There are a lot of reasons. If you can use the space that the propellant takes up with shells, then you can obviously go longer between resupply. Modern naval ships rely more on missiles because of range these days. But most ships carry no more than 200 missiles, on the high side. Those launchers can't be rearmed at sea and take weeks to resupply. So they become floating targets. You can carry a hell of a lot more shells than missiles. Plus shells are cheap compared to missiles. Obviously they can also be resupplied at sea as well.

On top of that, carrying propellant is dangerous. It has to be stored in the most armored part of the ship. If it gets hit by a shell or missile, the vessel is gonna sink. That's what happened to the Arizona at Pearl harbor and many other ships during WWII. Even sitting in the harbor it wasn't possible to save the lives of those who had not been killed by the initial bombing aboard the Arizona.

Propellant has to be made. If you can throw a nuclear reactor on a ship and eliminate even some of the need for it, it helps with the need to manufacture, transport, store, safeguard, and resupply it.

Lasers are great for surface to air, but ground to ground, or specifically ship to ship not so much in comparison to a kinetic weapon. The curvature of the earth causes a drop in the horizon the farther you get from a fixed point. The deck of an aircraft carrier is around 65 feet from the ocean surface. At that height you can't target anything with a direct energy weapon past 10 miles. And at 10 miles you won't be hitting the super structure of any vessels. Current chemically propelled guns have a better range for surface to surface engagements at 12 miles. The 16 inch guns on an Iowa class battleship was double that at 24 miles. The most recent Naval rail guns have a range 10 times that at 250 miles.

Kinetic weapons fire a projectile in a ballistic arc rather than a straight line. So for surface to surface engagements they make a lot more sense. On top of that, we don't have energy weapons that are powerful enough to sink a naval vessel. If you hit the side of a destroyer with any current ship based laser it's unlikely to even cause a scratch compared to hitting it with a kinetic weapon. Our current lasers are good for missile or drone interceptions. You won't be sinking warships with lasers anytime soon.

"If you managed to save 2000 retired people in their late 80's is that worth potentially compromising the immune system of 20,000 toddlers?"

I suppose that the "IF" qualifier at the beginning of the sentence wasn't obvious enough for you. Thanks for answering the question about your literacy.

It was a hypothetical. My fault for not stating that. Regardless, we have no clue how many retired people were saved. Could have been one, could have been 5 million. Since we do know the immune system of children does a good chunk of its development between 0 and 5, a lot more than 20k kids were affected. Hopefully it's not a long term issue. But we have no clue.

No, it's a fact that suicides increased during lock downs.

Seriously, with your quality of "argumentation" you can justify any and all stances. What you cannot do is find out how things actually work.

Yes, I was much more simplistic than people "dead people are dead". End of discussion. Next you should solve all economic issues by stating "1+1=2. See, It's simple math. No more inflation, recessions, or bubbles."

Yes, there is. How many kids born in 2018/2019 will have compromised immune systems from not being exposed to the typical contagions they normally would have? How many developmental issues will there be for kids who missed out on a year of their life outside the home? What about the education of all school aged kids? We'll be dealing with the aftermath of this for a long time.

As I stated in another post, I'm old. My value to society is not the same as kids. There's no way to know how many people were saved. But the long term effects of me dying, or people in nursing homes is not going to have the same long term impact that the lockdown had on kids under 20.

I'm not trying to sound callous, but this is not a black and white issue. If your context is simply how many lives did it save? Sure lockdowns were fantastic, other than the elevated suicide rate. But there's a bit more nuance to it.

Very true. However we'll never know if it was beneficial. Sure, a lot of retired people and others who are/were at higher risk were certainly saved. But what was the actual cost?

It's more than just, "Oh, lets through some money at our urban centers."

If you managed to save 2000 retired people in their late 80's is that worth potentially compromising the immune system of 20,000 toddlers? Or an increased suicide rate among teenagers? What about the long term affects of all school age children? How many kids may never live up to their potential because of it? Well, we don't' know, and never will. Even if someone finds a way to figure it out, I doubt, and frankly hope, it never becomes known. You can't just look at it as, "look, we saved x number of people". There's no way to say a person of this age is more valuable than that age plus 50. I'm old, my value to society isn't as high as someone who's 4 years old, or 15. If you save 5 people in a nursing home, but one kid who would have become a rocket surgeon becomes an emotional basket case and drops out, or commits suicide, which is better? It's not black and white.

