China very difficult to construct. Gas was usually the path of least resistance, even if it meant more economic dependency on Russia.
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  449.  @sino_diogenes  Well, yes and no. Both sets of residents have legitimate concerns, the urbanites don't want to be priced out of their area, and the suburbanites and rural folks don't want to have their peace and quiet ruined by more people and traffic. Considering the UK's poor track record of building adequate infrastructure to cope with the expansion of suburban and rural settlements, and the lack of provision of affordable housing in cities, you can see why some people might object.
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  450.  @moweednarr  To be fair, it's probably better from an environmental perspective than corn fed feedlot beef from somewhere like the US. The EU (particularly Western Europe) has quite a lot of otherwise unproductive grassland where ruminant grazing and farmed meadows are pretty much the only economic use for it. While they are often grain finished before slaughter to fatten them up, most of their diet is grass or silage.
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  451. It tends to be more final in the UK, there's no version of chapter 11 here.
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  452.  @fhujf  It's a personal safety net, rather than one given by the state. A safety net metaphorically is anything that protects you when things go wrong.
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  453.  @rightwingsafetysquad9872  I think it's more an issue with Trump than Republicans, past Republican presidents haven't been nearly as inflammatory to large trading partners and some were pretty skilled at foreign diplomacy.
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  454.  @derludditus2758  Bail in many countries has conditions instead of a cash bond. Curfews and electronic tagging are often used, you may also be subject to travel restrictions or be required to report to a police station every few days. In general it is still called "bail" whether money is involved or not.
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  455. I doubt they ever will. Lego is a family owned European company. Those tend to stay private.
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  456. I think even that wall of text greatly simplifies things. In terms of North Africa, there's a fair bit of difference between the east and west, the west being much more isolated from the Middle East and while they certainly draw their ancestry and heritage to the region, they mostly do their own thing in terms of politics. In terms of Sub-Saharan Africa, where there are some nations that got bit by the communism bug and aligned themselves with the Soviets, many others did not, and both sides often ended up fighting each other over political ideologies, between nations and within them. The thing is, colonisation, and subsequently independence, was experienced differently by different African nations. Some were horribly exploited and brutalised, and therefore developed a deep hatred of Europe and the west, and when independence came they severed all ties with their former conquerors. Others were still exploited, but to a lesser degree, and by the time independence came, they were more willing to leave the past behind and keep relationships with Europe. They were also pragmatists, Europe still had a lot to offer them in terms of investment and experience, after all, they had been running the show for many decades and these new nations often needed a helping hand. There's a big difference between how the people of Botswana and The DRC feel about Europe.
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  457. High energy prices also put pressure on energy intensive businesses to relocate, it could result in these industries moving production to places like the US, and since the costs of relocation are immense, once they go they are probably never coming back. This would cause permanent harm to the european economy.
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  458.  @Dumbledore6969x  That's not Communism, that's Anarchism, or at least Anarcho-communism. If you want to support such an ideology, be an Anarchist. Saying the USSR wasn't Communist is a retcon to trot out the "but real Communism hasn't been tried!" defence when people point out its failures. It's silly and dishonest. Also I wouldn't be putting up mid century China as an example of functional Communism if that's what you're thinking, you know when hundreds of millions of Chinese people starved to death.
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  459. ​ @PerMortensen It's a valid point, but I think treating it as some grave error is misguided and rather rude. Racists don't give a shit about the shape of the turban, they usually don't have the cultural knowledge to tell the difference. Fern is not going to change their minds by being accurate with the turban style.
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  460. If you have to use an extension lead with a space heater, get one with a thermal cut out. This has a similar thermal limit switch that can shut power off if the wire or socket gets too hot.
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  461.  @pawz3016  I think any resistance would be a struggle against the inevitable. Most people will take the artificial eyes and exoskeletons if they are available and affordable (or even free under a universal healthcare system), they aren't bothered by such esoteric moral concerns. In many ways it would be easier in the long run than to shape the world for universal accessibility, especially as sometimes that's not even possible because there's a conflict in requirements between two different groups of people.
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  462. Unfortunately the skullduggery that Nestle created over baby formula caused such a backlash that now there's extremist anti-formula groups who pressure mothers who have difficulty breastfeeding to keep going even if it causes pain and injury for them or results in a malnourished baby. In the end, if you have access to clean water, good pediatric healthcare and don't dilute the product then formula is fine, it's not going to harm your baby temporarily or permanently if you don't breastfeed them. Whatever advantages there are, are small compared to all the other factors that will influence your child's development. It's only when you have issues like contaminated water, diluted product, and other poor living conditions that the differences will be significant.
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  463.  @hahahalol870  In the end, what would be the most "moral" immigration policy? Because most countries want to get the immigrants that provide the most benefit to their country, be they rich investors, highly educated, or can fill shortages in specific occupations. Would a system like a US green card, which is essentially a lottery where everyone who applies has an equal chance of getting in, be more moral?
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  464. Fun fact, those blankets contain no gold whatosever, not even a microscopically thin layer. It's either PET or Kapton (yours would be PET, Kapton is expensive and it's what you see on actual satellites due to its high heat resistance). The plastic film is a translucent yellowy brown colour, and with an aluminium backing it looks very much like gold.
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  465. To play devil's advocate, It does seem like what he wanted to say was the safety regulations are outdated based on modern submersible technology, which he may have had a point about (though considering what happened I'd be looking for that opinion elsewhere in the industry), after motor vehicles were limited to 10mph when they first came out. But what he actually said really does sound bad.
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  466.  @RetsamX  No offence to the Germans, but several of the most famous bands, in the entire world, ever, are British, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Queen, and so on. Of all that you mentioned Rammstein comes the closest. I'm not saying German bands are inferior, but it's well known that a large amount of Britain's cultural soft power comes from its music industry.
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  467.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  It means, for example, finding some of the left's social justice crusades a bit much.
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  468.  @jonathangibson9098  I think that is what it at least was called in most Commonwealth countries because that's what the British called it. It was still Chinese Whispers when I was growing up, dunno what it's called here now.
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  469. Water's a solvent, that by itself doesn't make something toxic.
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  470. Tea, from China.
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  471. As James May once said, "To win at cars, you must first lose at war".
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  472. I think there's a significant economic impact around worker comfort. Try doing an 8 hour day in a hot climate with no AC, you'll find it difficult if not impossible without long breaks. So workers closer to the equator end up producing less per day than those in colder climates. While cold is also a problem for productivity, you can use far more primitive technology to mitigate it. Compare an AC unit to a coat and a fire.
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  473. The Wikimedia foundation did get into some hot water recently with some of the groups it disbursed donated funds to, both internal and external to the foundation. The problem being Wikipedia itself goes to great lengths to be politically neutral, it's really essential when you're the largest encyclopedia in the world not to appear to have a shred of bias. The problem was some of these groups were anything but politically neutral, and that made some donors on the politically opposite side of these groups angry.
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  474. It won't be stair-stepped when it comes out anyway, because even if it wasn't passed through an LP filter first which would get rid of it, loudspeakers being mechanical devices have inertia and friction which limits how fast they can move. So that stair-stepped signal would be smoothed out even if you fed the dry signal straight to the speaker.
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  475. Not really. There are far less dramatic explanations that make more sense. Primarily an ageing population, cancer risk skyrockets as you get older. An increase in cancer rates can simply be a sign that your population is not dying of other causes as often. Also more cancers are now partially treatable, so a lot of people who get cancer live longer with it rather than dying quickly.
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  476. The issue is the bridge wasn't really for traffic going into Baltimore but going past it. Vehicles that would bypass the city are now driving through the middle of it.
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  477.  @canto_v12  I think the plan was for a slow transition, but that didn't really happen. Possibly there was some pushback from corporations wanting to keep the status quo.
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  478. Nah, Gestapo implies some kind of central government control. Some police departments in the US are probable closer to some Afghan warlord, basically looking out for their own interests and rather willing to bend or break the rules to do so.
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  479. Many modern structures are designed to be able to flex a little, skyscrapers sway in earthquakes for example. It can be safer than making them really heavy and rigid so they don't move. So it's not necessarily a problem as long as movement is within safety limits.
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  480.  @raynemichelle2996  For individuals at the time of invasion, it generally isn't. But for human progress as a whole, it's hard to see how humans would have advanced beyond cave dwellers without it.
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  481.  @ashleyanne2056  Might be nice to clear up a few graphical errors too (like the Schengen one). I know TLDR prioritises speed and quantity over quality for good reasons, but it would be nice to have some of the worst howlers tidied up after a while.
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  482. Tokyo might be even cheaper if you're on the west coast, especially at the moment with the weak yen.
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  483. ​​ @sciptick Disagree. Wind and solar's advantages are little to do with not boiling water (solar thermal still does). The efficiency loss is not that great considering neither wind nor solar are that efficient than begin with. Heating up water is nearly 100% efficient by nature, so nearly all the losses are in the turbine, and the waste heat can be used for other things. PN junctions generate waste heat and wind turbines cannot capture all the wind energy available due to physics.
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  484.  @ArchmageNydia  If you're staying in Central and Western Europe, France, Germany, Low Countries, and Italy, Spain and the UK to some extent, you can get to most big cities by rail fairly easily. Further than that, it's a bit more tricky.
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  485. Unfortunately the highly restrictive loading gauge in the UK makes the use of trailer carrying wagons difficult.
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  486.  @toosas  Germany building stuff quickly? Berlin Brandenburg Airport would like a word...
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  487.  @eugzo  If you charter one and you have say, half a dozen or more employees to transport, the price might not be much different. Also, not all small charter jets are the lap of luxury, sure it's probably at least as good as business class on an airline but there are options at different price points. The big advantage of course is flexibility, a charter can be booked to fly pretty much anywhere in the world whenever the company needs it.
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  488. I wouldn't call a single track funicular an "eccentricity", they're quite common, especially on systems with longer, wider cars.
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  489.  @OhAwe  Certainly in places like Finland the "1:3" rule seems to be the norm, cut 1 down, plant 3 in its place, 1 survives, repeat. But many forests in these countries are essentially giant tree farms, just privately owned by individuals instead of corporations.
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  490.  @kurtmueller2089  Or New Zealand :P
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  491. It helps that Stansted is probably the most secure civilian airport in the UK. It's even designated as the airport any hijacked planes would be instructed to land at.
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  492.  @mpetersen6  Spaceplanes in general can be more "gentle" on their payloads. This would be great for really fragile cargo or sending a sick crewmember back to earth. It's also better for tourism as you don't need to train your passengers to endure high g forces.
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  493. I guess part of the problem is Spain really really doesn't want to lose Barcelona, being one of the richest cities in the country and a major tourist magnet.
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  494. Of course a comment about Nigeria would attract a scam bot.
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  495. The trick is not to overthink it. There's a niche but sizable financial industry that manages wealth for the very rich who are more than happy to manage your money for a reasonable cut of the returns. They can also advise you on any tax or legal issues, and will often have connections to other companies should you need some recommendations.
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  496. Problem is doing it the "simple" way may very well violate anti discrimination laws. With AI you can at least obfuscate the process into a legal grey area.
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  497. Cyprus and Ireland both have border situations that probably make joining Schengen impossible unless they are resolved. Ireland has a soft border with the UK that must not become hard because of the GFA, so either the UK has to join Schengen (which probably won't happen) or reunify with NI (which might happen). Cyprus has a border with "Turkey" that officially does not exist but is a problem nonetheless.
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  498. @@ghost_mall When a particular usage is prevalent, it's no longer misuse, it's just language.
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  499. @@ghost_mall Well that's the risk you take making any word popular, other people will use it to mean something else.
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  500. I suspect it continued to MEX with just the pilots (unless someone has information otherwise), passengers were probably put on another plane (or several) without the pigs aboard the next day. I hope the pilots who flew that one got paid well for it!
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  501.  @wiiztec  Steel wool scratches. And as you said burnt on or dried food can be hard to remove. For boiling and stewing stainless steel works well, not so much for frying in my experience.
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  502. Probably replacing hydraulic with catapult or LSM. Hydraulic has always been notorious for reliability issues.
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  503.  @HollowHimself  If it's thermoset plastic, then they'd have no choice. It's a one way trip, heat it up again to reform and it would just burn.
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  504.  @Markus-zb5zd  I think calling AfD "Nazis" is a bit inappropriate. They may be far right, but they aren't Nazis. Especially in Germany that label carries a huge amount of gravity. Besides, there are self-declared Nazi groups out there, that follow the same ideology as those who came before.
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  505.  @goste4  In theory, yes. But in the end it's often up to the judge who shoulders the cost, and in many cases a rich defendant, unless the lawsuit is truly, absolutely 100% baseless may be expected to shoulder their own court costs. Nevermind that lawsuits are still stressful and time consuming, you can waste enough of the defendant's time and energy to make them give in and accept a settlement. It's better to make yourself less of a target, someone who lawyers will tell their clients not to bother with unless their case is watertight.
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  506.  @bonetonelord  As far as I am aware they do exist but service isn't that good and it risks simply moving the congestion to a couple of train terminals which would quickly run out of parking space themselves. Realistically if you wanted to increase public transport use in NJ and similar you'd need more stations close to people's homes, so even if people do drive they don't drive as far and all try to park in the same place. But of course then you have the problem of building new rail lines through suburban neighbourhoods.
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  507. I think the concern there for pro-gun supporters might be if anti-gun supporters would use the power vacuum between the transition from the NRA to another organisation to lobby for strong gun control laws that would be hard to undo once enacted. It's probably not possible to simply transfer the political and lobbying power of the NRA to another organisation overnight, it may take months or years to regain that clout, a window of opportunity for anti-gun supporters to strike while their opponents are politically severely weakened.
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  508. To be fair, the fisherman don't protest anymore because there aren't many of them left.
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  509.  @NovaGirl8  The way you need to frame it is to not contradict what the Silmarillion already says. I think it's possible for that to happen, but you make a point that great care would need to be taken. Unless Tolkien explicitly said no elves ever went south (and I don't believe he does) there might be some leeway there. If worst comes to the worst you could say they are a related race, not quite like elves but very very similar, who have their own creation history.
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  510.  @Robo96841  They are, but it's no excuse. London's are even older and they manage to keep the tube clean and well maintained.
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  511. "Passenger numbers aren't that much higher in summer than in winter " Europe enters the chat
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  512. Thanks for the level headed take on the issue. Personally I think quite a few people have overhyped this issue and seem to think that the US won't be relying on China for manufactured goods very soon. Personally I think there are several large barriers to Mexico replacing Chinese imports for a lot of products, moreso for individual components than the finished products themselves. Most were already talked about, but I think the issue of lack of intervention at a federal level hints at a much bigger issue, the vastly different way each country is governed. China has a strong centralised control apparatus, there is some level of regional delegation but they're kept on a relatively tight leash. This is great for big grand industrial and infrastructure planning, China can commit trillions to shaping their country around a specific economic model. Mexico is very different, the federal government has varying levels of control over different parts of the country, arguably in some places, such as much of Chiapas and where the cartels are particularly strong, they have practically no real control at all. So forming a cohesive strategy is likely to be near impossible without a lot of changes to the political system.
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  513. Maybe the mascots just have a better union...
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  514. Probably not. There is still plenty of oil left, the problem has been extracting it economically. Advances in technology have meant that we can extract oil out of more places and extract more oil out of existing fields. Plus there is also the possibility that demand will naturally shrink. Oil is valued as an energy source because it is portable and energy dense (which is why we are willing to pay a lot more per joule for our petrol than our electricity). If something can replicate that for a fair price (advanced batteries, hydrogen or bio/synthetic fuel) oil will become less attractive as a fuel and that will put a huge dent in demand. While it may still be used for plastics, they only require small amounts, so it would last a very very long time (especially with improved recycling and bio/synthetic plastics).
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  515. Australia is a big place, and considering there's bugger all else around it, I don't think you need to worry about getting anywhere close to this place.
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  516. ​ @milksteak2306 Pickups are a thing in Europe, but they tend to be commercial vehicles. Though vans are still more popular.
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  517. I think it's likely to be a call for a more unified approach to immigration and asylum. The Syrian refugee crisis shows the problems of having everyone in the EU setting their own policies and the "first safe country" rule creating heavy burdens on the generally poorer club med countries. It's certainly going to be hard to sell a common asylum and immigration policy to a group of countries with vastly different attitudes to immigration, but I think efforts will be made towards that goal. It's probably not going to result in an open door or fortress policy, compromises will have to be made and likely there will be something in the middle, perhaps with fewer extremes at either end.
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  518. Technically there are, but those would be companies where the customers effectively are the shareholders, i.e. credit unions and some retail cooperatives.
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  519. I think education certainly plays a role. Better educated, more skilled migrants tend to integrate better, probably because they rely less on migrant social networks to find accommodation and employment so are more likely to end up in a far more diverse housing area and workplace. Waves of mass migration from particular regions of the world can create little economic and social bubbles in cities, informal support networks that help newcomers find jobs and housing. On the face of it, it's a good thing, it's a migrant group supporting each other. But it's often difficult for low skilled migrants to break out of that bubble, and any hardships or discrimination they face outside it will make them want to retreat back in. So over time it acts as a barrier to integration.
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  520. Did they exclude all non white people?
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  521.  @fluoroantimonictippedcruis1537  That's a fair point though it's not something I think can't be worked around. What Europe needs from Ukraine might be the opposite of what the US needed from Europe, a place not to sell to, but to buy from. Raw materials, agricultural products, and pool of low cost labour. If Ukraine can provide minerals for batteries and fuel for nuclear reactors at a favourable price, the EU can reduce dependence on Russia and China for its clean energy goals. Same for some more mundane products like sunflower oil. The EU is concerned about its dependence on imports from countries like China in some areas, and is keen to develop a stronger manufacturing base in some sectors. Ukraine could help a lot with that, by providing primary goods and nearshoring some low-cost manufacturing that isn't profitable enough on EU wages, basically an EU Mexico. So a large low interest loan in exchange for some preferential trade deals would probably work out in both the EU and Ukraine's favour.
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  522. I expect as dogs transitioned from being primarily working animals fed on scraps from the game they helped hunt or animals they herded or guarded, to family pets, a market developed for industrially produced dog food.
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  523. Can Mercosur do the same? It's not mentioned.
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  524. ​​ @samartinez1988 I guess perhaps it's the nature of that wealth. Elon's wealth is pretty much entirely based on the stock price of the handful of companies he owns. Companies like Tesla, whose stock price many consider vastly, vastly inflated. If Tesla's stocks fall to what you'd expect a car company producing a fraction of the cars of Toyota or Ford, he'd crash down the rankings faster than a falling Starship. Even SpaceX, which is arguably far more sensibly valued, if something went wrong there, say a Dragon crash landed and killed some astronauts, again his status as the richest man on earth would be over. He's on top, but it's a precarious position and he knows he could easily lose it if the spell is broken. So perhaps that's why he has such a fragile ego.
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  525. I think cruises will take the longest to recover, people will still be nervous about diseases. It won't go away, but it might need to adapt. Perhaps we'll see more smaller "excursion" cruises to remote destinations rather than the greatest hits tours of various parts of the world.
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  526. The land sheep farms sit on is rarely good for anything else. If it were suitable for arable crops or larger livestock they'd probably have it. The land is often hilly and remote so developers aren't interested, they want to build in the valleys near major roads. The reality is if subsidies for these farms stopped, most of the land would be worthless and would be abandoned (which I'm sure some environmentalists would rejoice at) or bought up by rich toffs looking for somewhere to shoot things.
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  527. Gotta yank up the ladder behind you!
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  528.  @hail_seitan_  I don't think that's really true. Ancient societies were very diverse, some were quite authoritarian, some were more individualistic and some were more communal. Tribes under stress from conflict or a resource shortage are less likely to be equitable, since anyone not pulling their weight is a major hindrance. The idea of profit may be modern, but hoarding resources is definitely not.
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  529. The end result of intense identity politics is the false belief that each identity group is a political monolith, that all Black men or all Hispanic women hold very similar political views on *everything*. Politics in the US is so divided across these lines that it hides the true plurality of political beliefs amongst the population. People side with a party that actually goes against a lot of their political beliefs because it is the party that stands up for or belongs to their identity. If Republicans weren't seen as the party of White Americans, you'd see a lot more Black and Hispanic members even if they didn't change any of their other political positions.
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  530. Because a) Most houses won't be able to fit 40 solar panels on their roof, unless you have a mansion, b) You still need to factor in the cost of micro inverters and batteries if applicable, and c) solar produces sweet FA most days in the middle of winter in the UK.
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  531. It's a trade-off between convenience and style of living. You could live really close to the station, but that would mean a dense high rise a lot of the time. It's a way to live in low rise suburbia and not choke up the roads into the city (though local congestion around the station may be an issue).
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  532. I think you'll be okay, airlines have had a pilot shortage for a while now. Realistically there's no feasible alternative to air travel in many parts of the world, either the distances are too far, populations are separated by inaccessible terrain or water, or there just isn't the population density to warrant something like high speed rail. Any puddle jumper routes under about an hour and a half have the potential to be electrified, beyond that it'll have to be synthetic or bio hydrocarbons, or hydrogen. In the latter case expect planes to get bigger but carry the same number of passengers (H2 fuel tanks take up quite a bit more space than kerosene).
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  533.  @jonas6799  Fibre optic generally. And a tall tower could have an enormous coverage area (though multiple smaller ones might be cheaper and more reliable). I think there's really an overestimation of how many "really remote" places there are in the world. It's a tiny fraction of humanity, and it's getting smaller every year. Already over 55% of the world have internet access, and that is rapidly shrinking as more ground infrastructure is built. $100 dollars a month is cost prohibitive for most of the 45% that don't, so at most you're probably looking at a couple million potential customers.
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  534.  @vadim6385  Because they're intoxicated or high on drugs, not because they don't know how. As for a port-a-potty, that's not how you would design a permanent pit toilet. You can have an open bottom and vents near the top to circulate air (no, it won't smell if designed properly).
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  535. They don't really look bad at all to me. As apartments go, they look on the better end of things in terms of livability. They are undoubtedly bland but really no less than any apartment block built in the last 70 years in most cities in the world. Some are considerably worse, brutalist monstrosities from the 60's are still around in many places, particularly eastern europe (because communism).
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  536. From what I've found racism is but one justification for these kinds of revolutions. It's being used now because it's topical, but they'll use corporate greed or poverty as well.
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  537.  @dawre3124  That's not really practical. It can take months or even years to process an asylum claim because there is such a massive backlog. A ship holding thousands of asylum seekers for a very long time is a logistical and safety nightmare. It would become a floating refugee camp within days.
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  538.  @switzerlandch4986  Keeping up with the volume of content will be hard though. Kurzgesagt typically only release a video once or twice a month, TLDR does at least twice that a week.
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  539.  @TechnologyConnections  Unfortunately some of it is done poorly. My house was cavity insulated before I moved in, but without adequate ventilation, so the humidity crept up and it was unbearably stuffy. I have some windows partly open year round to prevent damp and keep the CO2 down and Ozone up.
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  540. The British would have known more than anyone else!
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  541. I suspect short term adaptations have been made to avoid total gridlock, lots of people have worked from home, other journeys in the local area have been postponed or cancelled. In the short term these are manageable, in the long term it could have more severe economic consequences, businesses near the bridge may find it too difficult to retain employees, make deliveries or attract customers so are forced to relocate or close. Property prices in the local area might also drop as the longer commutes make homes less attractive. It's why there's usually a rush to open up blocked transportation links as soon as possible. Genoa basically built an entire temporary highway through the city when the Ponte Morandi viaduct collapsed a few years ago. Baltimore doesn't really have that option unfortunately.
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  542. And let's be honest, a lot of people prefer the latter option to the former. You get more floor space and private green space for the same money as your pokey city centre flat. Car dependency for many is a price they're willing to pay.
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  543.  @ZacharyDussault  Because aircraft cost a fortune and require a lot of training to use, plus you can't keep one on your driveway (unless you live in one of those rich communities that have runways next to them). If you're going to need to do some long distance driving, perhaps with minimal planning, there's no convenient alternative. Renting an ICE car is going to be a big hassle unless you live next to the rental place.
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  544. It basically took two world wars and the collapse of an empire to knock the pound off its reserve currency perch, I think something similarly dramatic would have to happen to have the same happen to the dollar in such a short time frame. Long term, there could be a transition to a "multipolar" set of reserve currencies where the US dollar becomes one of a number of roughly equally weighted options, and countries pick and choose, and perhaps even mix and match, depending on political allegiance and practicality. But I think this will be far from dramatic, it'll likely take decades for any other currency to "catch up" to the dollar. But that still means the US dollar is a reserve currency, it's just got some real competition unlike today where it's so far ahead of everyone else.
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  545. There were forest fires in 2020, and while Pripyat and the plant were unscathed, the fire reached parts of the highly radioactive red forest. However, reports indicate that radiation levels in the smoke were within safe limits, though they were elevated. So perhaps things aren't as bad as they seem regarding that.
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  546.  @HoaxW  The contraction became the slur, not the other way around.
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  547.  @FreekHoekstra  That tends to have a lower capacity than properly fitted washrooms.
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  548.  @FreekHoekstra  Well most of us guys aren't as bothered as you about privacy. It's simple really, individual toilet rooms take up more space than two shared rooms, and require more plumbing. Urinals are also more efficient so in many modern buildings the men's room takes up less space than the ladies. I work in a pretty much brand new building, and only one toilet block on the ground floor is as you describe, mainly for accessibility. The rest are the same as you'd expect anywhere else. And it goes without saying houses aren't businesses.
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  549. They would probably assume every American is scared shitless of just about everything.
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  550.  @limiv5272  I think there are some roadblocks to Starship being human rated as it currently stands. I think the "belly flop" landing concept will likely never fly with people inside, too violent. You could give it wheels and try to land it on a runway, but I can imagine the shape and limited control surfaces would make that impossible. I could see a vertical landing work, but you'd still need to keep the g forces for any orientation changes limited to not injure the squishy astronauts. I don't think it's impossible for starship to be human rated, but I think some major changes to design and operation may be necessary. In the end it's a bit speculative at the moment, Starship is still some distance away from consistent unmanned launches, let along manned.
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  551. Not for long!
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  552. Residential conversion is costly and often difficult. Open plan offices need to be subdivided, utilities need to be rerouted, pretty much the whole building needs to be reconfigured. If it's going to happen, the owner needs to be absolutely sure commercial demand will never return, or they'll have flushed millions down the drain.
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  553. Europe is generally more economically progressive, but socially it's more conservative than many people from the US realise. I'd argue many European countries are less tolerant of immigrants than the US (and you will be expected to socially integrate in many that are, not join your own cultural silo), gay marriage is still illegal in some European countries and LGBT rights aren't always that strong either. Cannabis is still illegal for recreational use except in Germany and Malta, though somewhat decriminalized in countries like Spain and The Netherlands (and even there with more restrictions than US states where it is legal). One difference might be abortion rights, those are pretty universal, but even there there are still more restrictive term limits than states like California. Europe like to have a progressive, left wing image so it can look down its nose at the US, but it's more of a facade than you might realise.
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  554. ​ @pistolen87  "Commie blocks" or indeed similar cities full of high rise buildings crammed up against each other, are really just trying to maximise density in the most efficient way possible. It does turn housing humans into a packing problem. And it might result in some very low housing costs, which might please a lot of those on the left, but I can't imagine many people would be happy in such a situation. It's like those shoebox apartments in some Asian cities, better than being homeless or a bunk in a shelter, but only just. I do appreciate Amersterdam trying to maintain a more human scale despite many pressures to build up, but it does mean that housing is going to be expensive. In the end perhaps the argument should be whether there is a need to push so many people to live in Amsterdam itself, or if jobs and opportunities could be more dispersed especially in such a small country already.
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  555. I think fundamentally there's going to be a difference in approach in different parts of the world. I'll tell you now, you'll never get rid of outdoor cats in Europe. Indoor only cats are very much the exception, often because the cat has a health condition. People often have smaller homes and therefore the cats are allowed to roam outside to exercise (though a traditional cat flap in the door usually). Walking a cat on a lead would be seen as really wierd, people would ask, if you wanted a pet you could walk, why not get a dog? In some parts of southern Europe, "community cats" which are owned collectively by villages are common, and you should see Istanbul, cat capital of the world probably. And since wildlife has had some chance to adapt over the past 3000 years or so, they're probably less vulnerable than in the Americas and Australasia. So I think it's fair to focus on those areas and don't worry about Europe.
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  556. The idea of more people meaning we get more opportunities to roll the "genius dice" more often goes to the heart of a nature vs. nurture argument about intelligence. Some might argue a smaller but wealthier population may produce the same or more genuises as young adults have better access to advanced education and research opportunities that allow them to become the next Einstein/Turing/Tesla/whatever, and that today many of those potential genuises are simply born into circumstances, like a slum in Nairobi, where they can't develop into one of these world changing people.
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  557. An APM system would have probably been even easier. Lots of manufacturers to choose from, with plenty of proven solutions from, I don't know, every other international airport. Could have saved some money as well if they allowed it to be elevated.
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  558. European had serfdom which was arguably very similar to the sort of slavery they had there.
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  559. I find those ASMR city walking videos a good way to make a place seem more familiar. You notice that it's really not too different from the cities in your own country. I think one false impression I had was Japan was a country that it is always clean and spotless. And while that might be true in some respects, such as the lack of litter, it is in the end a humid, damp country, and exteriors quickly begin to look grubby and rusty. Even the interiors of facilities like railway stations can have a lot of dirty tiles and floors just because of how many people traipse through them every day.
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  560.  @mattb8754  Airbus recovered years ago. The A380 was a mistake, sure, but no more than a bad business decision based on an incorrect forecast of the industry. Airbus pivoted to midsize models and has done a good job selling them.
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  561. Disney seems to be trying to attract fewer, richer guests. I think they want to price people out to reduce guest pressure on the parks. I wonder how long the party will last though, once Universal opens epic universe, which I suspect will be full of these super immersive experiences, I think Disney might have to start inticing people in again.
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  562. What I'm really curious about is how the reusable containers are cleaned and sanitised. This is McDonald's after all, a regular commercial dishwasher would be way too inefficient and take up too much space, plus you'd probably have to hire several extra employees just to wash them (one of the main reasons why takeaways like disposable packaging). I bet they've designed some special piece of cleaning equipment that's specifically designed to take a small number of specific geometries of containers, and clean them in a continuous fashion as efficiently as possible.
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  563.  @omegaRST  Part of the issue is if we do decide to step back and leave them to duke it out themselves, we still have to deal with consequences, be it an uptick in terrorism, other world powers (*cough* Russia *cough*) trying to intervene for their own benefit, disruptions to the supply of much needed natural resources, or what is usually the most objectionable to European citizens, waves of refugees coming into Europe. It's really a no-win situation, if we intervene we cause problems, if we don't intervene we get other problems. The Syrian conflict was a good example, at least early on, of what happens when a "leave them to fight" strategy is adopted by Europe and the US. It became pretty clear that Assad would eventually crush any rebellion, especially as Russia was helping him. The consequences of that were envisioned as more refugees and more terrorism in Europe, so after a lot of arguing a more interventionist approach was gradually adopted.
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  564. What I'm curious about is what non-white middle to upper middle families do that's different. Are they more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods despite their wealth, do they do the same as their white counterparts, or do they move to their own enclaves?
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  565.  @bobbob-kc9wd  I think it depends on the alternatives. Currently HSR cannot compete with air travel except on the most popular routes with a reasonably well-off population. If we make air travel much less competitive, then things change.
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  566.  @Arlae_Nova  That's true if HSR isn't provided. But fast long distance mobility is generally good for a nation's economy and its people. If parts of the country become slow and inconvenient to travel to and from, then you would expect them to suffer from brain drain and a lack of opportunities.
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  567.  @blahfasel2000  It's not quite as bad as some people make it out to be. A typical nuclear reactor could load follow from 50% to 100% in 3-5 hours to compensate for xenon poisoning. That's nowhere near the response time of gas or hydro, and probably isn't good enough for renewables, but it's not like it needs days to shift its load. A couple of days (at least) from a complete shutdown is more procedural than anything, lots of systems are turned on gradually to check they are functioning correctly, and power output is increased slowly, again as an abundance of caution to make sure everything is working properly.
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  568. In the end, price curbs of any kind end up having the same effect, pushing up prices of nearby properties to compensate. I expect if this went ahead, you'd end up with a "doughnut" effect, an artificially lowered core surrounded by a ring of expensive housing. Berlin can keep pushing the border further and further out, but unless they plan on owning every home in the state (and possibly beyond) then they're going to keep running up against this problem.
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  569.  @anameyoucantremember  Yeah, well not every Twilight Zone episode was super deep.
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  570. It's not a perfect solution. Done incorrectly it can cause rampant inflation.
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  571. We don't have enough letters in our alphabet to really represent spoken English accurately. That's not to mention the major differences between dialects...
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  572. I'd always separate management consulting from other kinds of consulting. There's a lot of technical fields where it makes sense for a company to hire consultants to advise rather than hire expertise in house. Deloitte does a lot of this in civil engineering alongside management consulting, and there's also a vast array of self employed consultants that have very specific knowledge in a very niche field or process that are very good at fixing very specific problems companies may have. And I think that's generally easier for people to understand where the value comes from. Management consulting is a whole different beast though.
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  573. ​ @Wolf-oc6tx There are two kinds of ethical considerations in science, the ethics of the methodology, which is a fair and reasonable thing to consider, and the ethics of the research question itself, or the results that may arise from arise from it, which is considerably more murky and prone to political and cultural bias. Consider a research project that aims to investigate if there are differences in intelligence between genders or races (and I must stress this is only an example). It's methodology may be clearly ethical, collect data from test scores from participants anonymised except for gender or racial data, no individual is going to come to harm from merely conducting the research. But then if the results say there is a difference, that would have political and social consequences some would argue are unethical, and therefore for the sake of society such an experiment should not be carried out for fear of getting the "wrong" result. Others will argue that science should always aim to find the truth no matter what the consequences might be for finding it out.
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  574. ​ @MtJochem I agree, Europe has its fair share of generic identikit suburbs.
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  575.  @MartijnPennings  Cheaper memory foam mattresses have mostly pushed out waterbeds, you get the body conforming benefits without the "jiggling".
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  576. @Chris p Not in the UK.
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  577. I've heard it's only considered a "nazi" swastika if tilted 45 degrees. In fact the swastika is still used in a few obscure institutions in Europe, like some squadrons of the Finnish air force.
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  578. It's a really interesting time for fusion energy research. Lots of different designs and approaches, and any one (well, nearly any one) could be the "Kitty Hawk Flyer" that goes on to change the world.
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  579. It wouldn't have been able to follow I-70 exactly either, rail lines have tighter tolerances for gradients and curvature.
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  580. You can only store so much oil profitably. Maybe enough for a couple weeks domestic consumption in case of a supply issue, but no more.
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  581. Better than Wakanda really. Botswana is a democratic, multicultural and open country, not an isolationist ethno-state monarchy that makes nearly all of their wealth from one resource.
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  582.  @hhvhhvcz  If you go to hot countries and look at traditional buildings, you notice two things, thick walls and small windows, that are usually shuttered during the day. It's usually so dark inside that lights have to be on all the time people are awake. Problem is that is the antithesis to the desire for natural light and outdoor views many modern buildings incorporate. You can make building insulation as thick as you like, but it can all be for nothing if the owners want a panoramic window.
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  583.  @At_sk  Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work in a lot of cases. Some studies suggest that there's little to no correlation between the ethnicity of the officer and how they treat minority populations, including their own.
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  584.  Stephen West  I agree up to a point, but I do think there are cases where regulations are unnecessarily burdensome. They might be out of date due to new technology, based on a biased risk perception, or just plain ineffective in the real world and could be replaced with a better alternative. If a reasonable and robust justification can be made for cutting some red tape, then I think it's fair to get rid of it.
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  585.  @ImplodedAtom  To be fair, the accident did contribute to those economic realities.
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  586. I think the idea would be the exotic matter is only at the "edge" of the wormhole, and there would be a point somewhere in the "middle" where the repulsion would be weak enough for something to "punch through".
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  587. ​​​ @John-zh1ud To be fair, card payment systems are pretty rugged nowadays usually. If the internet goes down many can use mobile networks as a backup, or even a legacy dial up mode which just needs a working phone line, and some can even use "offline mode" which while it isn't risk free (the system can't decline a card so you wouldn't use it for big transactions) can store transactions and send them once the internet is back up. With all of that the extra expense of having to handle cash can be not worth the effort.
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  588.  @IvanGoldBit  That's not going to work, you'll end up steaming high moisture foods. Fine if you want them steamed, but if you want to reduce moisture the last thing you want to do is put a lid on! Many foods also won't brown well like that.
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  589.  @IvanGoldBit  Then if the water evaporates, there's nothing to stop the food sticking. Come on, there's a good reason teflon pans exist, and even seasoned cooks use them.
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  590.  @acidbath3226  EVOO has a low smoke point, it's terrible for frying. If you want to fry with olive oil use refined or virgin/refined blended oil if you want to impart more flavour.
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  591.  @thequackashow619  Hmm, I'd dispute that, I'd say Norway probably has more.
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  592.  @TheTechCguy  AFAIK Karen is the "Jane Doe" name chubbyemu uses for any mother. The reports he sources these from aren't going to have people's names in them, certainly not anyone who isn't a medical professional.
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  593.  @sangle120  To some extent, though I'm not sure what alternative approach would have avoided the massive bailouts to companies and individuals. Perhaps it would have been better to avoid stimulus when the problem is on the supply side, but we'd still have to keep businesses afloat that would otherwise have crumbled.
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  594. Round here you get housing built with fake sandstone, which are just sand colored bricks made in a textured mould. They do it to try and match the older buildings made of real sandstone, but the difference is obvious, the real deal is far more varied in shape and colour. With all that said, I don't necessarily think this kind of fakery is bad. If it makes a home look nicer (and I think it often does) without breaking the bank or being a maintenance headache then it's worth it. It would be nicer if there was a little more variety in design and layout, but I'd pick one of those over a modernist concrete box any day. We can't house everyone in quaint and charming historic buildings.
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  595.  @Markus-zb5zd  If the AfD are Nazis, pretty much every far right political party in the world are Nazis. Does AfD want to exterminate Jews and disabled people? Invade France and Poland and establish a new Reich? Do they want to install a dictator? So far, I can't see any credible evidence of that. Seriously, crying wolf over far right parties only makes them more powerful, as it makes the left look paranoid or arrogant. Maybe instead of trying to label them as evil, people were more willing to have an honest and open discussion about the issues that lead people to adopt AfD views, then maybe they wouldn't be such a problem.
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  596.  @jules8876  Indeed, if you look at the Secret Service snipers, they both had spotters.
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  597.  @rafangille  I think many working class Americans are probably pretty pissed at both. After all, it's possible to blame the political elites for not cracking down on illegal immigration as well.
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  598. ​ @Rulerofwax24  Part of it is how much you can tolerate failure, and how often that failure is expected to occur. You don't need to design for the worst case if failure is rare and the consequences of failure are not catastrophic, in the case of the LED traffic light, having the odd intersection signal obscured by snow in a rare snowstorm is probably OK to deal with, nobody should be driving very fast anyway so defaulting to a 4 way stop is fine. In w8stral's examples, in the first case it's not particularly catastrophic but it might not be rare, if every year on specific dates hundreds of thousands of EV drivers create traffic jams due to inadequate fast charging, then that's a big problem even if everything works fine the other 360 days of the year. In their second case, it's the opposite, the failure is fairly rare (though intermittent renewable generation arguably raises the chances), but the consequences of a brownout or blackout can be really really bad, so grid reliability always comes first, whatever the cost. In the case of using nuclear as a backup for wind and solar, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Fuel costs for nuclear are so small that it would be more cost effective, if you had to build the nuclear to completely back up the wind and solar, to forget the wind and solar entirely and run the nuclear 24/7.
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  599.  @goste4  You understand that minimising financial exposure to legal proceedings can have moral and immoral benefits simultaneously? Civil law and even criminal law is complicated, you'd be surprised how easy it is to break, but at least for criminal law the burden is much higher. As a wealthy individual owning a company, if you don't dot every i and cross every t you could find people trying to sue you for just about anything, and with a lower burden of proof in a civil case winning is not guaranteed even if you are in the right. Maybe that patent should have never been granted, but that's down to the judge and a crack legal team on the plaintiff's side could swing things in their favour. These are things that less wealthy individuals and companies would never encounter, since it just wouldn't be worth suing over for the meagre compensation they could expect. That's why your local ice cream van can copyright infringe Disney to their heart's content. And few people are eager to spend time and energy on lawsuits, except lawyers because that's their job. Rich people don't want to deal with that shit any more than the rest of us.
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  600. Sadly It's not that simple regarding glass bottles. With the extra shrinkage (for obvious reasons), plus the extra weight during transportation, means that glass bottled soft drinks can actually emit more CO2 than plastic. You can just put a deposit on the plastic bottles, of course.
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  601.  @Maranville  It's an odd state of affairs. We go from seeing urban ghettos as a social ill to something of historical importance.
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  602. Disney made some big misses with the sequel trilogy, but I think they've done considerably better with some of the TV series and spinoff films. They're very inconsistent to say the least.
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  603. Cash is not necessarily cheaper for merchants, they might have deposit fees or similar for the business bank accounts. There's also the extra time spent taking cash to the bank, and the security and equipment needed to keep that cash safe. If a merchant can go card only, they might actually save money even with the processing fees. This is starting to happen in some Scandinavian nations.
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  604.  @vandeheyeric  I don't think it would too much of a stretch to add an extra group of elves, treat it as an "expanded universe" piece of lore and I think it could work. Maybe they're from a splinter tribe that went south, perhaps there was only a few of them initially and their numbers grew down in the rainforests, their interaction with Middle Earth was limited, perhaps they had a few merchants and explorers go north, or maybe they're diplomats there to mend the pain the schism caused and improve relations. I think with dwarves it really comes down to one thing, if you spend your life mostly living in caves, you're gonna be pretty pale. This is generally how biology works for most animals. So have some dwarves that decided to leave the caves and seek their fortune in the deserts to the south. No caves, but they find lots of gold and other metals in open pit mines. Working out in the burning sun all day, they develop dark skin.
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  605. It's partly because the amalgamation happened really only on paper. As far as the factories were concerned they were still separate manufacturers, and often refused to share components and tooling resulting in a ridiculous amount of redundancy.
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  606.  @samsonsoturian6013  There's always something we can use excess baseload for, we could use it to turn plastic back into oil, produce hydrogen, fertiliser or synthetic fuel, and so on. We could even suck CO2 out of the air. There's a lot of problems that can be solved with more energy.
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  607. You won't change things in Europe, cats have been kept outside for thousands of years here.
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  608.  @D4PPZ456  The problem is many of those houses are still sitting empty. China has a significant housing surplus despite its huge population.
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  609. If the parasite stays in the GI tract then it's usually easy to get rid of and full recovery is very likely. It's when they move elsewhere in the body that things can get a lot more serious.
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  610. I make it at home all the time, so I can be a millennial for a much lower price!
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  611.  @nobbyfirefly57  A lottery is a form of gambling, since you must buy a lottery ticket which is essentially making a bet. A sweepstake is technically not gambling, since you are not required to place a bet to have a chance of receiving a prize.
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  612. Botswana is also supposed to be a good choice. Less of an ethical dilemma than Tanzania because the people aren't so impoverished.
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  613. ​​@momytikI don't think it can. A lot of the traffic are lorries going to the port. Amsterdam's port is just outside the city, Antwerp's is right in the middle.
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  614. I think from a market perspective it's a fear of change, which is kind of warranted. Change carries uncertainty, and most investors don't like uncertainty. A candidate that either doesn't mess too much with the status quo or is much more gradual with reform is a safer bet. We can see from other countries that are social democracies like the one Bernie proposes (or at least aspires to in the long term) can support healthy capitalist economies, but we have to remember these have usually been that way for a long time, and their system has slowly matured and is very stable. Trying to turn the US into Sweden (or even a less drastic change like Canada) quickly would certainly cause a lot of economic disruption. And right now they have all the disruption they can handle.
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  615. Fusion is kind of like fixed wing aviation before the Wright brothers, there's a lot of players, some with more wealth than others, and we have no idea who might be the ones who have the Kittyhawk moment.
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  616. To be fair, there was no good reason to import slaves into Ireland (and the British didn't really have access to any when the Tudors initially conquered Ireland). The whole reason there were slaves on british sugar plantations in the caribbean is that tropical diseases wiped out so many european indentured servants and convict labourers. In the wet, mild Irish climate it wasn't necessary.
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  617. It's like gluten free water.
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  618. putridspit We tend to do a lot of western history because a) western civilisation generally recorded events using multiple sources, both oral and written (some parts of the world didn't even have writing systems, such as much of the pre-colonial Americas) and b) many nations which relied on oral tradition to keep historical records have been greatly reduced or even completely wiped out via natural disaster or genocide/conquest. We know little about native American or Australian history because they didn't write anything down, and were almost destroyed by disease and genocide from conquerors.
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  619. I've been pronouncing it Lah-pyut-a (læpjuːtɜːr). Didn't realise I was doing it all wrong.
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  620. The China study was enormous, yes, but its data can be interpreted many different ways. Scientists have come to different conclusions from the same set of data, and many say the meat argument is tenuous at best. As for the link between read meat and cancer, smoking and alcohol are still much higher risk factors. You'd do better to cut down on those than red meat.
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  621. Well, you could go around eliminating everything that even slightly increases your risk of cancer, but you'd making big sacrifices for little reward. People can have a very bad perception of risk, often focusing on the things that only increase risk slightly as opposed to the far more significant risks. As for addiction, it varies from person to person. Some people may find it easier to give up alcohol or cigarettes than meat. I don't drink or smoke, but I do eat meat and sugary foods. I could give those up too, but it would make me unhappy and the increased risk of cancer is slight enough for me to consider it an acceptable risk.
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  622. I think as much as it is a mistake to generalise the whole of North America over the role of women in society, the same can be said of Europe. Women were treated well in some places, and badly in others.
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  623.  @ninjapikachu5673  A little zigzag on the axis to indicate it doesn't start from zero.
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  624. From all the comments here, El País sounds like a Spanish version of The Guardian.
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  625.  @aword3213  Why is it ironic? Many animals are omnivorous, we're just one of them.
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  626.  @apokkalyps6  Million years? The human race doesn't have time for that! We want solutions now.
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  627.  @hrksknfe  That's fair enough, but you could say the same thing about many parts of the US Midwest (apart from the whole daylight thing, but I'd point out the UK is at the same latitude as Newfoundland, and it manages fine), or Alaska. It's not like the US doesn't experience harsh winters in places.
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  628.  @hrksknfe  Yes, but pretty much nobody lives in northern Alberta, The furthest north large settlement is Edmonton, and that's the most northerly major city in Canada. Climatically, Toronto and Montréal's winters aren't really any worse than Chicago or Minneapolis. Vancouver is only a little further north than Seattle, and has only a slightly cooler climate than the UK thanks to a similar effect of ocean currents. My point is the US has a number of large cities that deal with cold, harsh winters, just like in Canada, and much of Europe has to deal with darker winters than most of the Canadian population. And I really don't think a combination of both should do that much harm to productivity. European cities don't shut down in winter, and neither does Chicago or Minneapolis. Anchorage is mainly hampered by its isolation, not its climate.
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  629. I think some women don't appreciate how devastating public humiliation can be for a man. I think that's partly why dating has become so nerve racking for some. It's one thing to be rejected in private, it's another to have that rejection posted on social media, even if anonymised.
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  630.  @mohammedsarker5756  That is true to some extent, but when you have everyone piling into a single city that wants to keep a lot of old buildings and has sightline rules that prevent tall buildings being built (unlike Birmingham or Manchester), it's no wonder there is a chronic housing shortage. London's success has been a self fulfilling prophecy for the most part, it receives by far the most investment in transportation and infrastructure and that just attracts even more people. If other major cities were allowed to catch up a bit then they could take a bigger economic share which would ease the pressure off London and the South East. I'm not going to say the UK economy won't ever be as pluralistic as say, Germany, but currently the economy is so incredibly weighted towards London that if it were removed from the economy the UK's GDP per capita would be less than the poorest state in the US. I think that is an unhealthy situation when a country of 65 million people is so reliant on just one city for its prosperity. Even in France, another capital centric economy, things aren't nearly so skewed, because they invested so much more in their second and sometimes even third tier cities.
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  631. ​ @Bedinsis Probably because Maltese is the mother tongue of most of the population, even if ESL proficiency is very high and over 80% of the population speaks English fluently. Also, Maltese is a weird language, like Arabic and Italian had a baby.
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  632. There does seem to be a separate category of "Self Coups" where an incumbent holds onto power, or attempts to hold on to power, through "illegal" means. They don't seem to count as proper coups since they require a force against the incumbent. Jan 6th could be counted as one of these, but there's also examples from Finland (Urho Kekkonen) and South Korea (Park Chung-hee) so it's not something unique to the US in the developed world (and Kekkonen is generally viewed favorably by Finns).
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  633. It's actually a lot better than it used to be, though possibly not when compared to recent history. Inequality in the Gilded Age was gargantuan.
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  634. For a building that big a subway or rapid transit line would be a viable option. Especially considering the number of commuters, a tram probably wouldn't be enough. The Pentagon has a station after all.
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  635. Here in the UK we have homes made of brick and cinder blocks. Occasionally a tornado might damage a couple of them. These tornadoes are small, nothing like what the US tornado alley can produce, but there's often enough force to rip the roof off. Plus bricks do make nasty projectiles.
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  636. I can imagine them landing at Bangalore and then being stuck there for so long they'd end up having to go back to Doha without seeing any of their family. That might of been part of the thought process, Jet wasn't going to pay for a last minute aircraft to rush them down to the airport they should have landed at.
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  637. To be fair, overseas students aren't completely harmless (as a group, not as individuals I must stress). They make it harder for UK students to get into courses at many universities, since they become extremely oversubscribed due to the influx of overseas students and therefore grade requirements go up to try snd limit numbers. And of course the universities have no incentive to limit overseas students because of the extra income, so they'll add as much as they can get away with.
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  638.  @DiamondKingStudios  I do wish basements were more of a thing in the UK, you only find them in urban townhomes and old farmhouses here. A space under the house as big as its footprint would allow me to do a lot of things I can't do currently.
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  639.  @russianbear0027  Well, we don't get hurricanes or severe tornadoes, so we don't need storm shelters. The one problem we do have is flooding, but a basement is obviously the worst place to be when that occurs! Though most houses are not flood prone.
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  640. This is probably a controversial take, but I think Starlink is a little overhyped. Satellite internet will be useful, sure, but it's arguably a shrinking market. More and more ground infrastructure is being built every year, and Starlink is never going to compete on cost with a fibre optic cable or a 5G (and whatever comes after that) antenna. Ground infrastructure can use lower power equipment, it can handle more bandwidth per device, it can be repaired and upgraded. And more and more parts of the world are being covered by this infrastructure.
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  641.  @annasolovyeva1013  To be honest, I'm not convinced someone needs a lot of education to use a toilet. If they're used to squatting out in the open, then telling them to squat in a cubicle over a hole instead (we can build hygienic squat pit toilets that need no water and minimal maintenance) isn't exactly a mental stretch and requires minimal behaviour change. In terms of infrastructure, clean water can be introduced without local electrification, you can maintain pressure from pumping stations many km away if you need to, or just use hand pumps if nessecary. I agree electrification is very beneficial, but I think the immediate hygiene benefits of clean water do trump it, even if the benefits are less tangible to the population.
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  642.  @annasolovyeva1013  I'm really sceptical there's people out there where it is culturally acceptable to just take a shit on the ground wherever. That would make them less hygienic than many animals with much less intellectual capability than them. At a minimum they'd do it away from their home and other dwellings, and more likely have a crude latrine or bury their waste. This isn't like a bicycle, that takes considerable skill and technique. This is literally just keeping a muscle closed.
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  643.  @IntoEurope  I think the argument is the clauses are in there, and China could choose to use them if it wanted even if they haven't yet. At the moment China is trying to buy friends in Africa, they're playing the long game, so it probably doesn't make much sense for them to spring any of these traps at the moment.
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  644. I don't think they need to compete with each other. As part of an integrated transport system with intelligent journey planning, autonomous vehicles could compliment mass transit by extending the catchment area of stations considerably.
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  645.  @jonathanodude6660  The issue there is there will always be net producers and net consumers. Europe is never going to export energy to Northern Africa. Singapore is never going to export energy to Australia. Those sorts of bidirectional relationships work when you have comparable countries such as within Europe. Dependencies will be created everywhere. You won't solve the problem by hooking everyone up to a massive super grid, never mind how ginormously expensive that will be, as well as not terribly efficient, because you can never guarantee you'll have enough surplus from friendly countries if there is disruption.
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  646. I definitely think the replacement term "refugee" is the most egregious. As you say it is a very specific term reserved for a legally distinct group of people and nobody else. And what's so wrong with "migrant"? International people is meaningless nonsense.
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  647.  @onlyeveryone2253  There's already a tunnel for the metro under construction nearby, so it would be redundant.
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  648. ​ @hobog In the case of Antwerp, a lot of the traffic are lorries going to the port. Amsterdam has its port infrastructure just outside the city, Antwerp has it right in the middle.
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  649. A lot of Ag GPS systems augment their data with ground stations too. At the sugar refinery where my dad used to work there's a base station on one of the silos that helps improve the accuracy for local farmers.
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  650. For 1K? you have to be joking, most rooftop solar starts at 20 times that.
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  651. Perhaps the loss of parking spaces can be compensated for by additional off-street parking if necessary.
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  652.  @EggEnjoyer  We do aspire to it. Brits don't like apartments, we'd rather have a house with a private garden. We don't tend to live on top of each other. Australia and New Zealand have a lot of US style suburbs, and of course Canada does. I wouldn't call it a standard, it is something you only find in cities. Even Europe has plenty of low density housing outside the big cities. And if you ask most people who live in them, they'd generally much rather have a bigger place, they just can't afford it.
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  653. ​ @mrmarecki1  Indeed, though there are some caveats I put in my updated comment.
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  654.  @softrally  I think part of it is the convenience. Credit cards will generally have an assumption that the holder is in the right until proven otherwise, so will refund then investigate. Merchants also have to pay fees on any successful chargeback, so it puts pressure on them to refund unless they know they're in the right (you should always try to get your money back from the merchant first as your issuer will not allow a chargeback if you haven't attempted to communicate with them).
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  655. Well, that's one reason. The other is because it started out as multiple companies competing with each other, so a lot of parallel routes were built.
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  656. France seems to be flip flopping on the whole nuclear thing, one minute they want to reduce dependance, the next they're commissioning new reactors.
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  657. The issue with maglevs has partly to do with the same reasons conventional monorails didn't take off. It's not so much the technological challenges, but the extra expense of designing, operating and maintaining a fairly unique system that doesn't have the vast industrial base built up over centuries of good old steel wheels on steel rails. Speed is also an issue, the speed of a train, conventional or maglev, is often limited by track geometry, and if you can't make the track straight enough then the higher speeds maglevs can reach won't make a difference. You will save some energy because of a lack of track friction, but you've still got to deal with air resistance, which is going to be the bulk of your losses at higher speeds. You could slow down to reduce energy consumption, but then why bother with a maglev in the first place, all that extra expense to save a bit of energy you're almost certainly not going to make up for any time soon.
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  658. @Parallax Trans-Siberian sleeper services tend to be more like "rail cruises", extremely expensive luxury tours for rich tourists. One I saw had more staff than passengers!
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  659.  @drmilkweed  Though in this case, you couldn't realistically replace I-70 with a rail line, it would be even more expensive as rail lines have even less tolerance for gradients and curvature.
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  660. Especially as fish and seafood has become a less significant part of the diet in many nations. Go back a few hundred years and many working class people who lived anywhere near the sea had fish as their primary source of protein, it was much cheaper than land meat.
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  661.  @XDC13  The native Americans were feeding a population at least an order of magnitude smaller, and with not a lot of surplus compared to today. It also required a lot more people to be farm labourers.
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  662. Electric cars are still pretty expensive at the moment, many taxi drivers or firms simply cannot afford new vehicles right now.
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  663.  @matthewbaynham6286  Taxi firms and owner operators won't buy a new car until the old one is no longer fit for purpose, it's a waste of money otherwise. Especially at the moment new and used cars are expensive.
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  664.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  How about Mao's Great Leap Forward? Sure, it's an extreme example, but it's a pretty radical change! I don't think we need a lot of hard studies and numbers to know how that one turned out. 30+ million dying of starvation says it all.
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  665. In Australia, the wildlife tries to kill you. In New Zealand, the planet tries to kill you.
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  666. We do have the notorious "Barratt Boxes". Estates up and down the country with exactly the same house designs with the tiny gardens and brick paved driveways. There's one in my village and one in my parent's village that if you stood in the middle of them you couldn't tell the difference, and we're at opposite ends of England.
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  667. The thing that strikes me about duck and cover is it seems very similar to advice given for an earthquake, namely get under something sturdy to protect yourself if the parts of the ceiling break off and fall on you (or even if the roof collapses, it might be enough to create a cavity you can survive in). I assume nuclear blasts do produce a sizable seismic shockwave so for that it would make sense, but I wasn't sure if it would really protect you from a shockwave in the air, the desk, and you, would probably be blown away. So it almost seems like good advice for the wrong disaster.
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  668. Well they do tend to split urban, suburban and rural areas which individually are more likely to contain politically aligned voters. Whether that's gerrymandering or not depends on your perspective. Not saying some districts aren't gerrymandered through very artificial means, but in a lot of cases it's probably just natural divisions.
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  669. Plenty of horror stories from communist nations would say otherwise.
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  670. ​ @kennethc2466  It's not about if a class struggle existed or not (though as the term is marxist in and of itself not everyone believes in it) but framing all historical events through the lens of class struggle. There's always oppressors and the oppressed, rich people are always in the wrong, etc. etc.
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  671.  @DanteGabriel-lx9bq  Historically, alternatives to capitalism have fared far worse than capitalism. Often they have been paired with autocracy.
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  672.  @generalco2554  I think we also have to understand a lot of people like suburban living. Youtube is full of young new urbanists who will rag on about how terrible suburbs are, but there's a more silent contingent of the population who like single family homes on quiet streets. Sure, most would probably like it if there were more sidewalks and if there was at least a small store within walking distance, perhaps even a railway station to the city centre, but they don't want to swap their detached home for a cramped apartment in a bustling downtown, whether its next to a public park or not. They want a backyard, not a balcony.
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  673. I don't think Ballmer's wealth or power extends to building a spur off the C or K line.
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  674. For many who are really struggling with finances, the stark solution is to earn more money, period. No amount of investments, debt strategies or spending cuts are going to get them out of the hole, they need to find a better job that pays more ASAP. That's of course a lot easier said than done, especially if they have little education. But if they're accumulating debt on the bare minimum of consumption, even bankruptcy isn't going to fix the problem.
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  675. That would be a good fit for the Nebula series, though of course it would be nicer if it was available on YT 😊
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  676. What surprises me is how most competitive eaters aren't overweight, in fact most seem quite thin and skinny. But I guess if you eat that much food in such a short time, you probably overwhelm your body's ability to extract nutrients, and a lot of it just passes straight through. Couple that with the extra energy expended in digestion and I wouldn't be surprised if a competitive eating session doesn't give you that many calories.
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  677.  @pungetello  From what I remember he didn't just wander in, but it wasn't too difficult, just a phone call and he pretty much got a guided tour. I think the main one in SLC was a bit more tricky, but it got sorted in the end.
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  678. ​ @shatzofhudson  I don't want to make a moral judgement on the beliefs and practices of the religion, only that they are far more open and transparent than some other minor religions.
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  679. It's pretty understandable as a Brit, here "Marines" means something very different to what it means in the US military. (For those in the US wondering, our marines are more like Navy SEALS, a small, elite force).
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  680.  @magniwalterbutnotwaltermag1479  I'd rather not have medieval food insecurity. You'd be starving and malnourished every other year.
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  681. In some ways the UK is pretty light on red tape compared to some of its EU peers. Setting up a corporation is famously simple, pretty much anyone can do it for a minimal fee online. So I'm not really sure beauracracy between the government and the private sector is the primary cause of Britain's woes. Infrastructure is another matter though, it's notoriously expensive to build anything here, even simple road improvements can cost billions. In many ways the UK has US sized infrastructure prices without US sized tax revenue to pay for them.
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  682.  @MaxSnowDude  That's a very North American centric viewpoint, and not even completely true even there. In the UK, there is far more resistance to development in the countryside than towns and cities, same is true in much of Europe.
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  683. Also I can imagine its reputation of being relatively safe from cartel activity means Mexicans themselves are quite keen to move there.
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  684. A lot of Europe went through that in the mid 20th century, dreary concrete apartment blocks that were brutally functional. Many have been knocked down, mainly because they were badly built, but also because they were incredibly ugly.
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  685. ​​ @non-hyphenated That's the whole controversy around it, that H1-B is being abused to bring in skilled but not exceptionally talented (that's what O-1 is for after all) workers to undercut US citizens in mid tier tech jobs, the argument being they'll work longer hours for lower salaries.
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  686. Well, the examples are from a school in Balitmore, which is 63% African American (There aren't many Hispanic people) so in this case, they are probably talking about mostly black students. I'm sure there are probably similar school issues in more white areas, probably not so much gang violence as drug addiction.
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  687.  @kensmechanicalaffair  If the country was safer and more stable the middle class would not have left in such great numbers, and that would have allowed for more social mobility and therefore greater economic equality. I also think the post-apatheid environment, while arguably necessary to close the massive economic gap between white and black South Africans, may have also contributed to the exodus early on. Some white South Africans did fear that the ANC would be more hostile to them in future, and policies like BEE , again while arguably necessary, also made some white South Africans think that their children would have better opportunities abroad than at home in terms of education and employment. But ultimately, these factors pale against the issues of crime, instability and corruption that are now pushing the middle class of all races away.
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  688. I think it's sometimes important to separate LGBT "culture" (by that I mean a collection of different subcultures centred around LGBT identity) and merely the label itself. I think when people complain about it "being your whole personality" they are objecting to the cultural expression rather than who you have sex with. And, you know, I think it's fine to find LGBT culture disagreeable, as much as you might find Goths or Jocks disagreeable. There are a fair few LGBT people who shun LGBT culture, after all! The problem the same people who think the local pride parade is a bit too NSFW for a public place with children around are conflated with genuinely anti LGBT groups.
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  689.  @warrenschrader7481  I think the punishment for the airline or the FAA would have to be severe for using CVR data in anything but an investigation after an incident, even for something like training purposes is probably going to be unacceptable. And 10 years is probably too long, more like 6-12 months is probably the most that's going to be palatable.
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  690. ​ @jarink1 Turing's personality seems like the most egregious error. He's played as aloof and borderline autistic by Cumberbatch despite the fact there was no evidence that he was. Most personal accounts paint him as sociable and friendly.
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  691.  @OrolesMagnus  That's hardly going to work in the middle of the countryside though. A lot of city railway tunnels in Europe are upgrades to existing surface routes, or to connect two termini together.
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  692. In some countries pharmacies do only sell medicines, if you want to buy groceries you go to a supermarket. So I don't think getting rid of 90% of the retail space and keeping only OTC medication would be the end of the world nessecarily. But then again big supermarkets now often have in store pharmacies.
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  693.  @CRneu  The real issue is that it's hard to do proper regenerative without either lowering yields or increasing manual labour requirements. Both make the cost of the end product, be it corn or cows, go up.
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  694. The UK and Japan differ in one major aspect, and that is population distribution. Rural areas in the UK have a lot of people in them, thanks to the relatively benign terrain and climate. Japan, on the other hand, has mostly concentrated its population into a chain of megacities. Imagine if Greater London had 20 million people, and then the Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester metro areas all had 10 million each, with the rest scattered among some smaller cities and rural areas, which are often barely inhabited.
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  695. Wonder if those who landed at Luton were bussed to Gatwick or remained on the aircraft. It's only about an hour around the M25 at that time of night, so it might have been quicker, and for some who didn't have a car to pick up it may have been better to take the train from Luton, especially as the DART is now open.
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  696.  @IvanGoldBit  It depends on what you're cooking. Some foods you want to cook at high temperature. And some foods will stick once they lose enough moisture regardless of temperature, so unless you want to spend 30 minutes constantly stirring your food you will end up with stuff sticking.
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  697.  @thequackashow619  Norway is almost all hydro. You can probably count Iceland too.
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  698.  @canemcave  Norway's electricity grid is 99% renewable, and nearly all of it is hydro.
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  699.  @canemcave  Still doesn't change the facts.
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  700. Depends on where he was. If he was near the earthquake epicenter, sure, he was lucky, but the other parts of Japan were completely unscathed or only had a relatively minor tremor.
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  701. Wind only really makes economic sense on grid scale, individual turbines are great until they break, and then the flat callout charges to maintenance rack up, plus you go to the back of the queue since the grid scale arrays take priority. Solar is different.
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  702.  @mc-ps-playa5569  It's probably accurate considering the demographics of YouTube.
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  703. I knew a couple that emigrated to Europe. They were both atheists or at least not particularly religious, so I guess that was the reason they left.
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  704. I think there often still was a lot of arguing, but it was generally over less serious topics, often the pettiest thing imaginable.
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  705. Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be "well if we just used the popular vote then candidates would only care about NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, Houston etc.". As you say, the big divide in population isn't necessarily state vs. state, but city vs. country.
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  706. There's certainly a lot of parallels with the BLM protests in 2020. They got hijacked by anarchists and militant marxists who spread much of the violence and destruction, going so far as to basically create an anarchist commune for a few days.
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  707.  @fioreloe.9256  Berlin is actually one of the cheaper German cities to live in, despite being the capital. In wealthier cities rent is considerably higher.
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  708.  @Kylesico912x  I think for the vast majority it is a disgust response, not a fear. And typically evenly spaced large holes don't do it.
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  709.  @kidhfajuhi  So you'd rather the million+ commuters who don't live in NYC just go work somewhere else and deprive the city of tax income? Yes of course there are alternatives, but those alternatives typically take longer, are more expensive, or both. You want people to pay more or wake up earlier and get home later for the privilege of working in NYC? Try that and see how many middle income workers vanish.
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  710. Regarding self driving cars, I think part of the reason its so hard is we're designing autonomous vehicles for road infrastructure designed for human drivers. As autonomous vehicles become more common, it becomes more cost effective to invest in road infrastructure upgrades that make autonomous driving easier to do. Many decades from now we could see autonomous vehicles that are actually less complex in some ways than the ones we're trying to develop now, and rely more on infrastructure for their operations (optical/inductive guideways, centralised traffic management, etc.).
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  711.  @d33pblu3  It's only a recent shift in philosophy, previously antitrust law was focused around consumer prices, i.e. the main focus was "is this going to allow the company to jack up prices and fleece the consumer?". In a lot of cases the answer is basically no, because a small competitor could still undercut them and take more market share, or there's something else keeping prices stable. Now less tangible effects like employment, innovation and consumer choice are more likely to be considered, which make it more difficult for mergers and acquisitions to get approved in the future.
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  712.  @ManNoName-c9u  They might be correct on a local scale in some urban and suburban areas, where demographics have shifted a lot over the past few decades. But not for the country as a whole.
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  713.  @bend386  Well, obviously.
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  714. The Amish will run out of land before they can increase their population significantly. Amish culture requires an agrarian, low density environment which is going to become increasingly difficult to acquire.
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  715.  @amartinez97  Don't be a snob. Not everyone cooks as a hobby, and even those who do own cast iron probably don't want to cook with it every day.
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  716.  @juicysushi  Most cities do delegate some core functions to city districts, look at London for example.
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  717. It's a trade off, loss of control of monetary policy for an increase in stability. Pretty much the same deal some South Americans have using the US dollar. Currently the plan is to unpeg the CFA franc from the Euro eventually, I think it's going to be renamed the "Eco" for some reason, and monetary policy will be set by an East African monetary union.
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  718. Did you also catch the Space Dandy reference in the same frame?
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  719. Yeah, I'd have taken that one up with the CAA, any change less than two weeks before the flight should be compensated for. Though I guess as you say it was 20 years ago, it might not have been worth the time considering the sums involved!
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  720.  @dalton-at-work  I don't think that would work. Single office businesses will need an accessible central location, and that means urban areas in a lot of cases.
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  721.  @OneReallyGrumpyJill  I did, and I came to the opposite conclusion.
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  722.  @OneReallyGrumpyJill  The video presents a very credible motive that requires no consideration of Milk's sexuality. Plus why the mayor as well if that was the motivation? His punishment may have been the result of it, but his motivation? That seems highly doubtful to me.
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  723.  @himoffthequakeroatbox4320  Italy also has a sizable luxury goods industry. If you want the most expensive cars, jewellry, handbags, clothes, etc. you get them from Italy. Mostly from northern Italy. The country suffers from a north south divide arguably worse than the UK (and the other way around). It's been argued that if southern Italy was a rich as northern Italy, Italy would be as rich as Germany.
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  724.  @Hybridog  Everybody thinks of this, but it's hard to know how manageable it is without trying it out.
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  725. Regarding the issue of tech giants, I can imagine that's going to be difficult for the Democrats to navigate, since several of them tend to be quite supportive of the party's values, or even the party themselves. Come down too hard and the loss of support might be a problem.
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  726.  @damienpeladan481  They're happy to go along with any social justice issue under the sun as long as it doesn't impact their bottom line.
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  727. It varies a lot between countries and public and private institutions. Generally there's 3 income streams: Endowments and donations, research grants, and student fees and/or equivalent government subsidies. There also maybe a small amount of income around university owned patents.
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  728. Polyculture is hard to automate/mechanise. Getting a harvester vehicle to work with more than one crop at once would be difficult and expensive. That's why it's more common in poorer countries with cheap labourers. Going back to small-scale familial is another way of saying a return to subsistence agriculture. Telling 80% of the developed world they'll have to quit their jobs and spend the rest of their days doing back-breaking labour for a pittance would be a rather hard sell.
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  729. Solar is unlikely to be used for thrust outside of ultralight unmanned aircraft. The surface area required would just be too great. If you could make a battery with the same energy density and volume as kerosene, than sure, that could work. Personally I think bio or synthetic fuels will be used, possibly hydrogen if it can be stored properly.
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  730. Rupesh Patel, you don't understand what carcinogen classification means. It's not a measure of risk, it's how well proven the risk is in the first place. Class 1 means there is a definite, well proven risk (such as ionising radiation). 2A and 2B means there is a strongly suspected risk but with limited evidence. Red meat is in 2A, along with hot drinks, frying food, shift work and _being a hairdresser_. Alcohol and Tobacco are both class 1.
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  731. Chickens eat grain and soy too. Cattle can eat grass or silage, and pigs can eat waste food (properly treated).
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  732. That's considered stress, not tones, but similar idea.
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  733. Was St. Helena even in the EU in the first place, given it was a British Overseas Territory?
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  734.  @viewbuster1979  The cumulative exposure issue does complicate things. He wouldn't be allowed to work on anything radioactive anywhere because of that.
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  735. Peace is also a major factor. The end of the troubles boosted confidence in the economy and attracted more investment.
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  736.  @Dantick09  And that's the real reason cycling is safer. It's got nothing to do with the actual bike, it's the speed of travel. Driving would probably be even safer (if rather pointless) if cars only drove as fast as a bike.
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  737.  @tigershark2328  It's highly unlikely we'll see another pandemic on this scale in the near future. The last one on this scale was 100 years ago, and likely it will be another 100 years before the next one. Of course we can't say for certain, but the 1918 pandemic didn't lead to a generation of germophobes and I doubt this one will too. Give it a couple of years and I think people will mostly have returned to a pre-covid level of care around hygiene. Regarding the trays, it might work depending on how sturdy they can be made, though passengers might object if it's only brought out for meal service. IFE might go the way of an optional request with each airline keeping a stock of locked down tablets that can be docked into the seatback, since not all passengers will have large tablets and watching an inflight movie on a smartphone screen will be painful on a long haul flight.
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  738.  @emanueldobos8452  But when it gets to the point where administrative and managerial software robots can do the jobs better and cheaper, where do you go from there?
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  739. I think it's easy to scoff at NIMBY's until you end up in their position. It can be so hard to have a familiar place you've lived in for so long changed in such a way that you fear could make a place you love a place you hate. You worry that you won't want to live there anymore and you won't be able to find, or afford, a place you do want to live in.
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  740.  @trapfethen  I don't think that would work. Community patrols are often desired as they allow police to get used to a neighborhood and it builds trust. Some good apples might be pushed out by bad ones, but more are pushed out by overwork and inadequate pay. Some areas might be overpoliced but there are others that are definitely underpoliced.
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  741.  @aredditor4272  Rope and sacking do provide some demand, even though the rise of plastic based alternatives have dented that market somewhat. But outside of niche products like oil and some eco building materials that's really all there is.
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  742. In the end, a railway megastructure project may be running before they can walk. In a country with a lot of adverse terrain, building highways with more tolerant gradient and curvature limits is probably easier, and getting international cars and lorries in will give a quicker economic boost than trains. Also, a railway megastructure project is going to be hampered by poor road infrastructure during construction. The old railway network is likely unsuitable for modern passenger and freight transport in its current form, and rail project is likely to involve the creation or realignment of much of the track in order to allow for bigger, faster trains.
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  743.  @paulmccartney2327  And a Merry Christmas to you too.
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  744.  @SamyasaSwi  Depends on what you watch or read from him. He has given off those vibes from time to time, that he's got a rather utopian view of the Netherlands, the perfect country where everyone lives in compact little apartments or townhouses and cycle everywhere, which seems to be how he likes to live and thinks a lot of other people should live. I'll add a disclaimer that I don't really like him, but I think that's more down to some of his followers who often comment on other infrastructure or housing videos about how awful it is and how the Netherlands is so much better. I just wish they'd be a bit less annoying.
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  745.  @FalconFour  I agree, J1772 has the advantage of being very robust and stable, and requires only simple electronics to monitor. That said, CAN transceivers are cheap, ubiquitous and are considered pretty sturdy. I can't imagine the reliability is that much greater. After all, modern cars already have one for diagnostics and EMS reprogramming, and I've never heard of one failing (though I guess it must happen from time to time). Perhaps I'm missing something here, you're the expert after all :) As for the protocol, I seemed to have gotten my terminology mixed up. I meant to say I imagine an extension to the OBD-II protocol would be sufficient for most EV charging communications (OBD-EV anyone?). The message format is already well defined and the data that would be useful to the unit could be added as PID addresses. In fact I would be very surprised if they didn't already exist on many EV's since they'd be very useful for maintenance. All that would be needed would be for manufacturers to agree on standard PID addresses for all the info the unit needs. To me this "single wire CAN" idea seems to be a way to shove CAN capability into the existing connector, so it seems like EV manufacturers (Tesla at least) are coming round to the idea that CAN would have been a better idea in the first place, but it's too late to change the connector design.
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  746.  @z3dar  The Saimaa canal comes to mind for that. I wonder if Russia would keep the special arrangement if Finland were to join, or start insisting on visas and/or lengthy customs inspections through their territory. That could impact the Finnish timber and paper industry quite significantly, making it harder for them to export their products.
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  747.  @timothydoyle9635  Maybe it used to be like that. Now I think more and more of the right see the left as equally evil, who want to erase traditional culture and values and create a sanitised ultra-PC dystopia a la Demolition Man. I think the right and left now both have this image of their opponents heading authoritarian regimes in their head.
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  748. Definitely pick something you have specialised skills in. Trying to do low skilled work will make you a pitiful wage for a lot of effort. That's why consulting works well. You are leveraging the skills and knowledge you have acquired, generally through experience in your past or present "day job" to generate income.
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  749. The UK doesn't really use a lot of Russian gas. It has a decent amount of domestic production from its territory in the north sea, and most of the rest is imported from Norway or the Netherlands via undersea pipelines.
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  750. Shout out to all the proud POC (that's planes of colour).
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  751.  @SirCharcoal  FPGA documentation is often pretty terrible though.
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  752. I'm honestly expecting an exodus of pensioners to low CoL countries in the next few decades. It kind of already happens from northern to southern Europe, but I think that won't be enough in future and retirees look outside Europe for a place where they can have a high standard of living in their remaining decades. One barrier will be medical care, reciprocal arrangements in Europe means that this isn't typically something to worry about, but outside of it more arrangements will need to be made.
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  753.  @caav56  Or an AGR, they do too. You can walk on top of the pile on those as they're low pressure reactors that don't require a strong containment building.
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  754.  @dhuang81514  Some EU countries, Germany in particular, have made a lot of money making equipment and tooling for China's factories. The machines and consumables that make the cheap consumer goods that come from China have often been made in the EU's manufacturing heartland. China increasingly makes their own equipment and tooling as a quick browse on AliBaba will show you, but it's often not up to the quality of EU products, so many factories prefer to pay more for better equipment, especially when it comes to more expensive consumer goods like electronics.
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  755.  @Strieuok  The EPR honestly kinda sucks. It's over designed and out of date. Only four have been built, all delayed and way over budget, and two of those were in China. One is under construction, again late and over budget (though that's partly the host country's fault for insisting on thousands of design changes), and one is in the advance planning stages. Hence EPR2 is already being conceived.
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  756.  @jonas6799  Obviously we aren't going to lay fibre optic cables everywhere, but there's also wireless internet (4G/5G) to consider. A single cell tower isn't very expensive to construct, for 10-15 billion (which seems like a low estimate, especially considering such satellites will have to be constantly renewed if they're in V-LEO as seems to be planned) you could build tens of thousands of towers across the world, enabling ground based internet access for a lot of fairly remote areas, and likely with a larger bandwidth. Starlink will be useful in true wilderness, absolutely, but true wilderness by its very name doesn't have a lot of customers in it.
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  757.  @absalomdraconis  Honestly, what I hear is infantalisation (or worse) of impoverished communities, like they're some primitive tribe who are mentally incapable of adopting modern hygiene practices, so why bother trying? I haven't adapted to their living situation, but their living situation sucks, it's making them sick. At least with traditional medicine you can introduce modern drugs alongside and as long as said medicine is a harmless placebo (sometimes it isn't, or it's wiping out some endangered species) it's OK. But with this, you can't make that practice any better, keeping faecal matter segregated and away from water sources is hygiene 101. And again, this isn't just some western paternalism. Go ask the government of any functional country in Africa, South Asia or South America and their officials have the same attitude, because they're smart people and they listen to the science.
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  758.  @jensmikkelsen1071  I think when it comes to something as basic as going to the toilet, it is. I can train a cat to go in its litterbox. This is suggesting that these people are less capable than cats at learning new things, domesticated animals. I get it for something like learning to use a computer, that's complicated and difficult, it takes a long time for people in the developed world to learn it, and there's a fair argument that in a village with no electricity and running water, IT skills are far less important than other skills. But this, this is incredibly simple and fundamental hygiene. And it presents a moral hazard, do you put them at significantly more risk of dying of horrible diseases like cholera and dysentery which cause great suffering because they can't learn the simple task of pooping in one spot?
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  759.  @Dumbledore6969x  If you don't believe the USSR was communist you're getting into unicorn politics, where you describe a political ideology in such specific narrow terms it can't possibly exist in the real world.
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  760.  @Dumbledore6969x  I read it perfectly well the first time. You just look like you're avoiding my argument.
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  761. Probably also helps when de-icing, those brightly coloured dyes to indicate coverage will show up better on a white background, reducing the risk of missed spots, which is a major safety concern.
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  762. Honestly they're not that car dependent, not like the US or even some UK cities. Hannover still has a fairly extensive Stadtbahn which is mostly underground in the city centre. That's better than a lot of other cities its size. Sure, there's not so many cycle lanes everywhere but most countries aren't as crazy about cycling as the Dutch are.
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  763. One issue with middle skill jobs is they are often more volatile than high skill. They're often one of the first jobs in the crosshairs when companies want to downsize, and many are often directly or indirectly dependent on temporary contracts, be it a construction project or a large customer. Low skill jobs are so interchangeable that it's relatively easy to change employers, and hey, somebody always needs to clean the floors. High skill jobs are the opposite, they're very much not interchangeable so employers tend to hold on to those employees through thick and thin since rehiring and retraining is so expensive. Middle skill though? If you're a manufacturer and your order books start to thin out, who is getting laid off? Not the college grads in R&D, you spent a fortune training them and they know your product inside and out. Besides, if they come up with something good they might get you out of this rut! But the welders down on the factory floor putting your widgets together, they can be furloughed or laid off for a bit, can always hire some more when work picks up again, even if it might take a while.
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  764. It's two different philosophies: "move fast and break things" and "get it right the first time". Most rockets in development aim for the second, so they do lots of on the ground testing, and nowadays, computer simulation. It's slow and costly but you get a much more reliable product at the end. SpaceX is doing the former, they're booting out rockets with much less testing and simulation and they'll keep launching again and again until they've (hopefully) fixed all the problems. It worked pretty well for F9 so I see why they're doing the same with Starship. But Starship is a far more radical design compared to F9, so it remains to be seen if the same strategy will work.
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  765. What I can't stand is those who decry Western aid and investment as "karma colonialism" but then cosy up to Chinese investment as if it's morally superior. I'd be more willing to listen to the arguments in favour of China if many of its proponents wouldn't use it as an excuse to bash the West. Maybe there's a place for both Western and Chinese aid and assistance, it doesn't have to be a fight over who is better.
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  766.  @18booma  Thing is, that bakery could easily just be a Panera Bread or Greggs nowadays. Your cute little greengrocers and corner stores are often homogenised just as much nowadays, and especially in more expensive new build mid rises (compared to rickety old townhouses where the rent is cheaper) you're going to see the chains more often.
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  767.  @cebbi1313  I read that in ChubbyEmu's voice.
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  768. To be fair, the empire probably wasn't going to last much longer regardless of the relationship with the US. WWII had pretty much financially ruined the UK, it didn't have the money to prop up an empire in the long term, especially one that in the modern economy was increasingly a libaility and not an asset. It needed to downsize to be able to rebuild itself.
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  769. The impression I get is a lot, possibly the majority, of Australians wanted Whitlam out, but they weren't happy having the GG do it.
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  770. We've been getting less violent over time.
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  771.  @mandisaw  I'm not sure that much more people do go to university in the US than in Europe. In some European countries it's fairly similar, and In the majority it's at least over 30%. But European universities are pretty different, we don't have "college sports" or fraternities/sororities.
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  772. Not so much nowadays. It's a nature reserve and tourist attraction mostly. There are a few hot bits but most of it could be safely repopulated now if there was a strong desire to do so.
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  773. Then you'll have great depression II, which will cost not just money, but lives. It's why we can't really have pure capitalism. And I agree it does reward companies who are profligate and careless. This moral hazard has already been talked about on this channel, and unfortunately there is no ideal solution. Let them all fail at once, regular people suffer and even die, bail them out, no incentive to save for a rainy day, government ownership, soon the government owns nearly all the big corps, enforce better contingency, how to design it so startups aren't priced out.
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  774. To be fair, that release is a concentration well below acceptable limits as it's going to be done over a long timescale. It will have practically zero impact on the pacific.
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  775.  @xmtxx  It's probably not as big of a deal for me as it would be for other people, families on longer road trips sharing driving duties for example, so don't take my example as the most impactful. Still, it would make many of my long distance trips significantly longer because I'd have a meal break plus a couple charge stops of 10-30 minutes each. All EVs have to do is match ICE cars for convenience one way or another, which they can do I'm sure. But they still need a few years. In the meantime, better to wear out my used ICE (I take the train to work) car than buy a new EV.
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  776. Let's be honest here, the problem is Mexico, not Canada. Canada and the US would probably both benefit from even more economic integration, perhaps even towards freedom of movement. But Mexico is a completely different story, NAFTA was made in more optimistic times when the future of the Mexican economy was looking more rosy. But for a number of reasons that vision never happened and now the US has a free trade deal with a smaller but similar developed economy and one that's still stuck in the middle income trap.
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  777.  @guillemedina7908  It is what was needed at the time. Open door immigration policies were common back then because a) Fewer people had the means to immigrate, international travel was more expensive and less accessible, and b) Even the richest countries had a far more labour intensive economy, there was a constant need for labourers and factory workers, in many cases far more than the local population could supply even with significantly higher birthrates. I think it's reasonable to say that the world is very different now, and while the need for immigration to the developed world has not gone away, it's not needed in the quantities it was before, and the quantity of people able to immigrate has grown significantly faster than population. So it stands to reason developed countries are being more selective and favouring quality over quantity.
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  778. Because they are more powerful apart than they are together. Maryland isn't a risk of flipping red anytime soon, so it's better to have an ally than a merger.
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  779.  @WaitinInAmber  Well in this case, the term is pretty much unknown in most parts of the world, and in the countries where it is used, it has both meanings. It's probably more of a regional US distinction than anything else, I've heard it used regularly in many rural parts of the US but not in urban areas. In the end, I wouldn't yell it across a room full of people because it's easy to mistake the subject, but when the subject is obvious, I think it's fine. Things get sticky with the furry fandom, I've heard it plenty in private chats but there's a fair amount of angry Twitter discourse over the whole thing from time to time.
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  780.  @FreekHoekstra  Stalls take up more space than urinals, and also require more complex plumbing. Privacy is not generally a major concern if the toilets are gender segregated, though if they aren't stalls are usually not considered adequate, each toilet needs its own room, sometimes its own sink and dryer, further increasing complexity. I haven't seen this as pretty standard anywhere, perhaps in a small to medium sized restaurant, but no bigger than that.
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  781.  @dah9112  Repairs might be more complex because a patch would need to be made and cured, rather then just bolting a new panel on.
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  782.  @vinniechan  Actually most of their electrical power comes from hydro. Geothermal is mostly used to produce hot water. It's mostly cost prohibitive in other locations because the earth's crust is significantly thicker, so you need to drill much deeper holes even for hot water.
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  783.  @hobbypsychologist6444  Hydrogen is not going to power the steel refinery furnaces, it's an alternative to coke for chemical reactions needed to produce iron from iron ore.
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  784.  @Voicelet  Equality is fairly objective, Equity is fairly subjective. How to treat a group of people "fairly" is pretty much a matter of opinion, but if one group is treated differently to another that's far more obvious.
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  785.  @corinneskitchen  Of course, but the Chinese do tend to use it in larger quantities.
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  786.  @byjynydjshsnny2430  Cheese can, but often it doesn't to those used to it. To someone unused to cheese, a mild cheddar might seem a lot stronger than to someone who has eaten cheese all their life.
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  787. Deindustrialisation in the 80's hit many second tier cities in the UK and surrounding areas particularly hard. These cities saw their manufacturing jobs disappear and new jobs in financial services almost all were in London.
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  788. Personally I've found the S in ESG to be more controversial than the E, because it's usually connected with the growth of initiatives and professions like DEI, which many detractors consider at best an irritating waste of resources and at worst a malovelent force pushing a particular ideological agenda.
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  789.  @TVDVDawg  In other countries they're defined a little differently but in most democratic developed nations the rules are broadly the same. The process for restitution might be different, in the UK you'd probably raise an IOPC complaint instead of going straight for legal action.
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  790.  @aldotanca9430  That's fair, but in general there's far more people studying these things than there is money to employ them in said field.
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  791.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  Yes he has, and he's examined, and I think endorsed, the gradual, methodical way centre-left and centrist liberal politics approaches social justice issues, which in contrast to the hard left who usually want radical and controversial solutions fast. That would be the "too much" here.
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  792. Even with green energy it's an uphill battle, literally. The US has lots of windswept plains in the midwest and west where wind turbines can be easily installed, no need to cart things up a hill in the middle of a forest. Even then wind turbines don't provide nearly as much steady employment after installation, you need a handful of maintenance crews but that's it. The harsh reality is that the state cannot economically support the number of people who live there, only a few farmers and associated businesses plus tourism. But no politician is going to tell people they should abandon their home and move somewhere more economically productive, like a city, because they would obviously hate that.
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  793. AFAIK sodium guidance may be based on those with hypertension. Those without hypertension can probably consume more safely. Salt of course has a lot of benefits beyond the minimum needed to survive, it extends shelf life without the need for artificial preservatives. It also make lower calorie foods more palatable.
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  794. One thing that was surprising to me was just how restrictive California's air quality and pollution laws are. I was having a nosey around woodworking YouTube (as you do when you're procrastinating), and apparently there are common solvents and varnishes that you just cannot use in California because of the VOC restrictions. These are restrictions that even the most progressive environmentally conscious European nation would consider going a bit too far. Of course all these VOC's pale in comparison to the pollution spewed out by all the traffic in LA every day, but I guess it's a far easier target.
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  795. It appeals to some I guess, the noise would be an issue, even without cars that's a lot of people going in and out.
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  796. ​ @richardhanck972  Still though, I think it's going to be a very long time before this thing carries humans, if ever. Starship survived through good engineering, sure, but a decent chunk of luck too. I don't think I'd want to be a passenger on anything that's falling apart on re-entry even if I survived!
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  797. My prediction for a negotiated peace: 1. (likely) Russia keeps Crimea and special territorial rights for Russia are given to the canal that connects the region to the Dnipro river. This is because Crimea has a dry, Mediterranean climate and Russia wouldn't be happy with Ukraine being able to cut off their only significant fresh water supply (as they did after the annexation). 2a. (50-50) Future referenda for Donetsk and Luhansk regions to join Russia or stay in Ukraine. Don't think Ukraine would be happy, but it might be a concession when push comes to shove. 2b. (unlikely) Donetsk and Luhansk join Russia outright. Doubt this would ever be acceptable to Ukraine.
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  798. It's interesting this culture war flared up (pun intended) in the US rather than in Europe. Because gas stoves are common in many countries in Europe and apart from a few scaremongering articles nobody seems to think their gas stoves are going to be banned. What will probably kill them off here is not air quality considerations or anything like that, but new homes not being hooked up to the gas grid because they use heat pumps, so you'd need your own propane bottles to cook with gas, which clearly not many people are going to do.
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  799.  @kskcp7243  Virtual 2-3 party systems can emerge even in countries with PR. If no party has a controlling majority, you get coalitions, some which are very strong and can last for decades. What that means is that votes for several different parties with significant political overlap end up being for one big virtual party.
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  800. A classic example is the "marxist" historian, where everything is framed as a class struggle of some sort.
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  801.  @kennethc2466  What political narrative? I'm not denying the French Revolution or Paris Commune were not heavily influenced by social class, but the same can't be said for the English Civil War or Cuban Missile Crisis. And no, I can't think of a peer reviewed historian because thankfully agenda driven historians who are willing to bend everything to fit their ideology don't tend to be noteworthy. I've certainly heard plenty of stories about university lecturers though.
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  802.  @kennethc2466  Going by how incredibly rude and hostile you've been to me, I guess I could name you, though perhaps I'm giving you too much credit.
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  803. ​ @kennethc2466  You're the one spitting feathers here, not me. It's hilarious when someone claims their opponent acts like a child when all they've done is spew insults and ad hominems at them. Besides, Wikipedia has a whole article on Marxist historiography if you want to look some up. Not saying every marxist historian is bad, but there's certainly plenty who will call anything a class struggle. Those ones don't end up being famous though, they just end up in a bubble at some ultra liberal humanities department.
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  804. Coups tend to be better planned than what happened in the US. There's a least some idea of a power structure to replace the existing government. There was nothing like that, it was a mob of angry chaotic people who just wanted to do "something". If it was a coup, it was perhaps one of the most poorly constructed coup in history.
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  805. So, how many "British/Westerners are evil" comments am I going to see here? C'mon guys, a lot of countries have done bad things in the past (China is hardly innocent), and sometimes the law of unintended consequences produces something positive down the line. HK is a fairly liberal, well-off pseudo city-state and many of its people are proud to live there, both with British and Chinese ancestry.
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  806.  @minecrafter023  Probably because the businesses have kept them in check. A good example why the power of unions should be limited.
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  807. ​​ @GonzoTehGreat I think stealth in the Expanse is done in a way that is potentially plausible. It's important to remember that stealth isn't necessarily about being invisible, just looking like something else, something smaller and harmless. So maybe if the ship can have the thermal signature of, say a small meteor or piece of space junk, much like a stealth fighter might resemble a bird, then you're still using stealth effectively. In a busier and more crowded solar system, it might be enough.
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  808. I'd say the UK has struggled to get on its feet since 2008. The period around 1993-2008 was a good period for growth though it was very uneven, with London and the south east dominating while other areas stagnated or grew a lot more slowly. I think partly it's because the UK failed to tackle its regional inequality, with London sucking up most of the infrastructure investments, and over reliance on financial services. As such that growth was fragile and couldn't easily adapt to changing circumstances. Germany isn't perfect, but it's more diverse and pluralistic economy adds resilience. If finance in Frankfurt suffers, manufacturing in Stuttgart is still there.
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  809. It's interesting what effects randomisation has. When Japan was building its first high speed rail lines they were getting resonant vibrations in the overhead line which was so bad it was damaging the pantographs. But France, who was also building their first high speed lines, weren't having the same problem. Turns out the problem was the pylons for the OHL were almost perfectly spaced apart on the Japanese line thanks to typical Japanese perfectionism and attention to detail, whereas in France the pylons were much more unevenly spaced. But that uneven spacing was actually a good thing as it was preventing those resonant vibrations in the wire.
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  810.  @adwaawddw4730  I'd expect a lot of court hours will be spent trying to argue just what "widespread" is.
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  811. Booting up a tram network from scratch is very expensive and often controversial unfortunately. Just look at Edinburgh.
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  812.  @perseus_the_slayer  Those are unlikely to be your ancestors though, they would be the ones that survived the harrowing trip to give birth to your closer ancestors in the US.
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  813. I think long term demographic trends are also influencing the housing market. DINK's being one, but also internal migration. As the economy has shifted from manufacturing to services, we've seen many middle class jobs cluster in major cities due to network effects. This did happen before with manufacturing of course, but not nearly to such a concentrated extent, especially with factories being built near natural resources like mines which tended to be in rural areas. But services turbocharged this as cities like NYC, London, LA and SF became hubs for well paid service industries like finance, entertainment and tech. This attracted huge numbers of people from smaller towns and cities and consequently drove housing prices through the roof. The secret is that there is plenty of affordable housing (or affordable land to build more housing) in the US, just in places nobody understandably wants to live. Now obviously moving Meta HQ to rural Mississippi wouldn't be a good idea, but I think cities like Austin are showing that spreading out the middle class jobs into more second tier cities can help with affordable housing. Remote working probably hasn't had as big of an effect as many might have hoped especially with increasingly stringent return to office mandates meaning employees need to live somewhat close to their workplace. But that same technology can still help corporations spread their workforce out a little more.
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  814. The Black Orange Box
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  815.  @Mtaalas Well obviously many modern DAC chips include an onboard LP or similar reconstruction filter so you can't see the raw output from the ADC. But that first step could still very well be Sample and Hold. Some DAQ devices still use basic SAH because they're not designed for audio output, they might be controlling another device that requires analog inputs. Old audio equipment was probably built that way not because people were idiots, but because they expected the end user to fit their own reconstruction filter (maybe they wanted to save on cost and space). Nowadays with modern miniaturised solid state devices adding a reconstruction filter is cheap and easy. I completely understand that digital audio does not look like a piecewise signal because it is almost certainly filtered. But I don't see why you think it's so stupid to represent it that way because that is what it will probably look like as a dry signal straight out of the ADC, onboard filtering or not. My point was even if you did feed in a raw SAH signal into a loudspeaker, you wouldn't a corresponding movement of the same shape because of the mechanical properties of the speaker. Look, I get you don't like the misconceptions people have, but you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater into the river by refusing to even consider it as a useful concept. Piecewise signal is a fine and realistic interpretation for sampled data as long as you understand what happens further down the signal chain.
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  816.  @einfachnurleo7099  The consensus is Tesla is extremely overvalued even with the most optimistic projections for future growth. Everyone's waiting for the "correction" to a strong but sensible stock price, but nobody can work out when the hype train is going to stop. Smart investors know trying to time the fall is a mug's game.
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  817. Just change the name to Eurasianometry 😊
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  818.  @phaedrussmith1949  In a nutshell, capturing slave ships and basically offering an ultimatum, turn around and take them back somewhere where the African slave traders wouldn't be able to recapture them, or be arrested and have the Royal Navy take the ship back instead.
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  819. That all sounds a bit soviet to me, and didn't work terribly well last time.
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  820.  @wgowshipping  I'm not so sure. I suspect China will focus on its internal market with the cruise ships it builds.
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  821.  @Banom7a  China is making moves way before that deadline, whereas only a few years ago they seemed content to wait it out, or may have made the two systems status quo permanent, even if HK was China proper by then. It doesn't seem that China plans on respecting that deadline at all, they want HK like the rest of China ASAP. That's what's changed.
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  822. For an English speaker, Danish probably isn't that hard to learn in terms of reading/writing, the grammar is similar and a lot of words are also similar, but speaking might be difficult compared to say, Swedish because of the pronunciation.
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  823.  @NeilABliss  I think it's reasonable to have this section open first, otherwise it would take longer to build. They might start on the extension to UBC soon after.
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  824.  @bfc3057  The Ottoman empire only fell in the early 20th century, and it had been around a lot longer than the British empire. It did cover quite a large part of the globe, most of the middle east, north Africa, southern Spain and eastern Europe at its height. The British were only able to cover such a large area due to advances in technology, particularly in maritime navigation. The Ottomans certainly considered themselves superior. They forced Islam onto conquered areas, charging higher taxes to those who refused to convert. They also had an extensive slave trade, that while smaller than the transatlantic trade, carried on after the British made it illegal. As for the last point, I can't say if they thought they were "civilising" non-Muslims by converting them. It hardly matters anyway. I don't know what sort of "self-righteous hypocrisy" you speak of, it's rare to find anyone that thinks 100% positively about the empire in Britain, and even rarer to find anyone who wishes for it back. There do seem to be some who use the empire as a stick to beat brexiteers with, which I don't think is fair at all, just because they don't like the EU and wants the UK to forge its own path doesn't mean they are imperialists.
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  825. That would make a good episode of The Twilight Zone.
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  826. The heat was even more of a problem in the past, and contributed to the late industrialisation of all of the southern US. Factories in the days before air conditioning would have been nearly unbearable to work in that far south.
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  827.  @mikey3666  It's a sign of professionalism and improves the channel's reputation, and it also means that anyone who does use these videos for research later on isn't misinformed. Ideally these mistakes should never occur in the first place, but with the amount of videos published so quickly by such a small team, it's understandable that they are a little rough around the edges.
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  828. The EIC also had a good go at it, though they managed to fuck it all up royally eventually, over the stupidest of things.
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  829. There's been a lot of discussion that the current laws around space, particularly around liability and responsibility, are no longer fit for purpose. Space law is an evolving field, and some law schools are starting to research it.
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  830.  @Austrolopithe  I think we can look at things like the UN convention on the law of the sea for laws we could adapt to space. Such as every artificial object in space having a registered country whose laws govern its operation and who assumes responsibility in the event of an incident. Space is in a lot of ways like international waters.
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  831.  @BlackM3sh  Exactly. "It will be done" suggests delegation of the action, that the speaker may get someone else to do it, while still shouldering responsibility for the completion of the action. "I'll do it" suggests the speaker will do it.
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  832. "Time is money" really applies when assessing the value of options on the market. A great price for a reasonably cheap product isn't worth it if you have to spend several hours finding it. Even those who say "I'm really poor, so of course I do this" probably aren't really getting the cheapest possible price, spending several hours a day optimising their purchases, because they have other things to do, like work or study or chores. Of course if you're buying in bulk for a business it may be your job to do this, but even they have a limit, if the extra hours of salary spent on research isn't worth the saving the company makes, then it's better to go for the more expensive but more accessible price.
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  833. It's not the "normies" who are spending $3000+ on a top of the line graphics card and 8K HDR curved monitor. Graphics have always mattered to gamers, from the transition to 16 bit processors in the mid 80's which allowed for a massive jump in 2D graphical resolution and colour depth, to the introduction of dedicated 3D acceleration hardware in the mid 90's (what we call graphics cards nowadays). Even if we discount PC gaming, consoles, while lagging behind somewhat, still went through immense upgrades in their graphical capabilities from generation to generation, especially in the 90's. The most popular MMO games have graphics that are far from the bleeding edge, especially those that can run on mobile devices. The games that push the graphics envelope are almost always single player experiences first and foremost, think Crysis or Cyberpunk 2077.
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  834. Extraterrestrial origin seems to be the go-to for most occult monsters nowadays. Another one that is popular is ones created by human action through genetic engineering or radiation exposure.
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  835. Venice isn't really a shrinking city, it's just turning into a tourist attraction. Residents are leaving and tourists are more than taking their place.
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  836.  @GeoStreber  My Hotpoint dishwasher has a "Tabs" button, I wonder if that opens the door immediately. It does still have a pre-wash chamber though.
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  837. Did Ethiad get they money back even though it was their fault?
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  838. I'm not so convinced it is. You can find plenty of stories of specific people from ethnic minorities being elevated above their peers in imperial era Europe, for example. Perhaps not all the way to royalty, but sometimes into high society. It's not always a sign that racism is superficial, just that a person with the right connections and typically a whole lot of talent and luck, can overcome it, to some extent.
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  839.  @component9008  Not necessarily. The tourists and rich immigrants probably don't want to stay in some apartment block in downtown Honolulu, they want somewhere with great views and nature on the doorstep.
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  840. That's a noble idea, but you've got people living in literal cages and windowless single rooms that can barely fit a bed. At some point you need to balance the wellbeing of humans over sacrificing a few more hectares of jungle (and before you ask, building taller is not necessarily a way out, beyond a certain height, especially for residential buildings, it stops making economic or practical sense).
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  841. ​ @VocalMabiMaple  It's hard to know how India would have developed without the EIC or the Raj. India even back then had a lot of people, so famines were still going to happen until the green revolution. The cause of some of the famines can be partly attributed to poor administration and governance, but of course you don't need an imperial occupier to be bad at that.
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  842. It's a bit of a button pushing term to use, at the very least. It also begs the question of how Europe and Africa should trade so it isn't "imperialistic". Because otherwise how can there be any trade at all?
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  843.  @1968Christiaan  That's even worse for dependency than relying on Russia. The Sahara isn't known for being particularly politically stable, and it just takes one terrorist group to sever a transmission line.
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  844. I think one would cause the other, in whatever order they were in.
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  845.  @ms3862  Unfortunately many of them were compounds built for northern and western European tourists as holiday homes, and as such are fairly self contained without the services needed to sustain locals. Families can't move in if there's no schools or supermarkets.
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  846. In this circumstance I don't think it would have made a difference, she almost certainly sealed her fate when she first ate the burger when the lettuce was fresh out of the fridge. Leaving it out will have increased the number of bacteria, but you don't generally need to ingest a lot of pathogenic E-Coli to make yourself very sick. But there are other pathogens where time spent in the "danger zone" will make more of a difference. It's also important to note that some people's immune systems are significantly weaker than others. In a cookbook I own, the section on food safety emphasises to be more careful when cooking for others than when cooking for yourself, because you don't know if their immune systems are in top condition. A reasonably healthy person can probably push the limits of the danger zone with minimal risk, after all many of us don't think twice about eating a sandwich that has been sitting in a warm backpack for hours on a hike, something that would certainly break food safety rules in a kitchen. But your 80 year old grandmother or someone with a chronic illness probably can't afford to be so blase.
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  847. This reminds me of the fluidic circuit research I saw at ICRA 2022.
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  848. Actually in some places, there are just too many restaurants. Even if people do go out to eat regularly, there's just too many establishments to match demand. That was true in the UK even before COVID, there was a rash of chains closing restaurants because they'd overbuilt.
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  849. I think the refugee crisis brought out the idealist in Merkel, and listening to that idealism over her more typically pragmatic approach was her biggest mistake. She overestimated the goodwill the German people would have, and her own background meant she was especially sympathetic. To be fair, for a while it looked like it might work. Most Germans seemed very welcoming, but after a bit of a honeymoon period, the reality of letting in so many people began to hit, and the idealistic vision of Germany as a haven for refugees began to crack. I reckon there was probably a part of Merkel that knew this would probably happen, and that flinging open the doors was not a good or sustainable idea, but her idealism mean she didn't listen to that voice. Thankfully, it's one of only a few blemishes on an otherwise very solid record, and unlike with Tony Blair, it doesn't seem like it will scar her legacy too much.
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  850.  @ultracapitalistutopia3550  Falun Gong is basically the Chinese equivalent of Scientology. Just because they hate the Government and vice versa doesn't mean they are trustworthy.
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  851. For short haul, approximately anything under 2 hours or less, batteries are feasible. That's not nothing, that could replace a lot of shorter flights in europe where demand is too low for high speed rail (or it's just plain impossible), and even many feeder routes in the US. But hydrogen or carbon neutral jet fuel are the only feasible alternatives for anything longer than that.
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  852.  @future62  They also might be be taking more risks in order to lower their bid. They might have an idea that if they can do X, Y and Z (that may or may not have worked on a previous project) then they probably could do the project for that cost. But then they get on site and discover that X, Y, Z or all 3 are impossible or impractical, so up goes the price.
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  853. I think one thing that could improve the Boston subway is probably quite controversial, but common in many of the other cities mentioned: more inner city gentrification. In London and Paris you can find shiny new residential towers and traditional large townhouses with luxury apartments, mixed in with fancy cafés and restaurants, and crucially excellent connections to the subway system. These high income areas prevent the subway from becoming a transit system for the poor and nobody else, but they inevitably displace some existing inner city communities when introduced.
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  854.  @Sevenfold120  There's some, but not on the same scale as Canada, even if you consider landmass and population.
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  855.  @justinwatson1510  You don't generate profit if a product offers no advantages over its competition. Marketing helps, but in the end your product will only stand the test of time if it is genuinely innovative. Teflon pans were better than what was on offer at the time, and even now we're still struggling to create alternatives that are just as non-stick and low maintenance as a reasonable price. Besides, cookware is really a side business for Teflon. It is used in clothing, water pipes, industrial equipment, all kinds of things. Ditching cookware would only make a small dent.
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  856.  @canemcave  Someone said the UK had the most renewable energy of any european country, I disagreed. It's nothing more than that.
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  857.  @danharold3087  Unless you want impractically long pins, increasing cross section is the only practical way to do that. Increasing voltage is also not easily accomplished, it often requires redesigning the whole power train, your existing insulation may not be enough to safely avoid dielectric breakdown for example (otherwise we'd be running EV's in the multi kilovolt range already). Not to mention the increased safety risks when maintaining the vehicle, since the higher the voltage, the easier it is to have arcing. Increasing charging current is easier, you only really need to alter the battery, charging system and perhaps update the cooling.
