In my state something like 28% of the population is 18 and under by my estimate, so we'll likely never reach herd immunity if the vaccines remain 16 and up. Getting a vaccine approved for kids and making it mandatory for school attendance would go a long way to getting closer to herd immunity.
If we ever start really living and working in space it seems like we might reach a point where going down into deep gravity wells like Earth or even Mars will be too expensive to be worth it most of the time.
I've always thought something like the Skyhook described in Seveneves by Neal Stephenson would be perfect for lifting things off of high gravity worlds where the rocket equation is a deal breaker, provided you were starting in orbit or outside of the gravity well:
My first response was "Sweet, Starlink in a mobile phone!" but this is just VoIP over the existing Starlink dish, which, while cool, is not a huge surprise. SpaceX has not shrunk their receiver into a mobile phone [yet]. As someone who frequently goes out of cell phone range, I would love to see something like SPOT or inReach over the Starlink network instead of Iridium, maybe they can bring the price of these services down a little bit more.
My wife found out our 95 year old neighbor hadn't gotten the vaccine yet, because she had no idea how to sign up for it. We went in and signed her up using our phone number and email address to make sure we got the notification when she could schedule an appointment. The way it works in our area is you sign up at various health provider websites and then you are notified when your name gets drawn and you have 48 hours to log in and schedule your appointment. The sooner you get in when you get that notification the sooner your appointment will be and if you miss that 48 hour window you are SOL. Anyway we got notified the next day after signing up our neighbor and got her scheduled for the Pfizer vaccine next week. We had already been through this with my In-Laws so we've gotten pretty good at navigating these various providers' websites. If you know any people that are eligible for the vaccine and might need help, get them signed up. It's great that all these health care providers are doing more online and through apps, but it's not helping the older community out, and no one is reaching out to help them get the vaccine at this point.
Some companies are moving towards selling directly to consumers, especially if they have a brand to protect. Nike is pulling back from retail a bit and focusing on their own website and app to promote and sell their products.
The flip side is Amazon has empowered a lot of smaller manufacturers to get nearly direct access to consumers. Especially Chinese firms but even some small American companies have benefitted from the huge base of customers Amazon gives them access too.
Taken by itself the evolution of the human thumb may not be convincing, but along with other evidence, such as the changes around the human shoulder joint at around the same time period provides strong evidence that the ability to throw was a major factor in human evolution:
I always thought Google missed a perfect opportunity when they released Google+, they should have created a new open protocol for social media instead of another platform, something like RSS feeds for blogs. Then people could host their "pages" anywhere they want and still own their own data. The protocol would allow the aggregation of comments, likes etc. Google has a vested interest in keeping the web open to protect their indexing/search business and they have the industry weight to force new standards. Instead of course they opted to create another platform...
He's even fine with them using adapters for Tesla's plug, they just have to pay "their fair share" to use the Tesla superchargers. Of course the devil's in the details who knows what a licensing agreement like this would cost.
I'm really shocked that other manufacturers haven't invested in more infrastructure. Toyota and Honda pushed hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for years, they could have easily accelerated adoption of the tech by investing in refueling infrastructure. Now all that money they invested in fuel cell cars looks to be wasted as they both are playing catchup with battery electric vehicles, mostly because of Tesla.
Air pollution has already been linked to a number of ailments like heart disease, cancer, asthma, dementia/Alzheimer's, it's certainly not the only cause but it's contribution is significant. Health care costs are something that are rarely discussed when we talk about the costs of fossil fuels but they are significant and costly in both lives and dollars.
This is a false dichotomy, we have to get away from thinking of charging stations like gas pumps. Charging stations can be everywhere: grocery stores, retail stores, office buildings, malls, just about any parking lot or parking garage, hotels, airport parking and on and on. Gas pumps have to have huge underground tanks, and they have to be regularly refilled by large tanker trucks, by their very nature they will be less common and so they'd better be able to service more cars per hour. Charging stations are much smaller and can tie into the grid just about anywhere, there should be a lot more of them and thus they won't need to handle as many cars as a gas station does.
I think the assumption by many that we are being visited by aliens was based on the idea that the universe must be just teeming with intelligent life. Over time we are gathering more and more data that shows that may just not be the case. As we've built better and better telescopes we've found no evidence of Type III Civilizations. We've intercepted no interstellar communications or even errant radio waves. As we learn more about other stars we find that many of them probably create hostile environments for life on nearby planets due to solar activity. On top of that a number of studies have come out recently like these two:
that, through the use of models and simulations, come to the conclusion that we are dang lucky to have evolved on the Earth at all.
While I don't know that I was ever a believer in the Earth being visited by ETs, I always thought that we wound find evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy any day now. For the reasons above, I'm less and less convinced of that with every passing year.
Musk has mentioned using Hyperloop to transport people to the launch platforms. I don't have time to dig up the interview I heard it in but I'm pretty sure he said as much at one point.
The previous king (current king's father) was revered in Thailand and I think far fewer people had a reason to violate this law. Now that the son is king there's going to be a lot more problems with Thai citizens wanting to be openly critical of him. I married into a Thai family and we've had a lot of discussions about this exact issue, since long before the previous king passed. In my mind you can't have a free and open democracy when you still have these monarchs hanging around and especially when you aren't allowed to be openly critical of them. Thailand has an elected assembly and prime minister, but the king is still head of the military and both the previous king and current king use[d] their influence to stir things up as they saw fit. Thailand has technically been under a military dictatorship (with the king ultimately at the head) since 2014 which is why these lèse-majesté laws are much more frequently enforced now. In my opinion trying to maintain a monarchy (even as a symbolic figure) and democracy doesn't work, they've had 20 different constitutions in Thailand since 1932 and they've had the 4th most coups in the world in modern history. Currently Bangkok is in state of civil unrest with pro-democracy protestors forming the #MilkTeaAlliance with protestors in Hong Kong and Taiwan. We'll see if they are able to enact any real change in the country.
