In space science, the term 'ice' can refer to many different substances.

In astrophysics and planetary science the term "ice" refers to volatile chemical compounds with freezing points above about 100 K, such as water, ammonia, or methane - wikipedia (Ice Giant)

Hearing damage is up enormously, even from the 1990s - and even back then it was well understood that even teenagers in modern societies tended to have inferior hearing to people from primitive societies.

At the same time, the entertainment industry has adopted a norm of having loud background sounds and/or music during conversation. This wasn't the case in the 'old days' - it's changed quite a bit, and not in a good way. The advertising industry also makes a habit of raising average volume for their material.

I remember visiting a older relative who had to turn the TV up to levels I found painful to make out what was being said on the TV - and didn't realize that the TV was loud. He didn't have a clue.

This issue has a significant impact on using sub-titles - and almost certainly dominates the use of sub-titles. People that know how dangerous sound can be to themselves or to their children make an effort to protect themselves through the use of sub-titles - and setting the volume lower than they otherwise would. Certainly everybody that I know that uses sub-titles does it for this reason.

Unfortunately, the human body is not well equipped to measure sound loudness - especially as people lose more and more hearing. That's why we need to use a technology known as a 'sound level meter' to measure the loudness. People who are using sub-titles to protect themselves might not be putting the sound down far enough. One time I showed up at a dance with my sound level meter in my bag, and measured a level well over 100 dB, well over seventy feet from the band, and through closed doors. The dancers were a lot closer! The 'safe' exposure at that level - if we can trust government standards, which we can't, it's well known that they have serious problems - was someone around 15 minutes. Not many dances only last 15 minutes ...
The band had no idea how loud they were - not a clue!

From a legal perspective, the current practices of the entertainment industry and - especially - the advertising industry should be considered a clear case of doing harm through negligence. They know or should know that people have to turn up the sound - not so much to hear things, but to correctly perceive them - and that people can't tell when the sound is at damaging levels.

Worse, the increased sound levels lead to increasing levels of hearing damage, in a viscous loop. Different people will have different amounts of susceptibility to hearing damage here: it's important that the people who are genetically better able to handle loud noise aren't able to prevent the law from protecting everybody else.

There's a clear double standard going on here in law: it's ok to sue ordinary members of the public for negligence with respect to their property (people tripping over things and getting hurt or kids having access to a swimming pool). But somehow it's not OK to sue the entertainment industry for causing enormous and widespread hearing damage - maybe too many lawyers have large investments in that business. Perhaps we're dealing with a legal ethics problem on a massive scale. This would hardly be any surprise in the USA, where the legal profession has enormous difficulty getting it's ethical act together (see any decent business school textbook on 'risk management and insurance' for citations to studies).

Another potential problem is that politicians often view the entertainment industry as one of the 'bright spots' in the American economy - and are hesitant to do anything to interfere with it.

As usual, some people are getting extremely rich off doing harm to others. Those people won't want change, and will do all sort of really bad things to resist change.

Damaging people's hearing through negligence is clearly a violation of fundamental rights - and for the people doing this to attempt to claim that they are acting within the standards set by federal law is an infringement of fundamental rights 'under the colour of law', and hence should be grounds for both civil suit and criminal charges (damaging hearing is a form of 'battery' so it should also be actionable at the state level, not just the federal level, in the USA). Bands and nightclubs also need to be required to make appropriate measurements when setting up and need to be held responsible for failing to limit the sound to reasonable levels (note that loud music in a nightclub that is at levels that damage hearing - that's frequently the case - also violates federal law on workplace safety). I suppose one could require the audience to have hearing protection - but that gets tricky because it's often not as effective as we might want or wish it to be.

Most likely there is a two-part technical fix that would work for home viewers. The first part is to put music, sound effects, and voice all on different channels, each with an independent stereo audio volume control. Mixing is done in the user's equipment, by default. Content producers might still provide a pre-mixed audio channel - for special situations or for older equipment - in addition to the three above channels. Require ALL new AV equipment to support this - and existing equipment to be upgraded. People might be allowed an exception for existing equipment if they demonstrate knowledge of sound measurement, have the appropriate tools, and set their equipment up to be safe.

Note that the vast majority of data content for multi-media is video - audio is relatively tiny. So it's not a big deal to have multiple 'audio channels' - they won't be anywhere near as big as the video channels (especially as we move to higher and higher resolutions).

The second part is to require some sort of sound level measurement that's both accurate and precise and keeps history either distributed with the equipment itself, or in people's cell phones/headphones/etc - and teach people how to use it. Some sort of warning system should let people know when the combination of amplitude and duration is likely to lead to hearing damage - with better standard for what is safe.

Note that sound level measurements need to be made in the right place and under the right circumstances. The sound level right in front of the speaker is probably much higher than the sound level where people are actually sitting. Also, measuring sound from car stereo in a car that is motionless tells you nothing about the sound level that will be used when the car is in motion (people driving cars and listening to video or music or audio books will raise the sound considerably, often to damaging levels, without realizing it).

