fiftyfifty

Yes! This is exactly what I was alluding too in my original comment. I will also add that there are a number of demographic factors that are going to come to a head over the next 10 years or so that are going to put a serious squeeze on non-revenue men's sports:

First college enrollment is likely going to drop significantly starting around 2025 due to severely declining birthrates in the US that started during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It is expected that 2025 will be the smallest graduating high school class in the US in the last 30-40 years. Every college and university is going to be fighting over a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer people are going to attend games and fewer people will be watching college sports on TV which means smaller TV contracts.

The percentage of men attending college has been declining, in 2017 57% of college students in the US were women: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

And it looks like the declining rate of men in higher education is only speeding up: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-...

College men and male alumni disproportionately support college athletics, they attend games and donate to the athletic department more than their female counterparts. Fewer men on campus in the long term likely means less money for the athletic department as a whole: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34

Lastly, Title IX only requires that sports opportunities for both men and women be proportional to the percentage of men and women in the student body. With only 43% of college students nationwide being men now, and football being the juggernaut of college athletics that it is (with typically over 100 players on a college football team), there will be little room left for any other men's sports in college athletics, and no incentive for the athletic department to keep them around.

Over the next decades many men's sports will likely become nearly extinct at the D1 level: tennis, golf, rowing, wrestling, hockey, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, even track and field and baseball look to be in big trouble as athletic departments try to keep the revenue from college football flowing in while dealing with these challenging demographic factors.

We saw during Covid that as soon as there was a tiny bit of financial stress on athletic departments they immediately started cutting non-revenue sports, here's a fairly complete list from the last year:

https://businessofcollegesports.com/tracker-college-sports-p...

You can see from that list that the vast majority of sports that were cut were non-revenue, men's sports. $1.05M lost to paying the football team could just as likely be covered by cutting one or two non-revenue sports as it is by raising ticket prices. The reality is attendance of college football games was already down before Covid, even for powerhouse schools like the University of Georgia:

https://ugawire.usatoday.com/2019/03/27/college-football-gam...

It is extremely unlikely that even the biggest football schools will be able to cover the cost of paying their players through increase ticket prices when they are already concerned about filling seats.

The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their football and basketball players (and lets be perfectly clear, that's what this is about), it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level, and will likely only leave enough women's sports to offset the football team due to Title IX. I won't even get into the ridiculous hypocrisy of our institutions of higher learning pouring billions of dollars into a sport that is proven to cause brain damage, while cutting other sports that don't. That is not at all what college athletics should be about, it should be about extracurricular opportunities for real students. I think the Division 3 model (no sports scholarships/no backdoor admissions) has been much more successful and has provided many more opportunities for students (men and women) to compete in a wider variety of sports. I say this as someone who was a college athlete on scholarship years ago and still coaches high school.

Most devices these days including the iPad and things like Go Pros film in at least 720P which absolutely fills up storage space in no time at all. I started filming my kids' sporting events in HD and editing them on my laptop and I completely filled up 1 terabyte of storage on my computer in no time at all. Then I had to start playing the game of moving older stuff to external storage which totally sucks if you want to go back to it quickly. 1 minute of 1080P video at 60fps is around 200MB depending on the format, an hour is like 12 gigs. The only reasonable way to manage almost any amount of HD video is on a desktop system with loads of cheap(er) storage.

“The new devices rely on optogenetics, a technique in which researchers use bursts of light to activate or suppress the brain nerve cells, or neurons, often using tailored viruses to genetically modify cells so they respond to illumination (SN: 1/15/10).“ That seems like a really important piece of information: they controlled genetically modified mice with light, not just any old mice.

I've been involved in several IT projects and companies in the agricultural industry over the years. Most people that try to solve agricultural problems with tech are surprised to find that there is far less money in agriculture than they expected and farmers are far less willing to part with it on unproven tech.

This is because when a bank loans out money in most modern countries they in turn borrow the money from a federal reserve bank which in turn just creates the money to be loaned out. This is how federal reserve banks create more money. The idea being that loans drive the economy through building businesses and infrastructure but it also has the side effect of driving up the cost (inflation) for consumers of everything that can be paid for with loans: houses, cars and higher education and most of those things don't grow the economy in the same way a business loan would.