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  858. Legacy admissions don't really benefit the vast majority of white applicants either, only a small minority in high society. Most people who oppose Affirmative Action for whatever reason will probably oppose legacy admissions too.
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  859.  @R3dhawk95  Signal priority helps but is never as good as grade separation, for it to be feasible you need to limit the top speed of transit vehicles and you have a cap on frequency. In reality some transit vehicles will also have to wait because they arrived at the wrong time in the cycle. It's not a magic bullet to make light rail act like a subway.
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  860.  @piccalillipit9211  The problem is, there's a lot of cause and effect in there to muddy the waters. Many of those things can either cause, or be caused by, those other things, as you said so yourself. We still don't know the "chain of events", what events in isolation caused other events, which eventually led to collapse. We have a much clearer idea of what caused the Roman Empire to collapse thanks to a wealth of documented sources. For the Bronze Age Collapse, we have barely anything.
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  861.  @piccalillipit9211  Not in the sense of micromanaging people's lives, it hasn't. Democracy is pretty new, but people still had a spectrum of freedoms throughout the world. Some places had tyrants who restricted internal mobility, imposed punitive laws and punishments, and meddled with the affairs of their subjects a lot more than others. Those places tended to have rebellions.
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  862.  @Ryyyaaaaannn  That happens more often than most people think. Thing is, a "fly by" is still a very long distance away.
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  863. Indeed, where else am I going to feel like I'm watching the credits to a 90's daytime soap opera?
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  864.  @southcoastinventors6583  China mostly.
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  865.  @erongi233  Yes, but the point was how badly it affected the UK economy compared to other countries. In Germany it barely moved the needle, in the US the drop was surprisingly small with New York gone. With London a hypothetical 51st state UK would be a mid tier US state, without it, it would be the poorest state in the Union. It's supposed to show how largest city centric the UK is.
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  866. We might be in the same situation with plastic now. There's bacteria that can already break down PET, and all the other plastics in our landfills are food for any bacteria willing to evolve the right set of enzymes.
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  867. If you keep telling young men they are the problem, they will listen to the only people telling them they aren't. I think that explains a lot of the rise of people like Andrew Tate. He makes these young men feel good about themselves and doesn't tell them they are potential monsters who need to "tame" their own behaviour and personality.
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  868. I really don't think they'll be able to dodge E261 on this one, it'll be 600 euros per passenger. Some very expensive pigs!
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  869. I like the occasional tirade when the woke side of the gaming industry does something stupid. Reminds me of old times, but you can't really sustain a YouTube channel on that.
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  870. I think there's a couple of issues that make Affirmative Action an easy target for students that get rejected. Firstly it's seen, fairly or not, as treating people's group identity above individual circumstances, many people think a privileged African American is more likely to be accepted than an underprivileged White or Asian applicant, which some people see as unfair. This is probably because race, gender, and other identity markers are connoted with AA far more than income or family status, which gives people the impression it is about those things and not about elevating disadvantaged applicants regardless of identity. The second is that because college admissions has become such an opaque and subjective process it's easy to speculate on all kinds of reasons why you didn't get accepted. SAT scores and GPA are harsh but transparent reasons for rejection, they are easy to accept and move on from. But these character and life experience assessments are easy to ruminate over, to question not just your intellect but your whole personality and identity, to ask yourself over and over why you weren't good enough, because in today's admissions environment, you'll likely never know.
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  871.  @fighterck6241  Tim is a bit of an outlier in that regard, it's pretty unusual for a republican or democrat (also his net worth is probably closer to $1M if you consider his rather generous pension). Also teachers are generally considered middle class, salary notwithstanding, so that may count against him.
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  872.  @bennettbullock9690  The Germans don't really care what language is used, they just don't want to waste time.
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  873. ​ @daniel.friedrich  Unfortunately it's Germany's own environmental policies that hamper its decarbonisation. An obsession against nuclear energy and a reluctance to embrace gas as a transition fuel means it's been stuck burning huge amounts of dirty brown coal even after most of the rest of Western Europe has pretty much ditched it.
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  874. I'm sure there was a survey somewhere that said the most psychological benefit you can get from spending money is on using it to save time and effort. Not having to clean or cook on a regular basis is one of the benefits the wealthy most enjoy. So one of the first things you should do with your money is hire a housekeeper.
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  875. I think when it comes to certs more is not necessarily better. For a specific skill you need in your field, it might make sense or even be required. But trying to get cert after cert is a lot of expense and stress for little to no gain, and you'll probably end up not even using the skills gained from many of them anyway.
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  876.  @goste4  Because it's far far cheaper (the best legal teams will cost you an arm and a leg just to keep on retainer, even for rich people) and less stressful to do the latter. Set it up once (plenty of companies will do it for you) and it's all just a matter of accounting, you don't need people with highly specialised experience that cost potentially millions per year. Plus it comes with lots of other benefits, some less moral than others, to be fair.
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  877.  @goste4  If you're calling me a paid shill and saying my argument is fundamentally illogical, well, you could be right, or you could just be so single minded and ideologically blinded that you can't contemplate that someone could ever have an alternative view to yours and not have an alterior motive. Besides, if I was a paid shill, do you think I'd spend days arguing with an irrelevant, inconsequential and increasingly insulting YouTuber for days on end? I would hardly be earning my keep! Is it not far more likely that I'm a person just like you, someone who feels passionately about their opinions on certain topics and would happily keep up an argument for days because I have the same drive you do?
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  878.  @goste4  Get off your high horse. You've constantly pushed an appeal to emotion through your "why should we care" argument.
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  879.  @elysian2765  The very low income, yes. The middle income workers through can just about manage it especially if it's not right in central Manhattan. They're also more likely to live in suburbs outside the city, the poorest rent cockroach infested shoeboxes in NYC itself. The richest live in luxury apartments in NYC and have enough FU money to afford any congestion charge going.
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  880.  @mukkaar  I understand, it's just it would probably be a lot easier if the public transport infrastructure was there already. I guess perhaps we might have to find a way to reduce the pain for those in those suburbs, it might have to involve letting them work almost fully remotely (but then they might move to a cheaper state in the interior). NYC could become devoid of middle income commuters that often propped up the lunchtime economy of many restaurants and food trucks, so there will be knock-on effects if that happens.
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  881. @mukkaar  It's likely that for a significant proportion of people any modified commute would be significantly longer, significantly more expensive, or both. Longer isn't great, it might be the difference between getting home before the kids go to bed and not. If they have enough sway with their employer they might get a raise to cover the cost, though I think most won't. Some might be able to work fully remotely or quit their job and work outside of NYC, but this will obviously hurt NYC itself. I appreciate the arguments for introducing it now, but I think if public transport was in much better shape this would be a far easier sell and such counterpoints would have much less validity.
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  882. @thelakeman2538  That is true, but India had suffered famines at a similar rate before the British arrived. Some industries did suffer, mainly textiles as the British mechanised manufacturing at home, they only wanted the raw material. The canal infrastructure did wither because the railways usurped it, the same was true in Britain. If there was a decrease in productivity it was short lived. Don't get me wrong, the EIC did some horrible, horrible things. But they were a private company expecting a return on investment, so they were reasonably efficient. Though they weren't always competent of course, see the sepoy rebellion, a war started for perhaps one of the stupidest reasons in history.
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  883.  @ManNoName-c9u  It is true that the percentage of the British population that is Muslim, and therefore abstains from alcohol, is increasing, even if the population as a whole is not declining. This is not happening everywhere since these groups tend to cluster in certain urban areas. But the demographics in those areas have changed a lot so I can imagine the effects on the pubs there might be quite dramatic. I agree the way that person said it invites a xenophobic interpretation and they are certainly incorrect about the facts on a country wide scale. But I don't think their argument is completely without merit if you tone down the rhetoric and narrow the scope.
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  884. I'm not so sure. Japan is losing its lead in robotics to the US and Chinese. When we hear about new robots and autonomous technologies, we think Boston Dynamics and DJI, not Honda or Fanuc. Japan still makes industrial robots, but I'd argue it's not at the cutting edge anymore.
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  885. It wasn't so much the ships, the Chinese and Ottomans also built some very good ships, but the navigation tools. Europeans were by far the most adept at open water navigation, whereas other civilisations had to use littoral navigation (hugging the coast) or island hop, which allowed them to cross the fairly empty Atlantic ocean (which has few island chains compared to much of the Pacific) and land fairly rougly where they intended. The invention of the sextant increased this advantage as the Europeans could now accurately calculate their latitude, which meant they were far more likely to arrive at the correct spot on the American coast.
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  886. It's easy to make the environmental argument against infrastructure when you live in a country that already built that infrastructure decades ago. To a lot of these countries it just sounds like we're saying "for the sake of the environment, you must stay poor and less developed" which obviously isn't going to fly.
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  887.  @militaryav8r  I really doubt that would happen. Airlines can simply not be allowed to schedule flights that would land after curfew if they were on time. Unless the airline has truly dreadful punctuality it's not going to happen all that often. Filing paperwork for permission is really just busywork.
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  888.  @militaryav8r  There's honestly no need. This is commercial aviation, there's already a paper trail a mile long for every single flight, it's trivial to find out why an aircraft landed outside of curfew. Asking for permission when it's obvious to everyone involved that you've been delayed is useless busy work. Airlines aren't going to push their luck, because there's no method for them to do so, they already can't schedule flights outside of curfew, and they aren't going to deliberately delay them to screw with the airport. If residents complain, a permission slip is going to make no difference.
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  889. You provided a fairly impartial two sided argument with a for and against when I'm sure the popular consensus on Youtube could have easily tempted you into telling your audience what they want to hear. I think both sides make good points, but it's been quite tough to show any agreement for one side at all and I've been roped into defending it just because I think it deserves a fair shake, even if I don't fully agree with the idea. Sure, wealth inequality is a problem in many situations, but many seem to treat it as almost the be all and end all of the worlds woes, as if a far more equal society would fix nearly everything like poverty and crime and Nordic style tax rates and strict controls on where rich people's money moves for every country is the solution. But I think this ignores many of the complexities of the economic and political system, and a blind adherence to reducing inequality could result in a sub optimal solution to an issue.
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  890.  @tomsoki5738  Realistically the civilian police are probably in a better position to deal with any terrorist threat anyway.
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  891. I think sales often do play a valuable role, especially in B2B industries. They can act as an interface between engineers/developers and customers/clients. Sometimes you need someone in the middle to translate customer requirements to something the engineering team can understand, and vice versa. You have to remember the people doing the purchasing at the client company may not be experts in whatever software or widget they are buying.
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  892. To be fair, if you missed your connecting flight because of a 1 hour delay and that made you miss an important function, your schedule was too tight already.
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  893.  @Dangic23  In that case the investment was poorly rated, most did not know the real risk. Even then, the bank has to invest it in something or loan it to someone and if riskier investments and loans are the only ones available (which is what happens with a savings glut) then they've not got much choice.
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  894. Not so much moving away as dying out altogether. The traditional circus is almost extinct in many countries. What remains is closer to high end artistic performance than family entertainment.
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  895. With Botswana, it had a pretty hands off relationship with the British Empire, and when independence came, they took a pragmatic approach, they didn't kick all the whites out of government so the bureaucracy stayed intact and kept the country running. Rwanda is a different story, they're a real "phoenix from the ashes" going through one of the most brutal race wars/genocides in history that it kind of wiped the slate clean (mostly).
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  896.  @josephdrach2276  Taste is not the only factor, some cultivars are too soft to transport long distances, some spoil too quickly, some are just plain uneconomic. But I think it does play a big role. Consumers in the west are used to very big, very sweet bananas. They don't want anything else and if you tried to sell them something else many would just not buy it and turn to alternative sweet fruits. You are right about Cavendish not being the most approved of, that's the Gros Michael, but that's been practically wiped out by disease.
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  897.  @benedict6962  That's fission, not fusion.
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  898. ​ @loveheals3173 The British did invest in infrastructure projects in their imperial subjects, that much is true. The projects were arguably more self-serving since the British stood to directly benefit from economic growth and productivity improvements from their Empire. So you can argue whose infrastructure investments were "better" than the country in question, but both did invest in infrastructure.
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  899. Well, you have the Scottish dialects of English, and Scots Gaelic which is considered a different language. It doesn't help that the Scottish dialects of English often contain many Gaelic loanwords.
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  900. I think the limiting factor was oceans. We couldn't build vessels that could do transatlantic or transpacific routes, so America and Australasia were cut off. Within Europe, Asia and Africa we had land routes we could use.
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  901. I can totally understand this decision from an engineering perspective. They'd rather put the pipeline in a rural area where a) It is less likely to be dug up by construction workers and b) if it does spill, fewer water supplies are contaminated. It is a numbers game, the fewer people affected, the less money they have to pay out, the easier it is to fix and the fewer lives are disrupted. That said, we don't make engineering decisions in a vacuum, social and ethical issues come into play and we have to work around that. Saying the pipeline is completely safe is a product of the expectations of the public. No, it is not completely safe, nothing is. Building it in a way that if in accident did happen, the consequences would be minimised, is good engineering practice. I guess the best solution would be to route it to the north of the city or just to the south, bypassing Bismarck and the reservation. Might mean a bigger bill in the end, but would be probably worth it considering the disruption the protest has already caused. I'm also surprised that the pipeline company didn't try and negotiate with the native Americans, where if the pipeline did have to cross their land concessions could be made, after all, this is what is done with any other landowner. What's happening to the protesters is wrong and unethical, period. But there is a pipeline that's gonna get built one way or another (unless demand magically vanishes, which it won't) and that still needs to be dealt with.
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  902. +Solomon Ayalew Sadly, as was the case with the Zulus, it is much harder to gain an authoritative account of history when most or all of it was not written down. Hence we know very little of Native American or Australian Aboriginal history, and why it isn't taught all that well. What we know of the Zulus is based on carefully corroborating oral sources, and including written sources from British and Dutch colonists. There is also the fact that, whether by natural disaster or conquest, if a civilisation without written records dies, its history mostly dies with it. Much like the game Chinese whispers, oral sources are easily distorted as they are passed down the generations, and while written sources are not infallible from distortion either, they are generally accepted to be vastly more authoritative and reliable, especially when combined together to reduce bias. Now, that is not to say that either of your examples do not have written records (and I expect your latter example does), but it is a fact that some parts of the world, particularly parts of central and south Africa, North/South (but not central) America, and Australasia did not have writing systems until they were conquered by countries who did. So sadly, for quite a bit of the world, we will never have a good history for them.
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  903. Probably even more so, supermarkets over here do more own brand products.
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  904. In the end, you have to consider your health and energy may deteriorate if you leave it too long. So spend some time doing the things you want to do while you're young.
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  905. I don't think we usually see anything on the scale of what happens in France, when we do it's rare.
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  906.  @fiendish9474  The outfits will have to change, way too flamboyant!
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  907.  @MrWeebable  Not in the larger cities, with a few exceptions.
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  908. Grenfell would probably come before that.
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  909. So now Germany's national infrastructure embarrassment moves from BER to Stuttgart 21. Though I've heard that's actually going quite well recently.
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  910.  @abhisheksamanta1  In this case, they're probably right. Realistically the only alternative to not having landlords is for the government to own all the housing and maintain it through taxes instead of rent. Which is bona fide socialism. Unfortunately when this has been tried, it usually results in most regular people living in cramped, undesirable gloomy tower blocks.
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  911. There's usually two kinds of road taxes, an annual tax per vehicle and a duty on fuel. Some argue we should be moving away from per vehicle taxes and move towards a distance based model. With fuel duty that's already done indirectly, with a bonus that gas guzzlers inherently pay more. With EV's it is hard to tax the fuel, you'd need special tamper proof meters installed in every home which would be expensive. You could measure power consumption in the vehicles themselves and calculate tax accordingly, or just measure distance travelled and apply a multiplier based on average consumption.
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  912. Nah, it would take more than a temperature rise. Humans are adaptable. It won't be fun, but we'd live.
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  913.  @emanueldobos8452  Problem is, robots are increasingly doing service jobs too.
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  914.  @tecwynjones6532  I think population changes probably mean most of the beeching cuts won't be reversed. It's not that we don't need new railway lines, we do, but probably not exactly in the same places we used to.
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  915.  @tecwynjones6532  Unfortunately a minority of cyclists have a burning hatred for cars and a smug superiority complex. It's like veganism, most vegans are fine and don't judge others, but those that do give all of them a bad reputation.
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  916.  @trapfethen  Overpolicing can be an issue I agree but I don't think that's down to frequency of patrols, that's down to how the police deal with incidents criminal and non criminal. In the end it doesn't really matter, because you can't do community outreach events without enough police officers either.
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  917.  @trapfethen  I don't think there are many places in the US which have too many police officers, a few perhaps, but not many. In many cities a regular patrol is a pipe dream as it is. The US doesn't have an exceptionally high number of police officers per capita, it's slightly more than most European countries but that's easily explained by lower population density, you still need a minimum level of coverage in sparsely populated rural areas. Without increased pay and incentives, removing the bad apples is likely to result in an operational shortage in much of the country.
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  918.  @coopergates9680  In a country like the US where everyone is potentially armed, you can't really take that risk. I agree getting rid of the military surplus vehicles may help, but the reason they have them is money, it's often cheaper to buy military surplus, partly due to government incentives, than purchase a new vehicle and have it modified for police work.
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  919. So he's basically wanting more power and funding to go to Frontex instead of individual member states coast guards and immigration authorities?
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  920.  @somethinglikethat2176  It's also a country where a crappy pizza costs $30.
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  921.  @elleanna5869  I don't agree with that assessment. Races were elevated above their peers both before and during the era of scientific racism. You just made an exception, this individual was exceptionally intelligent, or exceptionally civilised, for his or her race. I think using Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as an example is not a good idea, it was seen as an extreme outlier and abhorred by its peers even though they were similarly immersed in the same pseudoscience during the imperial era. You really don't need a scientific sounding justification to do horrible things to certain groups of people, as history has shown. What I really don't agree with is the idea that scientific racism is somehow worse than other forms of racism. It doesn't matter if the people who are doing it have a spiritual, ideological or pseudoscientific reason, it's all equally bad.
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  922. Coconut, which is even worse.
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  923.  @TheLiamster  Not all greenbelt is created equal mind you. Some is more agriculturally productive than others, and a lot of that is in the south east. And really anything which increases UK food imports even a little is not going to be popular. Agriculture is seen as a very important industry which is already struggling. I have watched some of that video, including the portion on housing, and it's an interesting if quite radical position to take. I do think he is boiling down a complex issue and only considering one simple solution. As I said in my comment I think a lot of the problem is caused by regional inequality and the absolute economic dominance of the south east. There are other parts of the UK which could support a lot more people (some are basically post industrial wastelands) with minimal impact on prime farmland, if only the economy was less London centric.
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  924.  @inbb510  Yes it does, but should it have 8 million people? (more like 14 million when you consider the whole urban area, plus many commuter towns who also benefit from that investment in infrastructure). Would it be all that bad if it had, say, 2-4 million less and Birmingham and Manchester had 1-2 million more? I think it would not only benefit those second tier cities but also take a lot of the pressure off London and the south east. As I said, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. London gets more investment, which attracts more people, which requires more investment, which attracts even more people, and the cycle continues. Meanwhile that means less money is left over for other cities, so they either grow much more slowly, stagnate or even decline. If we want to break or even just slow down that cycle, and as I've said before I think there's a lot of benefits to doing that, we much invest more in these other cities. Why don't Birmingham and Manchester have subway systems? It's not because they're too small, there are many smaller cities in Europe with underground transportation, it's because London sucks up all the money for their system.
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  925. @pooroldnostradamus I remember taking the subway in Philadelphia and noticing how dingy and dirty it was. Just keeping things brightly lit would be a start in some places.
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  926.  @Sonic_emperor  Well, that's kind of the idea, nations intervening to prevent war, tyranny or genocide, internal or external, either only delay it or make it worse. So it's best just to leave them alone to go through the horrors and then after they'll emerge stronger.
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  927.  @howardblackwell1422  The problem is demand is typically very elastic. If you raise your prices customers will often order less or come less often so you end up losing money anyway. Sometimes you can't win, you're ultimately screwed either way and all you can do is hold on for as long as you can before you inevitably close up.
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  928.  @SGast  It would certainly solve the shortage, but you might then have the opposite problem, the service industry employs a huge number of low skilled workers, and you'd probably see a huge reduction in the restaurant industry (from restaurants that have closed, and from others that would likely automate and streamline to cut costs, especially fast food and casual dining which would probably be the most likely to survive). You'd have millions more low skilled people who are unemployed.
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  929.  @SamyasaSwi  It's more he doesn't always square that the reason he likes the Netherlands is because the urban lifestyle aligns with his lifestyle preferences, he presents it in a way that it's the perfect society for everyone. He does sometimes seem to think his model for society, and therefore that of the Netherlands, is objectively the best one, which is fairly common among some urbanists I'll admit.
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  930. Because you'd need, well, loads and loads. Actually, that's a massive understatement, we're talking several GWh of storage for some nations.
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  931.  @BelaJuTe  Certainly in my country it was WWII that kicked it off. Suddenly there was an acute and enormous housing shortage, and the country was broke, so there was a need to house as many people as possible as cheaply as possible.
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  932. Thorpe is a common suffix for place names in parts of England, or just on its own.
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  933. As it's from the UK Delta also probably had to compensate every passenger £520 for the delay, as I can imagine most would be delayed more than 4 hours. I wonder if they'll try and get the £200-300k back from the crew member, that would be one hell of a lawsuit!
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  934. On the face of it, it hasn't been sceptical, the US has the most reactors in the world, even more than France. Individual states have been more or less keen on nuclear energy, California is probably the closest to Germany in terms of nuclear scepticism. What has caused the decline of nuclear in the US in recent years has arguably not been renewable energy, but cheap fracked natural gas. This has half the CO2 emissions of coal and the plants are far more dispatchable than nuclear so it plays well with renewables and solves their intermittency issue, which is what keeps renewables so cheap in the first place, if you have to add a battery it can come off more expensive than nuclear. The future really depends on what happens to storage costs and the cost of raw materials like rare earth metals. If storage gets cheaper then nuclear is unlikely to be able to compete, but if they stay stubbornly high, then as gas has to be phased out to meet emissions targets it could become more attractive again, especially if costs fall for nuclear as well.
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  935.  @avinashreji60  Especially in cities like Detroit, the suburbs are significantly wealthier, without their income the city would be significantly poorer.
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  936.  @avinashreji60  That's vastly oversimplifying things. Lots of people who work in urban centres live in suburbia and they don't want to move, and you won't make them. They use the roads and railways commuting in and out of the city, which their property taxes help pay for. If you were to disincorporate these areas then your urban population and businesses would have to pay for all the infrastructure these suburban commuters use.
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  937.  @avinashreji60  People like living in suburbs. It's quieter, there's more space and privacy. You only need to consider what often came before, cramped apartments in overcrowded conditions.
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  938.  @thedapperdolphin1590  PA seems to be one of those places where wherever you go, something interesting happened there at some point in history. It's a state with a lot of stories to tell.
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  939.  @RubenKelevra  Those can cost more than the panels in a lot of cases. Also remember you'll probably need 3 sets as solar panels typically last 20-25 years.
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  940. Japan's renewable capacity is fairly limited, there's no hydro left and solar and wind can only do so much in a country with such a large population. That leaves nuclear, but since its reputation is in the toilet in Japan, for obvious reasons, that's unlikely to be an option.
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  941. That and with a temperature gradient that large there would be extreme winds trying to equalise the air pressure (because warm air is less dense than cold air), to the point that the friction generated would probably heat up the air so much it would probably consume the cold front.
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  942. While I'm sure there was some disparities in service, I don't believe SA only supplied electricity to white homes under Apartheid.
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  943. The way my EE teacher taught me is comparing it to being hit with an object, where voltage is the velocity and current is the mass. High voltage low current is like being hit by a fly at 100 mph. It's going to hurt, but it's not going to do anything more than maybe leave a mark (assuming it doesn't go in your eye or anything). Low voltage high current is like being hit by a car, but at 1 mph. You get pushed along, but not at a velocity to cause any injury (assuming you don't go under the wheels). High voltage high current is being hit by a car at 100 mph, you're human jam all over the bonnet. Not a perfect analogy but I think it gets the concept of the consequences across.
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  944.  @liamannegarner8083  Hardly anyone goes to Chalki because it's inland, most tourists stay near the cost. We went for a hike up to Zas last time I went, and the place was much quieter than where we were staying.
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  945. +KillMeWithPotato You can't build enough suburban rail lines and stations to give everyone a short enough commute by bike to the station (5-10 mins is a realistic goal, any longer and it's going to add up to too much extra time). If you have a motorbike you may as well go all the way in (and most people don't have a licence anyway). Particularly distant suburbia, satellite villages, and rural locations just outside these areas, it's just not economic to connect them all to the suburban rail network.
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  946. ​​​ @KevinBalch-dt8ot A geothermal plant where? There aren't many places in the US geothermal would even be viable, you need a thin crust or nearby volcanism. Maybe Yellowstone?
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  947.  @Strieuok  It's a pretty old design and it's quite complex. The Germans, back before they planned to phase nuclear out, overengineered it.
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  948. Part of the problem is many european buildings are several decades, sometimes several centuries old. Reducing the energy intensity of these buildings is really expensive, often significantly more than demolishing the structure and building something new. Problem with that is, Europe places a high value on historical heritage, old buildings slated for demolition often generate a public outcry, and there is preference is for retrofitting rather than starting with a clean sheet. But ultimately, the economics of the looming energy shortage may mean some hard choices have to be made, and historic buildings either end up abandoned, or as rubble.
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  949. 0.02% is pretty close. You can't have zero as you'd get false positives.
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  950.  @vadim6385  A proper, well constructed pit toilet (which needs no water supply) for a small village will only need emptying every few years. In that time the faecal matter will ferment which makes it less dangerous as a disease vector. It's even possible (though perhaps unwise if you don't know what you're doing) to use it as fertiliser. How often do you think the ones on remote trails in the wilderness in places like appalachia are serviced? Not terribly often apart from a bit of light cleaning. And guess what is also outside? Bugs, snakes and whatnot!
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  951.  @jessh4016  They did have homes, they just had leaky roofs. Leaky roofs can be fixed with local materials. It's not ideal but it can be done until better materials are sourced. Other people in similarly poor conditions throughout the world manage it and they also build and maintain proper enclosed latrines. I just don't think people have the right to live and bring their children up in such primitive conditions, conditions that would be considered crude and unsanitary by people who lived thousands of years ago. I'm all for cultural freedoms, but you've got to draw a line somewhere.
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  952.  @AntoshaPushkin  Well I think when it comes down to this there's no other option. If people don't appreciate the importance of proper sanitation over a leaky roof (they never said they had no roof) then what else can you be? And there's really no way to dispose of human waste safely by just burying it unless it's happening infrequently, like on a hiking trail. As I said, you've got to draw a line somewhere. We only let people do so much harm to themselves and their children for the sake of personal and cultural autonomy.
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  953. I wonder if relaxing the debt brake rather than scrapping it might be more palatable. It's probably a good idea, but it is rather strict and could hinder investment needed for future growth. Maybe double it for now with a sunset clause that states it returns to the baseline after X years, and see how it goes.
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  954.  @Dumbledore6969x  I think you just repeated yourself there. Was that a mistake?
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  955.  @Pr0nst  Both involve governments downplaying or covering up the true scale of the problem.
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  956.  @Pr0nst  It was an accident caused by a design that was known to be dangerous. The USSR was willing to look the other way for the sake of progress just as much as any capitalist nation. Because producing energy and stuff was just as important to them.
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  957.  @LesserAndrew  I don't think SpaceX really intends Starship to be human rated (for earth launch anyway). Passengers are less lucrative than satellites. Starship is a massive LEO truck and that's what it will be good at. F9 is fine for humans (or something like Dream Chaser in future).
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  958. Unfortunately among the genuine innovations we'll see a raft of consumer products with "carbon nanotube technology" that has little to no effect on their performance. Looking at you, Solus!
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  959. Why not just build up and have larger spaces that way?
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  960. Environmental laws are interesting to compare. While overall the US probably has slightly more lax regulations than Europe, California probably has more restrictive laws than nearly anywhere in Europe, even the most progressive countries.
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  961.  @jbird4478  Then you have to set production quotas and pay farmers to effectively grow nothing, this does happen in europe. Ending subsidies won't mean european farmers produce less food, it will mean most won't produce any food at all, because imports from developing countries will outcompete them on price for nearly every crop. In many european countries, farms are still owned by smallholders, there are cooperatives that may act as monopsonies, but the farms themselves are still owned by families and individuals.
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  962.  @arthurclery5731  New Zealand has one advantage for ditching subsidies that other places like europe lack: geographic isolation. NZ is pretty much guaranteed a domestic market for many agricultural products because the costs to import anything are high. Not so for well connected places like europe. For exports, it focuses on high value animal products like lamb, butter and honey. These are products that are expensive to produce pretty much anywhere, so economies of scale can offset the high shipping costs.
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  963. I'm generally quite sceptical Mexico can ever come close to the breadth and diversity of manufacturing that China has. Apart from corruption and crime, it also lacks the political stability of China, with little centralised control and a very politically fractured country, arguably much worse than the US, from the more libertarian north to the socialist/anarchist south. Sure, you can build the odd factory here and there, but I think Mexico would struggle to manage the gargantuan supply chains China has.
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  964.  @whatayaDO543  Computer chips aren't everything though, they are an important industry but a niche one. China is capable of producing most of the non cutting-edge microprocessors itself, which is fine for most products.
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  965.  @mandisaw  The statistics aren't clear. I've found around 38% of people in the US have a bachelors or higher, and about 34% in the UK. Associates I don't know as there's not a direct like for like equivalent, but as a bachelors takes 3 years here I guess there's not that much difference? I haven't found data on dropout rates.
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  966. It's a bit self defeating to write off taxes when you're the one collecting them!
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  967. Renewables will be hamstrung in many more polar regions like Europe unless massive amounts of energy storage can be built fast at very low cost.
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  968. Indeed. A $30 meal voucher and a $500 flight credit would have been more acceptable.
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  969. ​ @aliengeo  Assistive devices don't necessarily cure people of an ailment, the only reduce the disability that ailment causes, sometimes to such a degree that it becomes little more than an inconvenience. I think it's reasonable to assume based on current trends, that 100 years from now we will have a lot more assistive devices that cover a much wider range of disabilities, and the costs of these things will continue to shrink. As such we will approach more and more disabilities the same way we have with vision correction, something which technology can adequately compensate for. For example, very few people think it's ableist to not have all signs in massive print so nobody has to use glasses, we accept that some people will need them to read the sign. Sometimes that's baked into the law as is the case with driving. In the future we might have the same attitude to other impairments. It won't be for a long time, but a century is more than long enough. As for conditions like autism, well that's always going to be a problem if stimulating environments are the sore point. Because many people kinda like them, so you're creating a conflict between autistic people and a lot of neurotypical people.
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  970.  @faustinpippin9208  No, for household use with 6-12 hrs battery storage you are not doing it for 1K. The kilowatt scale micro inverter alone will cost more than that (which you still need unless you run everything on low voltage DC).
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  971. ​ @stevecha3612 In Nordic countries it's normal for people to put heaters in cars to keep them warm overnight. You'd need that infrastructure in the US in every home and unheated parking garage to really solve the problem.
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  972. He probably means $1000 per year for 12 years. That'll get you around a million with a 50% return.
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  973. I think Putin will keep on the offensive until he has enough of an advantage to push through enough of his key demands at the negotiating table. The question is can he get to that point before the whole thing collapses, maybe he's forced out in a coup, assassinated, or the military refuses to fight.
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  974. Part of it is definitely France's civil engineering pedigree. They have a very large and experienced civil engineering industry, particularly in transportation.
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  975. Honolulu is pretty dense as US cities go, so unless you want it to literally look like Singapore where every building is a massive apartment block, there's not much more density you can add.
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  976. I like it, these videos are my bedtime story.
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  977.  @xmtxx  That's meaningless by itself. It's obvious he could have taken less time if he hadn't stopped as often in the ICE. Many people want to drive 2-3 hours at 130 km/h without stopping for more than 5-10 minutes (and in some cases not at all). That's only just about doable now at the low end, with a high performance EV in near perfect weather conditions. Until you can get an EV that can do that reliably that's going to be a barrier for a lot of people, even if it's only necessary a few times a year.
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  978.  @xmtxx  It doesn't work very well if you want to do a only one large break rather than lots of little ones, which is how a lot of people want to drive on road trips. On a 4-6 hour trip, I would generally want to stop once for food, for maybe 20-60 minutes depending on how long the drive is. In an EV that won't be enough, in order to get the range required I'd need to make 3-4 shorter stops, and even then I'd very likely still be stopping for longer because I could be driving in cold weather, or I might have to take a longer route to stay on the highway. Besides, why don't I just wait a 2-3 years for a range that could manage that? The ICE used car market is still healthy and environmentally it's better to drive a used ICE for a while than buy a brand new EV. Why put up with any inconvenience when I can save may pennies for a little bit longer and have no inconvenience when an equally performing EV comes on the market? With battery tech the way it is I don't hate EV's, not at all, but I'm not going to pretend the whole range argument is a non-problem, because it isn't. And I think for a lot of consumers, they look at the inconvenience and decide to wait a little longer.
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  979. Solar's biggest problem is its distribution over the day, generally there's a big spike around midday and then it tails off on either side. In more temperate regions it also varies greatly over the year. That means especially in more temperate regions less likely to use air conditioning, solar generates the most energy at perhaps the second lowest period of demand (night would be the lowest of course). A summer day, when people don't have lights on, are more likely to be outdoors, and are more likely to be on vacation. So periods of negative pricing become more common, as other generators are paid to shut off to prevent the grid overloading. Wind is less variable, but more unpredictable and you can have days or weeks of very low generation. We have lots of it here in the UK, but a slow moving high pressure system (which is fairly common) can result in slack winds for a long time (and freezing temperatures in winter).
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  980. ​ @hahahalol870  A rich immigrant will provide short term gains in terms of investments, long term gains from taxes (including consumption taxes, they're going to be buying your luxury goods) and a low risk of state dependency (they are unlikely to need to claim benefits). Really there's not a lot against letting wealthy people into your country. Sure, they can cause problems like buying up housing or taking control of vital industries out of the country, but there's lots of ways to mitigate that while still allowing them to enter.
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  981.  @sankarchaya  Oh, fair enough.
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  982. Unlike a certain submarine company...
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  983. Realistically you can't rely on recycled aluminium alone, there's always some waste in a circular economy so you need virgin inputs to keep things topped up.
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  984. Ironically nuclear may be the only viable solution for a large martian colony. With no concentrated source of hydrocarbons, only half of the solar energy of earth (plus frequent dust storms that blot out the sun) and low atmospheric density meaning any wind turbine would have to be absolutely enormous to get any usable energy out of even in hurricane force winds, nuclear reactors (fission or fusion) will be nessecary. Uranium, Thorium, or MOX fuel rods could be shipped from earth every few years, and the same is true for deuterium and lithium. Eventually these resources could be mined from Mars. That's probably one good argument for keeping nuclear technology alive. Getting Mars's greenhouse effect going probably means expending a lot of energy to heat up the CO2 and water ice on the polar caps, plus maintaining an artificial magnetosphere to stop the solar wind blowing it away.
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  985.  @FreekHoekstra  It's still a fair difference, you're probably looking at an extra metre or so, and if space is at a premium that's gonna matter. It's also just more expensive and time consuming to install.
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  986. I think he rents a commercial unit to do TC videos.
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  987. Consider that these countries cannot focus their infrastructure funding exclusively in these densely populated flat river valleys, and they usually have multiple flat river valleys separated by less ideal terrain. Imagine trying to tell your rural and low density suburban populations that you're slashing infrastructure funding for them and concentrating it into one or more high density city regions. It would clearly be politically untenable, any party trying such a thing would lose any support they had in those areas and would probably lose the next election. If the UK were to follow the Netherlands, whole swathes of the country, especially in Wales and Scotland, would have to be "sacrificed" in order to bring up infrastructure quality in London and the South East, maybe the West Midlands, the North West and Scottish Central Belt if they're lucky. Smaller cities too far away from larger ones would also have to be deprioritised.
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  988.  @user-bp7tm5rd6h  Fair enough, but that could still be a fair chunk of cash every year. It's not something you find in a lot of other countries.
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  989. The only two scenarios I could see that happening is either a second US civil war or a third world war. In the latter case, we're probably not going to worry too much about reserve currencies in a post apocalyptic wasteland.
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  990.  @curlyfries2956  My point is Israel as a nation state is not particularly old and has been settled by a lot of people from other parts of the world. Does that make it an illegitimate country? No, no more than arguing that the US or Canada shouldn't exist because the native Americans lived there first.
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  991.  @curlyfries2956 No it hasn't. Israel didn't exist other than as a concept from about 63 BC until 1946 AD. If a nation disappears and then comes back millennia later you don't get to count that time in how long its been around. The original kingdom of Israel is very old, but was conquered millennia ago and the Israel we know today isn't even 80 years old. But like I said, that doesn't mean that the country is any less legitimate, unless you have some very radical anti-colonial views.
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  992. London does outpace every other city in the UK by quite a large margin. There's such a massive infrastructure gap between London and Manchester. It's like the difference between Berlin and Magdeburg rather than Berlin and Hamburg.
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  993. ​@EnriqueThieleOnly if said cameras are not covered in dirt or rain. I saw the Cybertruck rear view camera being useless once it got water and dirt sprayed onto it. You need something to keep it clean.
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  994.  @American-Motors-Corporation  It's not busy work if it serves a purpose. Somebody has to direct visitors, somebody has to schedule appointments. These things don't do themselves.
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  995.  @American-Motors-Corporation  It depends on the business. A receptionist in a hospital is very important, they are dealing with members of the public who probably have no idea where to go or what to do. Similarly for any firm who have walk in clients or customers. Not every business will have interactions with people who have a good understanding of their structure, some will have absolutely no clue.
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  996.  @rainmirron  For that sort of regulation, I'm not even sure democracy can cope. It might take an authoritarian planned economy to make those kinds of radical changes work.
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  997. I think Switzerland benefits from having perhaps the most civically engaged population on the planet. People who will go to a polling station like a trip to the hardware store, and willing to pay a decent chunk of tax money to have regular old school paper ballots. Realistically, to have that kind of direct democracy in other countries, you'd need to make it cheaper and more convenient. Perhaps using the internet like what Estonia is trying (though of course there are serious security concerns with that).
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  998. It would be interesting to see how Just Eat does. In the UK it started as a relatively simpler takeaway aggregator, a portal to provide a standardised online experience ordering from lots of different takeaways. The restaurant would then use their own delivery drivers to deliver your order, and delivery fees would be set by the restaurant, and would often change depending on how far away you were, often not showing up at all if you were more than 4-5 miles away. But one Deliveroo and Uber Eats came into the picture, they started using their own drivers more often. Since the costs of the aggregator model are pretty small since there are no drivers, I do wonder if that could be profitable.
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  999. Major cities in Texas do seem to be investing in infrastructure. Texas is probably always going to be car dominant because of the amount of land available. But that doesn't mean there won't be some changes. A high speed rail spine linking Houston and Dallas looks promising, with potential future extensions to Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio could definitely boost the economy further.
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  1000. To be honest, I'm not sure what Aus has to offer. Whatever it can diversify into, other nations with better global connections can often do for cheaper. Even high end manufacturing can be done for less (for most customers) in Europe, North America or Japan and Korea because of the distance. We see that play out with innovations that get manufactured abroad.
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  1001. If Spain wants to use the colonialism argument it better give Ceuta and Melilla back to Morocco.
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  1002.  @digitalrandomart3049  Very much British.
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  1003.  @sergewind2208  A train or a bus is much less flexible though. The most efficient thing would be to pack everyone into giant apartment blocks and have them walk to work or the shops. But a lot of people object to living that way.
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  1004. @xtr.7662  It's not that poor by global standards, but it has been a big fall from where it was. At the turn of the 20th century it was one of the richest countries in the world, and had it carried on it would probably be something like Australia, resource rich economy that nevertheless has a well paid well educated workforce with a healthy service sector alongside mining manufacturing and agriculture. Instead it's been a cautionary tale of how a growing and prosperous economy can turn into a perpetual basket case from decades of mismanagement.
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  1005. ​ @vengefulavenger3998  Some Islamic banks are pretty large, certainly comparable to many other national or regional conventional banks. But higher fees aren't a surprise, unless the banks are really good investors they are going to see similar returns for their deposits compared to conventional banks. Without the loan income they're going to need to find an alternative income to stay competitive, they still have investors who want returns after all. To be fair though, few banks, conventional or Islamic, offer a good deal for cash savers right now. Either through fees or pathetic interest rates, your cash is going to be losing value. And that doesn't look like it will change soon.
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  1006. Geographical barriers to trade are important I think. The Sahara Desert is a big barrier to southern Africa trading with Europe.
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  1007.  @PsyKeks  Lisbon is a problem since the rail connections between Portugal and Spain are dreadful.
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  1008. I think it's often a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. DEI and HR departments will focus on all these little issues they think are really important and will have endless bullshit meetings and workshops over whatever the latest trendy topic is, stuff which your typical employee not indoctrinated into the "culture" will see at best as an annoyance, and at worst fostering a culture of hypervigilance and paranoia (kind of like what was mentioned regarding Disney's language guidance). Meanwhile the simpler but more difficult to address issues that are actually causing most of the problems go unsolved.
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  1009. Yeah, but they do include transit too, generally.
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  1010.  @TessHKM  I'd disagree. You'd need passenger rail to 90% of suburbs and outlying community that might commute in, so unless everyone lives in super dense urban areas it would be very inefficient. And for freight it gets even worse, you'd need massive intermodal terminals all over the city to transfer goods onto trucks for "last mile" delivery, which would probably take up more space than a highway, and would result in a logistical nightmare for keeping lean industry and commerce running. After all that, sometimes a highway is the easy and efficient option.
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  1011. Net worth at the top is a bit messy, because you've got those who own multi million dollar companies and 90% of their net worth comes from that ownership stake. They might be very rich on paper, but they're often very precariously so, as their worth is tied to their company's performance. Then you have those with a far more diverse portfolio of investments and assets who have a much more secure place in the 1%.
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  1012. Likely a significant global economic recession will stymie demand for some time, that's probably the biggest factor.
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  1013.  @muradm7748 Mainly people outside of europe, often illegally. Greece's geography, with over 200 inhabited islands exposed to the north African coast plus a border with Turkey, makes it a favoured route for people trafficking.
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  1014.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  Because there's no such thing as a free lunch. Giving everyone free housing or food, for example, has major and complex political, financial and social consequences. You can answer many radical ideas with the phrase "sure, in a perfect world that would work, but in this world it doesn't". And Venezuela sucks, it really does. Ask the people that live there. So why does it suck? Because it tried something radical that didn't work, and for a long time refused to believe it wasn't working.
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  1015.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  I could ask you to do the same, and we could both spend hours watching YouTube video essays, but I don't think that would make any difference. Perhaps you could answer me this one question. If radical politics and economics is so good, why hasn't it worked in the majority of cases? If you say imperialist meddling from <insert rich capitalist country here> I'm not going to believe you, because that's such a common excuse and there are only a few examples of that clearly happening.
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  1016.  @fred_______  Only the top few layers, it isn't brown all the way down.
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  1017. It's usually the other way round because lighter skin generally means a person spends more time indoors, and therefore is likely to be richer and have higher status. That's the case in many countries in Asia and Africa.
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  1018. Deep frying in particular seems to be one of the oldest cooking methods. Makes sense since you could heat a cauldron of oil or fat over a fire fairly easily and just drop whatever you wanted in (long as it didn't contain too much water!)
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  1019. You mentioned storage, but it's important to remember storage has a LCOE too which can either be added on to the plant or the grid as a whole. In an analysis done in 2018, a utility scale PV + storage facility using current technology batteries LCOE was at the most optimistic $108 MW/h, which surpasses nuclear comfortably. It's not clear in the report if this includes the cost of the PV or not, if it doesn't that makes it even worse. Now nuclear does use a little storage sometimes, France has a pumped storage facility (which is cheaper than batteries) it uses to help buffer sharp changes in demand so nuclear can catch up, but the storage capacity required is much much smaller than what an equivalent amount of solar generation would need. https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-40-vfinal.pdf
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  1020.  @hockeygrrlmuse  Buy why clamp down so harshly on such a minor source of pollution? The major issue was clearly ICE vehicles, and technologies such as catalytic converters helped a lot there.
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  1021. @ Easy, when land is cheap it makes no sense to build up. Second stories for buildings that are already pretty tall adds a lot of cost.
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  1022.  @Victor-kh5rh  Every form of transportation exists on a spectrum of efficiency, flexibility and range. Trains have excellent efficiency, range is fairly wide, probably comparable to cars, but flexibility is poor, only really beaten out by some very niche transportation solutions. Cars have poor efficiency, similar range but high flexibility. So with trains, because they are less flexible, design and planning need to work around their shortcomings. Low density suburban and rural areas aren't really viable with trains, so you'll need to replace all those single family homes with apartment blocks and condominiums, which would make a lot of people angry and miserable. Many places would have to be abandoned entirely as the transportation infrastructure required could never be economically supported.
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  1023. I was a bit curious about Poland. Sure in the past it had a large diaspora sending back remittances and a pretty shaky banking system, but not really anymore. Poland is considered a developed country nowadays and salaries have risen to the point where going abroad to do low paid agricultural work has been mostly handed off to romanians and other less wealthy eastern european nations, so remittances are much less common, and what is still there can be done through a regular account transfer.
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  1024.  @lawkey14  Please could you elaborate? I'd be interested to know what I'm right and wrong about.
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  1025.  @dougaltolan3017  Saltwater still passes through the turbine during operation (it wouldn't work if it didn't), and that will result in biofouling and corrsion, that's a guarantee. That will need more than sacrificial anodes to maintain, you'll need to partially disassemble it at port and clean/replace components from time to time. I guess you could not bother cleaning the pontoons ever, fair enough (but I wouldn't recommend it) but since you'll need to bring it in to dry dock for maintenance regularly anyway, may as well do it, reduces the risk of them leaking or breaking off. All in all compared to an offshore wind turbine this will need a lot more maintenance, or you're going to need more expensive materials. I'm not trying to rubbish all renewable projects, and I'm frankly dissapointed but not surprised you jumped so such a conclusion. It's just every so often someone comes along claiming to have "cracked" tidal, they run a very expensive prototype for a few years and then it never goes anywhere. So forgive me if I'm rather skeptical. The sea is a very harsh environment, and offshore wind has all the sensitive parts far above the waves. This is quite different.
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  1026. Possibly. The Russian government may do a deal to pay compensation to the lessors over the long term.
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  1027.  @pedroalmeida5547  I'm thinking of the Realpolitik here. If you brush aside morals, what's a practical way to get the fighting to stop. I think even Putin could be persuaded, he's not completely deranged.
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  1028.  @BoGy1980  The zeerusty lightening holes (yes that's the technical term, I looked it up) in the roof girders along with the exposed corrugated sheet metal and bright red paint job give it a very 90's look. Interestingly the same kind of architecture can be seen in Tomorrowland too. I think there was a brief architectural trend in the early 90's harking back to the Sci-Fi of the 50's.
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  1029. I remember somebody saying that more and more kids are aspiring to be influencers when they are older. I guess we might see a return to more traditional aspirations.
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  1030.  @24680kong  They seemed to be implying he was autistic, when there's no evidence that he was. At least that's the impression I got from the film, playing into the "savant" stereotype.
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  1031.  @anti_fascist  That's kind of like saying you know a lot about computer architecture because you are an expert on the electrical properties of a transistor or a logic gate. It's at least one layer of abstraction up.
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  1032.  @richardwills-woodward  I'd disagree. The systems in Newcastle and Liverpool are more like S-bahn systems with short underground sections in the city centre. But bigger cities like Birmingham and Manchester have no underground sections in the city centre, Manchester's Metrolink would be something you'd find in a third tier German city, and Birmingham really has the bare minimum. Regional and Commuter rail is somewhere the UK can sometimes match Germany, but it lags behind on everything else.
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  1033.  @richardwills-woodward  You'd find something like the Manchester Metrolink in Saarbrucken or Magdeburg. Bigger cities have "pre-metro" systems where the city center sections are build to rapid transit standards either elevated or in tunnels. This would be cities like Hannover or Cologne. These are cities with metro areas often with a smaller population than Birmingham or Manchester, sometimes around Liverpool or Newcastle but are probably fairly comparable. Cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt are bigger and I think would be considered first tier. You talk a lot about urban rail, and I generally agree it is good in many large UK cities, though there is a lack of integration sometimes. But I don't think that replaces the advantages metro systems have, particularly getting around the more urbanised areas. They're good for those in the outlying towns and villages, as they are elsewhere, but there's still a gap for those living closer in. I agree tunnels aren't completely necessary, but generally unless you have a lot of wide viaducts crossing the city center you will need them for a viable through service. And in the UK many big cities have termini stations rather than a central rail spine leading to a main station. I don't agree systems like Merseyrail and Newcastle Metro are not like S-bahn systems. They have a similar frequency and stop spacing, and cross city centres in tunnels like many S-bahn systems do. Both systems act exactly as you described, branded urban rail, Newcastle Metro just uses slightly smaller and lighter vehicles. And what I think is the most important point, it isn't just Germany we can make the comparison with, Spain and France, and even Italy sometimes also have better public transport in their second tier cities. The UK is probably not behind the world as a whole (definitely not the US or Australia) but it is behind its nearest european peers.
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  1034.  @kennethc2466  You've pointed nothing out. You're just being rude and spiteful to me and everyone else on this thread. Are you really a marxist, or are you just a troll?
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  1035.  @Micha-qv5uf  Europe does have indigenous sources of uranium, in Sweden and (ironically) Ukraine among other places. It's just mining it is quite controversial to say the least, Europe would rather import especially because fuel costs are such a small fraction of nuclear generation costs the fuel could almost be considered "free". But if push came to shove and a few hearts and minds were won, Europe could source its own nuclear fuel.
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  1036. I disagree. Plenty of science fiction has imagined the end of capitalism, some have imagined post scarcity utopias, others authoritarian dystopias. Generally neither resemble communist or socialist systems from our own history, because they were created in a very different world than today.
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  1037. From my experience greek tavernas often have quite extensive menus, even if the food is pretty simple. This might be due to tourism though.
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  1038. I think it's hard to convince people of the "temporary" nature of any transition. How long would it take? 10 years, 20 years, a century, longer? There could be billions alive today who may never see life as good at they have it now ever again, and that probably includes you and me. It might be temporary on a societal scale, but not on a human scale.
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  1039. Im honestly surprised European tourists would even go to an olive garden. They'd be on the hunt for that quirky neighbourhood diner that's been there for 50 years. Or McDonald's, just once, to see if there's any difference.
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  1040. In my experience, many of the biggest european ski areas tend to be self contained, they are not "ski towns" but resort complexes often separated from residential areas. That said, it's often not that far to the nearby towns and villages so it's not difficult to go eat in a local restaurant for example. In the US and Canada, the distance between settlements is just that much greater.
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  1041. Nuclear decommissioning is on average around $1 billion a plant I believe. Usually a small premium on the electricity generated is more than enough to build a decommissioning fund over the 50-70 years these plants run for.
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  1042.  @kennethferland5579  Per kWh the costs are comparable. Renewables aren't completely free to generate, even though fuel costs are zero there are reasonably fixed operating overheads, mainly maintenance. Nuclear is actually pretty similar, the actual cost of fuel is such a small percentage of operating costs it may as well be free. That's an advantage over gas which is sensitive to fuel prices, uranium prices could double and there would be little impact on the price of nuclear energy. These overheads are significant, nuclear power plants are very expensive to run, but they generate so much energy per annum because their capacity factor is so high, the actual operating cost per kWh is pretty reasonable.
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  1043. I think there's a difference between those who died from radiation burns and those who died from radiation poisoning. In the latter case you inhale or ingest radioactive particles that kill you from the inside, and that tends to lead to slow agonising organ failure. Less graphic, think jaundice instead of rotting flesh, but more drawn out.
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  1044. It's tricky. I don't support giving the homeless free housing for life no strings attached, since it would create perverse incentives. But I would support means tested accommodation for the poorest in society to eliminate homelessness. My take is we need to get over our discomfort and face the reality that many of the most destitute have psychological needs that preclude fully independent living, at least temporarily. I think we need more "sheltered" accommodation.
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  1045. Depending on how you classify a "crash", they are more common than you might think. Minor runway excursions with no fatalities (and sometimes even the aircraft only suffers minor damage) aren't all that rare.
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  1046.  @omegaRST  It depends. Some terrorist groups may not attack the west directly, but others may hide among refugees and commit sectarian attacks targeting other refugees in western countries. Kind of like how Hutus and Tutsis would attack each other in Refugee camps outside of Rwanda during that genocide. I think it's also possibly a bit optimistic to assume that terrorism would stop without western intervention in the ME. These are religious extremists after all, and many of them want to create their own religious exclaves and live by their laws (or the most deluded will want to overthrow the western government itself), which of course the west would never allow. France doesn't even have that much of a military presence in the ME, they are more focused on Africa.
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  1047. That's very similar to pound shops in the UK, you don't have much in the way of foodstuffs, maybe some cereals and chocolate bars but it's mostly non food items.
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  1048.  @Demopans5990  There's always been a general generational preference, younger singles and childless couples tend to be more interested in city living, privacy and personal space are less important than places to socialise. Many don't even spend that much time at home, preferring to use so-called "third places" at lot more. Families, on the other hand, tend to value space and privacy, since they are going to spend much more time at home. In terms of politics, those on the left tend to be more amenable to communal living arrangements, they aren't so bothered about sharing spaces with others, whereas the right tend to be more individualistic and value private space, and since there is still a left/right split by age and familial status, that tends to amplify the former.
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  1049. Utrecht has a big university or two, so that could be considered the education sector.
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  1050. I can't stop seeing the British Union of Fascists in that logo. Not that I'm trying to imply anything there...
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  1051.  @PrezVeto  To be fair, civil suits do tend to happen after these incidents, it's just most are settled out of court through arbitration, rather than go to trial. The corporation usually would prefer to claim a few million out of their public liability insurance than likely face even higher costs in a civil court case, even if it was dismissed in the end. And of course, we shouldn't forget regulatory fines, though these were less common in the past. Again though, this will be against the corporation, not people.
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  1052.  @trulyUnAssuming  Sure, and that would make them a pretty successful car company. But their valuation is way, way larger than the biggest car manufacturer in the world. You'd think they'd be one of the biggest companies on earth based on their market cap. Simply put, the bar Tesla has to reach is so stratospheric that I don't think many really believe that it will make it all the way there. It won't crash and burn, far from it hopefully, but there's successful, there's market domination, and then there's Tesla's stock price.
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  1053.  @daniel_960_  Tesla doesn't exactly have tons of capital either, its share value is almost all down to speculation. Plus I wouldn't call other car manufacturers "legacy" I don't think Tesla is all that different. They make a relatively small number of luxury cars with the most advanced self driving technology. Its enough to make them a bit special, sure, but in the end, it's still a car, and it is still in the same market as other car manufacturers. The electric side of things doesn't matter in my eyes, other car manufacturers are just as capable of building them and are increasingly doing so.
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  1054.  @Mexicanj0ker2  It didn't have nearly as much support in the early stages of the war. It would have been steamrollered by the Russians in days if its military was inadequate.
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  1055. It's kind of what the GAO did, though some might argue they were perhaps a little too conservative.
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  1056. I think the housing issue has been at least partly fueled by the tech and finance industry that has overwhelmingly clustered in big cities in blue states. This has pulled people out of small towns and cities to these big urban centres and they just haven't been able to keep up with demand. Short of bulldozing the suburbs to turn NY or LA into Singapore or Guangzhou there's not much that can be done if those jobs are to remain there. What's partly causing the drain are these tech companies spreading out into cities like Austin and Atlanta in red states. It's possible that these big cities in blue states might see a levelling off in cost as population growth slows.
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  1057. Honestly I'm not convinced re-zoning would help in a lot of cases. Many of these towns already have fairly dense accommodation in their cores, and they're not going to build giant apartment blocks for workers as that would often ruin the aesthetics for the tourists. Many of them are already fairly walkable, as skiers are often a fairly active bunch, and shuttle buses do provide decent if sometimes expensive public transportation, much much better than you'd find in other rural areas.
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  1058.  @wgowshipping  Which is dominated by China. The point being that they may not compete with each other. Europe and North America still have a healthy cruise industry.
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  1059.  @TheFriendlyInvader  I wish they were that practical. I remember learning about personality types and a lot of rather esoteric theory on engineering, there was a lot of strange social sciencey stuff in them.
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  1060.  @computron1  It also discourages moving home, which causes all kinds of problems, including making development more difficult.
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  1061.  @SirBlackReeds  I think the property tax structure might actually make it much harder to reform zoning laws. Say you're a family in suburb X and the city wants to rezone suburb X. This means that your neighbourhood of single family homes is going to have apartment buildings and complexes sprouting up all over the place. You really don't want to live next to an apartment building, you think it would ruin your environment, and you definitely don't want to live in one of those apartments, you're not a couple in your 20's any more. So you have three options: You give in and live in misery, not a great option. You move to suburb Y which is still low density zoned. Not ideal, it would be expensive and disruptive, the kids will probably need to travel further to school, but if you could sell for a good price, especially as the land is now more valuable, you could bear the one-off costs. But because the property tax is recalculated when you move, you can no longer afford a like for like property, because you have a permanent increase in your tax outgoings. So all that's left is to fight tooth and nail to prevent the rezoning in suburb X, hence zoning reform becomes an immense struggle.
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  1062.  @leeleeisgay  Perhaps they were so militarily dominant it never was? We really have so little evidence about their society and history that it's as good a theory as any other. They were one of the first advanced civilisations in the area, so it's reasonable to argue they were just so superior to any potential rival that nobody could touch them. What we mostly have are buildings, physical objects, little to nothing about politics or society. Some even dispute the claim that there was never any violence or destruction, saying some evidence has been overlooked. The simple fact of the matter is, a pacifist society cannot survive in a world of warmongers, not unless they are protected by strong natural barriers, and even then those are eventually overcome. The list of peoples that have never, ever, fought with, conquered, or been conquered by another group of people is vanishingly small. And you rarely get the resources you need to develop and grow by asking nicely. Peoples that have been lucky or unlucky enough to have been isolated by natural barriers inevitably lead far more technologically primitive lives than the peoples that surround them. Those that take are those that win.
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  1063.  @RakelDaNell  Probably not enough though, if the "insurrection" last time was anything to go by.
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  1064. I found American 787's really cramped.
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  1065. @LightbulbTedbear2  Even those who grew up there are generally opposed to significant development. Many rural folk nowadays are middle or upper class.
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  1066. It seems quite nice, long as you don't mind the wet climate.
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  1067. @Handle0108  Indeed, though it's worth pointing out those tensions are very old and predate British colonial rule in the region. India was ruled by an Islamic empire before a British one.
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  1068.  @sparqqling  Sorry, I deleted my comment in a fit of rage, but I'll post a more measured response now. I don't think ARM could be easily replaced as other commenters have said, and ASML is only required for the smallest processes, for now. I think they are two sides of the same coin, both dominate the industry and both would be challenging and expensive to replace at short notice. They are just different parts of the same industry, architecture and fabrication. If either vanished overnight, there would be chaos.
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  1069.  @somerandomgamer8504  I'm not from the US, but Iran doesn't have much in the way of checks and balances at all. It is an authoritarian Islamic state, and not particularly democratic (through it isn't completely undemocratic).
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  1070. From my experience, state parks tend to be less crowded, but are considerably smaller. Some of them you can pretty much cover most of the trails in a day.
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  1071. ​ @chaddixon9764  I mean, what else can you call it? The Galaxy Rangers? Star Corps? Anything I can think of just sounds more silly.
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  1072. I think the UK flag is probably the best example in the world of how to combine multiple flags into one and have it still look beautiful. Then of course it goes on to create many other nations bad flags because Empire.
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  1073.  @ablamill8357  Patrick mentioned a few issues about a 100% IHT, such as capital flight and retirees blowing through as much as they can so they die as close to penniless as possible. Another might be a massive increase in early inheritance gifts in order to skirt around IHT if that's possible.
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  1074. You think The Day After was bad? Try Threads.
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  1075. It's why some smaller farms, like in the UK, tend to rent some equipment just for a few days.
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  1076. I'm a little confused about the speed issue. As long as it's below Mach 1 and within the design limits of the aircraft, then I'm not sure what the safety case is against increasing the cruising speed specifically. Does Kenya have laws on fuel efficiency for flights?
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  1077. ​ @tulliusexmisc2191 I think the difference between US and UK police is nothing to do with qualified immunity or some legal equivalent, but far more robust internal affairs with a fully independent complaints body on top of that. In the US it seems to be patchwork at best, and therefore lots of lawsuits happen because there's no mediation pathway available. I think the US could benefit from state and federal commissions in a similar fashion, that can both oversee internal affairs within police departments (perhaps providing a standard protocol that governs their structure and operation) and be somewhere that complaints can be escalated to if the plaintiff wishes to appeal against an internal affairs decision.
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  1078.  @garethbaus5471  I never said it had to be night time, just "dark". Europe doesn't get a lot of daylight hours in winter due to its latitude, and even then the sun is fairly weak. Power from Morocco is unlikely to be enough there, for all kinds of reasons, but especially energy security and geopolitics.
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  1079. ​ zandaroos553 It's arguably a good thing for the US as a whole if those jobs are spread around more, it's a big country. No need for everyone to pile into a handful of towering megacities.
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  1080. Would it be safe? I've heard there's a risk of prion infection from cannibalism.
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  1081. Also worth pointing out electric water heaters in general are less common in the UK than in the US, many places use tankless gas boilers. Older properties generally have a water tank, but the immersion heater is often just there as a backup, a loop will connect it to the gas boiler to allow in hot water.
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  1082. ​ @_Circus_Clapped_ We all accept some level of risk for the benefits it provides to our lives. Cars allow us to live further away from work in bigger homes. We can also travel to places with ease that would have required weeks of travel in the past, and hence were restricted to those with the privilege of lots of free time, or were prepared to commit to actually living there. A world without such a fast and convenient form of private transportation would certainly be a safer one, quite a lot safer perhaps, but one where the world would be smaller and some things that are commonly enjoyed by the masses are once again restricted to a lucky or privileged few.
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  1083. I don't know if this is true, but my impression of Canada is that in general the government is more economically interventionist than the US. That can be a good thing, sometimes, but a government can also cause a lot of long term problems through bad intervention policies that create perverse incentives that harm productivity and growth.
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  1084. I think we're coming off a peak of Social Justice zealotry from 2020-2021. Covid resulted in a lot of bored young people with time on their hands and combined with a general increase in unrest and the US president becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable, tensions were running high. George Floyd was the spark that lit the fire. What a year or so ago would have certainly resulted in protests and perhaps minor riots, but perhaps only for a day or two, ignited a firestorm that swept beyond the US borders, and had corporations falling over themselves to put out "anti-racist" messaging (even getting as far a children's cartoons). But after a change in president to Bland Biden and the light at the end of the tunnel for covid now shining much more brightly, it seems to me things are beginning to calm down. What the permanent effects to our culture will be, I'm not so sure. The social justice side managed to gain quite a few symbolic victories, statues have been removed, some in retrospect quite egregious, but several more requiring a very unflattering interpretation. Some effects seem less likely to last. Police reform will probably happen, but not to the radical extent that many desire. Cities that have experimented with "alternative" public safety models don't seem to be seeing positive results, or even end up making things worse. I can also tell you from experience in my country that reductions in police numbers can come back to bite a country decades down the line. Corporations certainly make a bigger deal of social justice than they used to, a supermarket near me had posters up for UK black history month, which used to be a pretty obscure event, understandable since black people are only 3% of the population. But once the fervor wanes, it's possible they will no longer see financial merit in doing so. I could go on about other impacts, but there's a lot and it's quite complicated and hard to predict what will stick. Going into the future, I'm not really sure what it holds for the Social Justice movement. It could destroy itself or fracture into too many pieces, but I think more likely it will begin to decay into obscurity, slinking back into the academic fringe it used to inhabit. Or it could remain strong, remaining the "permanent radicals" that shift their views to remain in the same political position. Even if gender and racial equality was achieved tomorrow, they would find some new set of beliefs to oppose those to the right of them. One of the clearest historical maxims we find is that political extremism tends to arise when times are bad, not when times are good. So going forward, if economic conditions improve and recovery from covid is swift, then both the far left and far right's power will probably wane. If not, then they will likely continue to be prominent in politics and society. While I think a US civil war based on these groups is pretty far fetched to near on impossible (it won't be like the first one, more like the Balkans on steroids), I could see, as a worst case, a situation similar to Italy's "years of lead", where hatred and animosity between the two groups is so strong that it breaks into organised lethal violence. If one side (let's be honest, probably the right, but I wouldn't discount the left) assassinates an opponent's figurehead or bombs one of their protests, the other side is likely to feel the only way to respond is with equal violence, so they start assassinating or bombing too.
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  1085.  @2639theboss  It's often significantly more than 10%. The build quality is going to be the same, if not better from Japan, South Korea or Europe. Shipping costs are marginal, it might cost an extra couple thousand but you'd be saving tens or even hundreds of thousands on purchase price in many cases through economic efficiencies. And since the US has bases all over the world, geographical isolation doesn't really matter. And yes, it's true semiconductors are likely to come from foundries in Taiwan, but that's true for all defence contractors around the world, and their cost is such a tiny fraction of the cost of most military equipment that it's not worth worrying about, as long as the supplier is an ally. I am aware it is a jobs program in the US itself, but it's then hardly surprising that it results in bloated budgets.
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  1086.  @sarahpiaggio2693  When you think about it, at face value it suggests that a ships captain should essentially commit suicide even if they've done everything within reason to ensure the evacuation of surviving passengers and crew (which might not be anything depending on the situation). Which I'm sure seems very romantic but it is a waste of a life that could have been saved.
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  1087.  @ricahrdb  To be fair, nationalising oil production and perhaps even turning to communism may have caused nearly as much damage to Iran as the revolution did.
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  1088.  @MrNgMichael  Yeah, it helps, but in the end no window is going to insulate better than a wall, or even a wooden shutter, because if the sun gets in it's going to heat the room up.
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  1089.  @daudl5011  Colonialism is like a food chain, individual tribes get conquered by little empires that get conquered by bigger empires.
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  1090. I think it's fair not to mess with anything over fire or structural safety, don't clad your tower with flammable insulation for example. But I get the feeling a lot of these are ergonomic and design norms that haven't been updated in decades and are based more on vibes than science.
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  1091. One thing I noticed about Boromir is how his fighting style changes once he gets shot. It's aggressive and uncoordinated, the style you'd expect for someone who'se life is being barely held together with adrenaline and rage. And you can see how he's on the verge of collapsing after each herculean effort. This Elf on the other hand seems cold and clinical, like the arrows aren't even there a few seconds after she was shot with them (which thanks to sloppy continuity they aren't!). I don't know what happens afterwards, but I imagine she just collapses suddenly, as if she just remembers there are five arrows in her body.
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  1092.  @zarategabe  Budget redirection (i.e. defunding) and reform did happen in some progressive cities, problem is many have reversed this position and increased budgets due to a spike in crime.
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  1093. I think it's generally an issue that's very specific to a university, department, or even just a single professor. It's not a broad problem that affects nearly the entire sector. It's something that is important, but it's something that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
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  1094. A diesel vehicle wouldn't be a bad choice since it can run, maybe not all that well but at least move, on a wide range of liquid fuels, even something like cooking oil in a pinch. But in the end it really depends on what your imagined post-apocalyptic world is like. If you're imagining a governmental collapse but most infrastructure remaining intact, then cars might still be practical even if you have to run on non standard fuels or electricity. If it's a bit more disastrous than that, then you're probably looking at something more basic like walking, mountain biking or horse riding. In the latter case your world is probably going to shrink, a lot.
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  1095. It would be interesting to see a breakdown by voter age, because it might indicate the waning influence of the iron curtain as the dividing line within continental Europe. Certainly people my age, even though I was born just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, are likely influenced a lot by the economic and social fallout from Europe being divided into two political systems for nearly half a century. Nations that didn't have a Communist regime are considered western despite their geography. Turkey is the odd one out since many people do not consider it European in the first place.
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  1096.  @dieseldragon6756  Indeed, though the optics of a plane crash vs. lost or damaged luggage through less dramatic means does mean the airline is far more likely to enforce liability limits in the latter cases. I can sort of understand why people do those things, the alternative is having a courier deliver it and for high value items that can be nearly as expensive as the airline ticket, plus it takes longer so might have to be shipped weeks in advance (and you need somewhere to hold it for you if it does arrive before you get there) and of course it's out of sight for a much longer period. P.S. I think you mean the Montreal convention, Athens is for ships I believe.
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  1097. It's a totally different demographic though. People take long distance overnight buses when they are extremely price sensitive, to the point where even budget airlines are too expensive. So you usually have students and low wage immigrants using them, there's not going to be much interest in a more premium experience.
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  1098. The problem is in many cases, especially on islands, there really isn't anything better unless you have some rare natural resource or fancy becoming a tax haven. Some places just have an upper limit, short of massive ongoing subsidy, on the sort of industries they can break into. If the location just isn't well connected enough, tourism might not be perfect, but it's the best the place is gonna get.
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  1099.  @olik136  Which is somewhat enabled by generous agricultural subsidiaries which keep European small scale farming economically viable.
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  1100.  @mar_man813  In Europe I think it's also more common to have point to point flights between smaller cities rather than hub and spoke flights via a large intermediate city, so layovers don't matter so much because Europeans tend to avoid them as much as possible.
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  1101. I see it as playing it safe. Saying "illegal" would sure anger some people in the comments and you'd get shouts of "people aren't illegal!" and such. Notice that he still used illegal for the action of crossing a border.
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  1102. The reason was to prevent a feared civil war between the two religious groups, which was a very real threat. If they wanted to divide and weaken, why make India so much bigger than Pakistan? I'm not saying it was a perfect plan, it was very flawed, but doing nothing was not an alternative unless you wanted possibly even more bloodshed.
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  1103.  @NG-nf2mz  My point was partition (and partition specifically) wasn't done with the intent to weaken ex-colonial powers on the Brits left (if so it clearly hasn't been very successful!). As you said they India is bigger because of population and religious issues. Yes, you can argue the civil wars would not have happened if the Brits hadn't spent decades stoking religious tensions for divide and rule in the past, but what's done is done and we need to look at the options they had at that current point in time. Do nothing, high likelihood of a civil war. Partition, still a high likelihood of conflict. It was a choice between two bad options. The question is which one was worse than the other. Perhaps if partition had been done better (maybe go the Kosovo route and make Kashmir an independent state) things would have been a lot less bloody. We'll never know.
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  1104. I appreciate that this channel might have a majority US audience, but having a video focused on the UK and using Fahrenheit in the sponsor segment seems a little odd to me (in Celsius it seems like I'm choosing between first degree and third degree burns!).
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  1105.  @victorcapel2755  It's about 46% modal share in Stockholm I believe. Which really isn't bad in a city which isn't all that dense.
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  1106. ​​ @orkkojit I'd disagree, most western countries had their demographic dividend in their post colonial era. The key wasn't colonialism, but lack of competition. They had the first mover advantage, so workers could demand better wages because there was nobody else who could do it for cheaper. This built up a large middle class which enabled a high standard of living and enormous consumer economy. China also had a massive change in birth rates which has lead to a very sharp reduction in fertility. A slower decline would have resulted in a smaller but longer lasting dividend.
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  1107. With hindsight, the compromise of an Irish Free State wasn't a bad one by any means, since all the other dominions gained independence after WWII, including Ireland (well, most of it anyway, but we're keeping that can of worms tightly sealed!). But to be fair to the anti-treaty side at the time they couldn't have foreseen that.
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  1108.  @justinwatson1510  You can cherry pick a few examples, mainly from monopolistic companies who can price out any competition. But in general products dont succeed that are worse than their competitors in all aspects. DuPont didn't sell Teflon cookware just because it had a pointless coating made from one of their products that conferred no advantage to the user. If they did it would have never got off the ground.
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  1109.  @WhatHappenedIn-vt3vq  Indeed, cast iron is the way to go for open fire cooking. I don't think anything else would be durable enough.
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  1110.  @marscruz  With SMR pressure vessels are small enough to fit in electron beam (EB) welding vacuum chambers. So in future we might not need nearly as many manual welders as we do now, and no manual weld is ever going to be as good as an EB weld.
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  1111. Because prevention is full of just as much trial and error as therapy. Think how much nutritional recommendations have changed over the years.
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  1112.  @johngaltline9933  Yeah, this is what I was thinking regarding CCS being more "future proof". 1MW might seem like overkill now, but with demand for faster charging times, larger battery capacities, and EV's expanding into larger vehicles like vans and trucks, having an extra megawatt or more to play with could be a big advantage. And while increasing battery voltages will help, realistically I think it's going to be harder to do that than increase charging current.
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  1113. In my university buildings, we just give our floors letters instead. Floor B is usually the ground floor though, as floor A is the basement. One building is especially confusing: it goes B1 (sub-basement) A (basement) ME (mezzanine, where the entrance is instead of on B like the rest of the buildings) B, C, D and so on up to L... except there's no floor I, it just goes from H to J for seemingly no good reason.
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  1114. A lot of Asian systems get a lot of their income from real estate. Basically they own the land around or above the station, so they plonk down a skyscraper or two and charge top dollar in rent because big businesses really like it when their employees can jump off a train straight into the office or their customers straight into a shopping center.
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  1115. ​ @geraint8989 DB looks on very nervously.
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  1116. Cubic kilometres works for the rest of us.
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  1117.  @pedrolopes3542  If you only consider the cost of generation, sure. But if you factor in the cost of transmission, gas spinning reserve and/or storage that changes. Europe hasn't been pouring subsidies into renewables for no reason.
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  1118. Many HS rail services in Europe actually have onboard cafeterias where you can get hot food. If you have a first class ticket it might even be included.
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  1119.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  Geothermal energy is more expensive than nuclear when it's used for electricity. To get steam hot enough for turbines you need to drill down pretty deep even in volcanic areas, and you'd need to drill thousands of boreholes to match a nuclear power station. Where geothermal works best is thermal energy, you don't need deep boreholes for hot water if you are in the right places. Even Iceland mostly uses hydro for electricity, almost all the geothermal is for district heating.
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  1120.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  Storing it is the problem. Currently storage technologies are very expensive and costs are reducing, but not fast enough. There are also potential roadblocks such as the supply of lithium that could cause prices to stall or even reverse. If you need a lot of storage, because your sources of renewable energy are very intermittent, it can work out more expensive than nuclear energy.
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  1121. ​ @baronvonlimbourgh1716  A few residential batteries aren't going to solve the storage issue, they'll only put a dent in it. Industry and infrastructure have enormous energy demands, and are even less tolerant of reliability issues. Plus with the electrification of heating and transport, demand could double in many developed countries meaning any storage you install is quickly eclipsed by the increase in demand. These are serious issues that have been reported on. The only thing I can conclude is you haven't seen much research outside of your renewable bubble because I have seen plenty of criticism. Few people are saying renewable energy has no place at all, but there are many questioning the economics and practicality of a fully renewable + storage grid, at least in the near future though also in the long term. Research is by its very nature unpredictable. We don't precisely know how easy or hard it would be to double the efficiency of solar panels, or cut the price of nuclear energy in half. We can only speculate, fund the research, and hope for the best. Even if there's a lot of lithium reserves out there, mining it isn't always easy, or economic. Lithium salts have to be fracked out of deep rocks in many cases, and like with natural gas this can have environmental issues. And alternatives like nuclear aren't standing still. There's lots of research going into making nuclear energy much cheaper and easier to build. If that happens that could change the economics, renewables + storage definitely would be the more expensive option in many locations. As for being pretty opinionated, well that's the pot calling the kettle black.
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  1122.  @Markus-zb5zd  It would have to be the result of some extraordinary circumstances for that to happen. Circumstances I think Germany is very unlikely to repeat. And again, you could say the same of any right-wing protectionist parties, UKIP could be Nazis by that logic. But as I said, comparisons like that poison the debate.
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  1123.  @Markus-zb5zd  Lots of far right parties around the world have views like theirs, you want to suggest they'd all turn into goose stepping Nazis at the first sniff of power? It takes more than a few policy overlaps to be a Nazi, you need the ideological dogma and zeal for violence and anti-democratic principles. Yes, there have been genuine Nazis within the AfD, but they have made efforts to expel them when uncovered. It's clear they don't want that ideology anywhere near their party. In my opinion, the AfD are an extreme reactionary party in response to Germany burying its head in the sand over various grievances its population have because of that dark shadow of Nazism. Accusations of them being Nazis only makes the problem worse. I don't like them or support them, but I can see why they exist.
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  1124.  @gerhardaryawardana72  I don't like "Nazi" being thrown around so loosely. To me it specifies a very specific right wing ideology, and when it instead becomes an epithet used by the left to describe any far right party (much the like the right uses "Marxist"), then I think it loses its power and gravitas. Even if a few Nazi sympathisers are in the party, that doesn't make the whole party a Nazi party. And I think your attitude is a good way to generate more hostility between the left and the right. By labelling AfD voters as at least halfway to goose-stepping Nazis, you show them that you have no consideration for their concerns or point of view. That will only increase the power of the party, as the party will have an excuse for a persecution complex.
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  1125.  @Greenitthe  Well not if they were spread around a bit more evenly. The problem is that they're all concentrated in places like silicon valley and NYC. Sure, prices would rise a little in some other cities, but they would ease up or plateau in the big cities instead of shooting for the moon.
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  1126. As far as I can tell REL has narrowed their focus to just the engine and precooler technology. I think the idea is to farm out any SSTO spaceplane development to an aerospace company like BAE or Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. Let them design and build the craft and they mostly focus on the engines. Skylon is a cool concept of what the technology could do, but more and more I think it's now a concept, a starting point for others to develop their own designs from. I think we might see one or two spaceplane designs come from this, perhaps a small one that isn't man rated for regular satellites, then later on a larger craft more like Skylon comes along that can carry larger satellites or passengers. But in the end this is going to take time unfortunately, the fact is the tech is at a much lower TRL than most rocketry technology so I think it'll be at least a decade before it makes a serious impact. And initially the technology may be uncomptetive with rocketry, though the potential for a greater lifetime and faster turnaround than a reusable rocket means in the long term it could be the way to go.
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  1127. I'm not sure there's been too much of an overlap between SpaceX and Boeing. Rocketry and aircraft don't have that much in common (Starship is still balistically controlled for the most part, it's not the Space Shuttle 2.0). It might tempt some young new aerospace engineers who haven't specialised yet, but I can't see experienced engineers making that much of a lateral move.
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  1128. In this case it would have been better for the airline to cover the fine, now they have to pay out E261 compensation to every passenger which would probably be at least €60,000 euro, plus the cost of the bus and the extra flight.
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  1129. ​ @harmonicaveronica I think you have to be really upfront and clear that people should not make food for you. Because people will try to make an effort if you don't.
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  1130.  @pepperonish  I wouldn't doubt they had undercover officers, but to attribute the violence and destruction to them as part of a false flag operation seems pretty implausible. They wouldn't have had the numbers to have the measured effect. And, as in this case, many of the BLM protestors were willing to turn a blind eye, a few may have even been persuaded by the radicals themselves that what they were doing was justified. I think the reality is the situation was very similar to what happened here, extremists seized an opportunity to further their own agenda and scout for recruits.
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  1131.  @alveolate  That's not what the debt trap diplomacy argument suggests though. They suggest China is trying to sieze land and assets, similar to Dutch style colonialism where they purchased or conquered ports to make money off trade. If you want to call soft power and dependency neocolonialism, then it would be hard to find a nation that doesn't engage in such practices. Within Africa itself many more powerful nations exert influence over less powerful ones. It becomes hard to define without setting a geopolitical double standard. I'd argue even without WWII imperialism wouldn't have lasted though, despite what some people like Churchill might have thought, or at least hoped. The colonies were already turning from asset to liability well before the 20th century. Technological and political change was already making the imperial economic model less lucrative. WWII was the straw that broke the camel's back in many cases, but there would have been another straw along soon enough.
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  1132. California needs its own sovereign wealth fund. Though I guess in this case it would be a state wealth fund.
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  1133. They used to fly to Manchester before COVID, Aer Lingus took over some routes but direct flights to cities like Philadelphia still haven't come back.
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  1134.  @goste4  Civil law often comes down to who has the best legal team, sometimes even criminal law does. It's not how it should be perhaps, but it's how it is. So if you have money, people and companies are far more willing to try their luck. And again, few people want to spend their time in court. If I'm rich, I'd rather not be sued at all, I've got far better things to do than spend my time in a courtroom, or in an office or on the phone to my legal team. I've got a business to run, cocktail parties to attend, all that rich person stuff. If being rich means I have to constantly be fighting lawsuits or the threat of them, what's the point?
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  1135.  @goste4  Frivolous cases are far from guaranteed to be cheap, I've told you how a good team of lawyers can bolster even a frivolous case, because the law is complicated. And they're really not as expensive as you think. You don't need a lawyer to set up a corporation in most places, just a consultant who knows the process. These packages are standardised enough that companies can just offer them at a set price. Think about it, why aren't you worried about being sued as a person who isn't rich? It's not because you're more law abiding, it's because you're not an attractive target.
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  1136.  @goste4  I am using it in a more general sense than the strict legal term. I think you're putting far too much faith in the moral fairness of the justice system, particularly civil justice where the burden of proof is much lower. Do you wonder how many laws you break every day, just by accident? In the US, it's quite a few. If you own a company it's probably even more. But nobody is going to haul you in front of a judge in a civil or criminal court because it's not worth the time and effort. But if you're rich, it might be. And even if you end up fully compensated for everything, there's still the time and stress to take into account. Lawsuits aren't fun, and you have a lot of other things to do. I am not denying the system cannot be abused, it certainly can and certainly is. But I can see their potential for legitimate use. Not every scheme involves offshore accounts in tax havens either, I'd say only a minority do that.
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  1137.  @goste4  I told you, they are open to abuse, the abuse you have mentioned, and in an ideal world, aren't nessecary for private individuals, they exist to tackle another problem that shouldn't exist. What more do you want? You seem to want me to completely agree with you for the sake of debate.
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  1138.  @kidhfajuhi  That seems silly, they'd have to do that anyway at their destination. What they fear is either having to pay more or spend more time commuting, and out from the distant suburbs buses are usually much slower than cars even without traffic.
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  1139.  @dosadoodle  Still, at $9 that's an extra $2250 per year more or less, not pocket change for most. But that's better than London where it's nearly $20 a day now!
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  1140. But cars still have benefits for a lot of people. It allows people to live in places and environments they would be unable to without private transportation. Many people would rather take the risk of driving and live in a roomy suburban or rural home, than not take the risk and live in a cramped apartment in a city.
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  1141. @l.c.8475  I know, I live in one, with buses and rail, and I still own a car. Because buses are slow, and rail is only useful if you're going to a destination near a railway station on your railway line. Most people in the suburbs drive regularly, especially families. I'm an exception as I don't actually use my car all that much. This is true in Europe, Australasia and North America.
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  1142. Beef tapeworm is incredibly rare in the developed world nowadays, you could eat as much raw beef as you like and you wouldn't get infected as long as you're buying certified beef. E-coli is more of a risk, but if the beef is freshly ground the risk is smaller.
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  1143. I'm not sure Starship ever will carry passengers, it's unnecessarily large for such a task. For the cost of making it human rated it might be better to leave it as a heavy duty space truck and put humans on something smaller and more agile.
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  1144.  @hoshyro  NASA can't afford a similar approach because it needs to have its heavy rocket human rated as quickly as possible. Starship doesn't need to carry humans any time soon, and may never do so. It doesn't need to get to the same level of reliability before it can enter commercial service, as long as it only disintegrates or loses control rarely enough to allow the payload to be insurable (and not bleed money of course) it's good. After that if they want they can work towards carrying passengers.
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  1145. ​ @timjackson3954 The country pubs that do survive are typically "gastropubs" that are really restaurants first and pubs second. Most of the profits come from food.
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  1146.  @moomie1634  Yes they do. Look at deindustrialization in the UK. The service jobs that replaced manufacturing were overwhelmingly in the south east around London, whereas the manufacturing jobs were more spread out due to needing cheap land and uncongested infrastructure. It also harmed regional cities, nowadays London and the SE is almost a third of the economy and a quarter of the population. And no 50 5-1 will not solve the problem not even remotely. That's ten thousand people or so. That's a modest town in Europe. They're also not that cheap, cheaper than luxury apartments sure, but if you want to see truly affordable dense housing look at the 20+ storey copy and paste concrete towers in east Asia. Imagine rows of those in every major European city, all with shoebox apartments less than 30 sq m. Don't tell me that wouldn't have a major impact on historic character. And really is it actually a good idea to cram the world's population into a handful of megacities while leaving everywhere else abandoned? With fast transportation and advanced communication is it really necessary? Do businesses really need to all be next to each other?
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  1147.  @nehpets216  That's probably unlikely to happen. The energy density of a battery the volume of an oil barrel is much lower, and for the mass even more so. A "battery tanker" would be much larger and much heavier than the equivalent oil tanker. So any power SA can export will most likely have to be via transmission lines, maybe one each to Europe, Africa and Central Asia. The problem is that these areas will be generating their own energy too, so SA would have to undercut their prices, which might not be so easy even for a sunny desert as the transmission distance adds a significant cost. I don't think it would come close to making up for the oil.
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  1148. I can understand the riots, but I can't condone them. It's like someone beating someone to a pulp after a tirade of the most disgusting abuse possible. Yes, I can totally understand why you attacked them and certainly they were in the wrong and what you endured was horrible, but in the end you didn't have to hit them, and you shouldn't have. By beating them up you lose at least some of the moral high ground.
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  1149. Rolls Royce's approach is also quite interesting, of all the SMR designs it's one of the largest. It seems to be trying to hit the sweet spot of making the biggest reactor it can within a factory setting, the reactors are about half the capacity of full fat ones. That might inhibit any cost reductions due to learning rate as they build fewer reactors, but on the other hand it's likely cheaper for a nuclear power station to have fewer, larger reactors as long as they are still modular.
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  1150.  @user-kd1eb6vc7y  Apparently the interrogative can get interpreted as imperative in Japan if you aren't careful enough to emphasise the action is optional. "Can you have that report ready by tomorrow" becomes "Have that report ready by tomorrow" because they don't want to say no. I've heard this has resulted in embarrassed English speaking people on business trips learning that their Japanese counterparts worked through the night to make a report they only wanted if it wasn't going to cause too much bother.
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  1151. It's not bright enough to be in SJW territory either. I think it looks quite cyberpunk.
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  1152.  @TruWill99  Fine if you want all your food to be oily. But a lot of the time I don't want tons of oil in my food.
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  1153.  @jonathanodude6660  Australian suburbs in major cities tend to have one thing many US suburbs do not, regional rail stations connecting them to the CBD. This doesn't eliminate driving, but a lot more people will go and park at the station and get the train in because it's usually quicker and cheaper, which does reduce congestion and reduces vehicle distance travelled. It's a decent compromise that does allow for US style suburbs while not exactly reducing car dependency (maybe a little with feeder busses), but reducing car journey length. Unfortunately building a regional rail line into an existing suburb is really hard, many of these rail lines were built a long time ago.
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  1154. Part of it is a lot of corn is poor quality that people in the developed world won't eat, and that varies from year to year as it depends on the weather. So the lower grades go to animal feed, and the crappiest stuff is turned into alcohol.
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  1155. You'll never see widespread adoption of permaculture unless there's major advances in agricultural robotics. We need a way for mechanisation to work in permaculture as it has done in conventional agriculture, and I don't think there's any way traditional farm equipment is going to fit the bill. We'll need smaller, more autonomous machinery.
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  1156.  @mammeafooli6635  Even then you'll need technical expertise. If you don't have an existing industry you'll need to bring people in. I'm sure Iran has a lot of intelligent people, but that alone won't help you build infrastructure.
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  1157.  @ChineseKiwi  It's not cheap, no, but not that expensive either. Life extensions tend to run into the hundreds of millions of euros. That seems like a lot, but if it extends life for 5-10 years it's economically sound. Nuclear power generates so much energy per plant that one power station can make hundreds of millions in profit per annum once initial construction costs have been amortized.
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  1158. Even Anime has its generic crap. Slice of life shows which are basically carbon copies of each other but with one weird quirk.
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  1159.  @ganjaeypuff  Indeed, even so, there was a significant white population in the country and in government.
    3
  1160.  @gutyhuy3817  That issue is complicated by China having some of the most restricted airspace in the world, forcing airlines to take convoluted routes and restricting capacity. Much of their airline industry is also state owned, so they might not be responding to market pressures but party pressures.
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  1161. I doubt Antonov will go into large passenger aircraft, at least with any new designs. They have a good little niche in super heavy cargo with practically no competition, and a small share of the turboprop market. Trying to go up against the Boeing/Airbus duopoly is unlikely to end well for them.
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  1162.  @KainYusanagi  Water ingress is not just a problem for reinforced RAAC, because the water can get trapped in the concrete, which can cause it to swell and crack. Preventing any moisture from getting to concrete, especially in a damp climate, is really challenging, a bit of sealant is unlikely to cut it. It is still a material that has some niche applications, but it's not something that ever should have been so widespread, especially in places like the UK. What we didn't understand is just how easy water got into RAAC and the damage it caused even without reinforcement. And I don't know what you do in your country, but we don't usually use concrete for our roads and pavements, we use aggregates and tarmac. RAAC would also be a terrible choice for roads as its compressive strength is lower than regular concentrate, it'll get flattened.
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  1163.  @FOLIPE  It's just as true for them as anyone else. Unless you don't plan on selling any of your crop, you want the best price and to be able to sell as much as you can, and even if you don't, you want to produce something tasty and hardy that you can grow a lot of in a small space. Some might have the luxury of selling rare cultivars to hipsters and foodies in the west for premium prices, but for most it comes down to economics and practicality.
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  1164. Do you want to be packed into an ugly concrete tower? Because that tends to be what you get with mass production of social housing.
    3
  1165.  @daneclark3161  Many budget airlines don't do through tickets, especially to less popular destinations. Besides, there are many other reasons why you cannot be delayed for a day. Here in Europe you can demand they put you on the next flight, even if it's a rival carrier.
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  1166. From a European perspective, skiing doesn't seem like such an elitist sport. Plenty of middle class families take their kids skiing from a young age.
    3
  1167. Lead generally isn't dangerous unless there's a route to ingestion or inhalation. Lead is still used in flashing for roofs or for decorative patterns on windows, for example. Divers and aircraft still use lead weights (sealed in plastic generally). Lead acid batteries aren't being phased out due to lead exposure concerns, but because lithium batteries are significantly more energy dense. Lead is not like asbestos where no application is really a safe application. If you're not spewing lead fumes everywhere or using it to transport drinking water, it's not that much of a concern as long as proper precautions are taken when manufacturing and working with it.
    3
  1168. Would have probably been faster to walk it yes, even in thick jungle where it's still slow going. Getting a big heavy 4x4 through that is more difficult.
    3
  1169. ​ @AlanTheBeast100 CCS is just as capable as NACS on this front, and is also a bit more future proof. The problem has never been hardware, it's been software. Tesla's subscription garden wall is seamless within that ecosystem, but everyone else is an inconsistent mess. It's like in the early days of smartphones, where people were paying a premium for the convenience and curation of Apple over the mess that was the early Android experience.
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  1170.  @BrianDeBoisGuilbert  I really doubt that would have worked. And what would be the point? Intelligence has a genetic component, sure, but few believe that those genes correlate with race. You'd also dilute the tropical disease resistance genes.
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  1171. Honestly I think it's the Rhotacism more than the accent (hence the rather tasteless Elmer Fudd comment below). Sucks, I know but it does make it harder to understand. I think just getting a friend or family member to narrate will be okay. Good luck :)
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  1172. Costs of communication and exchange. Sending physical goods would mean sending it by secure mail rather than just having an in-house courier take it across the city, and it would also be more expensive for different agencies to co-operate because physically meeting up means taking a plane. Decentralisation works better for smaller countries where the burden of travel is much less.
    2
  1173. When you have a famine (caused by drought or whatever), long term economic effects take a back seat to saving people under immediate threat from starvation. Could more work be done to restore the agricultural industry after the famine? Sure, but during it there are bigger priorities.
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  1174. Adam 1984 How's that new tinfoil hat fitting you?
    2
  1175. You'd save a lot of money in manufacturing and construction. Then you won't need special components, hardware, and tools. No more #10 bolts, just use M5 like the rest of us.
    2
  1176. +Thorntonian Indeed they have, but if you recall the first episode they outlined the difficulty modern historians had piecing together the pre colonial history of the Zulu, with a caveat that this might not be as accurate as you would expect from many historical accounts. A lot of hard work went into recording and cross referencing oral accounts, much more than would be required for written ones. Though it was possible for the Zulu, for many non written civilizations, especially those where few remain, we will probably never know enough to form an accurate history of them. It's kinda sad, but unless we invent a time machine, not a lot we can do.
    2
  1177. Thorntonian Indeed you you are correct, there is a lot we can learn from a civilization without written records, no question about that. Forming a chronological history based on a series of events in time however, does require a lot more detail, and while it isn't impossible to get this from oral records, written ones are far better, even if they are not firsthand accounts (many are of course memoirs or historians documenting the events well after they occurred, but often within living memory). We do know quite a lot about how the Native Americans and Australian Aborigines used to live, mainly by asking those who remain, but we can't get a decent pre-colonial record of their tribes history. In the case of the crusades, yes a single written source would be considered biased and unreliable, but we have many written sources to work with, both during and after the events, most importantly from both the crusaders and those who fought against them. By combining these sources together, you can fashion out a reasonably accurate record of events.
    2
  1178. +Solomon Ayalew do you mind giving me some examples? I would be quite interested to read them. Actual records of historical events as well, not just an examination of their technology and culture.
    2
  1179. mansour alketbi A Christian Crusade is no different than a Muslim Jihad in many ways, and cruel and greedy things have been done under both names. I don't think anyone nowadays sees the Crusades as a good thing, including most Christians (and EC did show just how fucked up they were!), but like Jihad, the word can have a less violent context.
    2
  1180. Some parts of the UK get small tornadoes fairly often. These are never above about EF2 (though the UK uses the Torro scale which like with hurricanes is based on wind speed) but they can cause damage and injuries, roofs have been ripped off. One hit only a few miles from my house earlier this year.
    2
  1181. Where I think some structural unemployment may occur is in businesses taking the opportunity out of a crisis to streamline their workforce and embrace new technology. A massive reduction in "business as usual" activity will give them time to consider new and less labour intensive approaches to their work. Plus as it seems for the immediate future social distancing measures are to continue, employee upkeep is going to rise significantly, so the initial cost and effort of adopting these approaches will seem less burdensome. If you can only have half the personnel working in your warehouse, buying some robots to make up the difference is a lot more attractive, and once the initial cost of setting it up has been spent, those other half are never coming back.
    2
  1182.  @KamKamKamKam  There's certainly a difference between spending corporate tax income on a lot of welfare and government programmes and having a lot of control over how corporations make that income in the first place. That's probably one of the big differences between Chinese and European socialist tendencies.
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  1183. I think banning wildlife farming is going after the wrong target. After all, the industry does exist in the west, albeit perhaps on a smaller scale (go online and you can find many sellers of exotic meats). The issue is the mixing of live species in these wet markets in unsanitary conditions. If they were slaughtered before being sold at the market, the risk of cross-species transmission would be much lower.
    2
  1184.  @hewhohasnoidentity4377  In that case you'd have to balance the disruption caused with that of a civilian airport. For somewhere like Heathrow, the choice is obvious, there's loads of nearby RAF and USAF so at least one would be available.
    2
  1185. Germany is a million miles away from 1938-45. It can absolutely by trusted with a strong military as much as any other European country.
    2
  1186. I think it was one of the first genderbent magical girl animes that I know of. The outfits were slightly masculinised, the skirts were swapped for very short shorts, but they would still be considered femboyish attire and very much fit with traditional magical girl uniforms, season 2 power frills and all. There was also one character I remember having a serious arc about his relationship with his father or something? Some have argued the whole thing is very queer coded about gender non conformity but I'm not convinced any of that was intentional.
    2
  1187. I do remember a youtube comment someone made, they were a guide at a national park or similar attraction somewhere in the US, and they got loads of coaches of retired senior citizens which would rock up and mostly just sit in the cafe all day looking at the view. And they found that really sad, because if they had visited when they were a couple of decades younger they would have been fit enough to actually go out there and walk on the trails and hike up the hills, experience the park as it supposed to be experienced. Their message was don't wait until you're retired to do all the things you want to do, as your health will eventually stop you.
    2
  1188.  @0MVR_0  It is considered a specific set of agricultural practices, generally a highly complex and labour intensive approach that can give good yields at the expense of the above.
    2
  1189. I think we're going to need to get less squeamish about incineration. Realistically I don't think we can reduce plastic consumption all that much, what we've done with bags and straws is only a tiny fraction of the waste. And usually the alternatives have their own problems, glass is fragile, can't be as thin, and is heavier, which means more diesel is burnt carting the bottles around. Incineration isn't pretty, but it can safely destroy plastic waste that is uneconomic to recycle, it generates energy, and the ash can be mixed into concrete in construction or buried.
    2
  1190. Yeah, this sort of living isn't for everyone. It's better than a flat with no private green space whatsoever though.
    2
  1191.  @GodwynDi  There's always New Zealand! (Though the house prices are just as bad in places there, though if you can get a plot of land self-build is common)
    2
  1192.  @rayclam8079  You realise with a mega tax, ownership limits and rent caps, you're going to virtually do the same thing? Practically nobody is going to want to, or even be able to, let out anything. And why would anyone want to pay for anything they can get practically at cost from the government? Only if there is a massive disparity in the quality of housing.
    2
  1193. From a layman's view, I think each NOTAM should have a priority tag (from something like critical to informational) proportional to the likelihood of causing an accident. "No lubrication at airport" might be an inconvenience, but it's unlikely to result in a pile of burning wreckage. Secondly, have a limited list of quick reference tags that pilots can easily decipher, the current categories could probably be expanded a little and shown in plain English to the pilot. This would also allow for easier filtering, not just by VFR/IFR, but by engine or aircraft size.
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  1194. It's a matter of who I'm talking to. If I moved out of my birth county, to my host country I would be an immigrant, but to my birth country I would be an emigrant or expat. It's not like English is the only language to make that distinction, a Mexican immigrant to the US could be an immigrant to Americans, but an expatriado/a to Mexicans.
    2
  1195.  @chrismckellar9350  Whether it's seasonal or not doesn't make a difference. Flu isn't really seasonal, it's just diseases spread more easily in winter. Annual Immunisation maybe more widespread, but it will still be managed the same way. Excessive hygiene outside of a pandemic is expensive and may cause other health issues like allergies. The methane viruses are speculation at best, and the lab theory is just a conspiracy.
    2
  1196. There's always going to be the argument about how to deal with the human consequences of radical climatic adaptations. Because in many cases there are complex secondary effects from strong interventions. Radically restricting air travel would slash income from tourism, which would decimate the economies of many countries, even developed ones like Greece. Banning animal products would result in vast tracts of grassland, perhaps owned by farmers for generations, becoming economically worthless, resulting in a small but significant percentage of the population losing everything and having no income. Many animal feeds produced from waste products and/or substandard grains and vegetables would also have no market. Maybe these would have to be solved by massive global subsidies, resulting in a far more socialist economy or even a global government. Perhaps "nature" should take its course, and the pampas of Argentina become wilderness, and the islands of Greece return to an impoverished agrarian lifestyle (without the meat or fish, which now I think about it would make many uninhabitable, so they'd probably have to allow some of that).
    2
  1197. Depends on the interest rate. If it's a rock bottom rate, may as well leave it invested, you'll make more money in the long run.
    2
  1198.  @tomlxyz  Indeed, but the average age of a home is higher than the rest of Europe. The UK might have some of the oldest housing stock in the world.
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  1199.  @tecwynjones6532  I can sort of understand their frustration, even if it's unwarranted here, a lot of the online transit discourse is about trains as if they are the be all and end all. Roads only matter as something bad because people drive on them, as cars are the enemy.
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  1200.  @tecwynjones6532  Well, if they're not talking about trains, they're talking about cycling, so that doesn't necessarily help I'm afraid! 😆
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  1201.  @tecwynjones6532  I can understand that. To be fair in my city there are also some very bad cyclists, typically delivery riders on what look like illegal e-bikes. But that is beside the point. There is a minority who hate cars no matter how well they're driven, they either want them restricted/banned or slowed down so much they become glorified milk floats.
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  1202. Eh, a goal is just that, a goal. Here in Europe there's plenty of pledges to move to net zero (which will require a lot of sequestration as it's near impossible for us to emit no CO2 at all) but plans are often a bit shaky at best, every so often someone comes up with one and it gets picked apart until someone else comes up with another. Technology is changing rapidly in this area due to many billions in R&D investment. As such it's hard to forecast an optimal path to net zero, or what hard choices would have to be made to lifestyles and standards of living.
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  1203.  @marcoroberts9462  It's not really fully in either, that's the whole basis of the agreement.
    2
  1204. Admittedly, we don't have that many places where a large hospital is more than an hour away. Air ambulances often have one or two helicopters that cover a very large area, there aren't that many. They seem to mostly do only the worst trauma cases (like major RTC's) and mountain rescue for places inaccessible by road (where they might just hop down to a road where a ground ambulance is waiting). Scotland is an interesting case because it's the only country on earth AFAIK that has a state owned air ambulance service. But they do have the most inaccessible areas in the UK.
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  1205. Another problem was if the VR was even slightly out of sync (and it almost always was) it would induce nausea in a lot of riders, even those fairly resilient to motion sickness. Rollercoasters are, by their very nature, slightly unpredictable, there will always be small variations between runs due to friction, the weight of riders, or even gusts of wind. So having precise timing of VR visuals is very difficult compared to something like a motion simulator.
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  1206. There are limits to what you can do, otherwise things would get uncomfortable.
    2
  1207. Hasn't China tried to invade Vietnam several times over the last millennia or so?
    2
  1208. Sometimes the risk is better than having all your time and profits swallowed up by bureaucracy though!
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  1209.  @tripackonetooth4910  To be honest, you just sound like you think Switzerland is so much better than anywhere else. You are playing right into the Swiss stereotype of a superiority complex. I made a light hearted comment about conspiracy and you rush to defend even the suggestion that your country isn't a perfect paragon of transparent democracy, while also shitting on everyone else. Regarding the bunkers, it's common knowledge and not a secret so I don't know why you are denying it.
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  1210. Problem is, even when you try to do it right, you can still end up with problems. See partition in India/Pakistan, where the British tried to separate the Hindu and Muslim populations to prevent conflict, but things still got pretty nasty. Would it have been better if it had been kept unified and the different religious groups told to play nice? Who knows.
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  1211. Lead acid is good at delivering high current, but it has poor energy density. For emergency use of essential systems, it's fine. But powering a whole house? You'd need a whole shed full, at least.
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  1212. I'm quite surprised the film adaption of A Walk in the Woods did so much to boost AT thru hiking, despite the fact that it wasn't a very good adaption (one of the major plot points in the film never happened in the book, or in real life one would assume) and also that Bryson and Katz only section hiked the trail, though Bryson did intend to thru hike it initially.
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  1213. Richi Arditya The problem is if you suddenly decide to un-subsidise it, there will be many thousands of Americans with uninsurable houses that are essentially worthless. You'll either need to continue subsidising them, or agree to buy their houses at the value before the subsidy was removed, and write them off.
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  1214.  @inbb510  It's a chicken and egg problem though, if the infrastructure isn't there, businesses won't move in, people won't move in, so you'll never get to a point where the city can afford to pay for itself because it'll never grow big enough. London built the DLR while the docklands was still mostly waste ground, only after it was built did the finance industry move in.
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  1215. George Floyd and BLM drove a lot of companies into a woke frenzy, and now we're coming down from that, especially as interest rates rise and fiscal concerns become more important than public image. Some change has happened and will probably stick for better or worse, but I think many recognise that things have gone a bit too far and they need to come back down to earth.
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  1216. Single family homes do exist in Europe, they just tend to be smaller than the ones in the US. Though in some densely populated parts that are quite hard to get.
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  1217.  @GurtTheHurt  It's a relatively new building, so I guess we will see!
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  1218. Europe can't get away with deliberately building enormous refugee camps in some isolated areas like many other nations do. Giving refugees only the bare essentials to survive makes the EU look inhumane as a bloc of developed nations. So they have to be housed in permanent structures (or at least something better than a tent), given better food and supplies, and often allowed to work or given a financial stipend. This makes every refugee more of an economic and social burden than they would be in a less developed nation (also likely not to receive as much assistance from NGO's and the UN), hence why there's always an impetus to limit numbers. The irony is that when the EU does recieve more refugees than it can handle, informal refugee camps, often more squalid than those in the developing world, spring up all over the place.
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  1219.  @philipchoo958  If you look at the metrics Malaysia isn't far off some of the poorer developed countries. And I believe the Malaysian government has an objective to break out of the middle income trap. It's doable, several ex soviet countries in Europe managed it after independence.
    2
  1220.  @philipchoo958  Every country has problems, but out of all the countries in the world that could escape the middle income trap, Malaysia is one of the highest on the list.
    2
  1221.  @akuankka321876  And nearly all of them have at least one little summer house or fishing hut on them.
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  1222.  @Roy-kj8or  Singapore is an ultra dense city state where everyone lives in an apartment block. It's so dense that building subways going literally everywhere makes financial sense even when the cost to build them is enormous. HK is a little different, but there's really not much land that can be built on so it still ends up being ultra dense. In terms of transit HK isn't as good as Singapore.
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  1223.  @johnsamoilis6379  Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. And honestly whether it's $5 or $100, the consumer shouldn't pay for a service they don't get.
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  1224.  @SamyasaSwi  It was said somewhat in jest, but I do think there's a grain of truth, Dutch food doesn't have the healthiest reputation. Neither does British food really, but we don't cycle to keep our weight down, we just get fat!