This solution means that people can turn down the music and background sounds to better perceive (not hear, perceive - there is a huge difference) the voices of actors. Plus, they can readily know what the levels are, and get a warning when things are too loud - something they can't normally get from their own body.

The idea that California subsides other states has been debunked many times.

For example, California is #1 in population among US states, but #45 in percentage of retirees. This tells us that huge numbers of people retire and leave California. This means that taxes spent on the social security and medi-care of these people are leaving California because the people themselves are leaving. It's not a subsidy. It's actually a benefit to California, because they trade people mostly on a low fixed income in houses which are largely protected from property tax (due to long residency) for new residents who are not on a fixed income, who will have jobs in the economy and thus contribute to the total dollar value of the economy (unlike retirees) , and will spend a lot more in the local economy, and will pay more in property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, etc ... Not to mention all the income generated when houses change hands and the associated jobs for all the things that happen when a home is being sold (lawyers, real estate agents, inspectors, painters, handymen, etc) ... The cash flow coming in vastly exceeds the money going out, over the long term. Freeing up housing is especially useful given how many houses are destroyed by wildfires each year.

Similarly, the US military has been moving away from California to the extent it can do so for a long time - it's just too expensive there and their people have trouble making ends meet. For both strategic and political reasons they can't entirely abandon California, but a lot of stuff has left. Again, California is #1 in population, but per capita in military personnel, it's #48 among the US states. All the spending associated with the stuff that has left represents federal funds not spent in California. Again, it's not a subsidy - and again California actually gets a net benefit, it trades a little more in federal spending in other states for having a lot more housing open up for people that are making a lot more money then military personnel do - and spending that money in the local economy, likely contributing to the California economy far more than the military people do, and paying more in property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, etc...

California also imports enormous amounts of food - which frees up California farmers to focus on high profit luxury crops (including crops sent to Japan). The infrastructure required to import food - paid for by federal funds - allows California's economy to generate a lot more money then it would otherwise - as a matter of basic economics and business, luxury items generate much higher profits than ordinary items - so again, not a subsidy, actually a net benefit.

This is a common theme: California trades a (relatively) trivial amount of extra federal tax dollars being spent somewhere else for an enormous economic benefit to California. In a curious and perhaps somewhat unexpected way, the other states are actually subsidizing California - by providing a place where retirees can go, the military can move people, and so forth.

A lot of people don't understand this, and unscrupulous politicians love to take advantage of those people. You see similar issues with urban vs. rural - city folks often mistakenly believe 'too much' is being spent on rural areas and they don't understand that they are getting an enormous net benefit in return (far more than they spend). Again, unscrupulous politicians love to make a big deal of this 'apparent injustice' that is actually no such thing.

Unfortunately, grade school education in the USA badly neglects both economics and business, which makes people vulnerable to being exploited by unscrupulous politicians. If you want to have a better understanding of these topics, then you'll want to do some reading in both areas. Make sure that reading includes at least several books on the topic called 'logistics', which is particular critical to learning to think about long distance effects.

Nonsense. It has worked extremely well on MANY occasions in the past century. Go read up on any of a number of conflicts, such as Vietnam. Or for a more modern example, read Black Hawk Down - and see just what happened to an elite group of US special forces soldiers when they had to fight their way out of a city full of armed and hostile militia.

Further, I suspect most Ukranian males have basic military training, so they really aren't just 'unprofessional armed citizens' in the sense you are thinking. Mandatory military service is still a thing in dozens of countries - and it was for a very long time in the Soviet Union. In Norway I think they actually require most men AND women to participate in mandatory military service.

Not sure about Ukraine since they left the Soviet Union but I believe the current requirement for men is either a) reserve officer training for two years in the university system, or b) one-year regular service.

The training can be very good in some of these mandatory military service programs. There was a TV special a number of years ago where the US Marines participated in a joint exercise with the Norwegians and were impressed by their skills.

Back in WW2, the members of a Norwegian rifle club - probably folks who had gone through mandatory military training and definitely under the command of a professional military officer - ambushed and stopped a German paratroop force (elite troops by any standard) dead in it's tracks and in so doing prevented them from capturing a major portion of the government of Norway (see the book "Norway 1940" by Kersaudy for an overview of the campaign and a reference to this incident).

So don't underestimate the skills of Ukraine's citizens ...

Infantry can stop armed vehicles very effectively if it has the right weapons. If you look at the battle of the Bulge during WW2, you'll find accounts of US infantry stopping German panzer units cold in urban areas on the North side of the battle. Molotov Cocktails are one of the classic weapons for use against vehicles - they aren't as good as some, but they still work under the right circumstances.

Don't underestimate women either, some of the best snipers in WW2 and in Vietnam were women ...

It's actually not that hard to understand. It has to do with scope of law.

The 1st Amendment specifically limits the authority of Congress. Read the text and you'll see this: it's right there in the text, plain and simple.

