Steel_Phoenix

Good point. I also find it to be an odd turn of phrase considering we spent those decades paying 70k a year or whatever to take care of them in prison. I'm going to have to start saying that my debt to society has been paid whenever I've just cost the taxpayers a great deal of money.

I'd like to see it tested in mars equivalent dust. I assume that the higher speed will correspond with more wear from sand blasting.

Maybe require that additional votes be different? Then they wouldn't be able to tell which was legit.

I was under the impression that most of the constellation would be at such an unusually low orbit that there wouldn't be much to collide with. How crowded are the planned orbit shells?

I was skeptical, but I'm happy with the decision. I can't cite anything for this, but I swear it rewrites your mind and body to be a more perfect parent. My own theory is that there are some kind of pheromones in baby breath that trigger something. If you have kids and spend a lot of time with them, you will be near certain to be glad you did. The biggest physical change I noticed besides some short term weight gain was a drastic improvement in my reflexes. I was happy without kids. I think what convinced me in the end to have kids is that my wife and I don't have a lot of friends or younger family members around. If I still wanted to have a family when I get older I'm going to need to make some.

I think you've got that backwards. If there were no Neanderthal genes on the x chromosome, then only men would have Neanderthal genes.

Doesn't seem to be. I edited out all the lines with Photoshop, and what remained looked identical.

I always wonder more about the airborne stuff. Blankets, carpets, clothing, furniture. In a sun beam you can see all the little fibers floating around. I bet I inhale and swallow way more plastic every year than I eat, but I never see it mentioned.

Anyone capable of sending such a thing would have more than one home, plenty of time to respond, and likely some kind of automated military hub every X light years as an early response force. We certainly would if we could.

You seem to have a good grasp of this. Do you have any thoughts on the effects this will have?

If China is discounting their goods, and consumers are paying for the tariff as taxes, then there is additional strain on China's ability to compete, which might bring back industry here, but more likely to Mexico, which is now getting the same treatment.

US taxpayers are basically now paying a more efficient form of taxes, since it's a tax on behavior we want to reduce, and it's largely offloaded from the consumer by the Chinese price reduction.

On the other hand, I only like tariffs to offset anti-competitive tactics. Given a little time, government will get hooked on the revenue source and US manufacturers will get soft from having hobbled competition.

Certainly. He's shown himself to be quite willing to listen. He postponed major Chinese tariffs on multiple occasions, referencing their good faith actions in negotiations. That was worth their time by itself. In the case of Mexico, he negotiated and signed on to the USMCA, which if Pelosi would pass it, would get them out of the current Tariff battle. By giving them collective bargaining and minimum wage, he would reduce their ability to undercut the US. He wants to be taken seriously as a negotiator. He'll gladly remove old agreements that are no longer in our best interest, but he'd be loath to remove his own accomplishments without strong reasons.

They only need to satisfy one man's opinion on whether they've done what they should.

I see a very different picture of why he does what he does. In this case, I think he's trying to pressure House Democrats into signing the USMCA, which would remove the tariff and give Pelosi the ability to claim she stopped him. If they don't, then he still meets his goals of renegotiating trade to reduce deficits.

He also isn't negotiating this in a vacuum. It sends a message to China and everyone else that deals will be renegotiated, whether they come to the table or not. One of his primary skills is forcing people into situations where if they try to ignore him, it hurts them greatly. He maintains his constant press coverage by saying something terrible about an issue he thinks he can win. He takes the hit and then fights his way up the resulting maelstrom.

The most brilliant counter to this I've seen is replacing the "it's ok to be white" paper that was removed with a blank piece of paper. Hopefully, once seeing blank paper is sending people to the campus police, this can all come to a truly ridiculous end.

Agreed. I'm a pretty solid artist who doesn't learn well from others, and I'll still praise the book. It had another lesson in it that I never see mentioned, one that was expanded on in Drawing on the Artist Within. Our mind has task managers that constantly assess what we're doing. They do scheduling, handle cost benefit analysis, etc. For someone who doesn't already have the right aptitudes, this can lead to a nagging voice in the back of your mind telling you that you aren't doing a good job, this is boring, you're wasting your time. Getting people to use some simple brain hacks to stop listening to their preconceptions and just draw what they see can bypass these issues long enough for some people to see that they're being their own worst enemy. It isn't a good book to teach you how to draw. It's there to help make sure you don't give up the moment you start.

When you're looking for something, you always find it in the last place you look.

I think it's dangerous to turn a complex and global issue into a binary social signaling device. We do terrible things to the planet. We should stop. Combining "should", goals, and politics only turns the majority of the planet against you. The global economy, global politics, national politics, and climate are all extremely complex systems. Ban plastic straws and cows and you may think you're helping, but end up being an example of failure to others. Make an electric car that is cheaper, more efficient, and outperforms gasoline, and you've taken a solid step towards saving the planet. When it's a binary issue, you lose the nuance of having choices. You burn witches before even figuring out if they were helping or hurting with their heresy. Is nuclear worth the risk and waste to offset carbon? Is the wind farm worth it if it destroys a bird's only habitat? Those are cost benefit questions. Believer or denier is a witch trial.