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  1225.  @SamyasaSwi  You make it sound like the Dutch don't have access to the internet and can't portray a more realistic image of their cuisine online. Which is clearly absurd. I come from Britain, I'm willing to say our national cuisine isn't very healthy either. We eat food from around the world too, it still makes a difference. But we probably don't exercise as much as you so we're more obese. As far as I can tell Dutch cuisine is similar, a little more fatty and sugary I'd personally reckon. You're managing it better than us so I don't think you need to be so defensive and offended over your food.
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  1226.  @SamyasaSwi  I think he has a particular lifestyle he really likes, and maybe the Netherlands is perhaps the best place for that lifestyle. I'd probably hate the way he lives.
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  1227.  @SamyasaSwi  If you did that with British, French or Italian cuisine, you'd get something fairly representative. So why not Dutch? People generally tend to eat their own country's cuisine fairly often. I don't see why the Dutch would be any different. I'll give Britain as an example, as I'm familiar with the cuisine. Roast beef, roast potatoes and vegetables, fish and chips, chicken tikka masala (yes, that counts). All you'd find easily with a web search. These are dishes that British people eat regularly. Not every day, but often enough that I'd argue it is representative of a typical British diet.
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  1228.  @SamyasaSwi  Space and privacy. For the more introverted and individualistic, a big house in a leafy suburb can be quite attractive. Car dependency is a trade off, but that's a price many will happily pay. I wouldn't say most like having to drive everywhere, but you generally can't have your cake and eat it unless you get lucky. If you want to be able to cycle to the shops or the train station, you're going to have to settle for a smaller home and closer neighbours.
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  1229. ​ @SamyasaSwi That is a classic leftist slogan though. The thing is in that scenario, needs are decided by a committee of people, not the individuals themselves. People have things decided for them based on what other people think is best for them. The right wing counterpoint would be that individual choice and agency is more important than collective goals like economic and social equality. Nobody is completely right or wrong here, but where the balance lies does reflect your personal values and priorities.
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  1230. ​​​ @isaiahsmith7123 Hi, other person here. Just to give my side of the argument, I was not trying to argue in absolutes and I think that's where this whole thing went off the rails. Of course I don't believe Americans eat nothing but burgers, but I do believe they eat enough burgers to have an impact on their diet, even a small one, which honestly seems rather reasonable to me. Really as you said in the previous comment, this was a joke that I thought had a glimmer of truth that got out of hand, it got picked apart and shredded and honestly I got rather upset and angry about it all. I really wish I hadn't said anything to begin with if I knew it would have been received so badly.
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  1231. I used PyCharm for a while because you could get a lot of plugins for it. There was even a really good LaTeX plugin, so you could write academic research up in a Python IDE. But compared to VSCode it is much, much slower. Even something like a VCS commit and push was so much quicker in VSCode, and start up was always a pain, I'd be waiting a good couple of minutes before I could edit anything. And VSCode's LaTeX workshop extension isn't bad, through it still lacks some features of the PyCharm extension, that was ridiculously comprehensive.
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  1232. You can PPP adjust military spending, which throws up some interesting data on how much bang (pun intended) you get for your military industrial complex buck around the world, and why some nations, like South Korea, are attracting a lot of military procurement from overseas with their high value for money defense industry. Perun has talked about this in some of his military breakdown videos.
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  1233. Yeah, the MAC for nuclear and onshore wind seems like it would be very uncertain. Both have a lot of potential, but also a lot of reasons why they may not reach their full potential. Onshore wind is often unpopular in densely populated countries due to visual and sometime noise pollution, even though it's relatively cheap and a mature technology, which makes offshore wind a better option in these countries. Nuclear has a well-known image problem, but conversely has a lot of potential to grow through R&D breakthroughs.
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  1234. Long term stocks and shares will nearly always beat cash. But we're talking horizons of decades, not years. Sure, you'll lose 20% on the S&P now compared to a savings account, but over decades you'll see growth of 300% or more, compared to a high interest savings account which would probably only see 50-100% or so over the same timeframe.
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  1235. Kraut has a long form series on Mexico right now if that interests you.
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  1236.  @CPD0123a  There will be safety factors built into standards and codes, and that's what engineers will base their calculations on. We don't overbuild as much as we used to, if you look at Victorian era structures many are so massively overbuilt even explosives won't bring them down. But they didn't have the technology we do today to make complex load calculations, so they generally had to overbuild massively in order to make sure it remained standing. This of course has many disadvantages, it's very expensive, It limits what you can build and how you can build it, and it's a nightmare to demolish, as we've been finding out in our century. Nowadays better load calculations and simulations mean we can build lighter, bigger and cheaper structures. But there's always a risk a big mathematical blunder will put a structure in the danger zone, and of course the were many structural failures in the Victorian era too.
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  1237. Vote of no confidence mechanisms are common in parliamentary systems. Prime ministers are usually not elected directly, they are chosen by party members and if their party wins the election, or they are the majority of a coalition that wins the general election, their prime minster takes the role. Once in there's really only two ways a prime minister can leave except by an opposition party taking control: either they resign or there's a vote of no confidence. While the public can't simply vote out a prime minister they don't like, enough pressure from the public and party members can force their hand. Since the executive power of a prime minister is much more limited than a US-style president, it's arguably not as important for the public to keep them in check.
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  1238.  @Jarake  To give them the benefit of the doubt, they might be South African. There "coloured" is a much less offensive term.
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  1239. I'm not sure it would work very well. You'd attract a few young urbanites while losing a lot more suburbanites. The areas around Detroit wouldn't 'return to nature', the suburbs would form their own communities and keep all of the tax income for themselves.
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  1240.  @avinashreji60  Based on what? A few yuppies who like their trendy coffee shops and ethnic restaurants?
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  1241.  @avinashreji60 I don't live in America. It's not the only country with suburbs you know.
    2
  1242. In the UK there are long term plans to convert the natural gas infrastructure to hydrogen (ironically more closely replicating the "town gas" from coal gasification that preceded it, the "natural" in natural gas comes from the fact it isn't made from coal). The hydrogen would be produced either via electrolysis using renewable energy, or perhaps through thermochemical cracking from high temperature nuclear reactors. The idea being a lot of old UK housing stock isn't sufficiently insulated for heat pumps to work effectively, and of course there are still a lot of industries who require some kind of combustible fuel, it's either cost prohibitive or down right impossible to electrify some industrial processes. So there might still be a use for NG networks into the future. There will be challenges though, hydrogen is not like natural gas, for one it will leak out of things you thought were solid, but to a teeny tiny H2 molecule are full of holes like swiss cheese.
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  1243.  @MegaLokopo  Even some of the best transit systems in the world can become incredibly overcrowded at certain times.
    2
  1244.  @MegaLokopo  It can be one stupid person, or a broken down train, or a lot of things really.
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  1245.  @MegaLokopo  Eh... I'm not so sure about that. Roads tend to have a lot more redundancy than railways. One blocked line can hold thousands of people up for hours.
    2
  1246.  @MegaLokopo  We used to have a lot of rail redundancy in my country and it wasn't profitable back then. Maybe some trams back in the day, but they were more like buses on rails. In the end, if a train is stuck on the tracks, it's not easy to go around it, you either take a lengthy diversion on another track or you can't.
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  1247.  @MegaLokopo  Roads are still cheaper to maintain than rails, well, if you want to go any faster than 10mph on them anyway. Even at the height of its extent the rail network in the UK didn't go to every little village or hamlet, and there weren't dozens of different routes to the same destination, and that was back in the day when rail infrastructure could be a lot less robust than it is today.
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  1248.  @MegaLokopo  Yes, but a railway has much higher fixed costs, so you need a minimum level of usage to be economically viable, and splitting that up among redundant lines means you've cut your usage in half. It's why we don't have a railway line going down every street like roads do. It would be patently absurd no matter what investment there was.
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  1249.  @MegaLokopo  I don't know what steampunk like alternate universe you're imagining where there's a spider's web of railway tracks and points going from door to door. It would look awesome, I'll admit, but a cursory understanding of the physics of rail travel would render such an idea entirely impractical. If roads aren't economically viable, no transportation infrastructure is. The only economically viable option would be to walk everywhere.
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  1250.  @MegaLokopo  I think if you saw a railway line being built and maintained you'd think otherwise. It's way more involved than some tarmac and a steamroller. And even if you forced people to walk to the nearest main road (or railway in this case) it would still be impractical. Stop spacing would be so close you'd be unable to go faster than 10 mph or you'd be unable to stop at the next stop.
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  1251. It's XR, they probably do want you to use horseback. Or preferably a bicycle, it's greener.
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  1252. Greens would need to radically alter some of their social positions to appeal to these men.
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  1253. In the long term, the future for mining lies in the Asteroid Belt.
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  1254. What I'm getting from you is not "less debt" but "more welfare".
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  1255.  @Strudlfaust  Do you mean the phoneme /x/ (like the "ch" in loch)?
    2
  1256.  @AureliusLaurentius1099  His Middle Eastern policy wasn't popular and he did slag off a couple of European nations, but that's nothing compared to Trump.
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  1257. It might, I'd expect a couple billion per year in revenue for the plant.
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  1258. I'm surprised he doesn't talk about how much Ireland suffered in the 2008 recession. People were lumping it in with the other european economic basket cases at the time., the infamous PIGS got an extra I. I remember stories about people leaving in droves, coming over here to the UK as well as places like Australia. To be honest the fact it's managed to recover so well even if it's still a two speed economy is still pretty remarkable.
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  1259. To be fair, one of those statements is being applied only to a niche market (fine art), another is a sweeping statement that is usually parroted by marxist historians based on just about anything that ever happened in the world.
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  1260. Every thermal power plant (coal, oil, half of a CCGT and nuclear) fundamentally relies on the same mechanism to generate electricity. The variation is on the choice of fuel.
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  1261. It was probably the best that could have been done for the price with the technology at the time. Nowadays you could make something a lot better for $200, something that probably would have cost more like $600-800 back then, even considering inflation.
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  1262.  @jeremybird5739  In terms of day ahead EPEX spot prices, currently France and Germany are pretty much level pegging, and the UK is ahead of both of them by a considerable margin, with Switzerland behind them. But EPEX spot prices don't tell the full story. If instead we look at consumer prices, Germany is on top for both household and business, with France decidedly middle of the pack (bear in mind these are not adjusted for cost of living).
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  1263.  @T33K3SS3LCH3N  Cooling systems can be upgraded to discharge cooler water, it generally means dumping more of the heat somewhere else, into the ground or the air. But that is quite expensive.
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  1264. I flew over this accident site on an Olympic puddle jumper from Naxos. I remember there were loads of burnt out trees near the crash site, and small forest fires still burning nearby. I don't know if the crash caused those or if it was something else.
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  1265. Travel insurance can, but it's usually an extra add on. If you booked a cruise package with flights they will generally also have protection, but not if booked separately.
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  1266.  @seniorrazr1654  Most contemporary sources seem to paint it in such a light. It has an interesting past, and perhaps it used to be more influential, but I don't see any conspiracy.
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  1267.    It depends. In many European countries all way junctions are very rare and perhaps only found in the most rural of locations. Though in many ways roundabouts function similarly to all way yields, and Europe has a lot of those.
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  1268.  @shizzlecrystal5964  That's why traffic lights in Germany usually have priority/stop/yield signs above them. If the lights fail then you obey those signs. In other countries the rule is usually to treat as an all way stop or yield.
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  1269. @KevinBalch-dt8ot  Wyoming perhaps? I did hear of rumours of a proposal for a geothermal power station in Yellowstone. Though with all the paperwork required to build something like that on NPS federal land, the NuScale option might turn out cheaper after all!
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  1270. In general: Short length, low voltage: DC Short length, medium/high voltage: AC Medium/Long length, high voltage: AC Very long length, high voltage: DC
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  1271. The question is, what would have happened if Britain had kept the status quo, and had not divided the country into two? You can argue that the previous decades stoking of religious conflict had helped them get into this situation, but what's done is done. Britain had a choice, to partition or not. Both risked conflict and civil war once they departed. Could they have done a better job? Probably. Both options were terrible in my opinion, the Brits had backed themselves into a corner and had few options.
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  1272.  @DiamondKingStudios  Yeah, as an alternative, an exterior barn/large metal shed would be a suitable alternative (with the advantage of better natural light) but obviously you need the land for that.
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  1273.  @vadim6385  Last time I checked, sanitation was also at the bottom of the hierarchy.
    2
  1274.  @the_expidition427  My point about saying "safety is relative" was comparing burying human waste in the woods vs. leaving it out in the open. Clearly burying it is safer, but only relative to the former. A proper toilet is much safer than both options. It wasn't to call safety subjective like you are implying here. As for your second paragraph, I don't really understand what you're on about to be honest. To me this seems like a lot of handwringing over something that is really quite serious.
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  1275.  @tudornaconecinii3609  To me the only way that would be moral is if the entire community consisted of consenting adults who had full and complete knowledge of the risks and the consequences. And I doubt either of those are true. This is not me infantilising them, I would not expect the average person in the developed world to have an intimate knowledge of fecal disease transmission, but generally most of us understand that pooping in a toilet stops us getting sick. Imagine if this was in the developed world, at a minimum their kids would be taken from them for child welfare reasons. Now I'm not suggesting we do that, but we're already applying different standards because they're some poor village in the developing world, and not because of financial constraints.
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  1276.  @tudornaconecinii3609  I would assume it wasn't just installed next to someone's house, but as a communal building. Nevertheless, this doesn't seem like an objection because they were built, but because the community either failed to appreciate the benefits of the toilets or the risks of their current practices. The best solution is to rebuild the toilets and stress the importance of using them. Leaving some roofing material would be good too, as it avoids temptation when the roof starts leaking again. I really don't see the lesson being "don't build toilets if people prefer to poop outside". There are some things communities should have agency over, but some practices are too harmful to not discourage.
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  1277.  @morgantrias3103  A leaky roof can be patched with natural materials, or you can put a container underneath to catch the water. While It may be a long term concern, and certainly a detriment to wellbeing, it is very unlikely to be an immediate threat to health. Improperly disposed of human waste on the other hand, is.
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  1278.  @jensmikkelsen1071  I don't want to suggest they are, but if they are genuinely incapable of defecating in a dedicated location, as some people here seem to suggest, then that would put them behind several domestic and wild animals. I would hope people would see how absurd such a suggestion would be.
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  1279. He won't when he sees how much more Europeans and Americans will pay for his product. Ghanaian produced chocolate would probably fetch a fair premium in fancy supermarkets.
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  1280. Could it be a medical treatment backlog? People waiting for surgeries and such to allow them to work.
    2
  1281.  @kenoliver8913  You sure you're not thinking of the Sunrise gas field and East Timor?
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  1282. ​​ @1Surge  think at least part of it is the EU tends to be in step with the US on international sanctions, mostly. There's really little political advantage to using the Euro over the Dollar outside of the EU.
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  1283. You could probably use them to run the control and monitoring equipment, but you'd want to drill 24/7 so solar would not be ideal. It would also need to be pretty large.
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  1284. As much as I dislike the guy, it would be hilarious if Elon Musk bought Boeing.
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  1285. They'd probably rather take the short term hit and sell it off.
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  1286.  @-datnerd-3125  So you are saying colonialism doesn't explain the difference? As for the Japanese, that was just one colonial master replaced with another, who was arguably more brutal, if more short lived. SE Asia has also had it's fair share of conflict too, plus dictators like Pol Pot.
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  1287. In the end, whatever his other faults are, he's willing to stand up for his country in time of crisis. Kind of like a Ukrainian Churchill, I guess.
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  1288. Italy in the face of it seems like a great place for remote tech workers to move to, lots of beautiful sleepy villages in the countryside that are full of empty homes, Japan style, and are increasingly unable to support a population that is increasingly comprised of retirees. But if the pay and infrastructure isnt there, people won't come.
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  1289. The problem is too much market access would wreck many european industries, they could never compete on cheap imports from Africa.
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  1290. Honestly I'd love him to do the Sharpe series at some point. It's a bit old but it's still quoted to this day.
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  1291. ​​ @mistermoogle Bread is an intensively processed food, the main ingredient is indigestible in unprocessed form, and it has to be mixed with yeast or chemical leaveners like bicarbonate of soda to rise into a loaf. Does it mean it is "ultra processed"? There's arguably more processing needed to make products like bread or coffee than many "ultra processed" foods.
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  1292. Solar doesn't work too well in northern Europe in winter, there just isn't enough sunshine and what there is is pretty weak. Wind does help most of the time but it does result in occasional price shocks when there's a blocking high over the North Sea and wind output falls off a cliff for a few days. This winter has been terrible for solar especially as it's been very overcast in a lot of northern European countries this year.
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  1293.  @SherrifOfNottingham  Fundamentally unless you want everyone to live in apartment blocks or townhomes, you're going to need some sort of personalised transport to fill in the gaps (and no, bikes don't count, not everyone wants to cycle for 20 mins in the rain). Autonomous vehicles can fill that role, and still reduce traffic.
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  1294.  @18booma  If the residents or government own the building, then the Panera Bread will likely pay the most rent. It won't be the residents who pay for the franchise, some local businessessperson will.
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  1295.  @18booma  That can happen, but the government or residents would be foregoing a lot of income from those chains. And when new builds have to paid off, they're going to be tempted by higher returns. Besides, independently owned business tend to have more expensive goods then chains. Fine for the middle class in premium apartments, not so much for those in more affordable housing.
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  1296.  @Willys-Wagon  It probably helped, yes. It wasn't without strife, just look at partition, but it could have been a whole lot worse, I agree.
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  1297. A police officer is technically a goon by their standards, since we could eliminate their job if nobody committed any crimes. But because people do, we need them to exist.
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  1298. As others have said, unless COVID becomes a major issue for several years it seems unlikely to me these will get off the drawing board. Airlines are in no mood for spending more money than they need to, so after the majority of the population have been vaccinated or cases are down to a low background or gone completely, then they'll be wanting to pack as many people on their planes as cheaply as possible.
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  1299. ​ @EdwardRLyons  Indeed, Dreamchaser could be ideal for more fragile cargo, and could even serve as a medevac craft in the case of a medical emergency in space.
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  1300.  @randymillhouse791  Well aren't you a cheery little misanthrope?
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  1301. Hey, I don't work for free!
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  1302.  @mandisaw  I'm not just talking about the UK, some European countries like Germany are lower but the Nordics are about the same. In the UK "mature students" are absolutely a thing and it's possible to bypass A level requirements through relevant workplace experience sometimes, it varies by university. We also have the world famous "open university" which has offered remote learning university degrees for decades (way before computers were common in people's homes, you used to get video lectures on VHS and have to post your assignments). They tend to have fairly generous qualification requirements.
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  1303.  @LarsJacobsenDK  Tesla is the Apple of Electric Cars. Got an early lead through genuine innovation and technological superiority? Check. Has a proprietary walled garden of connectors, protocols and software (unless forced by regulation to change)? Check. Has a cult like following of fans who worship their leader like a god? Definitely Check. Generally has some of the most expensive products on the market? Check.
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  1304. I believe Musk is more hands off with SpaceX nowadays.
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  1305. Water can put out EV fires, if you use enough of it. Drench systems like that should cool down batteries enough to stop fires. They use a seriously huge amount of water, it's like being under a waterfall.
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  1306. I wonder if the crew change was quick enough to keep passengers on the flight, or if some decided to use ground transportation to complete the journey (Frankfurt is still several hours away by road or rail from Paris mind you) or were put on another plane. Might be an interesting one regarding compensation, while the medical emergency is exceptional circumstances, I'm not sure crew timeout would count, so if they were on the ground for more than 4 hours in Paris Lufthansa might have to pony up.
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  1307. Part of the problem was these new tower blocks were more expensive per unit to build than standard homes, and minimum size laws meant the builders cut a lot of corners to maintain profits. Ronan point was a death trap and could have easily collapsed just from poor construction even if it was a design flaw than ultimately caused a partial collapse. Apologies to @anthonylulham3473 who corrected my pervious post, I deleted it in a fit of rage. You were right and I was wrong, I just don't take criticism well, I sincerely apologise. Hope you find this.
    2
  1308. What? We already have temperature gradients that large in existing fusion experiments. The problem has never been making contained fusion happen, we've been able to do that for nearly 60 years, it's getting more energy out than we put in.
    2
  1309. I think if you wanted to retire the image, focusing on its technical deficiencies is the way to go, and prescriptive edicts from journals probably isn't the best way to go. CS and other STEM subjects, even ones less male dominated, have been wary about encroachment from the more politicised areas of academia, trying to make them more "woke" so to speak. We've already seen this over the Master/Slave terminology debate which is arguably much more contentious than this as it affects a much wider academic field. Some feel this is the thin end of a potentially large wedge where social justice becomes far more important within STEM and like with some other subjects having the right political and moral views is essential to success and advancement. Maybe that seems absurd to you, but I think that's how a lot of people feel and I think stuff like this needs to be seen in the context of such an environment when people resist it.
    2
  1310. It's happened in a limited sense, but if fully implemented the EU agricultural sector would collapse. There is no way in hell most staple foods can compete on price with African imports.
    2
  1311.  @khalidatia6478  I think once things have recovered it will be a burden instead of an asset, though as a flag carrier it might not matter so much. I know budget airlines are usually very keen having only one or two types of aircraft in their fleet.
    2
  1312. Have it in big text on the safety card that the airline assumes full liability for all possesions left behind in the case of an evacuation up to some ridiculous limit, and that if passengers possessions are not returned to them within a day or so they are entitled to expense for replacement items they deem necessary for the enjoyment of their trip, including luxury items and even if they have to be shipped in overnight at significant expense. Let's be honest, incidents which result in an evacuation are rare enough that the cost to the airline isn't going to be enormous to implement such guarantees, and it's likely they already have to some extent, they just don't make it so clear to passengers. In an emergency which results in destruction of passengers possessions, the cost is going to pale in comparison to the legal settlement they'll end up paying anyway, $1000's per passenger even if everyone survived. Sure, you can say people shouldn't be so selfish, but people are people, and reassurance that the airline will bend over backwards and spare no expense to please passengers in the rare event of them losing or withholding their possessions due to an aircraft accident will probably go further than trying to scare them or shame them into doing the right thing.
    2
  1313.  @Giruno56  The UK lost a ton well before privatisation. Though I'd argue Japan still has more than the UK (kind of understandable considering the population).
    2
  1314. I think there is an absolutely fair argument to be made about what the appropriate age to introduce the concept of sexuality to children should be, introducing it too early would cause confusion and may cause unnecessary distress to some children at a time when they really shouldn't be worrying about such things. I absolutely think kids should learn about sexuality and LGBT identity at some point before or just at puberty, but I think there's a reasonable conversation to be had about what age that should occur.
    2
  1315. I treat MSG like table salt. It's not going to kill you, but you don't want to be consuming too much every day.
    2
  1316.  @MissRora  Rather common yes, but not ubiquitous.
    2
  1317.  @stevecha3612  For an ICE car, it's useful but not usually essential, especially for petrol vehicles. For an EV it's an absolute must everywhere you park.
    2
  1318. Patents are a little bit of a shaky metric to use for productivity, since it's possible to generate a lot of low quality patents that would probably collapse in court (which doesn't necessarily matter if you have the legal muscle to force a settlement), or fewer high quality patents based on real innovation and a lot of R&D effort. I think the US is a little more "patent happy" compared to Europe, they seem to generate a lot of very trivial patents that might not even get past the patent office in Europe. That's not to say Europeans aren't very productive in the US, but I think that's for other reasons, some Europe probably is happy not to copy like longer working weeks and a lot less vacation time, but others, like higher investment in increasing productivity and a huge pool of venture capital, that it would very much like to have.
    2
  1319.  @treelineresearch3387  Yes, it was, which is why NASA doesn't want it to happen again. Relying on a single design and company is just as risky as relying on their own.
    2
  1320.  DAGGER  I think SSTO spaceplanes are the mostly likely candidate to surpass SpaceX, but that's not likely to happen for at least a decade, and some argue they will never beat a rocket (probably true for heavy launches, but could take over the passenger and light cargo market).
    2
  1321. I sort of assume it's some way to represent both the white Afrikaners and the various black African ethnic groups in the country.
    2
  1322.  @ibellion  The issue is a lot of that traffic now travels through the city instead of around it, which will make commuting more difficult. Some of those journeys may have been delayed or cancelled for now, but they can't hold off forever. Maybe you personally haven't noticed any difference, but the severing of a significant road will have severe impacts long term.
    2
  1323.  @Vengir  Indeed, but these tunnels go straight into the city centre. So traffic that would go around the city centre will now go through it.
    2
  1324.  @Vengir  In the end, if the tunnels could take all the traffic, the bridge wouldn't be nessecary and would have been lightly used. Some commercial traffic can't use the tunnels either and have to take an hour long diversion. It will mean more thru traffic mixing with commuter traffic which is a recipe for gridlock unless one or the other is reduced.
    2
  1325. Part of the problem is the system is so old. If we were able to rip it all up and start from scratch we'd have a much better railway network, wider, faster trains on straighter track. Because we were the first a lot of other nations learned from our mistakes.
    2
  1326.  @Doazon  And perhaps, to some extent, that's how it should be, a viable business with solid foundations should be able to overcome that 2-3 year hurdle, barring a stroke of bad luck. I appreciate investors sometimes miss a trick, and in some places the barrier to entry may be too high, though I think other support structures would be more appropriate there. But I think there's a danger of making the barrier too low as well, which could happen with UBI if people are encouraged to do so. I think we can make a comparison with lottery winners, a number of them start businesses and predictably many of them fail, some after being on life support for years as those winners burn through their winnings propping them up. It would have been better for everyone, the winner and the economy/society as a whole, if that money had gone into passive investments or been donated to charity. We have kind of fetishized entrepreneurship a bit in today's society, and I think that's leading people who shouldn't be stating a business to do so.
    2
  1327. In terms of aesthetics, bare concrete and sheetrock look OK when new, and don't hold up too bad in a dry climate, but quickly become stained and horrible after a few years of damp weather. Their insulating properties also aren't great.
    2
  1328. In some overseas markets the US competition is coming for KFC. There's a Popeye's opening in Manchester soon, and there's already a Slim Chicken's. And there a number of alternatives offering Korean and Japanese style fried chicken, which many prefer with its crispier and less greasy batter.
    2
  1329. It is possible to do it relatively safely with an electric fence energiser, since the high voltage is sent out in very short pulses it will hurt you but it won't be fatal (unless you have a pacemaker or cardiac issue). It doesn't produce quite the same results and requires a bit more experience but it is an option for those who really want to try it. Alternatively a safer DIY project for a spare microwave transformer is a homemade spot welder. Instead of increasing the voltage from mains, you decrease it and in return you can dump a shit-ton of current through the contacts, enough to weld thin plates of metal together.
    2
  1330. "If woman wants a 6ft, 6 figure men, they should be slim, traditional, submissive, obedient... etc" I think you could frame this as both sides having unrealistic expectations. Basically saying "If all you want is a giant rich sugar daddy, that's like me saying all I want is a submissive trad wife shaped like a twig".
    2
  1331. And a BooBies franchise in the background.
    2
  1332. +Thomas nl I'm talking about the cars.
    2
  1333. +Thomas nl Maybe, maybe not. Depends on where the bikers are coming from. Especially in NYC they might have used the bus or subway previously.
    2
  1334.  @YounesLayachi  Disconnecting isn't that simple, you need something to shed the load, that will probably get very hot.
    2
  1335. To be fair, most subsonic planes will be audible out there.
    2
  1336. If we're really really early, maybe we'll be that mysterious forerunner civilization that dumps mysterious cryptic monuments all over the place before vanishing without a trace (apart from the monuments, of course).
    2
  1337. My experience living in a 70 year old UK end terrace is soundproofing is...meh. It's not like I can hear the TV or anything but a dog barking or someone shouting, yep, you can hear it. It might be better in some newer builds but I suspect it might actually be worse considering how poorly many new homes in the UK are constructed, especially on the more affordable end. As for fire, in theory a firewall should contain the fire to one home, but in practice if the house next door was completely ablaze you would not and should not remain in your own home. In all honesty I'd love to have a US style single family home in the suburbs but something like that in the UK is way too expensive for me.
    2
  1338. Spain might have vast international influence through its old colonies, but in terms of quality the UK can't be beat. Many British ex-colonies have become some of the richest and most powerful countries in their continental region, if not the world. The same can't be said for most of the Spanish ex-colonies.
    2
  1339. Something something corruption something something Mafia... nah i'm sure it's more interesting than that stereotype.
    2
  1340.  @jamestyrer907  They are technically, it's exactly the same design just smaller. Heat coming from the ground regardless of source is geothermal energy. From what I've heard the interior of parts Australia get so hot that you can get a lot of heat from the ground just below the surface.
    2
  1341.  @beauwille2294  It depends on the manufacturer and model. Some offer more customisation than others. But it's not some super niche thing that only happens with a select few supercars. Your experience will depend on your price range and what badge you want. Some you really can tweak a lot of different things.
    2
  1342.  @beauwille2294  It's not a misconception at all, you're saying it like it doesn't exist at all, or only for really really expensive cars. Not everyone is buying cheap econoboxes with two option packages. There's plenty of mid range and lower tier luxury cars (including SUV's, they're just big cars really) which attract wealthier customers who want a more tailored product. Perhaps you have some recency bias in your answer. Before the current supply issues it was much easier to have more options to customise a car. Shortages have meant this has been cut back in recent years. But I'm sure that will change once things get sorted out.
    2
  1343. ​​ @Effervescent_Smegma Which customisation? BMW does interior and trim colour at least, plus many different upgrades.
    2
  1344.  @ZabivakaPirate69  I'm not that familiar with US housing terminology, but I believe those aren't mutually exclusive. Condominium is an ownership structure, where residents own their own unit plus a proportional share of the common areas, which gives them a vote on making decisions about them. Apartment complex is a type of residential building made up of apartments, they can be part of a condo or rented out or a mix of both. I think Alec actually lives in a rowhome (what we'd call a terraced house in the UK) which he probably owns outright as there are no shared spaces.
    2
  1345.  @MostlyPennyCat  That's what I call them. Technically I think the rectifier only refers to the diode bridge that actually does the AC to DC conversion (even though the output is not a constant voltage) and then any smoothing capacitors or other components that are required for a somewhat flat DC output are bundled into a "converter".
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  1346. Always has been really. It's been mitigated by a wider adoption of diesel for large vehicles, more fuel efficient vehicles in general, and Europeans simply don't drive as far as the average American, due to shorter distances, lower rates of car ownership and better public transport.
    2
  1347.  @renerpho  It's always been a bit more expensive, but the fuel economy savings have traditionally been worth it. Though recent tightening of NOx emissions limits is really pushing the boundaries of economical diesel for any vehicle smaller than a van. That's what the VW scandal was really all about, they couldn't make a diesel engine within the emissions limits that didn't end up being more expensive to fuel and maintain than a petrol equivalent.
    2
  1348. I still want the former, I love the idea of owning a big house in a leafy suburb. But I appreciate it's not something everyone can afford.
    2
  1349.  @waisinglee1509  Well I'm sure there needs to be a backup incase the MRT malfunctions, and there's no point just having the buses on standby!
    2
  1350. I think the whole "public ownership" idea may do more harm than good. I can understand the desire to prevent land being swallowed up by non-native corporations and people, but I think it likely discourages investment from non-native sources, and that's going to put a barrier on development. Like it or not, more outside investment, carefully managed, could improve living conditions significantly. But, there's also just the fact these places are often geographically marginal (often by design from past US governments) and in some cases, you can't get blood out of a stone. Think of the mining towns in the Appalachians that are slowly being abandoned as a comparison. If there's no good reason for industry or commerce to locate there because it's in the middle of nowhere, it's going to be near impossible to improve things sustainably.
    2
  1351. I'm wondering how best to explain building societies to people in the US. The best I can think of is a home mortgage focused credit union. There's also 4 or 5 big ones (Nationwide utterly dominates) and couple dozen little ones.
    2
  1352. One of the problems with the North West is the terrain around these cities is not like the Netherlands, as soon as you get out of the city you often get 300m+ hills which means connecting them is more difficult, and quite a lot of people live in these satellite towns around Manchester and Liverpool that are at different elevations. That makes it more difficult to build train lines, though in many cases they do exist thanks to the Victorian era railway boom they're usually not as high quality. Walking and Cycling is not as easy on often windy hilly paths even with e-bikes and the cool, wet climate doesn't help. Not to say things can't be improved, I personally think Manchester and Liverpool could do with better urban transit, even better than what many Dutch cities have, but the different environment means a copy paste job isn't going to work.
    2
  1353. I think one of the biggest barriers in the UK is the age of much of the housing stock, much of it is over 50 years old, poorly insulated (attempts to retroactively insulate walls can cause issues with moisture bridging which can cause mold), generally built around high temperature water based gas central heating and often limited to 50 or 60A 240V single phase (though upgrading to 80 or 100A is usually possible). This is somewhat mitigated by their smaller average size, however US houses still sound like they might have an easier time of it. I think in this country if we really want to electrify our homes en masse, we will need to demolish many of these old houses, they are not worth the cost to properly retrofit without major issues. Sadly if new developments are anything to go by, the homes will be even smaller than the ones built in the 50's, though they'll at least have decent insulation (though 66% are still being built with gas based heating systems!).
    2
  1354. I think the UK just can't compete full stop. We don't the same number of eccentric billionaires willing to spaff money at long shots.
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  1355.  @YellowRambler  If that was the case nobody would be developing them.
    2
  1356.  @curlyfries2956  I mean the idea of a pan Arabic caliphate has existed for thousands of years too, doesn't mean it exists (the Ottomans did have a good go).
    2
  1357.  @A_B_1917  The US did not annex or colonise any of these countries. Creating vassal states doesn't fly in the modern world. "Regime Change" wars are indicative of the modern way of doing things, you can't rule a country directly anymore, but you can ensure their leaders keep you as a close ally, sometimes by force.
    2
  1358.  @A_B_1917  Taiwan does not want to reunify with China, there are concerns China will do it by force, which would be considered annexation depending on what you believe the status of Taiwan to be. And just because "regime change" wars are more palatable to us than just invading and colonising, doesn't mean they're perfectly moral either.
    2
  1359. ​ @vorynrosethorn903 Well, it does, but only if you want to move to some economically depressed hellhole.
    2
  1360. It's another demonstration of the horrifying shadow the Nazis still cast over Germany 75 years after their rule ended. They are so terrified of the far right they are willing to do a lot more than many other nations to keep them at bay. It's a dangerous balancing act though, as heavy handed tactics can cause a lot of collateral damage, and might even attract more people to the far right.
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  1361. I think of receptionists as a kind of interface between people inside the company and outside it. Somebody who can direct outside people to the right inside people to talk to. In a big corporation which might be very complicated that's certainly a vital service. Somebody wants to interact with the company in some way, be it delivering a package or arranging a meeting for a specific purpose, the receptionist can connect the person outside the company with the right person inside the company.
    2
  1362.  @American-Motors-Corporation  You've really got it in for receptionists haven't you? Yes, in theory you probably could have customers locate where they need to go themselves. But unless it's something super obvious, it's more efficient to have someone else sort it out for you. It might not be as straightforward as "I need to go to department X", it might be "I'm here for Y, where do I need to go/who do I need to see?". That's when you need an insider to help you, and that's what receptionists are often for.
    2
  1363.  @American-Motors-Corporation  I don't know that many receptionists on that kind of salary.
    2
  1364.  @limiv5272  I'm not so sure, I think it was designed to cause minimal damage to the vehicle. The rapid change in orientation is going to make it very uncomfortable for passengers at the least. The problem is Starship is so bloody massive and awkwardly shaped that options for landing it, especially on earth, are limited. Honestly, I think it's a bit of a waste to use such a massive vehicle for only carrying 3-4 crew members anyway. Save Starship for cargo, something smaller would be better for humans.
    2
  1365.  @JD-nt2sc  300m may have been enough to put a fully loaded large aircraft outside of safety limits, that's a possibility, or there was some other technical or equipment issue. Though it could have been a paperwork issue as you said, since bureaucratic rigidity was a major cause of this whole debacle.
    2
  1366.  @HenriFaust  There are so-called MSM (master-slave manipulators) which are those things you've probably seen in films. Being purely mechanical with no electronics they are a bit more resilient to radiation, though materials do eventually degrade.
    2
  1367.  @Lee-fw5bd  The problem there is if you keep trying to escape by fracturing the community then you eventually end up with a community so small it's unsustainable. Quarantining takes effort and generally makes the experience worse for everyone else. Sometimes it means content get censored purely to avoid making the subreddit a target. For example, r/dogswithjobs has to ban police dog posts for a while because the ACAB brigade from subreddits like r/copaganda would cause a stink on every post, not because they wanted to exclude that content.
    2
  1368.  @Lee-fw5bd  The point of my argument is the interventions you speak of become necessary generally due to influences outside the community rather than within it. The choice to censor content is often not because of the actual wishes of the community, who can, as you say, use flares on reddit to filter content while not pushing it off the main page, but people outside the community who are on some ideological crusade and won't keep it to themselves, and clearly a choice to censor that does not come from community consensus makes the experience worse for that community, and they're having to deal with something they didn't want. Nobody wants to split a community because they're being bullied into it by someone else, and clearly it won't help since now they've got a more focused target.
    2
  1369.  @Hisoka85  They are colonial possessions which Spain and Portugal took from Morocco, they are also the remnants of when much of north west Africa was a Spanish colony. Saying they're Spanish cities makes no difference, the French also consider most of their colonial possessions part of France. The UK just organises things a bit differently, it doesn't make any difference to their legitimacy. And I've not heard anything about the UN getting involved, why would they? This is a dispute between two rich developed European nations, there's not some big power imbalance or risk of violent conflict.
    2
  1370. I think with some people it's more like they don't like the people they think like country.
    2
  1371. To some extent, Spain. While the system is very impressive and extensive, it really struggles to make money. Not that HSR in Spain did not make sense at all, some routes absolutely do, but some lines do seem questionable, going to relatively small cities that were probably never going to have enough passengers to make it worthwhile.
    2
  1372.  @ArmchairMagpie  I think if you look at the US there is a wider political distribution between states than countries in Europe. California is arguably more left wing than even the most left wing European countries, particularly when it comes to social justice and environmental regulations, and being such a populous and powerful state that makes a difference. You could argue Texas is the polar opposite of that.
    2
  1373.  @EthelredHardrede-nz8yv  California's population is shrinking, while Texas is growing. Tech companies are starting to relocate there and to other states. It's true California has quite a long way to fall, true, but it is looking like its best days are behind it.
    2
  1374.  @alexanderhetzel8271  I agree, it's similar to the coal issue, but I'd argue it would probably affect a hundred times more communities, at least. Basically all of the countryside that isn't arable farmland in the UK and Ireland, which is about a fifth of the land in the UK and much, much more in Ireland. The hard truth can be that many communities just don't have a reason to exist anymore. We've learned the hard way in the UK, ex-mining towns are often still pockets of unemployment and deprivation even over 30 years after the mines closed. They've become dumping grounds for the unemployable and those that do grow up there don't have any opportunities beyond minimum wage work. In more remote areas, it's hard to see how even that would be sustainable.
    2
  1375. If you remove the water you get whey powder which can be mixed into animal feed.
    2
  1376. From what I've heard, Japanese workplaces are often endless exercises in "This could have been an email". While Japanese manufacturing may have a reputation for efficiency, other workplace practices seem to be as inefficient as possible to make up for it.
    2
  1377. Some of them contain short-chain polyethylene glycol, which meant if you drank one you'd get sick and possibly die. In fact, somebody nearly did: https://youtu.be/QJs431FsC_k
    2
  1378. Coal was dethroned by cheap gas. Half the CO2, much less pollution and power plants are very simple and cheap to build.
    2
  1379.  @joaquinelorrieta4203  I think we would have seen some kind of treaty, much like what happened in New Zealand. Imagine a US with say, 20% native population. There would probably be a bunch of native "states" but the Europeans would still have most of the land and power, though perhaps with some political concessions.
    2
  1380. Is the diesel red because it's dyed (to show it is exempt from vehicle fuel tax) or is it something else?
    2
  1381.  @matthewbaynham6286  Without subsidy you'd put half the taxi companies out of business when they're already under pressure from competitors like Uber that put more of these kinds of expenses on the driver.
    2
  1382.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  One reason can be because fast and radical change, while perhaps made with the best of intentions, can destabilise what is working and actually make things worse. And sometimes, the centre just flat out don't agree with what some on the left consider to be important for social justice, or consider the harms greater than the benefits. Hiring quotas or financial reparations for example.
    2
  1383.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  Oh that happens to me sometimes, neither you or I know what sets it off, don't worry! Sure, my example is about as extreme as it gets, but it's probably the strongest example. I could give other examples, Venezuela under Chavez, numerous socialist experiments during the 20th century, and so on. Consequences not quite as dire, but still resulted in a lot of problems.
    2
  1384. Regardless of your moral position on DEI, you can't deny it's a scammers dream. You've got corporations full of executives who dont know the first thing about it, but think they need it to pump up their ESG score or improve PR. So they will purchase the services of anyone who vaguely seems to know what they're talking about for a boatload of cash. As such the industry is full of grifters and outright scammers who throw a bunch of buzzwords together to create products and courses out of thin air.
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  1385. I do find some of the the concept art amusing, like a 186+ mph train is going to rely on diesel traction. Though they seem to be unsure since other concept art does have OHL.
    2
  1386. To be fair, India has a lot more subsistence farmers. Nobody in NZ was going to starve to death if ag subsidies were removed. Same probably can't be said for India. Ag subsidies there are essentially an extension of the welfare state.
    2
  1387.  @tinnic  There's also the lack of skills, lack of time and poor health to consider. Poor families in the US won't have been taught how to grow their own food from their parents unless they're farmers. Many working families won't have the time (some work very long hours) to tend to a vegetable patch or chicken coop. And finally poor US families are likely to have one or more members with chronic health conditions that limit their ability to do manual labour.
    2
  1388.  @tigersilberhannes9153  The alternative to zoning is case by case planning permission which is worse from a bureaucratic perspective.
    2
  1389. It's still from fossils, just not dinosaurs. Coal is essentially fossilized wood, oil is fossilized plankton.
    2
  1390.  @enisra_bowman  The problem is when there's so many destinations and they're quite far apart, you need as many buses as a city, many of which will run half full or even mostly empty to less popular destinations. It wouldn't be practical when you don't have the tax income to fund a bus service of that size.
    2
  1391.  @ericvulgate  OK, how exactly did we define absolute poverty in 1960 compared to how we define it today?
    2
  1392. The worst I can see happening is RT has to pay a bunch of money to Business Casual and take down the video. Because that's the worst that would have happened in the pre-YouTube era if this had been a dispute between, say, television networks, probably not in a courtroom but with a teleconference between legal teams. I don't know if RT's lawyers have refused a reasonable settlement that perhaps makes the lawsuit necessary, but the demands still seem unreasonable. If the goal was to shut RT's YouTube presence down completely, it makes total sense, but not to get recompense for copyright infringement.
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  1393. He's clearly very intelligent, but I still think he thinks he's smarter than he actually is. He's certainly got an ego that matches his ambitions. Doesn't help that he has a cult like following like Steve Jobs had, so you can't blame the guy too much for thinking he's the next Tesla, Brunel and von Braun all rolled into one. Tesla and SpaceX look good, though I'm sceptical Tesla will be as insanely successful as its stock price suggests. Hyperloop and Boring Company, both of them have some serious engineering barriers that have yet to be addressed (if they even can be).
    2
  1394. ​ @mightyraptor01 If you want the true blacklight effect you do need a little UV. But the ones you use for nightclubs emit way less than germicidal lamps. You're not supposed to have people in the room when those are switched on.
    2
  1395. Dictators of Europe banknote series. Guaranteed to cause maximum offence!
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  1396. Probably not as much as some people think. Planes have a huge infrastructure advantage over trains, you only need an airport at either end. High speed rail needs high speed track connecting every destination to every other. That's okay if you're looking at connecting big cities only 2-3 hours away, but when you have lots of smaller destinations, especially for leisure, it's never going to be economically viable to connect all the routes that destination is served by plane. Imagine a HSR line that only has a lot of passengers at certain times of year, and the rest of the time is almost empty. It would never work. But an airport can add extra routes with minimal cost, and it doesn't matter so much if they're seasonal. In the US in particular, while there are clusters of cities which could benefit from HSR, it's likely that they'll take more cars off the road than planes out of the sky. The "point-to-point" model would also have to be thrown into reverse, rail only works as aggressively hub and spoke, and even worse, there's currently no infrastructure to transfer luggage, so connections mean carting all your luggage off one vehicle onto another yourself. Otherwise the distances are just too great.
    2
  1397.  @montiro8999  500 miles might work if you had a string of big cities to connect up, like in China, Japan or some parts of Europe. If you've got two big cities 500 miles apart and pretty much nothing in between like in the US, it doesn't work.
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  1398. Unfortunately Europe is one of the worst places in the world for solar energy, so encouraging intracontinental solar generation would mean many more panels would have to be built for the same output, even considering transmission losses. The massive amount of solar panels germany has for a measly 10% of its generation is testament to this. Couple that with the large variation in day length over the year due to its high latitude and solar is far from ideal as an energy source. It's probably quite remarkable Europe has managed to generate any more than a tiny sliver of consumption from solar despite all the challenges. In general I think Europe has a pretty bad hand when it comes to renewables. It has some hydro, but only enough for a small fraction of consumption. It's got some decent wind in the north sea and a few pockets in the mediterranean sea, but not really anywhere else. Solar only really comes close to matching more amenable climates in the mediterranean. So without significant imports from Africa or the Middle East, I can see a future of either an overbuilt and very expensive renewable grid compared to the rest of the world, hundreds or even thousands of massive battery farms and pumped hydro facilitates managing the daily, weekly, and monthly variations in output, or a shift towards non-renewable low carbon generation like CCS or nuclear for at least a third of generation.
    2
  1399.  @allonzehe9135  Like what? Dubai will even let you bring alcohol in.
    2
  1400.  @allonzehe9135  Adult toys? I don't think they're illegal in the UAE anyway.
    2
  1401.  @mylesgray3470  I'm not sure they are. A modern phantom doesn't look out of place compared to other modern cars, especially with that massive front grill. This doesn't really look "modern", it looks like a car equivalent of a modern art exhibit. Which is sort of understandable given it's a concept, but I think when we get round to something more practical, the difference isn't going to be that great between it and a lot of other luxury EV's.
    2
  1402.  @davidarco6127  Sure, but that's who they've been competing with already, Jags were never cheap.
    2
  1403.  @Berkeloid0  Unfortunately not, you'd have to claim business interruption on your insurance (if you have it, not all policies do and many might not cover law enforcement investigation) and I doubt a small company will have enough of a claim to exceed the excess for a single day. Best you can do is deduct a day's worth of overheads on your taxes. Only way you could get compensation from the government (probably after a lengthy legal battle) is if the secret service made a clear mistake and didn't have probable cause to close you down. That said, the business could possibly sue the counterfeiter for damages such as this. But again, the legal costs for a day's worth of overheads is unlikely to be worth it. Really if the business must recover the loss, easiest option is to increase prices to compensate. It's important to understand that LLC's and businesses in general are less protected from financial harm than individuals, since the worst that can happen is they go bankrupt, nobody is directly harmed personally (though they are of course indirectly through job losses). Businesses are expected to assume more risk over their finances and have either adequate liquidity or insurance to cover unexpected events, including where they are not at fault.
    2
  1404. I think the future plan is for ADS-B multilateration to serve as a primary backup for GPS. With enough base stations it would be enough to maintain suitable accuracy.
    2
  1405. Realistically the reactor containment itself was never in danger, it takes a lot more than an artillery shell to crack that open. There was a risk the coolant loop could be damaged which, if the reactors weren't able to be shut down quickly enough, could lead to a meltdown. Something like a FCVS system could provide a last line of defence, allowing for any meltdown to have a much smaller radioactive release, but they aren't fitted to some older reactors.
    2
  1406. In Europe, if it's less than 14 days before the fight, the airline must get the customer to their destination as soon as possible at no cost to the customer, even if it means putting them on another airline. I think compensation is also due if you arrive more than 4 hours later than your original arrival time, but only if it's the fault of the airline. If it's longer than 14 days they can technically just issue refunds I think, but in most cases you get moved to the nearest available flight, but you can't force them to put you on another airline at no additional cost unlike in the previous scenario. The only thing they must do is refund you in full if you choose not to fly.
    2
  1407. I think the CO2 issue is much larger and more encompassing. What we did with pollution was generally what carbon capture intends to do, filter, concentrate and safely dispose. Prevention wasn't so important as the quantities were much smaller, just scrub out the nasties from the stack. With CO2 there's just way too much emitted for that to be practical.
    2
  1408. Realistically there is no chance of such payment, it's just too big, it dwarfs the Haitian debt. It would act as a massive economic drain on the EU over centuries, and it would pretty quickly be scrapped once europe falls on hard times, or there would be severe political unrest (inter-war Germany being a prime example). It might even be counterproductive, a continent making reparations to another is unlikely to have the desire to make investments in said contient, it'll need to turn inward to maintain as much of its own wealth as possible.
    2
  1409.  @nik6304  Such a penalty needs to be enforced, there needs to be consequences of the country, or international intstution in this case, simply refuses to pay. Typically these are very harsh economic sanctions, but for most countries around the world, economic sanctions on the EU would be shooting their own economies in the foot, so they won't punish the EU if it refuses to pay. The EU itself is finding hard enough to sanction Russia right now, a single country it doesn't do that much trade with. You think China or India would really want to sanction such an important export market?
    2
  1410. I think he bought it on impulse out of spite, then had second thoughts.
    2
  1411. Stagnation would probably be OK, a sustained fall would be disastrous. Millions would have underwater mortgages, therefore literally unable to afford to sell their home (plus being put on the worst interest rates). Governments would be under a lot of pressure to bail homeowners out by either paying the difference to the bank/building society or forcing them to take a haircut.
    2
  1412.  @Rico-yw1jf  Because it would cause a good chunk of the housing market to seize up. People who are underwater literally cannot afford to sell their home, so people have to turn down jobs which affects economic mobility. They also end up on the worst interest rates since their mortgage debt is now junk, which reduces consumer spending. You'll also see a massive amount of foreclosures which tank prices even further and create a vicious feedback loop. This would send the economy into a sharp recession at best, and sustained depression at worst. Sure, there'll be some winners, but you're robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the economic damage and political backlash mainly to middle class families won't make up for a few more young people able to afford a home.
    2
  1413.  @lawkey14  That's a similar situation to Japan.
    2
  1414.  @김라임-j3y  80% of Finnish males do conscription as well, admittedly It's considerably shorter but it doesn't seem to have an adverse effect on fertility.
    2
  1415. Don't forget the equipment carnets! When you're carrying that much expensive stuff customs will want you to prove you aren't trying to dodge import tariffs and taxes. I think for a lot of really big international tours, it isn't uncommon to charter a full size passenger plane, or maybe even an additional cargo plane, to cart around everything.
    2
  1416.  @dougaltolan3017  It's not just a ship though, and ships need a lot of maintenance below the waterline. You won't just be able to leave this thing out there, it'll have to be brought in regularly to clean off biofoul and prevent corrosion, compared to a wind turbine which doesn't really need cleaning at all. It could perhaps last that long, but if it would be economic to do so is another question. It might be cheaper to just have something with a shorter lifespan that is cheaper to build and requires less maintenance. A lot of tidal projects in the past have used expensive alloys and coatings to increase resistance to corrosion and biofouling, but that means it isn't competitive with other renewables or even nuclear energy.
    2
  1417. I think one of the problems is that it's way, way too expensive for people to get into chip fabrication as a hobby, and therefore gain enough interest in it to pursue a career. To make a software prototype is often completely free, for a hardware PCB it's a few dollars from one of the many Chinese batch fabs like PCBWay and it's shipped to your door in a week or so (or if you're old school you can get out the dip tanks and DIY). But for a prototype ASIC? It's typically thousands of dollars for even a small run of a simple design. That's just not a price point a hobbyist can bear, and no hobbyist could afford the equipment to DIY. So they buy a "black box" microcontroller, or at the lowest level, an FPGA, because even if it would be less efficient, it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to prototype and implement.
    2
  1418. Ah, tax law. When whole legal cases are based on whether X is classed as Y, to attract consumption tax rate Z.
    2
  1419.  @richardhanck972  Well, thankfully there are a lot of other options. They're a bit more boring, but more tried and tested.
    2
  1420.  @Akay4444444444444444  That's not what I mean. If it's possible to keep a fetus viable from conception outside of a womb, then the whole "you can abort if the fetus could not develop outside a womb" argument vanishes.
    2
  1421. People tend to drive longer without breaks in places like the US because of the distances involved, if you stopped as often as you did in the UK or Europe, it would take you several hours longer to get to your destination.
    2
  1422.  @AlexC-ou4ju  I think they'll readily agree to 1, 2a I give half a chance since it kicks the can down the road a bit and I think the international community would probably support it, and 2b I think is unlikely, only if Russia really turns things around.
    2
  1423. Were north Africans able to bypass the Ottoman Empire in terms of spice imports? That could explain their cheaper access to spices. All of the stuff to Europe had to go through Ottoman controlled areas pre imperialism, hence the expense.
    2
  1424.  @nrdesign1991  My guess is perhaps the brakes are a little worn, and don't stop the train as quickly as expected by the system.
    2
  1425. Huh? I thought a "loss leader" was a product that was sold at retail for a negative markup to attract in customers who will hopefully buy other profitable products.
    2
  1426.  @sidehoe  There's not much use in giving citations to people who probably won't understand them. Plus they're unlikely to be able to tell good citations from bad ones.
    2
  1427.  @jdrancho1864  I mean, if you're that rich just get a taxi.
    2
  1428.  @derorje2035  I'm not sure it would have been feasible, the plan was wildly optimistic in hindsight. It's would have been extremely expensive and technically challenging then, and probably only a bit less expensive and technically challenging now. Germany has built more new renewable capacity than nearly anyone else in Europe and they're still nowhere near decarbonising their electricity generation, let alone anything else. Perhaps if they'd focused on closing the brown coal power plants first (easily the most polluting and carbon intensive) and worried about anything else later they'd be in a better position.
    2
  1429. I get the impression there's been some progress in reducing the costs of underground metro construction, such as single bore tunneling and in tunnel stations. It's never going to be as cheap as at grade or elevated in less dense areas, but I think the costs are getting a little closer. Overall I think a tunnel is better if it's affordable, but obviously a longer elevated or at grade line that goes further into the suburbs would be better.
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  1430. A couple of large reactor complexes down on the south east coast could probably meet the energy demands of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney alone. Add a couple of smaller sites for Brisbane and Perth, and that's most of the population supplied with nuclear energy.
    2
  1431.  @Dani-it5sy  Boarding gate staff usually want to see some form of ID in my experience, even on domestic or schengen flights. Maybe it's different in Norway.
    2
  1432.  @neolithictransitrevolution427  Matching supply with demand is the biggest challenge for renewables. Generation is cheap, sure, but storage still isn't. Interconnects do not solve the problem, they might improve resiliency but there's still that blocking high pressure in the middle of winter that will take too much wind power out over too large a region with inadequate solar to back it up. And you have to remember, everything has to be built around the worst case, because a power shortage is worse than even the most expensive forms of power generation. So any grid heavily reliant on wind power has to account for a scenario where the wind effectively doesn't blow over a third of a continent for several days or even weeks. Deep geothermal can provide a baseload but it's currently a lot more expensive than nuclear for electricity generation, which requires the deepest boreholes to generate hot enough steam.
    2
  1433.  @Micha-qv5uf  Sweden's isn't that bad, it's about a quarter of Europe's total proven reserve. There's likely to be even more but it's not been prospected for.
    2
  1434. In the end if it's what people want they'll find a way to make it so. Have a bonfire of planning or zoning laws and watch people form HOA's and similar structures to enforce those rules anyway.
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  1435. Problem is that would have hiked up utility costs considerably for everyone living there, electricity is more expensive than gas in the UK. Probably another reason they found it hard to persuade the occupiers back.
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  1436. It seems to me in such a constrained environment the point to point model doesn't work as well in the US. When there's an abundance of capacity and personnel and few sources of disruption, budget airlines can make a lot of profit by running routes that would be uneconomic for legacy airlines, typically between smaller airports with lower slot fees. But when those smaller airports don't have as much capacity because the tower isn't fully staffed, and disruption means aircraft often end up stuck at remote airports without any nearby relief crews, the old hub and spoke model's resiliency must look more attractive.
    2
  1437.  @GonzoTehGreat  That's kind of true with terrestrial stealth too. A stealth fighter is not nessecarily going to be completely invisible to primary radar, but the signature will be small enough to be dismissed as say, a flock of birds or atmospheric artifact. In a more crowded solar system, the same principle could apply, if your IR signature looks like a dead satellite or other piece of junk, maybe you are ignored.
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  1438. Powerpuff girls remind me quite a bit of the core Sonic team, Blossom is Sonic, Bubbles is Tails, Buttercup is Knuckles.
    2
  1439.  @CL-mu2wk  Yes, it does work from both ends. I'm not sure if that's more important or the social stigma of ostentatious displays of wealth is.
    2
  1440. In some ways, if we had to build the whole system from scratch, it would be a lot better than what we have now. A much wider loading gauge for a start.
    2
  1441. It's odd because the Fresh and Easy format bears no resemblance to a typical Tesco (standard, not Express) in the UK. A normal Tesco is closer to the US style of supermarket (though still not as large), and Tesco Extra even more so. Makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd just transplanted their standard UK model to the US, maybe with a focus on the larger "Extra" stores. But then how would it have been any different to the native companies?
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  1442.  @kevadu  In the US, that's pretty much true of all vehicles, ICE or EV nowadays. But by European standards the ID.3 is not a small car, not like the "hot hatchbacks" of yesteryear which were nimble and light and are like driving a comfy souped up go-kart (in a good way!).
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  1443.  @alextabara9150  The "tuna chunks" in the toilet was probably the big giveaway. Trichinella is pretty small.
    2
  1444. You have to remember, he's talking about Sydney Light Rail. Possibly the worst new light rail system in the world, sometimes slower than the buses it replaced. On the flipside, I give praise to the new Sydney Metro, possibly one of the best new subway systems in the world!
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  1445. Considering they live in an enclosed community, it would be feasible to keep the ambient air temperature higher than normal, solving the heat loss issue.
    2
  1446. ​ @ronmastrio2798 Trust me, the rest of the UK doesn't really give that much of a shit about NI one way or the other. Economically it's unimportant and probably more of a burden nowadays. The only reason the UK government ever cares about NI nowadays is if it can use its politicians for gains in Westminster.
    2
  1447. Some devs: "lets rename it to something much more offensive".
    2
  1448.  @eljanrimsa5843  There's always some floor where any further spending limitations are not reasonably possible. A family of four isn't going to live out of their car or give up their children for adoption to make ends meet. Even asking a single person to become homeless to save money is generally considered unreasonable. So there aren't really any other options.
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  1449.  Aventicity  Yes, including all waste that cannot be recycled. I've heard of calls for safety regulations to be rationalised, especially in the face of now reactor technology that includes passive safety controls. As it is nuclear safety and regulation is a bureaucratic mess, so much so that construction of new reactors and research and development needs extensive licencing and paperwork, which some argue simply makes things much more expensive without actually making them safer. So perhaps that is what you've been hearing about. As for "huge death tolls", I like to use the plane crash/car crash comparison. Someone falls off and dies from a wind turbine or roof with solar panels on fairly regular basis, that's the car crash. With nuclear, a handful of accidents have caused the deaths from just a couple of people to a few thousand, that's the plane crash. Nobody disputes planes are safer than cars, and the data backs this up. But there's still a lot more fear around plane crashes because they kill hundreds of people at once. Besides, if you want big death tolls, hydro tops the list easily.
    2
  1450.  @rowd149  That's all very interesting, but it doesn't really answer my question.
    2
  1451. When you've got the most well funded military in the world, you can go to war with a lot of people without worrying investors.
    2
  1452.  @trejkaz  Generally people want to ask about someone's ancestry, but are often unclear with their wording.
    2
  1453.  @andrasbeke3012  I mean, fringe economics do sort of happen on a very small scale, through voluntary religious and cultural communities (some may be considered cults). They're often quite closed off from the world, so they can be hard to study.
    2
  1454. Asianometry has a few videos on South Korea.
    2
  1455.  @sillybeanthing  You can only fix a car so much before it would cost far too much to be worth it. In some countries it's easier since safety standards are more lax, but even considering that there will come a point where environmentally scrapping it is the better option.
    2
  1456.  @HelloKittyFanMan.  Storing the same quantity as a gas would require a massive cylinder probably about the size of a car. It is a liquid in there, it's under about 850 kPa of pressure to keep it just about at the point of vaporisation even at a typical temperature range outside the cylinder. If you let out some of the gas into the air straight from the cylinder (I don't recommend trying this for obvious safety reasons), you'd get a similar effect to a CO2 fire extinguisher, a jet of very cold (about -42C) gas blasting out at a high velocity which would ice up anything in front of it. Isobutane, another hydrocarbon, is actually used as a refrigerant gas. The reason it doesn't ice up all the tubing is because the regulator maintains a flow rate that stops it exiting the cylinder all at once, so while it might chill the hose down a little bit, it's not going to chill it to below freezing on a warm day.
    2
  1457.  @nalder1093  You have to remember this is the BBC we're taking about, that name carries a lot of weight, it's not just some random journalist.
    2
  1458.  @Spherical_Cow  Starship and HLS Starship are basically completely different spacecraft apart from appearance, so I don't think you can really compare them. Landing on the moon is completely different to landing on earth.
    2
  1459. @Spherical_Cow  Honestly I think it's a greatly overengineered (and oversized) solution but I get why SpaceX is doing it as it saves creating a lander design from scratch. And to be fair, while it will launch from earth if it does so on SLS that will be doing most of the work. But regardless, as a lunar lander it doesn't need the same performance as regular Starship to be considered safe for human use, that's the critical thing. As you say, regular Starship is years away from carrying passengers, if it ever does (I have my doubts, there may be better alternatives in the long run). Just to be clear, I am assuming OP meant using regular Starship instead of SLS and Orion for launch and transit to HLS Starship (they aren't entirely clear, I'll admit).
    2
  1460.  @HesderOleh  If the difference were that small, perhaps (though 3 hours is considered worthwhile for most HSR projects in the West). But we're talking about 8 hours vs 22 hours here. I don't think China could resist the economic advatages mobility would bring by allowing more planes to fly, if HSR wasn't there.
    2
  1461.  @HesderOleh  China still has a lot of relatively empty space. The real speed constraints on HSR routes is when you have to avoid a lot of obstacles. And realistically this is the way things are going, even in crowded Europe. New high speed lines are being built to 350+ km\h design speeds, even if the trains don't go that fast yet. If it was that much more expensive than fewer countries would be willing to put in the additional expense. I think that mass mobility is in modern China's interests. For the most part people in China are free to travel within most of the country, and that has economic benefits, from employees for factories to domestic tourism. If the HSR network wasn't there, and flights were still hamstrung by airspace restrictions, then China would suffer economically. It wouldn't just result in a lower quality of life for their people, especially their middle class, but it would also hurt their nation too. It's also fair to say the China of today is not the China of 30 years ago. While the country is still far from democratic, it's not the same rigid dogmatic autocracy it once was.
    2
  1462.  @WobblyBits_X  Despite the southern alps there's still a lot of flat land though. Christchurch itself is completely flat apart from the south east, surrounded by not particularly good farmland (mostly grazing and stud farms). There's not really any pressure not to expand outwards, especially considering Christchurch itself isn't that big, most people living there are still within a 20 minute drive of the CBD. Hell, I biked all the way from Cashmere Hills to the cathedral in about 20 mins!
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  1463. He always had a cultish following, but before it was nerds and tech bros who just thought everything he touched turned to gold (even when it didn't). Now it's political radicals.
    2
  1464. Cybertruck will be a lot more expensive, it's a luxury toy in the end. F-150 is a workhorse.
    2
  1465. Part of that is probably the numbers, there aren't that many EA and SEA immigrants in the UK. Many Chinese are either temporary students or from Hong Kong (the latter has far closer cultural ties to the UK than Mainland China for obvious reasons).
    2
  1466.  @Isometrix116  I think the reverse may happen because spaceplanes have to compete with rockets, not aircraft. Rockets have gotten better, but spaceplanes do have some potential advantages over them. In terms of noise for example, rockets are deafening, so even a spaceplane that is as noisy as the noisiest aircraft is an improvement. On the other hand, you're trying to make a faster plane compete with a slower plane that's already fairly quiet and fuel efficient.
    2
  1467. Zimbabwe and Botswana are the polar opposites on how to and how not to become successfully independent from a colonial power as an African nation.
    2
  1468.  @ellchaplin851  We could be seeing more of a bifurcation of the market, with middle class holiday makers increasingly going DIY or for smaller more premium operators, and those on lower incomes increasingly able to afford overseas travel, if only on a very tight budget. Thomas Cook kind of occupied that middle ground which might be why it went bust.
    2
  1469. You mean Elon Musk?
    2
  1470. Good luck getting affordable travel insurance if a fever means you have to cancel your holiday.
    2
  1471. From what I've heard, NZ has most of the living costs of Australia without the income. And there just aren't that many jobs. As for the weather, imagine a slightly warmer United Kingdom and I don't think you're far off.
    2
  1472. My concern is there's a fine line between "I deserve these things and it's a woman's fault I can get them" and "I don't deserve these things because I'm a worthless human being who doesn't deserve to live". Any kind of "shock therapy" could drive an former incel to suicide, and there's some evidence there's a pipeline between the two groups.
    2
  1473. Carlos keeps it contained allowing the rest of Vox to be more neutral. Somebody has to keep the SJW's happy.
    2
  1474.  @clangboomsteam  I think we do in a social context, men hanging out with other men, typically exclusively, does seem to be seen as a bad thing by some. But beyond that, there does seem to be this idea that if men don't express their emotions in a straightforward and obvious way, it means they are emotionally repressed, and masculinity usually gets the blame. I think that's partly why these pursuits are undervalued compared to approaches like therapy, some think men need to learn to be vulnerable and express emotions more blatantly, whereas I would argue that it's not reasonable to expect all men to be the same in this regard. I think many men just express emotions and talk about issues in a less direct and more subtle way, and that might be picked up by men similar to them, but not everyone else. There are those who see the tough and stoic image of masculinity as toxic, but I would counter that's how a lot of men want to be, and we should work with that rather than expect them to be someone else.
    2
  1475. If airbus had come up with the A380 in the 80's or 90's, it would have been much more successful. It was really bad timing.
    2
  1476. Nuclear is certainly increasingly expensive, but it's hard to say how much of that is a result of irrational anti-nuclear sentiment, and how much of it is down to other factors. The cost is partly down to a skill atrophy, few new nuclear power stations have been built in the west since the 1980's, and may of the engineers that helped construct them are retired or deceased. R&D is also incredibly sluggish, it;'s very difficult to test novel designs, and the current state of the art that's ready to construct doesn't look much different from the designs built in the 1980's.
    2
  1477. One thing Botswana also didn't do was kick out all the British officials and civil servants in government at the time of independence. They kept them on until they retired or resigned, using their experience to teach the next generation how to run the government. This avoided a bunch of amateurs being put in charge and wrecking things.
    2
  1478. I think that's partly why suburbs are so popular. They're a transitional environment between the city and the countryside. One of the first things young expectant couples in many developed countries do is buy a spacious, often single family, home in the suburbs or in a satellite village/town, within a quiet neighborhood and with ample private green space. Basically they're trying to get as much of that countryside environment while being close enough to the city for their job. Culturally the urban core is not seen as a suitable place to raise children for anyone with the means to do otherwise.
    2
  1479. Then people will create shell companies to own more properties.
    2
  1480. I think from about 1985 there was a plan to gradually introduce representative democracy to HK. I don't know how corporate votes got involved.
    2
  1481.  @canto_v12  I do wonder if the democratic transition was part of a plan to make HK more resilient against Chinese communism, perhaps even able to go fully independent a-la Singapore. That's probably preferable to the UK than having the CCP come in and put HK fully under their authoritarian yoke. It would be enough to scare the corporations into going along with the plan (though they clearly managed to get some huge concessions). For a while it seemed that it sort of worked, no independence but mainland China kept its hands off. Increasingly in recent years it seems that China is changing its mind though.
    2
  1482.  @canto_v12  Unfortunately democracy often comes with corruption. It can take a long time to improve things and even the best democracies are regularly beset by scandals. We can't ignore the wider changes within Mainland China itself as well, economic reforms there are being halted or rolled back, and they've slid towards more authoritarian governance. It is easy to see why China is becoming increasingly less tolerant of the "one country, two systems" doctrine. Couple that with the fact that HK is becoming increasingly less economically relevant within China. Shenzhen and Guangzhou have become the more important cities within the region.
    2
  1483. Because people hate living and working underground, generally.
    2
  1484. They're Alstom Metropolis vehicles, so kind of? They are a different length and use OHL instead of 3rd rail, but they are based on the same design.
    2
  1485. Realistically it would have to be everyone or no-one, because a wealth threshold is ripe for dispute and abuse. You could do a Norway and make everyone's taxes public information, but I think culturally that would be near impossible in the US.
    2
  1486. I can kind of understand why, not doing so would create an incentive for these multi-millionaires to wind up their businesses rather than keep them open. If the PPP's objective was to preserve jobs, the wealth of the owners can't come into it.
    2
  1487. France is importing cheap energy from Germany, because they can't store all their solar energy when it spikes in the middle of the day.
    2
  1488.  @leeleeisgay  When you're talking about civilisations that old, there might but not be many records about their existence. We often learn of ancient battles through written records, there are precious few for the Indus Valley. The idea of them being peaceful is entirely based on an absence of evidence, but as the phrase goes that is not evidence of absence. And if indeed they were peaceful, historically they would be very much the exception. Other Ancient empires such as the Egyptians were certainly not.
    2
  1489.  @ashutoshsingh3204  The UK, if it matters. Accuse me of bias if you wish, if so, my defence is that I don't consider the british empire to be better or worse than any other. In my eyes the Ottomans, Mughals, Zulu and others are comparable, just on a smaller scale. We do sometimes not give enough attention to empires outside of Europe.
    2
  1490.  @bfc3057  The colonies is a joke term, it's not supposed to be taken seriously. And if you are inferring that saying "East of Suez", a far more specific term than "Asia" (which has no fully agreed upon border) somehow betrays a colonialist mindset, well you must have very low standards. I'm no fan of Johnson either, but calling him an imperialist is going a bit far.
    2
  1491.  @niranjansrinivasan4042  It's not so much the Indians would have caught up with the British, it's that the British would have never pulled so far ahead in the first place. Nobody would have. India didn't have an industrial revolution for the same reason China didn't have one, a huge pool of manual labour and a limited supply of raw materials to process. Thanks to imperialism, Britian had way more raw materials than it could deal with by labourers in cottage industries, therefore the opportunity for mechanisation and the factory system presented itself. The industrial revolution was enabled by the most brutal kind of "creative destruction" that Britain perpetuated in its colonies. It's not about sharing technology, it's about developing it in the first place.
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  1492. Was it only white people that conducted chattel slavery? That's honestly an interesting question. I'd like to think not, I'd hope not as it will feed into the "white people are evil" narrative.
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  1493. UGB only works if it encourages densification. Green Belts in the UK don't always do that, sometimes they just encourage longer commutes from people outside the belt, leading to overcrowded roads and trains. Personally I hate living in an apartment block or high rise (which is why I don't live in one), but I am forced to accept that's what you have to build in order to make a city less car dependant. High quality public transport needs density to be profitable, or even sustainable in and of itself (a diesel bus that runs empty 90% of the time all day long is probably worse for CO2 than a bunch of cars driven twice a day). Walking and cycling need to be practical options, and that means shorter commute distances, again coming back to densification. I think it's really is the key to everything, as much as I personally hate it.
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  1494.  @timogul  We've been able to make heat since we discovered fire, to make cold (without hauling blocks of ice around) requires advanced knowledge of thermodynamics and the ability to construct complex machinery like fluid pumps. Without agriculture Mississippi and the rest of the south (apart from Florida) would have been just like the south west before the 20th century, barely inhabited wilderness.
    2
  1495. @weissfox5857  True, but I'd argue in the suburban case it's a necessary compromise. I bet many of these people would love a rural bolthole, but practical considerations, such as proximity to work, get in the way. This is not something that's an issue in all countries, in the UK distances are smaller so more people can live in the countryside and be able to work in the cities.
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  1496. Good locations are especially important if you're a child. Drivers cannot see a short child between two parked cars, whereas they could probably see an adult. In the end, it's best to make eye contact with drivers before you cross, if they stop for you.
    2
  1497. @TV-ex5qq  Indeed, but other countries have been more willing to adapt their culture in the face of new technology and working practices. That doesn't mean politeness has gone away, it just means it has been more willing to embrace change.
    2
  1498.  @kelciheit  It's hard to say. I don't think it would be seen as a command economy in the traditional sense, since that suggests control from a bureaucracy mostly detached from any concerns of individuals. The problem is generally any current economic model, from eco Marxism to libertarian capitalism, is based on some level of scarcity. Once we remove that scarcity then those models don't really work anymore. So trying to compare the model of a post scarcity economy to one where scarcity is still present does tend to produce tenuous and incomplete analogies. That said, I'd consider the system in Wall-E as a bizarre cultural continuation of consumer capitalism, one that might make little sense to us in the "past", but could be viewed as a logical end point for a capitalist system which can exponentially produce more and more at lower and lower costs.
    2
  1499.  @BellXllebMusic  If you've got access to the asteroid belt, you've effectively got unlimited resources, including water. Even better if you're really good at recycling, as you might be with super cheap energy, you can just re-use resources over and over again. Though clearly Buy n Large chose the latter.
    2
  1500.  @ingold1470  Indeed, but if you imagine dialling that up to 11, you can see how it could be used not just for a pension, but an income.
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  1501. One confounding issue in the UK is there are also a lot of Hindus and Sikhs here, and they also have a rather antagonistic relationship with Muslims. A lot of ethnic violence in the UK has been between Muslims and Hindus.
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  1502. I don't think it's the end for the DSTO spaceplane concept. It just needs something with a bit more grunt to get into orbit, then you've got a vehicle with the capability of a small rocket with the flexiblity, lower g-forces, and turnaround time of a spaceplane. Great for passengers and small but fragile cargo. But the tech probably needs a few more years of R&D. Though you can go the Dream Chaser route and just stick the thing on top of a booster!
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  1503. I think the slavery reparations would have been taken a bit more seriously if some of the figures weren't so absurd. Like several multiples of UK GDP absurd, sums that would take centuries to pay off under any realistic scenario. Couple that with a struggling UK economy and you've not got a snowball's chance in hell of it happening.
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  1504. ​​ @oliviastratton2169 I think that's perhaps in part due to the sometimes incestuous relationship between sociology and political activism in some circles. Sometimes some fields of sociology seem to want to construct some grand narrative to reshape society along some prominent academic's pet idea of how the world should be run.
    2
  1505. ​ @SigFigNewton When we tax the wealthy less often what we're doing is preventing them moving their money somewhere where some other country will benefit.
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  1506. Compared to literal theocracy I'd take the US any day. It's not perfect but it at least it has checks and balances.
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  1507.  @theslavbeing335  Depends, if India agrees to route it through Pakistan or the Kashmir (not an easy feat I know), the Himalaya issue is irrelevant, just go around them.
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  1508.  @ARandomDonut  I think the difference is you can't often make a whole weeks vacation out of a state park, if you want to be hiking or doing similar activities every day, which you can do with a national park. When I've visited the US a state park would be a day trip or a stop off on the way to somewhere else, it was never really a "destination".
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  1509. Because factories go off-grid by installing a coal or gas boiler generally.
    2
  1510.  @Azraleee  There are quite a few charter sleepers still kicking around.
    2
  1511. ​​ @AspiringDevil SpaceX was a combination of hard work, good timing and a US government keen to support new launchers with generous contracts. It's not had much competition for the last decade or so, to the point where Starlink is basically a dogfooding project to keep the launch numbers up so the economic model actually works, otherwise there just isn't enough demand because they've saturated their market. But I do see some competitors on the horizon, so I suspect they'll have to compete more in the next decade or so. I think Starship remains a big question mark for the company, it's a far larger technological leap and initial ambitions have been somewhat scaled back. What it will be actually capable of, if it succeeds in being reliable at all, remains to be seen.
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  1512.  @Bododolive  His clean look and posh accent may suggest he comes from a wealthy background, though it is of course just a stereotype. It probably helps to look and talk that way when dealing with wealthy clients.
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  1513.  @iBloodxHunter  Battlefield is still not the bleeding edge in graphics though. And for every Battlefield, there's an Overwatch, Fortnite, and Minecraft, none of which are particularly graphically intensive (especially minecraft!).
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  1514. I think where storage is going to be the most of a challenge is for very long term storage, weeks or months. This is going to be necessary for areas that have highly seasonal demand patterns, i.e. places that need a lot of heating in the winter but don't need a lot of air conditioning in the summer. If not blessed by abundant hydro like Norway or parts of Canada, places like this will need to harvest excess generation in the summer and store it for the winter, much like a hibernating animal stores food. Hydrogen is a viable option, but it's pretty much the most ineffecient energy storage method, requires lots of infrastructure and will leak out of an airtight container because the molecules are so small, nearly every material is like swiss cheese. In the end this may be where small modular nuclear can shine, providing energy and hot water on demand, the latter of which can be used for heating, eliminating most of the need for very long term storage.
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  1515. That's a bizarre law. I can imagine motorways getting clogged up with drivers doing 70 when everyone else can go 130.
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  1516. The Belgians pretty much just gave up and decided not to have a national government for a while. The system seem to be designed well enough for the country to function without one, more or less.
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  1517. Though it's important to point out that in countries with good regulation there isn't much overlap between antibiotics used for livestock and humans. Livestock antibiotics in wastewater is a problem, of course, but one less hazardous to human health.
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  1518.  @maxwellquebec8675  I think there are merits to both kinds of testing regimes. SpaceX's "keep launching rockets until they don't blow up anymore" is certainly less cost efficient than NASA or Blue Origin's "try and get it right the first time". Methinks SpaceX wouldn't be able to do what they do without the world's richest man's deep pockets along with his cult like status. OTOH, there are things you can learn from physical experiments that are hard to discover in simulation or on a whiteboard.
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  1519. I think escalation to the CAA is the best route forward here. Lufthansa had their chance to make things right.
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  1520. I had a strange experience where my luggage arrived before I did! This was on a return trip from Kuusamo to Heathrow via Helsinki, we decided to overnight in Helsinki, get a nice hotel and explore the city a little. We left our snowboards at the airport as Finnair were happy to keep them overnight and put them on our flight the next morning. Turns out they just put them on the next flight to Heathrow, where some rather confused ground staff saw them lay unclaimed in the oversized baggage area for at least half a day! So instead of the bags arriving after the passengers, the passengers arrived after the bags!
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  1521.  @alexfrank1831  I could give some other examples... But yeah, you guys aren't that bad really, unlike the UK, it gets finished eventually, rather than spending a few hundred million on consultation and then cancelling the lot when the next government takes power!
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  1522. I think the treatment of disabled people does somewhat reflect the needs of the civilisation to compete with others. A lot of the times when we see eugenics and other discriminatory ideologies come up, we see them from civilisations who are in fierce competition with their neighbours, they want physically perfect people who can out compete their rivals economically and/or militarily. Ancient Greece and Europe for much of its history were highly competitive. In periods of low competition, as long as there are sufficient resources, compassion is much more affordable, as we see in much of the modern world and in certain periods of prehistory.
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  1523. Tokyo's transit map just looks like a plate of spaghetti 😂
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  1524. ​​ @mikeAK89 I can understand the justification somewhat. Police make a lot of enemies as opposed to medical professionals, so would probably be sued every other week for something even if totally vexatious. That could create a large administrative burden that would be easier to handle at a precinct level. Another issue is salaries. Malpractice insurance isn't cheap especially for more senior roles, so police wages would need to rise to compensate, especially in less desirable precincts which already struggle with recruitment and retention.
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  1525.  @component9008  Honolulu is pretty dense as it is, it is not a city with a lot of sprawl, that's pretty much a necessity due to geography. And yes, more middle class tourists may settle for a high rise hotel, but the wealthy ones are going to want something a bit more secluded.
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  1526. I thought the 2005 incident was caused by a bomb hidden, in all things, a barrel of beer?
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  1527. Any dish that uses fish goujons or fish fingers does not deserve the title of fish and chips. Whole fillets of fish in batter, never breadcrumbs, and the batter better be thick enough to fall off the fish, is the only acceptable way.
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  1528.  @garethbaus5471  For renewables (other than hydro) it really depends on what is available to service their intermittency, and how much it costs both in fixed costs and variable costs. We could assume slow progress with storage and imagine gas doing most of the heavy lifting well into the 2050's, or we can assume rapid progress with storage, and gas becoming less necessary more quickly. These won't necessarily tie in with the amount of carbon tax, it just depends on how well the research goes, what is viable outside the lab and what isn't. It also may depend on the availability of certain ores like lithium, and the number of mines people are willing to open. Renewables can also be constrained by a grid that isn't flexible enough to absorb their varying generation. Solar in particular can swamp the grid around midday, which could means panels would need to be disconnected, same with wind power if there's a strong breeze. That will obviously impact their capacity factor, and therefore their cost per kWh.
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  1529.  @garethbaus5471  I think that estimate will really depend on local geography, climate and current energy mix. 50% would probably be more than manageable in some places, but difficult to achieve in others, particularly those with poor access to gas and highly seasonal supply and demand.
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  1530.  @garethbaus5471  Some places are more constrained with their interconnector capabilities. A cold, dark, windless Europe would struggle to access much outside its borders, not enough to make up for a large deficit. Besides, long distance power lines are still quite expensive, you don't want to build more than you need.
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  1531.  @garethbaus5471  Not nearly enough to make up for a big shortfall in wind energy.
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  1532.  @garethbaus5471  Blocking high in January in Western Europe. Winds light to non-existent over the area, which provides the vast majority of Europe's wind energy (particularly the north sea). Electricity demand is high, because it's cold and days are short. Weak sunlight means solar doesn't produce very much.
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  1533.  @othian2567  Indeed, that would seem very odd since its next door neighbour (the UK) has huge stockpiles of plutonium it's desperate to dispose of.
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  1534.  zandaroos553  Perhaps in the dense eastern US to some extent, but not out in California nearly as much. Those cities are significantly younger, and many of them didn't become significant until after the car became commonplace. And I think too many new urbanists blame the auto industry for suburbia, people generally want open space and privacy if they can get it. Europeans generally either didn't have the space or the money to afford the big houses many in the US have, so the suburban lifestyle was never as prevalent. In the UK suburbs were built after the war too, not as low density as land wasn't as cheap, but people were generally enthusiastic to go from cramped town houses out into the suburbs where they'd have their own green space and much more generous living area. A lot of people like suburbs, not everyone does, but a lot of people do, and that's why they still exist. It's not brainwashing or some social experiment, just people with more money and opportunity moving up to what they see as a better lifestyle. Is it segregationist? Sure, not everyone could afford it, and there was exclusion along racial lines in the US. But that wasn't the fault of the suburbs themselves, African Americans just wanted the opportunity to live in them the same as any white American.
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  1535. I think some dedicated concert venues do have something like that, just not sports arenas. Problem is each lighting set is still going to be subtly different for each concert, and there's going to be something that doesn't work.
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  1536. I think current space law, as it stands, is not sufficient for our future needs. No company is going to want to do a lot of business in space without a solid legal framework for things like ownership, liability, and jurisdiction. A vibrant economy in space needs the right legal framework to give stability and confidence to investors that if there's an incident or dispute, there is a somewhat clear path to legal resolution.
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  1537. I think the ultimate answer to Sokal was SCIgen, a computer program that spat out jargon filled but nonsensical CS papers, which managed to get accepted in a handful of journals and publications. When the hoax paper isn't even written by a human, that's the next level.
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  1538.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  That's not a particularly useful statement by itself. Colonies varied greatly in their governance and intended purpose, some were extractive, others were more about keeping territory out of rivals hands, some were also about access to trade routes. Generally you can argue that colonies caused suffering when oppressing people for whatever reason, and certainly many, but not all colonies used violent means to deal with independence movements. But apart from that, whether they objectively made the lives of the people worse compared to an alternate history where they remained independent (or under the control of a previous empire) is not so easy to answer. Also it's important to point out that empires before the colonial period would also conquer territory for extractive purposes, sometimes just by demanding tribute from a vassal.
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  1539.  @Jade.Palace  But that means you're restricted to your city and other settlements you can get to by train or bus. You can't easily go to the countryside or a remote location.
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  1540. I do like the simple way the US marks their trails. Often in the UK you have a real dearth of trail markers, you have to look for a fingerpost or a pillar with a coloured arrow on it or text, and those often only show up at junctions. In the US, they just put a bit of coloured paint on a tree, sometimes in a shape but often just a stripe. It's cheap and easy, which means there are usually a lot more markers which makes it significantly harder to get lost.
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  1541. One issue is we don't know what the employment landscape might look like in 2100. It could be that so many jobs have been automated away that most people do not work or only work a small number of hours per week. This could be compatible with a shrinking and ageing population, if population and economic growth essentially detach from each other thanks to technology. You could imagine lots of people in semi-retirement, who may spend 1-2 days a week probably working from home in order to be ten times as productive as a person working 5 days a week is today.
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  1542.  @adams13245  Hitler was like the RTS player racing to the top of the tech tree while neglecting their defences and basic units.
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  1543.  @non-hyphenated  I think the problem is more with private sector employers who know how to use the system efficiently. Interesting that your institution used H1-B for your postdoc, any reason they couldn't use J-1 for a visiting academic? Perhaps they were needed for longer than the visa allowed.
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  1544.  @darran311  If you count the one on the crazy golf course.
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  1545. ​ @katrinabryce Part of the problem is there's a lot of poor quality electric bikes and scooters from low cost manufacturers that don't have very safe batteries and chargers. Scooters in particular are a problem because they aren't road legal in the UK so there isn't a big market for legitimate brands for law abiding customers.
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  1546. It's sad to see the core message of the protests being infiltrated by far left extremists wanting communism or anarchy, as is shown here it will likely be their downfall. Those who want to change government for the better get swamped by those wanting to smash it to pieces.
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  1547.  @nunyabiznes33  True, though crude oil isn't far off in our world.
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  1548. Redenomination is a tool that is often used to combat the practical effects of inflation. Just create a "new" currency with a base unit that's some fixed order of magnitude more valuable than the "old" currency base unit, and have everyone switch over. With that, you can effectively allow inflation to continue indefinitely. Ideally you shouldn't have to do this more than once every few centuries or so, but in cases of hyperinflation, redenomination can happen much more often (it's important to remember consistent inflation hasn't really been a thing for very long at all, estimations going back into the past suggest a mostly stagnant level of inflation until the last couple of centuries).
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  1549. This is why I prefer to stick with simple glyphosate weedkiller. It's not perfect, but the acute toxicity is very low.
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  1550.  @JitzyJT  Well, let's just say the track record for that sort of thing isn't great.
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  1551. Tesla is losing the battery storage market to east asian competitors, both old (Samsung, Panasonic) and new (CATL). Tesla has even started buying CATL batteries for its cars, because vertical integration can't beat economies of scale in this case. The humanoid robot is still firmly in gimmick territory, and they're still way behind Boston Dynamics and Unitree in practical mobile robotics. Personally I don't think Tesla has much of a hope of being any more than a bit player in the energy storage market, the giant battery manufacturers just have too many advantages. As for the cars, it's hard to say. On the EV front legacy automakers are catching up along with some startups like Polestar and Rivian, and while they often can't match the feature set of Tesla, they can make up for it with superior build quality and some offer a wider range of vehicles. Charging networks do seem to be somewhere Tesla is well ahead in some markets, mainly because the competition seems to want to copy it with walled garden membership systems (seriously, just put a f'kin card reader on the thing and be done with it! Thankfully this seems to be changing) without the scale to pull it off. Self driving is the big unknown, Tesla is doing well at the moment but it's insistence on a purely visual system without use of new technologies like low cost solid state radar and lidar might mean it falls behind in future if it doesn't change its mind (which it probably will but still). EV's are still in a position where they are upmarket vehicles that are not being sold to the masses (though at the moment that seems to be all new cars!) so there's a big prize to the company that can break in to the midrange and budget market with a practical (i.e. not a tiny battery) but affordable EV. That could be Tesla, but I think it's likely that to could be someone else, maybe a legacy automaker but perhaps even one of those new Chinese companies able to reduce costs through massive economies of scale. With a new vehicle ICE ban looming in many nations and EV prices still out of reach for many, customers will need to buy something, and if the only affordable options with more than a 50 mile range are some no name Chinese marques, then that's what they'll have to get.
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  1552. The problem is that once you get to very high net worth individuals, wealth becomes a rather complicated thing to measure, and the effect of a wealth cap would have a very different impact on different individuals even in they are similarly wealthy on paper. Let's for a start ignore trusts and all the other machinations these people could use to skirt a wealth cap, and assume the system is pretty watertight. Let's consider two billionaires of similar wealth, billionaire A and billionaire B. A founded a company that made it big, really big, a company that's worth tens or even hundreds of billions and they have a large percentage or even complete ownership of said company. B started out similar to A, but is significantly older than A, and has sold most of their stake in the company they founded. Instead they have a family office or similar investment vehicle that splits their wealth into a diverse array of investments. So a wealth cap comes along, and both A and B are over the limit. What can they do? B can sell or give away some of their shares, spread around all of their investments. There is a hit to stock prices, but it's fairly evenly spread out so the damage isn't too great. A doesn't have those shares to sell or give away, they can only raise funds by selling shares or an ownership stake in their company. This will likely lower the value of their company as selling a lot of shares often does, and could cause a vicious feedback loop that wipes billions off the stock price. It might even mean the government has to seize a majority ownership stake as that's the only way A can get under the cap, so we end up with nationalisation by stealth. Perhaps A decides it's best to avoid the hassle by constraining their company's growth, perhaps they won't invest in that new factory or hire 1000 more employees. Which is obviously not an outcome many people actually want.
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  1553. It may depend on if those rights were in the property deed in the first place. You may have an easement on your deed allowing a road to be built in a specific location on your land. In which case you aren't due compensation since the right was stated when you purchased the land.
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  1554. Depends on the antifreeze. If it's propylene glycol you'll likely be fine anyway, it's a common food additive.
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  1555.  @stuarthamilton5112  It's closer to midnight now than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. If it only tracked threat of a nuclear exchange then that would make absolutely no sense.
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  1556. I visited Naxos a couple of years ago, and the last time I'd visited was pre-crisis, a couple of years before the fall. The increase in tourism from when I last visited was substantial. This was in late September, which was usually a quieter period compared to the peak in August as the weather becomes cooler and wetter, but there were still a lot of tourists. Where there used to be housing has sprung up may new hotels, guest houses and restaurants (a bit of a shame since many locals had been displaced from the town centre into the surrounding villages). Sure, you could still find a lot of empty abandoned concrete shells outside the city, but those had been a feature even before the crisis. The demographics of the tourists had also changed. There were a lot more long distance tourists (USA, Canada, Australia/NZ, even a few Chinese and Japanese) among the Germans, Brits and Swedes that had been the staple tourist groups since air travel become affordable to the masses. As far as I can tell many of the tourism dependant island economies are recovering rapidly. I don't know it's that's reflected on the mainland though.
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  1557.  @johnsamuel1999  And city, there's a lot of layers to the police in the US.
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  1558.  @cjmillsnun  Including voice recordings on the QAR would be fairly trivial to implement though. There might need to be some rewiring, but they wouldn't need to completely overhaul the aircraft.
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  1559. Really it's a good argument for not carrying any money at all. Unfortunately insuring against lost cash is difficult unless you can prove how much was on you. But we're not at that point yet in most parts of the world. And good on you for at least sticking out the vacation. I'd want to go straight home after that, that would totally ruin my vacation and I'd be miserable for the rest of the trip, I'd want a total do-over and extra time off.
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  1560.  @fomobull4187  Cloned data won't make a difference anyway, since it's still an unauthorised transaction. Really I think the only reason to do it now is due to lack of infrastructure (even in many developed countries). And cash tips are more likely to be kept by staff than credit cards. There are of course precautions you can take to almost certainly prevent incidents like that, generally not ever being in a place on your own, go with a tour guide or mingle in with a crowd (though that won't stop the pickpockets!). But I appreciate that can limit your opportunities.
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  1561.  @georgeshapiro301  Neurological implants are driving a lot of the renewed interest in psycho surgery. In some ways it's the precision airstrike to the lobotomies carpet bombing, delivering electrical stimulation to just the right part of the brain to treat a condition. We've also got to consider the "anti-psychiatry" movement, that claims most, if not all mental illnesses (other than those caused by physical illness/injury such as head trauma) are either rooted in psychological trauma or maladaptation caused by societal problems such as poverty and discrimination, or are not an illness at all, but a "neurodivergence" that is not accommodated by an overly conformist social structure. That has made its way into mainstream academia among some left wing social and political scientists.
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  1562. Many regulations are not, but we hear about the ones that are.
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  1563. I guess the people who would be most swayed on environmental grounds are likely to be working in jobs where remote working is an option and are probably young and living in urban areas in large cities which they rarely leave. Basically people who don't really need cars so much anyway.
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  1564. ​​​​ @juannaym8488 I think he made a fair argument that automated vehicles would be far more efficient than human drivers and that you could fit more cars on the same amount of road infrastructure. It wouldn't be a solution where roads are extremely congested, but if it allows us to do more with the road infrastructure we have, that's still a good thing especially in smaller towns and cities. I also don't like the blanket argument of just replacing cars with public transport, be it buses, trams, trains or subway lines, without recognising its limitations. Public transport can't be a solution to traffic if said traffic has highly dispersed origins and/or destinations, and in a lot of places, especially the US, that is the case. Automated vehicles could actually allow for public transport to be more easily incorporated in some cases by allowing more seamless multi modal transfers without long wait times. But that would allow people to stay in their single family suburban sprawl and not move into dense apartments or townhomes like good little urbanists.
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  1565. Apparently they weren't blanks, which is very disturbing!
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  1566.  @hurrdurrmurrgurr  Yeah... no. The UK hasn't been self sufficient in food for centuries. Nations were not capable of feeding themselves, people starved to death when there was a famine.
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  1567.  @hurrdurrmurrgurr  There was no Haber Bosch in the pre globalised world. Even after it, in WWII with strict food rationing and home allotments galore, the UK still needed massive food imports to avoid starvation. What you would end up with is a lot of marginal, low yield land being overexploited, and existing arable land being overworked. It would be environmentally unfavourable and would increase dependence on synthetic chemicals.
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  1568. The problem is that 38% is very unevenly distributed from day to day. The vast majority of renewable energy generated in the UK is wind, with biomass hydro and solar making up the rest, and the rest is not very much. Wind is cheap to generate, but it's intermittency is probably the worst of all renewable energy sources. You can have days or weeks of plentiful production and then days or weeks of almost no production. The best you can do is estimate your output based on weather forecasts. Part of the reason the UK grid has so much gas is to balance all that wind energy out. There's a small amount of pumped storage at Dinorwig, and the new Norway ICT basically uses their hydro as a battery, allowing them to slow down their outflow when the UK has a lot of wind, and then send back that increase in hydraulic head that otherwise wouldn't have happened when there's little to no wind. However, gas is still by far the primary way to balance out the intermittency of wind in the UK, and will likely remain so for at least the near future, as increasing electrification of heating and transport means demand is likely to outstrip any storage capacity that is built.
    2
  1569. ​ @LA90598 Manchester has lots of new skyscrapers, and so does Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow, but their infrastructure and size still trails London enormously. You can see this by metro area population, London has 9.5 million, Birmingham and Manchester have about 2.7 million each, and Leeds and Glasgow only has 1.9 million and 1.6 million respectively. Infrastructure is also massively superior in London, with a large network of metro lines and commuter rail with multiple cross city routes, let alone a vast bus network. The other cities have some light rail or a single tiny metro line, or in the case of Leeds, nothing but buses. A lot of the north south divide is due to the domination of London and the South East in the UK economy, while cities elsewhere in the country have been improving they still lag way behind.
    2
  1570. ​​ @Apathy.Apathy. As someone who lives near Manchester, I don't think the city will rival somewhere like Milan or Munich without significant improvements to transport infrastructure. The Metrolink is nice, but it's a system that befits a smaller city than Manchester.
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  1571.  @Apathy.Apathy.  Ehh... it's perhaps better than it was 30 years ago, but the gap to close is so immense. Manchester is bad enough, but Birmingham is much further behind, and Leeds lags behind many smaller cities in Europe.
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  1572.  @Kelson01  Not if you have a fuel filter. It might gunk that up a bit quicker, sure, but filters are relatively cheap to manufacture and replace.
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  1573. I mean, if you wanted to be ruthless about it, you could argue the Faroes shouldn't be inhabited at all.
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  1574. Could you make deuterium from protium, given a suitable source of neutrons (such a neutronic fusion reactor)?
    2
  1575. The scrubbers in the chimney did remove nearly all of the radioactive elements though, so it's still considered only a level 5.
    2
  1576.  @ronald3836  Indeed, but it's a very inefficient fusion reactor and we can only hope to extract a tiny fraction of its output.
    2
  1577.  @Alarios711  I am disagreeing with you on the idea that we can be confident that we won't have viable fusion for a very long time (or vice versa for that matter, but that's not my point). We could have a breakthrough in the next year or so, or not for decades. We know fusion is a hard problem to solve, but we really don't know how hard. That was exactly where we were with fixed wing flight in the 19th century, there had been some incremental improvements but people could have said it was 10 years or 50 years away in 1890 and both would have been reasonable, justifiable positions.
    2
  1578.  @Alarios711  FTL involves theoretical physics and exotic concepts that may or may not exist. Fusion works, we can do it now, we just can't get an appreciable amount of net energy out yet. A lot of that is down to not understanding exactly how fusion plasma behaves inside confinement. We have made a lot of progress in recent years in understanding that, and there's more going on as we speak. There's plenty of reason to be hopeful. Of course, there might be other challenges that push back the timeline, but there might not be. We won't know unless we try.
    2
  1579. I want an all electric hot hatch. Unfortunately physics makes this quite difficult, an EV the size of a hatchback is much heavier than a petrol one, and will have a lot less range and power. In the end that's probably why compact cars, outside of small city hire schemes, are probably on their way out.
    2
  1580.  @Insulus  That's going to be even more true for virgin aluminum though. You're always going to have impurities and slag to skim off.
    2
  1581. To be fair, there are many versions of Robin Hood and that is the Victorian version. In some of the older versions he's actually just a thief and not really a good moral character at all. But this "Robyn Hood" is not really either of those.
    2
  1582. I think synthetic (using atmospheric CO2 as a feedstock) or bio diesel is likely to be the future fuel of choice for long haul trucks. Hydrogen will take up too much space, and batteries will be too heavy. The fuel will be carbon neutral but will cost energy to produce, however as long as there's enough clean energy it should be viable, and it will likely have fewer contaminants than fossil diesel so it will burn cleaner. However there is an option to range extend battery electric trucks: electrified highways. On the busiest routes, probably in parts of central Europe, it might make financial sense to put up OHL like you do with rail or trolleybus on the outside lane of some highways, so trucks running on the most popular routes could have a pair of small pantographs installed with only a small battery for the bits at either end. However I don't think the economics will work in the US in most cases because the distances are too long.
    2
  1583.  @ThomasBomb45  They do, it's just a regular train that runs at night, no beds, you sleep in your seat like you would on a plane or a coach.
    2
  1584.  @squirlmy  AFAIK antibiotic use in livestock is higher in China than it is in the US. And worryingly it's easy to buy antibiotics meant for humans and give them to livestock, at least in the US there's not a huge amount of overlap so bacteria can't easily become resistant to human antibiotics from livestock use.
    2
  1585.  @foty8679  Well, it didn't call itself fascist, but most people do seem to consider it fascist, and it does tick most if not all of the boxes.
    2
  1586.  @michaelxz1305  Sure, but the alternative is for europe to import all it's food from other countries who can produce it much cheaper, typically by not having so many environmental and animal welfare regulations.
    2
  1587. @Adam Filinovich Well, to be fair, a lot of Marshall money wasn't subsidy or grants, they were extremely favourable loans. Some countries still haven't fully paid them off, mainly because the interest rate is so tiny it's not a priority. In the end it worked out well for the US as Europe and Japan prospered. If the US were to do the same in Central America, they'd probably want to be very confident such loans would be honoured.
    2
  1588. Although modern buildings are much safer in earthquakes, they still won't last as long as buildings in non earthquake prone areas. The primary goal of earthquake protection is to preserve the life of the people inside the building, not necessarily the building itself. After a big quake many buildings that survive still end up condemned because the earthquake protection features are only rated for so many quakes of a certain severity, it might have survived this quake but it might not survive the next, even if it's of a lower magnitude. If the building has gone beyond the limit, it either needs to be gutted and the features replaced, or more often than not if it's just a timber framed house or something of low historical or financial value, demolished and rebuilt.
    2
  1589. I suspect the last one is dealt with by an insurance claim.
    2
  1590.  @stevecha3612  That seamlessness happens because it's a Tesla though, it won't necessarily be seamless with other manufacturers. Adopting NACS as a connector standard won't solve the issue as that was never the problem in the first place.
    2
  1591.  @inteallsviktigt  There was a certain irony with Easten European countries being so anti-immigration when they were complaining about the treatment of their emigrants in Western Europe.
    2
  1592. I think that was partly their downfall. It made them think they were invincible and therefore didn't invest in the quality of their vehicles.
    2
  1593. An alternative is to use the control pilot as a single wire CAN bus, I think this is what Tesla does at the moment, which honestly isn't a bad idea. It'll probably require lower cost electronics than a EoP solution, and overall will probably be less complicated. The downside is it'll be pretty slow, maximum baud rates of about 33300, but that's almost certainly more than adequate for the messaging going between an EV and a meter. It's fairly straightforward to have the control pilot drop back to "normal mode" when not being used as a CAN bus.
    2
  1594.  @henkdeklapsteen6787  NASA won't lat SpaceX take over. That would give SpaceX, and therefore Elon Musk, far too much control over the programme. They'll probably buy some launchers from them once they've got more alternatives from other commercial providers.
    2
  1595. That isn't rocket powered.
    2
  1596.  @Aeronaut1975  That becomes more of a problem the longer the fight is. Eventually the batteries get so heavy the plane can't take off with any passengers or cargo.
    2
  1597.  @iian050  Crops need phosphates one way or the other. If we didn't use manure it would be mineral phosphate, and as far as the "algae" is concerned it makes no difference. If we're producing more manure than can be used on crops (which certainly isn't the case in most parts of the world), then reducing animal agriculture would make a difference. If not, it won't. Fundamentally there are three options, grow less food overall, find a way to keep more of the phosphate in the crop, or put in phosphate "sinks" that can absorb it before it enters waterways.
    2
  1598.  @elale8016  Extracted from what? The manure? It would be a pointless expense, and would be bereft of other nutrients, like nitrates and potassium. Manure is a bit of a complete fertiliser package, because plants have evolved to use it as a food source.
    2
  1599. The technology that arguably allowed the conquest of the new world was accurate blue water navigation. Before then no humans had been able to cross long distances of open ocean reliably. The Polynesians got close but even they had the ability to island hop. When Europeans could cross long stretches of featureless sea with nothing on the horizon and reach their destination most of the time, then they could conquer the world. Remember European colonialism started well before the industrial revolution.
    2
  1600.  @seasong7655  Well VW tried to vertically integrate software development, that was the point of the video.
    2
  1601. Guess she worked in Finland before coming to the Faroes. Those are pretty much compulsory for any Finnish kitchen.
    2
  1602. Pi is the best Depends on what shape the wormhole is. It might not be a sphere.
    2
  1603. It's the wise old man whose seen it all.
    2
  1604. I'm not sure it's majority, but it's certainly a significant proportion.
    2
  1605.  @GonzoTehGreat  That isn't a very productive position. As I said, you pretty much make every argument about this subject with that kind of preface. You can't say "best effort" without defining what that could have been, or it's a hollow statement. If all you want to do is beat the UK with a stick for its transgressions then your argument works. But if we want to understand and learn from the decisions made given the options they had at that specific point in time, then it's not helpful.
    2
  1606.  @janelain8611  I think it's more the fact they had to be perfectionists. Hardware capabilities were very limited back then, you had to make things as optimal as possible to squeeze out every ounce of performance. Nowadays outside of very specific niches, nobody needs code to be as efficient as possible. And of course it's important to note that women were not doing all the work (though not to diminish their achievements). The men were designing and building the hardware, for the most part. Computer hardware was far less standardised back then. It was very much a collaborative effort between the sexes to create the computer systems used for the moon landings.
    2
  1607. Airline: Here's a brand new car, don't tell the insurers.
    2
  1608. Eh, I doubt it in the long run. There's still plenty of growth potential for air travel even if business travel is dented a little from developed countries (which I don't think is that likely, remote working will probably impact commuting rather than business trips, since you generally do those when a video conference isn't a good alternative). Developing countries with growing economies will also have a growing need for air travel, both business and leisure.
    2
  1609. It's a important point. People sometimes decry food packaging but we live in a world where food has to be produced with strict hygiene regulations. The packaging is there to prevent contamination and protect the product during shipping.
    2
  1610. Agriculture usually operates on thin margins and heavy subsidies, so any restrictions that reduce profit significantly can result in a rash of bankruptcies. More land can become uneconomic to farm, which can greatly impact isolated rural communities.
    2
  1611. Well, they try anyway. Specifically with COVID, there were many lawsuits against insurance companies for trying to weasel out of claims, and quite a few were successful. It also probably helped that massive amounts of government support reduced the risk exposure to businesses, lowering claims considerably.
    2
  1612. Way too heavy. The energy you'd consume moving a vessel full of batteries would be enormous.
    2
  1613. If that was the (very early in the morning) STN -> FAO on the 21st of December, I was on that flight. There seemed to be a slight crosswind on landing but not one that warranted slamming it quite so much! OTOH my flight back on the 27th landed in fog and was pretty smooth (probably because it was an ILS autoland considering visibility was almost certainly below visual minimums).
    2
  1614. Microbiology research lab in the middle of the jungle, with a harem of girls and armed bodyguards? Somebody send in 007.
