In higher-power silicon applications, thermal management is a very important consideration. Thermal stresses and TCE mismatch need to be investigated and managed, making FEA appropriate.

New applications like microfluidics might require a combination of the fluid simulations that Ansys can perform with the semiconductor simulations that Synopsys can provide.

What this does is provide a larger toolset that's all under the same umbrella. Any company that's using one of those tools will have a much easier time picking a new tool from the same chest should they need it, rather than establishing all of the infrastructure required to get software from another provider.

Also worth considering is the lower barrier to entry for trial periods of software, and the conversion rate of that into sales. If you're already a customer, most software companies like Synopsys or Cadence are delighted to give you a 2-week trial of another tool. It costs them nothing, there's very little overhead to getting it up and running, and I don't doubt that it frequently turns into paid licenses in the future.

"Please . . . scan . . . the next . . . item."

*beep*

"Please . . . place . . . the item . . . on . . . the scale."

Masking continues to make sense as long as there are people who _want_ to get the vaccine, but cannot.

Like, maybe, for example, the millions of children under 12 years of age.

As long as we never forget that in the end, The Boy who Cried Wolf was _actually_ eaten by a wolf.

And this wolf wants to eat the whole world, and you, and me, and everyone in it.

I'm sorry that your economic situation is so bad that you cannot afford toilet paper :(

Is that sarcasm? I can't tell if that's sarcasm.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politi...

(yeah, yeah. They still have to be US citizens. But dual citizens also have to pay US income tax. Only the US and Eritrea levy income taxes on citizens that live abroad. For every other country, it's based on residency.

Oh, the US also levies income taxes on foreign residents, too.

It's called "Jury Nullification."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A jury may acquit a defendant even if they believe the defendant committed the crime. They would do this in the event that they thought the law itself was unjust (or really, for any other reason whatsoever).

A jury cannot be punished for giving a "wrong" verdict. And thanks to laws around double jeopardy, the defendant may not by tried again for the same crime.

Unfortunately, it's already working very much against you. You're in the prime earning years of your life, but high housing costs are gobbling up your fortune, making it more difficult for you to amass savings on which to retire.

If you _do_ happen to own any property by the time the housing bubble bursts, suddenly your net worth is going to drop precipitously, and you may even have trouble servicing the now-underwater loans that allowed you to acquire that property.

Your odds of any inheritance being worth much are dropping, as most households have a significant amount of their total assets rolled up in their housing.

Even if you did manage to save money, and now houses are cheap, they're cheap because they're in empty neighbourhoods, where all the boomers died and left empty houses, owned by the banks. Those are not pleasant neighbourhoods in which to live. You'll get fewer municipal services due to the smaller tax base to fund them. Blocks of empty houses are also frequent targets for thieves and illegal salvagers.

The future does not look rosy at all. Maybe we'll get lucky and enough coastal housing will be wiped out by rising sea levels that we won't face quite so devastating a bubble.

If you're looking for a power armor fix, you need to check out The Expanse (currently 3 seasons available on Amazon Prime, or, 3 seasons available on your favourite bittorrent client).

Then, once you've watched it all and are begging for more, go and read all of the books by James S. A. Corey that the show is based on.

It's hilarious that you think the NHS has modern hardware :)

Hold up, I think you've got this backwards. Or, at least, you're not going all the way to the proximate cause for the tariffs.

The first tariffs were put in place by Trump, on Chinese goods, in an attempt to "correct the trade imbalance that the US has with China." In other words, China ships more shit to the US than the US does to China. The Chinese then imposed retaliatory tariffs on US goods. The US then imposed retaliatory tariffs on more Chinese goods. The Chinese then imposed more retaliatory tariffs on US goods . . .

Basically, the US Commander-in-Chief has ordered every new tariff, and has been the one to escalate the tariffs beyond parity each time. If anyone has the responsibility for cooling the trade war, that responsibility sits firmly in the White House.

RTFSummary - He's spending money on space so that resource extraction and manufacturing can move to space, in order to be able to preserve "The good [planet]."

Rough cost-based math. Average electricity price in Berkeley is 16 cents per kWh. 1kWh is roughly 3400 BTU. Average gas price in Berkeley is $11.60/1000ft3. Burning natural gas yields about 1000BTU/ft3.

You can get ~72kWh for the price of 1000ft3 of natural gas. That 72kWh is equivalent to about 250,000BTU.

Your heat pump would have to have a COP of 400% to be less expensive to run than a natural gas heater (modulo heat loss to exhaust, initial capital costs of systems, etc etc etc).

From a homeowner standpoint, the energy costs of the two heating systems are very similar.

They use two sources of energy: electrical energy to run the compressor, and the thermal energy outside to provide the heat. The "efficiency" that people speak of is the Coefficient of Performance (COP), which is a measure of the amount of heat energy that can be added to a home for a given electrical energy input. This is used to specify the units because the heat energy outside is free, but the electricity costs money.

The COP is dependent on the temperature differential between inside and outside. As it gets colder outside, the heating COP decreases, because the compressor has to work harder to move the heat to inside.

It's not a violation of thermodynamics, sadly.

which is highly volatile, and based on thin air. It also facilitates unlawful behaviour, such as the drug trade and other illegal activities.