Must be Canada. They’re sort of threading the legal loopholes for drug advertising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

That’s not a lot. Three to five F35 equivalents, depending on configuration.

It’s too bad we don’t have details about the other company involved that they were targeting. Seems like the sort of thing that could rapidly escalated – blinding all of your competitors birds on purpose. If those birds are in Geosynch, you don’t even need to be in the country to do it – just same longitude, approximately.

He doesn’t. He is lower density after transformation. Basically inflated. Also, he doubles as a life raft.

This is like some sort of black mirror ad

Alright. I’m a huge supporter of Ukraine here. But the west has been collectively providing Ukraine with a metric fucktonne of weapons. Russia is clearly the aggressor, at fault, and fucking evil. But if we can send weapons to Ukraine, Russia acquiring weapons elsewhere is probably fair game. That doesn’t mean we can’t apply economic or political pressure.

In many ways, this war dragging on for a long time is actually in Chinese interests, as far as I can tell. It makes the west war-weary making it less likely we can sustain another conflict should China decide to engage over Taiwan or similar. And it increases Russian reliance on China in the longer term. The only thing China is likely unhappy about here is NK’s increasingly large role (moving into Russian sphere of influence).

But unless we’re willing to actually sanction China, the west will just complain and do nothing.

Full agree. As a geoscientist, I am of the strong opinion that we should use more rocks in decorative contexts ;)

Classic intro to orbital mechanics question. You could actually pull this off on some of the smaller bodies in the solar system (asteroids, etc.) provided you put the hole through the body from the north to south pole to avoid Coriolis effects. Time would be equal to the circular orbit time at the same altitude. Cost would be astronomical.

This depends on what you’re optimizing for. If you are optimizing for total energy captured per square metre, then you’re right about the benches.

But suppose you have a sufficient flux even with some areas being covered so you aren’t bothered by the shadows. Wouldn’t it be aesthetically superior to have uniform tile types? Or would you prefer they micromanage the tile placement such that the tiles below the bench shadows are different?

Anyway, I think it is a good idea. Better than the silly solar roadways crap.

When you believe in an all powerful space fairy, it’s quite easy to believe in other arbitrary nonsense too. QAnon was an interesting phenomenon, as it was uniting the crystal woo hippy left antivax crowd into the magical space fairy religious right. And the radicalization pipeline took it from there.

It’s not necessarily religion that is the problem here. It’s that people who don’t have critical reasoning skills are drawn to religion. But they’re also drawn to whatever other bullshit anyone is peddling.

Excuse me a moment, I need to adjust my magnetic bracelet and turn on my Himalayan salt lamp.

2009ish

I am old, so this tracks ;)

The picture raises questions. If that is glowing due to heat, then something bad is happening. But maybe it is a bright light in a translucent pipe or something?

This is basically failing someone for being pregnant. That’s dumb.

Let’s make sure this is equitable. Fail any man that conceives a child during law school too.

And actually, let’s go full Japan and watch the birth rate plummet when people choose between career or family and end up choosing career for fear of repercussions.

Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc – and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger – fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life – most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don’t get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it’s no nuke.

So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they’re probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn’t.

Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.

Probably the money paid for whomever Alex Jones lost lawsuits against – so like Sandy Hook victims.

I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

while (0){};

Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…