I personally don't think we'll ever know the truth about how deadly COVID was either. Why did the US have a mortality rate so much higher than other more densely populated countries? Did they under report? Did we over report? I honestly have no doubts that we over reported. We took away a huge amount of our hospital system's income and gave them monetary incentive to over report COVID cases. I personally know of 8 people who died and were misreported. One was from smoke inhalation, another from pneumonia, etc. three of them actually fought the hospitals and got the death certificates changed.

Are you talking about 2020 or 2016?

After 2016 we got treated to Trump stole the election, he's an illegitimate president, Russian puppet, etc and so on for four years. The left lost their shit.

Now we have the same with regards to the 2020 election. But the right is losing their shit.

No, it's a commitment that both sides are fucking idiots and we have no worthwhile candidates anymore. Since impeachment seems inevitable for any future presidents, it will just get worse.

Basically you get to vote for whoever bought the candidate who wins.

Bush Jr. and the Iraq war sure seemed like some serious disinformation. While Obama denied any spying on Trumps campaign, there were in fact FBI wire taps. Trump used the NIH to candy-coat COVID. There was absolutely misrepresentation over Hunter Biden's laptop which likely did sway some voters. If it was enough to matter, I can't say.

We're lied to constantly by everyone in government. Somewhere along the way our government stopped working for the people and has been against us. Sadly, I don't know what the solution is. But until the majority of the populous figures it out, we're screwed.

Agreed. Sadly most people live in their own little reality and rarely, if every come up for air. Everyone treats elections like it's a ball sport. They vote for the guy in the red or blue jersey and don't bother listening to what they actually stand for. Not that many stand for anything but themselves anymore.

That's because most Americans don't want small cars. And the ones that do, don't want an American built small car. So why would you expect them to put much focus on a part of the market that isn't as profitable?

When CAFE was introduced, it killed big cars and particularly station wagons. But those were the cars Americans wanted. Since trucks weren't as limited by CAFE, Minivans and eventually SUV's took over. In reality, CAFE had the opposite effect of what was intended.

It burns the ammonia, it doesn't send it out the exhaust. The hydrogen gets burned and it expels nitrogen. Since it's a high compression motor, NOX is the biggest issue with the exhaust from an ammonia ICE.

How often did it get sited in the decade after it was published though?

A friend of mine wrote a paper 40 years ago on a medical imaging technique he came up with. It was cited a hand full of times in the first 20 years after being published. It's probably been cited close to 3 or 4 thousand times in the last 20 years.

The problem is that most people aren't that forward thinking. It basically took 20 years for CT and MRI scanners to be able to to use his technique clinically. It's used thousands of times per day, probably tens of thousands of times per day world wide.

In today's culture, I'm not sure this would have happened.

I had an HP iPaq in 2003/2004 time frame. I was pretty happy with it. Everything was similar enough to what 2K and XP were at the time and the office stuff worked well enough between my laptop and phone.

My wife needed a cheap phone in 2013 and got whatever the Windows thing was called then . I didn't see any glaring issues with it. Hell, she's pretty tech illiterate and could use it. So it seemed fine to me. After dumping all that money into it it seems foolish to get out of the market. But they were chasing everything apple was doing. Zune, mobile devices, hiding everything on the desktop, etc.

Yes and no. For someone who sits down in front of Windows for the first time, I agree. To a point. Moving your hand off the mouse to type an back in some cases can be less efficient

For people who had been used to finding things in the Start button menus for 5, 10 or more years. No. Once you have 5+ years of muscle memory, it's a huge pain in the ass to overcome.

I don't recall the exact numbers any more but you develop decent muscle memory doing something like 500-ish times. But it takes several thousand times to retrain doing the same task a different way. So Microsoft and its brilliant idea of changing shit in the OS is really stupid unless there's an extreme benefit. Which there rarely is.

That seems like all of congress these days.

I read TFS but not TFA. From the summary, this seems like a frivolous lawsuit to me. Does the pan act as advertised? If yes, then it's stupid. Did the plaintiff heat it up to the point it failed to function as advertised? Did the company claim you could heat it up under claimed usage and it did not function properly?

Perhaps the teflon plasma hit's that temperature on occasion for a femptosecond. Who knows. It's more likely someone in marketing heard the number and thought it sounded impressive but had no clue the engineers were talking about something else. Maybe the engineers were using the Reaumur scale as a joke. Regardless, how did it affect the plaintiff? If she wasn't harmed or defrauded in anyway, this is just stupid.

For her next lawsuit she should go after Kim Jong Un because his dad wasn't dropped off by the gods on a mountain top under a double rainbow at birth. Whether he was delivered by the gods or his mother, what difference does it make?

Agreed, it does degrade telescope capability. But the real question is, does it degrade the capability less than all the current light pollution? If the choice is much longer exposure times or just not being able to use it then the choice seems obvious.