The 14 Amendment loosely extends the 1st Amendment to state and local government. This was done because the Southern slave states had a long history of abusing their legal authority in the defense of the slave system (for example, in South Carolina the law was modified just before the Civil War to have speaking of abolition carry the death penalty for the first offense!).

However, the text of the 14th Amendment is quite vague - and thus gives the judiciary a lot of room to decide what the rules are for state government.

This allows state government to limit speech in various ways, such as libel and slander laws, without violating the combination of the 1st and 14th Amendments.

It is the state governments that do medical licensing. So a state government can prevent people from claiming (or even implying) that they are legitimate licensed doctors while not actually being licensed - and can legally punish them for doing so.

Hence, Biden (and members of the federal Congress) can talk about the misinformation problem. But under the Constitution, they can NOT legally pass laws regarding the problem - that has to happen at the state level.

In practice limitations placed on federal government by the Bill of Rights are often ignored. That is a very serious legal ethics problem: contradictions in law result artificial demand is the services of legal professionals as it makes the legal system harder to understand, and that is inherently a legal ethics problem given the historical role of the legal profession in the system.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of serious legal ethics problems embedded in US law: this particular legal ethics problem is just one of a great many problems. That is the reason legal services in the USA are a much larger percentage of GDP than in any other developed nation - a problem that has grown substantially worse since the 1950's - and a reason the rest of the world makes fun of America ('Land of the Lawsuit' and all that - which is actually a huge understatement of the scope of the legal ethics problem, since it applies to every major area of law and not just tort law).

But until the US public wakes up and realizes how badly they are being screwed that sort of thing isn't likely to change. Economists and insurance companies have been publishing studies on this problem for decades but very little progress has been made.

One of the side effects of this legal ethics problem is many members of the public do not understand the law - and your question can be viewed in that context.

It's nice to see that Biden is just talking, for now. Hopefully he won't go beyond that, and the appropriate state governments will be allowed to write and pass any laws that might be required.

It's a tricky issue because it's really dangerous to give government the power to decide what truth is. Think about it ...

Since under the Constitution federal judges can hear cases arising under state law - and Congress gets to decide the rules under which that will happen - there is no real need for the federal government to pass a law here. But power corrupts, and people with power often don't like being told they aren't allowed to do certain things. It's like children who get upset when they aren't allowed to steal cookies from the cookie jar. Hopefully the parents will keep the children under control this time ...

Long term, improving the US education system - which has all sorts of problems, a fact that is directly or indirectly connected to all kinds of problems society faces - will probably be a lot more useful than trying to pass laws controlling this sort of thing.

It's not as simple as you think.

Depends on what you do in your kitchen. If you're hosting classes open to the public there, things may get more complicated - especially if you are charging for the class.

If 'you' are a corporation or other organization, and not an individual, then things definitely get complicated.

The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it. US Supreme Court, Marsh v. Alabama - 1946.

Private property does not mean an owner can do whatever they want with their property.

The literal text of the 1st Amendment only applies to Congress.

(Unfortunately that literal text is often ignored by Congress, creating numerous contradictions in the legal system - one of the more obvious legal ethics problems that riddle the US legal system, contributing greatly to the income of lawyers at the expense of society as a whole),

Limiting speech is intended to be a legitimate function of state government: that's why libel and slander laws are done at the state level and not the federal level. The 14th Amendment to some extent limits the authority of state government with respect to limiting speech, but if you read the text it's rather vague.

In short, people are still trying to figure out exactly what the state governments can do.

Probably, in this case, especially given the presence of the 9th Amendment in the Bill of Rights, the law should have gone before the public and be subject to public vote before it became Florida law - which would likely have resulted in a very different law. But US politicians and lawyers routinely pretend their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights have an exclusion where the 9th Amendment is concerned.

Actually, they can just pass it on. Any cost increase (like a tax increase) that affects the whole market just shifts the supply and demand curve. A few consumers will drop out of the market (assuming they are free to do so), the rest will pay more. It's basic microeconomics.

It appears that you skipped this course. However, if you look up 'Shift in supply curve examples' you can find lots of web pages that discuss how this works.

In practice, businesses have a lot of other options in response to passing increased costs on to customers - but they all work out to be worse for society than just passing on the expense to consumers. For example, they can move a factory overseas, which kills a whole bunch of jobs at once, possibly devastating the local economy and certainly disrupting the lives of a whole bench of people - who now no longer have an income to use to purchase things. That's a lot worse than just passing a cost increase on to consumers.

Sometimes governments try to regulate the options businesses have in these situations, but in practice it seldom works out well for society. Businesses just have too many options - and limiting them usually works out to limiting some sort of fundamental right that modern societies don't allow government to limit.

So it's perfectly reasonable to look at things in terms of just passing on the expense to customers if your analysis is being done from the perspective of harm done to society: it simplifies the analysis and lets you reach conclusions about the minimum level of harm a policy will do. In other words, you can conclude that policy X (where X is whatever you are looking at) will do at least this much harm and could do a lot more harm depending upon how things work out.