Lower sperm counts as well as lower testosterone levels in men have definitely been associated with obesity, and there's no question that's a problem these days.

Unfortunately the part of Colorado that feeds much of the rest of the southwestern part of the US it's water is still below average in snowpack this year:

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/co/snow/pro...

Mann also wrote an article called 1491 for the Atlantic that’s an abbreviated version of the book for anyone who hasn’t read it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...

I found this News Week article also very interesting and it goes into more detail about the DRASTIC internet group and how they made some of their discoveries: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...

IMO the most upsetting part about this is people like Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak being repeatedly caught in outright lies and coverup behavior. These people seemed to have the best of intentions at some point in their career but they are doing irreparable damage to their field and science in general with the public lies and coverups.

One example is Shi Zhengli publicly stating the the 6 miners that died after shoveling bat guano in a mine in Mojiang died from a fungal infection while the DRASTIC group was able to dig up two papers that specifically stated the miners died from a SARS-like virus. They also dug up evidence that Zhengli's lab visited the mine multiple times since 2012 to take samples after the miners died and retrieved as many as 9 unique Coronaviruses similar to SARS-Cov-2 from the mine.

I've definitely been to some US East coast rest stops that have a pretty nice food court and there were Tesla superchargers in the parking lot. Not every state has them but it seems like Tesla could build something like that where they need them and rent out the space without having to get into the restaurant business. I guess it could be tricky staffing up some of these places if they are pretty remote, maybe that's where more automation could come into play.

Most Tesla superchargers will charge from 0-80% in 20-30 minutes. There's no need for anyone to spend hours in their car charging.

The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise.

Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.

In 2020 alone both Australia and the Western US saw their worst wild fire seasons in modern history. 2020 also saw the worse Atlantic hurricane season in history: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-...

2020 also saw the Philippines get hit with the most powerful Cyclone at landfall in history (175 mph winds at landfall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni

And that was no outlier, in the last 5-6 years we've seen multiple Cyclones with winds over 175 mph, with several over 200 mph. This is definitely new territory for storms like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_recor...

With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.

Neither scenario for how Sars-Cov-2 came to infect humans looks good for China, it's interesting that they are pushing one over the other.

On the one hand we have unsanitary food markets and the questionable production and sale of exotic animals for human consumption.

On the other extreme we have the potential escape of a genetically modified virus from a research lab.

Honestly I find the second scenario more reassuring, if it did escape from a lab then the Chinese and the international community can put measures in place to prevent it from happening again.

If the virus made the jump from a wild animal somewhere in China's exotic animal industry then what is the recourse? Can the Chinese Government clamp down on that industry enough to prevent it from happening again? Will the Chinese culturally be willing to give up consuming animals like bats and pangolins that are frequent reservoirs for coronaviruses?

I think the world should demand more openness from China on the matter and demand a plan to prevent another outbreak like this from happening again. The latest estimate is 7 million people dead world wide and trillions of dollars lost. Surely that should justify some hard lines drawn and the threat of economic sanctions if the world can't be given some kind of re-assurance that this won't happen again.

The same I would think is true with coal power plants. Our local coal plant has a huge footprint, especially when you consider the cooling pond/lake, scrubbers, support buildings etc. This is not even considering the mining of fissile material/coal to feed these facilities as well, which also often have a large footprint as well. Plus the additional storage of waste, both short term and long term.

I never understood why Yahoo got so wrapped around the axle with the search engine business. I used to use Yahoo a lot to start my web browsing and I liked the fact that it wasn't a search engine. They provided broad categories that you could click on and you could keep drilling down to more specific categories until you found relevant websites. Not always the best way to search the web but it was great when you didn't know exactly what you are looking for. They could have easily continued to categorize and curate the web that way and provided a nice alternative to search engines, especially for non-power users. In addition to that Yahoo had so many successful components back in the day that had they spent even a modicum of money and development effort they would have continued to be a significant force on the web. Things like Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Groups still don't have a decent alternative these days. I still mourn the loss of some Yahoo Groups I used to participate in. Yahoo Finance was once one of the best places on the internet to research stocks and investments. Yahoo Mail was ahead of Gmail for many years and only through years of neglect finally let everyone else catch up, their lack of spam filtering was what finally killed my Yahoo mail account for me. Yahoo Briefcase could've been Dropbox or Google Drive 10 years before Dropbox existed. Heck Yahoo even had news aggregation years before Google did. Yahoo dominated fantasy football for many years. The fact that they couldn't grow and monetize any or all of these successful components was simply due to a complete lack of vision and leadership.