    2
  1615. In the UK we had a pissed up narrator (literally, Craig has admitted that he often had a few beers before recording) who had very little idea what was going on and therefore it was hilarious to see him come up with a narrative on the fly.
    2
  1616.  @雷-t3j  There are several closed uranium mines in Eastern Europe from the Soviet era. We could reopen them if need be.
    2
  1617.  @maximme  They do but it's mainly low cost and charter European flights.
    2
  1618. @Goose-g2u  There's absolutely no guarantee that wouldn't have happened anyway, the sectarian divisions remained regardless of the legal state of the nation.
    2
  1619. ​ @jessechaskey7205 Both can be true. Blaze orange is a colour deer can't see well so it doesn't compromise camouflage, but (most) humans can see well so they don't shoot each other.
    2
  1620.  @AndrewBeveridge461  Just look at the number of people supporting China's actions in Africa, and bashing Europe and the US at the same time. It does seem that the international community is viewing it differently.
    2
  1621. In many countries eggs aren't even kept refrigerated unless you need to store them for a couple of months or more (yes, eggs can last much longer than the best before date in the fridge). I believe it's because the US washes their eggs which removes the protective waxy coating on the shell, which allows air to penetrate it.
    2
  1622. I can see a future where vertical moves towards cargo and horizontal moves towards crew. You need the grunt of vertical for really heavy stuff, but horizontal gives you some safety and convenience advantages for crew and light cargo.
    2
  1623. Euros are OK, but they don't have the ubiquitousness of USD, and that won't happen for a long time, if ever.
    2
  1624. I know someone who is an earthquake engineer in New Zealand who I discussed this sort of thing with, and that's not typically true. The dirty secret is that many earthquake resiliency measures, past and present, are "consumable", i.e. they can only withstand so much total shaking before they fail. After a major earthquake these measures are inspected, and combined with records of earthquakes in the area, inspectors can determine if such measures will survive another major earthquake and whether the structure is safe to be repaired, or is condemned for demolition and reconstruction (a historic structure may be worth the cost of installing or replacing resiliency measures without complete demolition, i.e. Christchurch Cathedral, but in most cases it isn't worth it and generally requires the building to be gutted for several years). So in most cases a new home, even with identical earthquake proofing measures (which is usually not the case as newer structures are generally built to stricter codes), is going to be safer than an old home because it has experienced fewer earthquakes, and so the earthquake resiliency measures have a longer "quakespan" remaining.
    2
  1625. Sometimes there just isn't a simple solution.
    2
  1626. I think a city the size of NYC can't get away without having a few urban highways, especially if you compare it to European megacities like London or Paris. And honestly the BQE looks like one of those highways that is necessary.
    2
  1627.  @billd66  Loose fitting clothing can be broadly unisex (and was, medieval peasant clothing was generally unisex) but tight fitting clothing needs to be modified to fit different body shapes, and that means there will be always be sex differentiation for items like t-shirts and trousers.
    2
  1628. I doubt it. Cargo ships steam slowly to minimise fuel cost, and the facilities for any ride alongs are fairly basic. It takes weeks to go between Europe and East Asia. Modern liners are unlikely to be able to offer something that's tolerable in both journey length and comfort to potential passengers for a price that's competitive with even a significantly more costly airline ticket. Remember liners in the past were much like the planes of today, they had a class system, and the differences were probably even more stark than on modern aircraft, think the first class suites on Titanic and the windowless closets in steerage. Nobody is going to put up with days or weeks sleeping in a tiny bare room with very few activities and only basic food to go on holiday or visit family. They're going to want good food, maybe a swimming pool, cinema, sports courts etc etc, and then you're already halfway to a cruise ship.
    2
  1629. Hemp is not the best biofuel, so I doubt it will be used. Its other uses are also questionable, since the crop has been way overhyped in the US. We've been growing it for decades in the rest of the world, and it's never made a big dent.
    2
  1630. Unfortunately renewable energy isn't all that cheap in most parts of Europe. Sure, it doesn't cost much to generate, but the costs of compensating for intermittency and providing constant reliable power for industry add up.
    2
  1631.  @pedrolopes3542  That's incorrect. Fossil transmission is cheaper as power plants are larger and are less geographically dispersed (wind especially tends to be in remote areas like highlands or out at sea). The same is true for nuclear and large scale hydro, so it isn't the case for all renewables and low carbon, just solar and wind mainly. The european countries with the highest energy prices tend to rely the most on intermittent renewable sources, because they need to build more transmission infrastructure and rely on expensive gas peaker plants to solve intermittency issues (storage is generally even more expensive unless you have a lot of hydro). Fossil fuels have carbon taxes which artificially inflate their cost (not that that is necessarily a bad thing, just saying).
    2
  1632. @pedrolopes3542  Norwegian electricity is almost entirely hydro. Hydro is great, extremely cheap, if you have the geography for it, but most of Europe doesn't. I'm not lying, or shilling for fossil fuels, I'm just being realistic. Europe could extract more shale gas, but doesn't want to deal with the environmental consequences. Nuclear is an option but political opposition from the largest economy is causing problems.
    2
  1633. ​ @pedrolopes3542  Norway is nearly 100% Hydro, Iceland is 70% with 30% Geothermal thanks to its very thin crust, Finland is 20% but 30% Nuclear and a lot comes from burning sawmill waste which is practically free. Spain is the only one you mentioned with significant non-hydro renewables with 20% Wind and 10% Solar, but still has 20% Hydro and 20% Nuclear, and I suspect the difference between it and France disappears when you consider labour costs and other factors. Your correlation is not between renewables and energy price, it's between hydroelectric power and energy price. In fact, if you look at the EU countries with the highest capacity of non-hydro renewable energy capacity like Denmark or Germany (yes Germany still burns a lot of coal but a lot less than it used to), lo and behold you have the highest energy prices. Hydroelectric is not as simple as damming a river either, you need a suitably high flow rate and hydraulic head for dam construction to be financially viable. It's also not without environmental cost, you flood many square kilometres of land above the dam and reduce the river volume below the dam, not to mention issues with fish migration. I'm not opposing renewables, just being realistic about their capabilities. If Europe want to rely more on non-hydro renewables like wind and solar, electricity prices will rise and will stay high because they are not as cheap as they first seem. The base cost per KWh seems very attractive until you factor in spinning reserve or storage, transmission, advanced grid management and so on. Non-hydro renewables externalise a lot of their financial costs to the grid as a whole.
    2
  1634.  @pedrolopes3542  All I can say is, you have an overly simplistic view of the real costs of electrical energy. Smart grids cost extra money to build and to run. Residential solar only reduces residential consumption (for the most part) and in many polar countries only works about half the year. Batteries cost money and resources and we don't nearly have enough to manage the intermittent supply of renewables, not even remotely close. And just because a renewable energy resource is theoretically extractable does not mean it is in any way economic to do so. We could have geothermal everywhere if we spent hundreds of trillions drilling millions of very very deep holes all over the world, but clearly we'd all be bankrupt. Same for solar if we built a Dyson swarm. China has the largest everything in the world when it comes to power generation. Coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, everything, because it's an energy hog. So it's really not a good argument. Call me a troll if you wish, as it seems to be your response to anyone who disagrees with you.
    2
  1635.  @piccalillipit9211  Those are all the theories we have, but as you can see, the list is so long that it really doesn't narrow things down.
    2
  1636.  @pamberinehondo9447  Except the hot food is much better quality, and while not the cheapest, is usually cheaper than the equivalent airline food.
    2
  1637. I think those West Virginian cattle farmers could compete by offering a more premium product, grass fed beef from traditional West Virginian family farms, not big ag feedlots would probably sell well to middle class shoppers in the cities.
    2
  1638.  @DangerB0ne  If fusion energy ever gets "too cheap to meter" then I could see it being used for DAC.
    2
  1639.  @wclifton968gameplaystutorials  The problem with that is a modern HSR and conventional line isn't much different in cost. The existing slow, twisty lines are OK for freight rail, and have developed into perhaps the most extensive freight rail system in the world, but it's not good enough for passengers anymore, and besides the freight trains already use them.
    2
  1640. You could also use it for thermochemical water splitting to produce so-called "purple" hydrogen. It's technically less efficient than electrolysis, but if you factor in the efficiency loss of generating electricity via the turbine and that you could still use the waste heat from the process to produce electricity, it makes sense.
    2
  1641.  @domtweed7323  Turbines aren't terribly efficient to begin with, you're probably going to get about 50-60% of your thermal energy to electricity (it's better because at those temps you can use brayton instead of rankine cycle). That's about the same efficiency as thermochemical splitting. Electrolysis is about 80%. It's probably rather close, but if you consider extra equipment and complexity it probably makes more sense to do it with heat rather than electricity, especially as it's likely you'd still have enough heat after the process to generate electricity.
    2
  1642. I don't think short range is the future, if anything we've been going in the opposite direction, giving smaller planes more range.
    2
  1643. It's not really the case in a lot of places now. Some elite universities already discriminate against asian students through AA. White students sometimes have it even worse though, because a lot of the white places get filled with legacy admissions, which are pure nepotism. So if you're white and not well connected, you only have a very slim chance of getting in.
    2
  1644. As long as you're happy with your life, that's what matters.
    2
  1645.  @justcommenting4981  There are a couple of problems to being underwater, and they both result in you losing a lot of money. Firstly, if you want to sell, and the price offered is less than the remaining mortgage, the mortgage provider will demand you make up the difference from your own pocket before they will allow the sale. That could be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, money which many people simply don't have. You might be able to get a loan if your credit is good, but obviously an unsecured loan is going to have a way higher APR than your mortgage, 3-5% vs 10-20%, or worse. So you end up losing money in interest. And even if you can afford it, it could mean you have little to no money left to purchase even a shoebox, since the mortgage company has taken it all, or you have to take on a bigger mortgage with a higher interest rate because your deposit (which usually comes from the sale of your previous home) has been decimated. Secondly, if you're on a fixed deal and it comes to an end, very likely no mortgage provider will offer you anything, as underwater mortgages are a big default risk, you may have been prime before, but now you're pretty much junk. So you end up on the most expensive deal your current mortgage provider offers, again losing lots of money in interest.
    2
  1646.  @adamperdue3178  State by state PPP adjustment would be very difficult to do.
    2
  1647. As a general rule, if the new word on the cycle is longer that the old one, the less likely it is to be adopted. One of the issues of PC language is it's often too wordy. "Person of Colour" is a lot more syllables than "Black" or "Brown". Even that's been initialised to POC to make it snappier.
    2
  1648.  @erauprcwa  If it was in the EU each passenger would have gotten about $650 cash each for the delay, plus meal vouchers. The least United can do is a sizable flight credit for something that is obviously their fault. If the only requirement for an airline is to "get to your destination safely", they could delay you for days or weeks, completely ruin your vacation and there's sweet FA you can do about it.
    2
  1649. Personally, for actual residential streets, with lots of parked cars, cul de sacs and the like, 20mph makes total sense, there's likely to be lots of pedestrians about and the roads are short. For all other roads, I think it needs to be approached on a case by case basis. How wide is the road, are there a lot of shops nearby, is there a school nearby, etc. By all means make it 20 outside a school or a high street, but on a main road in a built up area with only a few pedestrians, 30 is fine. Making it 20 otherwise seems like they're discouraging driving by making it as slow as cycling (an experienced cyclist on flat terrain can go 20mph, so plenty of the MAMIL's will be keeping up with the cars in a 20 zone).
    2
  1650. ​ @baronvonlimbourgh1716  I agree renewable generation costs have collapsed thanks mainly to economies of scale, but storage is still stubbornly high. It's economic in some circumstances, but not in others, and as demand for storage increases there could definitely be a supply crunch. EV demand alone could consume most of the lithium supply for decades. It's myopic to simply take current trends and extrapolate without understanding the full picture. If we'd done that the 60's we would have assumed we'd all be powering our homes with nuclear energy by 2000. And if you must know, I'm in my early 30's. I think I've lived long enough to approach things with cautious optimism. I try not to get too on board with the nuclear or renewable hype train.
    2
  1651.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  Linearly or exponentially, it doesn't matter. We can't just magically solve roadblocks. Again, if you adopted the same mindset in the 60's with the S curve, you would assume there would be tens of thousands of nuclear reactors generating 85% of the world's energy by now. It's a nice idea from the world of management, but it's not a model you can fit all technological progress around.
    2
  1652.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  Well we clearly see the industry very differently to each other. I've heard positions like yours since the noughties, and so far it's proven to be wildly optimistic. So forgive me if I don't believe that this time it's actually going to work in 10 years or whatever. You've pretty much ignored the lithium supply issue which is absolutely a real problem, I have seen dozens of articles about it.
    2
  1653. In France, "all-terrain" has nothing to do with the vehicle, only the skill of the driver.
    2
  1654. Candles aren't a great idea, they cause a lot of house fires.
    2
  1655. Honestly this is pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I hear coming out of Canada nowadays. I wouldn't go as far to say it's reasonable, some of the substitutions are terrible, nonsensical or just plain inaccurate (especially when there's plenty of good neutral terms they could have used), but I have to admit they kind of have a point with some of them, some of the terms mentioned are often archaic and in some english speaking countries, pretty offensive, which is a point you made. Compared to the utter media circus that was the Kamloops graves (whose existence has still not been physically determined), silly "land acknowledgements" that are nothing but performative boilerplate, and tragically, the story of a teacher possibly bullied into s*icide because they dared to challenge the rhetoric of a DEI consultant at a mandatory workshop, this is a mild annoyance.
    2
  1656. The problem might be a lack of advancement opportunities. In times gone by crappy service jobs could lead to better things, if you worked hard and did your time you could work your way up to a decent middle management role, or even senior management if you were very good. But there's an educational glass ceiling that pretty much prevents that now. People are more motivated to work crappy jobs if they are temporary, if they know that they can tough it out and get promoted to something more cushy. If they see themselves working that job for the rest of their working lives, there's a lot less motivation to continue.
    2
  1657. Because customers won't pay for it over a cheaper twinjet.
    2
  1658. It looks like Mexico might go with NACS, it's a bit of a toss up, but I think South America will probably follow Brazil's lead and go with CCS type 2.
    2
  1659. ​ @andrewharrison8436  The cladding was what caused the internal compartmentalization to fail.
    2
  1660. I guess you're talking about kettling? Yeah, it's controversial, and only works at all for smaller protests. Basically there's an idea that small protests can be prevented from causing disruption and damage by keeping them contained (or "kettled") to a specific area, until they tire themselves out. Whether an exit is provided or not is generally done on a case-by-case basis. The concern is allowing too many people to leave will result in them regrouping and protesting somewhere else, resulting in scattered groups that are impossible to control. But of course, on the other hand, there is the question of if it is ethical, and some argue kettling tends to result in more violent and hostile behaviour.
    2
  1661. Problem with trades is a lot of them tend to wear you out faster so you have to either take on an administrative role or find another job when you get older.
    2
  1662.  @Greenitthe  The US has a lot of spare land, it doesn't need to be like the Netherlands. The fact is suburban homes are desirable, not necessarily McMansions but the majority prefer low rise homes with private green space (and not just a measly fenced in 10ft square of grass) over apartment blocks and condominiums, especially when they get older and want to start families. As for San Jose being like Singapore, it will need to be if the tech jobs keep concentrating themselves there.
    2
  1663.  @bcubed72  Other countries struggle with rail freight because there's too many passenger services with much faster trains that have a timetable to keep. Part of the reason US rail freight can be so big is because of their woeful long distance passenger services.
    2
  1664. Depends on the industry. The cruise industry is fairly small and everybody is doing the same thing. Try having that much cash in another industry and you'll be eaten by a competitor who chooses to invest it instead, or has thinner margins, and if things go south, eh, we'll just get a bailout.
    2
  1665. What impresses me the most its they're building all this in only 15 years. For a western country that's a pretty rapid timescale for a project this big.
    2
  1666.  @twixieshores  Unless it's a submarine, then it's always a boat no matter how big it is.
    2
  1667. They seem like they don't want people to travel much at all, everyone living in cities and barely ever leaving them, with a wild countryside devoid of humans seems to be the end goal.
    2
  1668. I personally don't see this getting better until the autumn, when demand drops. All the fresh new security cleared staff might find the summer surge is already over. I'd advise anyone who hasn't yet booked a summer holiday to wait as long as they can, the med is still warm even in September/October. Unfortunately for those who can't, in many parts of Europe an alternative "staycation" is becoming so expensive (especially with the cost of fuel) and overbooked that the only real option is to stay at home and only do the odd day or weekend trip.
    2
  1669. In the UK what is and isn't a particular food can be quite important as it can effect how much sales tax (or VAT as it is known here) it attracts when purchased. There's the famous Jaffa cakes case.
    2
  1670. To carry 16 kW the fiber bundle and thick kevlar "insulation" would need to be about the diameter of a penny. So imagine what it would need for 16 MW.
    2
  1671.  @VitalVampyr  I don't think that's true. Anywhere that isn't in the North East, Texas Triangle or West Coast is really too far apart. If you can't drive between two major cities in less than 3-4 hours, then it's probably too far away for HSR.
    2
  1672.  @fourbirds4201  Unfortunately that doesn't really add up. The UK didn't completely abandon many of its colonies until years, even decades after WWII. The same is true of France, except they kept more of theirs and maintain a set of small colonies to this day. That's not to say all of the colonies were a drain on the coffers, a few specialised places were useful, but the big holdings in Africa and Asia weren't really profitable anymore, and really hadn't been for a while. But there was a desire to maintain the colonies for the sake of political prestige (though there was increasing internal and external pressure to grant them independence).
    2
  1673. I think in the case of London, we need to consider if the population should keep growing? The UK has a really unbalanced economy with so much wealth and people crowding into the south east. Developing the economies of other cities in the UK where affordable housing is easier and cheaper to build, particularly in the north and midlands, could ease a lot of the pressure on London.
    2
  1674.  @John_Weiss  I thought research reactors were designed in such a way that meltdown was physically impossible.
    2
  1675.  @davealter2697  With 2 long runways and a recent terminal expansion, there's a lot of unused capacity at the moment.
    2
  1676.  @damac5136  That's generally very difficult to do to a proficient level for anything other than English (and maybe Spanish in some parts of the US). There just aren't the opportunities to practice outside of study.
    2
  1677.  @jagolago-bob  The UK is not a tax haven though. As for money laundering, well the extent of that is debatable but there are already laws to try and prevent it.
    2
  1678. It has, kind of. Passive safety is incorporated into may new reactor designs.
    2
  1679. I think if Poland goes for nuclear, they'll likely be looking to China, not Europe or the US for a government sponsored build. They're probably the world leaders in large scale fission now, the west have been burdened with too much red tape and protest, even France is starting to lag. As for SMR's, it's anyone's game right now, whichever companies get to market first, could even be Rolls Royce with their "medium" modular reactor.
    2
  1680.  @goste4  You seem like a strong idealist, you think the legal system is deeply flawed, and I do agree there are many ways it could be improved. But if we are to be practical, then these sorts of protections become a necessary evil for many. Being rich, particularly sudden wealth, can be a burden, things can get quite complicated when you have a lot of money. That's why people exist to manage wealth through schemes like this. You are right, it is rich people suing rich people, but with fully exposed assets, the rich who use top lawyers to abuse the legal system to profit will win, and those who acquire wealth through more honest means will lose. Unless you just hate all rich people, wouldn't you want the latter protected from the former? And obviously wealthy people don't just go to the local civil court to sort out multi million dollar lawsuits, so your example isn't very good.
    2
  1681.  @goste4  Because your talking points align with that position. But I'm hesitant to call you a radical socialist as you may take that as an insult, and I don't know if you just dislike this particular financial structure or you hate wealthy people in general. In the end, the money will end up somewhere, and will be taxed somewhere. If it's in a tax haven, very little or not at all, if it's not then typical rates apply. Nobody is saying the rich don't need lawyers, but the kind who write contracts and manage other business affairs are much cheaper than the ones who defend you in court.
    2
  1682.  @goste4  I'll admit I was curious, I have my strong suspicions and wanted to confirm them. Honestly if you'd said you were a hardcore socialist and fuck the rich, I would have used it as an excuse to end this debate based on irreconcilable political differences. I wouldn't want to mock you for your views as much as I would disagree with them (I personally identify as an economic center to center left), but I would be arguing with a brick wall otherwise. I don't think your argument makes that much sense. It's not like rich people can set it up so they never have any money at all, they must have some personal wealth to pay for life expenses like the rest of us, indeed if they have a trust set up they legally must receive a regular income from it, which could be garnished just like a wage. Besides, wage garnishment isn't used that much for civil compensation except for specific beneficiaries such as child support. Generally if you don't have the money you're "judgement proof" beyond your ability to pay. So for the same case, you generally can get significantly more money from a rich person than a poor person, all other things being equal. And again, abolishing such structures will benefit many people other than other rich people. There aren't that many poor or middle people who could sue rich people and win. Why abolish something to make some rich people's lives more miserable, with little to no benefit to anyone who isn't rich? Both rich and poor people can declare bankruptcy as well, and the consequences make it a significant deterrent for both.
    2
  1683.  @goste4  I never said that the poor or middle class were the source of these lawsuits. Generally unless they have friends in high places they won't be able to make a strong enough case. The schemes as you call them, are for protection against other wealthy people trying to profit. And that's the thing, they wouldn't be able to afford it at some point because the price of hiring good enough lawyers to defend you will spiral up and up in an arms race. Eventually it's cheaper and less risky to take the hit and settle, and that's when the moderately rich are bled dry by the very rich. Again, you seem to want to make the lives of some rich people more expensive, to the point where some lose most of their wealth, with the only major beneficiaries being richer people and lawyers. What's the point in that?
    2
  1684.  @goste4  Because it's possible to empathise with people who are wealthier than you and see their honest wealth protected, and because there are far better ways to solve the tax avoidance issue (I'm using the word "avoidance" as it's used for legal tax minimization, "evasion" means illegal tax minimization, at least in UK legal parlance). Besides, it's far from the only way to avoid tax, even with offshore accounts.
    2
  1685.  @goste4  Again, abolishing these structures will not prevent tax avoidance, and not every instance of this structure will avoid tax. If it's a domestic arrangement with no part in a tax haven, no tax will be avoided. It's not a compulsory feature of this structure and it's far from the only method. The primary reason is protection against lawsuits, the tax avoidance is a potential "add-on". You've not given me a convincing argument that abolishing these structures is the only way or even the best way to prevent vast amounts of of tax avoidance through tax havens. So I don't see why we should since there are negative consequences for people who don't deserve them. If you want to help poor people, this will do little to nothing for them. The problem is with taxation, not these structures. That's what the global minimum tax is supposed to help solve. And you can still tax the income someone gets from a trust.
    2
  1686.  @goste4  So why not force such arrangements to be domestic, instead of abolishing them entirely? Or enforce a global minimum tax? Or the numerous other things you could do other than use a sledgehammer to crack the taxation nut?
    2
  1687.  @goste4  I don't see any reason why transparency laws have to be changed, if secrecy is an issue there are still many countries who aren't tax havens that have more privacy focused banking laws. A global minimum corporate tax initiative is already underway. Closing other tax avoidance schemes could be done through similar diplomatic agreements. And for the final question, I believe the rich who earned their money honestly should get to keep it, not have it plundered by profiteers or give increasing amounts to very very rich lawyers just to keep the wolves at bay.
    2
  1688.  @goste4  Either you get taxed, or your corporation gets taxed. Either way tax can be levied at some point. If you have seen the other video HMW made, you know the primary reason for the structure is protecting against lawsuits. I guess if you won the lottery you'd just give most of your money away to avoid being a target. Or do you really want to pay millions to lawyers and spend all your time tied up in legal issues until it's all gone down the drain?
    2
  1689. ​ @goste4  Using a shell corp won't avoid tax by itself. If it makes no money so it doesn't get taxed, fair enough. Your money making corp still gets taxed and you still get taxed, so again, with a shell corp alone you are no better off. But some shell corps do make a profit, so to speak, and if they are in a low of no tax haven then yes, that's tax avoidance since your money making corp can reduce their burden in the high tax country. But if it's not, then there's no gain to you. And yet many rich people make these arrangements domestically, I argue the majority of them do in fact. So there's got to be more to it than tax avoidance, and there is. So you would just give all your money away to avoid the lawyers then? Would that be your plan? Don't just avoid the question.
    2
  1690.  @goste4  OK, I'll play. I think private shell schemes (ones for companies are a different matter) are a complex and open to abuse solution to something that in an ideal world shouldn't be necessary, because in an ideal world people wouldn't sue other people for stupid amounts of money because they're rich. There, that's my strongest argument. If you can think of a way to overhaul the entire civil legal system to prevent predatory lawsuits from ever being instigated, no matter how good the legal team and with zero burden, responsibility or stress to the defendant, then perhaps I might consider your position more positively.
    2
  1691.  @goste4  Yes. People can combine them with other techniques to avoid taxes and shirk genuine responsibility.
    2
  1692.  @goste4  I don't think it's that relevant. Capital flight would happen whether there were shell companies or not.
    2
  1693.  @goste4  It's an issue getting rid of shell companies won't solve. In the end, if free movement of capital is allowed, capital flight can happen.
    2
  1694.  @goste4  Well I don't see it making a significant impact on capital flight, so why take such a drastic measure for little to no gain in that regard?
    2
  1695.  @goste4  I thought you were talking about capital flight? That's mainly about when investors pull money out of a country, be it shares, bonds or entire businesses. Shell corporations are pretty common. It's not that surprising some hold money in tax havens. Doesn't mean every shell corporation does, or even that most do.
    2
  1696.  @joermnyc  I don't think it will be enough for what it needs to do, the costs for transit construction in and around NYC are some of the highest in the world.
    2
  1697. Maybe things are different now, but when my brother moved there 10 years ago, even as an English speaking Brit he struggled to get work in his field (geology). NZ, like a lot of developed nations, has a "citizens first" employment policy, so if a comparable NZ citizen is in line for a job, they are hired over the foreigner. He had to spend a few years doing odd jobs and working in a call center before on what I think was his third attempt he got the job he wanted at a geotechnics firm. Now he's thinking of moving to their office in Canada after all that effort. Go figure!
    2
  1698. @l.c.8475  Most people in many countries live in suburbs. It just gets counted as an urban area but they aren't living in apartments.
    2
  1699. It makes sense on residential roads in housing estates, narrow streets in dense urban areas, and outside certain facilities where there might be a lot of pedestrians, especially children, such as schools at certain times of day. Places where honestly, most sensible drivers wouldn't be going faster than 20 anyway, regardless of limit. But applying it in a blanket manner that includes wide arterials isn't a good idea.
    2
  1700. The problem in Canada doesn't seem all that dissimilar to the UK, if far more acute. There is space for new housing, but not enough where people want to live. You've got one or two large cities that economically dominate and have overheating housing markets as a result. So the solution is either to densify those dominant cities even more and increasingly concentrate your countries wealth in specific small regions, or spread those homes out among second tier cities and other regions which allows them to catch up a bit. Maybe Ottawa and Montreal could take more of the growth, especially as both cities are making significant strides in improving their urban transit systems.
    2
  1701.  @niamhleeson3522  Less like a train, more like a PRT. You still need that flexibility cars provide.
    2
  1702.  @niamhleeson3522  If the vehicles could join up and split off at any time to go their own way, they you could have some kind of convoying like that if it saves energy.
    2
  1703. Probably because dreams are abstract and wings are real.
    2
  1704. That's true, at certain times of day on certain days of the year. The "solar spike" on a sunny summer day is enough to overload the German grid, which pushes energy prices negative for an hour or so because the grid needs to get rid of the excess. The flipside to this is outside those hours solar isn't producing nearly as much, nothing at all at night, and very little on an overcast winter day. That's why they can't just shutter the coal and gas plants and run on solar.
    2
  1705. Geographically AU has more challenges than EU. Africa is much bigger and much more difficult to traverse. The infrastructure hurdle for a truly connected Africa is a lot greater than in Europe (we had a lot of easily navigable rivers even before road and rail became prevalent).
    2
  1706. Some of them liked to eat us. But to be fair, so do we (yes, octopuses are cannibals).
    2
  1707. I really doubt it'll ever be a viable alternative. The combination of high g forces and even worse fuel consumption will likely make it even more expensive than Concorde. Which is fine for space travel, but not air travel. Plus you'd need to build a lot of new infrastructure. You really want something that can use existing airports.
    2
  1708. I'm there right now. Conditions could be better, it's a bit windy!
    2
  1709.  @humppis  It's worth noting though that the stored snow can usually only cover a handful of runs, so while the resort is "open" in October, your choices are limited.
    2
  1710.  @kf8575  It is generally westerly, probably 70-80% of the time.
    2
  1711. I do wonder if there's much of a difference between Hostess and Host clubs in Japan. Do the female hostesses behave differently to the male hosts, or is it pretty much the same?
    2
  1712. I think the main issue with investing in disruptive technologies is it's impossible to know exactly how disruptive they will be even 2-3 years into the future. We remember the ones that succeeded, but we don't remember the ones that failed. Not every new technology changes the world, sometimes people work on it for decades and in the end it just doesn't live up to expectations, or a superior technology supersedes it shortly after. They are high risk by nature. But the hype and promise can make it seem like whatever we pick will be a winner, and it's very hard to predict what challenges the technology may face getting to market. And there's always the middle ground, the technology finds a useful niche but doesn't take the world by storm. But honestly with today's stock market looking more like a popularity contest, investing in sexy technology companies is probably a smart move right now. Just make sure to sell quickly if or when things start to come back down to earth.
    2
  1713. ​ @saine-grey  There are the other important features you lose that I honestly should have mentioned, that's my fault because it's clearly making me look stupid according to some commenters on here (I don't appreciate the insult but it's YouTube so I've come to expect such behaviour). I'll update the original post.
    2
  1714. ​ @johncherish7610 Why? The Dragon or Starliner capsule is fine for now, and there are competitors coming up with designs more tailored around human spaceflight that will be even better. SpaceX doesn't, and arguably shouldn't, be the be all and end all of spaceflight, as much as some of Elon's fan club wish it were the case.
    2
  1715. To be fair, people probably won't pay more for their steak, they'll switch to more grain fed beef or import beef from south of the border.
    2
  1716.  @rayden54  As I said, there's been a recent change in leadership at the FTC which has probably prompted this.
    2
  1717. One issue is rising retirement ages. For office workers it's not too much of a problem, the mind stays pretty sharp for most people well into their 60's or even later. The body often does not though, especially with a life of manual labour. People who go into the trades often need to have an exit strategy once they get into their 50's before their body breaks down. In some cases that might be a managerial role within an industry, but that's not an option for all trades. So there's a real risk into being forced into an early retirement with a meager pension and dying in poverty.
    2
  1718. Seems like the best solution would be for Mexico to build a refugee camp at its southern border supported with US funding. It might not be the most pleasant place for them, but it could at least be a solution until the conflicts die down and people can return.
    2
  1719. Breaking things is fine until you break too many things and angry investors tell you to stop breaking so many things and make them some money.
    2
  1720. New Zealand doesn't have much in the way of central heating either, or at least it didn't 10 years ago when I visited in winter.
    2
  1721. I can't see it being the third option, it's just too dysfunctional. They would have have to have made at least some effort for it to be true.
    2
  1722. ​@moomie1634 The problem is that it works both ways. People move to where the jobs are, but jobs also move to where the people are. So over time people concentrate themselves in big cities and other parts of the country get left behind. And don't think a few condos will solve the housing issue in these cities, you'd need enormous apartment blocks which would destroy the character of many historic European cities (and have in some cases). Europeans live in smaller, denser houses than most Americans, and yet housing affordability is just as much of a problem in many cities.
    2
  1723.  @johnlister  Well, "here's one my craft assistant made earlier" doesn't have the same ring to it.
    2
  1724. It possibly might do the opposite. With no easy route to send goods to the rest of the EU the temptation might be to pick somewhere on the mainland instead.
    2
  1725. Don't give the SyFy channel any ideas.
    2
  1726.  @joshua43214  Depends on what you are doing. I might test my welding equipment on cheap steel, just to make sure it works, or to establish a control, but that won't tell me that much about what the welds on the proper alloy will be like.
    2
  1727. The question I kept asking myself throughout the video was simple: "What's the alternative?". And in most cases, I couldn't think of anything realistic that's better than the status quo. Reservations, as was pointed out, are, in isolation, giant money sinks. People living in the reservation need compensation in order to survive, either through employment or benefits, so they don't have to farm the land. Rangers need to be paid to keep out poachers, loggers, ranchers and others. Even asking a wealthy nation to spend tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year keeping a huge chunk of their land pristine and undeveloped for the sake of wildlife with no income from that land is a tall order. So asking a nation like Tanzania to do that is nigh on impossible. Unless you have some multi trillion dollar UN global fund that literally just pays countries to leave that land alone, they're going to need to find a source of income. And even then, it's going to seem cruel to keep impoverished countries poor by only giving them enough to maintain their reservations. It's unreasonable to expect their tourism and trophy hunting income to be cost neutral, they've got ambitions to develop and improve their people's standard of living, of course they want to make a profit out of it. The only thing that really surprised me is the prices for trophy hunting. I assumed the fees would be significantly higher, and do wonder if the price could be raised so fewer animals are killed while the income remains the same or is greater. Someone ought to do a study on that.
    2
  1728. I disagree. Europeans tend to me more left wing economically, that's absolutely true, but when it comes to social issues, in particular immigration, many left of center europeans would probably be to the right of many US liberals. As for "woke" having a specific meaning, that's a prescriptivist position on the term. If enough people on the right use it as an insult or slur, which does seem to be the case, then it is an insult or slur.
    2
  1729.  @MrFastFox666  In reality it seems like the rent should be an extra couple hundred dollars to cover at least some of those extras (because who isn't going to use their trash?) so there might be some deceptive pricing going on there. For the car, I can see the perverse incentive but really this something the city needs to deal with. In the end it sounds like you have a place in a very high demand area, so perhaps you need to consider relocating somewhere cheaper if you dislike the current fee structure.
    2
  1730. It's not economic to run HSR (or even a conventional speed sleeper service) to a lot of smaller destinations. The only practical option is to fly. You might see HSR displace more air travel between large population centres that aren't too far apart (an hour or two by plane gate to gate) but your small cities in places like the US are still going to be reliant on planes.
    2
  1731.  @WARnTEA  I'm not so sure. At the moment conventional wisdom seems to be bigger is better for fusion, at least when it comes to magnetic confinement. Inertial seems to have produced some smaller concepts though.
    2
  1732.  @тито-к9в  So 320 million people would essentially lose their right to vote, instead being governed by a native elite who are less than 2% of the population? Way to turn the clock back on that whole democracy thing.
    2
  1733.  @тито-к9в  You've got this romantic myth of native peoples that's straight out of a children's book. Some anarcho-communist-primitivist utopia that's somehow more democratic even though power is more concentrated (and until a cow can understand how to vote, I don't see how you can impart democracy on to non-human animals). Native people aren't savages, but they also aren't saints. They are also diverse, with a plethora of different societies and cultures. This worship of native culture by some segments of the political left seems rather patronising to me.
    2
  1734. I wish Hershey had bought Cadbury, would have saved them from Kraft. As long as they kept their butyric acid flavoured chocolate to themselves.
    2
  1735.  @ButterfatFarms  Indeed, reusable rockets were a dream for decades, but engine gimballing and stability control technology wasn't mature enough to make it work, they always needed something to make them more aerodynamically stable, like parachutes or helicopter blades (anyone remember that?) which added weight, cost and reliability issues (parachutes were an issue as you couldn't control where they landed very well). SpaceX certainly was good on timing, the technology was just about mature when they started development.
    2
  1736. ​ @galenburghardt3272 I think part of it is Americans tend to have shorter vacations, most Europeans are going for at least 10 days and sometimes over a month.
    2
  1737. One issue that isn't often talked about is substation backfeeding that may occur during the summer solar maximum if there are a lot of homes with rooftop systems in the substations' catchment area. Many older substations are not specifically designed to backfeed, and may shut off or be damaged due to over-voltage conditions or might even not shut off properly when there is a fault. Even if it is resilient to backfeeding, the lifespan of components like the transformer tap changer can be reduced due to excess wear. It is possible to upgrade substations to better handle backfeeding (though sometimes the cheapest solution is just to disconnect some of the PV when necessary to prevent backfeeding, and/or install storage at the residences) but it is costly and requires a lot of new equipment. So net metering might not just force their non-solar neighbours to pay for their share of grid maintenance costs, but also for upgrades that are necessary because of their installation.
    2
  1738.  @TruWill99  Then the food will stick. A little oil doesn't cut it, the food will absorb it in no time.
    2
  1739.  @KJ4EZJ  The affordable ones scratch so easily and very hard to clean. I've heard of some top of the range ones that are supposed to be better, but they're pretty new and I'm not super convinced.
    2
  1740.  @TruWill99  Just the right amount is often not enough to prevent sticking.
    2
  1741. "fiercely arguing" indeed. It's one of the most vicious debates in all of science and it's been going on for over a century. People have tried to destroy each others careers and reputation because they were in the opposing "camp".
    2
  1742.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  It wasn't without economic consequence for Europe. Some industries have scaled back production to reduce gas consumption, and in long term that is not sustainable. Those industries will leave Europe, probably for the US, and very likely, once they do leave, they will never come back. Putin is not doing Europe a favour, Europe is still suffering. It's also had consequences for environmental goals, coal plants have been producing more and planned closures have been put on hold. On the plus side, Germany has postponed planned closures of nuclear power stations and there's renewed interest across europe in nuclear energy. I know that's probably not a good thing in your books but it is in mine!
    2
  1743. The regulations around colour schemes are quite interesting for UK trains running on network rail track. All must have bright yellow fronts for visibility to track workers, and there's also an orange "cant line" which indicates work above that height on the carriage must not be carried out when the overhead line (if present) is energised.
    2
  1744. High end semiconductors aren't particularly sensitive to labour costs, Taiwan is not a particularly low wage country (its GDP per capita is similar to South Korea) so it would be pretty viable.
    2
  1745. By the sounds of it the UK needs to pick some economic sectors that are promising for future growth and direct a lot of resources into them. It's spent too long floundering around hoping that growth will spring out of nowhere. It also shouldn't try and compete where it can't win, it needs to look at niches where it already has an advantage. The UK can't compete with California for tech companies, or Germany for manufacturing equipment. We do still lead the world in a few new and well established industries, and with a leg up these industries can make us all richer. I also think the UK is lagging behind many of its comparable nations on infrastructure. Stuff like HS2, as controversial as it is, should have been built 20 years ago. Many cities outside London also lack high quality public transit. This creates an overly centralised economy that creates a lot of unnecessary extra expense for businesses.
    2
  1746. I watched "A Call to Spy" recently, a drama about female spies in WWII France. While all the spies they covered did exist, I've heard there are some glaring inaccuracies so I think that would be interesting to review.
    2
  1747. It depends. I think the USA was so successful partly because it didn't have the historical and cultural baggage of its mother nation. Back in the UK a rigid class system held things back somewhat, whereas the colonists were more free to forge their own destiny.
    2
  1748.  @Vonononie  Even back then you could lodge a complaint with the CAA, imagine if that had happened in the 90's before everyone had email...
    2
  1749. When a startup does DTC just for the sake of it, I'm reminded of this sketch by CollegeHumour: https://youtu.be/pJ8HVWAOTEk
    2
  1750. It's realistic too. You think some fantasy world is going to live in racial harmony?
    2
  1751. I don't see how corporate votes = fascism. Plus most countries give businesses legal representation, if they didn't you wouldn't be able to sue them.
    2
  1752. Colonialism (as a distinct period or history instead of an activity) is arguably only special because of its scale. It's not something that was new, extractive empires had existed for thousands of years before then. The most interesting part about it is it was the the first time such large non contiguous empires were able to exist thanks to improvements in technology, particularly in naval technology. It wasn't exceptionally brutal as empires go, but it did affect a huge percentage of the global population.
    2
  1753. ​​​ @janremoto4849 Airbus failed to see the direction the industry was going in. The A380 was, and is, a fantastic and well engineered aircraft, just built for an airline industry that no longer existed. With all that said, they didn't dwell on the failure for too long, they hadn't put all their eggs in the A380 basket, they dusted themselves off and focused on the new reality of twin engined mid size aircraft within a point to point environment. And that has led to their success today.
    2
  1754.  @victorianascimentodesa6931  Jobs don't come naturally to a lot of places, they just wither away and die, or become ghettos of the unemployed. That's the unromantic truth, if you can't attract workers you won't survive.
    2
  1755.  @schwig44  Local businesses will hit a profit ceiling quickly in these small communities, a point where to grow they need to move to somewhere where there is better access to workers and services. What tends to survive in these communities are low wage, low skill jobs that unsurprisingly don't attract many people or other businesses. So what would happen with your plan is your local business take the money, and the ones that grow big will get out of dodge, and you're back to square one with nothing to show for it. Unless the government wants to heavily subsidise businesses in small communities forevermore as a form of corporate welfare, it won't work. Also bear in mind these communities would then have to deal with commuters from nearby cities, which would strain the infrastructure considerably.
    2
  1756. Where you live also makes a difference. In places like the UK and Ireland, we have huge amounts of otherwise useless grassland, all it's good for agriculturally is growing grass or grazing livestock. We do produce a lot of beef, but it's different to something from a corn-fed feedlot in the Midwest US, and arguably more sustainable as it's mostly fed on a resource we can't use (water is also less of an issue as these grasslands tend to be in areas of high rainfall, though droughts do still occur from time to time, this year has been a problem). There's also the issue a lot of the staple foods that are farmed like corn and wheat can vary enormously in quality. A farmer in the US told me how they grade corn. Grades 1 and 2 go for human consumption, but grade 3 and below is fed to animals or turned into biofuel. All farmers would like as much grade 1 and 2 as possible, it sells for a better price. But a bad season can produce a lot of inferior grades, which would otherwise be wasted. At least corn has the alternative of being used as a biofuel (though I think it sells for more as animal feed), a lot of crops don't have this option. In fact, there is a huge issue of wastage in arable farming, from poor quality to overproduction due to poor demand forecasting. One way to make animal agriculture more sustainable is processing more of this waste into animal feed (sugar beet pulp after the sugar has been extracted is already a popular cattle feed). Or find a way to turn more low grade plant based food into something platable (and probably highly processed). It's a complicated issue, and I doubt those concessions alone are good enough to justify current levels of production, but it's not as cut and dry as just replacing fields of livestock with fields of lettuce or wheat.
    2
  1757.  @nevm7469  I really think that depends on the product, and even then on what the qualities of the product are. A company that makes fishing rods probably isn't going to be targeting educated coastal consumers because they don't do a whole lot of fishing compared to rural folk. And sure, there's some overpriced brand of fishing rods as a status symbol for rich yuppies on their yachts, but they aren't selling that many fishing rods compared to the former. You might think that way because the companies you interact with are marketing to you, you probably don't even know of some brands that market primarily outside your demographic, and vice versa.
    2
  1758. London in particular has a lot of sightline rules that make it difficult. Other cities in the UK just aren't that big compared to Germany, the US or Asia. Manchester is planning and constructing a fair few skyscrapers, though nothing quite as tall as the Shard, yet.
    2
  1759.  @bennravi3171 College graduates alone can't build a railway. You need companies with the right equipment and expertise, and I don't think Iran has any of those. Since the there's a sanction wall with the west, China is the only real alternative.
    2
  1760.  @ChineseKiwi  There's a difference between new construction and life extension. Plants undergoing life extension have already paid off their original construction costs, there's not nearly as much paperwork or bureaucracy to wade through, and locals are used to a power station in their backyard, so what if it runs an extra 10 years, it's still not going anywhere! With all that said, your comparison needs some adjustment to be fair. Let's take it out of a fairly ideal country for solar and stick it somewhere less ideal, like Northern Europe. So we'll give solar a capacity factor of 0.15 and nuclear 0.9, fairly reasonable for modern systems. So average generation of the solar array would be about 300 MW over the year, nuclear 4840 MW. So that means solar is really just under half the cost of nuclear rather than over 10 times less. Still a good saving. But then consider the space required, 2GW of solar panels takes up a lot of land if it's all in one place. Distributing it more, like with household solar, will require more inverters and grid infrastructure which would add to the cost. Finally, more polar latitudes will have more seasonal variation in output, and less sunny climates will also have to deal with the weather which will also vary output. So a storage setup that's based on a simple day/night cycle will not work, you would need a grid capable of dealing with these long term annual cycles of day and night length, as well as fairly random fluctuations due to weather. So you're going to end up with something more complex than just storing energy long enough to make it through the night. That's going to add even more cost, and as these all add up solar just becomes less and less of an obvious leader when it comes to choosing generation.
    2
  1761.  @hell043  Not really sure geothermal is, outside of a few areas where the crust is suitably thin. Hydro has always been super cheap but has the same problem as geothermal, few places where it's economic to exploit. That leaves solar and wind, both cheap to generate but intermittent.
    2
  1762. Automation will certainly have an impact. The labour cost difference will shrink between countries, so shipping will become a larger slice of the price. Also if shipping becomes a lot more expensive, due to carbon taxes on bunker fuel for example, then that will also encourage onshoring of more parts of the supply chain.
    2
  1763.  @Tu51ndBl4d3  Only South Africa has a large population of european ancestry in Africa.
    2
  1764.  @somedudebro69  Probably not as distinct as you think. There's been population exchange between Ireland and the UK for millennia. Hell, their patron saint was Welsh!
    2
  1765.  @somedudebro69  But the celts are extinct as a distinct genetic group, and have been so for millennia. There's been so much mixing with other groups of people that there's nobody left who can claim even a strong genetic celtic heritage.
    2
  1766. Depends on where he sources his beef from I guess. Though based on this "dark kitchen" model I'm not sure how that supply chain works, do they have their own standardised patties, buns and frozen fries like most fast food chains or do they just source locally from wherever?
    2
  1767. Both are true I believe. Some grain that is fed to animals would be suitable for human consumption, but some of it isn't. How much is and how much isn't is where the arguments lie.
    2
  1768. It's a bit less formal than I usually expect from a polymatter video.
    2
  1769.  @Weerknuffelbeer  How far do you want to go though? You could argue most humans don't need to travel anywhere other than by foot or bike if everyone lived in ultra dense urban areas and worked from home (or not at all) because even electric cars and trains cause environmental damage. We don't need to eat anything other than bland but nutritionally complete synthetic food bricks, because even plant foods cause environmental damage. Many of the activities we enjoy or products we consume are completely superfluous to our existence. Really it comes down to how much you think people should sacrifice before you think life would become too miserable for the environmental benefits to be worth it, and everyone's going to have a different opinion on that.
    2
  1770. I think Greece did manage to weather COVID better than some countries by opening up to tourists earlier than many other places. Northern europeans desperate to go just about anywhere with sunshine and a beach began arriving in droves.
    2
  1771.  @markeldred5541  There have been some experiments with using recycled plastic as a road surface, either blended into asphalt or a completely plastic surface. Problem is that can create more microplastic particles that are shed off the road and into storm drains, and ultimately into the sea.
    2
  1772.  @FOLIPE  In the end the farmer is making a financial and practical calculation, they will grow what makes them the most money, whether they are selling for export or just down the road. If "re-localising markets" or "diversifying inputs" means "less profit for farmers" then it's a total non-starter. That's why I mentioned the hipsters, the only way to maintain profit on a sub-optimal crop is to convince the buyer to pay more for it. That's what we have with organic food and that's what we have with rare cultivars.
    2
  1773.  @FOLIPE  There are many good reasons. As I've said, a lot of cultivars do not ship well or are more expensive to ship. Crops going on to further processing also may need to be standardised, and it would be more expensive to use a more diverse range of cultivars. And some are just plain inferior to what can be grown elsewhere, and therefore attract lower prices. It comes back to money, those "incentives" you talk about are likely to be subsidies, which comes back to my argument about getting importers (and perhaps even domestic sellers, this is an issue within nations just as much as it is outside of them) to pay more than they normally would, if they get a kickback from someone then they can agree to buy at a profitable price to the farmer.
    2
  1774.  @FOLIPE  If it costs more or the product is considered inferior for whatever reason, whether that be taste, resilience, or ease of transport, then you will need to pay more than you normally would, in some way or another. Zebu meat is generally considered inferior to Holstein, it can actually be cheaper to import it from abroad than to buy locally produced beef in many parts of the world. So if the farmers switch to Zebu, they are going to make less money on exports, and they might not even be able to sell it for as much in local markets. Standardisation can be very important in food processing. If you're making potato chips from a few huge factories, you ideally want all your potatoes to be the same or very similar cultivars, roughly the same size and starch concentration. Same with bread and baked goods so that covers cereals as well. If you were to use smaller more flexible factories, costs would increase and you'd have to sell at a premium. It all comes down to cost whatever way you look at it. Unless technology can somehow make it no more expensive to use a more diverse crop (and there's absolutely no guarantee that it can) or you can make inferior cultivars a lot better, then there will always be that economic pressure to optimise unless you subsidise to change the economics.
    2
  1775. The problem is London is full of old protected buildings, some only a couple of storeys stall. If London wants to be like Singapore in terms of housing, it will have to throw out the listed building regulations and everything else and get the wrecking ball out. You can't be a forest of skyscrapers and apartment blocks and keep all your historic buildings. It's just not possible. Plus the sightline rules will have to be completely thrown out.
    2
  1776.  @dallysinghson5569  There are quite a lot in London though.
    2
  1777. Global pandemic maybe. But then you have swine flu, which was still a global pandemic despite just displacing seasonal flu.
    2
  1778.  @thabomuso2575  Neo-colonialism is a bit of a thorny term, since it's rather ill defined and often bandied about rather liberally. Corporations exerting influence over governments is pretty normal, they do it to every country they operate in. What's probably closer are the military interventions the US and a few others have done over the years in various parts of the world. These can be quite complicated though, as there are often other justifications that have to be considered. The US was of course obsessively anti-communist, so tended to fight against any country that flirted with it from committing to it. Some might argue that the real reason was to maintain power and control over that nation, but others would argue it was about preventing the spread of Soviet influence. I think you are right though that an 18th century empire wouldn't work in the modern world, ethical issues aside. The rise of the service industry means acquiring more raw materials isn't the most profitable way for a developed country to grow.
    2
  1779.  @thabomuso2575  I will not disagree that the incredible fear and hatred of communism in the US often meant it acted against its own long term self interest, that's happened over and over again. The Mujahadeen probably being the biggest one. I don't think the US really liked dictators, but even the worst dictator was better than a communist to them. The Marshall plan was incredibly expensive and required a huge military commitment for nearly a decade, but at the time it was politically palatable. The US went through a massive economic boom after the war which kept the program going. The same could not be said for many following nation building examples. Generally there was some economic downturn that eventually made the project look like an expensive money pit, so the US cuts back and looks for a way out. There's also the issue that years of strong occupation, like what happened post WWII, is not so palatable nowadays. In fact many would consider it not neocolonial, but just plain old colonial. There's immense moral and political pressure to hand over the country to local control ASAP, even if that means a really fragile democracy or keeping an elite in charge.
    2
  1780.  @thabomuso2575  It's not without its contradictions, no. But in the mindset of the US at the time, it wouldn't accept any move towards communism, no matter how slight, if it could help it. It couldn't always change what it wanted to at home (though not without trying!), or in its developed allies, but it could elsewhere. It might seem irrational to many people now, and probably did to many people then, but I think we have to understand how fervently anti-communist the US government could be, and how that could lead to some very strange choices.
    2
  1781. Based on the numbers here, with the dividends on investments it has it could probably maintain the infrastructure and staff without needing a penny in donations ever again.
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  1782. By botched renewable transition policies, I assume you mean Germany's Energiewende!
    2
  1783.  @spinerocker  Actually, we just call them coolboxes. Sorry to disappoint you.
    2
  1784.  @daneclark3161  That's not helpful if you need to be somewhere on time, say for a connecting flight or a cruise.
    2
  1785.  @daneclark3161  I think you live in the US. Here in Europe you may not have a choice. And yes, it may not be the end of the world but it can be an extremely expensive fix or totally write off your trip so you end up having to cancel everything. And in the case of an overbooking it's totally unnecessary.
    2
  1786.  @daneclark3161  I don't think you understand how the airline industry works here. Many routes have no "partner airlines", it's budget carrier A or budget carrier B, and you can bet your bottom dollar they are not "partners". To go on a legacy airline would be twice as expensive and would involve more connections, so it would take 3-4 times as long. The legacy airline is the "crappy" option, except you don't even save any money! Thankfully here if the airline does bump you, they'll have to pay you up to 600 euros for the privilege, and they can be forced to put you on the quickest alternative route to your destination, even if they means paying full price to their rival, so it doesn't happen often. It's usually just a case of offering better incentives to volunteers.
    2
  1787.  @daneclark3161  So I should buy a ticket that's twice the price for a more roundabout "hub and spoke" route, that takes much longer, has more connections, more waiting in airports and a greater chance of a missed connection, or the much cheaper direct route with a budget airline? Why not just enforce better minimum standards for all airlines?
    2
  1788.  @daneclark3161  That's fine if you want to do that. But being forced to do that is another matter. A free flight is no use to me if it means my trip is ruined.
    2
  1789.  @daneclark3161  I don't think the onus should be on the customer to avoid a bad business practice. After all, if everyone did what you do (though exactly how you'd ask for a more expensive ticket I don't know, generally with budget airlines that would only be through purchasing add-ons you may not want or need), somebody would still have to be bumped.
    2
  1790.  @delfinenteddyson9865  I can't imagine any application where a superconductor is required that would present an exposure risk. The only risk would be in manufacturing, and that could be mitigated with simple PPE.
    2
  1791. It'll certainly be a challenge regarding energy independence. Scotland is not the ideal climate for solar panels, thanks to long dark winters and famously cloudy weather. Run of river hydro has always been a challenge to do economically, you only extract a small fraction of the energy going past and it varies with the river flow rate, making it intermittent unlike regular hydro. Wind turbines might help, but of course there's the noise and visual pollution issues that probably mean they won't be able to install very many, if any at all. Maybe a small modular reactor round the back?😅
    2
  1792.  @denisdufresne5338  Problem is photosynthesis is much less efficient than PV.
    2
  1793.  @maxant4285  In the same way Apple is soon required to use USB-C there.
    2
  1794.  @damienpeladan481  Black Lives Matter, just don't make us pay more tax.
    2
  1795.  @TauCu  You might be able to power a few non safety critical auxiliary systems (such as cabin lights) with solar, in the daytime. It might not be worth the expense though, as a fraction of the total energy needed to keep the plane in the air, it's pretty small.
    2
  1796.  @quademasters249  Well, we can work on both. Solar, wind, hydro, fission work but fusion would work a lot better, so it's worth pursuing. Ships and trains were fine, we didn't need planes, but planes are a lot faster than ships and trains.
    2
  1797.  @callowaysutton  Fusion itself is fairly easy, getting more energy out than you put in is hard.
    2
  1798. SpaceX only thrives because Musk is kept at arms length.
    2
  1799. A lot of nuclear power plants don't have cooling towers already, because you can locate them pretty much anywhere you can stick them next to a big river or on the coast of a lake or ocean, and they can use those bodies of water as giant heat sinks, no cooling towers needed. None of the plants in the UK have cooling towers.
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  1800. FFS, does everything have to be "daring", or "controversial", "bold" or "polarizing" to win an award these days? No, the Oscars doesn't reward these things, and neither should it have to. Instant runoff picks the movie that pleases the most people, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's real effort required in making a movie with broad appeal that doesn't feel generic or phoned in. If Vox were in charge everyone would be trying to outdo each other in subject matter and less attention would be paid to, well, just making a good movie.
    1
  1801. To me, this sounds like a battle theme from Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.
    1
  1802. Indeed. I'd say at least 99% of deaths due to trains (at least in the developed world) are people run over by them, either accidentally or on purpose. Here in the UK we haven't had a passenger fatality (on a heavy rail service) for a decade.
    1
  1803. JDB 1113 The 90% of allowed speed is idiotic. It doesn't really improve safety and would just get you aggro from drivers behind you.
    1
  1804. Seems to me that self driving cars may wipe out rural passenger rail and bus networks in the US. Would probably be a lot cheaper to book a vehicle to come collect you than keep a passenger rail or bus service alive.
    1
  1805. Of course, Concord did have one crash, and although it was something that honestly could have happened to nearly any aircraft in one form or another, it was a big kick in the nuts when it was already weakening. I certainly think that it was the beginning of the end for concord.
    1
  1806. Valiant attempt at that infamous /ɣ/ sound the dutch love to make.
    1
  1807. The solar ship is a more of a blimp than a plane, and compared to a passenger plane the payload is tiny. And anyway, something that slow would not be tolerated by many passengers. I mentioned hydrogen, that is a possibility, but there are challenges compared to synthetic or bio kerosene. And even if the motors were 95% efficient, the fuel cells definitely won't be. Probably better to burn the hydrogen in the engine, after all, you only get water out.
    1
  1808. 80 mph? With all the hassle of the airport I think driving would be quicker. And good luck getting cheap tickets with a craft that small. Larger amounts of baggage will reduce the number of passengers it can carry. And even a comfortable seat would be uncomfortable after 24 hours sat in it.
    1
  1809. All that space is no good if you can't carry a whole lot. Space is not the most important thing, payload is. honestly I can't see these things being cheap if they can only carry a few tens of people. Economies of scale and all that.
    1
  1810. Exactly, these are not going to be used for passenger routes. Many tons is nice, but you'll need tens of tons of payload to compete with traditional large cargo haulers. Plus if you need massive specialist infrastructure that's also a problem. A small fixed wing plane just needs a small airstrip and a hangar.
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  1811. That's fine because it's a spacecraft, it's not going to be used for terrestrial passenger travel. There is the A2 hypersonic concept which uses similar technology, but that's even later in the pipeline. But in theory a London to Sydney trip could take just 4-5 hours on it.
    1
  1812. If you are doing non-OCR artists, I think The Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra deserves a mention. I've never heard better classical renditions of games from anyone else. Plus he's also made his own game music (The Stanley Parable).
    1
  1813. This isn't new science. We've known planting trees is useful for reducing pollution (though some studies dispute that). But trees have disadvantages. Apart from water usage, they also need to be carefully sited to avoid the roots damaging roads, pavements and building foundations. Above ground is also an issue, trees need to be trimmed to avoid branches obstructing roads or damaging buildings. On narrow streets surrounded by high rise buildings, there isn't always space to put trees in. Falling leaves can also coat the roads and make them slippery. Planners often really do want to plant trees, among pollution reduction they can act as a noise barrier to traffic and people generally find them aesthetically pleasing, but sometimes a more artificial or regulatory alternative is the only solution.
    1
  1814. You cannot reach the Americas without crossing an enormous ocean from either side. You can't say we have global trade if we physically cannot reach 1/3rd of the planet's landmass.
    1
  1815. I think it does. We can't say something has global reach if you can't find it in the USA.
    1
  1816. Essentially making our own coal (in several million years).
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  1817. Regarding the expat/immigrant debate, I see it this way. Expat is what you call someone of your own nationality who is living abroad. An immigrant is what the people living there call you. So to me, my brother is a British expat living in New Zealand. To a Kiwi, he is a British immigrant.
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  1818. I will agree that etymologically yes, Crusade has more overt religious connotations. But its usage nowadays is often secular (crusade against poverty, crusade against drugs etc. and it can refer to an internal battle as well), so it fulfills the same role as Jihad, especially as in the west the word has become much more religiously and negatively perceived. To ask me not to use the word Crusade (even though I'm not a Christian) is like asking you to stop using the word Jihad. It's a euphemism treadmill we don't want to go down. Also, I hope you don't mind me pointing it out, but you appear to have contradicted yourself by refuting the idea the the Crusaders were greedy and cruel. It was you that said it, not me. 
    1
  1819. I think the biggest issue with this is that it effectively kills the idea of direct democracy. Without cheap, easy to use electronic voting, direct democracy becomes impractical and unaffordable for the vast majority of countries and other political divisions. Imagine if you tried to implement regular direct voting on legislation using today's traditional 'pen and paper' method. Even developed countries would quickly go bankrupt under the sheer amount of money and labour required, and the disruption to people's daily lives would probably mean turnout would quickly peter away to almost nothing. Only Switzerland, California, and a few others do this irregularly, and then only on a limited selection of legislation. Preventing electronic voting puts up a massive barrier to a more democratic society. P.S. There are of course also political and social arguments as to whether we really want more direct democracy in the first place, but that's not the issue here.
    1
  1820. TheLeftLibertarianAtheist I never said it was anti democratic, only that it is a significant barrier to a more democratic system. Notice that I said it kills the idea of direct democracy, not democracy itself. Representative democracy with public polling every year or two is perfectly workable under the current system. But if you are planning on having public polling more often than that, which would have to occur under a more direct system, without electronic voting it becomes far too expensive and impractical. And I think most would agree that direct democracy is more democratic than representative democracy. Not necessarily better, but definitely more democratic. 
    1
  1821. TheLeftLibertarianAtheist Well the minor issues are probably not the ones people will want to be voting on directly. A lot of direct democracy proponents include some sort of hybrid system where you elect a representative that can vote on your behalf if you choose to abstain (few people have the time to vote on every issue after all). What I think you're essentially saying is we use a more direct system for minor issues, but for major issues we basically hope our representative will vote in our best interests, because it's more secure even if it's less democratic, which to me seems to be the opposite of what you would want in a direct democratic system. I personally think that sort of thing will please no-one.
    1
  1822. 3:40 Um, did you forget to mention Tritium breeding from Lithium?
    1
  1823. Chickenless Nuggets That's cured meat, that's different (so uncured bacon doesn't count). Red meat in general is class 2A. But once again, just because it's in class 1 doesn't mean even a tiny bit will give you cancer. There are a lot of things in class 1, many of them a lot of people are regularly exposed to, and some are far far more dangerous than others.
    1
  1824.  @someguy2135  These aren't terribly large dietary studies (though better than some dietary studies). Other studies have contradicted these findings, finding little significant difference one lifestyle is accounted for. And again, we can look at the nutritional profile of vegan foods that people outside of strict religious groups actually eat.
    1
  1825. Was pretty obvious what the answer was. Bridges that wide would be very expensive. A footpath or minor road bridge could be much narrower and more utilitarian, but obviously it would be difficult to get wildlife to cross it.
    1
  1826. We're not going to go back to the Edison model of the grid even with renewables. Even if we have local generation with 100% renewables (something I also seriously doubt), they will need to be strongly interconnected to allow a failure in one area to be compensated for by others. Many renewable proponents advocate something Tesla would be proud of, supranational grids of huge capacity allowing immense amounts of energy to flow from one region to another, as it allows sunny and windy areas so supply dark and windless ones. Probably the most efficient way for northern Europe to run on solar would be to import nearly all of it from more southern countries (politics and energy security nonwithstanding), such as north Africa and the Med as insolation levels are poor. And local generation is not a given with renewables either, hydro and wind tend to be in isolated areas, and rooftop solar with powerwalls only goes so far, you'd still have massive farms that act like big power stations. The only way I can see anything like Edison's model happening is if we invent a compact, ultra reliable generator that can be installed in homes or local neighbourhoods, offices and factories, and generates no CO2. something like a Mr. Fusion perhaps.
    1
  1827. Electric cars with lithium batteries could explode. Not likely but no less likely than a petrol car.
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  1828. The Irish couldn't grow much else in the poor soil. Even today most agricultural land in Ireland is used for livestock.
    1
  1829. That might not be a bad strategy if you owned a theme park!
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  1830. One of the biggest problems for new nuclear startups is gonna be regulation. It can take decades to get a type approval on a novel reactor design, and then even more years to get a site licence to actually build one. The time and cost of this means only the big boys can afford to play right now, and even then many are cancelled because of delays and mounting costs, sometimes before a single piece of earth is dug. We'll need to have a rational look at nuclear regulation, with the objective of making it cheaper and less onerous without compromising safety.
    1
  1831. +JOUE BIEN TECH Just to be nitpicky, it's spelt Bazalgette, and that was only his surname, his first name was Joseph. It is pronounced that way, though.
    1
  1832. Is this going to be part of a series? Would love to see some of the BWB designs and new hypersonic concepts like the REL A2.
    1
  1833. It's a nice balance, increasing walkability without starving off vehicular access (because then you would have a ghost town). It also helps if you have a lot of inner city residents who can walk to work.
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  1834. The argument I'd make is that inequality by itself doesn't produce suffering, since it's always a relative measure. You can have very equal countries where nearly everyone lives in dire poverty, or very unequal countries where the poor still have a decent living because the country itself is much richer. I'm not saying we can just ignore inequality, on a global level we're still in a situation where the poor do suffer, but on a more national level if we set the goal to be reducing inequality and measure that as our metric of performance, we might not actually be making things better.
    1
  1835.  @Bangpath247  Young as in 20's or 30's, not a teenager. Older than that and you get people who want to start families or are burnt out. I'm sure the really senior people probably already chose the job over all of that, but for everyone else...
    1
  1836. It won't be useful for every home since not all are oriented correctly for solar to be practical.
    1
  1837.  @Troll_Rottentooth  No, east to west means you only get the sun on the panels for half the day, which means they can be uneconomic in more polar latitudes where insolation energy is lower, like the UK. North to south means you can put the panels on the south facing side or north facing side of the roof depending on your hemisphere and they will be exposed to the sun for most of the day, including at midday when it is overhead.
    1
  1838.  @Troll_Rottentooth  The payback time certainly doesn't make sense on my E-W property, and up here in the north I'd not get much out of them in winter when I actually need the electricity. There houses with solar panels nearby, but all are on SW-S-SE facing roofs. An ASHP would actually be more beneficial in terms of return on investment, but of course they only really make sense for new houses because of the drastic alterations to central heating that is otherwise required.
    1
  1839.  @Troll_Rottentooth  No, my neighbour does but their house faces north-south. I ran the numbers and it just made no sense, it would produce energy when I didn't need it and produce bugger all when I did, so I'd need a huge battery to make it even marginally useful which pushes up payback times even further. Then there's panel lifetime to consider, by 15 years they're going to have degraded quite a bit so they're putting out less energy. Most of the installations around here are much younger than that.
    1
  1840. AFAIK Aluminium Sulfate (or Alum) is considered to have fairly low toxicity, it's not only used to purify drinking water, but it's been used for centuries as an additive to flour. The bioaccumulation of aluminium is concerning, though I assume there's not a proven link between that and ingestion of Alum.
    1
  1841. Small town with a big expensive arena screams private college town to me.
    1
  1842. Not on coal, on gas.
    1
  1843. Because France is much bigger than Estonia. It can't just dismantle its bureaucracy and rebuild it from scratch, which is pretty much what Estonia did after the USSR fell apart.
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  1844. The issue there is on a universal timescale those distances aren't that far. A generation ship could probably reach the nearest stars to earth within a century or two with near future technology, and from there you can spread out exponentially, if done so consistently within a few tens of millions of years you'd have colonised a good chunk of the milky way.
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  1845. I think even if Carol is legally innocent, she is possibly not morally innocent. She and her new partner maybe the "least worst" of the main characters in all of this, but she still kicked the hornets nest when they could have rose above it, and it's not out of the question that she claimed the moral high ground out of mostly self interest.
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  1846. Its a shame because I think the concept of the IDW has merit, there are people who conflate themselves with it who have, shall we say, "unpopular" viewpoints within academia but nevertheless are still genuine scientists and researchers in the field, and do deserve a platform to have their say. But such a label also attracts grifters who can use the shield of controversy to hide unscientific nonsense.
    1
  1847.  @ProfessorDaveExplains  History will tell you that's wrong. Academics are people with their own biases and cultural influences. Science is never as objective as it should be.
    1
  1848.  @ProfessorDaveExplains  Entire disciplines can and do develop biases, because those individuals add up to a collective centre of gravity. Scientific history is full of people shunned because they did not agree with the mainstream in their field. Sometimes they are honest but wrong, sometimes they are cranks, but sometimes they are right, or at least partly right. Sometimes it's just the result of a sticky consensus or inflated egos, but when there's a political dimension things can get especially nasty, when politics influences scientific consensus, and what side of an issue you are on lumps you in with a political ideology. You're confusing the idealistic vision of science with the messy reality.
    1
  1849.  @ProfessorDaveExplains  Alfred Wegener is a good example from history. Like it or not, many disciplines have an ideological bias, and that's usually towards the left. And that can and does interfere with objectivity, because scientists aren't immune from their own biases. I won't deny there aren't people that use this bias to prop up bad science. You are correct that it does happen. But there are also people who while you might or even I might disagree with their views, like Sommers, Pinker and Peterson, are people with genuine qualifications who are coming from a place of rigour.
    1
  1850.  @ProfessorDaveExplains  And he was discredited for years before then, his peers wouldn't even consider his ideas. I'm not asking you to agree with people like Peterson or Sommers. I'm not sure I really agree with them myself. But I don't like the way their ideas are discredited because of their political affiliations. Some more political diversity is also desperately needed in some disciplines, just look at the APA guidance for men and boys, it sounds like it was written by a bunch of radical feminists. There's no balance there. They aren't perfect, Peterson can't handle online discourse and I wish he would stop. But given the right environment he can form a coherent and professional argument. He also has the credentials to back that up.
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  1851.  @ProfessorDaveExplains  No scientist is authoritative outside their field, and you can expect some to espouse views that are wrong in that respect. The question is are their arguments reasonable within their own field? As for the transphobia, I assume you're talking about his dislike of alternative pronouns. It seems to me that it is a protest against the legal mandate in his country to use them or be charged with a hate crime. Perhaps you disagree on that front, which is fair, but this is really a matter of personal preference, not an anti scientific position. But even if we discount Peterson, there are others. And many more that aren't famous but keep their views quiet for fear of retribution. In the end I absolutely agree with you that controversy can shield bad actors. But I won't deny there isn't a problem with political bias and lack of political diversity within some scientific fields, and I fundamentally disagree with those who justify it by saying "science is naturally left wing". Academia is left wing through a self reinforcing feedback loop which pushes away or silences a lot of people who aren't, though of course some do hang on with a lot of determination. I'm not particularly right wing myself, I'd personally describe myself as center leaning ever so slightly left, but I'm still glad I'm in an engineering field where politics thankfully has little influence (and I hope it stays that way).
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  1852. Unions can be beneficial for workers, but unions that are too powerful and stubborn can end up destroying themselves and dragging the companies their members work for down with them.
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  1853. I'd leave it behind if I didn't have it with me, but I'd make the airline pay to replace everything I lost, and any extra expense I incurred, down to the penny. Yeah I don't care if it's going to cost you an arm and a leg to ship that from halfway across the world by tomorrow, I want it now and you're going to get it to me. I've been in a plane crash, you bet I'm going to be the biggest Karen in the world over this.
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  1854.  @KashifNawaz85  For something that expensive, the go team might want proof of purchase. If it was an $800 laptop, I think most airlines would just get you whatever you asked for. The go team is there after a crash to fulfil pretty much any reasonable request from passengers. Need an emergency passport? They'll get you a taxi to the embassy/consulate, put you at the front of the queue and pay for it all. Need clothes? They'll take you to a shopping centre and buy you a whole new wardrobe if you need it. Other possessions like cameras and laptops? Say what you want, they'll get it shipped to you ASAP.
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  1855.  @lauramartins5953  Whether someone is a legal refugee or illegal economic migrant can take a lot of time and money to discover and the decision is often open to interpretation and dispute. No doubt the refugee crisis allowed many illegal economic migrants to slip under the radar in more "open door" countries and it will be years before some will have that decision made about them, and even then there is the appeal process which can drag it out even further. Tougher immigration policies also inevitably make it harder for genuine refugees to enter, and vice versa. The two cannot be completely seperated.
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  1856. @SteamedBunX That's fair enough, but I still don't see what relevance they'd have with a perspective on South African issues.
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  1857. Possibly they plan on running longer routes between smaller cities.
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  1858. I don't think having a singular "official language" prevents multi lingual instruction or signage (maybe it does in the US if government funded?). AFAIK official languages are about obligations, not prohibitions. So a nation with two official languages maybe legally compelled to produce documents in two languages, or have two languages on road signs, but if there's only one they can still do it, they are just under no legal obligation to do so.
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  1859. Yeah, we talk a lot about how the US has restaurant chains dedicated to pale imitations of foreign cuisine, but you can guarantee nearly all the other countries in the world will have a similar chain (or several) imitating US cuisine (US chains in said countries notwithstanding). The thing is, as snobbish as the French or Italians might be about their cuisine, deep down they really quite like American food, be it burgers and fries, tex mex or BBQ.
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  1860. I think for these ultra sensitive tabletop gamers, there's going to be a money making opportunity. With creating new worlds from scratch too much of a burden, carefully vetted guides with established universes will give them a realistic chance of creating a campaign without burning themselves out. The experience will be less adventurous and more formulaic, but it will be "safe" for their sensibilities. Kind of like going to McDonalds over that new Asian Fusion restaurant. Not as interesting but nobody is going to complain about the food.
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  1861. ​ @1ycan-eu9ji Argentina is whiter than the US, which it seems not a lot of people outside of South America realise.
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  1862. Well, it's less weird than Gaykoslavie.
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  1863. From a financial perspective I'm not sure waste processing and disposal accounts for all that much over the lifetime of the reactor. The fact is there just isn't that much to dispose of.
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  1864. Britain certainly did have non-white people in positions of power... in their empire. At home, I can't think of many examples, I think there were some MP's in the 19th century, but no aristocracy.
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  1865.  @Project_Algiz  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadabhai_Naoroji 1892, first Indian MP.
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  1866. The US needs more ski resorts, that seems to be the fundamental issue. Aspen residents are worried about overcrowding, and not without merit, it's already a very busy ski resort. More flights is probably not going to mean more residents, but more tourists, and while you could build a few new hotels to accommodate them, the ski area itself can only handle so many more people without becoming a very unpleasant experience especially for regulars.
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  1867. I don't think there are really any downsides to cut through paths, as long as they're not excessively overengineered. It should just be a path, not some heavy duty active travel road with lots of paint and bollards. That's what makes the cost of these things go up.
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  1868.  @lugaidster  Slowing the growth or stagnation is the best option. It allows wages to catch up while keeping mortgage payers solvent. It would take much longer than a crash but would be a lot more sustainable. Tackling regional inequality can be a good way to cool house prices, in most countries there are plenty of places with cheap housing, but there's no good paying jobs.
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  1869. FR seems like a "genie" technology to me, one that can't be realistically restricted. Laws can be easily and clandestinely circumvented, and restrictions on research just push it to more accepting countries. We also enjoy some of the benefits of it, from automated passport kiosks to being able to find our friends in photos. I don't think it's going away.
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  1870. Asking people for their experience of a condition can be an important part of research, but I think it's important not to rely on it. The fact is, ask 100 people with autism about their experiences and you'll get 100 slightly different answers. Being able to step back and dispassionately analyse symptoms and and effects is needed to get a solid grasp on what Autism is and what it _isn't_.
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  1871.  @youtubeuser1052  Even if it's just a hour or so round an easy trail, I don't think there's any substitute for going out and seeing it in person.
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  1872.  @youtubeuser1052  I think their point was they'd see so many of these tour buses, compared to younger visitors, because these were the people who had the time and the money to do these things. Maybe some of them had been there when they were younger, but the next generation isn't showing up.
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  1873. That's not really a rule though, that's just ignorant HR departments writing the advertisement. Most candidates just ignore it and get hired anyway.
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  1874. The problem the UK has is it produced far more plutonium than it was consuming, there's still 140 tonnes of plutonium oxide powder in storage at Sellafield, and we don't really know what to do with it. It's not weapons grade thankfully but it's still hazardous.
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  1875. I remember much of the problem with agriculture in England was the flouting of the rules around muck spreading and storing manure near rivers. There is supposed to be a rule that you aren't allowed to deposit or store animal waste within X metres (can't remember the exact figure) of a watercourse, but this rule is regularly broken, often by farmers who see it as making the strip of land agriculturally worthless. Of course we could essentially pay farmers to develop riparian buffer strips, and with a bit of time and money you can put in landscapes that can absorb much of the excess phosphates before they reach the river, mostly through phosphate hungry plants. Problem is you're paying farmers to be less productive because that land can't be used for agriculture (mostly, you could put in some low yield crops like nut trees but for most farmers that's just not worth bothering with) and that goes down about as well with the public as you can imagine. Farmers are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, people complain about them recieving huge subsides but at the same time complain if the agricultural industry shrinks because it's fundamentally uneconomic without them.
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  1876. Eh, in some ways it's better than unitarianism. That tends to promote over-centralisation, think of France and the UK with huge capital cities that suck people and jobs away from other regions.
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  1877. I like tech in a car that makes it easier to drive. Parking sensors, reversing camera, even lane guidance (as long as it isn't too sensitive) all that stuff is generally great. But I don't really want a fancy entertainment system (at least until the things can actually drive themselves) because it's distracting. I just want good satellite navigation and something that can play radio stations, music and podcasts, and Apple Carplay/Android Auto already does that fine, no need for some fancy custom built OS for a bajillion features and settings 90% of which I will never touch.
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  1878.  @poetryflynn3712  Support is usually the main issue with open source, businesses don't want to waste time trying to troubleshoot an issue themselves or crack open the codebase to try their own fix, they want to call someone up and have a fix done for them ASAP. That's why you see industries that use a lot of open source often still pay for subscriptions to get versions with dedicated support teams. That and for software that has niche applications like autonomous agriculture, there's often just not enough people and donations to make something industry leading for free.
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  1879. The idea of using liquid lithium as a coolant does tend to raise a few eyebrows because of the risk of a lithium fire if there's a leak in the heat exchanger.
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  1880. I can see it being popular with some commercial vehicles, with a few passenger models for those that do a lot (and I mean a lot) of driving, probably in remote areas where charging infrastructure is non existent. Though, a potential alternative could be fast battery swapping for some use cases. If we could develop a standard attachment system for a range of standard battery packs that could be detatched from under the vehicle, then it could be as simple as driving into a car wash like bay and waiting 30 seconds. There's also OHL and inductive charging, but the infrastructure requirements probably mean that's unlikely to be used outside of very busy high capacity roads like some US interstates and a few European trunk routes.
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  1881. I think we need to look at more than reusability alone for advancement in space travel technology, we need to look at how many times your vehicle can be reused. If a reusable booster is good for say, 10-20 launches without need to be majorly reconditioned or scrapped, that's good, but to really bring the cost down, we need vehicles that can do 100's or even 1000's of launches with minimal maintenance and servicing. You know, like a modern airplane, which often clock up 30-40,000 flights in their lifetime. Certainly reusability is not a done and dusted technological achievement, there needs to be advancements in reliability to allow more and more reuses. Maybe rockets can achieve that, maybe we will have to look at alternatives. Who knows.
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  1882.  @Quickshot0  Rocket launches are high-G affairs, a lot of stress is put on the vehicles for sustained periods of time. I think this will be an issue for longevity at least in the near term. To solve that we could look at better materials, or we might have to look at alternatives to rocketry, or at least a way to make the launches "smoother".
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  1883.  @Quickshot0  Metal creep and fatigue will absolutely be exacerbated by increased stress, especially as it varies so much during a mission. Planes have to deal with it too, absolutely, but planes aren't pulling 3-4 G's for several minutes every time they take off (passenger planes never get close, unless something has gone really wrong!)
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  1884.  @Quickshot0  Rockets have sustained G-forces unlike rollercoasters or jet fighters, so a centrifuge is probably the closest, but probably not quite equivalent, a rocket has a lot more mass than most centrifuges, and aren't as reinforced! You may be right, maybe these things turn out to be very resilient. But I think in comparison to an aircraft, a rocket has a lot more stress to deal with in general. It's just the nature of a more ballistic flight trajectory. Add in all these rapid reorientation manoeuvres to enable booster re-use, and it's likely put under even more stress. FYI, stress is the pressure that is exerted on an area of material, and strain is how much it has deformed. Excessive deformation isn't good, but there's also cracking to consider. Likely it'll be the latter that would limit the lifespan.
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  1885.  @Quickshot0  I think it's the sustained strong acceleration that's the real big difference. Most planes never get close to the stresses of a rocket and never for as long. It's just a greater magnitude in a number of ways.
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  1886.  @Quickshot0  It depends on what orbit I guess, but you're right it's not that long, I was probably thinking of a GSO orbit than a LEO. Less than 10 minutes is possible, but very uncomfortable for human passengers. For you and me a slower launch is likely. 3-4 G's for even a few minutes isn't pleasant, your typical rollercoaster might pull 4-5 G's but you're talking 4-5 seconds at most. Personally I'm betting on spaceplanes for passengers and light cargo in the long term, with rockets for the heavy freight. Sure, it's a lot longer to orbit and it might not be as efficient (though supercooled ramjets could reduce LOx mass), but the stresses of a take off from a runway vs a launch pad should be significantly lower. The technology isn't there yet though.
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  1887.  @Quickshot0  Much like in the early days of flying, you'll get more daredevils who aren't too bothered with comfort. But your family vacation to the moon is probably going to need something more sedate.
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  1888.  @BadTakesGuy  Stainless steel has a fatigue limit, where stress below that limit shouldn't induce fatigue cracking. That doesn't mean it can't, and in something like a rocket launch there very likely will be spots that exceed that limit.
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  1889.  @BadTakesGuy  I doubt that would be the case. Some components or surfaces would be likely stressed beyond the limits and need replacing eventually. It's hard to know exactly what and where for every launch, because there going to be a lot of temperature fluctuations and aerodynamic forces. Simulations can give good estimates but real world knowledge only comes with experience. It's also unlikely they would build every component out of SS, because the whole thing would be very heavy and it would be unsuitable in some locations, particularly where thermal expansion would cause problems. We've gotten good results with aluminium for aircraft, and that has no lower fatigue limit. But the forces are significantly lower, and we've had a lot more experience managing fatigue in aircraft.
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  1890.  @BadTakesGuy  SpaceX is hoping the stresses won't be too great. They can run simulations, but only real world experience will give them certainty. In the end, it simply dictates how many times starship can be reused, and engineers can be optimists just like everyone else.
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  1891. It may be with chemical rockets. A workable fusion engine might change things.
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  1892. Even with the relatively low cost of labour in Sri Lanka, I'm not sure permaculture would be economic. You need a lot more people working manual jobs to grow the same amount of food. That makes it pretty much a non-starter in the developed world outside of hobbyists and alternative lifestyle communes.
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  1893.  @0MVR_0  Compared to what it was 150 years ago, agriculture is not labour intensive. We have a tiny fraction of the workforce in agriculture, even in developing countries only the poorest approach the percentages before the green revolution and industrial agriculture. As for complexity, I'd argue permaculture is more complex per hectare since you're dealing with a lot of micromanagement and bespoke practices tailored to hyper local agricultural conditions, compared to conventional agriculture where standardised processes are applied to many hectares of land at once.
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  1894.  @0MVR_0  By that argument all work is labour intensive, and therefore such a statement is meaningless. Until we develop incredibly dextrous and intelligent agricultural robots, permaculture simply cannot be mechanised. And try and apply the coarse knowledge about general climate and soil type over a 200 hectare farm to a 2 hectare permaculture plot, you won't get far.
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  1895.  @0MVR_0  Well crops don't grow by magic do they? So what's your point? As for a definition for permaculture, how about: intensive unmechanized small scale polyculture.
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  1896.  @0MVR_0  If it does, then it's not going to get the yields of conventional agriculture. I think many wouldn't even call it permaculture, it's just marketing at that point. You can't have your cake and eat it.
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  1897.  @0MVR_0  What the hell does that remark have to do with the niche agricultural practices of a few hobbyists and hippies?
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  1898.  @0MVR_0  I think that's a bit conspiratorial to say the least. I don't think think those who practice permaculture are dangerous. If they want to make their food that way, that's up to them. It's just not something that's going to work for the rest of us.
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  1899. I wonder if the US might have a "grand canal" project similar to China to pump water from the Deep South to the Midwest.
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  1900. When it comes to electric vehicles, cars are a far lower hanging fruit. While battery powered trucks may be something to implement eventually, why not wait until you've electrified most of the cars first? It's running the marathon before you've achieved the 10K. There is so much we still need to do to extend the range and affordability of electric cars. In the meantime, bio and synthetic diesel (in fact, manufacturing synthetic fuel is something well suited to renewables) could help reduce fossil fuel dependency in trucks, and that would require minimal changes to existing vehicles. Another important thing to mention is the charge time. For the 500 mile model, an average US trucker could run it from full to empty in a day. If it takes longer than the rest period for a full recharge, the shipment will take longer and the company will lose money.
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  1901. UK homes do tend to be smaller, which does help. Also winters are usually pretty mild. Still, I'd look at the cost of upgrading to 80 or 100A, it would probably make things easier and require less aggressive power management.
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  1902. Tesla Superchargers are now up against CCS, and it's like Lightning vs USB, CCS is going to win. It's not as sleek and elegant, but it's flexible, moderately future proof, and the standard for all other EV's.
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  1903. (unseasoned) scrambled eggs are what the vet recommended for my parent's dog when he wouldn't take his medication. He wasn't usually fussy but he would pich around pills if you put them in his food.
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  1904. Most likely it's a minimum design speed, i.e. the curvature and surface quality should be enough for a car to safely travel at that speed.
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  1905. This is very similar to how large livestock are slaughtered in many parts of the non-Islamic world, a boltgun is basically a pneumatic brain spike. Also, I would expect many deep sea fish to be flash frozen to death. Since that halts all cellular activity almost instantly, I wonder if you get a similar result. It also has the advantage of killing any parasites in the fish.
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  1906. Personally I'm banking more on synthetic milk than plant based "cheese". It's perhaps one of the hardest things to replicate from plant based sources.
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  1907. Did restaurants under Jim Crow exclude anyone who wasn't white?
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  1908. The biggest question we need to ask is, what and where are these jobs that are supposedly going to be created? In the past it was from manufacturing to services, but as services are automated, where do workers go from there? What sector or sectors can a) be difficult enough to automate so humans are needed, and b) can grow big enough to accommodate a large chunk of the displaced workers?
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  1909. Why did he have to purchase the properties? During reunification if he could prove they were expropriated he would have been entitled to either the properties themselves or their market value in cash if they were purchased in good faith and the buyer didn't want to sell it back to the state.
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  1910. @user-yz5vl2sz6n  I heard there was some lowball evaluations for commercial properties, but I didn't hear anything about residential.
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  1911. Amazon Q? I'm just waiting for the Star Trek jokes.
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  1912. If it is real, it is only because the white population is doing it to themselves.
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  1913. I'm curious to how the block operation works on the disney monorails. Is there some kind of cab signalling? I've not seen any light signals next to the track. Anyway, hope they fixed the issue with reversing on a spur. Maybe you could cover the Transrapid crash at the test track in Germany? It's not one I hear about very often. So far I believe it's the only fatal maglev accident.
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  1914. The thing that concerns me most is all the major flaws with the Cybertruck make it less safe. Less safe to drive, less safe to load snd unload luggage. It feels like a vehicle where safety has taken a back seat to aesthetics and experience, and that is not a good look at all.
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  1915.  @wintermint77  Government as a single landlord is a viable alternative in a socialist system. In the end the people pay either way, through rent or taxes, it just depends on how much they pay and how it is calculated. Many countries have public housing, including the US. A few lucky tenants may get a great place at a low price, but this is usually at the expense of the private rented sector as they have a supply squeeze.
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  1916.  @wintermint77  When a government tries to house everyone, or nearly everyone in government housing, which is what you'd need to eliminate landlords, it does tend to go that way. You can't cherry pick a few public housing projects around the world and claim that expanding such programs to everyone will work. In most cases those are either thoroughly means tested so anyone who can afford to rent privately or buy, even just barely, are excluded, or house a few lucky families that were around in the right place at the right time.
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  1917.  @abhisheksamanta1  I agree, but having the government own all the housing to eliminate private renting can be quite reasonably called socialism even from a moderate perspective. Even the most liberal social democracies of europe have plenty of private rented housing.
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  1918.  @chrismckellar9350  Then it will be managed like endemic seasonal flu, not a pandemic. So that means yearly immunisations for the vulnerable, not a more sterile environment. As for your second comment, I'm not sure how global warming would be able to create pandemics on this scale every few years. Some insect borne diseases could spread due to a shift in species range but these don't transmit between humans. COVID was not a result of climate change.
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  1919.  @tigershark2328  Of course we can't be certain of when the next major pandemic will be. But the trend seems to be making them rarer due to improved medicine and basic sanitation (not sterilizing everything to within an inch of its life, just the basics like good sewers and clean water). It's not easy to remember that diseases like tuberculosis used to be endemic and flare up every so often, killing millions up until the early 20th century. Pandemics were a lot more common. I think mask wearing will face cultural resistance in the West, covering your face is considered untrustworthy in some Western cultures and most people I know plan to ditch them ASAP. Even the east Asians only tend to wear them if they're sick, and not all of them. As for Ebola, that's a media scare story. Outside of the most impoverished places in the world, it cannot spread easily. Notice how all cases in the developed world were quickly stopped dead.
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  1920.  @chrismckellar9350  So is flu, it just doesn't spread so easily. Either way it doesn't matter, if it infects people more easily you vaccinate more people. Or symptoms may become so mild we treat it like the common cold. This isn't going to change the world forever, and as I said excessive hygiene has its own problems. Any you know what I meant by methane viruses.
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  1921. For long distance routes, I don't think it's the trains that are the problem, it's the track. If America wants to make rail work like China and be profitable (in the very long term at least), they need to build thousands of km of brand new, high speed track that trains can zip along at 300 km/h and above, cutting many long distance journey times into the single digit hours. People look at a 14 hour train and a 4 hour flight and understandably go for the latter. As it stands with the ballooning costs of just one new HS line in California, that doesn't look feasible. Of course HS trains can't stop at remote towns, but slower local services could feed into a few strategically placed interchanges. In the end though, some places it's just not practical to connect them by rail.
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  1922. As history has taught us, partition is never an easy solution.
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  1923. By foot? Do you have any idea how big these reservations are? It would take you weeks to get there, if you didn't die on the way.
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  1924.  @kleeblattchen38  You don't get many tourists that way. Those with the money don't have the time, and those with the time don't have the money. And walking out on the savannah is dangerous. You have the elements as well as deadly wild animals, lions, hippos, etc. The natives will of course have motorized transportation for long distance travel, probably not a land rover, but something reasonably robust, an old hilux is probably a popular choice. They don't all live like they did in the 19th century.
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  1925. Ireland's gone from boom to bust and boom again. It wasn't so long ago I remember they were lumped in with Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece as one of the "sick countries" of Europe. Maybe the Celtic Tiger is back from the dead.
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  1926. I'd argue satellite communications aren't that big of an issue. Military communications satellites have been a thing since, well, satellites have been a thing. Most of the world's largest militaries have their own system or share with allies. Starlink is special because it's an "open" commercial system, and for Ukraine it kind of makes sense, no need for another military to ship expensive and militarily sensitive encoder/decoder equipment to them so they can use Satcom, Skynet or similar. But that's not necessary for the majority of European militaries who already have a system they can use. Besides, a european Starlink is going to run into one massive snag, lack of native launch capacity. I doubt Arianespace could crank out enough Ariane 6 launchers to keep up with demand, and they probably wouldn't be able to launch anything else even if they could, and other competitors aren't really ready yet. So some would have to be launched by the US which would probably not be acceptable.
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  1927. 0:32 Jesus, if you can't get an English proofreader when selling a jet, what hope do you have? This isn't a cheap toaster off Amazon!
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  1928.  @mab9614  The problem in the US has been natural gas has been very cheap for a long time (since they are pretty much self sufficient), so nuclear just can't compete. You'd have to raise the carbon price a lot to make nuclear competitive there, or cut nuclear costs in half (which while not impossible, is difficult).
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  1929. It does make me wonder why gas station sushi isn't flash frozen like most restaurant sushi is. 15 hours in a -40C blast freezer is enough to kill off fish parasites and eggs like this one. Hell, even a week or so at -20C will do the trick.
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  1930.  @KuraIthys  I wouldn't think that would result in any immediate effects to the economy. Consumption would still rise as the global poor and middle class improve their standard of living. Some countries could have labour issues but a bit of automation or immigration could help with that.
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  1931. It's interesting to think, would it have been better if partition had not happened? The British didn't do it for shits and giggles after all, they had genuine concerns that without partition there would have been civil war in India. As it turns out there kind of was anyway, though whether it was as bad as it would have been with no partition is up for speculation. Could there have been a better partition if the British had spent more time on it?
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  1932. I think it goes to show that the classic quote by Benjamin Franklin doesn't always apply when the needs for safety are so great. When you have a country with criminal violence that rivals some civil wars, people want safety above everything else.
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  1933. I can partially sympathise with some of Musk's criticisms of Twitter. But I can't support such a vindictive, childish, and egotistical billionaire who literally seems to think that being the richest man on earth (though only through absurdly overvalued stocks) means he can do just about anything he wants with minimal consequences, even if that means making things up, spreading gossip and slander, and bending the rules to benefit himself. He makes Bill Gates at the height of his greed look like a saint.
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  1934. ​ @daletidy.  Toronto average low in Jan is only -7 (Same as Chicago), Ottawa -10 (Less than Minneapolis). Montreal is only slightly lower than Minneapolis, and Calgary and Quebec city only a little more. And lack of sunlight, really? Montreal is at the same latitude as Stuttgart, and they get plenty of daylight even in winter, you'll get a good 8 hours of daylight, that can hardly be a major economic limitation. Plus you get up to 17 hours of daylight in summer to compensate. There are many reasons why Canada is never going to be as prosperous as the US, and the climate does play a major role. But I really don't think it's because most Canadian cities are less dynamic because of the climate. As I've pointed out, there are large, prosperous US cities which maintain a thriving economy despite adverse weather conditions. If the city half shuts down in winter, then it's got other economic barriers to success. I don't think blaming the climate, unless you're in the middle of siberia, is a good excuse, especially today.
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  1935.  @BallistikKitty  Buffalo, Boulder, Minneapolis, Chicago, all these US places deal with cold winters, lots of snow and ice. If they can manage a thriving economy, so can Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, and I don't really see any evidence they aren't. As for dark days in winter, there are these things called street lights, they work pretty well.
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  1936.  @jessip8654  Which is fair enough for the portion of Canada where almost nobody lives. But nearly all of the cities have climates that are comparable to several US cities that manage winter fine. It isn't a good reason why they should be less dynamic than their US counterparts. Climate can explain the productivity gap in a few primary industries located in rural areas. But it can't explain the rest. It can't explain why light industry, services and tech sectors lag behind their competition in Chicago or Buffalo. Because those are almost all located in urban and suburban areas near cities.
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  1937.  @spencerevans8719  No, but there's still several million plus cities out there.
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  1938.  @spencerevans8719  They aren't significantly different to Chicago or Minneapolis. Calgary and Edmonton are worse, but they are smaller cities than any of those.
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  1939.  @CommoditySC  London and Manchester are rainy cities with dark winters. Stockholm or Helsinki in the Nordic countries don't blame their economic performance on cold or snow. None of these places "shut down" in the winter, if cities in Canada are doing so then that is a problem within their control, this isn't the 18th century. Some Canadians just seem to be making excuses for Canada's lacklustre economy compared to the US by blaming it on the climate, rather than taking a long hard look at their economic policies.
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  1940.  @jimpaddy79  Not all of them did.
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  1941. I think this is important. Europe shouldn't just be trying to catch up to SpaceX, Europe should be innovating beyond them. Europe can't really compete with them, they're too far behind and SpaceX has access to extremely lucrative contracts from the US government. It could be an SSTO space plane, it could be something else, but if Europe wants to gain ground in launch capability it needs to look at the cutting edge, not just copy others.
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  1942. I wonder who you would sue in this case? Turo, the host or perhaps even the PD for failing to update their database? Though hopefully Turo agreed to settle for a full refund + additional expenses (probably had to find a last minute rental as a replacement and had to pay for a taxi to go get it) + a couple thousand dollars per person for the inconvenience and trauma.
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  1943. I wish it wouldn't swing so damn much and just sit somewhere in the middle twitching a little. All this swinging does is create chaos and conflict.
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  1944.  @simonh6371  Indeed, those would be the European style apartment blocks I mentioned. There are of course more modern ones but they tend to be larger. In the UK we don't really have a lot in that size, it's mostly single family detached/semi/terrace or a proper big block of flats. Partly it's a desire for private gardens which is quite significant here.
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  1945.  @arahunter9563  That still doesn't make it correct.
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  1946. I can't imagine this company staying in Denmark once they want to work with actual spicy rocks. Nuclear energy is still legally banned in the country since 1985 and it will probably be a long legal battle to get it repealed. Finland, Sweden, France or the UK might be keen though.
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  1947. Some countries consider familial ties in the application process as having more weight than others. That said, imagine if the US did just allow siblings to follow along with little resistance, they'd probably see numbers increase significantly. In some ways having a wait time at all is better than many countries, they'd just outright refuse to ever let them in permanently. None of this means your siblings can't come see you or your parents in the US, they can get a B1/B2 visa (you can get multi entry ones after a few visits) and as long as they leave on time they can probably visit for a couple weeks every year if they are able to. And if they can't get that for whatever reason (I appreciate it's not always possible to even get a tourist visa to the US from some high risk countries), you can always visit them in their home country or a third nation. Lots of people in your position do that. I know it would be nice of you could all live together in the US, but that's never going to be easy.
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  1948. I believe if you combine a business trip and a vacation you can tax deduct both your outbound and return flights, since you would have to have taken that trip anyway if you just went for business. Certainly my employer doesn't mind if I do that and expense the flights, though I know some ask you to pay half.
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  1949. Time to play the biggest con game in the history of the multiverse!
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  1950. UK perspective here, in many universities the STEM programs attract a lot of lucrative overseas students, which are exempt from tuition fee caps.
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  1951.  @browhatthatinsane34  Think affirmative action on steroids. It is designed to narrow the economic and social disparity of white and black South Africans by giving black South Africans overtly preferential treatment in areas of education and employment. As a result many middle class white South Africans are choosing to emigrate as they feel they'll be able to progress their career more easily abroad.
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  1952.  @coopergates9680  Bulletproof vests won't stop you getting shot in the head, arms or legs. You still need something to deter the assailant from firing the gun in the first place, and the best option for that is often another gun pointed at them. Police vehicles are harshly driven, need to be reliable and need special modifications (not off the assembly line, it gets taken to a specialist auto shop for that), it wouldn't be a good idea to buy heavily used vehicles.
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  1953. Suspect it's some otherwise worthless land the mine can get a bit of income for by putting some renewable energy on it. It's probably not all that much compared to what's still hauled out of the ground every day, but it's something. I suspect with a huge open pit mine the problem won't be so acute, you've got a huge area you can make flat so you can put industry or agriculture in it (assuming the land isn't contaminated).
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  1954.  @christopherneufeldt4035  Depending on regulations, they might have to fill in the pit up to some level anyway, which would make a nice flat piece of ground, flooding might be an issue though but that's hardly exclusive to a pit mine.
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  1955. ​ @Pyrrhic. In the short term renewables are still likely to bolster demand for gas for dispatchable load balancing, so gas producing countries are likely to see gains. In the long term it's hard to say, storage technology is still somewhat languishing but will probably catch up eventually. A nuclear renaissance is probably a more "immediate" threat as that has the ability to reduce gas dependence as soon as the reactors are switched on, but of course there're a lot of questions about if that will happen.
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  1956.  @davidgreen5994  My point was he's not satisfied with the current arrangement where the strength of the security of an external EU border depends a lot on the strength and commitment of the national border force that patrols it. You've got different nations enforcing different external borders with varying degrees of effectiveness. It's still quite a patchwork system. Frontex sort of ties them all together but like the EU itself, most of the power is in the national border forces.
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  1957. Honestly I think the French just don't like amusement parks that much. If they built Euro Disney in Germany, Spain or the UK instead it probably would have done a lot better as you said. They were always going to struggle with the castle through, when you can find real renaissance era castles all over western and central europe having a fake one in your park isn't so much of a draw.
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  1958. Well what's the alternative? Not build this infrastructure? People will just have to use their cars.
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  1959.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  Mainly to get geothermal for electricity, not heat, you don't want hot water, you want hot steam, very hot steam. That means drilling significantly deeper than the source of most hot springs (the ones people swim in anyway). In Iceland the majority of geothermal is not for electricity, it's for heating and hot water, because it's way cheaper to drill a shallow hole than a deep one. Electricity is mainly hydroelectric.
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  1960. @ Psychedelic mushrooms are native all around the world.
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  1961. Technically under UK law you can't speed or go through a red light to make way for the emergency services, even if that means you become an obstruction.
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  1962.  @bidoof4938  Before iPads kids had TV's, game consoles, books, or just went and played outside. Parents in the past were probably less active than they are today. If anything I wonder if being too active is a bad thing, it doesn't teach a child autonomy or how to entertain themselves. But the iPad is just too potent, it's an overstimulation machine for toddlers with the likes of Cocomelon. Just replace it with some colouring books like your parents may have done with you, and that'll be fine.
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  1963. Sales filter would be more accurate, but probably not as easy to visualise.
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  1964. Castilian and Argentinian Spanish do differ on pronunciation mind you. But I'm not sure how he pronounced them would be correct in either dialect.
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  1965.  @thefonzkiss  Agreed, air crash investigation channels are a dime a dozen, not that they're bad, but there's far fewer doing other kinds of disasters.
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  1966.  @tripackonetooth4910  That's what they want you to think...
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  1967.  @tripackonetooth4910  If you really think your country doesn't keep secrets from you, then you're just naive. Oh, and I think you'll kind the bunkers are still very much there, and that's just the ones you can find under you house...
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  1968.  @tripackonetooth4910  Your're ruled by your banking industry instead. As the video says, that's what keeps you rich.
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  1969. If you want more walkable cities, you have to get more people to accept high-density living. Some people say suburbia is a cancer, but the fact is a lot of people like to live there, they get their own back garden, they don't have to share space with so many other people, and it's generally quieter and more peaceful. Persuading people to give that up requires a cultural change and revaluation of aspiration. It's not just an issue in the US, though it is perhaps most pronounced there. Even here in the UK, we have an aversion to high rise living as either for the very rich in their penthouses atop chic modern glass skyscrapers, or the very poor in filthy concrete crime-infested monstrosities. I would personally hate it, I'm lucky in that I live in suburbia and work in the city but both are in proximity to a regular suburban rail line. Many people aren't so lucky, both home and work are distant and poorly served by P/T, so they have to commute by car.
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  1970.  @bilalakhtar561  Realistically for a lot of people wanting to immigrate to the US even those options are unattainable. You can't afford a master's degree, or you are poorly educated and can't afford to get yourself up to the standard. Similar for work experience (there are only so many positions and you'd probably need expensive education for those) or even English tests in some cases. If you got rid of the country caps for most of those people these will still be a barrier. But really that's the system working as designed, because you want to keep the numbers stable.
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  1971. He's done quite a few on us already. Nice to let other places in the world get a look in.
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  1972. In the end, Ebola just doesn't spread that easily between people compared with COVID. You could walk past an infected person in the street, even brush against them, and the chances of you being infected are very very low (that said, probably don't want to take your chances considering how nasty it is!). Ebola needs bodily fluids to spread, so unless you're a healthcare worker, or someone with intimate close contact with an infected person, there's only a tiny chance you would get it. It's also worth bearing in mind that the lethality of Ebola would be much lower in the developed world if it ever did take hold there (which is very unlikely). It would still be unacceptably high, but with access to intensive care units more people could fight off the infection.
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  1973. Probably the only person to cause the deaths of millions but also save the lives of hundreds of millions.
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  1974.  @aredditor4272  I think that's partly down to the legal issues. Many of these alternatives don't grow well in cool climates.
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  1975.  @aredditor4272  Indeed, but it can grow in cool, damp climates like the UK.
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  1976. I didn't think Aerosucre carried passengers? Just (way too much) cargo.
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  1977. "The world's most expensive railway" California HSR: "Just you wait".
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  1978.  @broosewee  Scalable? Have you seen the size of the DC charging pins on a CCS? It's a brute of a plug, sure, but those chunky pins can pull a lot of current.
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  1979.  @broosewee  No it can't. You can't move more current though a smaller cross sectional area without increased thermal loss. CCS is much more future proof.
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  1980.  @Chastity_Belt  They are R&D prototypes, not production models. They might be in commercial use, but that's part of the research.
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  1981.  @Chastity_Belt  If they're using them to collect data and feedback for further development, then it's consumer R&D. Car companies do lease out vehicles out for that purpose. Generally to be considered "in production" you have to produce more than a handful as well.
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  1982.  @Quickhand413  That's less than most urban high schools. I don't think that's the situation in the UK, there are a few very small universities but I can't think of any with less than 5000 students off the top of my head. Most have over 10,000.
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  1983. I wonder if perhaps her insight was exactly this. She knew the value of reputation and image was exceeding the value of day to day performance. She saw the second tech bubble coming and decided that she could make good money riding it. She's possibly even smart enough to know when it will pop, and how badly it will pop.
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  1984.  @elleanna5869  I disagree with that. Certain individual ethnic minorities have always been able to transcend prejudicial barriers, but that doesn't mean their peers are also seen the same way. You just make an exception for that person, they're unusually intelligent, unusually civilised. It was the same before and after scientific racism became a thing. You mention Nazi Germany specifically, but I do not see scientific racism as the cause of the Holocaust. Mass genocide does not need a pseudoscientific justification, and it was abhorred among Germany's peers where scientific racism was also prevalent. Nazi Germany was an extreme exception even within the racial environment of the time. I think this line of argument is often used to paint imperial era european racism as exceptionally extreme, and therefore argue europe holds a much greater share of guilt and culpability for racial discrimination compared to other parts of the world. I don't support this idea and I think it's cause a lot of backlash and division within europe.
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  1985.  @elleanna5869  Same happened to me. Unfortunately these topics tend to trigger the YouTube censor bots a lot. Again, I fundamentally disagree with you. Ironically, I think Eurocentrism is probably the reason for this point of view, it is easy to see European racism as exceptional when the history of other parts of the world are understudied and/or poorly recorded.
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  1986.  @elleanna5869  The west provided innovations which allowed for the "industrialisation" of m*ssacres and g*ncodies, I will agree with that. But I think that would be a case of blaming the tools rather than the bearer of them. I don't think scientific racism increased the amount of racial discrimination or made it worse though, it only allowed it to continue within a new philosophical framework, for a time.
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  1987. In the UK that's including and excluding utilities. In most rentals it's the latter, but some flats on a shared system may be the former.
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  1988.  @markh5210  It depends. Many rental contracts with utilities have clauses for excessive use. Of course, in some instances the landlord may only pay a flat rate for some utilities so this won't matter.