You might also want to look at a business school textbook on Pricing Theory, because in practice the supply/demand model is not always a good approximation for the real world. There is often a lot more freedom in the price the business can charge, and that textbook will explain how this works. Just like in engineering, there are a number of trade-offs to be made in selecting a price, or 'degrees of freedom'. This, of course, simply provides another reason why your previous thinking is not correct, because many businesses actually have a lot more freedom to trade off price versus other considerations than non-business majors realize.

An introduction to basic economics and business should really be required in grade school. There are too many people out there that don't understand the basics. Fortunately, there are a lots of good books out there and some good video courses as well (e.g. The Teaching Company has a number of excellent courses).

This is a terrible idea: sales taxes are highly regressive which means you place a large portion of the burden for supporting government on the poor and the middle class. There's nothing honest about this: if anything it is dishonesty.

Remember that every dollar that comes into the budget of a government from a regressive tax (or a flat tax) is a tax break for the rich, since that dollar didn't come from a progressive tax and hence the rich paid less than they otherwise would have - and that's a tax break.

Rich people need the services of government to protect their wealth, and to allow them to increase that wealth: they should be paying more than other people because they get more benefit.

Actually, sales tax is a huge problem for small business in the USA. I've been interacting with small business owners most of my life because of my family, and it's incredibly common for them to thoroughly detest sales taxes.

In general, the rules for sales taxes very enormously from place to place and year to year. They are usually written in language that is very hard to understand, often ambiguous and even contradictory.

As a kid I remember reading cases in the paper where newspaper reporters asked three different government officials a sales tax question and got three different answers. As an adult, I haven't seen any indication that things have changed.

Further, small businesses today are not just local: they are very much dependent on the Internet and have a national and even global customer base. But there are over 82-thousand taxing jurisdictions just in the USA - which means these don't necessarily align on zip code boundaries. To make matters worse, sales tax systems are every bit as subject to corruption as any other aspect of US government, and there are all sorts of special provisions and special cases in these systems that have been purchased by various special interests through mechanisms such as 'campaign contributions' (the politically correct word for 'bribery' - "invest in America, buy a politician!").

Unfortunately, you can't rely on software to tell you whether or not a tax is owed and on what products and how much is owed and who owes it, because software doesn't deal well with natural language ambiguities. Human judgement has to be used - and hence small businesses are far more affected than large businesses because small businesses can't afford a permanent staff of lawyers and accountants to deal with these issues.

To make matters even worse, small businesses generally can't just pass on the costs of dealing with the tax system to their customers the way the big companies do (think about why that is...).

So basically, sales tax systems are a problem for small business owners: they take lots of time, they require extra record keeping, and it's just a huge pain even if you are lucky enough to never get randomly selected for an audit.

Small business owners often spend huge amounts of time on their business - far more so than the average corporate employee spends on their job. This isn't even counting the time they spend on the tax issue - it's just the nature of running a small business. People who haven't done it and don't have family doing it don't realize how much it consumes your life. The additional burden of overhead caused by sales tax systems and just the general hassle of dealing with it is one the factors that causes people to just quit and find something else to do. Otherwise viable small businesses are killed because of sales tax policy.

From a Bill of Rights perspective, sales taxes as they are currently implemented in most states can be viewed as being in violation of a number of fundamental rights that the 9th Amendment protects, such as the right to ethical government (think about it!) and the right to ethical practice of law (think about it!).

But the corruption in US government and the ethics problems in US law (federal, state, and often local) are very deeply entrenched, so nothing gets done to correct the Bill of Rights violations - and basically small business gets screwed. Court decisions such as the one in South Dakota vs Wayfair (2018) have clearly demonstrated that the US legal profession has no real interest in fixing the problems and in fact are actively making things worse. This fits with the long term trend of legal ethics problems getting worse in the USA, as a fraction of GDP, considering the years from 1950 to the present day.

You can find references on this topic in business school textbooks on "Risk Management and Insurance". It's not a new problem. This is how things work in the USA, small business issues with sales taxes are just another symptom of a corruption and legal ethics cancer in government and in the various legal systems (federal, state, local). If you want more information on this topic you can look at "The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality" - by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles [2019]. It has all kinds of references to studies that have appeared in peer reviewed journals on a variety of topics that basically come down to issues with legal ethics and deeply entrenched corruption.

It should come as no surprise to find that the US looks poor in comparison to other developed nations in terms of small business metrics such as employment. For example: "An International Comparison of Small Business Employment - John Schmitt and Nathan Lane". There is a huge negative impact from sales taxes and other problematic government policies on small business in the USA: other developed nations have their own problems (for an interesting perspective on some of those problems see The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth [2016], but on the whole most other developed nations do a lot of things better than the USA does.

Small businesses are not the only ones harmed by sales taxes.

From a general social perspective - thinking in terms of the long term good of society and how government can either contribute to that or do harm - sales taxes are highly regressive. This means most of the burden is paid by the poor and the middle class. Most of the rich are incredibly stingy and pay very little in sales or property taxes. A sales tax that affects even a relatively small portion of consumer spending can have an enormous impact on the people who have the least money.

