A lot of countries borrowed large amounts of money to keep their economies going through COVID. Independent of whether it was a good idea to do so, it happened, and seems like a likely cause of high debt overall.

Many companies used to make cancelling very difficult but the streaming companies I've used recently, including Netflix make it easy.

Gravity acts in a way similar to electromagnetic forces - and is similarly well or poorly understood. Gravity (in general relativity) can be modeled as a curvature of spacetime, where objects travel in "straight" lines in the curved space. (think of two people walking "north" on the Earth, eventually finding themselves "attracted" to each other as they reach the north pole. (using an analogy from the MTW Gravitation book)

Gravity, like electromagnetism can also be described in a quantum mechanical sense as the exchange of particles (gravitons). This model gives exactly the same answers as general relativity in all situations we are currently able to measure. Both spacetime curvature and exchange of gravitons models run into problems at extremely high energies and short distances, but those conditions are far beyond any existing experimental evidence.

Gravity is an extremely weak force, the only reason its significant is that unlike electromagnetism the are no negative masses, so the vast number of atoms in the earth all add their tiny gravitational forces together to produce the gravity we observe. The extreme weakness of gravity is why we can't directly manipulate it except by moving masses around.

In electromagnetism we can observe the "field" that conveys the force - we can directly measure electromagnetic radiation. Recently scientists did the same for gravity, by measuring gravitational radiation. (see LIGO) Because gravity is such a weak force, its an extremely difficult measurement, but the results are now clear.

The original big bang is still mysterious. Lots of smart people thinking about it, but "why" the universe appeared is not known. Its possible that its not even a meaningful question - maybe its like asking "why" there is a north pole, where did it come from? In general though "why" questions can get into deep water of philosophy of science. Mostly science has to be based on making testable theories and then testing them.

Do you see any publication on the experiments? I wasn't able to find anything that described the equipment used in any detail - but if one exists, I'll read it. In the vide he tries to use classicl EM to describe the effect, but the equations of E&M exactly conserve momentum locally, so no correct calculation based on them can violate momentum conservation. (unless math itself is broken, in what case I don't know what to suggest)

In his description in the video at 1:08:09 left since he does not show the current return path so the model doesn't conserve charge. You have to include the ENTIRE circuit, since obviously you can produce a force on an object form the magnetic field of an external current.

Any experiment that doesn't include the fields form the wires leading to the experiment is flawed.

Maybe he was more careful in his measurements? If so, he should be writing a paper for physical review, not some non-refereed conference.

Agree, but what is this drive exchanging momentum with?

The physical principal is "conservation of momentum". Terms like "propellant" and "reaction mass" are not as clearly defined.

As described the device violates energy-momentum conservation (the relativistic combination of momentum and energy), one of the most tested laws of physics, at scales from subatomic particles to planetary motion (maybe to galaxy clusters, but dark energy / dark matter *could* be viewed as a failure of that law - but most likely are not). That is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence - which I don't see here

If relativity works, then it would produce the same thrust at any velocity. The power that represents is F * V, If the drive power required is less than F * C (wich C the speed of light), you get free energy. If the power required is >= F * C, then its just a photon drive, and requires too much power for any practical application

The vehicle pictured is not a "flying car" it can't drive on normal roads. Its a VTOL aircraft, similar use case to a helicopter.

Separately from that I'm pretty skeptical about the eVTOL market in general. While a vertical lift vehicle doesn't need a full runway it will need the equivalent of a helipad, and will be quite noisy - not something you can land in your driveway in suburbia. That limits its use to the sorts of missions that helicopters fly now. It may end up being a less expensive helicopter, or its limited range may make it a less practical helicopter, but I don't see it as transformative in any way.

If a special key is the only way to turn on copilot, it just takes a little epoxy and your problems are solved.

Agree. Airliners are highly automated and easy to fly UNTIL SOMETHING GOES WRONG - and then all that automation greatly increases the complexity of the problem. 200 hours is where typically pilots start to learn to fly "complex" single engine planes (retractable gear, and some other features) , which despite the name, have vastly less system complexity than an airliner.

I believe in the US, airline transport pilots are required to have 1500 hours time ( along with other requirements) which gives them time to have experienced a wide variety of situations and problems in simpler aircraft, where hundreds of lives were not at stake .

As a 2000 hour private, pilot, I could imagine getting trained to be a first officer on an airliner, but thinking back to my experience at 200 hours, it would be out of the question. There are certainly people with far more talent for flying than I have, but are the flight training programs really that selective?

Accelerator based fusion has extremely low efficiency, the nuclei scatter far more often than they fuse. Even with an optimal design, like a Farnsworth fusor, you can' get beyond a tiny fraction of break even - which is to say the fusion energy is a tiny fraction of the energy to accelerate the particles in the first place.

D-D produces about 1/2 the energy in neutrons, but the total enegy production rate would be something like 100X the p-B production rate under the same conditions -if you were hot enough for p-B to have any significant rate at al.

D-D needs 10X lower temperatures and about 100X lower Lawsen P X T than p-B, so if they are getting significant energy from p-B, they would have a working reactor running D-D.

They could raise nearly unlimited funding with that demonstration. There are fusion companies funded above $1B that have not gotten close to D-D or even D-T (10X easier) breakeven numbers yet.

Its difficult to imagine any way the system they describe can reach the temperatures, pressures and confinement times required for p-B fusion to produce significant energy and their press release was nearly information-free.

Imagine they claim that the sunscreen on the murder weapon matches the specific bottle of sunscreen the found in your room because their instrument is sensitive enough to distinguish the small variations in composition not just batch to batch, but bottle to bottle. Wouldn't it make sense for you to have access to testing data, code and anything else that that is needed to reach that phenominal level or accuracy?

In the past (maybe still) juries were told that the probability if a false DNA match was
The problem with technical evidence is that without access to the details, there is no realistic defense.

While CSA is obviously terrible, the number of cases of actual children being abused due to the transmission of content on the internet does not seem t justify the large risks to both security and personal freedom caused by the proposed legislation:.

Any requirement to scan for CSA would limit or prohibit the use of strong encryption, and in order to be effective, required the installation of monitoring software on all individuals computers. (without that, 3rd part encryption could be used to transmit there materials,) That is a serious threat to privacy, and to legitimate security needs, and a potential vector for cyber crime.

The risk of false accusations is large. We've already seen people loose online access when they transmitted a picture of their child's genitals as requested by the child's doctor for medical diagnosis. With the likely widespread and LEGAL use of AI to generate erotic images, what will determine if a particular AI image is "underage". . As has already happened, teenagers exchanging nude pictures (yes they do that) could find themselves facing felony charges - quite the opposite of the laws intent to "protect" children.

I believe its far better to concentrate to arresting and prosecuting people involved in the actual abuse of children - keeping in mind that the majority of those are NOT online criminals, but the children's own parents and relatives

Large portable drives are actually a pretty convenient method for offsite backup. I have 2 I cycle through so 1 is always at work. Takes a few days to transfer, but its a background process so that's fine. Having lots of space on a single disk makes this process easier.

Large drives are also useful if you have a large amount of data you don't access very often - say archival storage of videos or photos that you don't access often. I have several TB of photos that I can still get to in a few seconds if I want to.