I think if they do that now, women will regret it for decades to come. Ending the draft the moment they would have been asked to stand beside their brothers, matching their promise to risk themselves in defense of our shared values? It would be a hollow victory for peace, and a great defeat for equality and solidarity. Expand the draft. Have all women of age sign up. Give it a few years to sink in, and then decide together whether to abolish it.

The tree I'd most like to know about is the one at the top of the page. I think I saw one once and I've been wondering what it is ever since. Anyone know?

I had some games I used to let the kids play on my phone once in a while, like the one where you tip it to roll the balls into the hole, or go through a maze without falling down. They were great, but only ad supported, which is really irritating, but I imagine profitable. I would've gladly paid 20 bucks for an ad-free version, even if it felt like gouging. I was grateful to be able to try it out free with ads, but I wish people would sell it also, even if the price they would need to charge to be as profitable seemed excessive. Next time you're feeling stuck, we should talk and bounce around some addictive game ideas. A change in target audience might make all the difference.

Just a guess, but often politics is less about what gets done than it is about who gets to claim credit. Stalling until the next Congress could be someone either trying to take credit or offload blame, possibly not even the person or party seeming like the obstacle, since they trade favors. It could even be something as simple as being able to claim bipartisanship after the switch.

And often intentionally. See "predator double tap strikes".

It gets women in the Olympics. We can either keep gendered sports and tell people of ambiguous gender where they aren't allowed to compete, or we can have an Olympics that is 99% male(ish) by birth or hormone adjustment. I don't think women are going to like that. Sure, there are a few sports where there is some parity, but not many, at least among the elite.

I had a related thought that maybe someone here can answer. We've been approaching peak phosphorus, where we're using up the easy sources in much the way we do with oil. Like oil, we'll likely just find other sources as scarcity raises the price. Also like oil, the used product ends up distributed in the environment.

My question is, if photosynthetic carbon capture is nutrient limited, what happens when we are adding both CO2 and phosphorus to the environment? Does everything grow better? And what's the next limiting nutrient?

I'm glad Ars and others are doing this kind of reporting. The populace needs frequent reminders that ulterior motives are everywhere.

There's a nearly inevitable lack of conscience within deeply established institutions where people, in committee, are paid to seek an outcome.

Yeah, I always like to be the most conductive thing around in a lightning storm. Keeps life exciting. Doesn't resistance translate to heat and explosions? Besides, one in 7 million and all.

https://xkcd.com/795/

Whether Tesla itself is the future or not, I don't know. I doubt Musk really wanted to be in the business of building cars. I think he did it to change the way everyone else builds cars. Not by decree of some minor increment in emissions standards, but by showing that an electric car would be cheaper, cleaner, faster, and sexier. He did it at a time when Prius was the laughing stock of the evening news, with stories of Prius tipping, and jokes about its drivers. Does Kia really have a higher safety rating than Tesla?

I agree with other comments that things like his fight with the diver was unhelpful. I don't know what was really behind the threat to take things private. Hopefully he learned something and will focus again on what he does best.

Sometimes, established industry needs someone from outside to threaten do do something even if it isn't the most profitable thing to do. I remember when iphones were charging for ringtones and wallpaper. Google's decision to make an open source OS, and threat to build a phone for it if no one else would, changed the whole game.

I'd rather invest time or money in Musk, despite the risk, just because he built the car, landed the rocket, and I want him to be able to do it again. I can respect an investor who just wants a safe return, but they should invest elsewhere and good riddance. He doesn't need that kind of investor always threatening to pull their money if he doesn't play it safer. Maybe instead of going public, he should start the world's largest Kickstarter.

There is no shortage of boring automotive companies to invest in if that's what they want.

Invest in Musk if you believe the future won't happen fast enough if you don't. A corporate board making all the decisions would have been long ago crushed by big oil or bigger manufacturers, or their patents bought and buried to continue the status-quo.

Thank you so much for doing this. It has been a central political talking point for me for a long time, but I've never seen the data so well laid out.

Obviously, it's just one factor among many, but I think heavy social safety nets and regulations make a lot more sense to people in very populated locations and a lot of interactions and anonymity than they do out in the countryside, who would prefer to be left to themselves with no one else's hand in their wallet.

It looks like your data is by county. I wonder to what extent it would be clearer if it were down to the city level. A large, mostly empty county with a dense city in it is going to skew the data differently than a small county with city.

All the moving parts and flexible pieces seem like a failure point to me. I'd like to see something that can project a touchscreen onto a tabletop.

The challenge would be making sure that only that modified wheat was harvested. I'm sure it could be done, but a needle in a haystack seems much easier to find than a conventional wheat in a celiac friendly wheat stack.

I'm not sure genetic mapping is really the core of the issue anyway. What we need is the equivalent of a reverse vaccination, since celiac is essentially an immunity to wheat. Such a concept might do for chronic disease what vaccination did for acute.