To make matters worse, even if some things like food are not taxed directly, the business overhead associated with the sales tax problem tends to be reflected in higher costs for the non-taxed goods, so people are in fact paying more for those things, they just don't know it. After all, the bottom line for a business requires setting all costs against all expenses. Also, even if US-style sales taxes aren't applied in each transaction the way a VAT is, the overhead does affect each transaction, which means it's subject to the normal compounding and feedback processes that happen in all real economic systems. So you aren't just paying once, you are paying multiple times. Since it's all hidden, people don't realize this and often have completely delusional ideas about the real consequences of sales tax policy.

Finally, UN studies show that corruption in government is the single biggest contributing factor in violence. Having a legal system riddled with massive legal ethics problems is certainly a form of corruption, and it leads to a loss of perceived government legitimacy and to dysfunctional government. A dysfunctional government drives people to crime and creates mental illness in much the same way as a dysfunctional family does. So the violence problem in the USA (relative to other developed nations) is mostly a reflection of fundamental problems. Many people are seeing this more clearly now with the increased crime rate resulting from poor government handling of CoVid.

The USA badly needs to fix the corruption and the legal ethics problems, and as part of that, the USA would be much better off replacing all sales taxes with taxes based on income and wealth and tariffs ( in that context, it's worth nothing that EU VAT taxes are automatically added to the base tariff rate, so the EU actually has a much higher tariff than people think ... ).

Actually, that's false. See Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), a case in which a corporation tried to implement censorship on it's property.

The court said things along these lines: Ownership does not mean absolute dominion. The more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.

In practice, decisions like this are largely ignored these days. Don't the Emperor's New Clothes look nice? There's nothing to see here.

Corruption has become ever more deeply entrenched in US government, and the associated legal ethics problems that enable and protect the corruption have become worse and worse over time.

History shows that problems with corruption in government are usually only resolved at the cost of human lives: freedom is not free. The longer it takes to resolve those problems, the more lives are lost. More US citizens were killed during the 1861-1865 Civil War than all the other wars the USA has fought added together, in order to solve a really big corruption problem that had festered for a really long time.

Let's not repeat that. Part of solving the problem is freedom of speech, whether on public or private property.

In that context, censorship by private entities is a very big concern.

Not really.

Having the army control strategic air (bombing and eventually missile infrastructure) was undesirable, because that really isn't closely related to ground operations.

Having the Army control air operations associated with close support of ground operations, aka tactical support, is another matter entirely.

Unfortunately, in the USA both strategic air and tactical air were theoretically merged into a single service, which can create problems for the ground forces for getting good tactical support.

Sometimes the US Air Force does a good job with tactical ground support (the development of the A-10 being one example), sometimes it doesn't (look at the many attempts to get rid of the A-10 and not replace it with something as good).

It's something the Army and the Marines worry about a lot. This is why the Marines have their own air support, and why the Army has it's own helicopter gunships, in addition to the ground support provided by the Air Force.

It's easy for a single organization with multiple responsibilities to lose sight of the importance of some it's responsibilities, and to make bad prioritization decisions. Any group of two or more human beings will have politics, and those politics can be either good or bad for outcomes (sometimes both at once!). This is not just a problem for the USA.

For example, in the years leading up to WW2, the strategic bombing people in the RAF were politically dominant and did their best to fund bombers at the expense of fighters. Had they been successful, the British would have lost the war quickly, because they massively over-estimated the effectiveness of bombers and they badly needed the fighters - without them there would have been no "Battle of Britain" to stop the Germans, which in the long term would have meant Germany defeating both Britain and the USSR. The civilian politicians of Britain were convinced to force the funding of fighters in spite of the opposition from most of the RAF leadership - one of many decisions that turned out to be critical to winning the war.

Similarly, the bomber-focused RAF leadership badly neglected the allocation of resources to the Royal Navy, with the result that the Navy didn't have the long range ground-based air support needed to fight the Battle of the Atlantic effectively (the RAF Coastal Command was crippled). It was another really stupid decision, because without the ability to protect shipping there wouldn't be any fuel for the bombers or food for the aircrews. Here, again, the British civilian political leadership was convinced of the need to force the RAF leadership to do something they didn't really want to do and the Coastal Command would eventually receive the funding and resources needed - and RAF Coastal Command made a critical contribution to winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

Finally, the RAF leadership before and during WW2 badly neglected the Fleet Air Arm, which meant that British carriers were operating obsolete aircraft or aircraft not well suited to carrier operations until quite late in the war (when the USA started supplying them with the Corsair). This greatly reduced the effectiveness of the RN carrier force, which in turn greatly limited using the rest of the fleet (and got a lot of pilots, sailors, and soldiers killed). Disasters such as the successful German invasion of Norway, and the destruction of the PQ-17 Convey were in part the result of this neglect of the Fleet Air Arm by the leadership of the RAF and their focus on strategic bombers.