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  1989.  @rahmadisatriowibowo7019  Nah, sunflower is too low in saturates to replace palm.
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  1990.  @Merthalophor  Wood and wood pellet stoves probably aren't going to be widely adopted, due to pollution issues. Yes, you can get clean burning fuel, but it's expensive and takes more energy to make. Heat pumps (air and ground source) will be a good solution for suburban and rural areas in temperate and hot climates (since a heat pump in cooling mode is essentially the same as an air conditioner). For high density buildings and areas that get very cold, CHP or resistive heating are really the only viable options. Though I guess if hydrogen is used on existing natural gas networks, a hydrogen boiler could be a viable option, though appliances and infrastructure would need to be modified.
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  1991. I think a dissolvable scaffold will be needed to replicate a complex structure like a steak or a wing. By introducing different cells to different parts, you could, in theory, create any chunk of meat you want. Depends on how much it costs to make the scaffold. They might be able to be 3D printed or moulded cheaply enough.
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  1992.  @limiv5272  It depends. If it's small enough simple osmosis may be enough to introduce nutrients and remove waste.
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  1993. I can see it working for maybe places like Malaga and the costa del sol, but it's unlikely to replace flights to Athens.
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  1994. It has been considered as an option. Even ground based lasers might be able to do it.
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  1995. When you're a serial killer so famous other serial killers are named after you.
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  1996. It's the excessive need to plan and schedule everything with Genie+ (or previously Fastpass+) The crowds mean it's just not possible to be spontaneous or to have a hour of downtime to relax, and just doing a Disney vacation can involve hours of research beforehand.
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  1997. I think it's worth not going to top tier restaurants every time when you're on holiday. You can get a more "authentic" experience going for a more budget option, something a local might have on a friday night.
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  1998. In the end such a system never has a 100% success rate, even when fitted to an F-16 let alone an A321.
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  1999. If your debt is going to make you more money than the interest you end up paying on it, directly through current or future income or indirectly through reduction of expenses, it's good debt. Simple as.
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  2000.  @Taladar2003  At the time this ship was being used as a ferry.
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  2001.  @EJavierPaniaguaLaconich  I think the West would appreciate it if Afghanistan didn't have the Taliban in charge. What with them having a penchant for hiding terrorists, even from a totally selfish perspective.
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  2002.  @dannypope1860  Molten salt is incredibly corrosive, designing materials that can withstand it for decades is not impossible but very challenging.
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  2003. ​ @yurrwithme The most ignored rule on stack exchange. Everyone knows taking it to chat is just a way to kill the conversation apart from a small group of users having an argument.
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  2004.  @philipchoo958  I could throw whatever stats I like at you and you'd still say "you don't know because you don't live here", so I don't see the point in arguing with you.
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  2005.  @philipchoo958  Not really, just look at the US. Bad vibes matter more than numbers.
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  2006. It didn't really matter in the end because AMC is nothing special. The mid-tier cinema market is in steep decline ever since COVID, people have got out of the habit of going to the movies and haven't really gotten back in with the rise of streaming. The industry as a whole is in rough shape, so it would be pretty wild to see AMC as an outlier. Now it's sitting around $4, which is probably partly due to an overall slight recovery in the market.
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  2007. I would disagree with the battery storage. It's not so much technology, it's technologically feasible to add enough storage, it's the cost, materials available, land, and labour needed to build enough of it. When you sit down and do the maths, the amount of energy storage required by a country like the UK, with a very large seasonal variation in solar and wind being very unpredictable, is gargantuan. It would require over 100 times the amount of energy storage we have currently, more like 150-200 times when you consider increasing demand due to electrification. Storage has gotten cheaper, but the costs haven't fallen nearly as fast as green generation, mainly because all options need a lot of raw materials, be it concrete for pumped storage or lithium/sodium for batteries. That's fine for countries where seasonal variation is small or non existent and the sun shines a lot more than it does here, but at 50 degrees north under a sky that is often overcast, it means you need at least a weeks worth of energy storage to maintain a reliable grid.
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  2008.  @thrawn9115  I doubt it. Cheaper satellite internet is a nice to have but it's not going to beat out good old fibre optic or even 5G, and with developing countries already starting to lay in their own infrastructure starlink is likely to be more of a stopgap for rural areas in developing nations until ground based systems catch up. If that were true for mobile phones we'd be using satellite phones and not bothering building all those cell towers. Starlink is great but let's not over hype it, it's going to be useful to a decreasing number of people every year.
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  2009. The UK is rather stuck now, because of rising interest rates it is now much tougher to borrow to invest. If we'd managed to grow the economy a bit more after 2008 we would have a larger tax base to pay down the debt more quickly as interest rates began to rise.
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  2010.  @SGast  If all they have is hospitality skills, there isn't much else they can do. It's not like we'd see more hotels and shops take their place. It's the middle that will go. Fast food and casual chains will mostly survive as they can cut costs more easily without raising prices (but will also employ less people), and demand at really high end is fairly inelastic, people are usually on waiting lists to get in and they will pay just about any price because of the reputation. It's your local family restaurant and the more modest "premium" restaurant that the middle class might splurge on once a month or so that will close en masse. Small towns will probably see the most change as that's where a lot of these places are, you'll see a lot of empty units. But many big city neighbourhoods have a lot of these as well, and they're under more pressure because rents are significantly higher.
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  2011. @SGast  Automation can be difficult and expensive, but that's my point, fast food restaurants don't always adopt it because it doesn't always save money. But if your employees get more expensive, then the threshold where it does make money is approached more readily. Most fast casual restaurant work is fairly repetitive, making a pizza or burrito is the same number of steps every time pretty much. These often can be at least semi automated for a price, and that still cuts down the number of workers you need. And when it comes to restaurants, it might be harsh to say but I think the only skilled work outside of the very high end of Sommeliers and other professional FOH roles are chefs and managers. Honestly for fast food and a lot of fast casual I would say even they aren't particularly skilled, if it doesn't require a long apprenticeship or culinary school it's not a skilled role, sorry. I never said they were easy or not exhausting, but just because a job doesn't require a lot of skills and training doesn't make it easy. But chefs are even more screwed as they're specialised, they can only work in restaurants with the skills they have, unless they want to chase the tiny niches of personal chefs and food development. Of course people can be retrained, but only for jobs that exist, and the most acute worker shortages in the US are these service and hospitality roles. A lot of other things they could train for don't really have these big shortages and more, and in some cases are actually shedding jobs.
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  2012.  @SGast  Automation isn't free, there's an upfront cost and often it's not worth it for smaller chains. But higher wages can change that equation as every staff position cut saves more money. Why do you think self ordering terminals are showing up in smaller establishments nowadays? And I don't want to be mean, but honestly unless you're a manager, a chef or have a professional FOH role at a high end restaurant like a Sommelier, restaurant work is low skill. If you don't need a long apprenticeship or culinary school to do the job it's not a skilled job, sorry. I never said it was an easy job, but there are plenty of difficult low skilled jobs and easy high skilled jobs. Yes people can be retrained. But as I said there won't be businesses to train them for. Nothing will replace those restaurants. The chefs will probably be the most screwed though, they may be skilled but they're specialised, and there isn't much else they can do except for the niche roles of personal chefs and food development.
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  2013.  @waedidmyhandlechange  Japan is probably too extreme an example, you've got a lot of cramped, tiny homes butting up with businesses and industry. That would probably be very unpopular even among the urbanites in the US.
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  2014.  @oompaloompa9000  That's gonna be fun if Poland does its nuclear rollout, Germany buying the electricity they wanted the Poles not to generate...
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  2015.  @SamyasaSwi  Hagelslag, Bitterballen, Poffertjes, and many more. If you Google "Dutch food", most of it is something deep fried/greasy and/or very sugary.
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  2016.  @SamyasaSwi  The thing is that's nearly all you see when you search for Dutch food. There aren't that many healthy dishes that are considered Dutch cuisine. And yes these might be snack foods (Hagelslag excepted) but if that's what is considered Dutch cuisine, then they must be consumed fairly often. FYI, I'm British, so we're used to having our cuisine labelled bland and stodgy just like the Dutch. But I would argue we do have a bit more that's not deep fried and/or sugary.
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  2017.  @SamyasaSwi  From the US, well you only need to look at their obesity rate to make a judgement on that. As for Italy, they've got lots of healthy dishes that are easy to find online, pizza and pasta can be fairly balanced with the right toppings. But the Dutch? Maybe a couple of stews, fish soups, sausage and cabbage, that's really it, and they're not super prominent. We know the Dutch don't eat bitterballen and poffertjes every day, sure, but if you take an average of all Dutch cuisine I'd argue it's going to be more deep fried, fatty and sweet than its peers.
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  2018.  @SamyasaSwi  Yes I have, for a little while. And I think it's a pretty fair judgement, and I've had Dutch people agree. If there were significantly more healthy dishes then they would be documented more widely online anyway, you wouldn't need to actually visit. Anyway, the Dutch have similar, perhaps slightly lower, obesity rates to France and Germany, so maybe burning a few extra calories on their bikes does actually help with that. I wouldn't be surprised if there was at least a marginal effect.
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  2019.  @SamyasaSwi  No, but they do eat those things regularly. You're acting like any Dutch cuisine you find online, whether it takes 5 seconds or 500, is something a Dutch person rarely ever eats and that is completely unrepresentative of actual Dutch food. Which isn't true for pretty much any other developed country.
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  2020.  @SamyasaSwi  You're hung up on the methodology without really engaging with the results now. And honestly, I'd take it over an individual anecdote, even from a native.
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  2021.  @SamyasaSwi  My claims. Sorry, probably should have worded that better.
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  2022.  @SamyasaSwi  Well really you don't get much of a choice in either country, the Netherlands is too densely populated to do what the US or Canada does. I'd actually say you can probably have a bit more choice in the US, especially in some of the larger cities (though not all of them). There are cultural differences, people in the US or Canada do generally prefer bigger homes and more space and privacy. So the answer to why the US or Canada isn't like the Netherlands is partly because most people prefer a different style of living. When you're talking about low density suburbs, walking and biking infrastructure isn't going to get people far enough to go anywhere beyond their immediate neighborhood, and no public transport is going to be convenient, reliable and economic. Shops are just not going to have a large enough customer base to survive in many cases, and even then they'll only be able to stock the basics so people will still drive for most grocery trips. Having your private acre and all that, unless you're lucky, is just not going to be feasible.
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  2023.  @SamyasaSwi  I think your claim just suggests that national cuisine has no relation whatsoever to national diet, which I think is just absurd. For the record, I did go on Wikipedia, and I still saw mostly unhealthy food. You're probably going to say that's not good enough, but I think at this point unless I checked out recipe books from the library and sourced dietary studies going back 20 years you wouldn't say it's enough, but there you go. Again, I don't know why you seem to object so strongly to the idea that the Dutch diet might be a bit heavy on the fat and sugar. It seems like you feel I've deeply insulted your culture by claiming so. And hey, I'm not claiming that your diet is like that, or even that of your peers. But either the Dutch are somehow special that they loathe their own food, or your experience is not representative.
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  2024.  @SamyasaSwi  There is a certain amount of social conditioning I'll admit, in societies which tend to be more collectivist, which is most of Europe, and more importantly the generally left wing urbanites, denser living arrangements tend to work better. But that's kind of the political thorn in the side of these things, what's best for "us" is split down ideological lines. The left is going to see co-operative, diverse, highly social living arrangements as more attentive than the right, who see individualistic, family centered, private arrangements as more attractive. And who is to say who is right? People prefer different conditions, and someone who doesn't live in their ideal conditions may simply have nothing to compare it to until they experience it for themselves. A Dutch person who is relatively OK in an apartment block, but not brilliant, may move to the US and decide a detached house in the suburbs is way better and won't want to go back, and of course vice versa.
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  2025.  @SamyasaSwi  I don't see much that isn't, that's what I see. Some asparagus and potatoes, which looks like a German import to me honestly, a couple of stews. Generally when you look at national cuisine I do expect to see a few less fried and sugary dishes even from a cursory search. Honestly it was a flippant exaggerated comment I didn't expect to be taken way too seriously. I do believe there is a kernel of truth there (including the bicycles keeping the obesity rate a little lower than it would be) but I'm not trying to claim that it's a massive effect.
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  2026.  @SamyasaSwi  Well there's the left wing collectivist thinking coming in, asking what's best for the most rather than what people want. I'm not saying it's wrong, it's a balance since complete individual agency is chaos, but I think you can see how some would find that sort of thinking objectionable, especially when it comes to how they live.
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  2027.  @SamyasaSwi  I meant the dish, not the food. It is extremely popular in Germany. I did say "It looks like" so I don't know for certain.
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  2028.  @SamyasaSwi  That doesn't nessecary have much to do with living arrangements. Rich and poor people live in both high and low density living arrangements. Generally lower density gets you much more space for your money though. Also I don't agree with that as a binary choice (I thought you leftists hated binaries? Sorry, couldn't resist). You can balance individual agency and collective goals on a spectrum.
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  2029.  @SamyasaSwi  I know what you've been trying to say and I disagree with it, because it would make the Dutch exceptional to everyone else, especially in Europe. As for macronutrient regulations, most European countries have those, including us (not really working here though are they!). So either that's the case or your experience is not representative, and I believe the latter. Honestly this is a lot of grief over a semi-joke, I'm beginning to think the Dutch don't have a sense of humour, but I'm also going to suggest your reaction is not representative. But hey, I took the bait and doubled down, I took you seriously in response and led you on, so I guess I'm to blame there.
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  2030. ​​​​​​ @SamyasaSwi I know how these things go, I'd always be ignorant in your eyes unless I agreed with you. If I were to claim that British people were actually really healthy eaters would you believe me just because I said it? I don't think so. I'm not going to believe you just because you're Dutch, and I wouldn't expect you to believe me just because I'm British. Honestly I think it's your completely humourless "well acktually" response that frustrated me, it took a long time for you to even concede that Dutch food does have somewhat of an unhealthy reputation, which was my original claim, then you move the goal posts to say it had zero impact on the actual diet because the Dutch eat other cuisines too, which is true about everyone but we don't claim their cuisine doesn't affect their diet at all either. I almost feel that you reacted the way you did because I suggested the Dutch aren't a perfect culture who all eat healthy, exercise and live in ideal communities. But I don't think that can be true, you must be somewhat self critical, I've never met a leftist who doesn't have something bad to say about their own culture! If my weakness is overconfidence, I think yours is lack of humility. I think we could have had a much better conversation if you'd been a bit more conciliatory and willing to play into the joke, something like "Yeah, Dutch cuisine doesn't have the best reputation for being healthy (which I think we've established is true) but of course we don't eat the most unhealthy stuff every day. Perhaps the bikes do help us keep a kilo or two off a year!" (A reasonably small effect, and non-commital). Perhaps that's not a position you can agree with, but I think it might be. I'd do that with claims about the British that were a bit exaggerated (except for the teeth, I'm damn sick of that stereotype because it's so common and completely untrue).
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  2031.  @davidvanrijn  No, but that's true of pretty much all national dishes, healthy or not. I do think it reflects on the national diet somewhat, not that much but at least a little. As I have said my claim was exaggerated for comic effect. Hagelslag does seem to be a breakfast staple though.
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  2032.  @SamyasaSwi  Well then by that logic nobody can joke about any culture that is not their own or that they have studied extensively, because they don't have the knowledge and experience to do so. And they certainly can't exaggerate even a little bit, everything must be taken seriously and at face value. Yes, I'm not Dutch, I don't have a perfect knowledge of a Dutch diet. But if the first things people see when they Google your cuisine is deep fried snacks and sugar, I don't think that's just a coincidence. If people didn't eat these things regularly I don't think they would be there. If that's not the case, then the Dutch are very exceptional or are extremely bad at documenting their own culture. But perhaps this has all been a misunderstanding. In my original response to you, I said "kernel of truth". Perhaps you didn't understand what that meant. That means a small, not very consequential truth. I do not believe these foods completely define the Dutch diet, as much as any other countries most famous dishes do. But I think it's reasonable to believe there's a small effect. Are you going to find hard evidence for it? Probably not. I think perhaps you believe that my statement was to be taken at face value, and argued against it accordingly. And in response I did not readily indicate otherwise, which is on me.
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  2033.  @SamyasaSwi  But you can appreciate this is not a binary choice. It's a spectrum, with the far left and far right at opposite ends. So there's not going to be an objective argument for where the balance should lie. Even what is a decent standard of living is going to be subjective. Some will argue the bare essentials, others will include things that do more than just keep people alive.
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  2034.  @SamyasaSwi  I do disagree with that, I think an image search does prove something, even if it's just a little. You were basically arguing that what I find on the internet about Dutch cuisine bears absolutely zero relation, absolutely none, nada, zip to the Dutch diet, even when that doesn't apply to any other culture. But I did just wonder if you thought I was excessively exaggerating my claim, but it's clear you see any relation, even the tiniest one, as objectionable and deeply incorrect. Of course the conversation wouldn't have happened if I said you were 100% right and I was 100% wrong, but that would be dishonest of me. It would have also completely ruined the joke, but that's another matter.
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  2035.  @SamyasaSwi  I am confident there is at least some relationship, and that inference is correct based on the cuisine of other cultures, but the magnitude of that relationship yes, I do not have enough information to say. Does that seem fair?
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  2036.  @SamyasaSwi  Well that is the impression I got from you. Honestly you just seem really hung up about that web search. Which I don't really understand since I don't think any other culture would argue that it's at least partially representative. Americans do eat burgers, italians eat pasta, and so on. It makes a difference to the diet, even if it's a small one. But OK, it's easy to be believe the other side's argument is more absolute than it is in a heated argument, so fair enough. I certainly got the impression that you thought the effect was either non-existent or so small as to be totally irrelevant. And it's better to argue heatedly over food than politics!
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  2037.  @SamyasaSwi  I think it does indicate a slightly less healthy diet when compared to some other peer nations, people still eat snack foods regularly after all. Healthy and unhealthy are absolute terms after all. Which honestly I don't think you need to be too upset about, there are probably other factors that counteract this and the obesity rate isn't too bad. Yes, I do think the cycling may make a small difference, maybe a percentage point or two off the obesity rate, but no more. How strong the magnitude is, I can't say. But I think it's there.
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  2038.  @SamyasaSwi That's fair enough, I'm clearly just a lot more convinced than you are.
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  2039.  @SamyasaSwi  I don't think that's a comparable example, you don't find such a significant correlation between national dress and people's wardrobes, but you do tend to with food. Also many traditional clothing items are archaic, as fashions have become globalised, but food has hung on a lot more. But anyway, I think we must agree to disagree on that, I'm sure you are very tired of that argument, as am I. I do find it interesting though that I would readily admit that stereotypical British foods, the ones any half arsed Google search would find, do still contribute significantly to our diet, whereas you don't say the same for your culture. Do you think I'm wrong about my own culture or that the Dutch are different? Do be honest if you can.
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  2040.  @SamyasaSwi  OK, I guess then it comes down to how much you think those traditional things equate to modern culture. And I do think for food, based on my observations, is fairly strong. But you think differently, which is fair enough. I think there is a stereotype, not as bad as some countries, I think the US and Scotland have a worse reputation for that, but it's there. Mainly people just think it's boring as you said though. As for your last question, not a lot that YouTube wouldn't censor me for! But I know those are more Amsterdamer stereotypes, and as a Brit not living in London I know how annoying it is when the culture of your capital is equated to your country...
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  2041.  @SamyasaSwi  That and the world's oldest profession, yes!
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  2042.  @syro33  Indeed, we do have to consider the average person here. Pizza is a bit of a strange one. It is really quite popular in Italy now, but that's really due to Italian Americans popularising it in the US. It's not a US import per se, it's just become more commonly eaten. Pasta has always been popular since it was developed as far as I am aware.
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  2043.  @syro33  I won't argue the public transport is better, but that requires people, on average, to live very differently to the US and Canada. NJB likes that lifestyle which is fine, but others don't. Though Switzerland is perhaps a bit different in its rural areas, but they're stinking rich so they can afford it.
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  2044.  @syro33  Per capita though, the Swiss are richer. They also have high taxes to pay for it all.
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  2045.  @SamyasaSwi  I never said you were!
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  2046.  @SamyasaSwi  OK, no problem!
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  2047.  @VinnieFarsheds  That's fair enough, but British people don't eat fish and chips at home either. Doesn't mean we don't eat them regularly, and it doesn't contribute to our diet. Same with Roast dinners and full English breakfasts to some extent, though both of those are more likely to be eaten at home. There are also a lot of "meat and two veg" people in Britain who may have a similar diet to that, but I'd say that's not the average, generally an older minority when food was a lot more expensive. Anyway, I'm done with this. What was supposed to be an off the cuff remark with perhaps a grain of truth has been totally ruined with pedantry (though I will admit some of that blame by encouraging it, give me pedantry and I'll give it back!) and honestly I wish I'd just kept my mouth shut and never said anything because it seems to be the Dutch are pretty sensitive about their diet. Which I find odd since the British don't seem to care nearly as much, we'll freely admit our diet and cuisine isn't all that healthy.
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  2048.  @mdkooter  I'm not going to even bother this time, just read my other comments. I'm completely sick of this now, just leave me alone!
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  2049.  @mdkooter  Sorry, I was a bit short with you. I made it as an offhand remark which wasn't meant to be taken too seriously and well, every Dutch person seems to have taken it very seriously. I've learned my lesson not to joke about these things anymore because clearly it offends the Dutch. As an aside, I still think I have a point and I don't think my assertions are completely incorrect, though I never intended them to be taken as extremely as they were. But I think making an edit to the original comment might be a good idea to put a stop to this, so thank you for that suggestion. Perhaps it's the best way forward.
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  2050.  @relo999  That's not too dissimilar to British food really, all the spiced stuff was lost from memory due to rationing in WWII. Honestly reflecting back on this long, ridiculous and emotionally charged argument (and I accept the role I had in making it they way) I am mainly just really shocked how defensive and easily offended the Dutch are about their food, to the point that something said mostly jokingly is taken extremely seriously and must be shot down as quickly as possible, especially coming from a foreigner. It seems in stark contrast to the British, who will happily play into the idea our food is not the healthiest, even though we have a similar range of cuisine and we suffer from similar stereotypes. I guess I learned a lesson from this, don't joke about Dutch food, especially if you aren't Dutch!
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  2051.  @RDB-mw9ig  No, that's not what is said. I said Dutch cuisine was perhaps not as healthy as some of its peers, when it comes to things like fat and sugar. I was being a little factious, but it seems a lot of Dutch people got very offended by my remarks.
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  2052. @prankster1590  I don't believe that. It's not bad, but it's nowhere near countries like Japan.
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  2053. Don't they put butter on steaks in Argentina?
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  2054.  @grmpEqweer  Eh, there's all those timelines where we all perished in nuclear hellfire somewhere between 1950 and 1990.
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  2055.  @StarlightPrism  Indeed, Seaworld is going to lose its USP in the near future, so they are likely to face stiffer competition when many people can see the same animals they have at a more local aquarium. So they've got two choices, either they try and stay in the top tier through massive investment in rides, or cut prices and costs to get down to Six Flags level. The latter is going to be especially hard for the aquarium side of things, as downsizing there is hard enough as it is with just the orcas.
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  2056.  @SlapstickGenius23  I don't think that any of SeaWorld's current orcas were caught in the wild.
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  2057. That's why some on the far left shun liberal politics. They keep Pandora's box closed by not pretending they are still liberal. Notice the change in language from "equality" to "equity". Equality is a tenet of liberalism, but equity is more associated with socialism and other far left ideologies. If you wish to achieve equal outcomes through force, then giving certain groups privileges to allow them to do that is logical and sensible. And in the end "fairness" is a subjective term. What is fair to one person isn't to another, and whoever is in power can essentially choose what is fair and what is not.
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  2058. Southampton is within the London commuter belt, as massive as it is, so you've got lots of people working in Central London living in Southampton. Even Norwich is starting to see more of them. Conversely in Mancunian suburbs you can get a 2-3 bed semi for under 200k still.
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  2059.  @varsoo1  If it's less than 2 hours, it's in commuting distance to London, especially as hybrid working has grown. I'm not being ridiculous I assure you, you can find plenty of articles about it online.
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  2060.  @varsoo1  Yes, it can be. Birmingham being a major city means it has more jobs locally and therefore has a smaller proportion of London commuters. Southampton is less so. And theoretically Lille and Paris could be if the cost and inconvenience weren't a barrier. Another example is Brighton, it isn't much closer, though the train is somewhat faster, and it's full of people commuting to London.
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  2061. I think Pop might work as it's catering to an underserved market, add flights to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and you've got a good chunk of the UK population covered. Play looks like it could make the same mistakes as Wizz.
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  2062. UK students specialise earlier than US ones. By the equivalent of 8th grade we're already starting to narrow down our education.
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  2063.  @MimOzanTamamogullar  Maybe not when he took power, but certainly when he left power.
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  2064.  @MimOzanTamamogullar  It does seem that his era allowed for a significant increase in South Korea's wealth. How much was down to his leadership? I'm not sure.
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  2065.  @himagainstill  I'm only going with the consensus. You can call them coups if you like, but you'd have to acknowledge that coups happen in even the most developed and most progressive countries.
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  2066.  @himagainstill  They get their own article on Wikipedia, and do not show up on the main coup page.
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  2067.  @himagainstill  You have a better, non partisan, source I assume?
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  2068. Balancing lakes are also another option, and can be simple as digging a large deep pit next to the river and have a gap in the levee. During high water, the pit will fill up first before the areas beyond. Pumps can then be optionally used to drain the pit either partially or fully when the water is lower, or you can allow it to evaporate naturally. The pond itself can be a pleasant wildlife and even recreational area if managed well (though badly done they can become stagnant and smelly). You can even build properties with a lakeside view.
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  2069. It looked more like a garden than a farm or even an allotment. There to look pretty but not feed people.
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  2070. Sometimes, it wasn't! Look up ergotism.
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  2071.  @gormanthomas8135  Problem there is you're trying to time the market, and you could easily make the wrong decision if your predictions don't materialise.
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  2072.  @gormanthomas8135  Cash is useful for being a fungible, liquid store of value, not for its returns. A savings account is useful for storing small amounts of cash that you might need in a hurry but not for day to day expenses. Anything else, you're better off investing it.
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  2073.  @melinareyes1457  I think that's probably a little broad for Kurzgesagt. Latin America's issues are various and complex. I don't think there's a single cause.
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  2074. It helped that the US desperately needed an ally in the area to counterbalance Communist Russia and China.
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  2075. The way I see it, fusion research is full of unknowns. We could have a viable design for a fusion power plant in 10 years, 30 years, 50 years, or maybe never (though I think that's unlikely). It's a field full of different ideas, different designs and different challenges, and nobody really knows what will be the one that changes the world, the "Kittyhawk" reactor that realises the dream. In some way it's exciting, but it's also regularly disheartening. It also leads some to conclude it's not worth even trying, that renewables and perhaps fission are the future, fusion is a dead end (seriously, if I had a nickel for every someone glibly talks about "the great fusion reactor in the sky" without mentioning all of the problems such an indirect and inefficient energy capture method entails). I say to that it would be like saying in the 19th century "Why bother trying to make a plane? We have ships and balloons, they do the job". I'm sure many people back then may have felt the same way about aircraft as we do about fusion, that it was an impossible dream, flight is for the birds, not for us, fusion is for the sun, not for us.
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  2076.  @Novusod  An engineer who did that would find themselves quickly out of a job, since they'd make every construction project 10x more expensive.
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  2077. You could argue that debt as a concept is central to human society. "I do something for you now, you do something for me later" has been holding together communities probably since the palaeolithic. What we mean by debt nowadays though is debt with ursury, and that's a bit different.
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  2078. I think people having children in many developed countries don't just want any house, they want a spacious home with ample private green space. Those are naturally extremely expensive in cities where population density is high and land is valuable. The idea of living in an apartment block with children just seems horrible to a lot of people, only for the poorest in society. So upzoning in places like Silicon valley, while it may be warranted for other reasons, probably won't encourage more people to have children, if all there is to choose are apartments and townhomes.
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  2079. In the end, it comes down to speed. Most humans can only manage such a loose set of rules at relatively low speeds, when they have plenty of time to react to the highly complex nature of mixed traffic. As soon as city traffic began to speed up, defined lanes and priorities became necessary because an open road would lead to a lot of nasty accidents. It's of course why modern "shared space" schemes almost always have low speed limits (either legally or by design).
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  2080. ​ @gockelxxxxxl9584  ARM is owned by the Japanese (Softbank) now.
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  2081. It's interesting how the UK and Germany differed with post war reconstruction. Both had cities that were pretty much equally bombed to shit. But I think in the UK there was more of a diffusion of people out of the cities. Like the US, people in the UK tend to prefer low density housing over apartment blocks, and the aftermath of WW2 arguably accelerated a trend of suburbanisation. There were also the "New Town" projects which expanded small existing settlements ten or even a hundred fold into, well, new towns. Vast housing estates were built all over the country. It was very car dependant, but in a different way, more spread out, lots of individual driveways instead of vast underground garages. Of course some tower blocks were built, but the result was the same as in Germany, they attracted crime and only the poor and desperate wanted to live in them, even the worst housing estates out in the suburbs were better. Nowadays things are a little bit different, some new towns have suffered as the UK economy has become increasingly centralised around London, those in commuting distance like Milton Keynes have benefited but others are struggling. New apartment blocks tend to be a bit better quality but are still disliked by many people, especially after Grenfell Tower. Vast identikit housing estates are still being built in suburban and rural areas, but increasing resistance from locals slow their progress. Public transport is generally poor in all but a few of the biggest cities and is generally worse for local transport than Germany (if perhaps slightly better for regional rail).
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  2082.  @chico9805  I disagree. The levels of conspicuous consumption by the rich back then, compared to what the average person experienced, pale in comparison. Wealth has become more abstract in the modern era allowing for greater accumulations, but in terms of material lifestyle, the difference between the rich and poor today is much smaller.
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  2083. ​ @chico9805  Most poor people were tenants back then, either on farms or as labourers in cities. They didn't own the land, and probably didn't own their home either. In fact, poor people would have owned significantly fewer possessions than they do now, no cheap plastic trinkets from China.
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  2084. Kind of undermined by the cut to the black doctor in the next shot.
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  2085.  @MegaLokopo  I can't think of a way you could have even a well designed rail system that could replace a road network especially at a local level. That has never happened and it is clearly unworkable. Maybe if you crammed everyone into giant skyscrapers or something, but that's not how we lived or how anyone lived in the past.
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  2086.  @fidelkva4810  You literally can't make a lot of products, food and non-food, without saturated fat.
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  2087.  @bazoo513  Nah, there's enough anarcho-primitivists and simple living hippies out there to form all on their own.
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  2088. If you want to be inflammatory you can call them that.
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  2089. I really doubt Springfield Nuclear Power Plant would be producing rods of Cobalt 60. The US only has one reactor which makes the stuff, and that's enough to supply all the demand for the isotope. You can also get it from nuclear waste at reprocessing facilities, but the US hasn't had any commercial fuel reprocessing since the 1970's. Then again, much of the infrastructure inside the facility bears little resemblance to a realistic civilian nuclear reactor complex (though the exterior depictions seem fairly accurate, probably from reference images). No nuclear power station I am aware of would have isolated "sectors" with individual consoles, reactor control is always centralised in one big room with multiple operators. There's also been several depictions of "hot cells" where radioactive material is handled, something you'd be far more likely to find in nuclear research laboratories and reprocessing facilities than a regular power station. What Springfield NPP seems to resemble internally is more of a research facility than a power station, with lots of specialised equipment and people in lab coats.
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  2090. The best news would be finding a living more advanced civilisation than us (so long as they don't kill us). That would show that it is possible to advance to that level.
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  2091. I think Trump probably thinks project 2025 is too puritan for his tastes. He's never been that kind of ultra-conservative, I think some of the positions he adopts are just pandering to them rather than reflecting a true belief in their cause, he's not going to adopt their manifesto wholesale. I think a Trump presidency would result in a period of instability and unrest, likely stronger than last time, but I'm not convinced he'll be able to do much of what he wants. Trump had plenty of opportunity to make these changes last time he was in power, and some he tried, but ultimately with a few notable exceptions, he didn't get very far. I don't think the doomsday scenario where the US turns into a Trump dictatorship is very likely, I'd say near impossible. Neither do I think a full blown civil war is really possible. But I could see a period of severe civil unrest like Italy in the 60's and 70's where there are frequent riots, and terrorist acts like bombings, assassinations and mass shootings.
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  2092. Here in the UK the whole heat pump thing is made a lot more awkward because water based rather than air based heating systems are the norm, which necessitates heat pumps that can go well above typical room temperature for heat output or a complete replacement of the heating system. Plus many small homes still only have 50A electrical service which complicates things especially with electric vehicles. But it does allow for very compact gas heating systems. A typical combination boiler that's found in a small UK home (though bear in mind UK homes are pretty small, 1500 sq. ft. for a single family home is typical, and about 700 sq. ft. for a two bedroom townhome) is really tiny, about the size of a small chest freezer, and that provides all heating and all hot water.
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  2093.  @raffaelepiccini3405  There's always milk products. Processing milk into yoghurt and cheese can remove most of the lactose, it drains off in the whey. You can also just add lactase to the milk and split up the lactose into glucose and galactose, but that's expensive.
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  2094. I imagine Japan's frequent disasters also create its topsy turvy housing market. Most earthquake resistance measures have a shelf life, after a couple of big shakes they "expire" and need to be replaced, and for smaller buildings it's cheaper to tear the whole thing down and build something new. So homes end up being built not to last and their value depreciates over time. No point building a home that will last for a hundred years when there's a good chance it'll have to be demolished in 30-50.
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  2095. That really depends where in Europe you go. In the Mediterranean that would be true, in the Nordics not so much.
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  2096.  @olimpusm  I'm talking more about the cost of living. The Nordics tend to be more expensive than the US.
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  2097. There are two obstacles I don't think the video addressed adequately, though feel free to correct me if they've been factored in. - The electricity consumption in 2050 is likely to be significantly higher than it is today (and that's not a bad thing in terms of human development). Developed nations consumption may stagnate or even drop slightly, but developing nations will become increasingly electricity hungry. We need to plan not to replace current consumption, but the increased consumption in the future. - The lifetime of a lithium-ion cell can be as little as two years. The Gigafactories would not only have to produce new battery banks but produce replacements for those that have already been installed. Newer battery technologies may have a longer life but we can't bank on it.
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  2098.  @tomgjgj  Still a good way to waste money if not done properly. Government ministers can spend months arguing and disagreeing with each other and few billion gets wasted on projects that get started and then someone changes their mind.
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  2099.  @tomgjgj  Then you can get constant elections and nothing really does get done!
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  2100.  @tomgjgj  No offense, but I'm not at all sure it works that well. But then again, why the way my government is functioning right now, I probably shouldn't throw stones.
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  2101.  @tomgjgj  Actually no, I'm from the UK. :)
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  2102. I think the conclusion is: On your test, best avoid them, after your test, up to you really, as long as you're not hooning around like a moron.
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  2103. Long term I'm wondering if it might be superseded by advances in spaceplane technology. By the mid 2030's we could be seeing SSTO designs taking off from runways instead of launch pads. I know a lot of people have doubts that SSTO spaceplanes will ever be economic, but I'm optimistic that there will be advantages in turnaround time and longevity, not to mention crew comfort. A space industry where spaceplanes are used for passengers and light cargo, and something like starship for the heavy stuff could be an option.
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  2104.  @jasonhaven7170  Indeed, try having several private companies producing exam papers for the same qualification.
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  2105. It seems to me that they may have underestimated the "flash flood" risk. This is where small streams do suddenly swell enormously due to intense rainfall. Predicting the riskiest areas is tricky, as it's a combination of local terrain and meteorological conditions. Flash floods can also be quite rare, some places may be fine for decades, then one day they get wiped out.
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  2106. Not really. Brexit hasn't really affected where Brits go on holiday all that much.
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  2107. ​ @CormacDublin Boring Company tunnels are really small and lack safety features nessecary for a subway. Plus you have to remember the cost of stations, which is the really big expense.😊
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  2108.  @WayOfTheCode  I predict they'll win one and lose one. So the GOP keep the senate, but only just, 51-49. Though if they can persuade the moderate from Maine to rebel a couple of times they might get some things passed.
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  2109. I don't think that's really the case. Businesses have put off a lot of things that would require in person attendance because of COVID, plus most conferences or trade shows were curtailed or cancelled. Some of those might not resume as the result of a pretty likely economic recession as projects are simply cancelled as businesses cut back, but long term I don't expect to see a big change. Video conferencing has been around for a while, most businesses used it extensively before COVID. But there are a lot of things for which in person attendance is a must.
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  2110.  @hughwolfe1176  I don't think we'll see a good rebound until next year at the earliest, businesses don't know how badly the economy has been affected yet as governments have spared no expense mitigating the impact, even paying people not to work. So a lot of planned projects may be cancelled and trips reduce much like they did in '08 during that rescission.
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  2111.  @marcusstewart3044  Yeah, it's been around for decades in mediterranean countries. I don't think it's really viable in cooler climates.
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  2112. It makes me wonder if GPS altitude working in tandem with the baro would be useful, or even an intelligent ground radar with accurate terrain maps to calculate the MSL-AGL difference. Something that could notice a disagreement and give a visual and audible warning to the pilots, maybe a master caution. I can understand there might be situations where there would be a good reason they wouldn't agree, but it could at least be a prompt to make the pilots think twice about what's going on.
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  2113.  @JewTube001  I think 50% would be too much, 10%, 5% or even 1% would be more appropriate.
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  2114.  @PhonkEcho  I don't think you need to be risk averse in your investments. If anything you can afford to take more risk than a less wealthy investor since you can afford to ride out the lows a lot more than most other people.
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  2115.  @PhonkEcho  You can keep some of it low risk, but why all of it? There's no need to.
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  2116.  @PhonkEcho  You won't go broke, that's the point. Obviously don't stick it all in bitcoin or high risk investments, but equally you don't need to put it all in low yield bonds or in a savings account either. But when you've got that much money you can afford to take riskier investments. Some you will lose, sure, but in general the returns on the ones you win will comfortably surpass those losses.
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  2117.  @PhonkEcho  Honestly they wouldn't. A money manager that bleeds their clients dry doesn't get clients.
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  2118. At 15 quid I can imagine many would decide Maccas is a better option, even then you're looking at nearly a tenner nowadays for a decent meal there.
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  2119. A crappy electric guitar could kill someone if it electrocuted them.
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  2120. I assume most of the deaths from falling in the grand canyon are deliberate, i.e. suicides.
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  2121. I have a love/hate relationship with paper ballots. On the one hand, it's the more secure way to vote. On the other, it's so expensive and time-consuming that it means that any more direct form of democracy is inviable. Voting is kept simple (because you can only fit so much on a piece of paper) and rare (because of the cost). Paper ballots are a tried and safe way to ensure democratic accountability, but they also mean any kind of ballot has to be carefully considered due to the cost and complexity, and that means some decisions that perhaps should be put to a public vote are instead made for us.
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  2122. ​ @LosianOne  Ever heard of Colman's Mustard? The mustard known all over the world for its fiery strength?
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  2123. This makes me want to go play Subnautica.
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  2124.  @raerohan4241  Absolutely, but they could be stuck waiting in Bangalore for days if there's no available aircraft, as long as the airline offers to get them to their destination eventually (not always on a plane, sometimes they charter coaches), they've fulfilled the contract, by which time many of the guest workers from Doha going to see their families for the weekend might have to refuse and hop straight back on a flight there as they have to go back to work, effectively wasting an entire trip. I don't know what air passenger rights are like in India, but certainly in the EU the airline would have to get passengers to their destination as quickly as possible, even if it means buying them tickets on a rival carrier, they would have to pay for hotels and meals and depending on the reason for diversion compensation on top of that.
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  2125. What do you think biofuels are?
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  2126. Ammonia has the problem of killing everyone on board if it leaks, even a little.
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  2127. I doubt it. Even an environmentally conscious civilisation is likely going to produce enough waste heat to be detectable. Plus the "greenest" way to harvest masses of energy, a dyson swarm, is pretty easy to detect.
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  2128.  @frankthetank5708  The reactors being shut down early are doing nothing but costing Germany huge sums of money. Their construction cost was already paid off several times over. They could have continued to operate profitably for at least a decade, possibly longer (the initial estimates of reactor lifetimes turned out to be very conservative). Not only is several PWh not being generated in the next few decades, which now has to be sourced from somewhere else, the German government has had to pay billions in compensation to energy companies for lost future earnings from these plants. Say what you want about building new reactors, but shutting down existing ones before they became unprofitable to run has resulted in a lot of money being wasted.
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  2129.  @neodym5809  Considering that only two nuclear power stations have really "exploded" in all of history, I think that's a bold claim to make. Yes, they are expensive to run, but at 1-2GW with an 80-90% capacity factor for a typical reactor complex, you get a lot of energy for your money.
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  2130. What do you mean? Germany isn't exactly short of any of those things. As for waste, the additional waste generated by an extra 10 years of operation for a single plant would probably fit in the back of a couple of lorries. It's not a big concern. Build another warehouse for dry cask if necessary, wouldn't cost a fortune. And it doesn't take a year to restart a reactor, don't know who told you that. 2-3 days at most if it's completely offline, 24 hours for regular maintenance.
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  2131.  @neodym5809  The current situation in france is very unusual, and generally a result an extremely risk averse policy when it comes to nuclear power plants. The expense of building new plants is multifaceted but certainly a major concern, but there's no logic to shutting down perfectly functional plants before their expected retirement.
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  2132.  @neodym5809  That's fair enough, if that what people really did want, and not because they were scared into it by anti-nuclear pressure groups. Either way, now the German public have to pay for it through the highest consumer energy prices in Europe.
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  2133.  @neodym5809  I can't post links because YouTube anti-spam is going crazy, but if you look it up, German household energy without taxes are still some of the highest in the EU, only behind Belgium, Ireland and Lichtenstein. Non-household fares better, but they are still comparable to their neighbours. Regarding the tax though, a considerable amount of that is a "green levy" which funds renewable energy development among other things. And after all that the Germans have one of the more CO2 intensive electricity grids thanks to copious amounts of dirty brown coal, which most of its neighbours now rarely burn, if ever.
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  2134. I'm far from what you call "woke", but even I acknowledge a pronoun selector in a RPG id not the downfall of civilization or even the gaming industry. It honestly seems a little pointless in a first person RPG considering PC's are rarely addressed in the third person for obvious reasons, but if it makes a few people happy and really doesn't detract from the experience then it's fine. If you don't like it, that's OK too, I know something as small as that can put some people on edge in such a political climate, you wonder what else they've put in the game, but by itself it's not a big deal.
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  2135. That sounds very similar to the IMF SDR.
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  2136. Interestingly with heat pumps the urban heat island effect in summer would result in the opposite effect in winter, a "cold island" effect so to speak. Urban areas could end up being colder, rather than warmer, than their rural surroundings in winter, depending on how many other sources of waste heat there are. I can imagine this might pose a problem for implementation of heat pumps in some cities, ground or air. Imagine a clusters of big tower blocks with ground source pumps, they could potentially freeze the ground beneath them on a cold day!
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  2137. If you're talking about slavery, that was pretty common almost everywhere at the time, in one form or another.
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  2138. It can be, if you don't consider the labour cost. Most people don't want to be farmers anymore, but in that system, they don't get a choice.
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  2139. So many self-loathing Americans here. No, your democratic process is not the worst in the world. No, the grass is not greener in Europe. Your system is flawed, everyone's system is flawed. Even PR systems are flawed. Every system is a compromise between true democracy and practical/effective democracy. Sure, there's a few things that could be improved. But there's no model that is perfect.
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  2140.  @mikeparker6907  Until someone actually uses it to drill a hole twice as deep as Kola (which is what would be needed for geothermal to be viable everywhere) and repeats the process hundreds of times over, then colour me sceptical.
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  2141.  @mikeparker6907  It's justified if a very novel technology hasn't been tested at the scale that is required. SMR are somewhat novel as well, but not nearly as such, small nuclear reactors have been used by the military for decades.
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  2142.  Gary Baldi  Horses were replaced with cars. What's going to replace an aircraft, teleportation?
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  2143. Perhaps cannabis taxes need to increase where it is legal, in order to make high THC products less affordable. To use an alcohol analogy, people are going to buy more vodka if it's not much more than beer.
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  2144.  @Anonnonner9546  Unfortunately that's not usually the case. The Indian government has been trying to persuade people who have homes to construct toilets rather than spending it on other things like alcohol.
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  2145.  @sakamoto8354  My impression is honestly that this comment section is full of hand wringing leftie do-gooders who think preserving the full autonomy of indigenous groups trumps everything else, including their health and wellbeing. I bet they don't treat conservative anti-vaxxers the same way. At least the people who say "yeah they're dumb primitive people, they need to learn the hard way" are being honest, even if I disagree with their attitude to the situation.
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  2146.  @sakamoto8354  What is the "adult" way to think? To say anyone can do whatever they want? Does this just apply to indigenous groups, or to everyone? Can I start doing my business in the woods, and I anyone complains I can say it's my freedom to take a dump there whenever I feel like it? India has a problem with unsanitary defecation, and they don't wring their hands over some remote village's local tradition. They build toilets, they encourage citizens to build toilets, they've even asked women to refuse to marry unless their husband will build a toilet in their home! This is what governments in the actual developing world are doing while charities in the west, and in the comment section, worry over cultural autonomy in their comfy armchairs.
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  2147.  @sakamoto8354  I see a bunch of idealists wringing their hands instead of getting the job done. Imagine if we took this approach with, say, vaccination or NTD's.
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  2148.  @Pomagranite167  All societies have red lines where they make the decision that the squalidness of the living conditions someone, or some group are living in outweigh their right to self determination. In the developed world we would never accept a group of people burying their own waste in the woods and creating a sanitation hazard as a lifestyle choice. At best it would be anti-social like the litter many traveller groups leave behind, at worst we might consider them unable to take care of themselves.
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  2149.  @HalNordmann  I think people in these comments are making it more complicated than it is.
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  2150. Ammonia being toxic is probably one reason. A fire could be deadly to anyone in the vicinity. Fuel cells in general have the issue that they are generally less efficient than batteries.
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  2151. ​ @georgetsokanis3542  Indeed, but it's rare to see it nowadays in the west.
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  2152.  @crazyhawaiidrivers4310  There aren't a lot of places, true, though there is a bit of land used mostly for military vehicle storage next to H1 that could have been used for the depot, plus a recycling center and some other low density industry. Though I guess getting that off the Army would have been too much paperwork.
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  2153.  @illiiilli24601  That would make more sense, but unfortunately it's not how many cities use the term.
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  2154. How would Ding Dong Ditch work if the front door was the division between public and private property, such as a terraced house? Technically you aren't trespassing because even when knocking on the door, you could be considered to be on public property.
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  2155. I don't think the argument here is whether the systems are inadequate, it is obvious they are not and I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who isn't hard right who thinks otherwise. The argument is around how to fix them. You can do one of two things, improve on the system you have or throw the system away (or "smash the system" as it's often said) and start again. The former is reform, the latter is revolution. While it's silly to generalise "the movement" as coming down on one side or the other, a vocal subset are certainly advocating strongly for option B, and I think it's fair to criticise them on that because of the rosy view Americans have of revolution. However, I can understand exactly why people who are angry, frustrated and fed up with the inevitably slow pace of reform feel so attracted to revolution. It feels easier when where you want to be feels so far away. "If only stark inequality and racism just vanished overnight" must be a strong desire in so many people, and proponents of various economic and social "-isms" will happily persuade people that this is what will happen if the average citizen threw off their metaphorical chains, ate the rich, and replaced the old system with something new and shiny. But I have to agree with UEG on this one, revolutions usually don't work, they don't bring the benefits people want, or if they do they come with dire consequences (The old saying "all communists are equal, equally impoverished" comes to mind, even though even that wasn't true as those in power enriched themselves). Reform feels like it's just too slow, and when people are dying that can easily tempt people off the path. But in the long run it does lead to more stable and meaningful change. So for people crying for revolution, I understand your pain, but think before you leap, would this really work, because I bet it almost certainly wouldn't. You will also probably make more of an impact pushing for reform, and yes, maybe sometimes reform could be sped up a little, though again, you have to be careful you don't create more problems down the line.
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  2156. DEI is an industry full of grifters and sometimes straight up fraudsters. Regardless of if you think it is a useful thing to have or not, you can't deny it is full of people charging ridiculous fees for workshops and seminars where grossly overpaid individuals lecture on relatively simple concepts that could be covered in a 10 minute powerpoint presentation. Corporations and public institutions big and small are being ripped off and taken for suckers because those at the top know next to nothing about the industry and are easily swayed by marketing.
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  2157. I think there are a couple of political/cultural issues that make building homes difficult in europe. One is a cultural reverence of agriculture and rural life, and a constant worry over food security, this makes building on farmland, which often surrounds cities, particularly unpalatable. Nightmarish images of bucolic european countryside being concreted over in a wave of urban sprawl have haunted europeans since the 19th century. Another is the massive number of historical buildings in cities and the strong desire to preserve them, and the general idea that no european city wants to end up looking like Singapore or numerous cities in China, old buildings swept away and replaced by a forest of modern skyscrapers. Personally I think the path of least resistance is residential conversion in urban centres. Europe does still have a lot of ugly post war office buildings nobody would miss, and converting those plots into housing would probably not raise too many objections. I appreciate the office vacancy rate isn't as high as some places in the US, but you might be able to increase supply by about 5% in many cities, which would add up over a lot of cities and are generally where these new immigrants are moving to. There's also some low value industrial areas quite close to city centres in some cities which might be suitable for housing, I know Leeds is building a lot of apartments on what used to be a railway yard. Again something very few people would miss. That might not be enough, but it would at least help.
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  2158. It depends. Some countries do, others do not.
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  2159. I cant think of a single new office skyscraper going up in Manchester, AFAIK all are luxury residential with commercial space on the ground floor for buisnesses like shops, restaurants and gyms. Some also seem to have co working spaces, I assume the idea is that residents live, work, eat and work out all in the same complex.
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  2160. I actually agree that nuclear power is too expensive, in some parts of the world (but mostly the ones that need it the most). But the reasons it is too expensive are not the fault of the technology, it's the public image, the endless bureaucracy that treats nuclear power plants very differently from other forms of power generation, and myopic green groups that would rather release millions more tonnes of CO2 than split a few more atoms. The most important takeaway I think is nuclear power is too expensive, but it doesn't need to be. Even with current nuclear technology, it doesn't need to cost so much. It didn't in the past, and it doesn't need to in the future.
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  2161. Zuck wants to be James Halliday but he's not anywhere close.
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  2162. In the UK the fairness doctrine still applies to television news but not to print or internet media. It's not always easy to apply especially when it comes to scientific issues with heavy political involvement, where hard evidence is biased towards one political viewpoint.
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  2163. The phenomenon is sometimes known as "Whig History", to paint the past as terrible to bolster a progressive political ideology.
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  2164. Unfortunately you probably can't do this indefinitely. Eventually you'll export more energy than the grid can absorb, at the same time as all the other solar installations in your area are doing the same. That kind of offsetting has a limited supply. If lots of people did the same as you it wouldn't be nearly as effective. You could build more energy storage to spread your exports out, perhaps even at night, but that's still incredibly expensive compared to just throwing more panels up.
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  2165.  @talesfromunderthemoon  Or Air-X!
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  2166. I think British tourists are like Jekyll and Hyde. Sober, they can be some of the most polite and considerate tourists in the world, almost rivalling the Japanese. Drunk, they turn into raving monsters and agents of chaos leaving destruction in their wake.
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  2167. Negative electricity prices have been a thing for a while now with the increase in renewable energy. But with electricity there's very little storage, supply has to nearly match demand all the time and you can't oversupply the grid or you risk serious damage to equipment. Of course the country can turn down dispatchable generation or even switch some off, but that's not always practical or cost-effective. So when there's a spike in solar generation around midday in summer, sometimes countries will pay their neighbours to turn down their disptachable generation and accept their excess energy. Of course customers will never be paid to consume electricity as is the case with petrol, as there are taxes and supply company markups, plus as with oil these negative prices don't last, often only for a few hours.
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  2168. I guess you could consider chemo/radiotherapy as sending the US Air Force in to carpet bomb Tumour Town. You're going to cause a lot of collateral damage, but because Tumour Town's buildings aren't as well built, you've got a good chance of destroying all of their buildings and only some of yours.
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  2169.  @Dumbledore6969x  Well, I think the vast majority of the world would disagree with your "fact" that the USSR wasn't communist. Because if it wasn't, then as I said you're engaging in unicorn politics with a no true scotsman fallacy, creating an ideology so specific it can only exist in fantasy.
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  2170.  @legerdemain  Yeah, that would be my concern with cheaping out too much on charging or capacity, you'd have to be super disciplined with plugging it in every day and you'd don't have a lot of wiggle room if things go wrong.
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  2171. Regarding the colonial argument, wasn't most of SE Asia also colonised by Europeans?
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  2172.  @-datnerd-3125  It just doesn't seem to be a good reason why SE Asia underwent the Demographic transition before SSA. Perhaps the colonialism in SSA was different somehow?
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  2173. ​ @-datnerd-3125  I'm not so sure if the Dutch would have been able to maintain control even if the Japanese hadn't invaded. They were ruined by WWII much like the British, I think they would have capitulated in '49 regardless. It is true conflicts and dictators don't necessarily retard development, but in most cases they do, and I think in SE Asia they have.
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  2174. ​ @kmason5241 I believe sodium is cheaper but their energy density is lower. I expect they'll be used more for static energy storage while lithium is still used for portable storage (like cars).
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  2175.  @poprostukeit6744  I don't find it spicy, I find it peppery (as in black pepper). That's one of the reasons I don't like it, that peppery taste can be so intense that it gives you a powdery and cloying aftertaste.
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  2176.  @simaancheno  I agree the infrastructure in the cities is generally OK, though it could be better. But there isn't much in the countryside. Infrastructure in this case is more high speed broadband than roads or railways.
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  2177.  @simaancheno  Eh, I can't imagine a sleepy Italian village in the countryside has great fiber internet access.
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  2178. Putting the current clamp around the power lead and hooking that up to a data logger would do the job.
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  2179. Markets like libertarians, but they dislike sudden change and uncertainty even more. They're very much "better the devil they know..."
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  2180. ​​ @andrewharrison8436 And with student accommodation you can get away with tiny rooms and shared kitchens and bathrooms. Try doing that with private residential and you won't get anyone but the most desperate.
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  2181.  @shadowninja6689  It also helps that their customers tend to skew young and liberal, or are fellow businesses in a similar situation.
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  2182.  @harlequincat  I'm going to piss you both off and say Roger Moore.
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  2183. I think some charter airlines did see an uptick in summer 2021 in Europe. People were playing it safe with package holidays, who offered covid protection and even discounts on testing to entice holidaymakers.
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  2184. Hopefully the passengers could get a last minute clearance to enter Brazil, I suspect after all that many would have rather spent the night in Sao Paulo than get on another flight immediately after. And while E261 compensation isn't due due to WX, I think the passengers have earned some flight credit for putting up with all that!
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  2185. Maybe there's too much focus on pump and dump and not enough on short and distort. Both are supposed to be illegal after all.
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  2186. To be fair to her on those topics, she is probably no less qualified than many YouTubers who claim to be experts because they took a social studies class or two.
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  2187.  @firstlast-cs6eg  At the same time, YT is full of "capitalism bad" videos from people who have read Das Kapital once (actually that's probably giving them too much credit) and think they're a revolutionary now, offering the same critiques and offering no realistic alternatives. I'll take the odd capitalist apologist amongst the sea of shallow socialists.
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  2188.  @firstlast-cs6eg  if you mean to my latest reply to you, no I'm afraid not. You probably said something that angered the algorithm, you could try making the comment again and paraphrasing anything that might trigger it. I couldn't tell you what because I've had the same problem many, many times. It's frustrating, I know!
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  2189.  @firstlast-cs6eg  Yes, I can see this reply! In the end I'm not suggesting that people can't suggest improvements (though many people say the same ones over and over again and don't consider the problems they might have). But you must admit there is a lot of "socialists" on here that have the air of first year polsci or socsci students who just blame capitalism for everything that's wrong with the world, conveniently glossing over how much worse many of the alternatives were in practice. It just seems a bit hypocritical to moan about people promoting capitalism in a rather shallow manner when there's so much of the opposite.
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  2190.  @firstlast-cs6eg  Yes, I saw this one too. Most capitalist countries do have these kinds of public housing. But they are of course mostly reserved for those who cannot afford private housing. There are still issues, people often treat public housing with less respect, leading to crime and vandalism. NIMBYism is more of a social than economic phenomenon so I don't think capitalism makes that much of a difference there, though a more statist government will find it easier to overrule them. Also a lot of people just don't want to live in that kind of housing, so you can only build so much. This of course varies between cultures, east Asians are more amenable to small, urban homes than Americans or Australians, and Europeans are somewhere in the middle. As always, it's complicated. I think part of it is because a lot of young left wing people tend to prefer this kind of housing more than others, they prefer more communal space and don't actually plan on spending all that much time at home.
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  2191. @firstlast-cs6eg  Yes, can still see your response! Looks like YT is leaving us alone for now. As to your idea, I look at the ugly concrete carbuncles that were built on both sides of the iron curtain during the mid 20th century and decide that having the government build and own all or nearly all the housing isn't the best idea. As for basic food, it'll be nutritional but it won't be interesting. It's certainly a very statist idea as well, because statist socialism is when the state owns stuff. And while NIMBY's can be a pain, we'd have probably concreted over half the countryside here without some resistance.
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  2192.  @firstlast-cs6eg  Again, seen it. Perhaps you have more faith in a strong government than I do. I'm not completely against the government owning "natural monopolies" like water, roads and railways, as long as those are kept at arms length. In my country NIMBY'S are mainly in the countryside resisting new identikit housing estates doubling the size of small villages and clogging up local roads. And without them we would have built a lot more motorways in the 60's and 70's, so you might find you were on their side at times. Private developers can build some rather nice apartment blocks and townhomes, I understand the need for the poorest to have subsidised housing, which may be government owned, but I don't think it's a good idea to extend it to everyone, especially as it will drastically reduce home ownership. Not even the Nordics do that, the only country that really comes close is ironically that bastion of capitalism and rather authoritarian nation of Singapore, and it is a lot of giant apartment buildings. But Singapore has so many people and so little space that I sort of understand their position as exceptional. Sometimes it's not so much that a "socialist" idea is bad on paper, but that the experience of its implementation over the decades has generally been negative.
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  2193. @firstlast-cs6eg  When it comes to large construction projects "by the people" means "by the government". If people are going to rent the properties, somebody has to own the building. However, if you want apartment blocks collectively owned by people, we have those already, they're called condominiums and they're a form of shared private ownership. They're very common in many capi countries. There's really not much difference between roads and apartment buildings in terms of visual and audible blight. Both block views and create noise. So to a NIMBY both are usually undesirable. I'm not against apartment buildings but I don't think just building them en masse by a government body is the best idea. And honestly I don't like the idea of them being plonked down willy nilly in a sleepy suburb either, but that's another matter. It seems to me what a lot of socs want we already have to some degree, they just want it taken to an extreme. And capi does work. It's not perfect, but it's gone on for hundreds of years in many countries and they have not collapsed, it just needs tweaking from time to time. Also people forget what came before, how much more stratified society was when it was rule by the aristocracy.
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  2194. ​ @firstlast-cs6eg  I did, but my post got deleted this time! To summarise what I said, my first point was that we already have the first thing you said in cap societies, it's called a condominium or condo, they're very common in certain countries like the US, as a form of shared private ownership. That's about as "for the people" as you can get. Of course you still need a developer to build the thing, but that's always been the case even for public housing unless you use a state run construction company (which most countries don't for a variety of reasons). The whole "soc has not been tried" argument I don't really buy, as whenever examples are given there's a "no true scotsman" argument to discount it. I also disagree that capi doesn't work, because so far capi countries have been fairly stable and soc and com countries have not. It's not perfect, but I'd disagree that it's not a functioning system. I'm not against apartment blocks per se, if they are well built, attractive, appropriately located and a response to local demand for them. Hence why I think it's important for their construction not to be driven mostly by central planning. Some limited construction may be needed to alleviate local population issues (though sometimes the problem is more complex than lack of accommodation, homelessness can occur even where there is a residential surplus), but I don't think we need to house everyone in state planned and/or owned housing. I can understand the issue NIMBYS can cause, but I also appreciate that people generally want to live in a particular environment and changing that environment often confers resistance. I also appreciate that local objections are not always baseless or selfish, they can have wider legitimate concerns, and that can include putting too many people in a place that does not have the infrastructure or environment to support them.
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  2195. @firstlast-cs6eg I think you're misrepresenting my position. I never said apartment blocks are a blight, but that they can be and often were in the mid 20th century. You can go on about the "inefficiency" of suburbs, but in the end a lot of it is freedom of choice. The truth is people live in suburbs usually because they prefer them to denser forms of living. You might not, but surveys in the US show a majority still prefer a bigger home even if services are further away. There is of course conflict when the minority and the majority want to live in the same place. NIMBY's can be about home prices, but that can be solved with money and block buying whole neighborhoods. But often it's about just not wanting to live next to an apartment block or having a more noisy and busy neighbourhood. Again, I don't think soc would solve your issues anyway, nor is capi the cause of them. Plenty of more soc countries have high levels of homeless, and many capi countries don't. It's more complicated than that. And inevitably if you want to change the way people live, that is going to involve some reshaping of culture or curtailing freedom of choice. You won't get rid of or even significantly reduce suburbs without doing one or the other.
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  2196. ​ @firstlast-cs6eg  Apologies for not replying sooner, no offence but your posts are long, verbose, and tiring to read, and I needed a break. I would not like to find another venue to debate as I would rather keep debates like this contained to a few outlets for the sake of my own sanity, but thank you for the offer. Here's the thing, your housing proposals have been tried, in part or in full, over the past century. Communist governments have housed people in gargantuan apartment complexes in pretty much exactly the manner you're imagining, and capitalist governments have also done the same but generally only for those who could not afford anything else. And when you have governments in charge of housing masses of people without having to respond to market forces, the result is "maximum housed, minimum cost". You get carbuncles made of cheap materials and built to the minimum of standards (sometimes, sometimes the builder cuts so many corners and a gas explosion causes half the tower to collapse). And I do believe aesthetics matter. People do not take pride in a living space that is an ugly expanse of stained concrete, you get graffiti, vandalism and crime. But to a government with budgetary pressures that's one of the first things to go. But I accept that sometimes, *sometimes*, that is the only option available. So a few of these things will inevitably be built. But the idea of expanding their construction to house more people, or everyone, just doesn't appeal to me at all, especially if they start popping up in the middle of sleepy suburbs. Call me a NIMBY if you want, but I wouldn't want to live next to anything like that, ever. Not only would it be an eyesore, but now my quiet neighbourhood is full of hundreds more people. I don't want to live next to hundreds of people, the dozen or so on my street are enough. They're nice people, and I like that they're there, but I wouldn't want more of them.
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  2197. I'd still like to know what the "Tabs" button on my dishwasher actually does, other than light up an LED. The manual is pretty obtuse about it.
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  2198. Europe has more of a problem with stubbornly high unemployment than other parts of the world, even the UK. It's probably why they're so obsessed with job creation.
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  2199.  @projecttitanium-slowishdriver  You have to be careful with unemployment statistics in some economies if they have a large informal sector. Europe has comparatively transparent reporting so it's more accurate.
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  2200.  @projecttitanium-slowishdriver  It does compared to similar developed economies with similarly reliable statistics, and it can't attract industry through cheap labour and low energy costs, so it has to tempt companies in with other methods.
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  2201.  @projecttitanium-slowishdriver  Those aren't the countries that are offering big incentives for industry to move there.
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  2202.  @tacoaficionado  Most Japanese people do not live in single family homes, and the ones that do exist are typically much smaller than a US home. And buses are generally not a good option in low density suburban areas, they are slow and infrequent, and the bus stop may still be a significant walk away. They're often an option of last resort or for those with either a lot of time or little money. This is true even in Europe. That's not to say buses are bad, but you need something a little more flexible for the low density areas if you want to increase the amount of people on mass transit.
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  2203.  @TalesOfWar  No, I don't. But I recognise that walkable neighbourhoods come with trade offs, some that some people don't want. Smaller, more expensive housing, lack of private green space, more people, more bustle. So some people are always going to prefer the suburban lifestyle. Self driving cars, which will obviously be much cheaper to run than taxis because you aren't paying a human driver, could offer an alternative to these people to private vehicles.
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  2204.  @rhidiandavies1991  Vang Vieng in Thailand had the same idea, it was previously overcrowded with backpackers who were prone to drowning themselves tubing down the local river. The issue is that high end tourists tend to be much more demanding, they want luxury hotels, imported food and lots of infrastructure like paved roads where they can drive their personal vehicles, whereas the more middle class backpackers were quite happy with a simple hostel, local food and a taxi or bus ride on dirt roads. As a result the local environmental impact went up despite the reduction in tourists.
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  2205.  @RoastedToastedPoops  And CBD oil you get over the counter is almost certainly going to be too low to have any therapeutic effect.
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  2206. I think New Zealand actually does represent some people twice with the Maori Electorates.
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  2207. Its absolutely true that the Cybertruck does a lot of things differently to other vehicles. But different doesn't always mean better, some things are done a particular way for good reason. And I think the Cybertruck does a lot of things differently that do make it a worse vehicle. But some people will buy worse cars that just don't look like anything else.
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  2208.  @langhamp8912  Perhaps you had one of the better ones. Certainly most tower blocks of the brutalist age don't have a good reputation. They became dumping grounds for the poor and crime flourished in their dingy corridors. The also just look awful, in every single way.
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  2209.  @langhamp8912  I'm making the observation that poor quality cramped housing becomes a place to send people who have no other choice.
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  2210.  @langhamp8912  I think there's quite a bit of survivorship bias going on there. For every good highrise there maybe 5 more that have long since been blown up. Bear in mind east Berlin was under a lot of pressure to show off how good communism was, so you might expect better quality, beyond the eyes of the west there are plenty of monstrosities built on the cheap. In the UK, 60's council highrises are almost universally loathed. 60's houses fare better, but generally because older estates are less dense than newer ones. New estates are really cramped, with tiny back gardens.
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  2211.  @langhamp8912  Design does influence social though. Depressing looking buildings tend to house people who can't afford anything nicer, because people like to live in nice looking buildings. It's argued crime itself is made worse by the design too, dark corridors make it easy for criminals to hide.
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  2212. Unfortunately universal design often clashes with historical preservation in the UK. Cobbled streets are hard enough for fully able people to walk on, they can be near impossible for wheelchairs to traverse. Similarly so many streets are so narrow that a wide pavement would make it impossible to accommodate vehicles, which might be fine in some cases but often vehicular access is still needed for businesses and residences. Small businesses also have an issue, if they can't widen their entrances or raise their floor because the building is 200 years old and under a preservation order, then they can't make it accessible. The problem is even worse with basement or second floor businesses, who may not have the space, or the finances, to install a lift without ripping out parts of the building that again, can't be altered by law. Lighting is also tricky, especially in residential areas. Make it too bright and residents will complain that they can't sleep at night.
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  2213. Thing is, the US is becoming less and less dependant on foreign oil, as new technology allows domestic deposits to be extracted more completely. Couple that with a slow long term reduction in demand and soon they'll be pretty self sufficient. Will be interesting to see what happens then.
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  2214.  @marksimons8861  That's very true. Reducing production now would just give more production to OPEC and the US/Canada. It probably wouldn't reduce consumption all that much. In the future Norway will probably make at least some of it back selling hydro to places like Denmark and Germany, who are increasingly reliant on intermittent renewable energy and need someone to help keep the lights on when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Possibly Scotland and/or the UK as well, depending on how well nuclear SMR tech develops (I'm not confident Germany and Denmark will be interested).
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  2215.  @recoil53  Eh... I think the empire could have recovered after WWI, long term issues notwithstanding. WWII was the nail in the coffin.
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  2216. ​ @williamdafoe3567 A cow might eat something like that for the salt (if you've ever been sweaty near a bunch of cows, you know they'll see you as a giant salt lick!)
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  2217. What I've found about capital flight arguments is that neither extreme is helpful. No, people aren't going to leave your nation en-masse to save a couple thousand dollars a year if they already live comfortably. It's silly to think people are that sensitive to what is often quite a small reduction in their income. But that doesn't mean you can take it further and slap huge taxes on the super rich and they'll just take it on the chin. Especially as in general people with more money have more options available to keep more of it, and moving around the world would be much less of a deal for them (since they probably do it already).
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  2218.  @AleksPTA  That's fair enough, but people in the UK say the same thing about Corbyn, and in the US about Sanders, so it's really about which side you believe. Plus, Whitlam wasn't above having his own machinations to keep himself in power, which is primarily what got him into trouble in the first place.
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  2219.  @leavingitblank9363  Cochineal is fairly strong and stable, but of course it means the food is no longer vegetarian because it's got crushed up beetles in it. Blue is the hardest, most natural blues are pretty weak and come out more turquoise in food.
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  2220.  @MalcolmRose-l3b  Interconnectors by themselves will not solve the problem, you still need that surplus of energy available. It's all well and good to have a redundant connection, but if it can't make up for the loss it's not going to be enough. With the internet the worst that happens is interest speeds are throttled, with energy you get blackouts or rationing.
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  2221.  @MalcolmRose-l3b  It's easier to deal with slower internet speeds than blackouts or brownouts though. And if Sahara or Australian solar gets cut off there's not going to be a suitable alternative just waiting to step in.
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  2222.  @rogerphelps9939  It's not Morocco where most of the solar farms will be, they'd be further south and east. Morocco would be where the transmission line runs to Europe, probably, across the strait of Gibraltar. Besides, Morocco is not a risk free ally in this. It might decide it wants Ceuta and Melilla back and can now hold Europe to ransom over it.
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  2223.  @hughleyton693  Multiple routes means more cost, and it still doesn't help if there isn't enough energy available.
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  2224.  @hughleyton693  And countries do have redundancy, over short distances internally and with neighbours, because that is affordable. When you want to build multiple high capacity long distance interconnects, you're looking at hundreds of billions in cost.
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  2225. As was shown in the video, giant cowcatchers have mostly been replaced by deflector plates, they're a lot smaller but their job is the same, prevent debris getting under the wheels.
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  2226. It won't be built out in time to be useful.
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  2227.  @just-a-purple-ork  The railways often don't go to where people live, and buses are too slow, infrequent or unreliable to be useful for many commuters (and useless for a lot of leisure or retail travel). Anyone who lives in the suburbs is probably going to need to use a car at least some of the time.
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  2228.  @MykhailoArmorer  A lot of people don't want to pay more money for less space and less privacy.
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  2229.  @just-a-purple-ork  You can't just magically improve bus services to suburbia in a couple of months. You'd need to buy more buses, hire more drivers, and even then you can't expect to cover every route that every citizen needs to travel, at least not in a way that isn't 2-3 times longer than driving and doesn't run 24/7. Expect many of your routes to lose money unless you put ticket prices up so high that it's more expensive than driving in many cases.
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  2230.  @just-a-purple-ork  Poorer countries don't do this, either the service is poor and people put up with it with 2-3 hour commutes, or people live much closer to where they work either as subsistence farmers, or crammed into slums or tenements in cities. Or they own scooters or motorbikes and get by by riding them in a fashion which would be illegal in the US. None of those are realistic options for the US.
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  2231.  @dancahill9585  That would only be the case if it was a long term trend lasting at least a decade of not longer. Currently there's no clear sign it will be.
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  2232. I can imagine in some cases that's just easier, even if they are innocent. It's what's often given as advice in cases like fare dodging, even if the person is in the right, a procedural slip up (like fare evasion notices not conforming to regulations) is easier to use as a defence than an often more complicated justification due to a byzantine ticketing system. The result is the same in the end.
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  2233. I'm not so sure. At the moment for humans the best we have are capsules, and they are OK but far from perfect. I really doubt Starship is ever going to carry humans, so that leaves the market open for something else. What VG lacked was a vehicle that could at least get to LEO. Suborbital is great for a fun jaunt for tourists but as a ferry for professional astronauts it's pointless. That's why I think something like Dream Chaser has more promise.
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  2234. Light rail can beat out BRT long term because the vehicles and infrastructure have lower maintenance costs. Rails are more durable than roads and an LRV can last for decades whereas a bus is pretty worn out after just one.
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  2235.  @pottertheavenger1363  I disagree. Mexico is ruled by a party that tries to be everything to everyone, and the regions are pretty much left to their own devices, particularly much of Chiapas which is practically self governed. The cartels also have their own little fiefdoms which they maintain through corruption, bribery and occasionally violence.
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  2236. And who might the "rightful" inhabitants be? The Silurians?
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  2237. There needs to be realistic expectations. The US is much larger than Europe and Japan, and it has about 20% of the population of China. Some distances between large urban areas are just too great to make rail travel economic compared to aviation. The US does have a lot of cities that are currently 3-5 hours drive from each other that could certainly benefit from a high speed rail link. But anything further than that it's unlikely to be able to take passengers away from air travel, unless the trains get significantly faster.
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  2238.  @EnjoyFirefighting  It's possible to link up many cities in Europe by connecting those between them as intermediate stops. In much of central and western Europe you aren't more than around 3 hours between major urban areas, not so much in the US. There are clusters in a few places, but I think it's unlikely at this point for a nationwide network to be feasible.
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  2239. Purity mainly. Anything that's going to be ingested needs to be much more free of contaminants.
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  2240. I can see how Argentina might have such an attitude, a country that used to be the richest in South America, who managed to (mainly through their own poor governance) drag themselves down to a developing country, while the demographically similar string bean of a nation across the Andes took their place (though not without some rocky bits along the way). There's probably a lot of lost pride. And Argentina was really quite rich and advanced in the early 20th century. Had it carried on it may have become South America's most influential nation, instead of Brazil, with a standard of living that wouldn't be too dissimilar to the US or Canada.
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  2241.  @mandisaw  A levels are like your AP courses in a way, they're taken at 16-18. Difference being they're not really optional if you want to go to university at 18. At 16 you get GCSEs which are like a high school diploma, everyone does them regardless of future ambition. We also have SAT scores but they're something completely different, they're non qualification examinations taken at the equivalent of grades 2 and 5 (and grade 8 until recently) known as year 3, 6 and 9 in the UK. These are just for tracking performance.
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  2242.  @mandisaw  If you generally need the HS diploma beforehand then A levels are even more like AP courses. Regular high/secondary school finishes at 16 here. Originally you could choose to finish education then but now you have to be in some kind of education or training until 18.
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  2243. I'm not so convinced. Chinese ICE cars never made inroads into europe, I doubt their EV's will.
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  2244. BYD is going to make a killing in the budget or even mid range EV market if other car makers dont get a grip soon. So many new EV's, even many new ICE cars in the west are bloated, autobese luxury SUV's and pickups because they are more profitable to sell. Lots of people are crying out for some smaller and more sensible cars in the EV market, a Ford Focus or Volkswagen Polo equivalent with a decent battery range and some modest comforts, something that'll fit in a regular parking space and doesn't make a fuss. If they can offer that sort of budget to mid range option then I can see them making big waves, especially in Europe where big SUV's struggle with narrow roads and tight parking spots.
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  2245. The UK is arguably very overcentralised, even more than France. While housing is an issue in many parts of the UK, in London and the South East it is the worst. London also sucks up a huge amount of the infrastructure budget just to cope with its growing population, leaving other parts of the country with worn out railway lines and overflowing sewage treatment plants. The UK needs to spread more of its economy into second tier cities. HS2 was supposed to be part of that, connect up the five largest cities in England and Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds can catch up a bit more with London, relieving some of the pressure.
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  2246. Not surprised about Canada, that's often considered a vexillologist's darling. Half the worst are crests or seals on a bedsheet, which again, isn't surprising.
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  2247. In the end I think the need for Lithium will win. Mines will just have to have better water treatment facilities, and locals will just have to accept the needs of the planet trump their concerns.
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  2248.  @silverhawkscape2677  Thing is, that's how the modern world was built, we dug shit out of the ground, often to the objections of locals. We are more conscientious now than we used to be, and that's a good thing, but ultimately if we want to continue living the way we are living and not go back to a pre-industrial existence, we're going to need to dig up more minerals. That goes for oil and gas, iron ore, or lithium.
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  2249.  @silverhawkscape2677  I mean if you want to go the primitivist route, that's fine, you've got that choice. Good luck getting many other people to follow you though, unless you want to be a tyrant yourself.
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  2250. What might be interesting is if we see the spread of "localisation" of railway networks similar to the London Overground and Merseyrail. These might still be in private hands, but with a lot more control and oversight when it comes to ticket prices, investment and infrastructure from a more hands-on local government. There are a lot of UK cities with rail routes that feed into them and nowhere else, so quite a bit of the network could be taken out of the hands of central government and the national TOC system this way.
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  2251.  @ephraimboateng5239  I don't think in either scenario Calgary would be bigger than Toronto or Vancouver. And still overall you have the famous map: http://imgur.com/CenW9oi showing how much the Canadian population clings to the very southern parts of their country.
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  2252.  @jaysmith1408  Yeah, let's hope they did that, but considering the flight took an extra 8 hours (stopping for a medical emergency doesn't usually take that long, 45-90 minutes on the ground generally), even including extra diversion time I think they probably didn't.
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  2253. The Ghanian middle class can afford it, domestic or imported.
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  2254. Discworld seems to me to be a fantasy parody of our own modern world.
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  2255. While country based caps might not be the best option, it does not really solve the problem, because in the end changing those restrictions to ones based on income or education will still make it impossible or highly impractical for a lot of those people to immigrate legally. You can't give everyone in the world an attainable legal option when it comes to countries like the US, because you'd have so many people attaining it that your numbers would skyrocket. And in the end immigration, like it or not, is a numbers game. You want just enough of the right kinds of people to keep the economy healthy and keep different political factions calm. Not too few, not too many. Every immigration policy is designed around those numbers, how many do we want to let in every year, and who should they be in terms of education and financial standing (and let's face it, ethnicity and culture also regularly play a role even among liberals). That's not going to change by abolishing country caps, it just means that the requirements on education and income will tighten in order to keep the numbers stable. For specific corner cases where children need to take care of parents, those can probably be addressed with something like a carers visa, that ends on death of the parents. It's harsh, but it's a practical option that isn't going to be considered a back door for unqualified people to get in. Also it's important to remember many of the migrants illegally crossing are not Mexican, they're from poorer and more unstable central american countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador. Mexico's border with Belize and Guatemala is considered fairly porous, it is argued Mexico doesn't really care too much about illegal crossings as they know the vest majority will be transiting to the US. Making it harder to cross the US border, in theory puts pressure on the Mexicans to tighten up theirs as migrants clog up Mexican services and draw the ire of locals.
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  2256.  @Zaire82  Er... no they didn't. If you look at a map, you'll see the majority of reactors are in England.
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  2257.  @Zaire82  The UK only has one site where it keeps its nuclear warheads, and that is in Scotland at HMNB Clyde and nearby RNAD Coulport. So yes, they are all in Scotland, but only at one site. We don't have silos dotted around the country like in the US.
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  2258. ​ @yakunats  In a couple of years they'll rebrand to something else, like they did with Hermes.
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  2259. They can, but there are other less invasive methods depending on the cause.
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  2260.  @lzh4950  Generally that seems to be a risk worth taking. Mostly groundings tend to affect only one variant so you still have options, you could dry lease a few older or different variants and your pilots could fly those without needing a new type rating. Though in general full grounding of aircraft variants like the 737MAX for long periods are pretty rare, and it's probably cheaper just to insure against it than try and build in contingency.
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  2261. Spectacular scenery but not much to do reminds me of New Zealand. There're a lot of really great places to visit, but as a country of only 5 million people there's not typically that much in the way of activities outside of the few tourist hotspots.
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  2262.  @colino72  Problem is that niche has stiff competition from BMW, Mercedes and Audi. So they'll still end up competing with them.
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  2263. Japan's economy is weird, so weird it's considered pretty unique. It might not be a good model for other nations.
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  2264. Europe has gotten rather unlucky in all of this, it has lurched from one crisis to another, as soon as COVID tailed off Ukraine happened. I think this is likely to drag Europe even further behind the US economically.
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  2265. I think in terms of future racism, it is possible there will be very few white majority countries in 100 years time, and in places like the UK or US, white people could be a minority for the first time in their history. This isn't to suggest some "great replacement" conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that white populations are having children well below replacement rate, by choice, and some other non-white populations are still having quite a lot of children. White populations are also mixing with other races much more than they did in the past. So the future could see white populations join up with mixed and some other racial groups to preserve their own cultural power, or we see more animosity between smaller groups of people where whites are just one of many battling it out, with a greatly diminished influence from what we have today. In some ways it would be interesting to see the outcome. Of course it would be nice if everyone just got along with each other, but c'mon, let's be realistic here!
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  2266. Trucks might not stick around waiting for loading or unloading, they'll detach from the trailer and go to the next job.
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  2267.  @MilwaukeeF40C  The problem is you can have good passenger service or good freight service, you can't do both. To do that you'd really need two separate railway networks.
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  2268.  @coleball6001  The all use the same logo and branding and split up from a parent monopoly. They are independant on paper, but not really in practice.
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  2269.  @dustycarrier4413  It's an odd and rather unique arrangement, for sure. But I wouldn't say they are really truly separate entities. They all have practically the same logos and branding. If you didn't know they weren't subsidiaries you would never guess. I'd argue they act as a quasi single entity in many cases because they cooperate so much. I don't think an airline alliance would adequately describe how similar they are to each other, they essentially just slap a little logo on otherwise completely different planes and let you pool your frequent flyer points. It's hard to think of a similar situation in another industry. I've also noticed that the less popular lines tend to be the ones JR doesn't run on, but are instead run by small private operators. So there's certainly no "balance" there! All in all it's very different to the situation in the UK. Most franchises have changed hands a lot over the years, resulting in all the trains being repainted a different colour and different posters and marketing materials being made. Japan's rail backbone is pretty stable, none of the JR entities are going anywhere. It's really a rail oligopoly based on region with little to no competition ever. In that sense it may as well be nationalised on a regional level for all the difference it makes to the passenger.
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  2270.  @dustycarrier4413  I'm not going to get into metro systems, because even in countries with nationalised railways, metro systems are usually run separately, either privately or by the city. But Japan has no tendering process, they don't have lines regularly changing hands. I'd argue that the UK is perhaps the only country where there is significant competition at all when it comes to running trains on a route, even if it is separated in time. JR group absolutely dominates intercity and regional, and has a majority share of commuter services. Nobody else really gets a realistic shot at these routes. It's privatised and a free market in name but is essentially an oligopoly that is going nowhere, none of the JR group entities will ever lose much of their control to anyone else. JR has the most profitable routes especially outside of cities. In the UK it could be as if British Rail was split into pieces, told to make a profit and UK government sold most of their shares. Sure, the odd branch line could get a private operator, but really British Rail still runs the show just now on paper they're a private company. But to the passenger, little has noticeably changed, maybe the colour of the logo and some new ticket options. It still works and feels like one operator to them in most cases. Even then, out of all the JR entities, only about half are totally free of government ownership, less than in the UK before COVID. So they really should be considered semi-privatised.
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  2271.  @pawz3016  The book title doesn't sound like it's taking an objective, neutral tone to the issue though. It sounds more like ideological propaganda. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my first impression. Here's the thing, if your legs didn't work (or didn't work well), and you had the choice between a wheelchair and an exoskeleton, why not take the latter (assuming cost is not an object, we're talking a century from now when tech like this could be a lot cheaper)? For a start, you could go hiking with your friends. There are no wheelchair ramps in nature! And is there really anything special about a wheelchair? It's an assistive device, it allows people with a disability some mobility over no mobility at all (or at least having to be carried everywhere on something like a litter). If something better comes along to replace it, is it really some massive moral issue in the grand scheme of things?
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  2272.  @pawz3016  I'm sure it isn't, but I'm not going to consider the social and cultural aspects because they will be irrelevant 100 years from now in the face of new technology. I can see where you're coming from, but I think you're worrying about the current limitations of such technology that has barely even made it out of experimental prototypes. Given 100 years of progress, we could have made vast improvements in reliability, comfort and cost with such technologies. I personally doubt you'd have the same hesitation if you were making the same decision then rather than now. As for accessible hiking trails, they are few and far between, none are in true wilderness, and many would argue for good reason. Many people wouldn't even consider them trails, since they so heavily engineer the natural landscape and tend to be more like roads in their design. Certainly it would be much better for everyone, and for nature, if everyone could enjoy low impact trails in true wilderness.
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  2273.  @pawz3016  It is going to be a long time before exoskeletons and robotic limbs become reliable and affordable enough to be ubiquitous, so universally accessible design will still be needed for quite some time. But it's clear that there are many places where such design will never be possible or desirable, such as remote walking trails, historic buildings, and so on. Steps are not going away. So these assistive devices which require no adaption to the environment will be a superior choice regardless. Regarding the wheelchair argument, imagine if you instead thought that modern wheelchairs themselves were the unreliable and unaffordable technology, and that you demanded universal accommodation for your litter, for example. Today you'd be seen as unreasonable, people would point at wheelchairs and ask why you don't use that. I put it to you that your aversion to "robotic" solutions is based entirely on present technological progress. And it's totally reasonable and correct to be sceptical of such technologies while they're still cutting edge or not even out of the lab really. But 100 years hence, or even 50 years hence? Things are likely to be very different.
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  2274.  @AUnicorn666  An optimistic vision of the future would suggest that vision correction would be available to practically everyone in 100 years time, and in any places it isn't, universally accessible design is unlikely to be implemented there either. We have books in large print because currently vision correction only goes so far, glasses and contacts can't deal with all eye conditions. Advances in medical technology will likely mean there are more options for vision correction that can treat far more eye conditions, to the point where we could even replace eyes that are too severe to correct. In the end as I said it's impossible to implement such design everywhere if we wish to preserve history and nature. I don't see that changing. The only way to make everywhere accessible to everyone is to adapt people, not the environment.
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  2275.  @pawz3016  Again, I really think you're making valid criticisms of where the technology is today, and you do make valuable insights into the pitfalls we might need to look out for in the future. You are right that some people really overestimate the capabilities of current assistive technologies. But none of what you're saying necessarily applies 50-100 years from now, and I think it is unlikely to. That is more than enough time for current expectations to become reality. And the reason the road isn't the same level as the sidewalk is for numerous practical reasons, if it rains the water doesn't pool on the sidewalk, it pools on the road, a kerb also keeps drivers on the road, same with debris from vehicles. You can see the problem that some ideas for universal design resurface other problems that the existing design solved.
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  2276.  @pawz3016  I guess I am fairly optimistic, I've seen what is out there and while I agree cost is too high and reliability too low at the moment, incremental improvements are being made. Electric actuation is a lot better than it used to be, for example. Certainly it's possible for people in 100 years time still relying on wheelchairs and canes, but I think there would have to be immense stagnation in technological development for that to be the case. And considering how much money is being thrown at medical technology right now, it would require a great cultural change. Also roads and sidewalks being level are hardly unique to the Dutch. Most "pedestrianised" streets are similar, it's because these are not streets designed to keep pedestrians and cars apart, but where pedestrians are the primary user and cars are only granted access at walking pace for specific purposes.
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  2277.  @AUnicorn666  I'm not so sure. The issue is it being universal, for everything. That's a lot harder than it might seem.
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  2278.  @ElpSmith  I think something like an exoskeleton wouldn't be seen as any different than a wheelchair. It's basically a more capable assitive device in the end. Body modifications perhaps less so, but if you're missing a leg or a limb, getting a robotic one doesn't seem like such a stretch, we've already got pretty high tech artificial limbs already! For mental conditions, the problem of accessibility has always been difficult, because it's more of a zero sum game there. A lively bustling city centre is never going to be "autism friendly" because it wouldn't be able to be either of those. Really the only solution that would work for everyone is separate places for those unable to cope with such environments.
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  2279.  @melissasingleton58  As I've mentioned in other comments, I don't think this is entirely possible since some aspects of society are a zero sum game, what the majority enjoys are anathema to some people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Severe autism is a great example of this, a lot of neurotypical people love stimulation, and want to live in and experience stimulating environments. If you take that stimulation away for the sake of a minority who can't cope with it, you can imagine the uproar. The only truly workable solution I believe, to be brutally honest, is segregation, if not always in space but in time. That is really what happens now, we have "autism friendly" screenings of films but these don't integrate autistic people into society, they create a parallel society which is tailored to autistic needs. Hopefully, we will get better at accommodating the needs of those with cognitive and developmental disabilities. But I really think it will still end up being a seperate society. I think we'll see "X friendly" self contained communities pop up which have their own specific rules and designed to cater for specific needs. Public spaces may have more special timeslots outside of typical busy periods where these people can come and do activities in an environment they are comfortable in. But I think that is as far as it will go unless we're prepared to consider "fixes" to allow these people to manage mainstream society better. Because I really don't think you can change society all that much before you end up in a situation where you can't please both sides, and in that case, majority wins.
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  2280.  @DanialTarki  I mean, sure, do you think a 4 year old knows or understands very much about sexuality? Many barely understand the difference between girls and boys.
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  2281. Reinsurance doesn't cover everything. Insurers still pay for "everyday" claims out of their own pocket. Reinsurance is for catastrophic events which might otherwise bankrupt the insurance company.
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  2282. The sheer area of land somewhat makes up for it. Stocking density in Aus is really really low in many places.
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  2283. If you tack on about an extra 1-2 billion (on average, some old and enrichment reactors for weapons are really expensive like Sellafield) you get a good estimate of decommissioning. Though this cost does not contribute to the initial debt because it's obviously paid from a fund from lifetime profits. And the longer the plant runs, the less decommissioning increases LCOE.
    1
  2284.  @shaochiavang  Depends on when the $1000 is invested, at the start of the year or end.
    1
  2285.  @shaochiavang  I ran it through a compound interest calculator, it's actually about right.
    1
  2286.  @shaochiavang  I definitely got £900k or £1m depending on when the deposits are made. I've tried to share the link several times but YouTube won't let me so you'll just have to take my word for it. It's the first result when you Google "compound interest calculator".
    1
  2287.  @gracefool  I tend to lean towards the personal choice end of things. Breastfeeding can be difficult, inconvenient or undesirable for non-medical reasons, and if that means a switch to formula, that's fine by me.
    1
  2288. China is more resource rich than Europe is, so it can get more of its minerals within its own borders. Europe has to look outside of its own.
    1
  2289.  @WupeViasco  Still though, there's less of a need. China can choose to internally source more of its minerals. Europe has no choice, it has to import.
    1
  2290.  @WupeViasco  My point is China still has a choice, an expensive alternative for sure, but still a choice. Europe absolutely does not. It has nowhere near enough resources within its own borders to maintain its economy. Neither does China really, but it would probably just have to slow down its growth a little. On the other hand, european industry would completely collapse without imported minerals.
    1
  2291. I think that might put them too close to the engines for safety. An important requirement for budget airlines is to be able to (dis)embark passengers without jetways (because those stands are cheaper and they often fly to smaller airports that don't have them).
    1
  2292.  @richardwilcock2942  Even if they're turned off I'm not sure how close you can safely have passengers, they're always very eager to keep you as far as possible from them.
    1
  2293.  @IstasPumaNevada  It would be dangerous to have a monopoly. If something goes wrong with SpaceX (a fatal accident perhaps) it could shut down the whole launch industry for months or even years. NASA knows this so won't allow it for their launches.
    1
  2294.  DAGGER  Lower g's could also mean longer lifetimes for spacecraft components, or even the spacecraft itself.
    1
  2295. ​ @Thecoffeefreak  In the end both systems incentivise resource extraction to improve the standard of living of the population. The only system that wouldn't is some kind of primitivist ideology. But for most people, those aren't very fun, and in many cases they are unable to support the current global population.
    1
  2296. Based on my observations, the secret to a healthy union culture is the right relationship between unions and companies. Countries where unions have fallen, like the UK, often have a history of a very adversarial relationship between unions and companies, both sides saw each other as an enemy to be fought. When most people thought about unions, they thought of strikes, protests, and radical politics. Countries where unions have been more successful have managed to foster a more cooperatives relationship, with unions willing to accept layoffs and pay cuts when times are bad, with the understanding that pay will rise when times are good.
    1
  2297. The peltier device seems a bit unnecessary for a basic cookstove. Sure, you can charge a mobile phone, but it's probably cheaper to use a small solar panel.
    1
  2298. It depends. Some routes are fairly profitable. But there are a lot that make a loss, but having it does bring other benefits.
    1
  2299.  @cokeforever  Yout could run aviation as a whole and make a profit, if you cut out all unprofitable routes. This would mean a lot of isolated places with no airline service at all, or only at insanely high prices, but it's possible. This is how it works in much of central europe where short distances and dense road and rail networks mean there's not much of an incentive to fund unprofitable routes.
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  2300. ​ @drtcgtheplayer5283 We had the same thing from a low speed train crash in the UK a few weeks ago. One passenger died from a heart attack but the media reported it as if he'd died as a result of the crash.
    1
  2301. There's seems to be a message that men meed to become more empathetic and caring in order to be employable in the future. Sure, some of this will be social conditioning, but for some of us we either aren't very good at it or just don't find it comfortable. Don't get me wrong, we aren't cold emotionless drones and are friendly enough to talk to, but when it comes to emotionally supporting someone, especially someone who may be very ill, we stumble and find it difficult to relate. We may fall back on trying to solve problems (like a doctor would) rather than just giving them a shoulder to cry on. I'd also say there are probably many women who also have this problem, but I'd hazard a guess that this is a more "male" thing. That's probably why we prefer to become doctors than nurses, doctors fix things, they solve problems, whereas nursing is generally more about supporting the patient through the process.
    1
  2302.  @neodym5809  At least a more tolerant approach to nuclear energy would help take the pressure off the need for gas. Germany is under pressure to wean itself off coal, compared to other western european economies it is very coal dependant. Because Germany has been so hostile to nuclear, the only short to medium term option for an energy hungry, export led economy is to switch to gas. Renewables could possibly replace coal, one day, but storage technology is lagging behind, so at the moment gas is needed to balance output. Nuclear can at least give this process more breathing room, by shouldering some of the baseload.
    1
  2303. They're usually not the same antibiotics, and in many countries prophylactic use is banned so the cattle who are taking them do need them usually.
    1
  2304.  @LuisAldamiz  And that's no different to human doctors.
    1
  2305. Home delivery is always going to be a tough nut to crack regarding packaging. You need enough so the food doesn't get squashed and keeps warm, and you can't use too many reusables (because you can't practically send your packaging to the takeaway before or after). Forgoing cutlery and napkins when not needed, and serving condiments in a small plastic tub instead of packets (because nobody likes those things anyway) is at least a start.
    1
  2306. Partial nationalisation can be a solution for the bailout moral hazard. The government acts like an "investor of last resort" buying anything up to just shy of a controlling stake in the corporation, which the other investors have to buy back when things recover. Another option is to simply require corporations who provide essential services to take out some form of compulsory insurance, which already happens to a limited extent in some countries. And lastly there's loans with deferred payments (because giving them ultra low interest rates is a moral hazard as well). Of course, none of these are perfect, the first only works is the companies straits are not too dire, the second is just begging to be circumvented if it was too onerous, and the third can kill the company later on as they spiral into a debt trap.
    1
  2307.  @lookingforsomething  You then have the "seize the means of production" issue. Lots of people will see that as socialism/communism by stealth, and that won't be popular with many. Just wait a few boom bust cycles, disasters and the like and the government will end up owning a good chunk of industry and business. In a few cases that it has happened in developed nations, more often than not it was a natural monopoly already, or the service provided wasn't profitable enough for any private corporation to want to provide it.
    1
  2308.  @lookingforsomething  If the government buys a stake, then they should see returns from share dividends. If they loan them the money, they should get interest. There's also the issue that nationalised companies are more exposed to political interests, which can make them inefficient and unstable.
    1
  2309.  @klankungen7794  Good businesses attract investors who think that it's a good business and will flourish in the future. If a business is only viable because of UBI, then there's a chance the investors have missed a trick, but more likely the business isn't sustainable long term. It's also worth pointing out that with small scale trials the number of businesses created is unlikely to exceed the capacity of the market. If everyone had UBI and the number of businesses scaled up accordingly, then they would likely cannibalise each other into unprofitability.
    1
  2310.  @klankungen7794  A good business with a potentially bright future usually attracts investment even if it's not profitable at the time. The issue is UBI might enable a lot of businesses to be started that are fundamentally flawed from the beginning, especially if it's widespread enough so these businesses oversaturate the market. There will be the odd success where investors missed a trick, but in most cases the business will never be sustainable.
    1
  2311.  @klankungen7794  A good business with a potentially bright future will attract investors even if it isn't profitable at the time. The issue is that UBI might result in a lot of bored people creating businesses that are fundamentally flawed, and end up wasting money.
    1
  2312.  @SwiftySanders  I disagree. You have to remember when we talk about urbanised populations, we are usually including those who live in the suburbs. I think people are generally happy to live a bit further away from work if it means they can afford something other than a shoebox flat, especially if they plan on starting a family. It's partly true suburbs didn't really exist before the car (not to the extent they do anyway) but the population was generally much less urbanised, this was before the green revolution so farms required more labour, and those who did live in cities lived in conditions we would consider inhumane today, we're talking multiple families sharing rooms. People didn't have the option to live any other way, unless they were pretty wealthy.
    1
  2313.  @SwiftySanders  I don't think so. Some people might prefer it, but many people don't have a choice. The fact that many people left the cities to the suburbs after they were constructed in the early 20th century is testament to this. City living is cramped and expensive.
    1
  2314. The jail would be for welfare reasons though, it happens sometimes in the UK when the police pick up a "drunk and incapable" person off the street. They haven't broken any law and can't be charged with anything, but if they can't discharge them to a responsible person they would be put in a cell to sober up and released in the morning.
    1
  2315. ​ @CorbiniteVids  In many cases they don't need land as they bury the pipe, just an easement.
    1
  2316. Generally the cheapest and most available cheese is mild cheddar rather than processed cheese though.
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  2317. For 100% non-hydro renewable, the only solution is complete storage coverage, enough to store all of the output until it is needed, but that's a colossal technological and financial challenge that could take decades to build, if ever in some places. For a more mixed solution, which is going to be the situation for even the most enthusiastic adopters for some time, highly dispatchable energy sources like natural gas and hydro can displace baseload and lower the "floor". In many countries, gas dominates energy generation so this will help increase renewable penetration. But gas power plants aren't free to keep spun up (they need to be to respond quickly and not mess with the AC frequency) so even that will have its limit. Sadly current nuclear doesn't play well with renewables, and future designs are probably unlikely to, which is a shame considering a partial renewable mix will probably still have to use a lot of fossil fuels.
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  2318. Put yourselves in the shoes of a monarch, an absolute ruler, what do you think would happen when you did all that? Would the people still be happy with your regime? Educated business owners who pay taxes tend to feel like they should get a say in how the country is run, and will want to take power away from you. So your benevolence would very likely get you deposed, or worse, overthrown by a relative to preserve the family dynasty.
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  2319. EV's do need significantly less maintenance overall, but most of what they do need just isn't safe for most amateur mechanics beyond what is common to ICE and EV's, like wheels, suspension and so on. While ICE cars aren't risk free either, a bit of common sense and some reliable equipment can mitigate most of the risk. With EV's you've got hundreds of volts under the bonnet (and soon 1000+ volt EV's will be a thing as it's the cheapest way to increase range and power), far more than mains power, which could easily kill someone who doesn't know what they're doing. It is going to be much harder for EV enthusiasts to maintain their own vehicles themselves. I'm sure a few will gain the necessary skills to do so safely, but it's not going to be on the same scale with ICE cars today.
    1
  2320. I have seen a hybrid range before, I think they're pretty common in small combination units in caravans and motorhomes, like in my parents one. The oven is generally gas fired and runs off the propane tank, but the range will have 1-2 induction hobs instead of gas burners, with the rest being gas. I'm not sure if the US would have many of them, since RV's are generally so large they can probably fit a pretty big cooker! But I guess in smaller motorhomes and caravans they might crop up.
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  2321. Greece would have problems extracting natural gas from the Aegean. Small islands are unlikely to be able to support the necessary infrastructure, and it would damage their valuable tourist industry (nobody wants a hotel room with a view of offshore rigs!)
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  2322. Replace profits with government quotas and you get the same thing under communism.
    1
  2323.  @Validole  To be fair, NordPool has a shit ton of hydro which can be used for storage or highly dispatchable supply.
    1
  2324.  @TheSiapajadeh  I'm aware, it's just most countries don't offer a lottery visa like the US does.
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  2325.  @abbofun9022  I would wonder if having a transformer + rectifier at the consumer unit and low voltage DC bus running on separate sockets (you'd still want your regular AC bus) would be worth it compared to just putting them in the device plug. It would be a lot of extra wiring.
    1
  2326.  @NicolaiBDK  higher efficiency and lower electrical losses than AC, but only over very long distances like 1000km. And if you're not using copper or aluminium, what conductor are you using?
    1
  2327.  @MikinessAnalog  That's why I was thinking low voltage, something around 5-30V, just for low power consumer electronics.
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  2328. This is very different to how beet sugar is made. That's sliced into french fry like strips and steeped in hot water which extracts most of the sugar, which then goes on for a little further processing before drying in pretty much the same way. The beet strips are then shredded and dried into pellets for animal feed. One thing they didn't show was the shake tables used to separate the different sizes of crystals for different grades (icing, caster, granulated) though sometimes they use a grinder if the crystals are too big. All in all I'd say the process is a bit simpler.
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  2329. I'm surprised Mr. Blobby hasn't been reborn as a Japanese regional mascot. He's got the chaotic energy of Chiitan combined with a creepy clown aesthetic that I'm sure would work well in Japan.
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  2330. I'd say for once in a century global pandemics we've reset the clock on that.
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  2331. You probably could, there are petroleum based polymers what closely mimic latex.
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  2332. One that's not been mentioned because it's probably a bit niche, the third season of Cute High School Defence Club (which is basically a genderbent parody of Sailor Moon) had costumes that were sort of based on knights.
    1
  2333. @Boababa-fn3mr  It's not always straight up fraud, it can be something like a defective product or contract dispute. It's not necessarily black and white.
    1
  2334.  @youknow6968  I don't believe so, the process is slightly different if it's under £100 than over £100 as different regulations apply.
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  2335. Could you get unemployment benefits for the period you worked but didn't get paid?
    1
  2336. ​ @poulhenne Increasing efficiency in the context of agriculture means less land is needed in the first place though.
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  2337.  @Ziegfried82  AFAIK this seems like a law for sick or care-giving leave, not annual PTO, and it';s paid by the state not the employer (though taxes will rise to cover it).
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  2338.  @Goddot  Oysters are still relatively cheap if you go somewhere where they are harvested. They can be under a euro each in coastal parts of France, or you can just go collect them from the beach yourself, for free.
    1
  2339.  @DaniCal1forn1a  Even chugging isn't that much of a problem unless you're drinking several litres at once.
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  2340. I think they're closer to what he calls "power centres". Big anchor store (usually a supermarket or hardware store) and then smaller stores either side. And I think for the most part while they may be on ex-factory land, the buildings themselves are purpose built. As you said, they can be accessible by public transport as a lot of them have bus (or in come cities tram) routes nearby.
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  2341.  @10191927  I doubt it. The indictment was clearly fast-tracked because of the civil unrest. There is very much pressure to get this done and I think there will likely be a bench trial if the law allows and if an unbiased jury cannot be be agreed upon.
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  2342. ​ @AnOceanOfBooks  Equally, a jury of all black people would have a different problem, because their experience of the police is overwhelmingly negative, they would be less likely to properly consider reasonable doubt. It's why you really need a diverse jury in this case.
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  2343.  @susomedin5770  Nigeria Kenya and India are all pretty powerful within their sphere of influence, and while not developed countries, are often richer than their neighbours. Not everyone's a winner (though personally I don't count Afghanistan as it was colonised by the Soviets after the British left) but Spain doesn't really have an equivalent of Hong Kong, Canada or Australia in their ex-colonial portfolio. The closest they can come is Chile or Uruguay, and while they aren't bad, they are nothing compared to what the UK can field. What they do have is a mainly a bunch of pretty dysfunctional middle income countries plus a few really impoverished ones.
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  2344.  @susomedin5770  Some of the poorest countries in the world are ex-spanish colonies too. Both nations have poor ex-colonies, but Spain doesn't really have any rich ones, the closest they get are minor developed countries like Costa Rica and Chile. But even the developing countries tend to be wealthier for the UK. Nigeria and India may have their issues, but both stand out as powerful nations within their neighbourhood. Nigeria is arguably the most important country in West Africa, and India is arguably a superpower. In South America Portuguese Brazil is by far the biggest economy and most of the Spanish ex-colonies are well behind. Finally, calling places like Canada or Australia "plantation economies" is a bit disingenuous. The hands-off approach was arguably what made them far more successful than Spanish colonies. It's also not like Spaniards didn't replace a big chunk of the Native population either, not as much in North America or Australia, but a fair amount. The UK also has rich ex-colonies with a higher proportion of native population, such as New Zealand and Hong Kong.
    1
  2345.  @justarandomguy537  No it wasn't. The US annexed territory from Mexico when both were independent.
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  2346. PTFE lining?
    1
  2347.  @kimchristensen2175  Well, at least Walmart offers a convenient place to purchase said item by buying in bulk and storing them in their warehouse or supermarket. I'm thinking more like a company that literally does nothing else but act as a middleman between you and the Chinese factory. Basically like the dropshippers of today, but with no legal alternative this time.
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  2348. A lot of white collar workers hate excel too. Mainly because it ends up being used for everything, even stuff it's not very good at. Would it kill people to use proper database and form creation software?
    1
  2349.  @leullakew9579  It's the seat in the Senate that will really change things. Since the Senate is often almost equally divided along party lines, adding one more deep blue senator could have a big impact on politics. As for overseas territories, that's a whole different issue, since they have some degree of autonomy over a state.
    1
  2350.  @thomastrautman5855  So you are right. Still, a extra representative or two wouldn't have much of a political impact, whereas a senator definitely would.