Regardless of where you stand on guns and the second amendment in the US, I don't think anyone can argue that the NRA was spending it's member's money well:
There are roughly 209 million adults in the US. Providing a $1,000/month UBI (which seems to be what's commonly proposed) will cost us $2.5 Trillion every year. That is a lot of tax to collect. If we are not careful it will be become a debt burden and it will cause inflation. I'm not saying that it can't be done but I think we would all like to see a very careful plan on where exactly that much money is going to come from.
There are a number of health issues that have been associated with spaying/neutering dogs including obesity, diabetes, cancer, cognitive impairment (Alzheimers type diseases) and joint problems like hip dysplasia, torn acls etc:
Male dogs especially seem to suffer significant long term health effects from being neutered. A much more humane option would be performing vasectomies and leaving female dogs their ovaries.
So if we only vaccinate people who haven't been infected does this mean we only need to vaccinate about 50% of the US population to reach herd immunity?
This money is being spent to improve things here on Earth. This is about providing internet to underserved communities on Earth. Now you could argue that SpaceX has made it clear that they created Starlink to increase their funding for settling Mars (developing Starship etc) but at the same time StarLink stands to be a huge boon for people in communities that don't have access to high speed internet currently and that seems like a win-win. According to the article, Charter Communications made even more money ($1.22 billion) from the FCC as part of this deal, I don't see anyone on here complaining about how Charter chooses to spend the profits from this deal, it's certainly not going to go to settling Mars.
The problem is, it's not just Apple, the entire software industry has taken a turn for the worse. Everything has automatic updates these days: my phone, my watch, my computer, my TV, my car, and every single app I use on these platforms, and they are constantly breaking stuff, undoing functionality, loosing data and occasionally ruining devices permanently. I've been on the other side of these things too, with panicked-laden all night coding sessions trying to fix a bad update that went out. I've been in the software industry for almost 25 years now, I'm not sure what the answer is but the direction things have gone is unacceptable.
It's also worth pointing out that Apple is also benefitting from TSMC's latest and best fab processes. Intel is not only behind architecturally but in manufacturing too:
Fort Collins just started rolling our broadband out and we voted on it three years ago. It's been a little bit of a boondoggle, behind schedule and over budget, like most of these kind of projects tend to be I guess. It's been just within the last quarter that Fort Collins is finally getting the number of paying customers into the thousands which should help the financials some. They pulled the fiber throughout my neighborhood a couple of months ago but then it seemed to stall. Occasionally I see a work truck doing something at one of the boxes, but we haven't heard anything as far as being able to get hooked up yet. Our cost is $59.95/month for gigabit up and down so there are many of us chomping at the bit. For anyone interested in the rollout of a municipal broadband program, the quarterly financial reports Fort Collins has been releasing during their rollout are kind of interesting:
The question is whether our institutions of higher learning (high school and college) should be sponsoring a sport where the vast majority of players are getting brain damage. They've shown CTE in people that never played past high school football, and they didn't get a dime for playing the sport. We don't let kids in that age group buy cigarettes or alcohol, why do we let them play a sport that has a pretty high possibility of causing long term health effects?
You are absolutely right, for example there are many studies showing vitamin D may have a protective effect against multiple forms of cancer, here's a nice meta-study summing a bunch of them up:
On the other hand another study has found that just taking a vitamin D supplement is not enough to statistically improve your odds of not getting cancer:
Vitamin D is certainly important for a number of biological processes including the regulation of calcium in the body and that is well understood. But for things like cancer prevention and lowering the risk of heart disease it may simply be that naturally occurring vitamin D is just an indicator of other healthy habits like eating a diet high in fish and exercising outdoors etc.
This is a good point, there is more to antitrust laws than just economics, they were put in place to protect our democratic republic. Senator John Sherman is quoted: "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life." The Sherman Antitrust Act is the foundation of modern antitrust law.
The question I've always wondered about UBI type programs (and I've been a fan) is what happens when people don't spend the money wisely? Take homelessness for example, what happens when you give homeless people $1,000/month and they spend it on drugs and are still homeless and hungry? In the end it seems like we will be left paying for UBI and social programs like public housing, food stamps and drug addiction programs. UBI will simply not be a replacement for most social programs as it is often advertised, which in my mind means we probably can't afford it.
I would actually argue that it should be the government's role to push the development of vaccines and drugs for treating even harmless diseases. We spend trillions of dollars on national defense in the US, when you look at the economic damage and cost in lives that the Covid-19 outbreak has cost us, the threat of disease outbreaks is every bit as damaging as a military attack, maybe even worse. If we had taken the time to develop and take all the way through the approval process a vaccine to previously encountered Coronaviruses such as SARS or MERS we would probably already have a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 approved by the FDA and in distribution. Maybe we should be building a few less F-35s and instead be developing vaccines against otherwise harmless viruses, because you never know when a close relative of a harmless virus is going to turn into a deadly outbreak. In the US at least that seems like it should fall under the protective role of the federal government.