geomark

Plenty of that misinformation is being indoctrinated in people at college.

My kid accused me of that. I grounded him.

Edit: Ah, come on! That's one of my best jokes and I got downvoted?!

That's a good demonstration of the results that come from price controls.

Not around here. TVs, fridge and a/c throughout the house working without issue for more than 10 years so far. A couple of Samsung mobile phones as well that kept going until they were so old they could not receive updates.

The transistor? (at Bell Labs, the research arm of the very capitalistic company AT&T)

"Perhaps critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical practice?"

I was having a discussion about this recently, recalling the vast majority of my experiences with medical doctors who obviously just follow a cook book approach to how they practice medicine. Worse than that is how many doctors cannot correctly explain test results. Seems like although they completed a lot of schooling they did not take enough math.

People may find this interesting http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf (PDF)

It is written by a mathematician who has taught in Russia, the US and Brazil. They have a lot to say about how math is taught in the US. The paper also has a lot of sample problems.

At the company I once worked for I used a NeXTcube to demo a co-processor board built from VHSIC Phase II chips. The cube's size and form factor allowed for a nice sized board to be plugged into the backplane. And the graphics of the NeXT were pretty advanced for the time. The co-processor board ran a missile tracking algorithm on canned data and the NeXT painted a nice real-time graphic of the tracking. It made for a really cool demo.

Steve Jobs actually paid a visit. When he saw the demo he said "That isn't what we had in mind." We thought he was kind of thick, that he didn't get it that when you have a cool product then users are gonna user and figure out all kinds of different things to do with it. Later it became clear that he was all about controlling the user experience, so seeing what we did was very contrary to his way of thinking.

Yeah, but receiving payments can be an issue because U.S. banks won't deal with you without a U.S. address.

Imagine being an expat in the middle of a pandemic, the U.S. donating millions of vaccine dosages to the country you live in, vaccines that your tax dollars helped pay for, and you can't get vaccinated because the U.S. won't stipulate that some of those millions of doses should go to the approximately 30,000 U.S. expats in the country .

Seems like there might be another way forward, one in which we all muddle along with an ongoing pandemic that doesn't wipe us out but keeps evolving and infecting and killing significant numbers of people. We continue opening and closing economies, rushing out experimental vaccines, and begin seeing larger numbers of long term effects of the disease and attempts to mitigate it.

That is very interesting. What are the preferred plants to grow to produce the biomass for slashing and dropping?

This is interesting to me. For the past 15 years I have had a small plot in the tropics on which I have tried to improve the soil by adding copious amounts of compost, manures and growing cover crops that I till under. All that organic material just seems to disappear quickly. Before I owned it the plot was planted with corn and sugar cane each year and lots of chemical fertilizers and pesticides were used. So the soil was ruined. I thought I could bring it back within a few years but it is still rather poor. There was one patch that looked much better after a giant pile of scrap wood left over from house construction was burned and the left over ash and char was plowed in. But that did not last long. It is all back to hard crusty soil now. The pH is rather high due to the high percentage of karst in the region and the high calcium carbonate content of ground water that is used to irrigate. Maybe that has something to do with it?

More than "a club to stop people criticising the government", it's used extensively by the rich and powerful to stop anyone from criticising them.

Another funny thing about it is that the truth is not a defense. So even if Unsworth was a pedo and Musk could prove it, that would not be a defense against a defamation case. All that is needed is to show that the person making the defamatory remark intended to cause the victim to lose face.

That's a good idea. A demonstration of that old phrase "birds of a feather flock together." Musk employs a sleazebag to do Unsworth dirty, gets done dirty himself. Or maybe karma is a better word for it.

I don't know about that putting on a pedestal thing. Musk is a brilliant guy, but has demonstrated that he has a pretty rotten character. IMO, a good role model for a kid really needs to have good quality of character above all else.

I saw and touched the sub; it was featured at a science expo in Bangkok not long after the rescue. It was a metal tube with some plexiglass plates on it with air valves mounted in them. I'm sure there was some engineering involved, but didn't seem at all impressive.

My son was a big fan of Elon, the "cool rocket guy". But after his comments about Unsworth he asked me "Why did Elon say that stuff about the man who is a hero?" My son is a Thai boy living in Thailand, close the the same age as the boys who were rescued. Sadly I had to walk back the idea that Elon was a good role model.

I thought Unsworth should have sued Elon in Thailand. It wouldn't have meant much since Elon would never travel here again. But in Thailand defamation is a criminal offense that carries jail time. And since Unsworth is a national hero there's little doubt the court would have found in his favor and Elon would have had an outstanding arrest warrant. Again, wouldn't mean much unless Elon forgot about it and ended up traveling to or through a country that would arrest him on behalf of Thailand.

There is an Instructable for making one yourself https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative...

So one wouldn't want to have an NAS with WD products (although the bare drives are fine). Is Synology the only good option now? Seems like a good time and place to ask if anyone can link to a good tutorial on a good NAS setup.

Can you mention some of those benefits?

About those benefits of having a US passport, could you mention a few of them? Because I'm a US expat and wondering why I have to keep filing tax returns but receive no benefits whatsoever. A number of important examples:

Being a non-citizen in the country I live means I am at the end of the queue for vaccination, while the US State Dept says it won't arrange for vaccinations of US expats, but countries like France and China are doing it for their citizens.

I can't maintain a bank account in the US because without a US mailing address the banks simply refuse to provide me services. The US government could care less, has no requirement that banks provide services to US citizens overseas.

Yeah, pretty much this.

Sounds familiar. When I was building my house (not in SA) the construction workers would often disappear after getting paid. I would go looking for them in the village and find them on a bender. They would come back when they needed more booze money. It was pretty obvious why they did not have many opportunities to get ahead, and never would.

Interesting. I was unaware of that and thought it was a bizarre approach unique to banks in this so-called developing country.

Some of them get finished other ways. Others get taken back by the bank when the owner decides to stop making payments on a loan for an unfinished house. You often see half finished houses that are slowly rotting.

"You wouldn't start building a house when it's uncertain that you have enough money to be able to complete the project."

Sorry for the completely OT reply, but this triggered me because it is exactly how banks in Thailand do lending to build a house. Once all the details and total cost are known, the bank lends about half of the needed amount and then checks on your progress. If you didn't get about half the house built they don't fund the remainder.

Same for me. But of course that is because we have been conditioned to feel that way, isn't it?

What if you don't have a family? In Brave New World there are no families. Technology plus social indoctrination have eliminated the need and desire for them.

Is monogamy in humans the result of evolutionary pressures or a social construct to serve other purposes? With the right social indoctrination the majority might not care at all about monogamy, even find it strange and undesirable, ala Brave New World.

It seems very sad to me to think of it as wasting your best years taking care of your aging parents. I considered it a privilege to take care of my parents to the end. To each his own.

So you have a big pile of cash. And you will just use it to pay someone to take care of you in your old age. And they will do it lovingly because you paid them. They won't take advantage or even abuse you when you get to the point of not being able to do anything about it yourself.