    1
  2351. The minimum earning threshold for repayment combined with any debt after 30 years being written off has led to a pretty sizeable indirect subsidy of higher education in the UK, and some estimates suggest that with the higher fees and interest rates (my old SLC plan 1 loans were only around 20k, around 3k tuition per year plus a maintenance loan for rent and expenses, and have a tiny interest rate, now the tuition is around 9k per year) around 50% of the money loaned out may be written off, either only partially paid off or not paid off at all.
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  2352. Honestly, I think the investors are party to blame, for pushing Tesla's stock price to ridiculous highs. At one point, Tesla had a higher market cap than every large legacy car maker in the world combined, Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, the lot. And yet it only made a fraction of the number of vehicles even the smallest of those manufacturers in a year. It by all means made absolutely no sense. The only way it made sense was if Tesla wasn't seen as a car company, but as a tech company that just made cars on the side, that's often the justification I would hear from the muskolites. That all the real money was to be made in the battery tech and the autonomous driving AI sometime in the future, the cars themselves didn't really matter. The stratospheric stock price probably also fostered a culture of complacency. After all, if your product has all these quality issues and yet your stock is still going to the moon, is it really that much of a problem? I think Tesla would not have been facing these problems if the stock price had reflected reality. Building poor quality vehicles in a sane market makes investors unhappy and your stock price drops. Seeing that your market cap is much smaller than legacy auto makers, as it should be for a company that produces a fraction of the vehicles and has a fraction of the profits, also shows the company how far they need to grow and how they are progressing. Tesla could have sustainably increased in market cap over the last decade or so, and with the right decisions and just a bit of luck, they could join the table with the big auto makers, producing ten times the number of vehicles a year with a realistic valuation.
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  2353.  @bosstowndynamics5488  The energy flow is only in the opposite direction if you're cooling, not heating. In the end, it's the same design and same physics when used for heating (which even most deep geothermal still is). It is still geothermal energy.
    1
  2354.  @JoelReid  Thanks! I assume there's a lava dome or something similar heating up the groundwater which is why it works. Otherwise I can't imagine it would be deep enough to work.
    1
  2355.  @beauwille2294  OK Buzz Killington, clearly you can't allow a little hyperbole on the internet. Can't have any fun can we? Gotta be super duper serious, this is the YouTube comments section after all! Heaven forbid someone interprets it too literally! It is correct enough, and I stand by that. For the record, I didn't edit it heavily at all, just added a few extra thoughts after an initial post and removed unnecessary detail. Seat stitching colour is an option that's sometimes available. It's not the most common but it is offered. Generally if the supply chain is functioning correctly then you won't have an issue with part availability. Build times aren't going to vary that much unless you're getting some hand built luxury car, it's mostly done by robots in the end.
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  2356.  @J0seph13  I do comment a lot!
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  2357.  @bobbybrown1258  Effectively in that scenario the UK is using Norway as storage, since they can hold back water in their hydro plants and release it back the UK when they need it. That's why it goes to Norway, and not say, France (though they do have their own hydro too, in the Alps).
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  2358. ​​​ @james.telfer Part of the problem is they haven't kept up with rising house prices. IHT affected far fewer families in the past than it does today, it's no longer just a tax on the wealthy but the upper middle or even middle class now. Some have suggested raising the threshold drastically to something like £2-3 million would reset things to a more comparable state.
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  2359. You don't drive a train then?
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  2360. I think the issue in the US is that it's not very equal. Rich schools get more money than poor schools because of the property tax model. In Europe school funding is more centralised, schools will get income not based on what they can raise from their local area, but based on number of students, with extra income for those with more impoverished students. That necessarily requires a more centralised system.
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  2361.  @w8stral  It's not 100% wrong, I never said that was their only source of funding. But local taxes play a much larger influence on schools than they do in other parts of Europe. Those new buildings make a difference, kids learn better in nice buildings, as do sports facilities that bring in additional income. There is still the "city effect" which does occur in Europe too, where city schools generally perform better than rural schools even accounting for poverty. This might be down to a number of factors, cities find it easier to attract more talented teachers, lower transportation costs, etc. Though I'd say quite often it's because cities are able to spread funding more equitably due to a higher density of schools.
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  2362.  @JayVal90  Maybe 5X isn't enough, it really depends on the comparison you're making.
    1
  2363.  @w8stral  You're telling me you could stick two sets of kids, one in a clapped out leaky cinderblock dump that looks like a prison, and another in modern, airy classrooms and not see any difference? Bullshit.
    1
  2364.  @JayVal90  Well you can spend the extra money wisely. Extra tutoring for kids whose parents can't provide as much support for example.
    1
  2365.  @JayVal90  Then something else would have to be sacrificed, which might be detrimental to all your students education.
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  2366.  @JayVal90  Maybe those schools don't have the same expenses as others do. I don't doubt there are a few schools who make a lot with a little, but that's probably not the rule. Maybe they have more experienced staff willing to be paid peanuts, or are able to acquire payment in kind for things due to reputation or community support. Or perhaps their building is just in better shape and needs less maintenance. It's not that simple.
    1
  2367.  @JayVal90  No, your point has been that it has no effect. I never said just throwing money at a school will yield better results, but I do argue that additional funding spent properly does have an effect.
    1
  2368.  @JayVal90  You can't expect miracles though.
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  2369.  @JayVal90  Isn't that an argument for more centralisation? With centralised budgets it's much easier for higher authorities to decide how income should be spent.
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  2370.  @JayVal90  That's a libertarian perspective on the matter, sure. But a more statist view would be that decentralisation can result in inefficient use of resources as the individuals in charge of using those resources are less experienced. Your argument suggests that some school leaders are so incompetent with budgeting that they squander 5X more money than a well run school for the same result. To me that suggests school leaders generally should not be so responsible for budgetary decisions. Also I'm not sure what incentive structure you'd propose. Various ideas have been tried, but they often lead to schools gaming the system.
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  2371. The nuclear industry is on life support in Europe and the US, but it's pretty healthy in China and Korea.
    1
  2372.  @maybehuman4  I don't think it's that bad. China has been willing to take risks with nuclear, investing a lot into Gen 4 R&D, and while the regulatory environment does make construction significantly faster and cheaper, coal is falling out of favour in China due to excessive smog.
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  2373.  @maybehuman4  That only works so well, the smog will often just get carried by the wind and end up in a city anyway.
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  2374. Supersonic airliners will have to contend with one major issue: noise. Even if flying supersonic becomes economic, people really don't like hearing thunderclaps whenever one flies over them. Concorde was hobbled by the need to fly subsonic for major portions of many of its routes just to keep within noise regulations, and at one point several countries banned it altogether. Unless we can design supersonic aircraft with quieter booms then this is going to severely affect their viability. That said, I am looking forward to where precooled ramjet technology like SABRE/SCIMITAR might take us in this space (as well as to space with the SABRE ramjet/rocket hybrid). Since these run on liquid hydrogen there isn't so much of an environmental issue (though most designs are pretty enormous as a result, a 300 passenger concept is nearly 140m long, easily beating the previous record for aircraft), and precooled ramjet aircraft have the potential to be very fast, like Mach 5+ fast. That's halfway round the world in less than 5 hours, a real game changer. Even if it has to operate subsonic a lot of the time, the sheer speed it can attain means that there will still be big time savings on most routes. I don't expect this tech to really be ready for commercial aviation at least another 15-20 years though.
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  2375.  @MrTinkerDoodle  I think the eventual plan is for MRT to cover pretty much all residential areas, the new lines and extensions are often filling in gaps where there isn't easy MRT access.
    1
  2376.  @JWYeo  Tokyo doesn't have the same density of metro lines that Singapore does though, they really begin to peter out towards the periphery.
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  2377. I think Wikimedia has two problems when it comes to its donations: Lack of transparency (pretty much already addressed in the video), and the alleged political biases in selecting the "community projects" some of this money goes to. Now I'm not saying it's necessarily bad for a nonprofit to have a political bias, but I think Wikipedia in particular has to tread carefully because of its nature as being objective and unbiased is very important for an encyclopedia. And while Wikipedia itself is generally considered to be fairly politically neutral, there have been some allegations, I think not entirely without merit, that the community projects selected tend to be ideologically left leaning, a lot of stuff around ethnic minorities, feminism and LGBTQ, all of that jazz. Again, that might be fine if Wikimedia wasn't what it is, if it was some left wing philanthropic foundation wearing its politics on its sleeve. But it needs to maintain this air of neutrality and that bias is not helping.
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  2378.  @georgeadams1347  I don't think LOTR were the first films to use MPI's in exchange for a tourism boost. In fact it seems that the US was the first to really use the strategy around the early 90's, where states would compete and some would market film locations as tourist attractions. LOTR is probably one of the biggest examples outside the US, but it's not the only one, and probably isn't the first.
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  2379.  @georgeadams1347  Big budget films would regularly do location shoots outside of the TMZ, it only tended to be cheaper films that stuck to those locations. LOTR may be when such a strategy entered the public consciousness, but it likely wasn't the first. And from what I heard, LOTR was originally going to film in the UK, because it had most of the landscapes required, it's the home of the author of the books, and it has a reputable film industry with world class studios.
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  2380. Wales isn't really getting rich, and Scotland only has potential through natural resources.
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  2381. I would be interested to know how soccer is seen in China. While of not particular interest to the US, being the #1 sport for so much of the world you'd think there would be a lot of interest in increasing its influence there.
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  2382. I think being able to land in more marginal conditions (not a hurricane, but hard rain or dense fog) safely would definitely be a crowd pleaser, happier passengers who get to their destinations on time (or at all), happier pilots who dont have to wait around for weather to clear so much and have extra assistance available when making a landing in less than clear conditions, and happier airlines that don't have to flush a flights worth of profit down the toilet (or worse, end up losing money) in extra fuel, extra wages and passenger expenses like meals, hotel rooms and ground transportation because of a diversion or cancellation.
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  2383. I think a lot of parents from affluent families would want option B. A school that is better at improving less proficient students is likely to be diverting resources from improving more proficient students. You can imagine that a parent doesn't want their child being denied the opportunity to learn more advanced material because the vast majority are still learning the basics. In an ideal world every school would be able to cater for every ability level, but in reality that's often just not the case.
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  2384.  @chaos.corner  To be honest, if the new homes are well built enough, to perhaps last another 60 years, it probably makes sense from an ecological perspective. The old housing stock is only going to get worse.
    1
  2385.  @chaos.corner  That's part of the problem, the amount of efficiency upgrades that are economic for an old home are limited and if done incorrectly can cause other issues. It's hard to put in good wall insulation after you've finished the walls, for example. As for lifetime, well that's a bit subjective, we have loads of houses that are over 300 years old, but most are not very energy efficient, not without very expensive renovations which might not even be legally allowed, which means the property has to be worth a lot to begin with. That's certainly never going to be the case with cheaply built post war housing stock.
    1
  2386.  @chaos.corner  Cavity wall insulation is really not an ideal solution. It's easy to mess up and create thermal and moisture bridges. Also it's only really going to improve insulation from dreadful to semi decent. You're not going to match the standards of a house insulated during construction, not unless you plan on external or internal cladding both of which have problems with cost and space reduction (external cladding is not generally a problem for tower blocks space wise, but it is for houses). If you want the standard of insulation needed for a heat pump to perform well, that's tricky with most old houses.
    1
  2387.  @chaos.corner  Problem with cavity wall is it's really difficult, and expensive, to do it right. You can't see inside the cavity so it's easy for bridging to happen and be missed. Also, if your house has poor insulation, you're probably not getting the best value out of your heat pump, hence the high bills. The heat pump might work, sure, but it'll be on a lot more than a well insulated house. I really do think if you amortise the emissions of a home over the long term, several decades, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of cheaply built post war houses in the UK that would be better off seeing a wrecking ball. We do have one of the oldest average house ages in the world after all, and not all of it is because of victorian era construction.
    1
  2388.  @chaos.corner  That's been the case for a lot of homes in the UK for a long time, inner walls are just plasterboard screwed onto a timber frame.
    1
  2389. Oh, to have this luxury. In many places in Europe roads are already so narrow they can't go on a diet without problems occurring with wide vehicles. Indeed, in some places that introduce bike lanes onto existing roads have to make them one-way single lane for cars, it's the only way to get a decently sized bike lane in there.
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  2390. I believe most deaths for solar energy come from falls, installers fall of roofs and die from trauma. Wind it's similar industrial accidents, though I think turbine fires have killed a few as well, since it can be difficult to evacuate a nacelle that's 80+ meters up in the air. Nuclear actually does the best in this regard, as there's less time spent at height during construction and operation, and not a lot of confined spaces to get stuck in. Nuclear power stations are almost absurdly safety conscious as well, as they know even a non-nuclear fatality at a plant will draw lots of negative press. Mining is going to be a difficult one. Nuclear needs uranium (though not that much) and renewables need lots of rare earth elements, so which one is worse in that regard is tricky.
    1
  2391. Majoritarian systems make the voters compromise. PR systems make the political parties compromise. There's pros and cons to both situations.
    1
  2392.  @oldebarneveldt5326  They may get some of what they want, but usually they don't get a lot of what they want.
    1
  2393.  @oldebarneveldt5326  You can apply this to voters as well. A large party in a majoritarian system can promise something to a small but significant minority in order to secure their votes. Instead of voting for a party that says they will try to achieve something for them, the voters can make it clear that if the party does this for them, they can count on their vote this time and next time.
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  2394. Australia might be taking some lessons from Norway. In 2006 it established a sovereign wealth fund, and while it lacks the control Norway has over its natural resources (I can imagine nationalising the mining industry would go down like a bucket of cold sick) I can imagine it could provide some more stability to the Australian economy considering the erratic nature of resource prices.
    1
  2395.  @ChineseKiwi  I would guess that's a lot more locked down in what it can be used for, the dividends from a SWF on the other hand could be spent pretty much any way the government wants.
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  2396.  @pierman4858  SpaceX didn't really go anywhere until Musk became a billionaire though, and started pouring huge amounts of money into it. I really doubt it would have survived without his money.
    1
  2397.  @pierman4858  SpaceX didn't really go anywhere until he was a billionaire though.
    1
  2398. I mean you dont "need" a lot of things, but we don't live in a communist dictatorship so we're allowed to have things we don't need.
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  2399.  @emceeboogieboots1608  Australia still burns a lot of coal for electricity, so I'll honestly believe it when I see it.
    1
  2400.  @YellowRambler  There probably are, but they need a lot more R&D before there is widespread adoption.
    1
  2401.  @NaumRusomarov  It doesn't take billions in investment to make a PowerPoint...
    1
  2402.  @NaumRusomarov  So Rolls Royce are scammers are they?
    1
  2403.  @peterparker9954  Well, I'm not really saying I agree with that statement, just that the younger generations are far more likely to agree with that statement. I'm an older millennial, and we tend to be a bit more neutral on the whole empire thing overall.
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  2404. Not all beef is equal though. Beef raised on feedlots with maize in the US is different to beef raised mostly on grass from marginal (i.e. otherwise unusable) land in the UK or Ireland. While there are still considerations of methane emissions, the latter is not taking up land that could be used to grow crops for human consumption, nor are they (for the most part) consuming food that humans can eat.
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  2405.  @WellBattle6  In my experience most starter homes, that aren't some pokey studio flat designed for urbanite young professionals, do have two bedrooms. It gives you flexibility, you can use it as a study, spare bedroom, let it out, and when you do have a kid, you don't have to move out (until you have more!)
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  2406.  @philmarsh7723  Raising interest rates too high would choke off the economic activity that would be giving you investment returns on your pension in the first place. It might have to be done, but it'll be a very temporary state of affairs.
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  2407.  @matjazkajba6150  Indeed. Solid lead is not particularly dangerous on its own. It's when lead gets into the air or the water it becomes a problem.
    1
  2408.  @American-Motors-Corporation  Well that might not be their only role, many also have administrative duties.
    1
  2409.  @American-Motors-Corporation  Well most are both nowadays.
    1
  2410.  @American-Motors-Corporation  Depends on the size of the business. Big businesses will have PA for senior execs but receptionists may deal with other appointments.
    1
  2411. It has happened on occasion here, some quite serious stuff. I remember seeing a video where somebody got into the drivers cab of a commuter train. Thank god they didn't try to drive it!
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  2412. Is that a Whickers World impression?
    1
  2413. I think the wind tax is very much a sensible idea. It's all well and good subsidising renewable energy to meet emissions targets, but states like Wyoming still need their severance tax income, and if they can't get it from the ground they need to get it from the air. So including renewable resources in severance taxes is something that is probably going to need to happen if we're going to make this whole energy transition thing work.
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  2414.  @finncarlbomholtsrensen1188  Denmark is not self-sufficient, not even close. It relies on Swedish hydro and nuclear to provide power during dark days and slack winds, and when it has a surplus it allows Sweden to slow down their hydro, effectively storing that energy for later use in the head of the dam. Solar doesn't really do much in Denmark, not compared to countries further south.
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  2415. It seems like there needs to be greater enforcement of the requirement for novelty and an "inventive step". Trivial patents that do not require research and development effort are supposed to be void, but it's clearly not well enforced.
    1
  2416.  @scotttild  I don't think the Warsaw convention waives your right to sue an airline, only sets the standards for where the lawsuit would be filed, sets up mechanisms for arbitration, and specifies who is liable for what. International flights have been subject to lawsuits in the past.
    1
  2417.  @KRDecade2009  The airline still has the responsibility to deplane passengers and provide welfare in case of tarmac delay.
    1
  2418. Trying to go back to historical ranges of many animals when the human population of an area was a tiny fraction of what it is today, is going to be near on impossible. If you look at the map, the Gray wolf thrives in areas with minimal human settlement, so for them to their reclaim historical range, huge swaths of land would have to be heavily depopulated of humans. Learning to live alongside wolves only goes so far, it's clear the best places for wolves to live are places where we don't.
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  2419.  fanch22480  Eh, to be fair not all of them are like that. A lot of these small establishments the owners don't make very much either, at least until they're successful. When they do drive flash cars it's often from money they made from something else. It's a tough business.
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  2420.  @kman9884  That would be great if the restaurant didn't want to be profitable and didn't want to go bankrupt in 6 months.
    1
  2421. This honestly would be a bit hilarious if it went like the "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" episode of The Simpsons.
    1
  2422. I don't think that will happen until there's a competing rocket to F9H/SH. NASA won't want to give that much control to SpaceX, not without a good backup. They might choose to alternate between the SH and SLS though.
    1
  2423.  @zefyrisd69  Whatever the case has been with the people, the government has been more indecisive. Nobody's talking about closing them overnight, but a significant reduction in dependence has been mooted.
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  2424.  @TriNguyen-he7xk  Europeans have traditionally eaten more pork than beef. In countries with higher population densities pigs are an easier source of red meat. Meat still the "main event" of the meal, it's just that meat is more likely to be pork sausages than beef burgers.
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  2425.  @evanchen703  I doubt beef consumption is the primary cause of that though.
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  2426. I think there is a reasonable middle ground to all of this. The most important thing to say is, like Christianity, Islam is a religion full of different denominations and spectrums of belief. Some are fairly moderate and I do not believe these Muslims present a threat to society in any way, there are those who perhaps have slightly more conservative attitudes to women than the majority of the UK population, but again I'm not convinced they pose much of a threat either. But there are those who really do have "medieval" attitudes to women and I think more efforts should be made to screen these people out before they migrate to the UK. I dont think there's much we can do about the ones who are already legally immigrated here, except to deport them swiftly if those attitudes lead them to commit horrible crimes, deporting them without a serious criminal conviction would set a dangerous precedent. But we can increase efforts to prevent more immigrating here, we have the power to reject those with undesirable attitudes even if they have no criminal record. And yes, of course there's a few white British men who also have "medieval" attitudes to women, but we can't legally deport them, they are our problem to deal with.
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  2427. They say those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but is it just me or does Italy's political system seem a bit bloated and unnecessarily complicated?
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  2428. EV's might be cheaper to maintain, but they are not cheaper to build if you compare like with like. Batteries are expensive and heavy, so you need a chunkier chassis.
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  2429. I wonder if San Onofre was used as the external reference images for Springfield NPP. The reactors bear a striking resemblance in shape to Units 2 and 3 at San Onofre.
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  2430. Food halls are kind of the "offline" version of this, and they've been around for a few years now.
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  2431. We really do love brick here. Even urban skyscrapers get brick veneers.
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  2432.  @richardwills-woodward  That wealthy area is mostly down to football, it's certainly not representative of Manchester as a whole.
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  2433.  @Lee-fw5bd  My argument hasn't changed, I'm just addressing your particular responses which may not all be relevant to my original argument. It is true that different groups have been in conflict with each other and that internal splits did happen in the pre Reddit and social media era. But I'd disagree that the most aggressive conflict is internal, because the option to split is there. External conflict cannot be resolved in this manner, so it continues, helped by the more complete awareness of each other we have now. As I said before, if a community has to change their content or rules to protect themselves from outsiders causing trouble, not to uphold a community consensus, then that's clearly not just "dealing with negativity", that's people from the outside harming that community. Of course everyone has to deal with the usual trolls and spammers, but if they're targeted because of their content or beliefs, that's different.
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  2434.  @digitalrandomart3049  And what does that make Gibraltar?
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  2435.  @Hisoka85  Did I say something funny?
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  2436. Because instead of people investing or spending their Bitcoin, they will just hoard it as long as they can until they absolutely have to spend it.
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  2437. Surely the machine can do that job itself? Just needs someone to monitor it.
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  2438. It would be interesting to see the percentage of the 1% that employ chauffeurs/drivers.
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  2439.  @WhatALoadOfTosca  Whatever the insurance company doesn't want.
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  2440. One thing that does help is the seperation of critic and audience scores. RT and Metacritic both do this, but Metacritic is a little more obvious. A film (or other medium, this often applies even more to games) that has a high critic score but a lot audience score, is probably going to be over-rated and highbrow, the opposite means it probably not a smart movie or film, but fun to watch or play.
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  2441. ​ @EthelredHardrede-nz8yv California has a larger population, so that would be expected. But Texas isn't that far behind, and California is losing ground.
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  2442.  @EthelredHardrede-nz8yv  And California is also drought prone producing thirsty crops. It would only take a long dry spell to severely weaken that industry.
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  2443.  @EthelredHardrede-nz8yv  That isn't enough, California wants water from other states, and that could be a problem. California's wealth comes primarily from three sources, agriculture, technology and entertainment. The first is under threat from water shortages. The second is under threat from tech company relocations to other states, and the third is still doing pretty well but is seeing competition from other states too. The state also has one of the worst housing shortages in the country, problems with the power grid (though so is Texas admittedly, but for different reasons) and weird and burdensome regulations that sometimes border on the nonsensical (their VOC regulations are so strict for example that common furniture wood treatments have to be done out of state). California may have been the richest state in the past, but there's no guarantee of that in the future. I think there's a real chance it could fall behind Texas or New York by 2030.
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  2444. I would be interested to know how elastic fast food demand really is. It might be quite inelastic because of the "downgrading" effect, if an increase in minimum wage impacts more high end restaurants as well, the increased prices may cause some to downgrade from fancier fare to fast food, which makes up for those that downgrade from fast food to, say, instant noodles. Demand might even be higher than it was before, since labour costs likely have less of an impact for a big fast food chain with automated kiosks and a streamlined kitchen than an independent local restaurant, so they don't have to raise prices as much.
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  2445. Realistically, jaywalking can be replaced with obstructing traffic. If a person deliberately prevents a vehicle from driving along the street at a reasonable speed, either by blocking their path or forcing them to slow to a crawl, that should be obstruction and attract a legal consequence, I think that's totally fair. It also goes without saying the driver is exempt from any civil liability if you are injured or killed by being run over and they could not reasonably have seen you and stopped. In theory they could sue you if you damage their vehicle for being reckless, but I can imagine that's probably not going to be very palatable. In the end, we're not going back to the "slow" streets of the 1920's, at least outside of the busiest urban streets (which could easily be designated as shared spaces or could just be pedestrianised). Cars are too fast now, it's not safe, and while it's certainly reasonable to slow down traffic on some streets it's not something that could be done for every road that pedestrians cross regularly, especially outside of the CBD.
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  2446. I've heard that Haiti's environment is so badly damaged that it's near impossible to make it productive. Massive amounts of deforestation have caused soil erosion which has decimated crop yields. Some have semi-seriously suggested that the only way for Haiti to develop is to evacuate the country for 10+ years to allow the biosphere to recover (where the hell they think tens of millions of Haitians could evacuate to is another matter).
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  2447. I think it's probably the latter.
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  2448. 9:25 you said that just to annoy the metric fanboys, didn't you?
    1
  2449. It is worth noting that grid scale renewable projects are not immune from massive cost overruns, Hornsea 3 in the UK has recently had its budget estimate doubled due to supply chain issues.
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  2450. I think "what's good for the economy isn't nessecarily good for the individual" is a good way to frame the concerns some people have over immigration. Overall, immigrants tend to be a net benefit to their host country's economy, barring some exceptional circumstance like a massive influx of refugees from a nearby conflict. But that doesn't mean all native individuals in that nation benefit, some will be undercut by immigrant labour, or face increased competition for housing and public services, not to mention the cultural conflicts that can arise when immigrants don't integrate well. These are real problems and concerns that should not be ignored or dismissed when we debate immigration.
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  2451. Going forward I can see more of the aviation big boys getting in on the point to point action. Here in the UK more and more routes are opening up outside of London (before COVID anyway). AA do a flight direct from Manchester to Philadelphia for example. Of course that will further decrease the demand for big planes.
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  2452.  @НикитаКузнецов-л9ж  For a bedroom? I've seen prices at $800 one-way for a second class berth, and double that for a first class berth, and these aren't in luxury charters which can run in to five figures. I could fly to New Zealand for less, and I live on the other side of the world. The price you quote seems to be the cheapest possible price in an open carriage with hard beds that pretty much no tour guide recommends. It seems pretty obvious to me that the former two classes subsidise the latter.
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  2453. ​ @Naomi-Wu  China has hundreds of cities with populations that rival Berlin or Chicago, so it's really the only country (apart from India perhaps) that can manage such long distance services, since there's enough intermediate cities to fill the trains.
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  2454.  @mralistair737  Depends, the HS lines in Spain are standard gauge.
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  2455.  @Newspeak.  See my response to Naomi.
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  2456. One amazing thing about driving is that while it's still a pretty dangerous activity, it's still much safer than it used to be a few decades ago. We have worked very hard to get the fatality rates down to where they are now.
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  2457. Maybe film could take a leaf out of video games book. In most modern games, when you go to audio options, you have seperate gain sliders for music, dialogue, and sound effects. Why not have the same thing for TV shows and films? It would require some tweaking to video formats and a change to the audio mastering process, but I'm sure it could be done.
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  2458.  @kazzz2765  Little agriculture is economically viable in a lot of developed countries due to labour costs as opposed to imports. Fruits and vegetables are often some of the worst because they need to be harvested by hand, and even migrant workers can't compete with farms in less developed parts of the world. So subsidies are often as much about food security as anything else. That said, not all meat and dairy needs subsidies. New Zealand manages without them, and they're a significant exporter of beef, lamb and dairy products. If you've got cheap enough grassland it's possible even in the developed world.
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  2459.  @RicardoPetinga  Well unless you want to enact a communist revolution in the UK and Ireland with the requisite land confiscation (and how to manage any resisting farmers?) then that's how it would have to be done. Even socialist countries wanting to redistribute land to peasants still offered compensation. Any land that doesn't provide income is going to be a net cost to the country. You're still going to have to provide some level of service to maintain its wild state, much like national parks in the US do. They make a decent income from visitors charging entry fees, but it's unlikely anywhere but the most spectacular of countryside would be able to do that. This is coming from a small scale farming position since that's generally what the UK and Ireland have for cattle and sheep, factory farming is more complicated (though exactly when "small scale" becomes "factory" is up for debate) but it can still present similar issues.
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  2460. I wonder if this has any connection to the formation of OSHA.
    1
  2461.  @skorpion7132  And sometimes safety regulations stifle innovation, because they are by their nature conservative, they are averse to new technology that may (I emphasise may) be just as safe or even safer because of a lack of proven track record. It's a difficult balance between keeping people safe and allowing new technologies to improve an industry.
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  2462. And here I thought France was just one giant subsidised farm (that joke might go over your head if you don't know much about the EU).
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  2463. I wanna be, I wanna be, I wanna be famous!
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  2464. Indeed, we've been trying to do the same with polio for decades, but that virus is a little more crafty. Influenza, forget about it any time soon.
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  2465.  @TheLewistownTrainspotter8102  A $60,000 salary for police work isn't going to attract many high IQ candidates anyway, they would have other opportunities where they get paid more with better conditions. Small towns already struggle to recruit enough police officers.
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  2466. ​​ @me-myself-i787 hey tried once before but it got boycotted instantly and they had to shut down. Popeye's is expanding into the UK too now so they've got more competition. They might succeed next time but it's still a big risk.
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  2467. Coalitions don't mean more compromise, they just shift the burden of compromise from the voter to the party. In a non-coalition system, most voters will not find a party that they can vote for without compromising on politics they don't agree with, because those parties they would align with more never get any power, any vote for them is wasted and acts as a spoiler for the opposition to take advantage of. In a coalition system, small parties with a narrower range of target voters can be voted for productively, with the caveat that they will have to cooperate and compromise with other parties who have different target voters once in government in order to have any influence, be it in the winning coalition or the opposition.
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  2468.  @bingchilling09  I think Germany also sees more skilled migration. A lot of Turks migrating to Germany now are pretty well educated and often go into professional jobs.
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  2469.  @denarjan  Waste externalities are unpredictable. The technical costs aren't really that great, because there's really not very much of it, all the high level waste produced since civilian reactors were invented in the US could fit in a football field only a couple of metres or so deep. But political issues and public resistance, like with reactors themselves, drive up the cost. Considering how poorly highly toxic chemical waste is often disposed of, nuclear waste is handled extremely well. Then there the big question of recycling, much of the high level waste is potentially future fuel depending on how reactor technology advances. It's comparable to the early days of oil consumption where we'd extract the kerosene and throw away the rest.
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  2470.  @ethanmccormick3271  Do you have evidence for that? Because last time I looked many older plants are well in the black. Most subsidy for nuclear is in R&D anyway, not production.
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  2471. India traditionally has had the same stigma for services that China has had for manufacturing: poor quality control. You hear a lot of stories about companies, trying to reduce their wage bill, farming out some coding work to India only to spend more money hiring freelance programmers in the west to fix the buggy pile of hot garbage that results. Part of the issue was Indians who were skilled enough to do those jobs to the same standard as the expensive coders in the west, immigrated to the west for a better standard of living under a skilled worker visa, and worked alongside the western coders for more or less the same salary. So often what you had left in India was the people who were not skilled enough to immigrate, so you ended up with poor results. This isn't just for programming, but also a lot of other tech jobs. I'm sure this will change in the future as the standard of living improves in India, but at the moment it is still an issue holding parts of the service sector back.
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  2472.  @Blueberryisgood  There's still that pressure to go abroad that creates a brain drain. Why choose an Indian start up when you can make more money in the US? (This is also a problem in Europe, but it's the companies that move rather than the workers).
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  2473. I guess you could argue it doesn't scale. If you invest into a business, it (hopefully) makes that business more productive. But investing into property doesn't make those who live in those properties more productive.
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  2474.  @emanueldobos8452  I guess there is a difference between building or renovating houses and just buying them to rent out. The former is probably much closer to what you are suggesting, and I can certainly see how that could improve productivity, nicer places to live will probably also attract more productive workers too.
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  2475.  @IntrusiveThot420  Batteries are still an issue, grid storage is likely to take a back seat resources wise to electric vehicles, and that would slow renewable adoption especially in places which would need colossal amounts of energy storage like more polar regions. Renewables + current storage technology is still more expensive in $/KWh than nuclear energy. That might change with further R&D and if nuclear doesn't get cheaper.
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  2476.  @IntrusiveThot420  Unless you have a plan to evict half the people from the suburbs and countryside and cram them into skyscraper apartments (and god forbid you've married someone who doesn't have a job near yours, better get divorced now!) that won't happen. It's EV's or ICE's, that's the choice in a lot of cases, drastic reductions in car use are unlikely to happen.
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  2477. At 5 million Melbourne is arguably too big for a Modern European Tramway to take most of the traffic. Cities in Europe that are that big might have trams but they usually have a secondary role to metro systems and commuter rail.
    1
  2478.  @RJohn-hd1gq  I think the construction of the GPE is testament to the inadequacy of the tram system to act as a suburban loop in Paris. It's fine for locals near the line to loop around the city but it's not got the capacity to handle that suburban connectivity on its own. Not that suburban loop light rail is a bad idea, but cities that implement it successfully are much smaller than Paris or Melbourne, where a lot less people are looking to travel between suburbs. As for the DLR, when they built it, they didn't expect it to have nearly as much patronage as it does today. Thankfully, being automated and fully grade separated gives it a transit superpower, it can run ultra high frequency services to make up for lack of vehicle capacity. But that's something that's impossible with a surface tramway/light rail system, not without making the system so slow as to be practically useless.
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  2479. Sounds like Airbus recently.
    1
  2480. There's the "galactic nature reserve" hypothesis. That earth is like a really strict conservation area where aliens are only allowed to observe from a distance and not interact "prime directive" style. But it's pointed out that it would be very hard for an alien civilisation within a few light years to cloak themselves from our detection technology, not without hiding themselves from everyone else too.
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  2481. I'd really like to know who came up with the stock footage at 10:07 and if they were high at the time.
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  2482. At that price point, why not buy a Range Rover?
    1
  2483. As interesting as that sounds, I'm not sure how well that would translate to paid employment. Humanities subjects just don't have that many paid positions.
    1
  2484. I thought they were going to turn it into a freight terminal, but I've heard they're using it as another terminal for extra capacity.
    1
  2485.  @airbus_a320neo  I would assume so, the planes for BER did include space to add 2 small island terminals in the big grassy bit in the middle. Then I assume the existing T5 will become the new freight hub, as I believe was originally planned.
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  2486. Regarding the frugality of retirement, one common strategy in many people that promote or subscribe to FIRE is to relocate to a low COL country, often in South America, South Asia or the poorer parts of the Mediterranean. Somewhere with good weather where there's lots of cheap housing available and you can dine out with a 3 course meal for $10 or less. I think for most people that's the only reasonable solution for a super early retirement.
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  2487. @@raciguy 80% of what salary?
    1
  2488. @@raciguy What do you live in for $300 or less a month, a shoebox?
    1
  2489. @@raciguy Even for a ghetto area you'd be lucky to find anything below $300 pcm with free utilities (sure you've got free heating, but it's then $50-100 for electricity). You're left with almost nothing to spend on food, clothes or anything else. Out of curiosity, what country do you live in?
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  2490. In the end, what's different between reform and revolution other than the pace of change? A century of reform can enact as much change as a year of revolution. The former tends to be more stable though.
    1
  2491.  @Ellipsis115  My apologies, I mistyped.
    1
  2492. Considering agriculture doesn't make up anywhere near 70% of global carbon emissions, I'm unsure how you came to that number.
    1
  2493. Germany does have a hell of a lot of solar capacity, unfortunately it's not a country best suited for it, and therefore the capacity factor is pretty low by global standards.
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  2494.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  And let me guess, these sources somehow blame all these failures on capitalism, corruption or outside influence from hostile states rather the weaknesses and problems inherent in such a system? I don't think diehard socialists are evil, they have the best of intentions, but so many of them blame anyone but themselves for why it doesn't work so often and they'll insist when they push through liberation, this time it will be different...
    1
  2495.  @MyName-cw4yr  Politics is the art of compromise, at least when it works well!
    1
  2496.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  I disagree, the modern world is the product of gradual change over centuries. It is not some radical diktat from on high. I'm not going to do your homework because it will not change anything. Do you think if I asked you to do the same thing I'd turn you into a centrist? In the end, if you want to believe anyone to the right of you, economically or socially, is "right wing", that's up to you. But that's not how the vast majority of people think.
    1
  2497.  @satyasyasatyasya5746  Compared to what, the mercantilist imperial economies that came before?
    1
  2498. To me it looks like many other "occupy" style protest camps I've seen over the years, just with quite a lot more graffiti and honestly a rather darker tone (especially compared to extinction rebellion which almost seemed like a hippie art festival at times) but maybe that's to be expected considering the subject matter. And I think some of that graffiti is evidence it's already starting to be infiltrated by far left extremists who want communism or anarchy. Which is a shame because it means sensible calls for reform then get drowned out by the "smash the system" brigade and the entire thing turns into a commune for the left wing fringe which everybody just ignores as part of the scenery, then disbands either through boredom or when the city has had enough. That's my dirty centrist take on the matter anyway.
    1
  2499. Not going to happen.
    1
  2500. They did the second one 2 days ago.
    1
  2501.  @ConfusedRaccoon  Subsidies keep them alive in many countries, especially in the EU.
    1
  2502.  @r.walker6577  Chickens can survive just on wild seeds and small invertebrates, but I think in most cases they are fed primarily with cereals (our pet chickens ate mostly maize seeds).
    1
  2503.  @georgekaradov1274  I think EE might have some reservations about breeding rabbits being from down under.
    1
  2504.  @georgekaradov1274  Nevertheless, they are still a pest in many countries in the wild. Plus rabbits aren't the easiest animals to take care of.
    1
  2505.  @georgekaradov1274  Ask anyone who has owned a pet rabbit and they'll tell you from zero experience it's not easy. Chickens aren't too difficult, build them a hutch and throw some food on the ground and they mostly take care of themselves.
    1
  2506.  @georgekaradov1274  Still doesn't stop them getting sick and dying if you don't know what you're doing. Another thing is chickens won't go after your vegetables patch.
    1
  2507. ​ @georgekaradov1274  I really doubt it. I kept chickens when I was young, all female (for eggs not meat). It really wasn't a lot of work, clean the hutch weekly (took only 5-10 minutes), throw down a load of corn every morning and collect any eggs, lock up the hutch in the evening to prevent foxes getting in, and you could pretty much leave them alone. Chickens don't need a lot of exclusive space, if you've got a yard they can just wander around that all day. If you've got a pond, you can keep ducks instead.
    1
  2508. Possibly. Railways sometimes have direct connections to power stations instead of the national grid. And nuclear is preferred as demand is fairly constant (except in the middle of the night). RER probably doesn't though as it's 1.5KV DC which needs a lot more lineside substations ("low" voltage DC can't travel as far without significant transmission losses) than the 25KV AC of the TGV, so it would make more sense to link those into the grid.
    1
  2509.  @fx-studio  Because when stuff dies it falls to the ground or the bottom of the ocean and sinks into the earth, then gets moved around from geological processes. We find fossils from the seabed on top of mountain ranges, so it's not surprising fossil fuels are found where no living organism exists.
    1
  2510. @fx-studio  That is a fringe theory, and while it does have some merit, consensus is that if such oil does exist it's only a tiny fraction of crude oil on earth, the vast majority is biotic in origin, from plankton and marine plant matter. In the end, both oil and coal are replenished over time (though much less coal is produced compared to millions of years ago before wood could rot), just at a rate far far slower than human extraction.
    1
  2511.  @goste4  Even 20mph is too fast to stop if a pedestrian steps right out in front of you. Realistically, you'd have to be limited to nearly the speed of the pedestrian, so walking pace, which would clearly be ridiculous.
    1
  2512. TeX/LaTeX is notorious for this. One error can cause a cascade of unrelated errors, because the typesetter spits out something invalid, which then causes the typesetter to produce something else that's invalid, and so on and so on until you get to the top layer.
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  2513. It looks interesting, though I'd be concerned many of the dishes on offer would taste pretty terrible reheated at home.
    1
  2514.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  India may be an exception, but it took some pretty unique circumstances for colonisation to be possible. Otherwise, why not just raise an army and kick the EIC out? Though I'd argue its GDP hardly went down a cliff after colonisation. For a good time, if taken separately, the GDP of the EIC, and later the British Raj, was second only to the rest of the Empire.
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  2515. 6 years for an undergraduate degree is honestly way too long for a full time degree, unless it's some high paying profession like medicine or law. 3-4 years should be the norm, do a full 6 if you want a masters on top of it. I think part of the problem is US universities are too general in their education, forcing students to take courses they aren't interested in, which they gain knowledge from that they never use. You're not in high school anymore, this isn't about a well-rounded general education, you've already done that. Get rid of the major/minor system and focus on a single subject, and any classes outside that discipline are optional for the curious. As for a solution, you can have free tuition or capped fees, but the universities have a lot less freedom over their finances, only getting a fixed income per student per year, from student fees, government grants, or both. This is kind of the model you find in some European countries, though the exact implementation can be very different. It's not without problems, universities will scramble to find alternative sources of income like endowments or non-EU students (who they can often charge a lot more for), and if you restrict that, well the universities practically become beholden to the whims of the state, which brings up questions over academic freedom, since a government can theoretically starve them of income if they become too hostile.
    1
  2516. There are some places where there's a huge parking lot at the entrance and people are bussed around. It probably makes less sense in the bigger parks since you'd need to run buses to everything so it wouldn't be economic.
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  2517.  @Totalitarianizer  It's a bit of a long video so I think I'll skip it for now. But I think I can understand the central premise based on some cursory research, and while it makes some important points (we shouldn't stop moving the goalposts), I disagree that the pessimistic approach is better. A pessimist is more likely to want to burn the system down and start anew rather than build on what we worked in the past to achieve, despite the fact this creates a chaotic and unstable state of affairs, and can perpetuate a cycle of progressive economic "visionaries" coming in, smashing everything to pieces, and then halfway through rebuilding finding nothing has changed or things have actually gotten worse, so they either double down and become a tyrant, or get overthrown by someone else.
    1
  2518.  @Totalitarianizer  It probably won't change my view that much, I've seen similar arguments in the past, and it almost always seems to boil down to "things are so terrible we need a revolution", which is of course a popular far left viewpoint throughout history.
    1
  2519. ​ @Totalitarianizer  If a reformist social democrat has lost their optimism, they've become a radical. Social democracy has always been an ideology of optimism.
    1
  2520.  @Totalitarianizer  I think we have to be specific about what we mean by optimist and pessimist here. After all, those positions mean nothing without context. These are positions on the "status quo". An optimist here would argue that we should broadly keep doing what we're doing while making gradual changes that will lead us to a better future. They would argue today's problems are slowly being solved, and we need patience and time to realise the benefits. A pessimist on the other hand, sees the status quo as fundamentally broken (to quote from the title: "we live in hell") and requires comprehensive complete structural change (which is really another way of saying "a revolution") in order to create a better future. Now a pessimist may also be pessimistic about that change ever happening, in which case they would be "giving up" as a nihilist. But that's not what we're talking about here, and that's not what they mean by pessimism.
    1
  2521.  @Totalitarianizer  How is it "neoliberal"? Is anything that doesn't involve radical structural change neoliberal? As for the title of the channel, I still think it's an apt phrase for the way some radicals on the left (and right, if we're being honest) think. "We live in hell, we need to turn hell into heaven".
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  2522. In the UK, we have two standard expiry labels: Best Before and Use By, plus Display Until, which is only for supermarket use. Best Before is quality and Use By is safety.
    1
  2523. I don't think that's quite true in many European and North American countries (barring wartime rationing). People might have eaten high quality meat once a week, like a roast, but most days they would have eaten some meat or offal, just cheaper cuts than many of us are used to. Portions of meat may also composed a smaller proportion of the meal, stews and pies instead of steaks and burgers. If you go further back, fish and seafood was often way more affordable than it is today, what we consider luxuries now were poor people food.
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  2524. @Dustyjazz _ Not in half, the canal only goes to Thessonaliki.
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  2525. IMO the TRL of this technology was much lower than a lot of people thought. It was a lot more advanced than booster recovery that really just needed advanced guidance and thrust vectoring, two technologies that have made leaps and bounds in the last couple of decades. That said I don't think the idea is completely without merit in the long term, because I think while booster recovery is great it is unlikely to scale as well if you're trying to make spaceflight more routine. It's fine in the current environment, it doesn't matter if it wastes a lot of fuel on retrograde burns because we don't really care about fuel efficiency, it doesn't matter if the booster can only be reused less than 100 times and requires a week or more to recondition and reassemble because even SpaceX's impressive launch cadence pales in comparison to that of a commercial airliner and that's seen as plenty enough. If anything we have a surplus of launch capacity currently as we see with SpaceX dogfooding its launchers for Starlink. Skylon, or a variant of the design, was an elegant solution to problems that currently don't exist in the space industry, but might in the far future. Still, it's a shame to see REL fold. I think part of the problem is the UK is not a great place for long shot technology startups. If REL was a US company it might have gotten a lot more VC and/or federal funding (or been picked up by an eccentric billionaire) and may have been able to develop something much more quickly. Perhaps even a scaled down "Skylon-Lite" that could have worked with a booster or air launch and would have provided a much better compliment to Dragon than the hot mess Boeing came up with.
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  2526. @thomgizziz  I don't believe that. Otherwise nobody would have tried. The maths maybe marginal but I do think it worked.
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  2527. I wonder if part of the reason for the reputation of US falling out of the walls has nothing to do with the plug and socket interface itself, but the angle the cable comes out. It's rare in some countries to have "parallel" plugs where the cable coming out is in parallel with the plug pins, where pulling on the cable with enough force will pull the plug out of the socket. Almost all plugs have the cable coming out perpendicular to the plug pins, so to pull the plug out of the socket using the cable may be significantly more difficult, and generally you'd have to pull the plug itself to release it from the socket cleanly. Not saying you can't do it, you absolutely can, but it might take a lot more effort. I have noticed parallel plugs are quite common in the US, especially for simpler appliances.
    1
  2528.  @montiro8999  Routes are not the issue, it's the tracks. You can have a train that only stops at some cities and one that stops at all cities and with good scheduling it's not a problem. But it's not economical to build a track that just goes between the cities at either end. China has enormous cities everywhere in some regions, so that's not an issue (and its HSR network is nowhere near as fast or extensive in the lass populated regions). Spain's system is arguably unsustainable, and France and Germany also have a lot of cities close together.
    1
  2529.  @montiro8999  But would only have a fraction of the ridership. The US has 10 cities with more than 1 million people. China has more than 100. When you have so many massive cities in an area that size, HSR nearly always makes sense, you'll have huge ridership on practically every route.
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  2530.  @DavidVreeland-tr1dv  It's not unheard of especially in Europe, my local has a mezzanine floor. Some supermarkets on urban fringes have the car park on the ground floor and have the supermarket above, essentially on stilts. Others do it the other way round and have the car park on the roof. But it is very, very rare for a supermarket to have more than 2 stories.
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  2531. ​ @ajn2370 ​When malnutrition becomes a leading cause of mortality, that's then you've got absolute poverty.
    1
  2532. Usually the stopover is only a couple of hours, so you spend it all in an airport eating overpriced food. Not a lot of opportunity to break the rules there.
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  2533. Legal issues aside, Japan can do little without the US, so if that treaty comes into question, Japan would probably back down.
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  2534. Whereas the Dutch next door have white bread with chocolate sprinkles on it.
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  2535. I was guessing Trichinella until halfway through the video, forgot about pork tapeworm. Guess the "tuna chunks" in the stool should have given it away, AFAIK trich is much smaller and hard to spot.
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  2536. The problem I've found is going into Haneda usually means a much more expensive plane ticket whenever I've looked. It depends on if an hour and 15 minutes is worth a saving of a couple hundred quid (and sometimes more).
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  2537. I was quite surprised how little snow it took to shut the runways, there couldn't have been more than a centimetre out there this morning, I've seen far worse and the roads were all clear. I wonder if the ice and freezing mist was more of an issue.
    1
  2538.  @GravyOverload  Still, an over 90 minute closure even considering how long the the runways are for all that seems a tad excessive. While I appreciate that Manchester Airport doesn't get snow all that often it seems like there's room for improvement in regard to logistics. Hopefully once T2 is finished and more flights start using the airport they'll have the money to invest in more equipment.
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  2539.  @GravyOverload  Sure, but other airports, even ones where snow is equally uncommon, manage to do this a lot faster and with less disruption for conditions of similar severity (obviously nobody expects it to cope with a blizzard, but this wasn't that severe). I still think Manchester could do significantly better (see a comment by a pilot on this video), and what with other incidents this year it is not helping its reputation. It already ranks bottom in some customer satisfaction surveys.
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  2540.  @GravyOverload  That seems to me to be a staffing and organisation problem to be honest. I'm not trying to find fault with those at the coalface, but I think there are significant problems higher up that reduce the airport's resiliency when things like this happen.
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  2541. Sometimes these are "ghost jobs" that the employer has already committed to hiring internally, but company policy requires they post it so they put up unrealistic requirements in the hope nobody will qualify and the job will be taken down.
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  2542.  @adamthornton6149  That could be an argument for making the technology more accessible. Have something which is passively safe, is removable so can be refuelled by nuclear engineers back at the manufacturer, and is no more complex to operate than a regular ships engine. It probably can be done, indeed some of the ideas around small modular reactors have these sorts of goals in mind.
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  2543. I guess from the perspective of a GA pilot, driving into fog or a blizzard is the automotive equivalent of VFR into IMC, and that's certainly killed quite a lot of pilots.
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  2544.  @firesurfer  Cross laminated timber might be the next sexy construction material for housing. You just ship prefabricated flat pieces to the site and assemble them like flatpack furniture with brackets and bolts (and a small crane). It's certainly suitable for single family homes and mid rise buildings may be possible too. Right now it's a bit expensive, but that's probably mostly down to a lack of factories to produce the panels.
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  2545. Does local vacuum EB work on very thin material? I know they use it for thick pressure vessels (EB is of great interest to the nuclear industry), but could it be used for this?
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  2546. Hardly since the indigenous population was harmed as well.
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  2547.  @jasonhaven7170  Considering what percentage of the population they are, that's hardly surprising.
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  2548.  @nik6304  And what if europe refuses to pay up? Because if it's too onerous, it will. The economic boost from better African diplomacy will not be worth the economic handicap from having to give away a decent chunk of its GDP every year.
    1
  2549.  @nik6304  You really think China is going to make one if its biggest export markets significantly poorer to make a few more friends in Africa?
    1
  2550.  @nik6304  You really think all of those countries would want to impose reparations on the EU? For most of them it would be detrimental to their own economies. African wealth would not make up for the EU, not for decades, reparations or no. What these economies want is a prosperous Africa and EU, and that's possible without reparations.
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  2551.  @nik6304  The EU offers 500 million relatively wealthy people to sell stuff to. It's a sizable export market, much much bigger than Russia. It also offers unparalleled expertise and skill in several industries, particularly high end luxury items these economies wealthy citizens crave. And none of these economies are seriously considering boycotting the EU.
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  2552. One thing that strikes me as possibly quite outdated, is that universities, especially large universities, are still usually highly generalist. You have an administrative layer cake of faculties, schools and departments, covering a very broad variety of disciplines, from hydraulic engineering to gender studies. Yes, there are universities that tend to lean in a more STEM direction, and those who lean towards liberal arts, but even these places have significant overlap. Berkeley still does engineering, MIT still does liberal arts. I'm aware of the tradition of having a broad education, but there's a decent counterargument that in today's world, where students, researchers and employees are pushed into increasingly specialised fields, that such an ideal, while well meaning, isn't practical or economic any more. Universities could instead specialise in a few dozen courses focused around a narrow set of fields. If students want or need a broader education, well, they can learn that online. For the field they are studying, the university can attract the best professors, and promising teaching staff who could learn from them, resulting in better personal development for staff and a better education for students. Equipment could be pooled, further reducing costs, and campuses could shrink, or be shared among several universities. There's probably quite a lot of money that could be save while providing a better education to a growing number of students.
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  2553.  @georgebrantley776  My point was, do we need so many universities doing the same courses as each other? Yes, each college or faculty may be specialised, but would it be better if we took all the engineering colleges, who mostly are teaching the same stuff at undergraduate level, and put them into a few engineering universities instead of scattering them among hundreds. Yes, some elite universities can provide a world class education in a broad range of subjects. But that's expensive as hell, and results in a very stratified system, where a few universities who can manage it sit on top of other universities who can't afford to give a top tier education in every subject. What works for the best doesn't work for everyone else.
    1
  2554.  @georgebrantley776  How many students really want to do double or triple major/minor, or is that just how the system works? Because this is not how a lot of students outside of the US do things. In the UK and Europe, you usually do a single discipline. That also means you can often finish faster, 3-4 years instead of 5-6. As for geography, those who stay close seem to do so for financial reasons. If tution fees were smaller thanks to consolidation, I bet more would be willing to move away.
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  2555.  @georgebrantley776  Well, perhaps it's part of the reason many private universities in the US are so expensive. Trying to do everything really well costs a shit ton of money, and for many lower tier universities it means doing a lot of things poorly. That said, it's not like universities in the UK and europe don't have broad areas of discipline, but I think that's down to tradition more than anything. Though switching subjects isn't unheard of, it's almost always within a narrow field, and generally because many courses are shared between similar subjects. Someone might switch from mechanical engineering to Aerospace engineering, but not from engineering to humanities, not without starting from scratch. It's clear that higher education is becoming too expensive and universities are becoming too inefficient, not just in the US, but especially so there. If rich students want the luxury of a highly flexible education, where they can go from robotics to social studies if they want, or do both, they're going to have to pay through the nose for it. For everyone else, a more specialised and streamlined university may be of greater benefit, with better value for money and a high quality education, at the cost of having to specialise earlier or move to a different university if they want to study something very different.
    1
  2556.  @georgebrantley776  That's arguably where the 6th form college helps in the UK. By providing 1-2 year A-levels that are sort of like AP courses but more focused, students can get a good overview of subjects which helps them narrow things down for university.
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  2557. Doubtful. We can use the smallpox vaccine which we already have and it doesn't spread as easily as COVID.
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  2558. At least they didn't try to play Global Thermonuclear War.
    1
  2559. The european equivalent to Six Flags is probably Merlin Entertainments, a British company who own a lot more than you might think, including in the US. They own every Legoland in the world, Legoland Discovery Center, Sea Life center, Madame Tussauds, a chain of Dungeon experiences in various european cities, and various other major attractions like the London Eye. Fun fact, they are 50% owned by Kirkbi A/S, the family investment firm of the owners of the largest toy company in the world, The Lego Group (hence all the Lego stuff). They seem to be doing OK, but I can imagine with a more diverse portfolio of attractions with a wider demographic, they are in a better position generally.
    1
  2560.  @Red_Ryan_Red  The only similarity I'd say is that they both own Aquariums. Merlin has a far more diverse portfolio than SeaWorld has, more diverse than Six Flags too but they do own more properties than SeaWorld does.
    1
  2561.  @mjg239  Walibi is much smaller than Six Flags though.
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  2562.  @dougaltolan3017  The point of raising the arms is shown in the video, so they can get it out of the water. Otherwise it wouldn't fit in a dry dock or on a boat ramp. You could probably do a rudimentary inspection out at sea, but you wouldn't want to clean or replace a blade out in rough seas (or really even in port for that matter)! And 3 years is nothing, try 5-10 and see how it holds up. I'm not saying the people who have made this thing haven't done their homework or don't know what they're doing. It's probably one of the best prototypes out there. But that's not a terribly high bar because tidal is a lot more difficult than people imagine. Maybe a handful will be made and they'll provide some power for a couple of decades. But I think it's unlikely they'll get further than that. I don't think it's the breakthrough that will make tidal join the ranks of wind solar or hydro. You want sources? Read any literature on tidal power in the last 20+ years. These problems aren't new and are well documented.
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  2563. It seems to me that police forces in the US are perhaps too independent, they have little in the way of centralised control or funding. Poor areas find it hard to raise funds through taxes, at the same time having the carrot dangled in front of them allowing them to keep whatever they sieze. Too many perverse incentives.
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  2564. Manchester wanted to introduce congestion charging as well, with lower charges than London. It was overwhelmingly rejected in a public vote. The problem is Manchester's transit system is far less comprehensive than London's, the best we have is a light rail system that doesn't cover a whole lot of the city, and covered even less when the charge was mooted. You definitely need top tier mass transit in place first before stuff like this can be introduced. The irony is most of the improvements that were planned with the revenue have been delivered anyway with small increases in council tax, making the charge seem even less necessary.
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  2565. I have a managed fund with my family financial advisor. Every year I have a very dull phone call with him in which I manage to pay attention to about half of what he says, then just take whatever recommendations he has. Yes, I probably could make a bit more money doing it myself, but he does also offer general financial advice as part of his fee. So far I'm about 35% up on my initial investment after about 5 years. Not great, but not terrible.
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  2566. I think the laws of physics do make certain features very likely to co-evolve on many different worlds. Senses would be a good example, you've got EM radiation (eyes), vibration (sound), chemical detection (smell and taste), object collision detection (touch), as well as temperature, injury detection mechanisms like pain and so on. All of these things are present everywhere in the universe, so I'd expect many alien species, at least ones that move around, to evolve them. Being able to perceive some portion of the EM spectrum is clearly going to be useful in any environment which is exposed to a source of EM radiation, like a star.
    1
  2567. When they swapped my sodium lights for LED's on my street (and moved them to the other side of the road) I had to change bedrooms to one round the back of the house. Even a blackout blind was not enough, light still bled in around the edges and it kept me awake. I've also found while LED's are better for vision when driving when they are there, the transition to unlit roads is more dramatic. It seems to disrupt my night vision, everything seems a lot darker than when I pass through an area with sodium.
    1
  2568. You can see why the craft is dying, it would be pretty easy to automate the process in a factory, and you'd likely get perfect tiles 99% of the time.
    1
  2569. ​​​ @HGenome  Some sources say rice paddies produce more methane than cows, but we do consume a lot more rice than beef. To be honest the data isn't great, I've seen all kinds of percentages quoted. A lot of anthropogenic methane actually comes from leaking landfills.
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  2570. I think China and the West target different areas for aid and investment. The West goes in with the goal of direct poverty reduction, which has less visible results, but has slowly improved standards of living for huge numbers of people over the last few decades. China goes for high level investment, something that's designed to "trickle down" benefits, and these result in flashy infrastructure. Imo both approaches are useful and valid.
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  2571. An interesting fact, the UK has the largest plutonium stockpile in the world, not because we were planning to build a lot of nuclear weapons, this stockpile is reactor grade, unenriched it can't be used to make a bomb, but because initially we expected that uranium would be a lot more scarce than it turned out to be. As such, we extracted the waste plutonium from the spent fuel in the expectation that future fast reactor designs would be able to use it, kind of like you might take diesel out of crude oil when you only have petrol engines, in the expectation that someone will eventually make an engine that can burn diesel. But of course, as we found more and more uranium reserves, nobody really was interested in fast reactors, as it was cheaper just to put the uranium through once and throw the rest away. So now the UK is stuck with 130 tonnes of a hazardous substance that can only be mixed into uranium with today's reactors, which even if greatly accelerated would take decades to get rid of this way.
    1
  2572.  @SC-yy4sw  You're forgetting the cost and volume of shielding and the cost of security, this is dangerous stuff that has to be kept under tight lock and key. It's not something you want to stockpile unless you need to.
    1
  2573. Really, we do, it's just nobody wants it within 100km of their settlement. At this point the waste issue is mostly political, not technical.
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  2574. In my experience, goretex (or similar fabric) + sweat wicking baselayer will keep you dry for a while in most conditions. If there are breaks in the rain it can evaporate sweat especially if the sun comes out, and the baselayer means the sweat is drawn away from your skin to sit on top of the fabric, so you feel dry. Realistically if it rains all day and you do strenuous hiking, you're gonna get soaked not matter what (baselayer can only wick away so much sweat). Goretex is perhaps a good compromise between being soaked by rain or soaked by sweat. It's not perfect by any means, but a lot of better solutions aren't terribly practical for hiking. They're also decent for daily use. Also many DWR treatments can be revitalised by tumble drying the garment on low heat. That re-melts the coating, which closes up any cracks that have formed over time.
    1
  2575. Acceleration to me seems like an extremely high risk strategy, there's a good chance it would just cause human extinction or near extinction through something like nuclear war. In the past we were not capable of destroying our own species in a war, now we are.
    1
  2576. There kind of is, it's called Frontex, but it's still mostly dependant on the national border forces to operate.
    1
  2577.  @martinidry6300  I think there's value in doing that. Shedding political baggage allows for more focus on the technical and practical details of history. Telling people who the good and bad guys are is more condescending in a lot of respects.
    1
  2578.  @gastonbell108  That's how it goes really, without opinion and speculation on a history topic it would just be a documentary like the thousands of others out there. You can't really do stuff like they do without being a bit "lecturing". Plus I think you're being a bit prejudiced just because he sounds a bit posh.
    1
  2579.  @harmonicarchipelgo9351  I wonder what would happen if/when ex vivo gestation becomes possible. Babies born without a womb, how then could you justify abortion using viability?
    1
  2580. I bet NASA is pretty worried. SpaceX is nice and all, but having a passenger spacefilght monopoly is still a bad thing. If something bad happens with SpaceX, which it very well could (honestly I wouldn't put it past Musk to do something spiteful even if it screws over his own company), they're not invulnerable, NASA is screwed. They don't want to end up in the same place they were post shuttle.
    1
  2581.  @AlexC-ou4ju  Of course there would be issues with electoral integrity, there would need to be intensive independent monitoring. But with some persuasion I think it could be done, especially if Ukraine would be confident in a win. Not a guarantee by any means, but a chance. As for war of attrition, I'm not so confident. A humiliated Russia might pull back for a while, but they'd probably strike again, this time harder and more brutally a few years down the line. Ukraine, despite the rhetoric, admits Crimea is probably lost, and Russian separatism is not a problem that will go away in Dotensk and Luhansk even after the Russians are gone.
    1
  2582.  @pedroalmeida5547  Well if you think that, best you get building a nuclear bunker.
    1
  2583.  @Frankiigii  I think Russia could regroup and re-engage at a later date. The war would be more brutal but they could do it. Short of a total collapse of the Russian Federation or a complete political coup I think that's a likely outcome. And I do think the rest of the world does want a quick end to the conflict. The sanctions were so strong as to starve Russia out, perhaps even cause a coup. That really doesn't look like it will happen. The war is still hurting the west, in oil and gas, air travel, and it's also hurting the developing world with food shortages. I think there will be pressure for Ukraine to offer some kind of compromise, even if the public rhetoric is entirely different.
    1
  2584.  @JamesC785  A referendum could be seen as a willingness to solve the problem democratically. It doesn't even have to happen, just a binding promise to do so if there's enough support, a la Good Friday agreement, could be enough.
    1
  2585.  @pavlobirch  I'm afraid to say many brave nations have said such things in the past, and in the end came to a compromise. Give it time.
    1
  2586.  Gert Bonk  If Putin dies, some other hardliner could easily take his place, the Russian government has plenty. I'm afraid I don't think it will be that easy.
    1
  2587.  @doradestroyer5821  I think a loss which would prevent Russia from ever trying again in future would require complete regime change, possibly via a civil war or violent coup, or a breakup of the Russian Federation. Russia is weak, but it's not that weak. If it was it would have already crumbled.
    1
  2588.  @doradestroyer5821  I don't think so. Russia has shown that it is fairly resilient to sanctions, it has the means to close itself off if it needs to. It's also arguably been holding back, it could be more brutal but it's trying to contain the scope of the conflict. We all know it has access to firepower it is not currently using. Compromise could backfire, sure, but it could also allow Putin to save face. A completely humiliated Russia is more likely to be out for revenge. Saving face is something that comes into diplomacy more than you think. There's also the issue within Ukraine itself. Russian separatism won't go away, and you can bet even if Russia retreats it will still fund the rebels in those areas. A democratic referendum, if it goes Ukraine's way, would reinforce their authority in the area and conversely delegitimise any claims Russia has. I know lots of people want to see Russia utterly beaten and broken, the big bully to run with its tail between its legs and never bother Ukraine again. And I get it, I do, it's what most of us want, and what most of think Russia deserves. But as I said, unless there's a radical change in government or the complete dissolution of the country, I can't see that happening. So I think talk of a settlement is entirely realistic.
    1
  2589.  @doradestroyer5821  Russia is playing a balancing act. It's initial aim was to win the war as fast as possible with the minimum of force. It knew if it were to use more force it might prompt a stronger response from the West. Russia has learned that next time it must go for broke. As you say, shock and awe maybe what they do next time. Russia is not the superpower it once was, no. But it's also not North Korea, not some tinpot country which is all bark and no bite. Unlike NK, it has nuclear weapons that can actually hit important things. It also still has plenty of military hardware and the industrial capacity to make it, sanctions be damned. It is still a real threat, and one far more capable than other enemies we have faced in recent years.
    1
  2590.  @doradestroyer5821  Tell that to the Balkans.
    1
  2591.  @doradestroyer5821  They didn't, they kept a lot of forces in reserve. They miscalculated what was needed to win quickly, they overestimated their capabilities and underestimated Ukraine's ability to defend itself. Russia no only has large scale nukes, but tactical nukes and conventional cruise missiles. It also has submarines and a sizable navy. Name any nation the Europe has fought since the end of the cold war with anything near that level of military capability. There is nobody that comes close. A settlement doesn't preclude democracy, not at all. The democratic right to self determination can be excerised, as long as it is independently monitored and verified.
    1
  2592. I think this is a good argument for having range from 50% or range from 80% as EV performance metrics. It might also be worth having EV cars display their main capacity value as only 50 or 80% of the actual battery capacity (something like "fast charge capacity" and then "total capacity" underneath). Sure, it will make EV range figures look worse for a while and battery packs will have to be larger, but psychologically it'll encourage optimal driving habits for EV's (and increase battery longevity by avoiding deep cycling) and probably result in happier drivers because every change only takes 15 minutes or so. Beyond that I think we also need to look more for alternatives to plug in charging, such as induction charging on roads (even if it's only a trickle, it will help extend range) and for larger vehicles like trucks, battery swap stations that can change in seconds (because time is likely money for them, and plug in charging would take hours even to 50%).
    1
  2593.  @Veexliat  There's always some degree of trust though, as a lot of people won't be able to properly evaluate any presented evidence or data.
    1
  2594. Definitely has the feeling of running out the clock so the meeting doesn't end early.
    1
  2595. Unfortunately reusing is often not as easy as it might seem. The energy required to collect, sanitize and recondition plastic bottles is not insignificant, and bottles would also need to be thicker and heavier, requiring more energy and vehicles to transport. In some cases reusable might be worse than disposable.
    1
  2596.  @richardwills-woodward  Manchester and Birmingham have mainly terminus stations. There are a couple of through tracks but they don't have the capacity to take more than a small fraction of services cross city (and they don't really cross the city centre but bypass it.) You don't see many S-bahn style cross city services because of it, it's already full with intercity services. This is especially acute in Manchester where the ordsall chord is extremely underused because there just isn't enough room to run services that could use it. Of course London does too but there have been efforts like Crossrail and Thameslink to create more capacity for cross city services. Regarding the Newcastle metro, I think it's a mistake to say S-Bahn trains need to be certain length or mass, it's a concept that is designed to adapt to cities of different size. Many smaller German cities have S-Bahns, and like in Newcastle they have smaller trains and sometimes they share tracks with intercity and regional services. Newcastle just decided to have a more distinct and separate system. It is a bit different, but it's not a completely unique system. As for France, Spain and Italy, we can look at cities like Lyon, Turin, and Malaga. All have small but useful metro systems, in Lyon and Turin an extensive tram network complements these metro systems. It's an alternative to the "pre-metro" idea, build new metro lines for more express journeys between higher density parts of the city and keep the trams as is. I get people hate on the UK and make it out like its entire public transportation system outside of London is in tatters, and I agree that's overblown. Regional and commuter rail systems still have some issues, but they can be good, rural coverage is better than in many european countries and reliability isn't as bad as many people think it is (at least until recently). Many of the issues are also not really our fault, we were the first and that means many lines are built to comparatively ancient standards in the rail industry. But I have to agree with a lot of other people that UK cities outside of London do lag their european peers on urban public transport, often quite considerably. And I think that has hampered their development and growth while London has gotten monstrously large. If Birmingham and Manchester had built proper metro systems, or even just a pre-metro, in the 70's, 80's or even 90's I think they could have stolen at least a million each of London's population growth by the present day. An honestly I think that would have been way better for the country, including for London.
    1
  2597. @@piotrwozniak5457 What's wrong with Hamburg?
    1
  2598. I'm glad Duncan and Simmonds got time for their criminal negligence, even though it was a really drawn out trial, think it took until 1980? Not to mention that 203 million dollar civil lawsuit, a record at the time for a building disaster and worth around 1.4 billion in today's money. Seems fair Roberts was exonerated considering his heroic actions. Of course, the corruption that allowed this sort of thing to happen remained, as usual, despite the death of a prominent state senator. At least it pushed legislation over the line in California, passed that same year I believe, to have compulsory sprinkler systems in all new buildings over 75 feet. That could have prevented the disaster in the first place.
    1
  2599. In a stable democracy, government collapse is not (usually) a descent into anarchy. Civil and public services will keep running based on their last mandate, and if you didn't read the news you would probably not know anything is going on. It generally just means there's no new legislation passed for a while as they clean up the mess.
    1
  2600. In the UK, the arrival of the German discounters Aldi and Lidl absolutely changed the industry and made it a lot more competitive. Whenever there's a spike in food prices they see a surge in customers. Many people still prefer to shop in the more mainstream supermarkets, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's, Asda etc. most of the time, but if pinched will shift down to these two (and the ones already shopping there end up at Heron Foods or Farmfoods which are honestly only a short step up from a food bank). They're not bad in terms of quality, but selection is more limited with far fewer SKU's.
    1
  2601. Per day? Per year?
    1
  2602.  @juanda680  Was about to say, per year would make you a very small power plant!
    1
  2603. The system prompt change doesn't make sense to me. The sentence itself is fairly reasonable, basically boiling down to not shy away from saying something that some people may find offensive or objectionable if there is good evidence to back it up. That's a core tenet of academic freedom in universities. How changing that was supposed to stop Grok worshipping moustache man I can't really fathom.
    1
  2604. I'd settle for just not "celebrating" fatness/obesity/whatever. I think that movement is the most dangerous because it's telling people they're perfect the way they are when they absolutely aren't. We don't celebrate smoking (anymore) but we do have sympathy for how hard it is to quit. We should have the same attitude to obesity. Regarding BMI, there had been talk about adjusting it for race/ethnicity and gender, however as you can imagine that's really controversial, especially because some research suggests that African Americans are more at risk for heart conditions and diabetes for a given BMI than European Americans. So those that say that BMI doesn't accurately represent non-white groups might have a point, but it might not go the way many would be expecting.
    1
  2605. You'll still need some form of ID usually though.
    1
  2606. It's such a shame that a few idiots can ruin the reputation of what I think is at heart a perfectly innocent and harmless excuse for a party. I do get rather sick of the smug liberals that come along when these disasters happen to proclaim all gender reveal parties are bad because it's "reinforcing the binary" or "you can't assume the gender of an unborn child". The fetus isn't even aware the party is happening, and if they decide later on they aren't the gender that the party proclaimed them to be, that's really no big deal, it's not like you have to have a party decide your gender. Let people have fun, safely of course.
    1
  2607. That is one of the most calming chimes I've ever heard. You could say anything after that and I would be relaxed.
    1
  2608.  @R0bbi3d  Plus that's a household income, so it probably assumes two earners. Sorry single income families and individuals, these homes aren't for you.
    1
  2609. I think it would be better if renewables produced most of the hydrogen and nuclear provided for electricity demand, only converting some excess to hydrogen at night. You'd need a little pumped storage to cope with the peak demand, but I don't think you'd need any more than that.
    1
  2610.  @neolithictransitrevolution427  That's fair, it's just got me wondering why we should build so much infrastructure to balance erratic renewable output when we could put them to work on something that isn't demand sensitive. But I do know a lot more about nuclear energy than hydrogen production, so there you go.
    1
  2611.  @neolithictransitrevolution427  It does, but you'd still need to store enough energy for a week with minimal or no wind and solar won't help you out much. And in winter when demand is high, that is an enormous amount of energy. Blocking high pressure is basically a massive slow moving blob of relatively still air. In winter this usually results in very cold temperatures which drive heating demand up, and the weak sunlight and short days means solar isn't of much use. To make deep geothermal practical the cost of boring deep holes has to fall massively, since you'd need hundreds of them to match the output of a nuclear reactor. At the moment it isn't anywhere close, not with proven technology. If we include potential advancements then we'd have to do the same for nuclear, which could potentially more than halve the cost of generation. Deep geothermal is also most practical only in a few regions where the earth's crust is relatively thin.
    1
  2612.  @RunningRugby4  It's a tricky line. A agree, to prove genocide, you need more than gross negligence, you need intent. And while some individuals in power in the UK may have held genocidal views, I think the evidence that the government as a whole acted beyond gross negligence is pretty weak. It's different to say, the Holodomor, where the Russians siezed food from the Ukranians and deliberately tried to hide what they were doing. That to me crosses the threshold from gross negligence to genocidal intent.
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  2613. I couldn't help noticing a lot of the examples of creators you gave produce a lot of politically outspoken right wing content. Is this merely coincidental, or perhaps these creators took on such sponsorships because their content precludes a lot of more legitimate sponsors? Though personally I haven't seen such a pattern.
    1
  2614. ​​ @spacefun101 To be fair, living in a single family home next door to a tall apartment block isn't a pleasant experience. You're going to be in shadow for much of the day, you've got dozens or even hundreds of eyes able to peek into your back garden and upper floors from their windows and balconies, and it's going to be a significantly noisier and busier neighbourhood than previously.
    1
  2615. That's basically the plot to Threads.
    1
  2616. I'm not sure the British people really cared that much by the 1970's. There was way too much economic turmoil going on at home to worry about what was left of the empire. By the 1980's most of the city had realised that it's a lot more profitable to just move money around than exploit natural resources in far flung countries anyway. I think this incident probably played a role in pushing the UK economy towards its reliance on financial services. It's probably also worth pointing out that by this time Britain itself had nationalised several of its own natural resource industries after the war. So for some of these companies, the British government itself was hostile to their assets.
    1
  2617. XXXX Gold Country sounds like a lager.
    1
  2618. Problem is the suburbanites don't want that to happen, they don't want to be turfed out of their semi detached house into a smaller flat or boxed in by high rises.
    1
  2619.  @TheUnshatterd  Japan also has negative house price growth, which means its more common for houses to be completely demolished after only a generation.
    1
  2620. I'm a little confused as to why there are noise complaints about the SkyTrain, the current route seems to run almost entirely alongside an 8 lane highway, and nowhere near any residences!
    1
  2621. I heard Clinton lost the biscuit at one point, and it was some time before he noticed it was missing.
    1
  2622. There is of course the dark horse in all of this, economic nuclear fusion. It might come too late, or not at all, but it might come sooner than we think. Let's hope it's the latter. So far it doesn't look like we've given up trying.
    1
  2623. This is the French we're talking about mind you, they'll riot if you install a new speed camera on the motorway. Eventually the protestors get bored and move on to something else.
    1
  2624. I believe it was this incident (and perhaps a couple of others) that led to the creation of the Dutch Safety Board that pretty much does everything.
    1
  2625.  Ginger  I think the interpretation is pretty clear here. Home grown could be a more informal alternative.
    1
  2626. ​ @kevadu  Unfortunately with EV's size and range do tend to be proportional. Hatchback EV's do exist, but they aren't that small. When you get down to city car size you're looking at sub 150km range, which isn't enough for a lot of customers to have as their only car.
    1
  2627.  @kevadu  The ID.3 is not city car sized, it may be small for an EV, but for a car in general it's decidedly average. If you truly want a small car, you don't have great options if you want to go electric unless you're happy with a short range.
    1
  2628.  @JCDenton3  That's only going to work if you can get people to cram themselves into higher density homes, mass transit needs a lot of people in one place to make it economic. And a lot of people, in the US especially, don't want to do that.
    1
  2629. I'd hope a tow truck company would have public liability insurance to cover claims. Maybe the more shady ones do not.
    1
  2630. The intro reminded me a lot of the video Jake Tran did on the same topic 2 months ago. I think both videos do complement each other though, as they go into different aspects of the issue.
    1
  2631. I'm not sure if they're always WW2 era sirens, but many beaches in the UK with large and fast tidal bores have sirens to warn of the incoming tide.
    1
  2632. Mayday/ACI isn't that bad. Some of the others though...
    1
  2633. I don't think that sort of "high road" politics really works long term. No political party is perfect, and the longer you spend in power, the more you will mess up. A perfectly clean political party is one that's never had a sniff of power.
    1
  2634. I was the opposite, I thought it was trichinosis. But I think that's probably because it's more well known, typically from improperly stored wild boar but a particularly sketchy domestic pig farm might have it I guess?
    1
  2635. Open streets could be a problem if public transport use is still discouraged as more and more people begin to start commuting again. Many people will have no realistic option but to drive in if they need to avoid public transport, so I think if that happens many of these open streets will need to be converted back to prioritise car use. In the long term I think it's really going to depend on what the "new normal" is for commuting patterns. Some people are predicting many people will never return to a pre-covid commuting pattern, especially if social distancing measures have to be kept up in offices for some time then the large capacity reduction will force more home working, and of course it doesn't take a genius to realise that even after those measures are removed it's cheaper to have a smaller office, so many businesses may make it permanent. If there's a dramatic reduction in people commuting into the city at all then it's a lot easier to keep open spaces. This is going to be especially true in low density cities where it's not cost effective to provide high quality public transport for a large portion of commuters. However there are economic costs to a large reduction in commuters. Shops and restaurants may see a large reduction in business from employees who are now working from home, no lunch break diners or people picking up a few things after work. If the locals and tourists can't provide enough custom, parts may become derelict.
    1
  2636.  @TheRailLeaguer  You can't fully replace public transit with bicycles, only a portion of it, mainly low speed transit near the CBD.
    1
  2637. Realistically, simply opening more areas to high density zoning won't solve the homogeneity problem. The UK is full of identikit estates that are semi-detached (duplex) or small rows of terraces. The same would happen in the US if the land was just rezoned and sold to developers. I think the only real way you're going to have architectural diversity is by selling the land in small pieces to individuals who self build. But that's easier for single family homes than high density, where space limitations make it much easier for one developer to do everything.
    1
  2638.  @alexpkeaton4471  Well, you could live in a cottage on an island but that's not a convenient commute.
    1
  2639. Amazon to their credit does make some fantastic shows. They just make utter garbage too.
    1
  2640. Though it seems the more common solution is to do precisely the opposite, hire a foreign crew from China and do the whole thing turnkey with a maintenance contract. Don't involve the locals at all.
    1
  2641. Hahaha... silicon valley has one of the worst housing crises in the US.
    1
  2642.  @Dota2funny  It's kind of both I think. Japan is still quite expensive in some respects, especially for some things tourists like to do. Some food items can seem unusually expensive too compared to what a tourist can get at home. But for the sort of consumer goods someone living there would buy, any visit to a 100 yen store will show how cheap they can be.
    1
  2643. Part of it was probably the airline itself. If it's running on a shoestring and there's no reserve crews available at the diverted airport, who else is going to get these passengers to where they are supposed to go? There's probably a lot of pressure on the pilots.
    1
  2644. Wait, didn't Valve do something similar with the Director AI in L4D back in 2008 (at least for single player and co-op)? I wouldn't be surprised if there are earlier examples too, this patent seems potentially invalid due to prior art, unless it's very specific.
    1
  2645. Some other English accents must be even harder to compare, some British English accents in particular like to slur several words into one big blob of phonemes and will happily skip or adjust some to enable that.
    1
  2646. In the end, China and the West are helping Africa in different ways. The West tends to focus on poverty reduction and basic infrastructure in rural areas, electricity, clean water, you get the idea, and it has achieved a massive reduction in absolute poverty in Africa through decades of aid and investment. China is building infrastructure at a more macroeconomic scale. Both sides aren't exactly benevolent, and both have some concerning practices. But stuff like this always brings out the China-bashers and West-bashers who fight each other in the comments.
    1
  2647. If you are paid well, you could more easily get a personal loan or a credit card. Hell, many credit cards will allow you up to 2 months interest free for a few thousand dollars, so you could get one and be no worse off.
    1
  2648. Makes you wonder if this will be popular in the future as a "green" alternative for those wanting to avoid air travel for environmental reasons but still miss it.
    1
  2649. That will ensure a shrunken industry losing money hand over fist for a long time. Making flying more expensive and more miserable? You'd be lucky to fill even half the plane in many cases.
    1
  2650.  @tadchase4461  More people would drive, especially in the continental US. The extra deaths from that would probably be more than those measures would save several times over.
    1
  2651. The good thing about situations like this because everyone is going slowly mistakes rarely lead to serious accidents, usually just a bit of annoyed honking and everyone gets on with their day. Happens all the time even with drivers that have full licences!
    1
  2652. One difference I noticed in North America compared to European resorts was a lack of automatic ticket gates. They still often have an employee scanning your ski pass whereas RFID turnstiles are the norm here. Also European resorts seem to employ fewer lift staff (on quiet days you're pretty much on your own, some even use CCTV instead of direct supervision), and are more likely to have cheaper drag lifts like pomas and t-bars where you'd have a chairlift in North America.
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  2653. Doesn't brown rice take longer? The instructions on the packet say 30 mins.
    1
  2654. Tokyo is great, HK and Shanghai are definitely the Disney parks "B" tier though.
    1
  2655. As with many authoritarian and corrupt governments, the ANC is threatened by a strong middle class. You can oppress the poor, ignore the rich, but the middle class is a problem, too numerous to ignore, too wealthy and informed to disenfranchise. The white middle class have been slowly leaving South Africa over the decades, partly as a response to some of the more heavy handed BEE policies, many decided they'd have a better life abroad. The black and remaining white middle class have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the ANC as their standard of living has stagnated, and may blacks have started to follow the whites to better pastures abroad. This creates an economically polarized nation, an elite class of whites who are self sufficient enough that the ANC doesn't really affect their lives, an elite class of blacks who have friends and allies in the ANC and benefit from the corruption, and a large, poor, mostly black underclass, with a shrinking middle class leaving in droves.
    1
  2656. I notice when I speak German (not that I speak it very well), I tend to slur my /s/ into more of a /ʃ/ and I really aspirate my t's. Don't really know why.
    1
  2657. I could understand a moratorium on on onshore wind, visual pollution and noise (mainly noise) do make them unpopular with a lot of people.
    1
  2658.  Aventicity  Many wind turbines have unrecyclable blades, so that would be a large source of waste. It's not radioactive, sure, but it's still a problem. Same with many waste products created from wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing. Not sure what you mean about the safety standards part. Nuclear already has arguably the strictest safety requirements of any power plant, and that is reflected in the lowest deaths per kWh of any form of power generation. It would probably be rather expensive to get wind and solar down to its standard too.
    1
  2659.  Aventicity  By mass or volume, it's more like 0.01%, if that. For high level waste, the fraction is even more minute. Bear in mind nuclear power stations have a significantly longer lifespan than wind turbines. As for safety, well most of the reactors built in the last 50 years had significantly lower safety standards than those built today, and yet even accounting for estimated deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima, plus all the deaths from uranium mining, it's still lower than wind and solar per kWh. People just expect a very high standard of safety from nuclear energy.
    1
  2660. "Al Jazeera is global NPR" BBC World Service has left the chat
    1
  2661.  @trejkaz  That's not what they're saying, but that's often what they mean.
    1
  2662.  @ninjagaro.  I like to think of it this way. You know all those people who think those greenies want us to all go back to living in caves? Well, Anarcho Primitivists are the ones who actually do want us to do that, more or less.
    1
  2663. Chinese companies can afford to produce crap cars because they have a massive market of customers who are buying their first car ever. They don't have any expectations so will put up with a crappy vehicle. In the US and Europe most people buying new cars have at least some experience and knowledge of what makes a good car, so if a small car company were to release an absolute shitbox word would quickly get round and sales would go through the floor. They wouldn't just make losses, they'd likely go bankrupt.
    1
  2664. One issue is that a lot of these measures to improve welfare do have positive feedback loops that mean the higher the percentage of meat produced to higher welfare standards, the greater the increase in price. One example is stocking density, if you need more land to produce the same amount of meat, as land is a finite resource, the price of agricultural land goes up. So if everyone decided to switch to free range chicken, it would be a lot more expensive than if a few people did.
    1
  2665. If the car breaks and it's uneconomic to fix, then buy your electric car. Or if you can find a buyer. In the end if you can delay scrappage for as long as practically possible, that's the best route.
    1
  2666.  @andrewduong2740  Some people won't want to move to dense neighbourhoods. Some people actually like the suburbs.
    1
  2667. Natural gas is piped in, if the pipes aren't there then you need to have a propane tank.
    1
  2668. ​ @HelloKittyFanMan.  "Natural Gas" is a mix of hydrocarbons, mostly methane with a few % heavier molecules (ethane, butane, propane, pentane etc.) You could deliver propane in pipes I guess, but I assume it's more lucrative to bottle since it's easier to liquify.
    1
  2669. Another future moneymaker maybe exporting electricity to more renewable poor neighbours as decarbonisation requirements ramp up. The UK is interested in laying a HVDC cable to Iceland, and I wouldn't be surprised if Denmark and the Low Countries are interested too.
    1
  2670. Interesting that European train manufacturers are making inroads in the US while China is doing the same in Europe.
    1
  2671.  @Neli42  Well maybe he got a recommend, journalists can pull strings like that.
    1
  2672. 15:40 I remember that segment. Pereira then rips off his suit broadway style (revealing a maid outfit) and dives in after Munn. Was there a certain sex appeal to the whole thing? Certainly. But it was quite playful in the fashion of many 00's shows at the time.
    1
  2673.  @Spherical_Cow  There's still a long way to human rating after that though. For a start working out how exactly is the thing going to land without injuring the occupants.
    1
  2674. It reminds me of the Deus Ex prequels.
    1
  2675. Diversity obsessed historical TV series be like: "Yes, there were X <insert minority here> people in Y country in Z year, and by some strange coincidence they're all going to be present in our show!"
    1
  2676. Both capitalism and socialism/communism have the problem of perverse incentives, where the system encourages unproductive or even destructive behaviour in certain circumstances. I think capitalism actually has fewer of these incentives than alternatives (often because overly centralised systems are easily corrupted), but not zero. Whatever system you choose, preventing perverse incentives is a difficult and ongoing task. Address it incorrectly and you run the risk of stifling productivity or creating an even worse perverse incentive to replace it.
    1
  2677.  @davidlenz9902  If we consider gender a social construct, then it would be impossible to ascertain the gender of a skeleton, particularly a military burial which would likely be the same for all soldiers of similar rank. The only way I could see it being inferred is if they were buried with artifacts or in a particular fashion that does not conform to other burials of the same biological sex, but to the opposite.
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  2678. Not all western power reactors have an explosion proof containment building, the UK AGR reactors use carbon dioxide gas as a coolant so don't need one. And of course if you don't vent the steam it will split into hydrogen and oxygen and that will explode with enough force to damage the containment building as happened at Fukushima.
    1
  2679.  @davidfuller581  If by containment you mean they're indoors so the top of the reactor doesn't get wet in the rain, sure 😊. Of course there is a concrete catch pit in case of a meltdown, but the top of the reactor vessel has no protection at all, just regular walls and a roof. You can walk on it, and people do when replacing fuel rods.
    1
  2680.  @johntrottier1162  I've visited Heysham and can confirm there's not a particularly strong containment building over the reactor, unlike BWR and PWR it's safe to walk on top of the pressure vessel during operation (and people do because it's refuelled online). It's likely it can be sealed in the event of a radioactive gas leak, but I'm under the impression it's not at a particularly high pressure so strong walls are not needed. Considering there's an easily accessible windowed gallery that allows visitors to view the reactor floor that would support the idea. AFAIK with Fukushima part of the problem was the containment venting valve had to be opened by operator input rather than a simple burst disk and it simply was not opened in time due to the operators waiting for permission from HQ. That was clearly an organisational failure that someone on site did not have, or chose not to exercise, the authority to make such a decision themselves in an emergency situation.
    1
  2681.  @SigFigNewton  Apartments are generally smaller and more expensive per square ft/m than houses. Is it better for society for people to live in smaller homes and are forced to share more amenities with neighbours? Depends a lot on your politics and personal preferences.
    1
  2682. ​ @Mtaalas  It's not idiotic, it's what you would create if you fed that binary information into a DAC (at least the ones that use the sample and hold method, which is many of them) as the signal can change levels very quickly, fast enough to be practically instantaneous. It's what you would see if you probed the DAC output before any filtering, a stair-stepped analog signal. A stair-stepped signal is perfectly fine as a raw analog representation of that digital information.
    1
  2683.  @benw3864  Those airports are not necessarily unprofitable. I wouldn't call state owned airports corporate welfare if they make a profit, and many do from slot fees, ticket fees and rental income from retailers. With the TSA, things get a bit more murky, in other countries airports do fund their own airport security.
    1
  2684.  @HesderOleh  I think those cost estimates are a bit odd in isolation. A higher speed would require shallower curves, which, depending on where the line is being built, may require more tunnels or viaducts than a curvier route. However, that's going to very much spend on the individual circumstances for the route. In many places even a 250 km/h line would be just as expensive! And as I said to the other commenter, without HSR there would be a lot more pressure to reform such a system, as long distance mobility is still important for China's economy.
    1
  2685.  @bobbob-kc9wd  That's kind of true, but to be fair there are a lot of flights around the world that do compete with HSR. Any flight under 2-3 hours is probably something HSR could do in a convenient amount of time, especially if the destination stations are closer to urban centers (not always the case in China, I know). In a lot of cases there just aren't enough passengers along the route to make it worthwhile. Two cities that are far apart and have a whole lot of nothing in between them aren't going to be currently economic to connect unless the traffic between them is really large. You're probably right Xinjiang isn't a good candidate as it's not that big by Chinese standards and literally on the other side of a massive desert to the rest of China. To that effect the rail line currently isn't very high speed (though that's just because they're using cheap trains, the design speed of the track could accommodate HSR in future).
    1
  2686. I disagree with Musk about short selling being fundamentally wrong. Because short selling can be based on fundamentals, in essence if you think a stock is genuinely overvalued then shorting it is a way to express that prediction and make money from it. I think that at least some people who shorted Tesla did base their position on a genuine sentiment that the stock was going to fall naturally, and of course Musk would see short sellers as bad because they profit on Tesla's loss. A stock market with only optimists in it results in bubbles that will eventually pop, having some pessimists does help keep things a little more restrained. That said the problem is clearly not short selling based on fundamentals, but predatory shorting when funds gang up on a company for no other reason to make money by killing it. In a way it's like a pump and dump with fewer steps.
    1
  2687. My question is, what makes it worth $350k? Is it the land value, would someone else come along, demolish the property and build a modern home?
    1
  2688. @elfrjz So every 2 lane bridge in some pokey little hamlet is gridlocked with traffic coming off the highway.
    1
  2689. @David Lightman I don't think it will be. Unless Tesla sells them at a massive loss, the cost of the proposed features alone would make it more expensive.
    1
  2690. I do sort of understand the outrage at the Dylatov's response. Was it sexist? Yeah, in my opinion. Not the most sexist thing said ever, but yeah, pretty sexist. Saying women couldn't handle the stress with no scientific proof, not great. As you said that's possibly down to a cultural disconnect. But of course, there are other legitimate justifications, or no justification at all (it's their game, they aren't legally required to add women) so I'm not saying they should of added women. If it wasn't for the comment I would be 100% on their side.
    1
  2691. That's interesting. NZ mortgage rates have just jumped up significantly. My brother got a raise to 100K, and any gains in salary were all wiped out by the rate rise.
    1
  2692. The fuel consumption would be insane. Even the most efficient rocket can't compete with an aircraft.
    1
  2693.  @hansyolo8117  I don't think Starship will ever be competitive as a form of terrestrial travel, even compared to supersonic aircraft. It might never even carry passengers due to the g forces. Plus it requires specialised infrastructure. Spaceplanes are used to go into space, currently only the domain of rockets, so that's what they have to compete with on fuel efficiency, reliability, turnaround time etc.
    1
  2694.  @hansyolo8117  It's not easy to compare like with like, since ballistic trajectories are different to aerodynamic ones. Fuel consumption may not be that different, but a spaceplane could dispense with a lot of oxidiser, depending on how the engines work. Regardless, as you said, I don't think either are a threat to regular or even supersonic airplanes.
    1
  2695. That would exclude nations with no standing armies, like Costa Rica.
    1
  2696. +Stephen Suggs Agreed. While I'm not going to state my own opinion on the topic, I feel this video is biased in favour, it isn't neutral. Which is okay unless they claim it is neutral.
    1
  2697.  @the_retag  As perhaps a bit of an outlier, nuclear fission from an SMR. If the eye-watering personnel requirements can be reduced, it's pretty much an ideal solution.
    1
  2698. ​ @dpeasehead Why, what have I got wrong?
    1
  2699. That's kind of what reddit tried to do for a while using "quarantined" subreddits, but it wasn't good enough for a lot of people and there were mountains of complaints (to be fair some of what they allowed in these quarantines was pretty vile) and that led to the infamous "purge" of lots of subreddits.
    1
  2700. The problem there is people may instead choose brute force or violence because they believe democracy will fail to keep them in check. And that often makes things worse. Left wing terrorism has fed fascism in the past because it only affirms their rhetoric that they are a threat.
    1
  2701. The Penrose/Black Hole bomb discussed in a previous video may do the trick, but first you'd need to lasso a spinning black hole and build a shell around it, not achievable with current technology (assuming you'd even be able to move the thing into position).
    1
  2702. You mean Atlantropa? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa. Yeah, few problems with that idea to say the least.
    1
  2703. I do get irrationally annoyed when Sigmas are used as stylised E's. Makes me want to pronounce them as S. THSSSUS.
    1
  2704. I'd love to do a secondment on the JSPS, but I'm mostly teetotal, and don't really like beer (I can manage a little sake, but only a glass or two). I don't know if things might be different in academia. I'm happy to eat snacks and sing karaoke (badly) though!
    1
  2705.  @salonez91  I don't think the Turkish drones came from the US, did they?
    1
  2706.  @Mexicanj0ker2  I think that equipment seems to be decisive in this war. It's not just about the equipment though, but how you use it.
    1
  2707. I'd argue the Canadian economy is more like the UK than the US in a lot of ways.
    1
  2708. English does use tones, just only for paralinguistic attributes like emotion and intent (like the rising vowels at the end of a sentence to indicate a question). I think most English speakers wouldn't have a hard time pronouncing the tones used in these languages with a little practice, we just aren't listening for them in general speech because our use of them is much much less complicated and less important in conveying meaning. However as someone who has spent a while trying to perform an Alveolar trill correctly (it's not a phoneme that comes up in my accent), trying to perform phonemes you don't normally use can be really hard. Oh, and as someone who has worked with a lot of Chinese people, the whole l and r thing is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential mispronunciation. I've had people from all over China, all with different proficiency in English, and it's ranged from practically fluent with a few slightly noticeable quirks, to being so incorrectly pronounced it sounds like gibberish. One notable example was from one person who was actually a pretty good speaker, but he pronounced "crack" like "quack" for example, and there were some other interesting substitutions as well.
    1
  2709. Based on my experience, the one piece of infrastructure that Germany does much better than the UK is urban public transport. Cities like Birmingham and Manchester would have a proper U-Bahn in Germany, no question. As it stands Manchester has a fairly decent tram system, but one you'd expect to see in a much smaller city in Germany like Magdeburg or Freiburg, not the second or third largest urban area in the country. There's not even a city centre tunnel. Birmingham is even worse in that regard. And then you've got still large cities like Leeds and Bristol that rely almost entirely on buses.
    1
  2710. I think the big downside to multigenerational living is not the burden put on the (adult) children, but on the parents. They will no longer have a choice about where they want to spend their retirement, they have to move to where their children want or need to live. Imagine if you wanted to spend your twilight years on a quiet beach shack on the coast, but all your children have an apartment in the city. Let's be honest, it's not the children who will need to give up their jobs and move out to care for their parents, because that would be a lose-lose in most cases, sure one or more of your kids are now able to take care of you, but the hit in income they will likely take will mean everyone is worse off. Maybe a post-COVID WFH world will mean in the future it will be easier for people to move around to take care of family, but there are going to be limits to this, and in the end ultimately the children have the power in this situation, they will have the final say about where the home is going to be. So it can work if both parents and children want to live in the same place, but otherwise one side is going to have to sacrifice their lifestyle on that front, and it's very likely to be the parents.
    1
  2711. As someone said, sanctions only really work if it hurts the sanctioned more than the sanctioner. So sometimes exemptions have to be made for this reason. If this is the case here I don't know, but it's something to keep in mind.
    1
  2712. What it essentially does is trade a small number of points of failure with severe consequences for many more points of failure with less severe consequences. With a microgrid system you'd expect there to be more failures, after all, there's more equipment to go wrong, but each failure only effects a small area as opposed to the catastrophic cascade that can happen. So it's a trade off. I think it's unfair to demonise centralised power distribution in this way. Big power plants tend to be more efficient, be they fossil, nuclear or renewable, and having fewer points of failure does mean a lower maintenance overhead. Centralised grids can also take steps to improve resiliency, and possibly for less than a microgrid model depending on available generation and consumption patterns. Consumer needs are also different, while the energy needed to run a few residences may be able to be generated locally, industry and infrastructure maybe another matter. That's not to say microgrids can't be superior in some places, but I wouldn't expect them to be superior everywhere, or even for a significant majority. Also, while a lot of developing countries have seen success with microgrids, in many cases they are starting from a pretty poor and unreliable baseline. If you're getting daily blackouts from your decrepit centralised power grid, or have practically no electricity at all, even a fairly unreliable system by developed world standards is a vast improvement. The lower demand and willingness to be more flexible with consumption must also be taken into account.
    1
  2713.  @E1Luch  Rural areas in Europe also tend to have a higher population density than the US. There's not a lot of true wilderness.
    1
  2714.  @DannycageGhostrider  And London has skyscrapers and tower blocks.
    1
  2715.  @DannycageGhostrider  Compared to say, Chicago or New York, there are not so many. But it does have a lot of residential tower blocks that are around 30 stories or so. But a lot of skyscrapers in the US are for commercial use.
    1
  2716. The odd thing is, this can't be politically motivated because almost all these newspapers are right or center right. The Daily Mail is even called "The Daily Heil" by droll left wingers who think they're funny. Still, a decent chunk of the readership of these newspapers are likely at least sympathetic to Peterson's viewpoint. So it is really all about attention and sensationalism.
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  2717. I wonder if I fell afoul of this culture of politeness when I left a lukewarm review of a Japanese restaurant in Manchester (the food was OK but not special, rather bland and expensive, plus they had a crap version of Scott Joplin ragtimes on a loop in the background which got irritating). I wasn't aggressive or hostile, just a but unimpressed. The response I got on TripAdvisor was extremely rude and condescending, basically calling me an uncultured swine who didn't appreciate authentic Japanese food or decor. I thought maybe the chef was just up his own arse on the praise of others, but maybe it was just the shock of being criticised.
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  2718. ​ @clangboomsteam  I think though we often take the wrong approach to encouraging men to seek help. We talk so much about being vulnerable and emotional and seeking counselling and therapy and I think that turns a lot of men off.
    1
  2719.  @clangboomsteam  Indeed, but we only talk about a handful of "acceptable" options. I think we also undervalue traditionally masculine social interactions and their contributions to male mental health.
    1
  2720.  @clangboomsteam  I think you need look no further than the APA's highly controversial reccommendations for boys. A lot of people interpreted it as suggesting normal male behaviour was disordered. As for masculinity and toxic masculinity, there's no bright line definition between the two, some see harmful behaviours whereas others see harmless behaviours. In this case it's seeing whether men in general being less emotionally expressive than women is a problem or not. Even many men have been persuaded by society that it is, international men's day is often awash with that kind of messaging.
    1
  2721. I do wonder how much of that NIMBYism is down to the property tax laws. If you want to densify an area of SFH, you need to have people willing to move out, not just those whose land you want to build on, but their neighbours who probably don't want to live next door to an apartment block towering over them. It's all well and good saying "just move somewhere else" to people objecting to development, but if you actually make it really hard and potentially much more expensive to move somewhere else, then don't be surprised if they decide to dig their heels in instead.
    1
  2722. Glad to know Boeing's 737 MAX 9 assembly line has a bus factor of... 1.
    1
  2723. I heard a grid operator talk about what they would do in the case of such an event, and he suggested something that might sound counterintuitive, close all the breakers, turn everything on and maximise the length of live wires on the grid. Apparently that way it reduces the severity of the effects on power electronic equipment by spreading it around as much as possible. So the solution wouldn't be to turn off the power, but in a way, to turn it as on as it can be.
    1
  2724. The problem with the paleo diet is it assumes human evolution just ground to a halt after the palaeolithic era, which it didn't. Humans have evolved since then to have more copies of a gene that aids in digesting starch, which would have only come about through increased grain consumption through agriculture. Similarly about 20-30% of humans have evolved some level of lactase persistence, and milking animals pretty much requires some level of domestication and animal husbandry, a wild animal would not be docile enough to milk!
    1
  2725.  @simon2493  Considering the plant owners sued for compensation, and won, I think many had some life left in them. 100 years? No. 20 years? Maybe.
    1
  2726.  @simon2493  If it wasn't profitable for them them to continue to run the reactors, they wouldn't have got compensation. Nuclear reactors produce enormous amounts of energy every year, so every additional year you can run it could be 400-600 million dollars in income per reactor (so probably a billion or so for the whole complex). If a retrofit costs a couple hundred million and gets you 10 extra years of life, it's going to be worth it. You'd make up for the cost in a year or so of operation.
    1
  2727.  @simon2493  In the end, if the operator wants to continue running the plant, and there's no safety reason for not doing so, then any premature closure is going to warrant compensation. The plants could have operated for longer and probably would have meant dirty brown coal power stations closing sooner, which would have been a big win for CO2 emissions. As for the US, I don't know for sure. Probably because the gas price was so low for so long (it's never been that cheap in Europe) that the financials didn't make sense. Design comes into it too, some reactor designs have been found to be more resilient than others. What's happening with EDF is really poor timing and very unfortunate. It's certainly not a normal event and aligned with a gas supply crunch and mild wind conditions this winter (yes, renewables are having bad luck too) it's really causing problems.
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  2728. He was good to begin with, but after a while they became misleading half-truths.
    1
  2729. A lot of pasture land can't grow arable crops, if it could farmers would probably already be doing it. It would otherwise be economically worthless.
    1
  2730.  @dorianphilotheates3769  I disagree that it was that simple. There were multiple reasons the British Empire banned slavery, some self serving but others ideological. Two ideological reasons were the increasing abolitionist movement within the UK government, and within the Church of England. These were both on moral grounds, just from slightly different perspectives.
    1
  2731.  @dorianphilotheates3769  These abolitionists had grown to be very powerful and influential within the British government by the time of abolition. There were still many who opposed the move when it was enacted. Remember, it wasn't without a burden to Britain. A decent chunk of GDP was used to buy out slaveholders so they'd give up their slaves in British colonies (yes, there were still slave-based colonies in the Empire after the US seceeded, mainly in the Caribbean), and running an anti-slavery patrol up and down the Atlantic with the Royal Navy wasn't cheap either. Perhaps in the long term there was some advantages to the Empire, but definitely not in the short term.
    1
  2732. Is 3 phase AC charging common in the US? It's probably not a good solution for most homes, but I could imagine it would be suitable for many business and retail parking without forking out for a high speed DC charging system, and could probably fill a nice gap for people who don't need really fast charging, but would appreciate something a little quicker than level 2 when they're out shopping or at an attraction. I know the IEC type 2 connector does allow for 3 phase AC charging, but I don't think the type 1 does?
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  2733. Hydro tends to get a bump in the spring when the snow melts, It then dips during the summer (if your summer is dry) and increases again in the autumn when it rains more.
    1
  2734. These are hard-line eco extremists. They basically want to ban all private vehicle ownership outright. It's not that they have a particular hatred for EV's, they hate all cars.
    1
  2735. Ammonia has the slight problem of being incredibly toxic if it leaks through.
    1
  2736.  @michaelroy1631  Uh, yes it has. Ammonia leaks have regularly killed people in industrial accidents. It's why we don't use ammonia as a refrigerant much any more. Sure, a small emission in a well ventilated area is probably fine, but we'd be talking storing millions of liters safely all over the place. That's a massive safety challenge. Hydrogen is flammable, sure, but it requires a much higher concentration to be dangerous to human health.
    1
  2737.  @michaelroy1631  Hope you find a solution to the safety issues. Personally I'm not holding my breath (pun intended). Hydrogen and Ammonia both have issues, but if I had to pick one I'd pick hydrogen.
    1
  2738.  @peepeetrain8755  If you ruin the small town aesthetic the rich tourists will stop coming and it'll all be for naught, so you're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
    1
  2739. Problem is the filters then get clogged with silt and detritus.
    1
  2740. So what do they do with the manure, just dump it? That seems like a waste. You'd mix it into a slurry and sell it as fertiliser.
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  2741. I do kind of wonder why a pass holder would still rent gear, buying your own stuff isn't that expensive especially if you take advantage of end of season discounts. It's a one off cost of $500 or so but you'll make that up in 3-4 years and you won't have to spend half a morning on your first day getting rental gear!
    1
  2742.  @adamlentz6708  And hate having superior gear generally! Rental skis and boards are designed around durability not performance, and you're not going to need that level of durability unless you're there all day every day all season.
    1
  2743.  @adamlentz6708 Yeah, you can certainly get a decent board, bindings, bag, boots, snow pants and jacket for under $700, under $500 if you're willing to cheap out a bit. I think I paid under $300 a few years ago for a custom flying v (not top of the range by any means but not the cheapest option either!). Trick is to buy at end of season when the shops are clearing out last season's stock.
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  2744. Realistically unless you're doing a complete refit of the home (i.e. completely gutting it) current heat pumps aren't worth it for those with water based central heating. You'd need a drop in replacement for your boiler that didn't require re-plumbing the entire home.
    1
  2745.  @InLoveWithCities  Of course they aren't going to stump up for business class because it doesn't get the engineer there any quicker, just more comfortably. But you bet if a customer needs an urgent repair on a multi million dollar piece of equipment that's costing them tens of thousands per day in lost revenue then they'll be happy to have the engineer put on the supersonic jet for an extra couple thousand dollars if it gets them there in half the time. It's not unknown for private jets to be used, but of course it often doesn't really save that much time. Though I think the original comment was more about 99% of business air travel being unnecessary rather than a need for shorter journey times, which my response was based around. I think you'd agree you couldn't ever do a lot of your work overseas remotely!