It's actually pretty amazing that the Royal Navy was as effective as they were (they did some remarkable things) given how badly they were being crippled by their own side for much of the war.

Fortunately for the Royal Navy, the Germans had their own political problems, and as a result weren't well equipped with air assets really suitable for naval operations (in spite of which, they still managed to sink quite a few ships!).

This is why the US Navy still has it's own aircraft - lessons learned from the mistakes of the past. But even here, the Marines don't trust the Navy to provide proper ground support, so they also have their own aircraft.

Some people see different services having their own assets as redundant and a bad idea, but it actually isn't. 20th century military history shows that many peacetime designs aren't always well suited to the realities of wartime operations, so having multiple designs maximizes your chances of having at least one usable design for any given mission ...

This is clearly true for people with learning disorders or brain damage - although some of those people have remarkable skills and talents.

It MAY be true with respect to learning languages. There is clearly something that goes on in children that doesn't seem to go on in adults that helps children learn language in ways that seem inaccessible to adults. But that might just be a case of "we haven't found it yet". In other words, our teaching techniques might be not be accessing the human adult brain in the right way so as to support efficient language learning.

It is NOT clearly true for the rest of the population. Science is based on measurement. From a scientific point of view, we have no way to make any kind of measurement that would prove this.

Even genetics does not determine outcomes - because the expression of genes has been shown to be modulated by environmental factors.

In a practical sense, however, given the limitations of our current teaching techniques and knowledge of what is possible, it is generally wise to assume that what you say is true.

However, if somebody really wants something, and if they are willing to put in the time, and if they have access to the needed resources (superior teachers, etc), then they might well be able to learn something even if they seem at one point in time to have no talent for it. The learning process in such cases is likely to be extremely inefficient, and there is always a risk that people will give up before they discover inside themselves whatever is actually needed to be successful.

One also has to keep in mind that it is really easy to jump to conclusions about things or people and be completely wrong. I have seen lots of examples of this, where people simply weren't getting the right instruction in the form they needed to shine.

As a teaching assistant, I was able to save a bunch of people from getting poor grades in their introductory programming classes because I was able to present the material in a different way from the instructor, one better suited to each student. What I found is that these people had the potential to be really good at programming, they just needed some help in learning how to think about it.

This is why low teacher-student ratios can be really valuable for an education system that is concerned with actually teaching people to use their brains instead of being just concerned with meeting standards.

Education that is overly focused on standards encourages students to memorize things for the test and then immediately forget them afterwards, so I suppose your ARE teaching people to use their brains, but not in a way that is useful to society over the long term! People can be remarkably good at 'learning to game the system'.

This is also why the 'publish-or-perish' system is such a disaster for higher education professors aren't willing to make the time to do the job right and adjust how they present the material to the needs of the student. The 'publish-or-perish' system is not just an ethics problem, it's an ethics problem with very serious negative consequences for society.

I suspect there were other people in the class that were doing poorly that I might not have been able to help on any practical time scale. Nobody is perfect. But they didn't come to me to get help.

I've also seen examples of people who always hated gym classes, and always did poorly in traditional grade-school sports, but then came to a martial art such as karate or an activity such as yoga or pilates or dance, and 4-5 years down the road turned out to be capable of fantastic things - and probably at that point could go back and do really well at some of the activities they used to be terrible at.

These people weren't receiving what they needed from the traditional sports and the traditional approaches to teaching - and probably most people who looked at them earlier in their lives would have said 'this person has no talent for physical activity' - but in a different environment with different traditions they were able to shine. In some of these cases, after the student has developed a high level of skill, I've often seeing observers saying things like 'Wow, that person has so much native talent!' and I laugh inside when I hear that because I know how much hard work was actually needed to develop the skills that are being mistakenly assumed to represent some sort of in-born 'talent'.

Life is a lot more complex then people often assume, sometimes in good ways.

False. ALL unsolicited political calls or texts or emails or letters violate rights arising under the 9th Amendment. All persons have the right to only receive these things when they opt-in, as a fundamental right in a free society - and also a consequence of the right to ethical practice of law.

Every lawyer, every politician, every judge, every high government official to uphold the Bill of Rights - including all the many rights that can be asserted under the 9th Amendment as rights 'retained by the people'. Those that are unwilling to act as their oath requires are welcome to move to another country.

Just as they can not kidnap you and hold you for ransom - stealing a portion of your life - to raise funds for a political campaign - they can also not steal a portion of your life by forcing you to receive and delete their texts (after possibly having forced you to pay for them, for those plans that are limited!).

Sending unwanted texts is no different from leaving political garbage on your lawn and forcing you to dispose of it, or putting powerful speakers outside your house and blasting political slogans into your house all night long, forcing you to buy sound-proofing (or perhaps just a rifle)!

Claiming that any law or precedent permits political entities to engage in unwanted solicitian merely turns the actions of the infringing parties into an 'infringement of fundamental rights under the colour of law' (and hence a violation of federal law that has been on the books since the late 19th century).