Yeah, I'm actually in Fort Collins, I was trying to be a little vague for anonymity but ya know. With Longmont Colorado having municipal broadband I think Comcast saw Fort Collins as a hill worth dying on. I've heard that Boulder and Denver are looking at putting municipal broadband on a ballot in the future. Certainly how things turn out in Fort Collins will be considered in other communities around the state. After 4 months on our community broadband I'm still fighting with Comcast over bills and charges.

The city I live in voted for municipal broadband in 2017. Our local private internet provider Comcast fought it at every turn, Comcast spent millions fighting municipal broadband in a city with about 150,000 residents. We started rolling out our own broadband to residents in 2020. It took a couple of years for the city to hire and build up a department and lay the infrastructure to support it city wide and I finally got the service at the beginning of this year, and it has been awesome. We have gigabit internet up AND DOWN for $59.95/month. What really burns me is the private providers we have, Comcast and CenturyLink, have been here for decades and could have done exactly what our city has done: run fiber to every neighborhood and house. It would have been cheaper for them too, they already had the infrastructure in place. They chose not to make the investment and instead spent millions trying to prevent us from providing better service for ourselves. I hope everyone has the chance to get better/cheaper internet service for themselves and their community, so far it has worked out great for us.

Couldn't they use the heat to to drive the wheels directly, maybe they could go to more of a hybrid drive? Just seems like such a waste to produce that much heat for 15 years.

Couldn't you use something like a Stirling engine to create more electricity from the excess heat? You might have to have an external radiator to create a heat gradient with a closed loop of liquid but it certainly seems possible.

It would probably be worth contacting someone at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is part of the USDA. It was literally created as a response to the soil lost during the dustbowl and was originally called the "Soil Conservation Service". They may already have studies that cover exactly what you are asking about:

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/abou...

The company I work for actually suggested getting rid of our office and going 100% remote for our group. We actually voted on whether to keep leasing it after Covid or not. We voted to keep it as we generally like our office and it's nice to have a place to meet face to face sometimes. Since we voted to keep it corporate has told us we have to come in at least 3 days a week after Covid. So for us it's less an issue of trust and more an issue of we are paying for this place so you better use it.

I think several of your categories nailed what the vast majority of car owners are looking for: an transportation appliance. This is where I think EVs will eventually dominate the market, the only thing you will have to worry about is plugging it in. The simplicity of the electric drive train will make them even more reliable (and efficient) than the best gas vehicles today. No more oil changes. No more random fluid leaks on your driveway. No more mornings where you are late for work because your car wouldn't start or you forgot you had to stop and fill up with gas on the way to work.

At this point the most economically viable solution is probably to widen the Suez Canal.

There were talks about building a train from Eilat to Ashdod, this article claims it's not economically feasable:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/suez-canal-ship-eilat-ca...

Looking at the terrain in Israel building a canal from Eliat to anywhere does not look possible, it would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than building the Suez canal was.

Here's some pictures of Tesla's plans for it's battery pack:

https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...

In that article it specifically mentions the cells being "bound" (their words not mine) into the honeycomb pack.

For Tesla's the battery pack is about 1/4 of the vehicle's weight. The battery pack weighs around 500Kg and the car is around 2,000Kg, depending on the model. The main problem as EV manufacturers look to shave weight the batteries are going to become more integrated into the car's structure, which is going to make them harder to remove and reuse the cells at the end of the car's life.

So can we say science has finally achieved a biological “Hello World”?

It will be interesting to see if they push Superheavy/Starship into production before they've completely mastered the landing/re-use of the second stage (or even the first stage)? They might as well get paid for some of these launches while they continue to refine their design, like they did with Falcon 9. Starship is supposed to be able to carry 240 Starlink satellites at a time, that alone might be worth pushing ahead.