    1
  2746.  @InLoveWithCities  Couple hours, maybe not. Half a day or more, maybe. When you're a small engineering firm with few or no regional offices, that could be the case.
    1
  2747. All of that for 7bn euros seems like pretty good value nowadays. Goodness knows if something like that was built in Britain it would probably cost double that!
    1
  2748.  @niooni7946  Well aren't you a ray of sunshine? Don't be so spiteful.
    1
  2749. Basically have a lot of education or an in demand skill.
    1
  2750. ​ @Doge811 It's probably partly true, a lot of the durum wheat that pasta is made from is grown in Eastern Europe nowadays. Though I suspect this has been the case for decades since the dry pasta manufacturing industry is so huge in Italy, there's no way they could survive on just what Italy can grow.
    1
  2751.  @realtissaye  For high quality high speed track, I would dispute that. Roads can be in a lot worse condition before they become unusable, even if the ride is a bit uncomfortable. Same is true for rail to some extent, but only if you plan on running slow freight services. For high speed passenger rail, maintenance needs to be far more frequent and more costly. Construction is also less flexible, for trains to go fast, tight corners are a no-no, and rail is also much less tolerant of gradients compared to roads, you can't have steep on and off ramps like on a highway. All of this means modern passenger rail track is typically very expensive to construct and maintain.
    1
  2752. Is it? Does regular old grass not do the trick?
    1
  2753. ​ @jarenc2048  Like that well known republican Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Bill Clinton in 2000.
    1
  2754. Certainly in the tourism and hospitality industry I can imagine many Greeks on the islands work 6 or even 7 day weeks, but only during the tourist season which is generally May-September. Outside of those months many will have other jobs in industries like construction (because it's often too hot to do that in the summer) which might only be part time.
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  2755.  @andro7862  I'm not exactly sure how that would have worked. Once the CCP had total control they could do what they wanted, they could wind back any reforms they liked. Fermenting democracy may increase resistance to that, but that was kind the point I was making. In terms of citizenship, while HK don't have British citizenship, they can emigrate to the UK quite easily, much more easily than mainland Chinese. Indeed the UK is preparing for an exodus as we speak, and UK citizens tend to view HK immigrants more favourably than other immigrant groups. I think what the UK would like the most is an independant HK within the British commonwealth. But separatism pisses off the CCP who the UK wants to remain on somewhat cordial terms with, and obviously it violates the declaration, so yeah, not really pushing for it is probably a good move. Plus at least for a while, it looked like China meet keep the status quo in HK, which while not ideal, is a decent outcome for the British. 2047 is a long way away, and there were probably hopes China as a whole might be more democratic by then anyway.
    1
  2756.  @RaptorFromWeegee  Yeah, like the time they had someone do a Finnish English accent...
    1
  2757. ​​​​ @LynxLord1991 The same is true for most languages, including English! Difficulty is a relative term here, and in terms of national languages in Europe, Dutch and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian are considered the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. French and German are more difficult due to the grammar. The hardest is probably something like Finnish.
    1
  2758. The problem is even when there aren't any low paid overseas workers doing the grunt work, there is really no minimum threshold for machine intelligence when it comes to calling something "AI" powered. Intelligence can fundamentally be boiled down to something that changes its outputs in response to inputs. That means your digital kitchen scales could be considered to be AI powered if you really wanted, since it is reading data from an input (a load cell) and changing an output in response to it (altering the numbers on the display). Machine learning is a bit more well defined, you need a model that is changed over time based on recorded data. But even that is a pretty low bar nowadays, a lot of home appliances have been doing something like that for years.
    1
  2759. Drastically reducing livestock in some places like parts of Europe and South America would be economically complicated. It would result in a lot of "worthless" land which has nearly zero utility to its owners which might mean a lot of people being paid simply to steward it (and you can imagine how politically unpopular that would be, though I'm sure the rewilders would whoop for joy). That said, those don't tend to be the areas where CAFO's are located so it's less of a risk, closer to the traditional farmland mentioned in the video. There's also an argument that properly maintained pasture land can have environmental benefits, and there's even the potential to greatly reduce bovine methane emissions through the use of food supplements. Also I was quite surprised how much the meat the US actually eats, it's about 20kg per year more than the EU average, and the EU loves their meat. So the US could reduce their consumption by about a fifth and probably still have a good hunk of meat nearly every day of the week. That might be enough to reduce the intensity of US livestock farming to less risky levels. And there are still steps that can be taken around cleanliness and biosecurity to make even intense operations less of a problem.
    1
  2760. I was really quite surprised at how little some police officers are paid in the US. It's obvious if you want better candidates and you want to raise the qualification and training requirement then you're going to have to look at a significant pay bump in some areas, or potential new recruits will go into more lucrative roles.
    1
  2761.  @drmadjdsadjadi  This person is clearly some far left anarchist/communist/whatever. They hate anyone with money.
    1
  2762. When it comes to getting a job with truly no experience, there are a few options: - Agency work. Some agencies will accept people with little or no experience and set you up with temp job after temp job. You won't get anything long term but it's at least some experience. - Internships. Some industries pretty much require an internship before you get in, which handily keeps all those lower class riff raff out (unless someone takes pity on you and gives you a stipend). It sucks, but it may be an option if you can afford it (or more accurately, your parents can). - Social networks/nepotism. Yes, it may seem scummy but everyone's doing it, and if you refuse on moral grounds you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. Ask your employed friends what openings are available. You'd be surprised how much weight employee recommendations can carry, it often allows you to skip the filter and go straight to interview. Same with parents or relatives, the more senior position they're in the better. - Apply anyway. If the requirements don't match the salary, they might not get any experienced candidates, and if you're lucky, you might be near the top of the list when they finally give up.
    1
  2763. There is the "pioneer" solution, that we are one of the most advanced civilisations out there and nearly everyone else is much further back. The mysterious forerunner civilisation we see in films and video games might be us in a few million years time.
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  2764.  @leeleeisgay  "Winning" in this context means an improved standard of living and greater security for your people. More land = more resources, more people = more workers and tax income, bigger borders = harder to invade your administrative centers. Increased security and more people able to do more than subsist allows for more time dedicated to innovation and culture, which also improves quality of life. It's possibly not easy to imagine in the world we live today, where territorial expansion is rare, and advanced technology and ease of trade has made it possible to become rich and powerful without colonisation either by swallowing up neighbours or going halfway around the world. But not that long ago that wasn't the case.
    1
  2765.  @leeleeisgay  Most of the time, yes. As opposed to never conquering anywhere and remaining a relatively small patch of land at the mercy of hungry neighbours. Of course some, maybe most empires eventually get too big or too greedy, and become unsustainable and fragile. Expansion for its own sake can have negative consequences, of course. But most historical empires at least had a "golden age" where their expansion resulted in a sizable net benefit, and an acceleration in the advancement of science and technology. Britain had theirs in the 18th century, the Romans and Ottomans had hundreds of years of glory.
    1
  2766.  @bfc3057  What's wrong with "East of Suez?" The canal still exists, why can it not be used as a geographic reference?
    1
  2767.  @bfc3057  Fair enough, you likewise seem to want to use anything to paint Johnson as a caricature from the 19th century, because you hate him.
    1
  2768.  @bfc3057  If you're going to project then so will I.
    1
  2769.  @logon235  I disagree. I think it's true that perhaps a few people are in a worse position than if there had been no empire, but they are the poorest of the poor, and the difference is fairly marginal. I take the view that many advances in medicine, industry and science were at least accelerated and possibly happened at all because of the wealth and power empire brought. I really doubt the industrial revolution could have happened somewhere without the access to resources Britain had. So without empire I believe we'd be living vastly more primitive lives, both in the developed and developing world.
    1
  2770.  @logon235  I guess if you're a primitivist then you would see empires as irredeemably evil. An existence where the average life expectancy is 40 and disease and starvation were commonplace would be more sustainable. We would all be in extreme poverty, not just a minority in the developing world. I'd not say it's entirely a good thing, while empires are necessary to progress, they can be unnecessarily cruel, and every empire throughout history has been so to one extent or another (the British likely not the worst). Some parts of Africa and the Middle East are certainly worse off, but it's not like there would be peace and prosperity either. There would still be inter tribal conflict, local empires would subjugate and enslave their neighbours. Maybe some other part of the world would be the colonial superpower, China or the Ottomans would be the most likely candidates, if you exclude other European countries.
    1
  2771.  @logon235  If we are to say the absence of european empires would be a positive thing, then we must say the absence of any empires throughout history would be a positive thing. No Romans, no Ottomans, no Chinese or Mayans. And yet many of these empires contributed greatly to advancements in science and technology. A bunch of small tribes can only trade in simple products, advancement is slow or stagnant. You can't forge an industrial revolution when you don't have access to enough resources to even build and power a factory, let alone produce anything. I agree, I don't think Africa would have remained primitive, because someone else would have colonised it instead. Probably the Ottomans, though internal powers are likely too, we forget the expansionist kingdoms Africa had, who were all too happy to subjugate and enslave their neighbours. You said it yourself, you think the scientific and technological advances european empires made are bad and a pre industrial existence would be better. Ergo that makes you a primitivist.
    1
  2772.  @logon235  So if you believe that the advancements brought on by the industrial revolution and renaissance era are bad, how does that not make you a primitivist? If you don't like the label, which is fair enough, perhaps you can elaborate your position. Without empires, small tribes are all that can exist. Empires don't have to be world spanning to be valid, they just need to dominate their local area. And if you object to the British Empire, then it is hypocritical not to object to other empires at all scales in all parts of the world, since many were just as oppressive, if not more. As for technology, I think the evidence speaks for itself. Name a technology or discovery between pre history and the beginning of the 20th century, and I'd argue nine times out of ten it's from an empire.
    1
  2773.  @logon235  Strange, I'm pretty sure you did make that argument. Regardless, it doesn't really matter. I've already made my points about how I don't think much progress would be made and the reasons why. Perhaps you think some tribe in pre-colonial Ghana would have invented the steam engine or something. I find such a notion pretty ridiculous, but we're both engaging in counterfactuals here, so there's always going to be vast speculative differences between people. I think if you're going to talk about the evils of the British Empire then you have to talk about the evils of other empires. Otherwise you're engaging in a form of exceptionalism that is unfair. You'd also be hard pressed to find any nation on earth that isn't some isolated island that never engaged in any kind of conquest. As I said before, an empire can be big or small, at at some level many nation could be considered little empires that have fully assimilated those they conquered.
    1
  2774.  @pectenmaximus231  I'm under the impression it was to process the vast amounts of raw materials that came into Britain from the colonies, that the existing cottage industry simply could not keep up with.
    1
  2775.  @logon235  Trade with whom? Other little tribes or tiny nations? None of them are going to have a steam engine either. Because without empires that's all their is. You think you can get millions of people to band together and renounce most of their own autonomy without force? That rich, powerful nations, those that could invent steam engines, can just coalesce totally peacefully? I can't think of any examples before the modern era, certainly none that we have solid evidence of their peacefulness.
    1
  2776.  @pectenmaximus231  It's part of a broader argument I'm making that power and access to resources are vital to rapid technological and scientific progress. The IR is simply one example, I could talk about the advances in engineering during the Roman empire, or medicine, mathematics and astronomy during the Ottoman and Mughal empires. My central argument for the IR is from an economic standpoint, industrialisation simply doesn't make sense without an excess of resources and a shortage of labour to process them. Factories need a minimum amount of material going through them to be economically viable. It's not like most of the products made in IR factories didn't already exist, they were just made artisanally in so-called "cottage industries" named because products would be made in small batches by peasants in cottages. That's why places like China, despite having plenty of natural resources, never really industrialised during the height of their imperial power (though they did make great advances in science and technology nonetheless), their population was so large that it would always be cheaper to maintain the cottage industry. Of course there are other factors to consider, particularly if you move out of the narrow area of factoryisation, but I think this economic argument is still central to the reason why the IR happened in Britain, and to some extent continental Europe, and not elsewhere in the world.
    1
  2777.  @logon235  Again, I ask the question, from where does the steam engine come from? Trade doesn't magically spur innovation, if you only have access to a limited amount of resources, you won't have enough to export and innovate with. I don't see how I'm being Eurocentric, I've been at pains to mention non european empires and their often overlooked contributions as much as possible.
    1
  2778.  @logon235  You seem to have a fundamental belief that any technology can be conceived by any group of people in any part of the world, regardless of how advanced it is and how powerful that group is. Sure, the steam engine is one example, but there are hundreds of other inventions and discoveries that I could also use, railways, the telegraph, various medications etc. I absolutely disagree with that idea. With no empire, I argue the British would have not invented the steam engine, or indeed most of the inventions credited to the nation within that era, and neither would anyone else (unless they had an empire). So no matter how much trade went on, these advanced technologies simply would not exist. You believe otherwise, this is my position. And it is not whataboutism to make comparisons to other empires. I don't believe the British Empire was exceptional in anything but scale. It did a lot of the same things other empires did. It wasn't exceptionally kind, nor exceptionally cruel. I don't think it deserves to be seen as so special, in a positive or negative way.
    1
  2779.  @logon235  You see invention and innovation as inevitable, I do not. If the right conditions do not exist, inventions and discoveries will either not occur, or will not be adopted widely enough to make a difference. In the modern world it's easy to see rapid technological progress as a natural state of human civilisation, but go back only a few centuries and you'd find it is absolutely not. As of indigenous eradication, the only exceptional thing there is, again, scale. Empires in the past were simply unable to commit such atrocities at that scale because their technology didn't allow them to (with the notable exception of the Mongols, but the consensus there is they were especially genocidal). Most of the eradication wasn't even deliberate, it was down to the higher burden of communicable diseases in european peoples, due to a much higher population density and number of domestic animals, which the immune systems of many indigenous peoples was just no match for.
    1
  2780.  @codingblocks3495  Yes, they did, because the British weren't the first people to have an Empire in India. And you can't ignore the scientific and technological advancements the British did make.
    1
  2781.  @codingblocks3495  Pretty much the entire industrial revolution, Britain was able to amass the resources for factory production and mechanisation to be economic. It's not that the Indians couldn't amass the knowledge to do so, of course they could, but it would have never been worth the investment when you have a subcontinent with 100's of millions of people, compared to about 5 million in the UK in 1700. By the way, if you're going to call out the British, are you going to do the same for the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate? India's history is chock full of outsider invading and colonising. The British are the last in a long list.
    1
  2782.  @codingblocks3495  Are you sure? New empires tend to wipe out the harms of old ones. Britain had the scale, I can't deny that, but I think it's a stretch to suggest the previous empires were more benevolent, they all wanted to rule india for their own gain.
    1
  2783.  @codingblocks3495  I think you're seeing past empires in a much more rosy light than they deserve. History often washes away sin. The Mughals enacted what could be considered a genocide on the Sikh population for example.
    1
  2784.  @niranjansrinivasan4042  Dismantling what industry exactly? I won't deny the Indian subcontinent did make many contributions to science and technology over the centuries, there was never the capacity for an industrial revolution. Perhaps in an alternate reality where the Mughals had developed their own extractive empire, which I think is a fairly plausible idea, India could have been the home of the industrial revolution. Perhaps you don't think that kind of technological progress is worth the immense suffering colonialism causes, which is a fair argument, but I really don't think the modern world we live in today would be possible without it.
    1
  2785.  @niranjansrinivasan4042  Well we can't have the modern world as we know it today without the industrial revolution, so that's a bit of a moot point. Yes, our modern world has thankfully moved on from that kind of imperialism, thanks at least in part to the technological progress and rising standards of living the industrial revolution allowed. We developed mechanised resource extraction and improved crop yields allowing for more resources for people to consume. New industries also increased the number of jobs available for people, and meant that places like Britain no longer needed to hoard raw resources to be economically successful.
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  2786. Next year I expect Alec will have a little miniature furnace and start blowing his own minature coloured glass bulbs. This has to be the endgame of all this.
    1
  2787.  @nickmalachai2227  At some point such a warhead would be far too heavy for any missile body, aircraft or submarine to carry, so it would be useless as a deterrent.
    1
  2788. To be honest, I think when to comes to nuclear power stations generally the blame cannot be put just on those who build them, there's so much politics and red tape that they do just take forever to build nowadays. It doesn't have to be that way, China and South Korea are both pretty good at building their reactors quickly and on budget.
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  2789. In this case I'm not sure it would have helped. If there's parasite eggs in the fish it wouldn't matter if it's 5 days old or 1 day old, you've got an equal chance of being infected. Of course there's plenty of other nasty illnesses you can get from rotten fish.
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  2790.  @triathlontimmy  For smaller destinations in more remote areas, high speed rail would probably still be too expensive to compete with air travel, even at $500 a ticket. Likely you'd just have to drive or take a slow bus if you couldn't afford that, and that destination would suffer as a result.
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  2791. He did say China and Korea.
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  2792. One other very handy thing about air fryer ergonomics is it makes it easy to shake the food around intermittently, which really helps it cook evenly even with the powerful convection fan.
    1
  2793.  @michae1simm  It's a question of available supply. In an economy with poor industry, infrastructure and supply chains, giving the locals a bunch of cash will just make prices rise. The money in that case would be better spent on industry and infrastructure, roads, electrical grids, water supplies etc, which would lower the price of goods by making them cheaper to produce and transport.
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  2794.  @michae1simm  You can't improve education without spaces in schools and universities, and you can't start a buisness without roads and trucks to move goods to and from your business. These generally require governments to spend money, not people. Giving people in a village cash which has no electricity, clean water, or medical facilities and is half a days drive from the nearest town on a potholed road is going to do little to help. Many developed countries do have cash transfer as part of the welfare system, but even then that can have problems. There are places in Australia where the locals receive regular income as part of a contract with mining companies, and a lot of the time they fritter it away with new cars and alcohol because there's nothing better to spend it on. There's no alternative businesses or industry, their education is poor so they can't use it to go to university.
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  2795. Even the Paris Metro during a refuse workers strike looked better than that.
    1
  2796. I do wonder if roof doors could be fitted to some existing widebody designs. You'd have to move some wiring, and it would mean that any cargo would have to be loaded in by crane which is less convenient, but it would mean not having to detach the cockpit or the tail. It might be a non starter due to structural integrity issues though, and difficult to pressurise.
    1
  2797. Because they don't buy it from them, they buy it from brokers who mix it all together from hundreds of smallholders. Only high end manufacturers who buy "single estate" cocoa have a direct relationship with growers.
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  2798.  @MaxSnowDude  Not necessarily. In more densely populated countries they often live in more rural areas. In sparsely populated ones NIMBY's are less common in general because there's not so many back yards for things to encroach.
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  2799. I still think it's a good idea to send people to Mars. But I don't think Elon's going to do it. Even though he's the richest person on earth, even if he somehow managed to liquidate all his wealth (which he can't as nearly all of it is speculative) he still wouldn't have enough money to get there. Starship, even with heavy modifications, is not an optimal vehicle for interplanetary travel, it's a giant space truck designed to lift mass into LEO, even turning it into an oversized lunar lander is somewhat stretching its capabilities. I think a Mars mission is possible within the century, possibly even by 2050, with some more development into nuclear propulsion (to ironically reduce radiation exposure to the crew by shortening the transit time) and offworld habiatation. But it will have to be a global effort by multiple government space agencies (hopefully with China and the US working together, but that might be a stretch too far). An eccentric billionaire isn't going to do it, no matter how much he wants to.
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  2800. Problem is, subsides are complicated. You can have capacity payments which go to dispatchable generation for just being ready to go if needed (mostly CCGT because they can switch on _fast_), R&D costs for developing new energy generation technologies (which is where the vast majority of nuclear subsidies go), and then carbon credits which effectively act as subsidies for low carbon or renewable generation.
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  2801. I do think hemp is somewhat overhyped. Perhaps it's because the US hasn't been allowed to grow it for decades, but in most of the rest of the world where hemp was never banned, it's still a marginal crop and nobody gets really excited about it. They way some people talk about hemp you'd think it was a miracle crop that can do just about anything. So while stuff like this is interesting, I think it's worth keeping a sense of perspective.
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  2802.  @TWX1138  I think while SpaceX is genuinely innovative and deserves its success, Musk's other ventures are not so shiny. Tesla is pretty good, though it's got a bit of the "walled garden" mentality of Apple so it loses a few points there. Hyperloop and The Boring Company are questionable at best and downright misleading at worst. Perhaps Musk thinks he can achieve anything if he applies himself, even ideas that have very tenuous feasibility and benefit.
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  2803.  @SeraphX2  Throwing money at a idea doesn't automatically confer any benefit. There are strong scientific and economic arguments against Hyperloop, and so far TBC seems to trying to reinvent the subway, but much worse. Wasting money to learn a lesson a simple cost benefit analysis could have told you from the outset isn't good for anyone.
    1
  2804.  @SeraphX2  If you want an example of what I'm talking about, look at Theranos. Though at least Musk is not misleading investors, I hope. He doesn't need to be a technological Midas, some of his ideas don't have to be brilliant.
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  2805.  @bobzeepl  Trains still have some way to go for long distance even in Europe IMO. A cross-continent journey still involves a lot of changes, potential for missed connections, will take an entire day, and is often significantly more expensive than a budget airline. Even if prices were to double for planes in some cases it would still be cheaper to fly. Plus there still isn't a convenient way to reach many tourist destinations by rail, especially in the north and east.
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  2806. It's cool, but still decades away from commercialisation. Military and Space will be interested long before supersonic passenger jets.
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  2807.  @Sebach82  Technically that's what the US federal government does, rich states do subsidise poor states. So it's not as ridiculous as it might sound.
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  2808.  @faithnfire4769  I don't think he's saying that. To me he's saying rich reservations should share some of their tax revenue with poor reservations, much like US states do. It's really got nothing to do with race, since native americans not living on reservations are completely unaffected. As you say, it's probably already done to some extent, but perhaps it's a reasonable argument to suggest this is done more extensively. Reservations are exempt from some taxes after all.
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  2809. I do wonder if part of the reason apartment blocks are generally unpopular in the UK (compared to much of Europe) is because so many were so badly built in the mid 20th century and they've just garnered this reputation of being damp infested concrete and sheetrock hellholes that could collapse in a stiff breeze. I'm sure there are other cultural factors (such as a preference for private green space) but this must have had an impact.
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  2810. Unfortunately MightyApe (New Zealand's more expensive answer to Amazon) has already claimed that joke with PrimeApe, which, as I'm sure you guessed, is their version of Amazon Prime.
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  2811. I can see it being possible to circumvent insider trading laws. The senator could call their financial adviser "off the record" and tell them to sell the stock say, a minute or so after some information is made public, likely beating most other non privy investors without looking too suspicious. Wouldn't be quite as profitable as doing so beforehand, but it's probably better than how a blind trust would perform.
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  2812.  @unitrader403  Often the need for redundancy actually creates the opposite, huge HVDC interconnects so if the wind doesn't blow on one side of the continent, you can hopefully get it from the other. The most ambitious was a plan to hook up Europe to massive solar thermal installations in the Sahara, which is probably never going to happen due to obvious energy security concerns.
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  2813.  @markotrieste  Not really, not on the same scale as renewables. A small amount of pumped hydro is useful for nuclear as a "buffer" which allows the power grid to respond quickly to fluctuations in demand. It doesn't have to have that much capacity.
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  2814. I think that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Controlling fire to cook food needs a decent amount of intelligence, no other animal does it after all! So the switch to meat probably did enable us to further increase our dietary efficiency through cooking as a kind of feedback loop.
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  2815. Some of those obstacles took me back to the days of watching Gladiator on the telly in the 90's.
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  2816. I think while the spread of video conferencing has reduced the need for face to face meetings somewhat, it's been dwarfed by other changes in the global economy. Companies are becoming increasingly global with their customer base and supply chains, and that means more flights are necessary for routine things like factory inspections, equipment installation and servicing, and industry conferences and trade shows. So video conferencing probably won't have that much of an effect, considering how long it's been around any reduction in flights that it has achieved has mostly already been done.
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  2817.  @AdamSmith-gs2dv  The Japanese are apparently the same. So much inefficiency apparently comes from employees running around the city meeting clients for something that could have been said in 5 minutes over the phone.
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  2818. To be fair, they are planning one in Dublin.
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  2819. I guess the burning was so they wouldn't be auctioned off and perhaps end up in the hands of Neo-Nazis, and since they were all modified versions of the original designs they couldn't just hire them from a prop shop.
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  2820.  @jenniferperry87  Either you need two cars, one for commuting and one for road trips, or you need a car that can do both (unless you go to work by public transport, then you may still need the road trip car). The latter is almost certainly going to be cheaper.
    1
  2821.  @majesticfalcon6402  Their point to me suggested that they'd rather stay in a country with no checks and balances than one that still has some.
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  2822. You say that like that's an enjoyable experience.
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  2823. 13:05 This is an interesting talking point in the UK, that 2nd gen immigrants tend to outperform natives in school. It's especially noticeable among boys from low income families, native boys do worse than all of their low income peers apart from Roma/Travellers. There seems to be this real lack of motivation and ambition amongst some of the male native youth
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  2824.  @ARandomDonut  I think it really depends on what you want to do. If you're looking for something more sedate, it's not a bad idea, probably great for a family camping trip. If you're looking for something more activity packed you might be left wanting though. I think that's where the draw of the national parks comes from.
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  2825. Kind of depends on what they mean by Cyprus. The whole island, only the "Greek" parts, including or excluding the british exclaves?
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  2826.  @RobMacKendrick  The problem there is there's very little documented anything. Also most native american nations didn't quickly vanish upon european colonisation, they changed and adapted greatly while being slowly ground down by european aggression and disease. So we don't really have a good picture of what many native american nations were like before colonisation because even reports by europeans often reflect a greatly changed nation from 100 years ago. Even something as simple as the introduction of horses greatly changed many native american societies, the stereotypical image we have of plains indians is a relatively modern version of their society. Most likely it was very diverse, some were more tolerant while others were more xenophobic.
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  2827. Was it a charter train or a scheduled service?
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  2828.  @CrackBabyZaches  I remember the early days whenever you brought up something about technological developments in energy generation or space travel there would be this fervent bunch of acolytes that seemed to think Musk had all the solutions. As far as they were concerned all energy generation needs could be solved with Tesla solar roof tiles and powerwalls, and as for space travel, may as well just allow SpaceX to take over NASA. I didn't get involved in many EV discussions but I can imagine there were the same people there saying Tesla is going to produce all the cars in the world in 10 years.
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  2829. That one might already be "solved", some are predicting we won't hit 10 billion, already we're getting to the point where increasing life expectancy, not birth rate, is driving all population growth. It causes issues though, populations age and countries cannot find enough workers to support pensioners.
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  2830.  Gap  What would he have to look/sound like for you to believe otherwise? Or do you think such an occupation is impossible to get into without money?
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  2831. Even going from clinically obese to just overweight reduces most of the risks enormously. So even if you never get to a "normal" BMI, you will have still improved your health massively.
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  2832. AFIAIK they did find some mobile phones could interfere with airplane instruments, but only in the cockpit itself (or very close to it) close to the instruments. Thing is aircraft electronics are already shielded due to cosmic rays and solar radiation at high altitude, so a phone signal from the passenger cabin of a large commercial aircraft shouldn't really affect anything in the cockpit. And I believe in GA there's no rule about it, it's up to the PIC.
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  2833.  @JohnDoe-bd5sz  Since the radio altimeter is measuring relative height above the ground, and the pressure altimeter is measuring absolute height above the MSL datum, you'd need some kind of terrain database to know the difference at any point on the earth. Not impossible, but it does mean the system will be error prone if the terrain maps are of poor quality. GPS altitude is an alternative, it's got its own accuracy issues but at least you don't need to correct for terrain.
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  2834. Spirulina can do bright blue, but dark blue is difficult.
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  2835.  @iBloodxHunter  What are the specs for 2042 compared to Cyberpunk 2077?
    1
  2836.  @iBloodxHunter  My point still stands, there are always games pushing the limits of graphical fidelity because that's what hardcore gamers want. It's not "normies" that care about the graphics arms race.
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  2837.  @iBloodxHunter  Minecraft works on mobile devices, it can't be that bad.
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  2838. How about the Middle East? Lots of war and empires there. As for other places, large wars are harder the lower down the tech tree you are.
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  2839.  @delancyj67  It's a chicken and egg issue. If you want to have big wars you need to be higher up the tech tree, and to be higher up the tech tree you need ???. The ??? is the question here.
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  2840. From what was described it sounds like they were trying to build city housing for people who don't like living in cities. Lack of privacy, lack of green space, cramped living arrangements, noise pollution from the usual trappings of city life, these are all issues that some people don't really have a problem with, generally the younger and more extroverted, while others migrate out or stay in the suburbs where they already have private, quiet, spacious homes close to nature. I can appreciate the ideas these architects had, to bring the benefits of suburbia to the city so people who would traditionally never consider living in a city would stay there, which would solve a lot of transportation issues. Problem is, it never really worked, at all.
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  2841. This might sound strange, but I'm not overly concerned about Trump, because he's emotionally fragile, impulsive, and increasingly unfocused probably due to age. His tenure has been one of chaos, of radical policies rescinded hours later, of rambling speeches and spur of the moment statements quickly forgotten. I don't think he has the fortitude of Putin or Orban to construct a tightly controlled well organised authoritarian state, and especially in the US that requires a lot of careful planning to permanently dismantle the many barriers to full control. Are there others in US politics that could do that? Very probably, so we should keep an eye out. As for Poland, I think fundamentally it is economic gains that have weakened the far right. The country is doing better than many of its peers in terms of economic growth.
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  2842. I think when we compare the US to Europe we have to remember the US has a lot of "unfair" advantages compared to Europe. Its position as the world's biggest economy and still prime political superpower means it can throw money around and take greater risks with less harsh consequences than any European nation or even the EU as a whole. So Europe in many ways is trying to do more with less, and quite often succeeding. Though Europe should probably not have too much of a victim complex since it has its own unfair advantages compared to much of the developing world.
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  2843. I'd be interested to know how many cars in China as status goods rather than for their utility. I mean if you live in one of those giant cookie cutter tower blocks in one of China's many, many megacities, how useful is a car?
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  2844.  Chris T  I agree, there are worse, but they would probably look better with their own unique design.
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  2845. I don't think you can remotely compare Midgley to Saville. Midgley was a flawed human being, perhaps blinded by hubris and perhaps greed, but I don't believe he ever thought he was really doing serious harm. Saville was a paedophile who was clearly aware of his actions.
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  2846. And fish sticks are fish fingers.
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  2847. I think the lesson we can draw from the video is, the Russian military is bad at advancing, but good at entrenching. Once they have a solid hold on a territory, they can build fuel pipelines, mend railway tracks, and generally build all the infrastructure that makes them very difficult to remove. So Ukraine needs to keep the pressure on to make sure the Russians can't hold on to their gains for very long. Because once they have it for a week or so, they won't be able to get it back.
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  2848. They're just too heavy. Even the best potential battery design has a specific energy that is too small for anything beyond short haul. Plus for large planes, recharge times could mean turnarounds of hours, not minutes, and a plane on the ground is not making money.
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  2849. The irony of the avatar robots is while Japan long had a reputation for leading the development of humanoid and service robotics, their models shown there are not made by Japanese companies. Bellabot is made by Pudu, a Chinese company from, where else, Shenzhen, and Pepper is by Aldebaran, which is headquartered in Paris (though I believe Softbank does have ownership). Japan did all that R&D in the early years, but is now having to import robots from abroad to realise the results.
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  2850.  @Nobody-Nowhere  Which doesn't matter to humans if they're not human antibiotics. They won't do anything because they target bacteria that infect livestock, not us.
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  2851. I like the idea of cities like Barcelona with the superblock. Instead of trying to create streets to accommodate everything (which in many places in Europe simply won't work as there isn't enough space), have alternating "high speed, car-dominated" roads with "low speed, non car-dominated roads". That way cars can still get to where they need, even if the last 2 minutes is a bit slower than they're used to. Admittedly this only works in gridded cities, but considering that's pretty normal in the US I think a lot of cities could adopt it.
    1
  2852.  @pilotavery  You got a source for that per passenger km? Perhaps for a lightly used service, but trains are generally more efficient due to lower friction and air resistance, and less time spent accelerating and braking.
    1
  2853. I don't think Starship is really that comparable to the shuttle, it's closer to a rocket with small wings than a true spaceplane. Probably what the Shuttle always should have been is something smaller, focused around crew flights rather than cargo launches.
    1
  2854. I'd agree in the midrange and luxury market, EV's are competitive. But there's not many EV budget models available in many western countries, yet. The Chinese automakers like BYD do look like they might try and fill this gap as they have done in some middle income countries already, and that might help bring the industry out of a slump. European and US automakers will be the losers though.
    1
  2855. A lot of student loans in the UK have an interest rate linked to RPI plus a certain percentage. The difference there is they have an expiry date, after that the remaining principal is written off, and monthly payments are tied to income.
    1
  2856. I think I'd go for a carter style siren over a klaxon. I much prefer my neighbours to think the world is going to burn in nuclear hellfire than I've got a submarine in my garage.
    1
  2857. I'm now imagining this in an episode of Food Wars.
    1
  2858. Sound Transit could be converted to a light metro pretty easily, only the section on MLK would need to be changed to remove the at-grade crossings. It honestly wouldn't be the worst idea to elevate that bit, then you could run something like the Alstom Metropolis.
    1
  2859. Changing working patterns also had an effect. In times gone by factory workers would have "wake weeks" where every factory in a certain town or city would shut down all at once, and all the workers would travel en masse to one of a handful of domestic holiday destinations, which would have a huge number of hotel rooms and guesthouses to accommodate everyone. This was a big deal as for many it was the only annual leave they got. Nowadays people tend take their holidays more spread out, both geographically and temporally. You don't have, say, half of Bolton all going to Blackpool on the same week.
    1
  2860. I actually had a shit overpriced pizza in Norway.
    1
  2861. It's really to incentivise investment as opposed to hoarding cash. Saving does two things, it provides financial security and it grows the economy as savers invest for a decent return.
    1
  2862. The difference is they tend to say inside as Britain is generally cold at night.
    1
  2863. I think when it comes to "wokeness" (sorry!) it tends to be specific universities or even specific professors. I'm sure your experience is broadly representative, but I can see how someone who went to a different university or had a different professor may see things differently. I think you're addressing the issues that are broadly applicable to the majority of non-elite universities, which is a good thing. When it comes to that particular issue, I think it's best considered on a case-by-case basis. I also agree it's a poorly defined term, usually an umbrella for a litany of distinct issues that should be addressed individually. We can talk about political diversity in academia and tolerance of minority political views, or the ability of students to cope with controversial or uncomfortable topics, or how best to deal with disruptive students or faculty while balancing freedom of expression. Sticking the "woke" label on those immediately ropes them into the culture war. But as I said, these are not problems at all universities, and often where they are each case is subtly different.
    1
  2864. I would assume he's talking about post independence, which would make Ireland fairly young, around a century depending on when you count true independence. As a client state to England it would be considerably older, going back to the Norman Invasion in theory. Regardless, with the exception of modern Germany, most european countries (let's ignore the Balkans) have existed in one form or another for longer, many can trace their origins to the triple digits.
    1
  2865.  @talideon  It's complicated and subjective. Look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_date_of_formation If we go by territorial modification, that was only 20 years ago. If we go by independence, less than a century. And while there are ex iron curtain countries that would be younger by this metric, most of Western Europe has been relatively unchanged for longer.
    1
  2866.  @thenextshenanigantownandth4393  Mostly true, some parts of Ireland were still under English control though, the Tudors basically took back what the Normans had lost over the centuries, plus the rest. More of a re-colonisation than a "virgin" colonisation. But then again, did the English invade Ireland the first time, or the Normans? Technically both England and Ireland were conquered and colonised in the 11th and 12th century. Eh, european history is messy.
    1
  2867.  @thenextshenanigantownandth4393  I think it's a bit unrealistic to say the Norman invasion had barely any effect, at least some of Ireland was under English (Norman) rule for nearly 500 years, even if it slowly shrank over time to a small portion as Norman lords became Gaelicised. When they first invaded Norman barons seized land and ruled it as was common in the feudal system, and the peasants would swear fealty to them. Fundamentally it's not that different to a businessman seizing land for a plantation, just under a different economic system. Also I think primeval forests is a bit of a stretch. Many of these lords were Norman descendants, they would have managed the land much like their English counterparts. You can find many examples of Norman castles in ireland, they wouldn't have built these in the middle of nowhere. However, I appreciate the historiography around this creates controversy, as one side accuses the other of making the English (and later the British) look as evil as possible and the other accuses them of using the Normans as a scapegoat. Personally I'd just say both invasions had negative consequences for the native population.
    1
  2868.  @thenextshenanigantownandth4393  I'm not misinformed at all, you're taking one small time period, I'm considering hundreds of years. Yes by the time of the Tudor invasion Ireland's English claims were very small (but still present), but they had been shrinking slowly for centuries and for a long time throughout the middle ages England had been in control of huge swaths of Ireland. They might not have had much control, but they still had _some_. Was there forest? Sure. Was it primeval? No. England and Scotland also had lots of forest, but it was managed for fuel, charcoal and construction material. Primeval forest sounds as if Ireland regressed to some pristine wilderness like the forests of North America. It's not as if Ireland was like the New World to the English, an exotic land they had never visited or interacted with. It was more like Scotland or Wales than New England. If they were making comparisons to Native Americans they were exaggerated or manipulative. This was a country that the English would have remembered having more control of in the past. So it's not the same as colonies in the New World.
    1
  2869.  @thenextshenanigantownandth4393  Ireland is no further than France to the British, it would be incredible to suggest that the English would find it as unfamiliar as Colonial North America. Both the landscape and people look pretty much the same as England, and the culture is not that far removed. If some notable English people considered them savages that was deceptive xenophobia not a genuine sentiment based on ignorance and an overactive imagination. Where the argument has merit is the plantation model that was later used in other colonies as a form of modern feudalism, a test run for the later Empire. But to say the conquest of Ireland was completely analogus to the rest of the British Empire I think is a massive oversimplification of the real history between the two countries. I get the sentiment behind the desire to conflate them but I don't think it's helpful.
    1
  2870. From what I've heard, part of it is because it's a easy for a citizen to get a bullshit job that pays a fat stack to basically sit around all day. Citizens often don't bother to get an education or skills training because there's no incentive to do so. Those that do tend to be self-motivated.
    1
  2871. Walmart has an even smaller presence in Europe, only through subsidiary Asda in the UK, where it's far from the leading supermarket.
    1
  2872. One issue with the fees is if the artist cancels for whatever reason, Ticketmaster doesn't have to refund you some or even all of those fees under the contract you made with them. So you could end up significantly out of pocket through something out of your control, even if you were sensible and chose refundable transportation and accommodation. The risk that used to be borne by venues and artists has been passed down to the customer. Of course this means they can sell you insurance and make even more profit.
    1
  2873. It's fine if you live in a Mediterranean, Subtropical or Tropical climate where it never gets all that cold.
    1
  2874. The Boring Company has yet to offer any novel technology that would make tunneling faster without just wearing out the TBMs faster. The diameter of the loop in Vegas is too small for any modern metro system bar some ultra light metro design (yes you could just about fit deep level LU stock in it, but modern safety considerations warrant a walkway next to the tracks for safe evacuation). Quaise currently can't drill holes of anywhere near sufficient diameter and I'm not sure the technology would realistically allow them to, but we'll see.
    1
  2875.  @DunnickFayuro  I'll give you Quaise as a possibility because they're being genuinely innovative (though does their system work with clay and soft rock? Many cities are built on that kind of geology). But IMO the boring company isn't doing anything new or novel and has shown no signs of working towards that goal. It's a vehicle for one of Musk's wacky ideas to replace metro systems with autonomous cars, which is pretty ridiculous even without the tunnels.
    1
  2876.  @DunnickFayuro  1.5 GW continuous? Are you absolutely sure? That would be a complete non starter if so, that's the output of a typical nuclear power plant (not a small modular design, a standard power station that powers entire cities). I'll give TBC time when they come up with a genuinely innovative and groundbreaking (pun intended) idea for tunnelling. So far I see nothing that hasn't been done before, speeding up the TBM is not a solution, if it was then other companies would be doing it already, they already spend a lot of time taking in geology, cutting head wear and overheads to work out optimal tunnelling speeds.
    1
  2877. Eh, both can be unsustainable. Grazing generally impacts the land less as animals return nutrients to the land by, well, pissing and shitting on it. Arable farming requires more careful management to avoid nutrient and topsoil depletion.
    1
  2878.  @brandonchan4537  Absolutely. If it wasn't for AC, much of the US south would be much more sparsely populated. Many of the big cities like Phoenix simply wouldn't exist.
    1
  2879.  @NotSure421  Argentina can impose severance taxes on the extracted minerals and corporate taxes on profits. Since both minerals are in high demand I doubt they'd have to do much sweetening to attract mining companies.
    1
  2880.  @NotSure421  Argentina has kept out mining companies using punitive export tariffs, if they can do that then they can impose taxes. "US racketeers" haven't managed to bribe officials to get those lifted.
    1
  2881.  @DreamVikings  Then replace the tax with another tax that doesn't disincentivise exports. The Argentinian government isn't getting very much from it anyway if there's very little exporting in the first place.
    1
  2882.  @DreamVikings  It's not the only way to make money. You can place severance taxes on minerals and corporate taxes on companies that produce and process renewable goods like beef. The difference being said tax does not care if the goods are destined for internal consumption or export. As the goods are likely to fetch higher prices for export, farmers and mining companies are more likely to be able to make a profit with the same tax burden, so therefore more production becomes economically feasible.
    1
  2883. I think there's also this mentality that elevates Africans living in a traditional "low impact" fashion as one that is in harmony with nature. You sometimes get this from the supposedly anti-colonial left, that Africa should be wound back to some fictional pre-colonial eden, as if that will fix all the problems. Of course nobody really asks if that is what the Africans living there actually want.
    1
  2884. Well, what was so evil about the Soviet Union wasn't the architecture, drab as it could be, more the secret police and gulags and stuff.
    1
  2885.  @cheekysignpost9403  Eh, it depends. In the UK and Ireland there's plenty of grassland, it's only good for livestock. It's hard to know, because even for grain fed livestock, it gets complicated if you consider how much can be unfit for human consumption in a bad year. Do we consider only crops grown specifically, or crops that could have gone to humans or livestock?
    1
  2886. Automated light metro is a good idea. You can use smaller trains with tiny headways, all the capacity of a heavy metro at less cost. If the train is full, no problem! Only 30 seconds to the next one.
    1
  2887. Volume is a problem there. Lithium is very compact compared to say, pumped storage. It's also easy to integrate with minimal disruption.
    1
  2888. Say what you want about AOC (I'm not exactly her biggest fan), at least she can market a Green New Deal better than these jokers. For starters, calling it something that doesn't sound like it came from the mouth of a dictator.
    1
  2889. Boeing doesn't seem to be able to do anything right in recent years.
    1
  2890. Technically true, but without enough potential difference you can't pass enough current to stop your heart. When you get an electric shock, you've become part of the circuit, and you have a resistance (and capacitance, but that's not important right now). Using ohms law you can calculate approximately how much current can pass through your body (skin effect and dielectric breakdown makes it a bit more complicated, but those only happen in the hundreds of volts or at really high AC frequencies). Assuming dry skin, you have a resistance of about 100kΩ. That means you need a minimum of 50V to pass a fatal current. Car batteries can easily pass 600 Amps, but you could grab hold of the terminals and feel nothing because the potential difference is only 12V. Also 0.5mA is definitely on the conservative end for cardiac arrest, generally I've seen figures ten times that quoted. Better safe than sorry though.
    1
  2891.  @wally7856  The problem is while there is a commercial market for EO launch vehicles, stuff that goes to the moon is another matter. NASA would still need to commission someone to build a launch vehicle designed for their purposes, which introduces more risk. They've already done that for the lunar lander. Plus SpaceX is likely to be the only bidder because Musk doesn't care about the money.
    1
  2892. In my city in the UK (and possibly in several others), it was because they didn't have the money to build an underground system (or more precisely, they started building one and then the money dried up). Trams are a step up from buses but still much cheaper than an underground metro, while still being able to use grade separated routes outside the city centre. Thing is, now we have problems with congestion in the city centre because there are so many trams sharing the same track due to recent rapid expansion (we've built a second crossing to try and relieve some of it, but there are still choke points), and the sharp corners and regular at-grade crossings mean that while the grade separated sections are almost as fast as a metro, street running and city centre sections are often no faster than a bus. I reckon we'll have to put at least the city centre section in tunnels sometime in the future, which won't be that dissimilar to the original plans.
    1
  2893. In a lot of cases, nothing that would be a true substitute. A lot of modern products simply couldn't be made profitably. Others would be heavier, less durable, and a lot more expensive. That's the thing, we can't really shut down plastics without shutting down a huge part of our modern world, and that goes for everywhere, not just the rich west. Unless you are a remote tribe living in a jungle or on an island, it would majorly affect your life, probably for the worse.
    1
  2894.  @jmtrad1906  Volume is an issue too, glass has to be much thicker than plastic, so you'd be able to transport significantly less of a product in the same space (especially as it has to be seperated in crates to prevent one jolt from shattering half of them).
    1
  2895. Well, it's not a bad idea. Muck spreaders can use solid manure ground into small particles so it looks almost like soil. It would require major changes to how waste management is done on those CAFO, and the state might have to subsidise the change, but it could be an option.
    1
  2896.  @flameknightplayz2939  Would be a waste of perfectly good manure for fertiliser. without it we'd have to use more artificial fertiliser.
    1
  2897.  @flameknightplayz2939  You still have the farms nearby needing fertiliser, they've got to get it one way or the other, and using local manure is the most efficient and uses less fuel to transport.
    1
  2898. I can see Argentina being a sort of South American Australia in an alternate timeline (which would make Chile a South American New Zealand I guess?). It wouldn't have the might to be a top player, but it would be home to a wealthy population and it would be in a solid alliance with the US and Europe.
    1
  2899. If you really want to go into hardware, FPGA programming with VHDL/Verilog could be an option. Problem is it's so specialised and so unlike anything else you will do, that there's not that many transferable skills.
    1
  2900. Good job on #12 without bringing up the "R" word.
    1
  2901. Don't bother with a turbine unless you have a lot of land, they're quite noisy. Plus a single turbine is hard to get repaired when it breaks.
    1
  2902. Not just gas, other natural resource wealth too. And a source of cheap labour. Ukraine could become Europe's Mexico in a way, a nearshoring opportunity for low cost manufacturing to reduce dependence on China but with a bonus of lots of natural resource wealth. I think Europe would be more than willing to write off a lot of war debt and offer cheap credit if it can strike some favourable deals on these things with Ukraine. And it's a win for Ukraine too, they get steady employment and a reliable customer for their natural resources.
    1
  2903. I think the ownership question might make civil action more difficult. The council has to show that the statue belongs to them in order to demand compensation. I don't think the defendants are judgement proof though. Even if they personally don't have any money, you can bet there would be activists lining up to donate to a legal fund, win or lose. In a civil case, they won't suffer either way.
    1
  2904. Some meats are harder to recreate than others. Chicken is probably a bit easier, at least the white meat, but trying to replicate a ribeye steak is going to be a challenge.
    1
  2905.  @videogamesleague629  The original anime pilot definitely gave off more of a "magical girl" vibe (also I've found western interpretations of the genre tend to be less wedded to the "girl" part of that, in Japan "magical boys" are almost always done as parody/satire).
    1
  2906.  @component9008  Doesn't look like it to me. Neither are like Hong Kong or Singapore if you want really high density, but there's not a huge amount of suburban sprawl in either. It's not much different from many European cities.
    1
  2907. Sedating an animal is more dangerous and more challenging than killing it. Tranquiliser darts have to be carefully dosed (often fentanyl or carfentanyl for big game) to knock the animal out but not kill it. Your aim also has to be good, hit the wrong part and it won't go down. Then you have to wait for several minutes until the animal dozes off, and then you have to take the risk of approaching it, where it might attack you if it's not completely out. After that, you need to work quickly before it wakes up. Not impossible by any means, but compared to a bullet, a lot more complicated and hazardous.
    1
  2908. Based on the general mood of news articles, Christmas is looking to be stunted in the UK, with gift and food budgets shrinking, middle class families downsizing to cheaper products, and poor families turning to charities for anything they can get. But of course the news, even the BBC, does have a negative bias.
    1
  2909.  zandaroos553  I guess you could raze half of San Jose and pack in a ton of high rises like some city in China and that would probably solve the problem, but I'm not sure how many people would actually be willing to live in such conditions for a prestigious tech job.
    1
  2910.  zandaroos553  Indeed, but the US is different, places in Europe are generally dense by necessity, the US has plenty of space and a culture which likes big houses and privacy. Though considering how acute the issue is in San Jose, high rise apartment blocks are probably the only way to solve it once and for all.
    1
  2911. ILS approaches do reduce takeoff and landing frequency so it could be your flight just got bumped off the schedule to make room, typically they try and do it with high frequency or domestic flights so passengers aren't delayed too long or can consider alternative transportation. Though Manchester airport has tons of spare capacity with its two massive runways so I'm not sure I'd buy that. Maybe fog at your destination airport?
    1
  2912. Battery swapping would be the fastest way to accomplish this. Drive into a bay and have a mechanism in the floor take out and replace the battery from under the vehicle. Problem would be standardising the battery in such a way that a mechanism could swap out the majority of batteries.
    1
  2913. They've got a pub named U.K. Margaret and nobody made a Thatcher joke?
    1
  2914. On land it's not finders keepers for the items themselves, but it is for the value of them in many nations. In the UK, anything declared treasure must be handed over to the government, but the finder must be fairly compensated as if they had sold the items at auction based on an independent assessment.
    1
  2915.  @bearcubdaycare  Plus the incompatibility with the rest of the network.
    1
  2916. So Al Qaeda make the same mistake the Japanese Empire made in 1941. Don't attack the US unless you want a war.
    1
  2917. The trick would be to build a casing that wouldn't just weld itself to the rock under such high temperatures and pressures.
    1
  2918.  @WaffleAbuser  Sure, but you've got to give people the option between those two lifestyles. You can choose not to have a car and live in a small flat in the city centre and almost never visit the countryside, or you can live in a bigger house in the suburbs or smaller settlement with a car and visit the countryside.
    1
  2919.  @Jade.Palace  And that's fine for someone like you who doesn't really like the countryside (I assume as you refer to it rather negatively) and wants to spend all their time in the city. But there's plenty who are the opposite, but can't just go live in the middle of nowhere because there's no work out there. So they have a car so they can go visit when they can. And of course there's a lot of people in the middle.
    1
  2920.  @WaffleAbuser  The problem is jobs are increasingly being concentrated in big cities so both types of people have to live near each other, which causes problems.
    1
  2921.  @WaffleAbuser  The problem is a lot of these viable alternatives are a zero sum game, for them to work you have to make driving less viable.
    1
  2922. Sk-or-neh?
    1
  2923. I think this is a good argument for why widespread grid scale lithium battery storage for renewable energy won't happen. Simply put, people put a premium on energy that is portable. You dont generally pay as much per Joule for the electricity or gas supply to your home than you do for the petrol that you put in your car. Arguably the same is true for batteries, if there's scarcity, those willing to pay more, the EV manufacturers, are going to win over any company trying to build grid scale storage and price them out of the market.
    1
  2924. In theory, this would work. The risk is that we scare off foreign investment in any British company or asset for a very long time. That's fundamentally the roadblock that prevents this. Problem is we don't really know how badly these investors would react if we significantly write down the value of these companies before purchasing them. And unfortunately we really do need overseas investment since we aren't the powerful country we used to be.
    1
  2925.  @davidcoletta3332  It depends on the available labour and their incentive to work. If there's a shrinking population, wages will increase as there's less competition for each job, but if there's still not enough people to fill all the roles, that's when productivity is hampered. But if automation reduces the number of jobs required over time, this can keep productivity up. Wages will also have to rise or the cost of living will have to fall or companies will no longer have a market to sell their products and services to.
    1
  2926.  @catprog  Hopefully that was because you were last on the route.
    1
  2927.  @carlgharis7948  Well you really can't carry either on a bus very well, but the TV is likely to be simply too large rather than too heavy.
    1
  2928.  @carlgharis7948  I don't think there's any way you could comfortably carry anything bigger than a 30" TV on a bus without causing disruption to a lot of passengers. Bear in mind a typical TV is now around 40-50" and many are larger. It doesn't matter about the weight, unless you're buying a small TV the dimensions of the box will be prohibitive for public transport.
    1
  2929.  @carlgharis7948  Maybe your friends have small living rooms. All the people I know have 40-50" sets or more. They aren't that much more expensive as these sizes are produced in greater numbers, only when you go above around 60" do they really increase significantly.
    1
  2930. My local recycling has pretty much stopped accepting mid-value plastics probably because of this. A lot of what used to be recycled now goes in the regular trash and they just burn it. At the moment incineration is probably the best way forward (it's not as bad as it used to be), we just have to accept some things aren't worth recycling and live with it.
    1
  2931.  @andrewmartin9995  Even with Europe the Netherlands is a bit special in that regard.
    1
  2932. Unfortunately not your city taxes, thanks to Paradise.
    1
  2933. Perhaps, but a house of cards that is hard to topple completely. Sure, the top few layers get blown off from time to time, but they are diligently re stacked.
    1
  2934. If they truly plan on building a triangle, then future conversion to a through station is something to be considered, and that might change the potential locations drastically. Ideally, and with a big enough budget (which I'm sure they don't have) they could do what a lot of European cities have done and build a cross city tunnel (though admittedly in a lot of cases the tunnel is connecting two existing above ground stations). They could even have their main station underground smack bang in the city centre. Not the most aesthetically pleasing, but certainly the most convenient.
    1
  2935. ​ @coolestdude11111  Because rezoning is not enough, you need to be able to get people to sell to redevelop the land. And a HOA can block that, they can force people to only sell on the condition it remains a SFH.
    1
  2936.  @hydroac9387  $2 Trillion for 9% of generation? That would make it the most expensive energy source in Germany by far.
    1
  2937. I've heard in some parts of India buffalo meat is quite popular, as buffalo aren't considered sacred and can be slaughtered freely.
    1
  2938.  @non-hyphenated  Apologies, I must have mixed up F and J, the US visa system is rather complicated compared to other countries, I have duly corrected my comment. And yes if they wanted to stay longer that would make sense, though I think J-1 allows up to four years?
    1
  2939. Some airport hotels will hold empty rooms on standby in case there's a cancelled flight.
    1
  2940. Though bringing services in house can save money and keep more money circulating locally, it is ironically what got Birmingham into trouble with equal pay (specifically, refuse collection). Because they employed their refuse workers directly, they were responsible for setting salaries, and because refuse workers have a good union and it's a rather undesirable job, they were able to secure higher wages than comparable staff in other parts of the council. The equal pay dispute comes in because refuse workers are overwhelmingly male, whereas most other council departments are far more balanced, or in many cases majority female. If they had outsourced their refuse collection, any equal pay claim would be untenable, as the council could rightly point out they have no control over those workers salaries. So perhaps outsourcing might actually save money for many councils because it doesn't mean they have to pay their admin staff the same wages as other roles with strong unions.
    1
  2941.  @anograsek  If both are on the same internal pay grade, it's apparently considered "equal work". I don't know why refuse collectors weren't on a higher grade to begin with, but there might have been some administrative reason.
    1
  2942. ​ @Secretlyanothername  That's without storage. With batteries you're looking more like $190 if you couldn't rely on gas backup.
    1
  2943. Arguably it did at one point and it still does have a very impressive safety record. But those times have mostly passed.
    1
  2944.  @2639theboss  With MBT's, it's clear that General Dynamics is making very little profit if any on domestic sales of the Abrams, otherwise they wouldn't have such an absurd markup for export, which is about twice the price of the South Korean K2 Black Panther. Nonetheless, that is probably one vehicle that is somewhat cost competitive compared to the competition (looking at you, Leopard 2!). The F35 is monstrously expensive, but fighter aircraft are one of those things where you do generally get what you pay for. Naval vessels the US probably could make savings on outside of the really high end stuff like giant aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. South Korea could definitely knock up some similarly capable small and medium size warships for a lot less, simply because they build so many ships, both civilian and military. It's not that the US contractors will always offer the least value for money, sometimes they will be the best choice. But sometimes they won't be, and at the moment the US military is nearly always forced to pick the domestic option even when a better foreign procurement option clearly exists. Other militaries are generally more flexible.
    1
  2945.  @UmbraHand  Maybe it is, but if it is change is happening very slowly.
    1
  2946.  @2639theboss  If you enforce domestic production from foreign suppliers you're going to lose much of the savings off the bat, because they'll have to spend lots of money starting a production line in the US, so the bids will usually end up uncompetitive. South Korea doesn't have an expeditionary force, no, but with a neighbour like North Korea it's understandable why everything has to go into home defence. That doesn't mean their defence industry is dedicated to just that, they've successfully exported much of their equipment overseas. They're probably not going to be good at making a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (though they do build quite a few very large civilian ships and civilian nuclear reactors) but something like a littoral combat vessel would be right up their alley, since they do a lot of coastal patrols.
    1
  2947.  @mosesracal6758  It does seem like things might be beginning to change, though if they enforce domestic production it might not make much of a difference since you lose the economies of scale. Unfortunately increasingly bloated domestic contracts might eat up all the savings.
    1
  2948.  @2639theboss  That's not really true, look at the air force of many European militaries and you'll often find a mix of US aircraft and aircraft from several European countries. Similarly for the navy, except there aren't many US ships. In the end as I've said before it's probably not the really big stuff where the savings are likely to be realised. And it's not just the US military that has this problem, the UK military to a lesser extent also has quite a few domestic defence contracts that have gone off the rails.
    1
  2949.  @jonathanpfeffer3716  That's what "Buy American" means though, it doesn't mean no company not founded in the US can get a military procurement contract. And those requirements do tend to dissuade many companies that do not already have a US subsidiary (which in the defence space, isn't many). So the bulk of the contracts still go to US companies.
    1
  2950.  @MrSolLeks  That assumes some kind of war which completely shuts down all shipping routes into the US. I don't think even China is capable of that. And for the most part the US does have huge stockpiles of lots of military equipment.
    1
  2951. Gotta love the interior design, it screams early 90's with those exposed perforated I beams. Hopefully the building isn't demolished as it looks in fine condition.
    1
  2952. A*? I thought that was for graph traversal, you know, what your sat-nav uses to get directions?
    1
  2953. In the UK some German British citizens were interred in camps, only about 20,000, the rest either had some restrictions placed on them, or no restrictions at all (such as most Jewish refugees). I don't think they were forced to forfeit their assets though. I believe in the US some Germans of Latin American descent were interred. In some occupied countries in mainland Europe things got pretty bad towards the end of the war, being German, military or civilian, might get you shot if you stumbled across the wrong partisan group.
    1
  2954. I'd love to hear one of these where they just keep the "extra" money and tell the call centre person to get stuffed.
    1
  2955.  @MariA-bu2jv  The Darien Gap says hi.
    1
  2956. It's basically a sci-fi moon buggy for Antarctica.
    1
  2957.  @IIXxSLAYERxXII  The moon buggy is, this probably isn't!
    1
  2958. Unleashed dogs aren't generally illegal outside of urban areas. Otherwise hunting dogs wouldn't be a thing.
    1
  2959.  @Helperbot-2000  Guide dogs are usually on leads, in case you haven't noticed.
    1
  2960.  @Helperbot-2000  They aren't going to let them run off though, regardless of what they can see. Regardless, there's not licencing system for what a "hunting" dog is so all dogs are allowed to be off lead unless posted otherwise in rural areas.
    1
  2961. I think AOC is likely to become a long term heavy hitter in the Democratic party, I don't think she's going to make it to the presidency. I don't think with her current position she'll be able to appeal enough to the more suburban and rural, mostly white, moderates to get over the line in a primary, and won't attract the same in a presidential election. She does a great job representing the urban youth and/or minority populations and they can certainly keep her in power, but her appeal is still just too narrow for the whole country. Maybe she can make vice for a more centrist candidate sometime in the future, I could see that happening.
    1
  2962. I think regarding the body cameras, depending on how the data from them are used, could possibly make police officers less effective in their roles. If you know that any deviation from the standard procedures may be subject to scrutiny and possible disciplinary action, you are going to do everything by the book, instead of using discretion and experience to be more effective at policing. The example of letting people off minor misdemeanours is a good one, because sometimes that is the best thing to do, but sometimes it's not, and if you're going to potentially get grilled by a higher up over your decision you're going to go by the book and avoid any discretion. So while I support body cams, I think there needs to be very strict rules on when and how the data can be used.
    1
  2963. The black on yellow is also the standard for ISO 7010 warning signs (which are generally the standard used outside the US) which ionising radiation is one of.
    1
  2964. I think some of the rhetoric on the left around making men "softer" and more in touch with their emotions as a solution has backfired. To a lot of men it just feels like they're being told to act more like women. Some men, maybe even most men, are just more stoic and less emotional by nature, and I think we need to understand that techniques that work with women to solve various issues don't work with men.
    1
  2965. That's not unusual.
    1
  2966.  @neilpickup237  That's interesting, it's happened quite often to me. Not usually as much as 15 minutes, but 5-10 isn't uncommon. Seems to happen more often on charter flights.
    1
  2967.  @deliezer  That might work with low volume, high value, "shelf stable" commodities like precious metals or uranium, but it doesn't work with oil. Many refined petrochemicals cannot be stored for more than a year before going "bad". Storing even a couple of weeks of local consumption requires hundreds of square km of oil storage tanks. You can't cover your country in oil tanks, no matter how much it would make.
    1
  2968.  @deliezer  No doubt there are some reserves, but they aren't as large as you think. The strategic reserve maybe stored for a long time, but it's still not that much oil. It's designed for emergency use in case of an acute supply interruption, not for price speculation. Some is stored for speculation, sure, but it's only a tiny fraction of global consumption.
    1
  2969. You do know CFA countries are free to leave the monetary union whenever they like and mint their own currency? In fact quite a few have done so over the years. Being in the union is a compromise, you gain stability with a loss in monetary policy control. In fact just recently France has begun to prepare to unpeg the CFA franc from the Euro and instead the currency will be allowed to float (and be renamed) and be completely managed by Africans. It's a risk, because if things go south in just one country in the CFA union the whole currency could become worthless.
    1
  2970. There are some things that are fantastic inventions that have no equivalent in nature. A great example is the wheel. There is nothing in the natural world that really resembles a wheel as a form of locomotion, and yet on a realtively smooth surface, it's pretty much the most efficient way to move. Biomimicry is a great source of inspiration, but sometimes there is a better "artificial" solution.
    1
  2971. I was under the impression that while systems and processes aren't copyrightable, they are patentable under certain limited circumstances, though of course patent protection tends to be a lot weaker and is easier to defeat in court.
    1
  2972.  @SonsOfLorgar  So is copyright, though it's much longer than a patent.
    1
  2973.  @karlr750  It's not that clear cut though. Game mechanics have been successfully patented in the past, in particular for video games (though whether any of these patents have been successfully defended is another matter). How it might differ from a rule is perhaps rather subjective.
    1
  2974.  @karlr750  There are plenty of video game patents that are not computer algorithms. They could be UI features, gameplay systems, methods of monetization and more. The only real difference between some of them and D&D being one is electronic and one is on paper. Also I was under the impression that you couldn't patent the algorithm itself, only the sequence of steps. So somebody could still take your math and change a couple things in the way it is processed by the computer, and you would have no claim. Their method would have to be totally identical for you to have a claim.
    1
  2975. @Marcel GRABOWSKI I'd say what we have are generally closer to what he calls "power centres" than strip malls. We just call them retail parks. There are few long, straight wide roads in the UK that are suitable for strip malls (never mind the lack of space in many places), the small shops and restaurants that occupy those places tend to be located in more urban locations in the UK, along a narrow town or city street that may be pedestrianised, or maybe isolated on their own site with their own parking if they're in a rural location. Not to say strip malls don't exist in the UK, but I think for the most part they are smaller, located further away from wide major roads (you might even have some tucked away in an industrial estate) and are less common.
    1
  2976. ​​ @ukj5850 Well in the UK it isn't that large. France has way more black Africans than the UK. Largest immigrant group here are Indian/Pakistani.
    1
  2977. Clapboard is something I associate with holiday cottages, fisherman's huts, and static caravans in the UK. It seems to be associated with a summer retreat or service building rather than a year round dwelling.
    1
  2978. This feels like a place where I'd take more food home in a box than I'd actually eat in the restaurant!
    1
  2979. I think any kind of electrolysis arrangement would be too heavy, you'd need the unit plus a hefty power plant to run it. Maybe if it was a nuclear powered plane, but that isn't going to happen and it would probably be cheaper to just use the heat from the reactor to drive the engine.
    1
  2980. Personally as long as he doesn't start training his own paramilitary, I'm not too worried about an actual dictatorship.
    1
  2981.  @stuarthamilton5112  Putin has not drawn any red lines for us to cross. Anything regarding nuclear weapons has been a vague half hearted threat. Because Putin isn't an idiot whatever you think of his ideology. He knows he's not prepared to climb the escalation ladder all the way to the top.
    1
  2982. The hours would definitely be a problem, Germans are hard workers but value their time off.
    1
  2983. I don't think it would be possible to build a fast train without tunnelling most of the route at enormous expense.
    1
  2984.  @jonashageboke8993  Nuclear would be ideal for large ships if it wasn't for the expense of a specialised crew.
    1
  2985.  @idjles  It has been done though, and there's nothing inherently prohibitive about the design of a turbofan or ramjet that prevents the use of hydrogen as a fuel.
    1
  2986. Is Conda still the standard or have people moved to Poetry?
    1
  2987. Interesting that both HK and Macau have egg tarts, both originally from Portugal, just that one came second hand via Britain.
    1
  2988.  @soc_rodjean_390  Police funding does tend to follow the level of crime, unsurprisingly.
    1
  2989. It kind of depends on what you define as "basic". Most developed nations do at least some of these to some extent, but many would argue that is isn't enough, and many would argue it is too much (the "Sky TV, Booze and Fags" argument). Free food in the US comes as SNAP, and basic education is free in developed nations pretty much universally (and many of them to a more advanced level too). But of course, "basic" food probably means no steak and lobster, shelter would be a dreary concrete shoebox, and education is not always high quality. What quality of food and housing should be provided at no cost? If they're pretty dire then only the desperate would settle for them and the economy may not change much, because not that much has actually changed. If it is at a level which satisfies most, then people may not be incentivised to work and earn as much (depending on their aspirational personality) so that could alter the economy, much like a large UBI. And of course, as the quality goes up, the question of how to pay for it has to be bridged.
    1
  2990.  @adamperdue3178  Plus so much of the interior is notoriously difficult to traverse.
    1
  2991. If I ever moved to Japan I'd want a cute little farmhouse out in the countryside surrounded by forests and rice fields. But I can imagine that would be nowhere near any well paying jobs.
    1
  2992. I can't see how Trump could destroy the US economy without taking himself and his family down too. If he would be prepared to sacrifice his own comfortable standard of living then maybe, but it's still fundamentally in his interests to have a solid US economy after he is no longer president. Plus not to mention an economically ruined US would likely be a very dangerous place, with all the available firearms it would put some of the South American nations to shame for violence and murder, and Trump would have a lot of enemies after his head.
    1
  2993.  @andrasbiro3007  I think that would be a bit premature. He's still got a good legal team, and even if he is imprisoned, it won't be for long and probably not in the nastiest conditions. Would he really want to risk his life or his livelihood just to go all scorched earth on the US? After all, he's still looking for a comeback in 2024.
    1
  2994. Probably not going to work in less densely populated areas.
    1
  2995.  @SpudderRail  The thing is, will the concession areas stay the same? Northern has already kind of proven itself to be too big and ungainly, I think it will be broken up. Manchester is already planning on taking over its own commuter lines Merseyrail/Overground/S-Bahn style. The Scotrail model may be an option, an "operated by" label that can be easily changed. It's just with a concession model, all the need for "balancing" in the old system is kind of pointless. You may as well portion it out in a more logical fashion. But what can I say, I'm a fan of a single livery. I see it with DB and NS and I think it looks good. Maybe others prefer the patchwork.
    1
  2996.  @SpudderRail  TfGM is planning on poaching several commuter routes in Greater Manchester, so those will almost certainly change.
    1
  2997.  @SpudderRail  There are a couple of lines that stop either within Greater Manchester or just outside it, those could be easily taken over. Other routes will have to share with regional and intercity services going further out, but it could be done, many S-Bahn systems in Germany do this. It's in the rail prospectus, and was originally proposed to start in 2025 when the franchise agreements ran out, but I could see it being brought forward.
    1
  2998. Movie explosions do often use a small amount of high explosive like a quarter stick of dynamite, but that's mainly just to throw the gasoline up into the air and blow some debris around (which will have been checked to remove any dangerous projectiles). A small spark generating firework is often added to ensure the gasoline does catch light.
    1
  2999. The moral quandary around palm oil is especially difficult because it directly competes with another food related moral issue: veganism. The most direct substitutes for palm oil or coconut oil (which is just as bad at scale) are butter and lard. If you're a vegan and you want to eat cakes, cookies or any other food product which requires saturated fat as an ingredient, you've really got no other choice but palm or coconut oil. No other plant based fats are either saturated enough or have enough yield to meet demand. Going forward, we can massively slash saturated fat consumption, which means biscuits, cakes and even many non-food items becoming much more rare and expensive, or we can look to science for trans fat free hydrogenation (which isn't as outlandish as it might sound, already GMO yeasts are being looked at that could hydrogenate oils). Hell, maybe we'll make a palm oil tree that can grow in temperate climates, who knows!
    1
  3000. Air resistance is not the primary enemy when it comes to faster ground transportation, bends are. No matter what transit tech you use, be it conventional HSR, Maglev or Hyperloop, the faster you go, the shallower the bend you can take without damaging either the vehicle or its passengers. So unless the Hyperloop track is ruler straight, in a lot of these cases you could achieve the same speed for your track profile with conventional HSR or Maglev, which is going to be much cheaper and probably less energy intensive (you'll need a lot of pumps to keep the air out of that tube!). This pretty much puts paid to Hyperloop in places like Europe, you can't just draw a straight line on a map between two cities and start laying down tubes, there are far too many things in the way.
    1
  3001.  @hurrdurrmurrgurr  Grassland is not fertile land, it's marginal land. You can't replace cattle with insects, insects don't eat grass. They also don't produce manure that can be used as a fertiliser for crops elsewhere. Hydroponics and vertical farming are both technologies which have their own problems being deployed at scale.
    1
  3002.  @hurrdurrmurrgurr  Find me an insect species that will munch on my lawn like a cow and I'll be very impressed.
    1
  3003. In theory, sure. In practice there's a whole heap of problems around energy security, maintenance and transmission infrastructure.
    1
  3004.  @prattyasheemahanta3318  Well, it's not that simple. The Sahara desert is chosen for a reason, you couldn't put the panels in Northern Europe and get the same result. We have small scale solar parks already in countries like Germany, but they don't account for a more than a small fraction of generation.
    1
  3005.  @luck3949  I think the technical challenges of a self driving vehicle match or exceed the challenges of landing an aerial drone. So it might be easier to land the drone in the long run.
    1
  3006. What these articles seem to think of as "dinky, adorable little ponies" seem to be close to pit ponies from the 18th century, that were specifically bred to be small so they could fit into mineshafts.
    1
  3007.  @Apathy.Apathy.  Well, most of the projects going up now were devised well before Covid. If anything that slowed things down.
    1
  3008. If you think the car symbol is anachronistic, the train symbol is worse! Most road signs still depict some 1930's steam engine instead of a modern diesel or electric train. I believe only recently have those been updated in some European countries. Even the tram symbol is generally out of date as it depicts a double arm pantograph instead of a modern single arm in most countries.
    1
  3009. Affirmative action is a difficult subject. It's easy to think it's a good idea if you are secure in your own job or education, but I can imagine you'd be very bitter about it if you got rejected from your dream college or job because you were a straight white male.
    1
  3010. 11:52 That, and the decreasing popularity of travelling circuses over the decades. As far as I know all the traditional big players in the US are now extinct.
    1
  3011. The problem with many of these "breakthroughs" is there are other hurdles the press release doesn't talk about.
    1
  3012.  @nerdy_crawfish  There aren't that many alternatives to lithium that are as abundant and energy dense for batteries. No point having a battery that needs just as much mined minerals as lithium.
    1
  3013. It has it's advantages, but also disadvantages, you can end up boxed in by high rises and lose nearly all your natural light, or have a nightclub spring up next door and keep you up at all hours. It probably helps that Japan's topsy turvy property market means that the building itself is worthless after a few years, so few people get attached to their home all that much. Coupled with a shrinking population and it probably isn't that hard to move to a new plot and start again if you don't like your neighbourhood anymore.
    1
  3014.  @thecashier930  You're really living up to the stereotype there!
    1
  3015.  @Alarios711  Plasma fluid dynamics inside a fusion reactor is not the same as basic aerodynamics. We might understand more now, but there's still a lot we don't know because some physical phenomena are just vastly more complex and harder to study. Thankfully massive increases in computing power have meant we can start to understand and model these more complex physical phenomena. This true not just for fusion energy, but materials science, medicine, even the fundamental nature of the universe itself. To think we know everything that is and isn't possible is incredibly hubristic.
    1
  3016. @WolfCoder  Why? Electromagnetic and inertial confinement work pretty well, and the more we learn about the behaviour of the plasma, the better we can design the containment. We've got better and better computers modelling the physics now.
    1
  3017.  @RCAvhstape  In terms of passenger aircraft, Lockheed is not a competitor to Boeing, so it makes sense to work together.
    1
  3018.  @KuK137  RR or GE doesn't get blamed for the 737 MAX crashes, because they don't work on the flight controls. It would depend of what LM is responsible for.
    1
  3019. How does it work with the nations in Oklahoma? It must be rather different, considering these nations have quite a few large settlements and I would assume a majority non-native population, at least in some of them.
    1
  3020.  @Knnnkncht  Sadly still a concept, and for a hot hatch it's a bit on the chunky side. But one to watch perhaps.
    1
  3021.  @jaredkennedy6576  It's just really hard to make a compact and light electric car that doesn't have crappy power and range. Pretty much impossible perhaps. Many of these electric hot hatchbacks are nearly as big as estate cars.
    1
  3022. Asteroids are one of the few extinction level events we have the technology to prevent. Give enough early warning, we could send up a bomb, kinetic impactor or tug to nudge it out of the way. Even a relatively tiny bump done a decade or so before impact could be enough to make it miss the earth.
    1
  3023. It's still a growing industry despite setbacks. We are seeing a decline in business travel in high income countries, but that's more than offset by increasing demand in middle income countries.
    1
  3024.  @RhetoricaRhamnusia  Another issue is increasing concentration of high paying jobs in large urban agglomerations. In countries with less restrictive planning rules house prices are often still rising in these places if perhaps not as much.
    1
  3025.  @Shaferyy  Surely the plastic would either be burnt off or form slag on top of the aluminum?
    1
  3026.  @Seriously_Unserious  Glass is in the discussion, but weight, required thickness and fragility have always been issues. It also requires significantly more energy to melt.
    1
  3027. I think we can compare RoP with another fantasy reboot, The New Legends of Monkey from Netflix. Both received backlash from diversity casting, though Monkey got it from the political left rather than the right, because as we all know diversity casting is only there to reduce the number of white people, if it's replacing an all Chinese cast then it's a bad thing. The tone and style was also quite different to the original, the reboot pulling heavily on 90's made for TV fantasy shows like Xena and Hercules, oozing with cheesy dialogue and rather fake looking sets and effects. In other words it was absolutely a divisive reboot. But it still did fairly well, with 59% audience score on RT for the first series and 65% for the second. I think for new audiences and children who hadn't seen the original Chinese version, it was seen as a fun family-friendly retro fantasy series, much like the reboot of The Mummy did in cinema, turning a schlocky horror into an Indiana Jones style adventure franchise. RoP has not had the same reaction, as you say. It's not different enough to be complete overhaul (as such a famous fantasy series it probably never could be), and it's not similar enough to be considered a faithful spin-off to the original material. So it ends up stuck in a position where it's pleasing nobody. Honestly at this point I wonder if doing something similar to what The Mandalorian or Andor did in Star Wars would have been better. Focus on something that's only lightly covered in the existing lore, and give themselves more of a blank canvas to do what they want. Maybe don't set it in Middle Earth at all, there are plenty of nearly undescribed lands outside it, full of people that could be nearly any shade of skin tone you want. Throw in a few characters travelling from Middle Earth, and you've got a lot of flexibility in the story you can tell.
    1
  3028. They are for some smaller aircraft.
    1
  3029. When mentioning stomach acid pH, what's really odd is human stomach acid is about the same pH as a Hyena, far far lower than any primate cousin. Its why acid reflux is such a problem for us. The theory goes that our distant ancestors would consume raw decomposing meat like modern hyenas when we started out on the African savannah, before we discovered fire and cooking.
    1
  3030. Investors are the corporation though (if it is publicly traded).
    1
  3031.  @johniii8147  If it's outside the passenger's control, that's what missed departure insurance is for. In the end, telling someone they should have left earlier can get absurd. Should they arrive 12 hours before the flight? 2 days? Clearly not, but sometimes circumstances could arise that would cause the most prudent passenger to be late.
    1
  3032.  @BrotherNick1984  I would imagine there would be additives that you could use to lower the freezing point if needed, currently it's just cheaper to blend with fossil diesel. I'm surprised LNG is used considering the extra volume and restrictions in some places.
    1
  3033. For Europe the length of the lockdown is going to be crucial. If it ends up extending into the summer then many charter airlines are going to have almost no income for the whole of 2020. Even scheduled airlines will suffer greatly as most of their customers also travel during the summer months. I wouldn't be surprised after this is over if some flag carriers are temporarily nationalised in Europe, or governments increase their stake just to keep them alive. What happens to budget and charter airlines is less certain. Easyjet/Ryanair maybe deemed "too big to fail" and we might see partial government ownership of them too, though I expect other budget and small regional airlines will go under. Charters are probably most likely to be left to die, since there are usually scheduled alternatives, even if they are not direct. That said, if it is over by the summer, airlines could see a massive surge in demand, as tourists rush to book something last minute and business travellers make up for lost time. It depends on how confident people are that the pandemic is really "over".
    1
  3034.  @rogerphelps9939  I mean at that point why bother travelling anywhere? We'd be in a "ready player one" situation.
    1
  3035. I think once they have a test bore at least twice as deep as Kola then we'll know if this is viable or not. If they fail, then it isn't, if they succeed but it cost tens of billions and drilling another would cost the same, then it's not viable. If they succeed and it could be repeated at a reasonable price, then it's viable. This really is the nuclear fusion of geothermal energy, there's a lot of potential but also a lot of unknowns. Though even if they do find it's not viable to replicate, the scientific knowledge gained would keep geologists busy for years!
    1
  3036.  @SmallDoki  It's an odd metaphor when you think about it. Surely all of them are "Indians"?
    1
  3037.  @ChUwU5  Both really. Certainly the social liberal policies of Volt would be a deal breaker for many, including some federalists.
    1
  3038.  @GiokkuWr  There are probably some good right wing arguments for federalisation, particularly in economic and foreign policy.
    1
  3039.  @haltor8821  In terms of social and environmental policies, they are solidly left wing. Economically perhaps not, but I get the impression the former matters more to voters nowadays.
    1
  3040.  @haltor8821  Perhaps Norway is a bit different, but in most places elsewhere radical environmentalism and left wing social policy tend to go hand in glove.
    1
  3041.  @haltor8821  I guess it depends on what you mean by "radical". I'd consider something like hefty sin taxes on meat and fossil fuel use radical, something that would have a strong impact on the lives of everyday citizens. If you want to get really radical we get into the Anarcho-primitivist and degrowth agendas, and they can't be anything other than extreme left since they require a complete abandonment of capitalism to work. I will concede that's a very fringe group of environmentalists though.
    1
  3042.  @TruthTeller-100  Which continues to exist because of the GFA. If there is a successful border poll and NI joins ROI, the CTA can be disbanded.
    1
  3043. American Dad did it years ago. So did the Simpsons.
    1
  3044. Now I'm imagining a malevolent AI with a valley girl accent.
    1
  3045. I'm sure I learnt somewhere that the Abadan Crisis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abadan_Crisis ) was a significant contributor to the great smog, as many homes and businesses that were using cleaner petroleum had been forced to switch to dirty coal.
    1
  3046. It would be interesting to see how middle class investors would react to making investment "harder". These people are more likely to be unwilling to spend large amounts of time or money either managing their investment themselves or paying top dollar for the best financial advisors to manage it for them. If we also assume the common tax incentives for small investors (in many cases they may pay no tax at all) go along with a rise in capital gains tax, then the savings vs. investment account tips more in favour of saving, particularly if cash returns rise. But of course if there's nowhere that gets them good returns without a lot of hard work, then maybe they just won't bother to save as much. Better to enjoy the moment than hoard cash in a savings account that barely exceeds inflation, or send it to an advisor which skims a third off in fees, or spend ages learning to become a savvy investor.
    1
  3047. Crush incidents can happen anywhere there's a big crowd. So you'd have to ban your teenagers from all kinds of events, and would that be worth it?
    1
  3048. A combination of factors, an aging nuclear fleet in France that really needs to be replaced meant a lot of reactors were down for extended maintenance periods, Germany shutting down its reamiang power plants and record high temperatures that meant river cooled nuclear power plants had to throttle back otherwise their cooling discharge would overheat the river causing harm to wildlife.
    1
  3049. The first instance honestly wasn't bad, it was patriotic but tasteful. This is just lurid.
    1
  3050. I can appreciate their concern, driving such a road in a truck is a hair raising experience, if the road is icy you might not be able to stop before you plunge off the edge. And there are alternative options like thermal scanners and convoying that could be used.
    1
  3051.  @argentonath  That's a solution that could be implemented during off peak periods as well, not just in adverse conditions. Thing is, the road doesn't have to be snowed up in order to be additionally dangerous for trucks compared to other vehicles, if it's wet or slightly icy that could also pose a challenge.
    1
  3052. Hemp is overhyped. It's been marketed as a wonder crop only because it was illegal to grow in the US for decades, which led some to think it was big corp holding it back for fear this miracle crop would destroy their industry. Well, it's been legal in the rest of the world for a long time, and it's never grown outside of a small niche. Hemp clothing requires intensive processing to make it remotely comfortable compared with cotton or polyester, the oil is really little different from similar cooking oils. What it is good for are rough fibres to make rope, cloth, insulation and some construction materials. You can make bioplastic with it, but you can do the same with many other plants. Same with paper and cardboard (though wood is still by far the best in this regard).
    1
  3053. The US does too, in fact much more than Europe does since the railway network is geared for freight rather than passengers. Routes are shorter in Europe because Europe is smaller, that's pretty much it, you can get from one end to the other in 4-5 days, and much of the industry is located in central europe, so really 2-3 days is the longest most routes will be. What Europe does do more than the US is move goods by barge and ferry, long navigable rivers, an extensive canal network, and long coastlines make this the preferred option for bulk materials, but even some manufactured goods will travel this way.
    1
  3054.  @adolforodolfo6929  Would "they/them/theirs" be considered neutral animate, especially nowadays?
    1
  3055.  @adolforodolfo6929  In general, I've found they\them\theirs is used when either the gender is unknown or as a third person plural regardless of if the genders are the same or mixed. We don't seem to have gendered plural pronouns (I believe Spanish does, though it defaults to masculine if mixed).
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  3056. If we want to go on examples from Europe, likely there would be swings between centre-left and centre-right coalitions every few years. The progressives would not get everything their way, they would be in power some of the time but would need votes from the centrists to get their policies through. I think Obama, Clinton and Bush Sr. would have all been reasonable candidates for president even in a PR system as the centre parties are likely to be the largest and most popular. You wouldn't get people like Trump, but I doubt you'd see Bernie or AOC in power either. But the US has some special considerations. Ethnic interest parties (African American and Hispanic) would likely be far more powerful there, and might switch coalitions depending on who can sweet talk them (don't assume they're left wing by default). So the dynamics of a PR system would be interesting.
    1
  3057. While the threat of Antifa may have been overblown by some media outlets, that does not mean they are harmless. Personally, I think they are a slightly more organised version of your typical anarchist mob who go and smash in shop windows whenever there's a protest against the bankers. Not a massive threat by any means, but still a nasty group you don't want to deal with.
    1
  3058. Nowhere truly does.
    1
  3059. I think seeing them less as filters and more as barriers makes more sense. Because as you said there is an alternative to destruction, stagnation, a species simply never manages to advance further but doesn't destroy itself.
    1
  3060. This actually happened in my city, but not with a road, with a railway. They built a new section of track to form a full wye between three rail lines, but one of those lines was already heavily congested, so when they tried to run new services using the new track that line became gridlocked so they quickly went back to the old schedule. Years later, that piece of track is still lightly used while work to ease congestion on the feeder line proceeds at a snail's pace with construction still years away.
    1
  3061. I can imagine there would be "pincer" like jetways that can adjust themselves for multiple sizes of aircraft. Will probably have several doors along their length for the largest planes, but only some would be used for smaller planes. Or, by the looks of the design, you could back the thing up and enter/exit from the rear.
    1
  3062. To be fair, the citizens of these countries generally do have a decent standard of living, not so different to those in western Europe or the US. The migrant workers often live in squalor though.
    1
  3063.  @jackogrady3118  There's a theory that there's a sweet spot for struggle that spurs innovation and success without getting complacent and sitting on your laurels. China had it too easy, Africa had it too hard. Europe had it just right.
    1
  3064. My takeaway from this is that Tesla is a high risk high reward investment. If they do manage to dominate the future of low density transportation with auto-taxis or whatever, then it's all golden. But that is a significant if, and if it doesn't work out then the stock will tank and maybe the whole thing could collapse. There's plenty of reasonable concerns, competition could catch up, governments may force them to break up, self driving tech development falters etc. And let's be honest, some of Musk's other forays into transportation (Boring Company, Hyperloop) are much less successful, some would say unviable. He's not Midas no matter what some of his disciples might say.
    1
  3065.  @user-hb6xb5qb6j  Begone, spambot.
    1
  3066.  @TheKindleySpotter  Hmm, fair enough. Seems in breach of the E261 rules unless nobody demanded to be put on an earlier flight. But considering where they were diverted to, perhaps that was the case!
    1
  3067.  @FictionHubZA  East Asia is a young protagonist who has unearthed their great grandfathers old books.
    1
  3068. I don't think we'll likely ever see the US have a rail network like Europe, Japan or China, the distances between city clusters is just too great. Long distance rail is too far to be competitive with air travel, even if air travel became a bit more expensive. What is possible are parts of the country where these cities are clustered connecting themselves together. Perhaps the one exception is the north east, which has a population density that's closer to parts of Europe so could probably support a more comprehensive rail network.
    1
  3069.  @odzergaming  Russia doesn't have a comprehensive HSR network, China has a population 4 times that of the US on a similar landmass.
    1
  3070. The US and many other countries could have gone the French route, and gone big on nuclear before renewables were viable. Of course that may have meant a couple more Fukushima level accidents in the last 50 years, but I guess compared to the teratonnes of CO2 emissions saved over that period, it may have been a price worth paying. And it's likely the reactors we would be building today would be cheaper, more efficient and safer than the enormously expensive monsters we're still considering.
    1
  3071.  @GonzoTehGreat  It would have been a difficult call to make. If they'd stayed behind in some capacity to create a more peaceful transition, would it have helped? Hard to say really. It didn't help they were pretty much flat broke after the war and had their own nation to rebuild, they couldn't afford to do peacekeeping, even if they had a responsibility to do so. Maybe with some assistance from the allies something could have been worked out, but it's fair to point out that this wasn't their problem.
    1
  3072.  @GonzoTehGreat  Then the argument becomes what exactly "every effort" would have entailed, and what the consequences of those efforts could have been for an exhausted UK and a shattered Indian subcontinent. Every decision from colonisation up to independence can be answered with a ton of justified hindsight, you can pretty much preface any explanation with "well if they hadn't done X all those years ago, this wouldn't have happened." If the UK had allowed independence from a position of strength they could have managed a more peaceful transition (which has occasionally happened with other colonial divestments), or if they hadn't fostered religious division then there wouldn't be such a strong religious conflict (though there was the "common enemy" aspect holding these groups together), or if the EIC never existed which would have meant the UK government would have never taken control in the first place (But then we'd be looking at a totally different world, so that really treads into the weeds of speculative history). I agree that the British could have done better, even with what they had and the corner they'd backed themselves into things could have been settled more intelligently. But how much better I think is up for debate. Whether they could have prevented significant conflict without diverting too many resources from their own nation (which could have resulted in political revolt at home) is hard to say.
    1
  3073. ​@TheShreester You've not made it clear at all. Your "best effort" argument relies on past action being different, often decades before the event. It's like saying the solution to climate change is we should have stopped using fossil fuels 30 years ago. It's correct, but it's not a productive position. UK and HK was a completely different situation, but perhaps you have a point. Maybe your argument is that the UK should have continued to occupy India by all means necessary until it had the means to ensure a peaceful transition. Whether that was even possible is more speculation.
    1
  3074.  @GonzoTehGreat  That's still quite a bit of hindsight that would have been required for a better transition. Plus shedding territory which could help the war effort (remember there were 2.5 million Indian soldiers in WWII) was probably the last thing on the UK's mind. Was it selfish? Yes, but you can see how a UK threatened by the Nazis would have seen India as invaluable. We can talk forever and a day about what that British could have done years before they decided on partition or independence that would have made it better or avoided it entirely. But I'm focusing on what the British did given the situation they were in (of their own making you may argue) and posing the question of how much better it could have gone given the circumstances. My argument is that the situation they were in was so dire that bloodshed was practically inevitable, which is why I think of the partition as a difficult and imperfect solution from a set of very limited options, that could have been executed better, but not as an inherently bad act in isolation.
    1
  3075.  @GonzoTehGreat  I think it's fine to study it in isolation. How people, and countries, react to a bad situation, be it of their own making or not, is important. You've dug yourself into a hole, what's the best thing to do to get yourself out of it? Telling them they shouldn't have dug the hole in the first place isn't productive. It's like when a person who has done many bad things tries to sort things out and make things better. You can absolutely judge what they are doing in isolation from their previous actions. That doesn't mean you have to forgive them for everything else they've done, but you can argue they still tried to make things better, even if their situation made "making things better" very difficult if not impossible. and if you are arguing that they weren't trying to make things right, you need to come up with alternative which they could have chosen instead, without erasing their past actions. Saying what they did was bad because of what they did before, means they can't have done anything that wasn't bad. So all you can say is that all their actions were bad, and at that point would have been bad not matter what they did.
    1
  3076.  @GonzoTehGreat  I don't think your approach is invalid. Studying the big picture is important as well, I agree. But I think studying in isolation is also useful. To use your WW2 example, I can study the tactics of a particular battle in isolation without having to take the context of the entire war into account. It's not that one of us is wrong and the other is right. Both of the ways we approach the issue have their merits and shortcomings. Speaking of conclusions, what conclusion can you draw by looking it at from your perceptive? Whatever the British did would have been inherently bad because there were no longer any good options due to past action. So they basically no longer have any agency because of what they already did. Looking at it in isolation, you can ask the question what the British could have done better in that situation, and if they could, why they didn't (incompetence or malice). Again I come back to the bad person trying to redeem themselves, it doesn't mean you need to forgive them for everything they did before, but you can at least ask the question if their actions were in good faith.
    1
  3077. It's cheaper than a MyRIO, that's for sure. Though it's not really powerful enough for some more advanced automation and robotics tasks.
    1
  3078. That can be true to an extent. In cases of extreme poverty, aid could actually allow for a dictator to be overthrown. A hungry farmer will rebel, a starving farmer is too sick to rebel.That can often be why dictators restrict the food supply, if you just barely keep your population alive, they will simply not have the energy to resist your rule. This especially true in extractive economies, where the dictator controls natural resource mines which they can hire overseas companies to extract resources from in return for a few palms greased in the government.
    1
  3079. Seems that would be more appropriate for HAI.
    1
  3080. I think in the modern globalised world, eating the rich doesn't work anymore. Once the rich get wind, they start shifting assets overseas, to a more friendly country. And internally, businesses become less efficient and less competitive, because why make the effort to grow any bigger? Where it seems to have worked, there's strong cultural inertia keeping businesses from fleeing. Where that isn't present, it doesn't work.
    1
  3081. Shared space is fine as long as everything is travelling at very low speeds. For faster traffic, there simply won't be enough reaction time to prevent collisions, you would need to segregate each type of traffic in time (which is what a normal intersection does). They also discourage motorised traffic in general, because there's no point driving a car if you can only go 10mph, so you may see motorised traffic becoming lighter as people realise that it's faster to take a diversion around the shared space than go through it (while flow rate may increase on a single junction with high pedestrian traffic, if you did an entire street that may be a different matter). In the end I would expect to see this in areas where motorised traffic is already light, or in places where they want it to be discouraged from using.
    1
  3082. Of course it that case it failed, horribly. The US's attempt was reasonably successful.
    1
  3083. Stethoscopes are being superseded with portable ultrasound equipment, far easier to see what's going on when you can have a visual image of the heart or lungs.
    1
  3084. Don't need to engage in office politics when you have real politics in the office.
    1
  3085. More and more I get the feeling like Forbes is the trashy tabloid of business journalism.
    1
  3086. I think much of southern Europe is thankful for that, their tourist industries rely on millions of northern and central Europeans heading south for 1-2 weeks of lying on a beach and eating in restaurants every night every summer.
    1
  3087.  @a_lethe_ion  There's quite a few people with the surname England.
    1
  3088. Simple, just get rid of the states and have a cluster of democratic city states in a sea of republicanism /s
    1
  3089. ​ @michaeldunne338  Even so, the population of the metro Osaka area was still 7.5 million in 1950, only a million smaller than London, and now it is 19 million. London is about 9 million now, and Manchester metro has only gone from 2.4 million to 2.7 million. The urban population of the UK is about 83% vs. 91% in Japan, but the UK has a lot of small towns and cities, and suburban areas, which still count as urban, tend to be significantly lower density.
    1
  3090.  @michaeldunne338  That's stretching it a bit, it pretty much includes the entirety of south east England and much of East anglia. It still doesn't change the fact that no city in the UK outside of London has a metro area of more than 3 million.
    1
  3091.  @TalesOfWar  I'm not saying it's not realistic to connect UK cities up with HSR, european cities of similar size are. But it's understandable why the UK doesn't have the same scale of HSR as Japan, any why it wasn't done 50 years ago.
    1
  3092.  @TalesOfWar  Japan is no stranger to road building, there are many motorways that cut right through cities.
    1
  3093. Once we have access to extremely cheap and reliable energy generation, then I can see it taking off.
    1
  3094.  @iamjimgroth  For certain crops that can't grow well in those climates, but then there are greenhouses.
    1
  3095.  @iamjimgroth  What about heating? You can have the brightest LED lights in the world, but they'll do bugger all if it's too cold for the crops to grow!
    1
  3096.  @iamjimgroth  As much as the sun? I'm pretty sceptical of that.
    1
  3097. What XR wants is a world where people travel a lot less, that's why they aren't in favour of HS2. No need for HSR if people rarely leave their local area. Not that I support such a position, but it is at least logically consistent.
    1
  3098.  @MattyP62618  Many XR members are either anarcho-primitivists, or not far off. In their eyes trade would be significantly lower than it is now as communities become more self sufficient and people massively slash consumption. It's a return to the slower world of a century or so ago. I agree that it's not a realistic viewpoint, but it would be more than possible to do without HS2 and save CO2 if they got their way (which they won't).
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  3099. My local airport was forward thinking and built a really long second runway well before they needed it. It's been underutilised for decades, now they're finally doing the terminal expansion to increase capacity.
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  3100. @ΟΜΑΙΜΟΝ ΟΜΟΔΟΞΟΝ Manchester
    1
  3101. You make it sound like in 2080 we'll never leave the house!
    1
  3102. Doesn't run ads? Sure that's not do true nowadays... seen some crypto nonsense on there recently.
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  3103.  @Goose-g2u  The sectarian divisions would have been a problem regardless of Ireland's status as a nation. I think the Troubles would have happened whether Ireland was fully independent earlier or not.
    1
  3104.  @Goose-g2u  I'm sorry, I can't see most of your comments, the YT censorship algorithm seems to be on overdrive, hopefully this gets through. In the end accepting or rejecting the treaty was never going to solve the sectarian issues or prevent partition, the protestants were not going to leave, most had ancestry in Ireland going back hundreds of years by then and exiling them would almost certainly provoke a response from the UK. Would the troubles have been different if the anti-treaty side won? Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure it would have still happened, even if it started a bit earlier. If you truly wanted to prevent that you would have had to wind the clock back to the 16th century.
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  3105.  @Lupercal6319  In the end you can't beat geography, the Republic of Ireland being so close to the United Kingdom and sharing a common language makes immigration in both directions easy. Capturing the north via some kind of insurgency would have been a pretty strong causus belli for the British to get involved again, and would have risked starting a guerilla war with the loyalists. I think Collins would have not risked that.
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  3106.  @shaddykack  Are you sure it's EV? Regular olive oil is okay to fry in.
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  3107.  @Nakia11798  Poor quality Teflon can be pretty bad, I agree. Generally I find you need to use quite a lot of oil to stop food sticking with a stainless steel pan, more than you might want in your food since you'll need to account for absorption.
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  3108.  @klubstompers  Don't be facetious. It'll rust if you store it improperly of don't use it for a while whether you wipe it or not.
    1
  3109. I wonder if the last one billed his client for the nonrefundable deposit.
    1
  3110. ​ @CjqNslXUcM Some have them on the books but they are pretty much unenforced.
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  3111. Honestly, I can't blame NASA for not wanting to overly rely on commercial launch providers for such an important programme, even if it means using an overpriced "in house" launcher built on a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. There's a certain additional risk about handing off too much of the control of future space exploration to a single private company. With SpaceX in particular, I think there's probably a feeling that giving them too much control over the hardware will make Mr. Musk want to do things his way, and I wouldn't be too surprised if he started to take control of the programme, he's made no secret about his own personal ambitions to lead his own exploration programme. I'm sure that would make a lot of Musk fanboys very happy, but it would definitely piss off NASA, and by that point there would be little they could do about it, short of spitting their dummy out and cancelling the whole programme. There's also the additional risk that SpaceX runs into some kind of trouble, and NASA is now left high and dry with no launcher. NASA is making a point that they want to involve multiple commercial companies in any future moon mission. That could mean in the future that launchers, transit vehicles and landers could be made by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and probably some other companies that aren't even on the radar yet. Then they have a diverse selection of companies that can provide redundancy in case one fails. But right now the only option that is close to SLS in its payload capacity is the F9H and, when it's ready, Starship. So NASA would be overly reliant on SpaceX without the SLS, and I don't think that's a risk they're willing to take.
    1
  3112.  @espenha  I think their concerns would be one and the same. NASA might have wanted a different launch vehicle, something better, but I don't think they'd want SpaceX to run the show either.
    1
  3113.  @espenha  That makes sense, lowering the payload requirement would open up the playing field to more competitors, perhaps even to some more novel launch concepts in the future that improve reusability even further. Given the choice between in-house or SpaceX though, I think NASA will go for in-house for the reasons I listed.
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  3114. There's two taco bells in Manchester, but there's stiff competition from home grown chain Barburrito which has double the number of locations, then there's a smattering of independent joints like Pancho's. Given the choice I'd take Barburrito over Taco Bell any day, it's more expensive but it certainly tastes a lot nicer and the "subway style" menu really suits Mexican food.
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  3115. To be honest I don't think places like Twitter or Bluesky are places where anyone should have an expectation of a private or even semi-private conversation. That is what chatrooms are for, and have been so for decades. Nowadays there are so many choices of platform, from WhatsApp to Discord. There's even a middle ground of the special interest internet forum, something which is almost seen as a relic nowadays. Sure it's annoying when you get bots, trolls or people who don't understand the context, but I think that's the risk you take, and a stranger constructively adding to the conversation should not be unexpected or considered bad manners. I think the restaurant analogy is certainly interesting but I don't think it's completely comparable as it's possible on the internet to have exactly the same quality of conversation where nobody who isn't invited can listen in. It's like if your table could put up an invisible shield that blocks all sound in or out.
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  3116. I think ease of compliance is something that can really help reduce the burden of nessecary regulation. Too many regulations are overly complex and have unique and archaic compliance mechanisms, requiring lots of form filling and expensive time consuming training seminars for employees tasked with ensuring their employer complies with them. An efficient state beuracracy that has simple, user friendly ways to comply with regulation can really help reduce the harmful effects of nessecary regulation. A simple example would be online portals (actually built by people who understand the concept of UX and not just to tick a box) over reams of paperwork going back and forth.
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  3117. Germany does have a bona-fide military though, and it has been involved in some overseas combat operations, Bosnia and Afghanistan in particular. On the pacifism scale they're certainly lot more "normal" then Japan.
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  3118. The problem wasn't that they couldn't learn to code, the problem was they knew they wouldn't be hired over a young college grad in CS from an urban centre 300 miles away. Many were too old and living in the wrong place to get those kinds of jobs, even with the expansion of remote working. These rural mining towns were never going to be able to replace the jobs lost by mine closures, and any miner over about 50 wasn't going to get rehired in a completely different skilled occupation because they'd be only a few years away from retirement once they had retrained and moved to a more prosperous area of the country. With all that better to hang on to the mining job as long as possible and retire early in their LCOL town if necessary.
    1
  3119. To be fair, it kinda was in the early days, computer architecture was much less flexible and more limited, you had to build the hardware around the problems you wanted to solve a lot more. That changed with more general purpose computing later on.
    1
  3120.  @danharold3087  I'm aware, but this is not something that you can expect to keep happening whenever more power needs to be delivered. As I said there's a lot that needs to be changed to accommodate increased voltages, at some point the connectors themselves won't be suitable either, and it won't be as simple as making the pins thicker and providing better cooling.
    1
  3121.  @PCLoadLetter  It's fine now, but is it going to be fine in 5-10 years? That's really my question.
    1
  3122.  @brettspencer-curran8269  I think the CCS connector has a deeper shroud for more protection, it's probably bigger once you get past it, you just can't see it.
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  3123.  @johnbennett1465  That would make sense...if there was a floor 1.
    1
  3124.  @johnbennett1465  You'd have to be very confused if every other floor was alphanumeric. And it's not like other buildings on the campus don't have an I floor, it's just this building.
    1
  3125. Based on what happened to the last reserve currency, we'd need a literal third world war to dethrone the US dollar (to be replaced by Nuka Cola bottle caps I guess...)
    1
  3126. ​ @skp8748 I doubt that would have been enough to make Britain lose reserve currency status by itself. Britain managed to recover from WWI, but WWII left it broken and without aid from the US, it would have probably gone bust. That's probably the ultimate reason Britain lost its reserve position, the country with the global reserve being bailed out by another country tends to push people to thinking the country giving the aid should probably have the reserve currency.
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  3127.  @SebAnders  I don't see how that's possible. He doesn't have the support in congress.
    1
  3128. Or Road Guy Rob!
    1
  3129. The problem is, when it come to horrific crimes like murder, it feels better to convict someone that convict no-one. It's hard to say that there's not enough evidence to change anyone with the crime and that a horrific act must go unpunished.
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  3130. First? I think the Romans and Napoleon might object to that. At least the third.
    1
  3131. It's used in a lot of places people don't think about. GoreTex is a PTFE lining used in clothing, and there's really no alternative that is as good for waterproofing and breathability. Tbh, even if people stopped using non-stick pans, it would only make a small dent in PTFE production.
    1
  3132. Whether you agree with DEI or not, you can't deny the industry is full of grifters selling training and courses to corporations at ridiculous prices, paid huge sums of money to regurgitate lecture notes from a liberal arts degree or a book, and that it's also created a bloated middle manager class in many companies whose value is hard to measure. I'm not surprised in these more frugal times businesses are ditching them like the plague.
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  3133. Japanese Summer Day: Crickets Buzzing USA Summer Day: Impact Sprinklers Buzzing
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  3134.  @Trueo9re  Yeah, if it's that cheap you're unlikely to be getting cod or haddock, something like Vietnamese catfish, a farmed freshwater fish that's one of the cheapest you can buy.
    1
  3135.  @chaosflower4892  Lot of places get round it by just saying "fish" nowadays. I find it's increasingly common for there to be no choice of fish on the menu, not like it used to be, where you'd have cod, haddock or plaice at a minimum.
    1
  3136. I mean, it's not like JetBlue had a choice, they are legally obligated to put passengers on the next available filght after a certain length of delay from the EU. And I can imagine since Paris and Dublin to New York are both popular routes there were quite a few spare seats available on legacy airlines.
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  3137. We've been trying to starve them out for decades, it hasn't worked. If we go to war we will win, but the human costs will be enormous. I think there's really no alternative than the status quo, and to hope that somehow the regime collapses in on itself. It took a very long time for that to happen in the Soviet Union, and the cult of personality is arguably much stronger in North Korea, where people see him as something like a diety. We are probably in for a very long wait.
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  3138. Argentina could be Australia and Italy could be Germany for the same reason.
    1
  3139.  @gstrdms  What do you mean? If you go find the video that's pretty much the argument.
    1
  3140. Reliable connections would make public transportation a lot more effective in many cities around the world (not just the US). Imagine two suburbs with rapid transit stations on separate lines, both heading for the CBD. Running a bus between them is one option, but there might not be a direct route and the actual demand between the suburbs is probably pretty low, so you aren't going to get a high quality service. But if you build an orbital rapid transit line to connect some of the largest radial stations together, people can go in a little, around and back out without having to go through the CBD, and it would be a lot quicker than a slow, infrequent bus route would take. But if those connections aren't reliable, then it's no good. I'm imagining in the future with more automated transit, AI could be working to minimise connection times, speeding up and slowing down services to make overall journeys much quicker.
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  3141. I'd argue that in many ways the European empires often had a "franchising" model too. Just like with Rome, total central control wasn't realistic, so in many cases either a leader from the conquering nation was installed and given quite a lot of freedom to run things, or a native monarch or similar basically became a vassal. In the end the big difference in both is it wasn't voluntary. Nobody is forced to eat at McDonalds, but in most cases people are forced to be part of an empire.
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  3142.  @ThePathOfEudaimonia  There are some socialist/communist groups as in South America, but the continent isn't some hotbed of left wing radicalism.