This is not a 1st Amendment issue. The 1st Amendment limits Congress: the Bill of Rights is a higher legal authority, and rights arising under the 9th Amendment can and do limit private entities, including those in the pay or acting as agents for political parties or political campaigns.

No law or precedent can take away rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment - for if this could happen, then there would be no rights retained by the people (proof by contradiction).

Of course, in practice, there is a long history of US political parties engaging in criminal violations of the law in the pursuit of power - and the politicians from these political parties select judges and prosecutors who turn a blind eye to the illegal conduct. So we have a massive contradiction between what the law allows, and what people do in the pursuit of power.

Is it any wonder that so many poor people turn to drug trafficking, given how blatantly politicians and US government officials violate the law? This is the real reason for the violence problem in the USA, not the guns - and it's also the real reason the high incarceration rate.

A government that massively undermines it's perceived legitimacy by breaking the law can not expect it's citizens to obey the law. We lead by example - a principle that has been lost sight of in US politics.

What are you smoking?

Black people do get into STEM, in large numbers. Admittedly they are often of Indian descent, as opposed to US African Americans. But large numbers of Indians had their own lengthy experience with 'masters', in the form of 'indentured service' which in practice often was not all the different from slavery. They were often recruited under false pretenses, even kidnapped, they could not leave their master, and even though it was theoretically for a 'limited time' it was arbitrarily extended in many cases (much like copyright!). The system of 'indentured servitude' existed in the British Empire until 1917. Despite this experience, as far as I can tell the STEM people of Indian descent don't care in the least about the terminology in STEM.

US African Americans also don't give a s#*t about the terminology in STEM: they are limited in their ability to go into technology fields in many parts of the USA primarily because of the system of funding education based on property taxes.

STEM still requires good education to be successful, and disproportionate numbers of African-Americans don't have that. When they do get the education, incidentally, they can every bit as skilled and smart and creative and capable as anybody else.

As Camille Walsh documents in her book 'Racial Taxation', the system of funding education based on property taxes was set up throughout the USA - definitely not just in the South - in the post-Civil War period. It didn't just target the African-Americans either - Native Americans, Hispanics, and other were discriminated against as well. But the net effect was that greatly inferior schooling was available to various groups like African-Americans, and that is still the case in many places. There is still a very strong correlation between property taxes and education quality in many places in the USA.

Interestingly, in those states that have switched to giving increased funding to poorer school districts, a number of very serious, very well done, multi-year longitudinal studies have shown significant improvement in student performance.

Basically, in the past many people in positions of power (including legislators and even Supreme Court justices) thought they could get away with indulging their racial prejudices without harm to society.

They were completely wrong.

It's not an accident that the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's also not an accident that the USA has the biggest violence problem of any developed nation (and it's not a function of firearms access - the guns have always been there in the USA, and a number of other developed nations have similar rates of access, a few even have mandatory military training and almost every male and even many women know how to use an assault rifle).

African-Americans see the system is horribly biased against them - and they also see large number of politicians, government executives, corporate executives, wall street people, and lawyers routinely getting away with abuse of the legal system or getting at most their hands slapped for illegal conduct. The massive ethics problems in all levels of US law don't help at all - they result in a huge loss of perceived legitimacy for government in the USA. It should be no surprise that many of these people turn to drug trafficking as a high risk but potentially high return way to get out of this trap.

The fact that Japanese-Americans received compensation for the violations of fundamental rights that occurred during WW2 - but African-Americans have not received similar compensation for the much larger violations of fundamental rights that they experienced through the 1960s and arguably up to today simply adds insult to injury ...

Actually, most of the things that HOAs do that give them a bad reputation are completely illegal violations of rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).

For example, they are effectively function as another level of government - and the right to ethical government arises under the 9th Amendment - but there's no ethical oversight at all over HOA activities and clearly in many cases they are not acting ethically if one applies the ethics rules adopted by most local governments.

The 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law - where even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided if reasonable alternatives exist - is also a consideration. Many HOAs function as another layer of government, and hence effectively increase the size and complexity of government, which creates artificial demand for the services of lawyers. Since everything HOAs do is something that could be done at the local government level (instead of requiring an additional level of government) the existence of quasi-governmental HOAs is clearly avoidable.

As such, the existence of HOAs that are effectively as functioning governmental entities (i.e. telling people what to do and how to live their lifes, and punishing them if they don't comply) is a violation of the right to ethical practice of law.

There's even a law on the books that makes it illegal to do the kinds of bad things that many HOAs have been doing. The infringement of fundamental rights 'under the colour of law' has been a violation of US federal civil law since the late 19th century (the post-Civil War era) and a criminal offense under federal legislation enacted in the 1980's. The infringement of fundamental rights under the colour of contract and property law is every bit as much a violation of the letter of the law as the infringement of fundamental rights under any other branch of law.

Further, US property law in general - as it is currently and has historically been implemented - involves conflict on interest on the part of the legal profession on multiple levels - and this certainly has implications for the legality of HOAs.

