I've taken lots of a lot of vaccines that need to be boosted after 5 or 10 years. The problem is when they wear out after 5 or 10 months.

Wait, so you are saying that we shouldn't shower money on inefficient businesses but instead on (efficient) public works projects? I have to laugh a little inside when I remember things such as failed California HSR, The Big Dig, and the Bay Bridge East Span Replacement.

In 1918 we had wet markets, questionable sanitization, and limited regulation of animal slaughter and meat processing. Today, nations like China they have the equivalent regulatory and sanitization practices as 1918 Kansas. Hence why there have been a series of respiratory epidemics originating there. The blame is warranted.

Weird that Google has no problem censoring content for the CCP, I wonder why they have grown a backbone and decided to oppose censorship in Russia.

EVs aren't like gasoline cars. The range can decrease 40-50% in real-world conditions in below-freezing temperatures. For half the year or at freeway speeds, the range of most modern EVs is closer to 120-150 miles. Charging is another gotcha. Batteries can't charge at their full rating up until 100%. Usually they have to start tapering the charge down at 50-60%. So in the real world, you are stuck charging the car for 1 Hour to go 150 miles, and another 1 hour to squeak the last 20% out of the battery. High or low temperatures will reduce this further.

The other issue is charging stations are still few and far between. Half the charging stations are Level 2 (220-240v) and virtually useless. Charging an empty 60kwh battery pack on a L2 charger takes 6-8 hours. And where there are charging stations there is a high chance it will be malfunctioned or down for maintenance. So imagine you have come off of a long road trip, wind up in the middle of nowhere in front of a broken charging station. This is a normal experience for EV owners.

So my verdict: EVs are great commuter vehicles. I am far from a critic, I own one. But the reality is you are accepting lifestyle limitations to own an EV as a primary vehicle.

I know that it is in vogue to claim to be a guardian of the Earth by driving an electric car or something. But the Earth doesn't really care about your movement or your political choices. In fact the planet is regularly pummeled with mile long space rocks that vaporize the surface every now and then. Your environmentalism means nothing. If you really want to protect the planet, support our economic and technological development as a species, support spaceflight, nuclear energy, the colonization of other planets, and so on. Trying to squeeze blood from a stone by pulling a few kW out of a solar panel or saving a few tons of CO2 by banning cars isn't the answer.

In that case I guess we will have to live with it in the same way that we live with the seasonal flu. This is of course a shocking and none of the experts could have predicted such an outrageous and debunked conspiracy theory such that the COVID-19 virus might behave the same as all other viruses that have ever existed in human history.

In what Jurisdiction? In California? In Ohio? In China?

Please forgive me for not believing that all these places have adopted identical laws and scrutiny as to the collection and storage of medical statistics.

Also forgive me for not believing that India or China have less COVID-19 cases and deaths than the USA. It's simply nonsense.

150,000 COVID-19 deaths have been of people over the age of 75.

In 1918 people died earlier, and the share of people over the age of 75 was substantially smaller than it is today (Approximately 10-20 times less).

The correct answer is that the number of deaths would have been greatly reduced.

Before you draw comparisons, the USA had 1/4 the population during the early 20th century, so you can take those deaths and quadruple them. And those deaths were of the young and healthy, not the old and sick.

Amazon delivers packages faster than USPS for less money. As far as sending letters, why are you doing that exactly? It's the 21st century, use the Internet, where infrastructure maintained by private industry can deliver your mail in 100ms instead of 2 days. Everything about the postal service is outdated and stuck in the 20th century.

Until about a decade ago access to space was exclusively government-run. Like most government programs, it's full of bureaucracy and waste, and thus it's no surprise that they would require arbitrary credentials to check the right boxes. As space becomes more democratized and private industry takes over I have no doubt that this will change. Physicals will be a thing, but I think academic experience less so, specially as spacecraft become increasingly automated and computer controlled. You may see, for example, a engineer with a decade of experience at SpaceX being much more valuable than a fighter pilot with a master's degree, simply because the skills people are picking up in the military or in college are less relevant than they used to be.

I work at one of the FAANGs and I can assure you a large cross section of my peers have zero college education or simply dropped out, and are in a whole different league than what's being taught in academia (I would know, I interview them all the time). In fact at the top end, most of the smartest folks simply skip college because they're too busy solving difficult problems or learning skills at a pace where the educational system would never be able to keep up.

The "ecosystem" you refer to has been destroyed, created, destroyed again thousands of times in the wake of asteroids, floods, volcanoes, natural plants and bacteria etc. In fact this happens so often that 99.9% of species were extinct before humans even showed up on this planet.

You act like the interactions of insects and the ecosystem is some mysterious forbidden knowledge that we can't possibly understand and that's just false. Humans understand agriculture quite well. We know exactly where the food we grow comes from, what nutrients it needs, what pollination it requires, how much moisture, etc. We've known these things longer than we've had computers, or electricity. Talk to a farmer some time. The only folks that sound like idiots here are the luddites that believe we should go back to the inefficient agriculture methodologies of the 1800s because it "feels better". Or the folks freaking out that "the insects are dying" because armchair scientists here see less of them going splat on the windshield of their Subaru.

Nuclear pumped lasers is a fascinating concept given the technological constraints of the 80s but it was never a great use of resources.

Check out the XN-1 LaWS and other modern solid-state lasers. The technology has advanced leaps and bounds over Star Wars, and the cost to deliver equipment into orbit has decreased dramatically. I think the Star Wars program was right on point but the technology of the era was not there to make it a reality. I could imagine us launching a modern space-based reactor powering a high-power solid state laser. In fact, it's probably quite likely the US is already doing this sort of thing with the X-37 or other classified payloads but it's not public yet.