    1
  3143. I think Spirit makes some parts for Airbus nowadays, even acquired a factory in Belfast off Bombardier to shorten some of the supply chain (though I think they still ship some parts across the Atlantic).
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  3144. ​ @team_fiasco There was a BBC prison drama called Time (as in, doing time). In the first series he was the main character.
    1
  3145. I think defective high voltage electrical equipment nearby could be a cause in some cases. That can cause vibrations which may produce low frequency noise.
    1
  3146. Heat stress can permanently change the structure of some polymers which does make them weaker, the only true way to get back the original strength would be to break the polymers apart completely and reform them.
    1
  3147.  @nousername5673  Pretty much. That's what Enzymes like PETase do. Hopefully we can find more. Unfortunately enzymes are often expensive to make in bulk.
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  3148. Fundamentally Scotland will want to make money from the land somehow. If it's turned into a preserve that's going to be tourism, if not then silviculture. That's the crux of the matter, preserves are nice and all but they can't burn a hole in the governments or landowners pocket.
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  3149. I think tribal politics gets in the way a lot of the time. African nations often lack the national unity found in places like China, your ethnic group comes before your country. I think the issue is that neither a continent of weak and pretty arbitrary states that carve up many ethnic groups, nor a massive patchwork of independent tribal nations is conducive to economic prosperity. The former breeds conflict and instability, the latter becomes too complex to coordinate (imagine an EU with 50-100 members over a continent several times the size).
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  3150. I have very tentative plans to visit Sardinia in September or October, nothing booked yet. However, I'm looking at a plan B in case flights are too expensive or a 14 day quarantine is still in effect, which would probably be travelling in my parent's motorhome somewhere in Scotland or France. Whatever I can manage I will do, because I do need to spend time away from home.
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  3151. This new remake of The Prisoner is clearly being done on a shoestring budget.
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  3152. I wonder if DEI/ESG has begun to repel more and more investors as culture war politics creeps into finance. Before it did attract more investment from progressive corners, and the rest were mostly indifferent, they didn't care as long as the stock price kept going up. But now I wonder if investors with more conservative politics are becoming more willing to divest from companies they feel run counter to their political beliefs, much as progressive investors have been doing for decades.
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  3153. I think that wouldn't be practical in some cases, you need to include dedicated remote control devices at sometimes considerable extra expense, or your product would need controls on the device itself, some of which would have to be so small to the point of being unusable.
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  3154. It's fine to write articles about politics and video games when it is relevant, be that the content of the games or in the industry itself. But Kotaku talked about it when it wasn't relevant, and did so in such an obnoxious and self assured manner that it was easy to see why they were so hated.
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  3155.  @piccalillipit9211  That's a good example of where things aren't so clear. China managed that statistic (if it's telling the truth, which it's probably not) through draconian authoritarian measures. Authoritarianism is usually a sign of an unstable society, as it promotes civil unrest which can contribute to collapse.
    1
  3156.  @angusyang5917  Indeed, and those monarchs that survive are the ones that give their subjects freedoms and don't intervene excessively in their affairs.
    1
  3157. Realistically I can't see any deal being made to abolish the electoral college without some kind of compromise to the small population states, they will want more powers as they'll argue they'll have little to no ability to influence the executive, they may as well not bother to vote at all. Even rural areas in more populous states may feel the same way. In fact I wonder if the fact the US has a fairly powerful federal executive might be one reason there's so much resistance to a popular vote, in many other countries that use the popular vote there either isn't an executive branch or the executive branch has much less power. I think in most parts of Europe even the rural areas are fairly populated, so they do have enough people to make a difference.
    1
  3158.  @anthonyglee1710  The question there is then why pay for BA at all? They're competing with airlines who have the same policy but half the ticket price.
    1
  3159.  @pamberinehondo9447  But it's not free unless you're in business, correct?
    1
  3160.  @pamberinehondo9447  The catering available is not the same though. HS rail services can serve something approaching a proper hot meal. Regardless, comparing planes and trains is probably not a good idea. Trains don't have nearly as much competition on routes, barring some exceptions like Ouigo there's usually no "low cost" model, so a train can't cater to a customer base that prefers service over value like airlines often can.
    1
  3161.  @Hugobros3  For the connectivity that interstates provide, probably not. Plus rail has far more stringent design requirements in terms of curvature and slope.
    1
  3162.  @dukctape  Back in those days, freight trains were smaller, faster and passenger/freight hybrid trains were common. Plus there was a lot of track, so freight trains did have a lot of the network to themselves.
    1
  3163. To me the diversity push was just very poorly handled, done in a way that was almost guaranteed to piss off a lot of hardcore Tolkien fans. I get the desire to introduce diversity into updated versions of existing media, and I'm generally not against it unless it would be ahistorical, I think there are many examples where it was done in a good way that was generally well received (you are always going to have a few racists!). With Tolkien's work, you had a revered author (who sits up there with Shakespeare in the UK) with a universe that is one of the most complex and well developed in SF and Fantasy. Naturally if you go messing with anything, you need to be super careful, people are going to be upset at any change, so if you are going to make a change or add new content, you need to do your research, and build a justification that works with the existing lore. Then when you announce the change or content, you need to give your audience that context that reassures them that you do care about the existing lore and that your change or addition integrates well with it. And I don't think Amazon did that, they released some pictures of black elves and dwarves with little to no context, and the hardcore fans assumed the worst, that Amazon didn't care about the lore at all, that to them the elves and dwarves of Middle Earth were, and have always been, races with a very wide mix of skin tones because that's more reflective of our modern human society in the west and because it's fantasy, skin tone has no functional bearing on any race whatsoever. Now that might not be true, at all, perhaps Amazon does have a decent lore that means these black elves and dwarves make complete sense being in Middle Earth, and I really hope they do because it would be a great expansion of the existing lore, but if they do they certainly haven't communicated it very well.
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  3164. It's probably the least worst of the alternatives at the moment. Coconut oil has a lower yield, there isn't enough supply of cocoa or shea butter, and butter or lard is a problem for vegans. That said, it's probably best it's used only where it's needed, mainly as a saturated fat in foods.
    1
  3165.  @mabamabam  Well there's not exactly many alternatives, animal fat is the only one currently. Otherwise a lot of foodstuffs simply couldn't be manufactured, no shortening for cakes or spread for toast for example.
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  3166. That makes me wonder if abnormally cold weather would be enough to turn the street lights on during the day.
    1
  3167. I would be interested to see if there's any difference with handedness. Do left handed people write backwards letters or words more than right handed people, or vice-versa?
    1
  3168.  @yvrelna  It's not as expensive as you might think, in urban areas there's already plenty of readily available places to stick a base station. It can be as simple as bolting a small grey box with a couple of antennae to a wall on a tall building, or a lamp post, and running an ethernet or fiber optic cable to a network switch. Smaller cells don't tend to need to connect to a lot of devices over a great distance, so they can be low power, and transmission attenuation from the device can minimise overlap. Of course data compression and multiplexing is always good, because it's still cheaper than building more base stations, but especially in urban areas with the latest technology, it's not a massive expense to add extra base stations.
    1
  3169.  @yvrelna  Less than ideal isn't so much of a problem when you're dealing with relatively cheap equipment. If it breaks, you send someone to swap the whole unit out and it gets repaired in a workshop rather than on site. In terms of heights, anyone who can use a scissor lift would be able to service most of them. Others just need access to a roof.
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  3170. It could still be partly TUI's fault, they may have oversold the flight or leased the wrong aircraft.
    1
  3171.  @doubleoof7907  Unless you live in an anarchist commune, you must have some private possessions.
    1
  3172. In some ways, it's worse. But in others, it's better.
    1
  3173. Realistically most journeys cannot have that level of contingency, it would make travelling absurdly expensive for the average person, and everyone would have to plan on departing several days early because they might get delayed, or they might need to go by bus instead of by plane, or something like that. It would also be a stressful nightmare for many people. Most just want to buy a ticket and end up at the destination within a reasonably reliable timeframe so they can actually do things like plan activities and be on time for family events.
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  3174. FYI just to clarify something, and I'm not saying this to downplay the severity of the situation, IARC classifications alone are not useful to evaluate the risks of a carcinogenic substance, only the strength of the evidence that it is a carcinogenic substance in the first place. Processed meats, alcohol, and tobacco are all class 1, but it's obvious they do not present an equal risk of cancer (in this case the risks are small with processed meats and large with tobacco, with alcohol somewhere in the middle) given sensibly equivalent amounts of exposure.
    1
  3175. And probably a reliance on imports from France, Denmark (when the wind blows), Sweden and Switzerland.
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  3176.  @johnathin0061892  Partly it's an issue of governance inside some of the nations, there can be a mix of elected and hereditary positions, which means their leaders can have different incentives to support or oppose certain issues. A hereditary leader is more likely to oppose development, since maximising the preservation of their culture keeps them in power, and they are not accountable to the population, whereas an elected leader is more likely to support development, if it means improving the living conditions of the population since that will keep them in power. So when a protest against a pipeline or mine comes up, it is important to see who is leading the protests. If it's all hereditary leaders, then we should verify if they truly do represent the will of the population.
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  3177. With modern scrubbers on the chimneys they're really not as dirty as they used to be. And the ash can often be mixed into concrete (it can actually improve some properties) for stuff like building foundations which saves sand and gravel, and processed further to remove recyclable metals.
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  3178. There have been some attempts to grow cocoa in greenhouses in southern Europe. Only small quantities have been produced, and obviously energy costs are a factor.
    1
  3179.  @hypernewlapse  I can imagine, cocoa has a complex combination of alkaloids that give it the "chocolate" flavour. Trying to replicate that with oats would be nigh on impossible.
    1
  3180.  @hypernewlapse  Honestly for that it sounds like you'd get away with just vegetable fat, sugar and brown food dye.
    1
  3181. I think the lesson is eating the rich sometimes works, in specific circumstances, but it can also go terribly wrong.
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  3182. Just a word about the main breaker, there's potentially going to be a hardwired fuse with a lower rating than the breaker in there somewhere, so just because the breaker is rated for 200A doesn't mean you can draw 200A!
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  3183. There are much less destructive ways of achieving the same outcome. We could spray salt crystals or sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.
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  3184. That must have been an expensive dish! I've seen bear steak on the menu in Finland for €160. I went for the mince as it was only €50. It is honestly the gamiest meat I've ever tasted, I wouldn't have been able to eat more than the small portion I had it was so rich.
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  3185.  @adamperdue3178  So is GDP, PPP is just a bit better. Really there's no metric we could use that isn't flawed, because intranational economic data is often poor and inconsistent between nations. The US is better than most because of its political structure.
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  3186. I think there's a certain amount of guilt from some Americans towards the Japanese in WWII, because of the nuclear attacks (as necessary as they might have been) and the treatment of Japanese civilians in the US (which while wasn't brilliant, is nowhere near comparable to what the Japanese did to civilians in Asia). Hence perhaps the more favourable treatment of them by Emmerich.
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  3187. Many reservations, but not all, operate in a pseudo-socialist manner, the land and property are owned by the tribe or the federal government, not the individuals who live there. Individuals can't buy or own property. Many have argued this system actually perpetuates native poverty by preventing them from building up wealth.
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  3188.  @AndersHenke  And even then trains aren't super spacious, social distancing would be difficult.
    1
  3189. ​ @comment6864 ​ I can't really speak for the US, but it is the place that coined the McMansion and "Keeping up with the Jonses" so there's got to be something to it.
    1
  3190. Aerospace grade is pretty meaningless really. Many different grades of aluminium go into an aircraft, one for the fuselage, another for the avionics, and another for the beverage cart! So any one of those could claim to be "aerospace grade", and at least one is going to be a cheap and cheerful alloy that's used in tons and tons of consumer products that do not claim to contain "aerospace grade" aluminium. It's also important to remember, that grades or alloys are all trade offs in material performance. Some may be genuinely superior to others in all respects (and therefore are more expensive), but mostly you consider the environment your alloy is going to be in, and then select your alloy based on the properties you need or don't need. You might want a steel with a high tensile strength, but you're not so bothered about corrosion resistance, for example.
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  3191. Part of it is probably about maintaining the democratic status quo (i.e. representative democracy). Paper ballots are too expensive to issue for 99% of decisions a government might have to make (unless you're Switzerland). So there's a justifiable practical reason why more direct democracy isn't feasible, you can't have a polling day every week. But with online voting, those barriers are removed, in theory you could have a public vote on lots of things, almost like a giant parliament made up of the citizenry. Of course most people would probably abstain from most referenda because they've got better things to do, but those with skin in the game could cast a ballot in seconds with a few clicks or taps. And I think if online voting was allowed you would see more calls for more decisions to go to the public.
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  3192.  @paulcooper3410  Well that's probably the reason why it's pissing so many people off. If it's not because of safety but to make driving less attractive, and generally to make journeys take longer in these areas which will encourage people to travel less far and use more local services (which feeds nicely into the "15 minute cities" conspiracy), then you can see why so many people would be angry about that. The safety aspect has also been emphasised more so some may feel the authorities are being misleading or dishonest.
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  3193. That's why a lot of hospital porters are male.
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  3194. Not if you're in space force.
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  3195. In some ways they don't need to. A train track is a pretty controlled environment compared to a road.
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  3196.  @henrywyckoff4301  In many modern driverless systems, platform screen doors actually make this impossible (or at least very difficult). But even so, platform staff and central control monitoring via CCTV can still stop a train.
    1
  3197. Well we do have to be somewhat careful, lest all the remaining green space is swallowed up by looming tower blocks.
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  3198.  @louismelahn1805  In some cases it may be nessecary, but I don't think it's unreasonable to consider how it might affect the character of a neighborhood. Urbanites and suburbanites have two very different views on what sort of environment they want to live in, and a peaceful low density neighborhood becoming more crowded and bustling is going to be a problem for a lot of people. Really you want to separate the two groups as much as possible.
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  3199. For being so green Germans burn a lot of dirty brown coal. Energiewiende seems to be less about CO2 and more about getting away from that scary Nuclear energy.
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  3200.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  You think if it was that easy we wouldn't have have done it already? That we wouldn't be using vast quantities of gas to balance out renewables instead of vast banks of batteries? That many countries still burn huge amounts of coal? C'mon. And no, most of the Lithium in the world does not come from China. It comes from South America, followed by Australia, then China. And South America has the lion's share.
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  3201.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  To me you sound like someone who has just taken the message from some environmental activist group like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth wholeheartedly and without criticism. Groups that ideologically oppose nuclear energy and therefore of course are going to argue we don't need it because in their mind renewables can do it all and there's nothing standing in the way. Of course they are going to ignore or downplay any challenges that might make that idea more difficult. Your blind faith in economic theory being selectively applied to renewables but not anything else seems to support that.
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  3202.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  I'll give you credit where it's due, you're not as bad as the crypto/NFT bros who think they'll replace traditional currency in 10 years. At least your position has something going for it.
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  3203.  @maskedavenger2578  If vehicles went round roundabouts at 5mph there would be little point having them. It wouldn't have much more capacity than an unmarked crossroads (or 4-way stop in the US).
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  3204. To be fair, most German political parties are anti-nuclear.
    1
  3205. Though, by sheer numbers, the problem is a significant global contributor to carbon emissions. If you can get hundreds of millions of people to cook on more efficient stoves, that might have a big impact.
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  3206. In the end, making yourself miserable for the sake of $5 isn't worth it.
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  3207.  @Maric18  I think you'd want fairly high capacity transit, since most people at the plant would be working in fixed shifts. I think a tram stop would certainly be worth it for 5k passengers a day, if it's just a simple line extension. Buses could pick up a few workers from outlying suburbs and villages, and of course there would be some who still need to drive in.
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  3208. The tourist industry in the UK is already gearing up for a boom in domestic holidays this year in anticipation that travel restrictions will still be in force for most of the world in at least the early summer, and even if they aren't many people will either choose not to fly because of the lingering COVID risk, or, as you say, will be priced out of the market. Whether this will carry into 2022 is another question. That said, many mediterranean destinations are really desperate for northern europeans to come back this year, since their economy is so tourist dependant and could continue to shrink if they don't come back soon, so we might see some subsidised flights to certain destinations. Though I think there are signs that the airline industry maybe adapting to the new situation, so things might not be as bad as you predicted. As Wendover said in one if his recent videos, now is a time of great crisis in the airline industry, and where there is crisis, there is opportunity for new business models to come in and disrupt the market. When it comes to the long haul market, we could see some big changes, a rise in airlines with smaller aircraft doing long haul point to point services catering mostly for a leisure and diaspora market (as in, people visiting family and friends who live a long distance apart from each other). Business and first class are replaced with premium economy and additional fees for things like extra legroom or better meals. Ticket prices may still rise, but not by a huge amount, as they are balanced by slashing expenses, flying to more regional airports with lower fees, fewer staff etc etc. much like any budget airline.
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  3209. Salt water is a bugger, it just loves to corrode any mechanisms put in it.
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  3210.  @shorewall  Demographics would play a big part. You can imagine a strong and increasingly hispanicized US a few decades from now, where Spanish is nearly as common as English, seeing a lot of benefits in letting in northern Mexican states who are increasingly disillusioned with the corruption of Mexico City. There would still be an economic divide, but it could easily shrink quite a bit as US businesses take advantage of the lower labour costs and better equipped law enforcement drives out most of the drug cartel activity.
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  3211. Give it 5 years, they'll probably set up one in London.
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  3212. There is certainly a "divide and conquer" idea, that focusing on race and gender differences fractures the working class and prevents them uniting against the wealthy.
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  3213. Guess that was back in the pre E261 days when the passenger had to pay for them and that meant finding the cheapest place near the airport.
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  3214. Indoor only livestock are also less likely to get sick as it's possible to enforce stringent biosecurity measures, which also greatly reduces the need for antibiotics. It's common for free range chickens to be cooped up indoors for months because of the risk that bird flu from wild birds will wipe out the entire flock. Pigs and cows to a lesser extent also risk disease, calves are often kept indoors or in open sheds for a few months because of the risk of illness.
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  3215. I agree. Islam will probably go through the same transformation Christianity did a couple of hundred years ago.
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  3216. It does risk the most desirable destinations becoming exclusive to the wealthy. Places like venice would be practically off-limits to tourists on more modest incomes.
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  3217. If you had a thick enough and soft enough mattress, an elephant (in theory) could survive a fall off a skyscraper. Mattresses slow the deceleration at the end of a fall by deforming, reducing the force exerted on the object, and gradually absorbing the kinetic energy.
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  3218. I can't imagine Turkish Airlines restricts alcohol for religious reasons. Alcohol, particularly beer and raki, is freely available and fairly popular in Turkey.
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  3219.  @kingace6186  To be fair, I think that's often because the far left are often far more unpopular, in most left wing coalitions they make up a much smaller percentage of seats, often to a point that they pretty much have to go along with whatever the centre-left does. The far right on the other hand are making gains large enough that they have to be listened to in any right wing coalition.
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  3220.  @BigPaul62  .02% is effectively zero. It can't be zero otherwise there would be false positives. To clear that reliably you probably shouldn't have any alcohol 12-24 hours beforehand.
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  3221.  @russell4652  I believe it does but only for a few minutes, it quickly wears off if you spit it out.
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  3222. ​ @andrewharrison8436  Grenfell was supposed to be compartmentalized, but it wasn't.
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  3223.  @kikoyago3607  There's a balance to be struck between the rights of the protesters and the rights of businesses, properties and the general public not to be disrupted or harmed (physically or financially) by the protesters. So the police have to consider both of those, as well as their own right to protect themselves from harm.
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  3224.  @kikoyago3607  Er...OK? Seems like rather an odd reason to me, but fair enough.
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  3225.  @Greenitthe  Well what do you want, fewer high paying jobs? If they were spread out more not only would existing homes be cheaper, there would be more space for new homes without having to turn San Jose into Singapore. People can have those spacious suburban homes that are so desired at more affordable prices.
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  3226.  @arkomoose1002  I don't believe that, there's a reason salaries in silicon valley are so much higher but people don't feel richer. And San Jose is not like Singapore, when you have a forest of 30+ storey tall skyscrapers and pretty much nothing else it will be.
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  3227.  @someguysomewhere37  Problem is, people generally don't want to live in such things if they have any choice in the matter. And that's understandable, A lot of HK style apartments are horrible, some don't even have windows.
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  3228. Trade between African countries has historically always been difficult. Africa is huge but also many parts are poorly accessible. It can be easier to ship products 1000's of km along the coast in a barge than a couple 100 km inland. You can notice that the wealthiest African countries before colonialism all had relatively easy access to the coast or to roads that led to the coast, plus the navigable nile. Most of Europe is well connected by large rivers so there are few places that can't benefit from trade. I think without colonisation we may have seen the development of a "two-speed" Africa, coastal kingdoms and empires may have continued to flourish, but isolated inland areas would greatly lag behind or even be colonised and exploited by the technologically superior coastal countries much like Europe did to Africa itself. They might even be as impoverished as they are today.
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  3229. Anarcho-primitivists. The people who actually do want to take us back to the caves.
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  3230. Yeah, I see it more like those donations at the self checkout. Would you really not shop there if they didn't do it?
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  3231. That might of been helped by partial immunity due to similar coronaviruses endemic in the country. Though I'm sure their draconian approach helped too.
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  3232.  @kingsharkoon  Don't think it would be that much considering the flight length, It'll probably be €250, maybe €400 because of the diversion. That's still probably €60-100,000 for the airline.
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  3233. I don't think all German accent stereotypes are harsh. There's the sing-song Bavarian stereotype (Like Uter from The Simpsons) and the "Camp Berlin" accent that's often used for pretentious european artists.
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  3234. ​​​​ @robertlee6338 In Europe the situation is complicated because of compensation payments to passengers, which would probably be at least 100,000 AUD in this case. Plus there's the expense of hiring coaches to transport passengers in the middle of the night, cost for meals and the cost of the replacement flight the next morning, all of which has to be borne by the airline. It could easily exceed the cost of a fine. Which honestly probably isn't a bad thing, it allows for breaches when the alternative is vastly more inconvenient for everyone without encouraging them. As for Sydney, that's probably because of its location, and it's clear that it's not a long term solution since they're building a new airport well away from the city that is unlikely to require such a strict curfew.
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  3235. Well, to be fair I think especially as you head out west, the distances between cities are just too great for HSR to make sense. The trains would never come close to competing with airlines.
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  3236.  @VitalVampyr  Chicago to Philadelphia could maybe be viable with a line via Indianapolis, Columbus and Pittsburgh. Vegas is a dead end, that's the problem, there's nowhere to go from there. Anything in the midwest is too far away. Really it's pretty marginal. A typical European HSR line is going through major cities at most every couple of hours, the US can barely manage every four on some routes even at high speeds. The more track miles per passenger, the less economic the line becomes.
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  3237.  @Sedna063  Pointless if you've got nobody to sell it to. Plus deserts can be challenging environments for solar panels, all that sand can scratch them up.
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  3238. I think the use of "olive" skin could be considered subjective and might mean people end up talking past each other. To a lot of people "olive" is seen as a slightly darker shade of "white" synonymous with Mediterranean populations in Europe, to others it fits more readily with the slightly darker skin tones of Turkish (on average, there are many Turks who are the same skin tone as many Greeks and Italians) and North African populations.
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  3239.  @KimbleJKL  They didn't used to be, back in the 70's and 80's they were cranking out reactors at quite a clip. But a lot of the expertise has gone.
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  3240. It depends. Some schemes do share the profits with local inhabitants, often in schemes like crop and livestock protection so farmers don't shoot wild animals because they are a threat.
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  3241. Except in Hamburg, they're all a bunch of rebels there.
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  3242. Like all political alignments, you have moderates and extremists.
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  3243. Sounds like they said family income, which would obviously exclude single people.
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  3244. I'll wait until they at least have a scale model prototype.
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  3245. ​ @gracicot42  I would partly disagree with that. They are more dangerous to repair than ICE vehicles. Motor voltages are getting higher as that's the cheapest way to increase power. Many EV's are getting to the 600-800V range and some may even go over 1KV in the future. That means your typical amateur mechanic is unlikely to be able to fix anything on an EV that deals with the drive system, there's a serious risk of fatal electrocution. ICE vehicles aren't completely safe either of course, but some common sense and reliable equipment make them safe enough to be worked on in a home garage.
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  3246. Or black mirror back in the day.
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  3247. I don't see electric planes being very widespread in Europe, only in the more remote areas like Northern Scandinavia and the Greek islands. Because of widespread train travel and an extensive road network, very short haul routes are less common. Most of the intracontinental flights are probably too long for viable electric passenger aircraft. I think there will be more of a focus on high speed rail, especially connecting different countries systems together, to try and extend the distance people can easily travel by train. There's also talk of new sleeper service routes, which can be slower because people are travelling while asleep.
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  3248. I've always liked the outro music. It's like I'm watching the credits to a 1990's daytime soap opera.
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  3249. The story goes that british colonists in the caribbean initially wanted to use european indentured servants on the sugar plantations, they saw the use of slave labour as too barbaric. But the servants began dropping like flies due to tropical diseases, so they started using african slaves instead, who are naturally more resistant to said diseases, and didn't really look back after that.
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  3250.  @雷-t3j  Eventually, though by that time the caribbean sugar economy was much less important to the british as it had been.
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  3251.  @ZipZoomZip  Renewables hide their true cost by working with gas power to service their intermittency. If it wasn't for the gas generation in reserve, renewables like wind and solar would have to rely on expensive energy storage solutions. Using current storage technology that would make them more expensive than nuclear in many cases.
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  3252. A major controversy to this day is we really have no idea how many people died because of Chernobyl. We only know for certain that around 100 people died from a direct effect of the disaster, from radiation burns or sickness. There a few more who died later from cancer who we're fairly confident came from radiation exposure. But all the other deaths are just estimates, and/or assume the Soviets didn't record all or even most of deaths that could be directly attributed. They range from 4,000 at the low end to nearly a million at the high end. There are accusations of radiophobia spread by anti nuclear green groups, or "big nuclear" downplaying the risks. This matters because Chernobyl still affects how nuclear power is perceived today, as Europe has lost access to cheap Russian gas and many countries are contemplating starting or expanding their nuclear fleet to compensate, it still looms like a shadow despite great advances in reactor safety and the fact that such a disaster has never been repeated (Fukushima was bad, sure, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl).
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  3253. I'd be interested to see if better freight rail infrastructure between China and Europe will come about, potentially reducing the demand for shipping between the two regions. Only problem is, the route either has to go through the Middle East, or Russia, both of which pose problems with politics and security. Unless things change in either region, perhaps that's not on the cards.
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  3254. The WDW monorail system is nearly 20 years older than the DLR, and the cost to automate it probably isn't worth it for the benefits.
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  3255.  @geoffreypiltz271  The WDW monorail opened in 1971. The DLR opened in 1987. That's nearly 20 years, and computer technology had come a long way in those years.
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  3256.  @geoffreypiltz271  Well as both tracks needed to run the same vehicles, you couldn't make one automated and one not. Plus while transit automation technology had been around for small people movers for some time, moving large and heavy trains with lots of inertia is a bit more complex.
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  3257.  @geoffreypiltz271  Well yes, as mentioned in the video, the block signalling didn't work properly on that spur. Interestingly as you mentioned it, it seems since 2014 the WDW monorail has been automated. Pilots are now only there to supervise operation.
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  3258. ​ @EShirako I think SpaceX will do fine in the heavy freight launch sector, assuming there's no major issues with Starship (which is a bit of an assumption) they'll have a very capable launch system for big satellites. I'm not so sure about their passenger offerings, Dragon is fine but it's not ground-breaking, and Starship itself may have issues carrying passengers depending on how exactly they plan on landing that giant bullet with tiny wings. Plus, it's really just unnecessarily large for passenger use. That's where I see an opportunity for innovation, but I doubt that will come from Boeing.
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  3259. I do think for non safety critical code a more iterative approach would be advantageous. One of the major problems with this style of writing software is that it is very hard to adapt it to changing requirements. What happens is that fed up users develop hacks and kludges to half implement new features because it's too expensive to update the code. They may even end up using the software for things it wasn't intended for just because it's too expensive and burdensome to do things properly. This goes on until everything becomes such a tangled mess the government is finally persuaded to fund an upgrade.
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  3260. 9:40 French, Spanish and Portuguese, on the other hand, seem to do the same thing up to 15 or 16, though this is probably a hangover from roman numerals.
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  3261. I think before modern traffic rules, the vast majority of road users were not capable of going much faster than that. So you can see why it wasn't such a problem.
    1
  3262.  @Racko.  That has not been my experience. Most French people will happily speak English if you really can't understand (though some will be more reluctant and will make it seem like a bother), but they'll try to use French as much as they can, even if your French is a little shaky. This is in contrast to the Germans, who would much rather use English unless your German is very good and often don't like you wasting their time with poor German.
    1
  3263. I think the nuclear industry in many parts of the world has a perpetual problem with communication, especially when it comes to risk management. Sometimes it can be a case of inadvertently overstating the risks through emphasis on redundancy, mitigation and defence in depth even for incredibly rare and unlikely accident scenarios. I went to a talk on the nuclear industry once where the speaker made a persuasive point that endlessly talking about accident prevention over other topics like carbon emissions, energy security and power plant footprints, may actually be harming the industry rather than helping it, because it makes the technology seem much more dangerous than it really is.
    1
  3264. ​ @MedicAthlete24W  That is a solvable problem, the simplest solution being additional exercise and extra protein in the diet.
    1
  3265.  @MedicAthlete24W  It is, but those side effects can be mitigated with additional exercise and a high protein diet.
    1
  3266. Really depends on the tax. In general cuts in consumption tax benefit the poor more because they buy more stuff as a percentage of their earnings, whereas cuts in income tax tend to benefit the rich more, since they get taxed more in a progressive taxation system.
    1
  3267. Doesn't matter, the BOT are not part of the UK so were never in the EU in the first place.
    1
  3268.  @jagolago-bob  Eh, not as much as you think. BOT are self governing for the most part. Mostly it's foreign policy and defence where the UK takes a lead.
    1
  3269. @hopegreen9027 London being a large financial hub home to a lot of family offices, you would expect an above average amount of illegal activity compared to other European cities. I don't think the EU would have been able to change that unless it made some rather major changes to the law which would infringe on the privacy of many legitimate transactions.
    1
  3270.  @themax9913  Not all of them. I'd say China is the one pushing the envelope.
    1
  3271.  @mikicerise6250  Why? China will be cheaper and soon may even be better. Poland isn't that wealthy, it will be looking for a good deal.
    1
  3272.  @goste4  Your "If they don't like being sued, they can just give their wealth away!" is the rhetoric of a radical socialist, the kind who really want to "eat the rich" (figuratively). Perhaps you are one of those people, but I'm not going to presume. Again, the tax avoidance via an overseas structure is not a necessary feature. Most wealthy individuals use an equivalent domestic arrangement and pay domestic taxes. Without these protections, the world of the wealthy would become a race to acquire the best lawyers to sue the pants off your peers and make money. It wouldn't reward talent, ingenuity or hard work, just the most greedy.
    1
  3273.  @goste4  Then the solution is a minimum global tax, or preventing certain countries from hosting such arrangements, not banning the whole construct. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We don't need to abolish it to temper its more harmful qualities. I'm not really considering the quality of your argument based on if you are a radical socialist or not, it's just a lot of your rhetoric and language matches with that political position, those who hate the rich and want to take a lot more of their money, so making it harder to be rich would help them achieve that goal. Though in this case I'd argue you'd have an even more unequal society, as the ultra rich with their teams of several million a year lawyers would be able to punch the slightly less wealthy back down. If I'll be honest, I wanted to see if you would admit to being so and proud of it, deny (perhaps even be offended by such a suggestion) and provide reasoning, or refuse to say either way. I guess you chose the latter. For me, it's not about benefits, it's about fairness, and not having people who have earned their wealth through honest means drained of it by greedy people preying on them. Perhaps you prepared to give these people a hard time in order to make it easier to recover damages from a legitimate claim (though I'd point out limited exposure tempers any outlandish compensation claims, plaintiffs would still be able to claim something in most cases since most rich people keep some worth on their person, but not all their worth), but I don't think it's worth it. Perhaps you consider the fairness of the group more important than the individual, which I guess is fair enough, but it's not my position.
    1
  3274.  @goste4  Shell corporations can be used for a number of reasons. Both Investopedia and wikipedia list private trusts as a legitimate, and fairly well regulated, use of a shell corporation. Tax avoidance and illegal activities are the ones that grab the headlines. I don't think you've ever seriously considered any alternatives I've presented, you've dismissed them completely with little regard, you just want the nuclear option. You know, I'll just come out and say it, I think you do hate the rich. I think you see them being regularly sued as a deserving burden they must suffer for being wealthy, and should avoid it by simply not being rich. Maybe you hope they'll destroy each other through lawsuits perhaps.
    1
  3275. Sounds a bit like some of the AIDS PSAs they had in the 80's.
    1
  3276.  @subjekt5577  They are flexible, but are going to be slower, less reliable and less comfortable than rail. Fundamentally there's a limit of how far they can go before even a congested car trip is quicker.
    1
  3277. Japan isn't necessarily all that great for housing. Houses and apartments are often really small and aren't terribly well built (because they need to be torn down every few decades because of earthquakes). Sure they don't have a shortage, but a shrinking population, unlike Canada, helps with that. Japanese commutes can also be incredibly long in the biggest cities, with 90 minutes not unusual.
    1
  3278.  @GammaJK  Sin taxes work when people or companies have an accessible and practical alternative. For carbon, in lot of cases that's just not the case right now, so all that happens is that companies raise prices and people pay more for their goods and services.
    1
  3279. It's interesting when you talk about the peak district as if it's a place seemingly quite remote when it's surrounded by several major cities (Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Derby) whose urban areas get pretty close to the border. The argument that inner city urbanites don't visit the country all that often I don't think is nessecarily the point of the green belt any more, most of its most vociferous defendants are those that live near it and therefore make the most use of it. They don't want to live in an endless housing estate and lose their immediate access to the countryside, but at the same time have a job in the city or local area so can't just pack up and move. At the same time there are a lot of cities outside the south east still with a lot of abandoned land and low value industrial areas from post industrial decline, so I think it's reasonable to argue that these places should be redeveloped before any green belt is considered (developers do sometimes push for greenbelt because it is cheaper to build on, even if brownfield land is available and in a more convenient location). The nature argument is often pretty weak I agree, but we can approach it from the other end with food security. The UK already has to import most of its food, so there is an argument that concreting over more prime farmland (and not all of it is prime, I know) is not a good idea. Even though the amount might not seem like a lot, there is a lot of prime farmland near cities. Personally as someone who lives on the edge of the green belt, I would want to see as little as possible sacrificed for housing, and the bits that are carefully selected with good justifications, like existing transport infrastructure such as a railway station or a shortage of brownfield or low value industrial land in the area. I can imagine if it's a free for all we'll get a sea of Barratt boxes as far as the eye can see, with local roads completely overwhelmed with traffic since of course the deveopers won't build additional capacity. I can appreciate British planning rules can border on the ridiculous on many occasions, and I'm all for a bit more reasonable pragmatism, but I'm not willing to throw them out entirely. Where I am I see skyscrapers going up in Manchester, and I think that might be the ultimate solution. London is too big as it is, and sightline rules make building high a challenge. The UK is way too London centric, allowing other city centres to build up and absorb more of the population seems like a good solution to me. It's a win win in my mind, London gets the pressure taken off it, other cities grow their economies, urbanites get modern dense high quality housing out of often decrepit inner city areas, and suburbanites get to keep more countryside on their doorstep.
    1
  3280.  @neuronneuron3645  It does sit on the ring of fire, so there's plenty of geological activity. Pretty much all construction needs a geotechnical survey for earthquake risks.
    1
  3281. I think the problem is, particularly with Autism but sometimes with other conditions, there's been a split into two extreme camps, what I like to call the "cure at all costs" and "_never_ cure at any cost". Autism is either treated as a debilitating disease or as a harmless divergence from the norm, whereas I think the reality is it's somewhere in the middle. Currently there is no cure, and perhaps there will never be an effective one, but some argue that even trying to research an effective and humane cure is still morally wrong, and it should always be instead accepted as a harmless divergence, much like being LGBT, no matter what the effects. On the other side, you have those who argue that Autism is always a harmful condition, and therefore should always aim to be cured, even if the effects are manageable by the person in question. My argument is, Autism can be both. It can be a debilitating condition, where those afflicted and their caregivers suffer (It's not uncommon for parents of severely autistic children to develop their own mental health problems or end up giving their children up). But it can also be a manageable condition, which doesn't cause suffering and which is essentially a harmless divergence. So if an effective and humane cure did come along, I wouldn't be outraged, I would recognise that for some people, it really is the best option. But for others, I would advocate for it not being forced upon them. For them, it can be a choice.
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  3282. I think in a lot of businesses and institutions, bending the rules to reduce regulatory friction is a common occurrence. When performing complex or non-standard procedures, doing things by the book could take a long time, or even be technically impossible without changing the regulations or negotiating with senior management, which could take even more time. This reduces productivity, and can even make the business lose customers, as lower level employees decide it's just not worth their time and effort to deal with any project or order that isn't simple and straightforward, especially if they won't be rewarded for it, better to drop them and find an easier sale. It also generally makes a job more of a drudge and less enjoyable, as more time is spent on compliance tasks which inevitably involve a lot of form filling which nobody likes (except that one employee, because they're weird). Then there's the paranoia and fear from excessive monitoring which can make work much more stressful, having a conversation with a coworker without having to watch your words carefully is probably a welcome break for many employees. Of course that mean internal rules aren't bad, some prevent crime while others keep workers safe. But trying to maintain 100% compliance can reduce productivity, make the business unable or unwilling to service complex customers, and make employees more miserable and likely to quit.
    1
  3283. Part of the reason we have better public transit is because we have smaller houses on smaller plots, even in the suburbs. It's really quite expensive to get a big house somewhere close to a city. When you've got more people packed together it makes public transportation more feasible to provide. The downside of that is you're not going to get the nice big house with the expansive back garden that's common in the US without paying through the nose for it or moving out to the middle of nowhere. I mean it would be nice if US suburbs were a bit more walkable, but man, a lot of those suburban homes look nice (especially some of the older craftsman style ones), and you don't have to share your walls with neighbours so often! Though most people in these suburbs will still own a car, sometimes parked out on the street because many houses do not have driveways or garages, because while there might be good public transport to some destinations, there won't be to every destination, and of course if you want to buy some lumber from the hardware store or something it's a pain to take it on the bus.
    1
  3284. So basically we could use the villain's superweapon from Die Another Day to terraform mars.
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  3285.  @NathanCassidy721  Monocrop farming is compatible with mechanisation, at the moment we can't afford to do it any other way, not unless you fancy being a farm labourer for less than minimum wage.
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  3286. Realistically, any deliberate sustained reduction in house prices is going to have to be coupled by some amount of mortgage debt forgiveness, otherwise the housing market seizes up with underwater homeowners unable to sell. One thing that could make houses more affordable in somewhere like the US is dispersing the economy more to second and third tier cities. Much of the most acute housing issues are concentrated in and around a handful of the largest cities, which even if they built new homes likes crazy would struggle to meet demand, and put an even greater burden on already stressed infrastructure, from sewers to subways. The US is not short on space, there's plenty of room for housing, but not where the jobs are increasingly concentrated. It's probably the best "have your cake and eat it" scenario, housing becomes more affordable without having to pack everyone into increasingly smaller plots (which some people might like, but a lot of people will hate).
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  3287. Demand response may help with very short term surge capacity like the cuppa effect. Like having a few hundred thousand commercial refrigeration units switch off for 5 minutes as the ad break begins. Doesn't reduce total daily demand as those fridges will need to cool for longer when they turn back on, but flattens the spike a bit and means a peaker power plant doesn't need to be built. Personally I think this is the only viable use for demand response, not for making up renewable shortfalls (they usually last too long).
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  3288. Meanwhile in the UK: Oh, my employer does that. Most people here have never seen a tax return in their life.
    1
  3289.  @humppis  consistently low temps also help. It rarely gets above freezing during peak winter season, and is usually well below.
    1
  3290.  @rolanddejesus3176  Where do you have evidence of that? It doesn't pay federal taxes in the first place! Every map I've seen of poverty in the US that includes Puerto Rico puts it way lower than even Mississippi. Under the current funding model, statehood would absolutely make it the biggest net recipient as a proportion of population.
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  3291.  @mikasa0327  Japan's population has become increasingly urbanised, a lot of the countryside has become practically deserted, whole villages have disappeared and may more have few residents. Urban housing in Japan, especially on the cheaper end, is notoriously small and often cheaply built with paper thin walls, which only works through immense social pressure to not disturb your neighbours.
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  3292. I wonder if that young streamer has ever seen Ed, Edd and Eddy...
    1
  3293.  @Bacteriophagebs  Of course there are some open source more managers for specific games, maybe even a few games, and some of those are great, especially the ones developers build in. But none have the depth of games as Vortex or SW does. An open source version of that either does not exist or has not been promoted enough for people to notice. Gamers want a one stop shop, having separate mod managers for separate games is significantly less convenient.
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  3294.  @Bacteriophagebs  I'm not upset, I don't care about starfield, the mod, or pronouns particularly. Installing compatible mods offline is possible with most mod managers, but that's not really solving the problem, because you'll have to keep reinstalling the mod whenever there's an update by manually checking the repository. You'll also have to manually install other mods that are dependencies, if applicable, and you'll likely have more problems with conflicts between mods. An open source modding platform should ideally be like a package manager where you can subscribe to multiple repositories for mods and browse their lists from there. One repository might be curated and censored, but you could find another which is not, or only removes mods containing malicious code. For individual games, many already exist, and I'm sure it's likely that there are a couple that are compatible with a few dozen popular games. But it's clear none have anything close to the breadth and dominance of the big commercial players. People, gamers included, like convergence, they like one or two mod managers that work with everything. And that desire means whoever has the control over those managers has the ability to curate, censor and gatekeep mods if they wish. That I do care about.
    1
  3295.  @Bacteriophagebs  Nexus is a centralised system, and for the most part a walled garden. They host the mods and provide the software to manage them. Support for non-hosted mods is there but is minimal and could be taken away at any point. Automatic updates really aren't an optional feature anymore with games being patched so regularly. Dependency checks are perhaps less important, but still an inconvenience. When it comes down to it, you can't deny that it is significantly less easy and convenient to use a non-Nexus mod with Vortex, and any mod banned from Nexus or SW is almost certainly going to be harder to find and harder to use. That's pretty obvious. Honestly I'm not really blaming Nexus for any of this. They're doing what any private organisation is allowed to do. If they want to remove a mod from their site, in full knowledge it will probably die because of it, they have every right to do so. The onus is on gamers and modders if we want things to change. If we want to avoid censorship with certain mods having artificially inferior support and compatibility, we need to move to a more distributed system, we need to take the power and influence away from Nexus, not force it to change.
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  3296.  @Bacteriophagebs  Most mod managers do pretty much the same thing under the hood for the same game, so it's not as surprising as you might think. What I meant by artificially inferior is by banning it from their site, Vortex cannot offer the same support than it could for a hosted mod. The banning creates the artificially inferior support, not the software. It's not completely a walled garden I agree, but these things can be seen on a spectrum. Something like Debian Linux's apt or many LaTeX package managers are at one end, allowing multiple source repositories. Android phones allow software from places other than the Google play store and similar, but you won't get updates or support, so that's more of a walled garden. I'm generally in agreement with you that asking Nexus to make changes to their platform is pointless and arguably unreasonable. That's why I argue we should move away from it to a less centralised system. By staying with them we give them a lot of control over what mods are and aren't visible.
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  3297. @Adi Odjidja You can look at the few strip malls the UK has on Google Maps and find out. Generally several of the following: A takeaway pizza place (Dominos/Papa John's), a sandwich/baked goods shop, a tanning salon, a small bathroom/kitchen/furniture showroom, a bookies, some kind of medical establishment like a doctor's surgery, dentist, optician, or vets, and maybe a small cafe or greasy spoon. There's also what I like to call "industrial" strip malls that have shops like Screwfix and lumber merchants.
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  3298. As long as you've got someone to monitor them, they're pretty darn safe. Each one weighs over 100 tonnes, so nobody is going to try and steal them (a terrorist group who wanted to get hold of dirty bomb material would have far better luck breaking into a hospital and stealing some medical isotopes). They're made of thick layers of steel and concrete, only something like a bunker buster munition is going to be able to crack one open, and you've probably got bigger problems to worry about if that happens!
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  3299.  @TecnamTwin  It was never seen as impossible, other companies tried all sorts of novel ways of doing recovery, including helicopter blades! It was partly down to good old inverted pendulum physics, computers just weren't powerful enough to do the complex balancing act needed to keep a booster from spinning out of control on its way down with a high speed ballistic trajectory. We see this in other fields too, why do you think untethered bipedal robotics has become a lot more common nowadays? Same reason, balancing that inverted pendulum.
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  3300. I assume they've already ruled out an intestinal parasite?
    1
  3301. Mediterranean countries are probably the best for that.
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  3302. In some ways, Tom was lucky, though that's not to downplay his skill and talent. He came along at just the right time, when YouTube was still growing up and was developing a healthy ecosystem for high quality content. Today if you start where he started it would probably be quite a bit harder to get there because YouTube is a very different place now.
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  3303. A frequent bus is still no good if it takes twice as long as a car though.
    1
  3304.  @adamfrbs9259  That may not matter if the bus takes an indirect route.
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  3305. I guess as you mentioned stability you're going to cover Lyupanov functions at some point? Those always seemed really hard to calculate, from what I can gather the best you can do is intelligently guess a potential candidate and than check if it fits the criteria.
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  3306.  @Aschraffff  It can be pretty good for knockoff sparkfun or adafruit pcb's electronics wise (sometimes they're even better designed), and other components as well. Need a particular chip or sensor on a breakout board and don't want to make it yourself? AliExpress probably has it at a good price.
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  3307. Are they really that ugly? Compared to many concrete apartment blocks, I'd say McMansions are pretty beautiful. In the end it's down to personal taste, many people find modernist architecture rather drab and boring. Even a rustic farmhouse can look pretty awful if poorly maintained.
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  3308. Wonder how compensation rules might work here. Being diverted due to weather is outside the airline's control, but being unable to source a replacement crew for 10 hours (unsurprising that passengers preferred ground transport rather than waiting that long considering it would only be 2-3 hours to drive to Dehli) might be seen as the airline's fault depending on how long the weather took to clear.
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  3309. Self preservation really. Extinction is far more likely if we don't spread out.
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  3310. So the economics of Logan's Run with a bit of an age bump.
    1
  3311. UK sockets seem to have an absurd amount of clutch force sometimes, you really have to pull hard to get plug out. I think we just start stronger so it takes a longer time to wear out.
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  3312. Great for some, perhaps, not for others.
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  3313.  @tomatao.  It sounds a lot like the "I like living in a permaculture commune, so everyone else will!" arguments I hear.
    1
  3314.  @tomatao.  My point was that what you may consider "great living conditions" most will probably consider primitive and undesirable, a return to subsistence peasantry not seen for several generations. So I don't think that part of your argument has merit.
    1
  3315.  @tomatao.  So just be honest, say "It's gonna be a crap standard of living for most people, but we have no choice". Otherwise you're just sugarcoating.
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  3316.  @tomatao.  If living like a hippie is a better stand of living for you, well good for you. But it isn't for the majority of us.
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  3317.  @tomatao.  Anything that involves subsistence agriculture isn't going to appeal to most people.
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  3318.  @tomatao.  20 hours? Yeah right. Ask subsistence farmers in the developing world how much they have to work, and what happens when the crops fail. And the work itself, back breaking. Besides, there's a lot more than farming to consider. You're giving up a lot of labour saving innovations. It would be hard, manual labour day in day out, with few luxuries.
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  3319.  @tomatao.  You're looking at people in their good years. Crops don't always behave, and not everywhere is blessed with good soil and stable climate. Permaculture doesn't fix pests and diseases, it merely throws many hours of human labour at the problem, and yes, with a lot more human input per plant, it can be more effective. But that's the cost, and it still won't always work. It's not just about food anyway, there's a lot of jobs that require a lot more labour without mechanization. Add it all up, and in a bad year, you could be running yourself ragged for very little payoff. But that's fine, if you enjoy that lifestyle which I'm sure some people do, go ahead. I've got nothing against people going to live in a permaculture commune if they want to. But they are not going to feed the world, not even close. It's pre-mechanisation farming with a nice new name and a bit more education. An experienced subsistence farmer could probably match yields.
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  3320.  @tomatao.  Nobody I've seen talk about permaculture has claimed it gets you fantastic results with minimal work. They all enjoy doing it, but they don't shy away from the fact it's really hard work, it requires a lot of time and energy to grow enough to feed yourself plus surplus to sell, it's quite complicated and needs intensive and careful management, and not every year is a good year, so you have to prepare for volatility. You have to dedicate nearly every day to it if you're being serious, this isn't a hobby allotment. It's not a good fit for most people. And it's certainly not less labour intensive than any standard farming practice, including organic. I can see the benefits of polyculture, but I think we can adapt the mechanization rather then throw the machines away for the most part. It won't be permaculture but it will be better.
    1
  3321.  @tomatao.  Plenty of people have allotments they might visit once a week, they can perhaps supplement 10% or so of their diet with what they grow, maybe sell a couple boxes of tomatoes or potatoes on occasion. But we're talking self sufficiency, enough to feed yourself and enough to sell at market prices to buy everything else you want or need. That's a different kettle of fish. There is no permaculture system anywhere that can match calories per man hour of mechanized agriculture, not by a long shot.
    1
  3322.  @tomatao.  It's a similar activity, people growing a bit of food for fun, sustenance and the odd bit of income.
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  3323.  @tomatao.  Fine. Hope you enjoy your lifestyle and it makes you happy. All I'll say is most of the people I've seen talk about permaculture, do not shy away from the negatives, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. It works for a minority of driven people, perhaps like yourself.
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  3324. The so-called "Metro Mayors" from the Local Government Act 2000 have similar powers to the Mayor of London, think Andy Burnham of the GMCA for example. Other mayoral positions, such as Lord Mayors (apart from the City of London) and Civic Mayors are ceremonial.
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  3325.  @msfl54  Well, there is Germany for that. In the UK you got the bonus of a lot of global connections (and some tax havens) plus a much more dynamic financial scene. Not sure if Ireland can replicate that.
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  3326.  @LeMerch  Sure you can do all that, but why stop there in the first place? There are bigger ports on the EU mainland, with far better road and rail connections. At least before you had one of Europe's biggest economies right next door, with the advantage of also bring able to transit through to the mainland fairly easily. Now Ireland is a branch line, not a through station.
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  3327.  @LeMerch  The UK is #1 (by some margin) for imports to Ireland and #3 for exports from Ireland, ahead of nearly every European country. Like it or not these two economies are very interconnected. I really think the UK being out of the EU will have more disadvantages for Ireland than it has advantages, despite the opportunity of being a new Atlantic go-between. No matter how fast your ships or planes are you've got to have a really good justification for stopping off in Ireland and not just going straight to Rotterdam.
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  3328.  @LeMerch  I'm not twisting reality, I just don't think Brexit will benefit Ireland. The Irish seem to see it that way too! For all this talk about EU trade, the UK is still one of their most important partners, arguably above the EU. When the UK was in the EU, Ireland benefited from both the EU and the UK, and vice versa. Now it's only got the EU, and will foreign investors necessarily pick Ireland instead of a bigger EU nation? They'd have to have strong reasons for doing so.
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  3329.  @LeMerch  Offering rock bottom tax rates only gets you so far. The UK has a lot of global financial connections that kind of make it special. Ireland doesn't really have the same, so what advantage does it have over the Netherlands or Germany? Not that much I'd say, and even less now the 3rd biggest EU nation next door has checked out.
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  3330.  @LeMerch  Go look up Irish corporation tax rates and come back to me. They're still some of the lowest in Europe. You don't seem to have done much research on Anglo-Irish economic relations for your part. You seem to think the comparatively huge economy next door is of little to no consequence to the country.
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  3331. ​ @Andreas-gh6is If a terrorist group wants to steal radioactive material for a dirty bomb, they can break into any city hospital and take their medical isotopes. It would be way easier than getting it from a nuclear power station.
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  3332. Looking at both fonts, Transport (the font used in the UK) sort of comes out in the middle of the two. As far as I am aware there are no plans to change it.
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  3333.  @vandeheyeric  I guess it comes down to how we perceive dwarves in Middle Earth, as magical beings where the laws of biology don't apply or as an animal just like humans which do seem to be affected by evolutionary pressure. Clearly there's plenty of the former, Ents, Balrogs and so on, but there's also plenty of the latter.
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  3334.  @NovaGirl8  Well there you go, there's your "tends to be" which allows for expansion. The creation mythos Tolkien gave was very detailed, but geographically limited, he didn't really explain what inhabited the rest of the world, and how they were created.
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  3335.  @anon2427  Because I understand the pressure for such shows to be more diverse nowadays, and to some extent I appreciate the benefits it brings. But I also know how damaging increased diversity can be if handled poorly.
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  3336.  @johncrowerdoe5527  Not when your material is under extreme environmental conditions. Tensile stress, creep strength etc. will all be different.
    1
  3337.  @joshua43214  When you're working under fairly extreme conditions, like a rocket would be, different alloys do matter. They might weld mostly the same, but not exactly the same.
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  3338.  @johncrowerdoe5527  If you're working out how to manufacture something, sure. SpaceX might make a scale model or a mockup just to work out how to build it, lots of engineering firms do that. You can make that out of cheap steel. But if you actually plan on the item being functional, it's much less useful. So you can use the cheap stuff to build a Starship that just sits in a hangar, but putting it on a rocket is asking for failure. I wouldn't make a pressure vessel out of cheap alloy then expect it to perform under a realistic test.
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  3339. ​ @joshua43214  Welds in different alloys will be different even if the welding technique is identical, they will perform differently under extreme conditions, like in a rocket launch. Plus the material itself will perform differently, putting different stresses and strains on the weld. Trust me, I was a welding tech for experimental nuclear pressure vessels. This isn't about how good the welding technique is, even if it is near perfect for both materials there would still be differences.
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  3340.  @joshua43214  Welding is not trivial when it's holding your spaceship together when it's being tested. I can 3D print a gear train out of cheap material to test that they all mesh and fit in my gearbox, but I'm not going to drive the car around a racetrack because the gearbox will almost certainly break, and possibly damage other components.
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  3341.  @joshua43214  He's not building a factory, he's building a spaceship, the factory is needed to make it. A spaceship that needs to withstand high temperatures and stresses. It's like building a prototype F1 car out of cheap steel, it's probably not going to work that well when you drive it on a racetrack, even if assembling it provides useful insight into how to build it. So you make one out of cheap materials just to see how it fits together, then use the real deal when you want something to undergo race testing.
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  3342.  @joshua43214  Then why is he testing them? It won't tell him how the real thing would perform. If all he needs to do is check assembly then just assemble them. He's just going to cause accidents like this and the data won't be that useful because it's all cheap materials. But it's his money and his factory, if he wants to do it that way. Just can't see much point in it, it's going to mean a lot of scrap metal.
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  3343. I'm slightly disappointed that my boy from the Goofy Movie didn't show up when "powerline" was mentioned.
    1
  3344. The first one is a classic "children starving in Africa" argument, and taken to its absurd conclusion nobody can talk about anything nice, be it a PS5, a holiday destination, or whatever may bring joy to those who can afford to experience it while there is still suffering in the world. This looks like something you'd find on Medium, not a curated magazine.
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  3345. If you think credit unions online presence is archaic, you should see public retail banks! They tend to be for low income customers and pensioners so they tend to be a lot more simple and basic with their products. There are of course public investment banks but they are generally for infrastructure investment and similar large government expenditures.
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  3346. ​ @boredboy1444  The thing is, the US is such an economic titan that it has a really long way to fall. For a situation like the great depression to happen again, things would have to get really, really bad.
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  3347. Would "act of god" mean all insurers involved would have to indemnify their own clients losses, or would a split be negotiated?
    1
  3348. I love how Korea basically looked at Japan and China's writing systems and thought "fuck that, let's create a writing system so intuitive even an idiot could learn to read it in a week".
    1
  3349. I think you'll love this video: https://youtu.be/HAKsoiHR8JU It's all about the trendy, minimalist graphic design trend that several US government agencies adopted in the 1970's.
    1
  3350.  @tigershark2328  I agree it is, but the actual proportion of plane routes HSR is competitive with, even in Europe, isn't that large. Skinny leisure routes to holiday destinations aren't going to be popular enough for HSR.
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  3351. Sydney seems to be determined to turn the ground into swiss cheese as quickly as possible, a massive underground motorway plus an automated light metro all being built at once.
    1
  3352. I'm not going to criticise anyone who wants to have one safely. Really it's not a big deal if the child changes their gender later on, 99.5% of the time they won't, and a party before they were born is hardly going to force them one way or the other. People can be quite condescending about the whole issue.
    1
  3353.  @WARnTEA  Because there have been lots and lots of simulations done, and energy consuming fusion has been done loads of times in research reactors. There's a reason magnetic confinement fusion reactors are being built bigger and bigger.
    1
  3354.  @Zirror  Politics was also a barrier. There was a lot of pressure to reduce coal consumption and close the nuclear power stations early. That was pretty much guaranteed to increase gas dependency, at least in the short to medium term.
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  3355. I suspect the GOP version of this to be more targeted to specific groups rather than a scattergun approach, since I'd argue the vast majority of the democratic target voters will be on mainstream social media like Facebook and Twitter, but that will not be the case for the republicans, many of their target voters are more likely to respond to more "old fashioned" approaches such as rallies, and others will shun mainstream social media networks in favour of more niche offerings.
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  3356. Eh, it's not always that highly paid to be fair, depends on where you are.
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  3357. A high speed passenger train derailing will likely kill tens and injure hundreds, so there's a much bigger incentive to prevent it from happening. Freight derailiments would also likely block passenger services, meaning the freight company is likely to be fined heavily by the infrastructure owner (usually the government) if found to be at fault.
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  3358.  @DARS_04  I think there was one who has since died from cancer, but he was a heavy smoker so they suspect the cigarettes may have got him rather than the plant.
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  3359.  @hiimjustin8826  I never said they've given up on the field, just they might not be the world leader anymore. Japan also spent a lot of energy making cute anthropomorphic robots, undeniably impressive from a technical perspective, but not of great use in industrial automation.
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  3360.  @тито-к9в  You clearly know little about these tribal governments you put on a pedestal. Many of them have inherited positions as well as elected ones. In many cases they are less democratic than the US government. Also, I don't see the connection between communal ownership and democracy. There have been plenty of dictatorships where everything was de jure owned by the "people" (and de facto owned by the people in charge).
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  3361. Gambling is forbidden by state law, it's federally legal. Since reservations don't have to follow state law, they can legalise gambling no problem. Illegal drugs are illegal under federal law, so producing illegal drugs would be a federal crime and the US government could legally intervene. There is a bit of a grey area since many states break federal law by legalising recreational cannabis, but since states generally have a lot more power, they can get away with it.
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  3362.  @EllieD.Violet  I mean, I'd argue it still was impressive, another empire would have had to do the same to achieve what the British achieved. So credit where credit's due, being able to build the biggest empire in history is no mean feat.
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  3363.  @EllieD.Violet  Every empire did those things. If we can't give credit for such achievements we can't celebrate any large civilisation in history ever.
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  3364.  @EllieD.Violet  If you want to view history as one unbroken reign of evil, you can think that way.
    1
  3365.  @EllieD.Violet  Everyone waged war and terror. No country got wealthy and powerful from being nice. Some yeah, being really good at it is somewhat impressive. You can praise the Romans, Aztecs or Egyptians for their achievements, but they were all enabled by conquest.
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  3366.  @EllieD.Violet  Look at this way, without the empires of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, europe would be a poor backwater. The EU probably wouldn't exist, Europe would have probably be colonised by the Ottomans or something. I don't think it's fair to dismiss the achievement of acquiring that wealth because it was done os in the manner that every empire did so at the time. Otherwise we end up with a very presentist view of history.
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  3367. @UCJo4UWuOAUQ-0ADYx2rpbbw The Ottomans occupied half of Eastern Europe until the 19th century. Arguably it was the wealth and power that Europe had gained that eventually drove them out. Same with the growing wealth from the Spanish Empire that drove out the moors. Without the wealth of empire Europe may have struggled against outside enemies, the Ottomans and Russians in particular. But it doesn't matter anyway. Europe is a small continent, without its imperial ambitions it would certainly be a much much poorer one, it's wealth drained by the empires around it who it must rely on for imported goods. Honestly you're coming across as an Anglophobe who just wants a stick to bash the British with. I can accept my country has a bit of an ego but I won't agree to it being dragged through the mud as you are doing.
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  3368. Technically yes, but in practice the JR group control the majority of regional rail and nearly all standard long distance rail market. Are the JR group technically an unrelated set of private and semi-private companies? Yes, but the way it's all set up is not exactly the free market either. It's like if British Rail turned itself into a private company, shattered itself into a cluster of regional operators, and still dominated passenger rail to this day.
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  3369.  @high-reshallucinations  Even if they were uncrewed, NASA blowing up half a dozen rockets before consistent successful launches would almost certainly result in their programme being cancelled. SpaceX essentially has infinitely deep pockets from the world's richest man, isn't accountable to anyone except Musk and investors, and said investors are prepared to wait a very very long time for an ROI on Starship.
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  3370.  @kylehill  I did read an article years ago that some drug was being tested that was designed to improve resistance to radiation exposure from a broad spectrum of sources. Not sure about the mechanism of action exactly, but I think it was protein based? I can only find two articles about it and the information is scant on both. Might be because I think the US military is funding it.
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  3371.  @junkerzn7312  That was the issues identified by the academic research I read, plus issues with excessive automatic adjustment of tap changers causing premature wear which shortens transformer lifespan, and some fault detection systems not working correctly. However, they didn't consider the solutions to be trivial, since while they are known, they are expensive since they would require more and more equipment replacement as more and more homes add rooftop solar, including less affluent ones. The research also suggested that the current philosophy for many electrical grids is that backfeeding is often an operational headache which isn't worth the energy saved. Therefore most solutions proposed sidestep the issue entirely by disconnecting or throttling PV systems during the solar maximum to prevent any backfeeding. That still requires a lot of extra equipment to be installed, but it's cheaper for the grid overall. However it of course wastes quite a lot of energy, especially as solar tends to output a significant proportion of its total daily generation in one big spike around noon.
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  3372.  @junkerzn7312  All of these are fine ideas, but I would agree with the paper that on the scale of a power grid they are not trivial to implement. You either need a lot of additional hardware, a complex layer of supply management to try and treat all solar installations as micro power plants, or both. All of this is going to cost a lot of money, which many would argue should be paid by those installing solar on their roof.
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  3373.  @junkerzn7312  Because they can't just be some pokey IoT setup. This is the electrical grid we're talking about, everything has to be super reliable, fault tolerant and with failsafes and redundancy. If not equipment damage could result. What might be simple and cheap in your home electrical system becomes complex and expensive on the grid.
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  3374.  @junkerzn7312  I fundamentally disagree. Even what seems like a simple solution can become very difficult and complex when dealing with the electrical grid.
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  3375.  @cameroneridan4558  Well you won't find anywhere like that in the US either, but yes Northern Europe isn't super diverse outside of a few big cities.
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  3376. An upmarket fast food chain in the UK did the same, though they didn't sell any beef products which made it easier.
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  3377. @chrisnoname2725  The Haber-Bosch process that produces synthetic fertiliser is incredibly energy intensive, the UK stopped producing it for a while when gas (as in natural gas) prices spiked at the start of the Ukraine war. The raw materials are nitrogen and hydrogen, both readily available (you can just suck the former out of the air). And no country is seriously trying to reduce or stop synthetic fertiliser use. Sri Lanka tried, and that led to food riots as crop yields crashed.
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  3378. People are surprisingly sensitive to commute times. There's something called the "Marchetti constant" which sort of says most people are only willing to consider slower forms of transportation if their resulting commute time is under about an hour a day. Above that, it doesn't take much for them to opt for a faster mode of transportation even if it only saves 10 minutes or so. It does sort of make sense, if you make a trip twice every working day all that extra time does add up over the year.
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  3379.  @zyyl1949  I think there's both "broad" and "narrow" definitions of fascism, and different authoritarian regimes can be included or excluded depending on these definitions. At the very narrowest Nazi Germany might not even count because of the differences between Nazism and Italian fascism. At the broadest we could include pretty much any authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime with nationalistic tendencies, like Putin's Russia.
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  3380. AFAIK it was technically illegal but there were unenforced loopholes that effectively made it legal.
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  3381.  @KJ4EZJ  There's plenty of reasons not to go for cast iron. As for ceramic, I got a pan to try it out and it's been an uncleanable shade of brown since I used it. The top is also scarred with deep scratches, even plastic utensils seemed to mark it. On the contrary most of my Teflon cookware is in much better shape, obviously not as scratch proof as my stainless steel, but a lot better.
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  3382.  @chistinelane  I think they're great for cooking, nothing else gives such an even heat, but at the expense of high maintenance and slower cooking times. Cast iron is not going to work for someone who wants something they can quickly fry something in then shove in the sink or the dishwasher to wash up later.
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  3383.  @Nakia11798  I boil pasta in stainless pans, that's ok if there's enough water. Usually it's the slower cooking stuff that sticks, if there's sugars in the food especially. But my frying pans are Teflon and they work pretty well, can put those through the dishwasher most of the time, the ceramic one I had was awful, could never keep it clean. I can imagine bare stainless would require a lot of heavy scrubbing to remove any stuck on food, as that's definitely been the case with my pans in the rare occasion I have had food stuck to them.
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  3384. To be fair, I think part of the reason children have become less affordable is due to higher standards of parenting. Parents are now expected to spend much more money on children than they were in the past, and kids are also expected to be more closely supervised, no getting older siblings to watch the younger ones or sending them off to go play in the woods. This either means parents have to sacrifice all their free time or pay someone else to have it back. So in light of that more couples just don't think it's worth it anymore.
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  3385. ​​ @vb8801 Honest answer, demolish it and build a residential tower block from scratch. It's expensive but often the only option.
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  3386.  @eveleynce  For those who are interested, that's the energy equivalent of about 9 kilos of TNT. Releasing it all at once when the tank ruptures is not far off what that amount of explosive would do to your basement.
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  3387.  @HeadsFullOfEyeballs  Though you could argue that a lot of conflict and other socio-economic issues that contribute to environmental destruction could be avoided by development. It's that or do a Nepal and depend on richer countries giving you tons of money to maintain some kind of rustic underdeveloped existence without the population revolting.
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  3388.  @rebralhunter6069  Indeed, but that's really the only barrier. You can build a new factory anywhere in the developed world and the cost of your products wouldn't be all that different. And at the moment there is interest in doing so.
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  3389.  @tombirmingham7033  Plus chip foundries have to be heavily automated, because humans are dirty and mess up the product.
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  3390. I think its unfair to merely look at capital costs, or even generation costs of hydro compared to other energy sources. Hydro has dispactability only matched by gas turbines, but even more crucially, they can store massive amounts of energy, either by running in reverse or holding back water to release later. Building out renewable energy in Germany and Denmark would be a lot harder if Norwegian hydro wasn't available to absorb excess production and cover shortfalls. In short, even today from an energy generation perspective there's still little that can beat hydro for reliability, dispatchability, storage cost and yes, even carbon emissions over the long term. Gas is still a fossil fuel, nuclear isn't as dispatchable and is very expensive, and battery storage is even more expensive.
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  3391.  @yuyutubee8435  I think some subjects in some universities have been subject to ideological capture. It's not a conspiracy, it's just what happens when the professors and lecturers in a field exhibit a strong political bias. Perhaps you might have questioned it, but a lot of fresh undergraduates don't, and over time this becomes a self reinforcing feedback loop where the students that are taught then go on to teach the next generation of students, and those who are of a different political persuasion are dissuaded from taking the course from its biased reputation.
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  3392.  @jonathanodude6660  European and Asian cities tend to have more apartment blocks and high rises which makes lots of mass transit more viable. Australian and New Zealand suburbs are fairly low density.
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  3393. Tesla's greatest challenge in the future will be the competition. Currently they are looking like the Apple did in the early days of the iPhone, well ahead of others with a luxury, high end, locked down EV product range. But other EV manufacturers are offering increasingly better alternatives with a more open system, still not as good as Tesla, but significantly cheaper in a lot of cases. That said, Apple still makes enormous profits through brand loyalty and tightly controlled ecosystem, despite their smartphone market share shrinking significantly. If Tesla ends up in the same position as Apple is now in 10-15 years, I think investors will still be very happy.
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  3394.  @militaryav8r  Give me one good reason why paperwork for permission needs to be filed before take off. What benefit or additional information it would give to any party? Because I can't see any way an airline could "take advantage" by landing more flights outside of curfew without it. You can argue all you want about JAL not following the rules, but I think it's still a pointless rule in the first place. I bet what probably happens is most flights due to land within an hour or so of curfew file the paperwork regardless just in case they are late. Which really defeats the point of the whole thing. And before you say "It's Japan", yes, I know, I'm not surprised. Pointless busywork in the service industry is an issue of theirs.
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  3395. If that's the case, than something like a HTHL spaceplane would be able to take a lot of market share in light to moderate mass launches. Even a reusable booster rocket needs time for reconditioning and reassembly, and still needs specialised facilities for launch. Something that can be serviced in a similar fashion to an aircraft is going to have the advantage in flexibility and turnaround time. SSTO Spaceplanes are out of fashion at the moment though, only the Chinese and British seem to have any significant research going on at the moment, and both are playing the long game in terms of market entry.
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  3396.  @linerider195  I think HTHL has been held back by less mature technology, we know how to build rockets to a very advanced degree, but the hybrid engines we would expect to see on any HTHL spaceplane are still in development. I think the shuttle was too far ahead of its time to be economic, too many design compromises had to be made and it ended up more expensive to launch than a dumb lifter. You make a fair point about launch frequency, but SpaceX has managed to create demand (yes, mainly through dogfooding the Falcon for Starlink, but still) and I don't see why we wouldn't see induced demand if there's a potential price drop. The second point about it being easier to refly would on the face of it be objectively true, it's essentially the same as an aircraft, a runway and hangar replaces a complex assembly building and launchpad. But obviously that's something that needs to be considered at design phase, again, if we end up going the same route as the shuttle with compromises, it won't work. Vehicle lifetime is also something to consider, how many times can you reuse a booster vs. a spaceplane?
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  3397.  Michelle  You don't become the world's largest economy and most influential culture without success.
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  3398. Underground cables are much more expensive to maintain.
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  3399. The Consortium sold the shovels for the Millionaire gold rush.
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  3400.  @Breenslg  From the people I've seen talk about it, it requires extensive knowledge about biological processes combined with a lot of manual labour. It's probably not going to be many people's hobby while they hold down a full time job. Plus, it can take a long time to cultivate an area with permaculture methods before you get any decent output. I've heard people who diligently worked at a plot for years before they got anything decent.
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  3401.  @Vonononie  Still, terms and conditions can be considered unreasonable and a complaint could have challenged them. But I know back then the cost of an actual Ryanair ticket might have been so low (assuming bag fees and airport taxes were refunded) that it may not have been worth it.
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  3402. I think it could be argued that at its height Rome was probably the most technologically advanced civilisation on the planet. China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Mesoamerica, Persia (not sure about India) and of course Renaissance Europe and the USA all hold that mantle too, just in different periods of history.
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  3403.  @maya-cc2sx  I still think Rome would have ruled the roost at its height. The Ancient era saw plenty of civilisations rise and claim the top spot, and Rome had its time in the sun like everyone else.
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  3404.  @maya-cc2sx  Civil Engineering would be a big one. There's usually been one civilisation that's significantly ahead of everyone else throughout history, and for a while, that was Rome.
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  3405.  @maya-cc2sx  It's the scale and innovations that really count. India had architecture that was comparable to what was present in much of the Middle East at the time, but the Romans we able to construct larger freestanding structures with fewer columns, very wide domes and arches. Large scale underfloor heating was also an important innovation, as well as large load bearing bridges (i.e. Roman Aqueducts). There are more, but that's a few examples.
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  3406.  @maya-cc2sx  I think we can use the benefit of hindsight to judge what architectural innovations were really the most useful, and I think the Romans do deserve the bulk of the credit for the innovations at that period in history. Suspension bridges had been around a long time, it's not too difficult to make a suspension rope bridge, but it's also a question of scale and load bearing, carrying a channel of water on a 50m tall viaduct is a greater feat than, say, building a bridge at that height that a few dozen people can cross at a time. Before the Romans, you had the innovations in agriculture and urban planning that came with the Mesoamericans, and before them the Mesopotamians, plus the advances in naval technologies with earlier Mediterranean civilisations. After the fall of the roman Empire, technological dominance moved east to the Chinese and later the Indians, Persians and Ottomans before returning to Europe over 1000 years later.
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  3407.  @maya-cc2sx  I'd argue the the stepwells, being generally solid structures with a hollow center, don't really require the same level of architectural skill. You do see arches, but they tend to be quite small. Still very impressive, like the pyramids are, but I don't think they are as innovative as what the Romans were building at the time. But, of course being able to make such large structures in the first place without them collapsing under their own weight is still an earlier innovation, so depending on when they were constructed, you could still credit them with architectural innovation.
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  3408.  @maya-cc2sx  All of these are very impressive, but they were all constructed after the peak of the Roman Empire (yes there were earthen walls in China before then, but if we're talking about what we see today, that's 14th century, hardly ancient). So it's not unreasonable to say that China, India or the Middle East in the European dark ages took the mantle of architectural innovation. In fact I'd argue one of them almost certainly did as europe regressed. What I'm arguing is for a particular period of ancient history, Rome led the world in architecture and many other civilisation defining technologies.
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  3409.  @maya-cc2sx  Well, it's going to be subjective who was the greatest civilisation at any point in time. I appreciate there are attempts to "rebalance" history away from eurocentrism, and that's often a worthy endeavour, but I think we do risk going too far and ignoring the times when europe genuinely did lead the world.
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  3410. Far left parties tend to want to leave the EU for being too conservative and capitalist. We're generally taking fairly hardcore socialist or even communist perspectives here, generally anti-capitalists. For them the goal might be a self-sufficient fiercely independent "worker's paradise" a la Cuba or Venezuela.
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  3411. In a historical context the bicycle was seen as an improvement in mobility as opposed to going everywhere on foot. It might allow you to live in a slightly nicer area a little further away from the big dirty factory where you and a couple thousand other people worked. Still, compared to a car it's not nearly as big of an improvement in mobility, you couldn't ride your bike out into the country, that was too far so you'd still be living much closer to work and services than many people do today.
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  3412. Insulated boxes can have even more trade-offs when you put warm, moist air producing humans inside the box. Too many houses in the UK have cavity wall insulation with no vents. Meaning they can be much more efficient in terms of heating but are almost airtight with all the windows closed. That's not so much of a problem with a fridge/freezer but with humans who breathe out moist air and like steamy baths and showers, it's a recipe for water dripping off the ceiling and black mold growing on the walls and windows. So even the best insulated house needs somewhere for moisture to be removed from the air, which will either take additional energy or will slightly compromise the insulation. In general though the savings from CW insulation are worth the increase in airtightness (and even a poorly insulated house can have problems with air circulation) as long as steps are taken to reduce the moisture (and contaminants) in the air. Sometimes this is as simple as having small vents on top of the windows, to skim off the warm, moist air from each room and replace it with dry air from outside.
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  3413. The problem is, nuclear weapons are a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. Unless we mine and use up all the fissile material on earth (which is perhaps a good argument for nuclear energy, but still), somebody can build one as long as they can do it in secret. It's like trying to undo man-made fire without chopping all the trees down, that knowledge is practically impossible to remove from the archive of human progress. Eliminating nuclear weapons could be the easy part, keeping them eliminated is likely to be far more difficult.
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  3414.  @JollyOldCanuck  To be fair, what other industry would ever invest in the areas they live in?
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  3415.  @jimzecca3961  In general, if security is that much of a concern then nobody is allowed to work on it outside the office, offsite only with a partner company or institution where employees are under NDA. After all, there's usually nothing stopping a WFH employee from going to a cafe or co-working space with their laptop and doing work there of their own volition. As for satellite offices, they also tend to be in big cities for the same reason the main office is. No point having two offices near each other if they have the same function.
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  3416.  @victorianascimentodesa6931  It's better than no jobs at all.
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  3417.  @exchangAscribe  Many do, because otherwise they get eaten by the competition. Only if they're providing a service to the local area because nobody else will. As for walkability, that's probably not the main goal in small towns. People are going to be coming from lots of rural settlements nearby, if you only focus on those living in the town then you're restricting your labour pool.
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  3418.  @exchangAscribe  That's really only going to be the case for unskilled and semi-skilled work for the local area, white collar jobs, particularly services, aren't going to stick around. As for walkability, it's not a magic bullet. For an isolated town too much can actually be harmful if it makes driving less convenient. People aren't going to move into a cramped apartment above a shop if they can buy a nice single family ranch house a few miles down the road and drive to work. If driving becomes difficult businesses will move to where it is not, and your main street becomes a ghost town. A pedestrian street with ample parking at one end is one option, but you can't pretend you're in a big city.
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  3419.  @exchangAscribe  Then you'll find those sorts of places don't do well in less populated areas. People don't want to pack themselves together if they don't have to.
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  3420.  @exchangAscribe If you go to the country in Europe you don't tend to find apartment blocks or townhomes any more than the US. If people have the space they will use it. The difference being that Europe tends to have less space in general and a lot of small towns have historic buildings that are fairly cramped, for defensive reasons or because people couldn't travel as far. But that's not the world we live in today.
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  3421.  @exchangAscribe  We're not talking about big cities, or even suburbs, we're talking small towns. Small towns with miles and miles of relatively empty low value land surrounding them. You try and tell people they should live cheek by jowl in an apartment block surrounded by *nothing*? They'll laugh in your face and go back to their single family home.
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  3422.  @exchangAscribe  Everything is relative. Compared to a single family home, you're not going to get nearly as much space for your money, it's going to feel cramped. That is a fact. The US is not Europe. There is lots of space, lots of empty land. In such a landscape, why would you choose to live in an apartment outside an urban area? What possible advantages could there be? If you want to live in an apartment, you may as well live in a city rather than a sleepy rural town, because there at least you have some of the upsides of city living.
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  3423. What a lot of people miss is that it is absolutely true that alpha wolves don't really exist in the wild. But humans aren't wolves, aren't even closely related to wolves, so why don't we look at say, chimpanzees, and there we do find an "alpha" breeding pair. The concept of an alpha male isn't wrong, it just doesn't apply to wolves, and in fact does apply to some of our closest cousins in the animal kingdom. It's just people generally don't want to think of themselves as chimpanzees instead of wolves.
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  3424. You certainly can send power over optical fibre, I have a very thick fibre the size of a garden hose at work for the job, it can send up to 16KW of power. Problem is, the beam at the other end is an industrial laser, great at cutting through steel, not so great for powering your electronics!
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  3425. Considering merely washing your hands kills millions of them, I'm sure it is.
    1
  3426.  @My_Old_YT_Account  Japanese homes are tiny compared to US ones. There's also a lot more mixed use.
    1
  3427.  @somerandom2858  Does make me wonder how much he's paying them if so. That's a fair bit of money with not very much to show for it.
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  3428. The problem is preventing single use plastics from composting before they're used. You end up having to spend more energy on climate control when storing the product which negates a lot of the benefits.
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  3429. I'm going to guess many places in the world where wok cooking is very popular (outside of Japan and parts of China) may have cheaper gas than electricity (or the electricity just isn't that reliable) and that's why they aren't as widespread as they could be. To be fair even in some western countries gas can be cheaper, like the UK (though I doubt it will be in a few years when we're supposed to switch to green/pink hydrogen).
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  3430. High barriers to entry can facilitate a large black market. We see this in legal cannabis states in the US, where the red tape means some growers stay in the illegal market because it's just so much easier to do business.
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  3431. To be fair, most English speakers say it with a hard "a" and "o".
    1
  3432. I read that as Eschede at first, and wondered how unlucky a town has to be to have a neighbourhood blown up and a major train crash to its name.
    1
  3433. To be fair, there are a lot of companies out there that fit #2 in the US.
    1
  3434.  @nevm7469  The US still has a very large white working class demographic, large enough for companies to specifically target them. Even with some other groups like Hispanics you can't assume that progressive credentials will attract them, particularly as some tend to be more socially conservative on LGBT issues then white Americans.
    1
  3435.  @nevm7469  Well there are some products that progressive urban coastal liberals don't buy nearly as much of, like cheap beer. These companies still successfully turn a profit even though their products do not appeal to that demographic, so they must be doing something right. By that logic we shouldn't market anything to poor people because there's no money in it.
    1
  3436.  @nevm7469  I don't think that's a tiny minority, in terms of size companies they focus on working class demographics tend to be larger as there is more of them. Bud light is a massive brand compared to some hipster microbrewery in Portland.
    1
  3437. There are, but it's so much easier to have them all in one place. Instead of spending your time on half a dozen sites you can spend most of your time on one.
    1
  3438. @fredm.7145 You serious? Mexico less dangerous than the US?
    1
  3439. Definitely not the fish. Aluminum Sulfate is toxic to fish.
    1
  3440.  @Showsni  What are the AA's figures based on? A modern light car on a dry or mildly damp road is going to be different to a heavy van on an icy or waterlogged road.
    1
  3441.  @Showsni  Are they less than the Highway Code? I was told those distances are very conservative.
    1
  3442. I suspect the coolant will act as a "heat battery" in this case, smoothing out the intermittent energy releases of the impacts.
    1
  3443. Problem is most people don't want to live in them given a choice, especially families. So only the poorest end up in them and crime inevitably follows.
    1
  3444. One thing to consider regarding merchant fees is the costs of handling cash for a business are often not negligible. Many business bank accounts charge more for cash deposits than electronic deposits (some charge no deposit fees at all if you forgo cash deposits entirely). Then there's the cost of having a full cash register (unless you're a street vendor you'll probably need one) instead of just a card POS terminal (which keep coming down in price). And then there's security, if you're handling a lot of cash you'll need a safe to keep it in, and perhaps other anti-theft measures, and of course without cash your cashier is not likely to be asked to stick 'em up and empty the register! Not to mention either you or one of your employees has to take 30 minutes to an hour out of their workday every so often to go to the bank with a sack of cash and deposit it. So while it seems like businesses and customers might be worse off going cashless, depending on the business they might actually save money. They'll take a 1.5-2.5% transaction cost and perhaps a small monthly fee for abolishing or reducing a whole litany of other costs.
    1
  3445. I think it's important not to get too hung up on historical emissions. Low carbon technologies like solar, wind or nuclear simply didn't exist or weren't viable when today's developed countries began to industrialise. Burning coal and oil was your only realistic option in most cases once water wheels and windmills couldn't give you the grunt you needed (a few lucky locations could use dams, but in places like England that wasn't an option). Hell, I'd argue without fossil fuels many low carbon technologies would probably have been very difficult to develop, as the industrial capacity enabled by cheap energy dense fossil fuels simply wouldn't be there to make PV panels, nuclear pressure vessels or efficient wind turbines. Developing countries industrialising today have choices for their energy generation developed countries didn't have when they were in their position. By all means developed countries should help those countries adopt these technologies because of their wealthy position, but pointing to past emissions is somewhat unfair when they really didn't have a choice, the only alternative would have been not to industrialise at all and keep their populations in poverty.
    1
  3446.  @MrTaxiRob  Lack of training and experience most likely.
    1
  3447.  @bennravi3171  Afghans aren't building subways and high speed railways. These aren't construction projects you can build with unskilled labour, not any more.
    1
  3448. I wonder if you could invent a "storage cooler" similar to a storage heater, something that pumps coolant through a solid brick like material that has a poor heat flux, which then slowly sucks heat out of the air during the day.
    1
  3449.  @askyourmama5862  Nah, these are way more generic than most action films.
    1
  3450. Generally what happens is an "anti corruption" leader gets elected, a "purge" of corrupt officials happens, then it starts building up all over again.
    1
  3451. Like with snowflakes, even if every fingerprint is truly unique, there will be some that to the naked eye (or even to a computer at a poor resolution), look the same.
    1
  3452. I think there's one factor that will reinforce or weaken the dark forest hypothesis: Scarcity. If there are scarce resources vital to an advancing civilisation, then it's logical to think an alien civilisation may come and kill us to take our resources, which in turn would be the same thought those alien civilisations would have about us. However, if we find that all the resources we need are massively abundant within our solar system, and there are plenty of nearby systems that are similarly rich in resources with no competition, then it'll probably make us, and them, less wary. Why would an alien civilisation want to go to the effort to wipe us out when they have everything they need from uninhabited rocks, planets or other solar systems? We can see this within our own world, humans had to settle pretty much everywhere easily inhabitable first before major conflicts arose outside of relatively small local skirmishes. Otherwise all an expanding tribe needs to do is spread into uninhabited lands. The same will be true for space exploration, if there's plenty of systems with no civilisations (or maybe no life at all) that can nonetheless be exploited, then it makes the risk of conflict a lot lower.
    1
  3453. So you'll have a situation where 1.6% of the population owns the whole country and gets very very rich. I can imagine this state of affairs wouldn't last very long in a democratic society.
    1
  3454. I didn't think anyone out there would hate being a billionaire playboy astronaut rockstar, but maybe I'm wrong.
    1
  3455. Wine is the most interesting to me, because many of them are so old the wine itself has long since gone off, and would actually be disgusting if drunk.
    1
  3456. I've always been reminded of the closing credits to a 90's US soap opera.
    1
  3457.  @jonm8513  Why not exactly? I guess it does sound a bit like the 93-94 "jazzy" theme: https://youtu.be/qKeVvBe5D-w
    1
  3458.  @jonm8513  It is the cringiest of cringy christian contemporary music, I'll give you that! And yes the singer is ear bleedingly awful.
    1
  3459.  @somedudebro69  Genetically the Irish are practically identical to the British, the difference is pretty much entirely cultural. If all that's required for indigenousness is some long lasting cultural heritage, then you could find hundreds of indigenous peoples all over Europe.
    1
  3460.  @scallopohare9431  How many ships do you think there are in the world?
    1
  3461.  @scallopohare9431  I don't think it takes an expert to know there's a lot of ships out there. One look at Marine Traffic would confirm that, and those are only the tracked ones.
    1
  3462. I think interconnectedness is not necessarily a bad thing for resilience. I'd argue it actually makes us more resilient against regional collapse. Regional droughts and famines used to wipe out whole civilisations in the past, but now we can send in aid to prevent total collapse. Same thing with peacekeeping forces sent in to to quell conflicts and wars, as well as the diplomatic structures to prevent those wars in the first place. Yes, it probably does make us more fragile to planetary scale collapse, but since most disasters don't affect the entire planet at once, it's probably a net benefit for resilience.
    1
  3463. Now make a bigger course for raccoons!
    1
  3464. I think the cost of resources in space is likely going to less about material value and more about accessibility and transport costs. You could have an asteroid full of gold but if there's no cheap way to transport it to where there is demand, it may as well be worthless.
    1
  3465.  @Dave-the-adequate  Depends on the distance and Delta-V. A long mission and large burn time is going to eat into profits massively. Currently it's still uneconomic.
    1
  3466.  @billyponsonby  I disagree. White was willing to compromise with Milk despite their differing opinions and morals, in return for a little quid pro quo. When Milk reneged on his side of the bargain and then tried to oust White behind his back, that was the motivation for murder. If Milk hadn't been gay I really doubt it would have made any difference.
    1
  3467.  @OneReallyGrumpyJill  I can see little evidence that Milk was killed because of his sexuality. The killer had an alternative motivation which would adequately explain his actions. Why would he kill the mayor as well if the motivation was homophobia?
    1
  3468.  @OneReallyGrumpyJill  Well, if you're so knowledgeable, explain to me why the mayor was k*lled as well, and why despite the obvious motivation discussed at length in the video homophobia was the real one.
    1
  3469.  @Spanner14  It's still dirty politics to renege on a deal, which Milk did. Arguably his resignation was because Milk didn't really like him and was pushing him out, he then changed his mind and decided to try to fight, but Milk wanted to make sure he stayed gone.
    1
  3470. @jordanmutlow108  In today's world it may have been considered constructive dismissal, and yes, that does mean you can "take back" a resignation if you can make a case that you were bullied into it.
    1
  3471.  @midnight8341  There's a difference between "inedible" and "not suitable for human consumption". If the moisture level or protein content isn't within acceptable parameters, crops will be rejected by food manufacturers. Bakeries need a minimum amount of protein to produce the correct loaves, canola needs to have the right amount of moisture. So in a bad year, a lot of the crop can be uneconomical or impractical to produce food for humans.
    1
  3472.  @midnight8341  Yes, as in "a human could eat it and not die". That doesn't mean it's nutritious or useful. A human can eat a bowl of the crappiest wheat if they wanted, and potential food poisoning aside they'd be fine. But nobody would want to mill it into flour, because it wouldn't make good bread. There are similar considerations with maize and soy.
    1
  3473. Lots of Chinese people live in giant apartment blocks with a density only matched by the urban cores of the largest US cities. If people in the US lived like the Chinese do then of course they wouldn't need nearly so many cars.
    1
  3474.  @henrywang3977  Perhaps, but that doesn't matter from a public transportation perspective. With that level of density everywhere, a rail or subway line is always going to make economic sense, so you build a crapton of them, like China has already done.
    1
  3475.  @Bobspineable  I agree. But you certainly can't have your cake and eat it. If you don't want car dependency, you can't have low density suburbs.
    1
  3476. I can imagine the "ecocide" law to be a legal nightmare to enforce. What will separate legitimate human activity from ecocide? I can imagine there's a lot of people who would point at the enormous French meat and dairy industry and accuse all of them of ecocide on that definition, but good luck getting the French to part with their steak frites and fancy cheese. What about companies like Renault and Dassualt who make fossil fuel burning cars and planes? This is just going to result in enormous legal trials costing millions while teams of lawyers argue back and forth over whether the action was "serious" or "significant" enough, or what the "planetary limits" actually should be.
    1
  3477. You can buy direct from VW in most of the world.
    1
  3478. In a smaller city it might work, like the Jokeri in Helsinki or the Hovedstadens Letbane in Copenhagen. But I think Melbourne is just too big for either of those ideas to work.
    1
  3479. I can see how psychic profit based on national loyalty could still be a problem, since it relies a lot on faith in the nation or its leaders, what could be called patriotism to some extent. You can see how places like North Korea use this to maintain what is objectively one of the worst working conditions on the planet, but it's really rather fragile, and under stress could easily crumble quite rapidly, causing your economy to pretty much self-destruct over a few weeks or months.
    1
  3480. 19th and early 20th century Europe was a hotbed of political experimentation. The old power structures were slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) weakening, and all kinds of relatively new ideas and ideologies were floating about. Such ideological terms were still quite "fluid" back then and hadn't crystallised into the far more rigid definitions we have today. Socialism seems like such a specific ideology nowadays, but that's thanks to a few individuals who promoted their version of socialism over others.
    1
  3481. For some the fuel costs are the least of their worries, if the planes are parked no need for Jet-A1.
    1
  3482. The irony of getting "the simplest way to make money online" ads before this video.
    1
  3483. I kind of get it for China, everybody knows they're subsidising the hell out of a diverse array of industries, probably manipulating their currency and in general not playing fair when it comes to "free market" global trade (though neither is the US of course, but I think China is probably doing more, and to be fair I think a lot, but not all, of what the US does is in response to China). So tougher and more broad tariffs may be valid there. But for everywhere else, especially other developed countries, I don't get it. What threat does Canada or the EU pose to US manufacturing? Little to none. Goods are typically no cheaper, and often more expensive, to produce there than in the US. It'll just result in a tit for tat tariff war where both sides lose.
    1
  3484.  @FOLIPE  In some cases, perhaps the export market does force the growth of a sub-optimal cultivar for the local conditions (let's not talk about completely different plants, that's a much broader scope). But in many of those cases the local market is just too small to make it worthwhile, and perhaps the cost of exporting that cultivar is higher (many are designed to store well for shipping), or they aren't as valuable in the export market (for a variety of reasons). Switching to a local cultivar caps your profits as exporters won't pay as much for them. You'd again have to go up the value chain and make the consumers at the other end pay more for them.
    1
  3485. Fakery can be seen in 300 year old manor houses in the UK. Rich people would design houses to look like medieval castles with crenellated roof lines and turrets, despite the fact they served no defensive purpose.
    1
  3486. Yeah, because the commies didn't do the same thing but way worse.
    1
  3487.  @dingahaban2288  I mean, if you want to cut off your nose to spite your face that's up to you.
    1
  3488. They might, but I think they're focusing on the spaceplane first.
    1
  3489. I've been told never to have Italian food in Japan because it's always awful. Don't know how true that is though.
    1
  3490.  @richardblain4783  Also redundant computation with a voting system. Basically have multiple computers (in hardware) do the same computation and pick the result that was reached by the majority of them.
    1
  3491.  @richardblain4783  Basically all earth orbit satellites are solar powered, so that's not really a problem in that case. Even for Moon or Mars rovers power consumption isn't as critical as a probe going to the outer planets. There is a chance the voting system might be corrupted, but it's pretty small so you can often shield it better. Even error correction isn't perfect since there's also a chance that the CRC or parity bit is correct even for corrupted data, or the error checking function itself is corrupted and approves corrupted data.
    1
  3492. In the UK and much of Europe the mainstream fast food chains were never the bottom of the market, it was always the independent kebab and fried chicken shops who offer food of questionable quality in rather manky surroundings but for a very low price. If Maccies and KFC raise their prices too much then these places benefit as low income customers just trade down. At the moment they seem to be offering deals to try and keep these customers as well as aggressively expanding especially in suburban areas where there might be few alternatives.
    1
  3493. Problem is those cheaper materials are much less energy dense. One of the cheapest forms of energy storage is just pumping water up a gradient and letting it flow back down to discharge. But that takes up an immense amount of space.
    1
  3494.  @okkomp  It is, because the more land you need to take up, the more problems you have. Lots of sites will be too small, there will be more objections from neighbours, environmental damage is likely to be much higher, and so on. All of this could derail many proposals.
    1
  3495. ​ @zeyu8 It's not a myth. "Streetcar Suburbs" were generally denser than most suburbs are in the US today. Those suburbs were also a lot closer to the city centre, the population has grown and cities have spread out, and considering how slow those streetcars were compared to a lot of modern transit, that was important. Even then, the suburbs were mostly the preserve of the middle class, poorer people lived in overcrowded conditions in the city centre.
    1
  3496. There's a lot of armchair, and even some non-armchair, pilots who think "I could never make a mistake like that, I always follow the procedures to the letter and have complete awareness of my aircraft at all times". It's a really arrogant and unsympathetic mentality.
    1
  3497. There is an alternative to non compete that some companies do practice, but it costs the company dear, so-called "gardening leave". Basically put the employee on full paid leave (so they can do some gardening, or more likely go on an extended holiday somewhere nice) until their knowledge is out of date enough to not be a threat. As the company is basically paying the employee not to work, this tends to be reserved for only the most important employees for the shortest tolerable amount of time.
    1
  3498.  @Tool683  Not in central London! You want to build skyscrapers in the suburbs and leave the city centre alone?
    1
  3499. What's really a shame is there have been some pretty good adaptations of Scooby Doo in recent years, it's a series that somehow takes what should be a tired formula, and mostly successfully reinvigorates it over and over again though a few well written and usually quite subtle changes. It's precisely when there's too much meddling that you get the truly terrible adaptations, Scoob! being a somehow less egregious example than this, which got rid of the entire mystery solving plot for some silly pseudo superhero movie. Meddling is pretty much all Velma does. It meddles with the characters, the plot, the tone, the setting, just about everything has been changed, only the names of most of the characters and the vague notion that there should be a mystery to solve (though now it's gone from silly hi-jinks from people in costumes to full blown grisly murder and mutilation). It knows meddling pisses off the fanbase so it's gone out of its way to meddle with everything it can think of while not going so far as to be unrecognisable. The idea that the producer felt like they couldn't pull off a proper Scooby-Doo adaptation has had to make rage-bait just makes them seem utterly incompetent and unsuitable for handling such a historic franchise. Because even as recently as 2019, there was another reasonably good adaptation. It wasn't perfect, but it stuck to the formula with a bit of a twist, and has generally been well received. So there's really no excuse.
    1
  3500. In the end it was probably the slow transfer of colonial power to the state thanks to that ultimately made colonialism unprofitable. It benefited the nations who took a hands off approach a lot more. The British and the Dutch were happy to just let their corporations do pretty much whatever as long as the money kept rolling in. It took an absolutely colossal fuck up by the EIC for Britain to take formal control of India, for example, and I'd argue that was the beginning of colonialism becoming unprofitable. When Britain had to run things itself it had to start investing a lot of money and effort in keeping these colonies stable, and that probably began to tip the scales, especially as civil unrest and calls for independence grew. I'd argue the choice of rather rapid decolonisation after WWII was largely a financial one. The empire had been a money sink for decades, but decolonisation before then would have been a massive loss of face and political suicide for any party suggesting it. WWII gave Britain a perfect excuse to begin the process, it was out of money and ravaged by war, so it needed to look after itself first. Plus the US was in a very anti-imperial mood at the time, and currying favour with them made more sense than hanging on to a dying empire. Of course, it still took a few decades to dismantle it all, and there's still a few small bits here and there, but the bulk was formally done by the 60's.
    1
  3501.  @thabomuso2575  The problem is that keeping the existing elites in power can be justified by arguing this promotes stability, and it's a fair argument especially with ideological competition. A weak democracy is much more likely to fall to political ideologies like communism or religious extremism than something less democratic but more stable. An orderly transition to a strong democracy is the best route, but that's usually slow and expensive, and interventions rarely have the funding to do that. There is of course a lot of conveniently aligning interests in all of this, which makes it hard to discern true intentions.
    1
  3502.  @thabomuso2575  Resource nationalisation and land seizure would be be unpalatable to the US on two fronts. Firstly, it would of course shut off access to US corporations, but secondly, it would be seen as a back door to communism since it's the confiscation or compulsory purchase of private interests. I agree in a few cases corporate lobbying may have influenced the US to engage in conflict purely on corporate interests, but I think in most cases there was an ideological component driving it. The fear being that a socialist government was halfway to a communist one, and that it was only a matter of time. The US is richer than it was in 1945, that's true, but I'd argue that it's a lot harder to justify such massive expenditure on reconstructing nations today than back then. A modern equivalent of the Marshall plan would probably cost in the tens of trillions, and the benefits to the US would also be limited or non existent for somewhere like Afghanistan or The Congo. You also have to remember the threat of communism also gave reconstruction a defensive dimension. The US needed a strong western Europe to defend against a potential communist invasion from the Soviets, because if that happened they then have threats off of both coasts. Europe was a buffer for the US.
    1
  3503.  @thabomuso2575  I'd argue Iraq and Afghanistan (and some other cases) were failures because the US could not commit to a full occupation like in Germany. You have to be a bit totalitarian for a few years in order to stave off chaos (though I'm not sure anything could change Afghanistan). West Germany didn't become a full democracy until 1949, and that was a country ripe for a clean sheet reconstruction. But that's been financially and politically off the table for decades. I think there are, or perhaps were, in the US government, those who genuinely believed that they could make these places better through intervention, as much as in the past there were those who genuinely believed ridding the world of communism would make it a better place, even if some unsavoury things had to be done to achieve that. There were. of course corporate interests who stood to benefit, and I'm sure a few lobbied their position and reinforced that what these people were thinking was the right thing to do. But I don't think in most cases their primary goal was straight up neo-colonialism.
    1
  3504.  @thabomuso2575  The closest you probably get there are the banana wars and the Philippines, though I'd say the banana wars were still a bit of fear that land redistribution would lead to socialism, and so on. I'd argue Congo was still about communism, it's just the US has a habit of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There was a fear of a domino effect in Africa as much as in South America, especially with a few ex colonies who despised the west for obvious reasons, and were tempted to buddy up with the Soviets to spite their former masters. I think with Afghanistan the task of achieving something like universal access to drinking water is not trivial. The US did build infrastructure, but it was a long, slow, process that would have taken many years because most of the country is either desert or mountains, and there's lot of remote villages, among other challenges. So you need something that stops the country falling apart before it is finished, and that's what the military occupation is for. If the Germany wasn't occupied, it's very possible there could have been a civil war between Nazi remnants, Nationalists, Communists and whoever else (there very nearly was in France!). If you can't keep those groups from fighting each other, and probably fighting you too, then you've got no chance of rebuilding the nation. That's pretty much what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    1
  3505.  @thabomuso2575  I've heard of both sources before, they do provide valuable insight but are not exactly unbiased. My view of the US in not exactly charitable in this case, but there are many others willing to paint the country in a much more malevolent light. I think you are somewhat right about some european countries, Britain and France in particular, who did so on occasion. Of course, they had a lot more to lose, they had mostly been ravaged by war and needed all the income they could get, even by the 60's and 70's many of these economies were still depressed and lagging behind, so trying to salvage as much as they could is somewhat understandable. I do think the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were the result of politicians with what they saw as good intentions. It was never going to be profitable for the US in either case. I don't think other countries could have done a massively better job, since they were not in the US's shoes and can speak both from hindsight and speculation.
    1
  3506.  @thabomuso2575  I agree on the bias, hence my rather middle ground stance on the whole situation. Though I'd argue no capitalist country has true financial and political independence from corporations, be they their own or foreign owned, and that goes for the developed world as much as anyone else. Hence I'd resist calling it neo-colonialism since it doesn't really follow the same model as old colonialism. Global corporations have no real allegiance to any nation, they operate to maximise profits in whatever region they operate. But, to be fair, colonialism is such a politically loaded term nowadays I may just be avoiding it for its own sake. But I still refute your last point. Yes, other countries had boots on the ground, but they were not being given the most challenging and difficult tasks. The US had to do all the stuff nobody else wanted to do. The only real exception to that were the British, and arguably they did little better than the US.
    1
  3507. I think plant will hit a plateau at some point. While products are getting better, the fact is it's just not possible to fully replicate a chunk of flesh with plant cells in texture and taste. Plant will get only so close, and then won't be able to go any further.
    1
  3508.  @dstblj5222  Well, they did build a lot of renewables, but they needed the gas compensate for the intermittency. Closing the nuclear plants early just kept the coal plants running for longer.
    1
  3509.  @GeneralBrwni  These low cost concrete boxes can often be worse than being out on the street. They concentrate deprivation and crime.
    1
  3510. Seems the Iraq invasion was the cause of the problem, spreading the US military too thin. Now it's too late to fix the problem easily, and the current attitude seems to be one of futility, that we may as well just give up and let them all go to hell in a handbasket. There are problems with more direct consequences for the western world in other parts of the ME anyway.
    1
  3511. Makes me think more of the Poseidon adventure.
    1
  3512. Julia Crawford You can't move chemical weapon stockpiles easily, it would be dangerous and costly. It's like the IRA back in the day, enough time to evacuate but not enough to move important assets.
    1
  3513. Tesla is a bit like Apple, there are people who say it's the best because it's Tesla while worshipping at the feet of the great Elon Musk. I think that's what pisses a lot of people off. IMO Teslas are a great luxury EV model with all the latest bells and whistles, but that's not what you need for widespread EV adoption. Cutting edge battery and self driving tech will have its place among the early adopters with money to burn, but for the more everyday motorist they need something more affordable and down to earth.
    1
  3514.  @MoistlyCritical  An "axis of evil" portfolio!
    1
  3515.  @delfinenteddyson9865  Well, they are really. You can't absorb lead through your skin, you don't want to touch it because you might eat something without washing your hands and ingesting lead that way.
    1
  3516. +Authorised Mike That tends to only be those who have no choice. Few would choose such a living arrangement, even if it meant commuting a long distance by car.
    1
  3517. That happens a lot more often than you think. There's lots of abandoned graveyards in London.
    1
  3518. At that point it will be Lightning vs USB.
    1
  3519. I think there's a reason they aren't popular in many cultures, they are difficult to eat and not particularly tasty. Most ideas I've heard involve grinding down the insects into flour to add to other foods, basically as a protein extract.
    1
  3520. I think some westerners have convinced themselves that because of all these historical colonial atrocities, everyone from the former countries of european empires must hate their guts, at least deep down behind any friendly facade. I think we also don't always realise when we're being used as a scapegoat by the political leaders of these countries either.
    1
  3521. To be honest, I don't think this will affect China's various ambitions one bit. China knows it's pretty much sanction proof from the west, the bees can flap their wings as much as they like, but most of them will drop dead before the Chinese hornet does. The Uighur situation alone would have resulted in a raft of sanctions on weaker countries, and yet the west did practically nothing to China.
    1
  3522. It could allow electric aircraft to break into the 2-3 hour medium haul market. That's a pretty big market, it would cover the majority of intra-continental flights in Europe (including those lucrative leisure charters to the med) and a good chunk in the US. Transoceanic will probably never be electric though, there just isn't enough range even with the best battery chemistry. Instead hydrogen or synthetic fuel will be used.
    1
  3523.  @quademasters249  Our current method of extracting fusion energy from the sun is incredibly inefficient. Unless we start building a dyson swarm we're not going to be able to extract energy as effectively as building a "miniature sun" on earth.
    1
  3524.  @23merlino  That presents its own challenges of transmission costs and energy security. And you still need lots of storage for when it's night time.
    1
  3525.  @23merlino  The problem is storage at the scale required is really expensive. It pretty much negates any advantage solar has in affordability right now. Add in the need for 1000's of km of transmission lines to deserts, and massive scale desert solar isn't as attractive as it might seem. Not to mention places like Europe, who would have to get their desert solar mostly from North Africa, which has all sorts of implications for energy security.
    1
  3526.  @23merlino  Decentralisation can increase costs and reduce reliability if done poorly, and it still may not offer improvements even if done well. People converting their suburban homes to renewable is fair enough, but that's maybe only 20-30% of total consumption at best (not including urban housing which probably can't do the same thing). It's the critical infrastructure and industry that's real tricky.
    1
  3527. I think some temporary and special liveries use wraps. I suspect they aren't as durable, are probably heavier and might even be more expensive.
    1
  3528.  @MadeleineTakam  That's the problem, when somebody needs antibiotics, they really do need them or they could be dead by the afternoon.
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  3529. How long would the paint last before it gets dirty though?
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  3530. I have a super cheap rice cooker at home in the UK, so cheap the handle broke off the lid. And yet it does have an on/off switch at the rear!
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