No contract can be legal if it violates the Bill of Rights, including creating violations of the right to ethical government, or the right to ethical practice of law - and thus mandatory HOAs that function as governmental entities (which is the vast majority of HOAs) are an illegal violation of the Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, the US legal system is riddled with legal ethics problems that exist in violation of the 9th Amendment, which creates a strong disincentive for lawyers to do anything about the HOA problem (and many other problems: the HOA problem is small potatoes compared to some of the really big problems in US law where legal ethics issues play a major role).

Direct expenditures on legal services have gone by 3x (as a percentage of GDP) since the 1950's in the USA, while they are still around 1950's levels in every other developed nation: the legal ethics problem has been getting worse for a long time in the USA. The indirect expenditures, of course, completely swamp the direct expenditures as a result of compounding and feedback through the economy. For example, every business has to get liability insurance, and is very limited in a lot of ways (resulting in both increased costs and lost opportunities) as a result of policies that the insurance companies require to limit their liability as a condition of getting the policy. This increases costs for the public for every good and service they buy, functioning in the economy much like a hidden VAT tax - a highly regressive tax.

We're talking enormous amounts of money here. As a percentage of GDP, the direct take of the US legal profession is higher than the military budgets of many nations. In fact, just the difference between legal spending in the USA and other nations is higher than most nation's military budgets. Many lawyers end up in the 1%. The lawyers as whole have no real interest in reforming the system because they would lose all of this extra income. There are some ethical lawyers, of course, but they are clearly in the minority.

Because the lawyers don't want to draw attention to the legal ethics problems in US law, they simply ignore all of the violations of fundamental rights that HOAs are engaging in when they are doing bad stuff - and ordinary people get screwed by the inability of the US legal profession to get it's ethical act together. The situation we find with the US legal profession today is not all that different from the old day slave owners ignoring what their Christian faith had to say about slavery ...

The top per-capita death rates as of 1 July 2020 were:

Belgium 853 per million
United Kingdom 657 per million
Spain 606 per million
Italy 575 per million
Sweden 523 per million
France 444 per million
USA 388 per million

It's probably a reasonable to assume that among the nations cited here any inaccuracies in the numbers are not significant relative to the overall trend in the numbers.

Hence, it is a reasonable hypothesis that the USA is in fact deriving a benefit from it's less well developed public transit system.

After all, it's pretty clear that under most circumstances the US health care system is greatly inferior to that of the other nations listed here. Overall, the rich get excellent care in the USA, but the poor and lower middle class bring down the overall averages quite a bit relative to pretty much any other developed nation. The USA doesn't even make the top ten list for longevity, despite spending almost twice as much on health care (around 18% of GDP for the USA versus 9-11% of GDP for other nations).

To put things in perspective, the difference in health care spending between the USA and pretty much every other developed nation is about 7-8% of GDP, or around twice the annual US military budget.

So the USA is spending a LOT more than other nations - and still gets really poor results under normal circumstances. The difference in spending is not made up in research, either, as many developed nations were spending more as a fraction of GDP (before the current outbreak) than the USA.

So, if anything, we would expect the USA to have the worst per-capita death rate, instead of being well below a number of EU nations and Britain. But that assumes that the quality of the health care system affects the COVID-19 death rate, and that doesn't seem to be the case right now: the disease is too new and there's not much we can do to treat it.

Which means we need to look elsewhere to understand this difference, and public transportation is certainly a candidate.

Europeans tend to live closer together than Americans do, which is part of the reason why they have better public transportation.

According to the 2017 American Housing Survey, some 52% of Americans live in suburbia, defined as "neighborhoods of single-family homes connected by roads to retail centers and low-rise office buildings". In Europe, my read of the statistics I was able to find is that only 14% of people that are living in similar circumstances. That's a huge difference.

I've worked in Europe - and the statistics pretty much match my experience there. They do seem to be pretty dependent on public transit in many places. This forces people to interact more, or at least to be in close proximity more often. For example, it's easy for a lot of American households to take a car to a big market or Costco or Sams Club and load up on lots of supplies for an emergency. That's not easy for many Europeans to do - they don't even have a car, and they don't have nearly as many of the big markets (at least from what I saw).

Don't get me wrong: I would LOVE if the USA had better public transit. It would be fantastic in so many ways under normal circumstances.

I thought it was so incredible that some of the trains (the non-express trains) in Europe would stop at isolated villages - and I saw people getting on and off there. Just on a cost basis alone that would be hard to find in the USA. It gives large numbers of people in Europe enormous mobility at very low cost.

Interestingly, Japan does have a lot of public transit - but also has very low CV rates - despite taking relatively few precautions.

The BBC has an interesting article on this (Coronavirus: Japan's mysteriously low virus death rate by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes). There's some evidence that Japan may have been exposed to a similar virus in the past and may have developed resistance as a result, to the benefit of the Japanese people today. Another possibility has to do with the high use of masks in Japan, something that has been part of the culture for many decades now.