Plutonium poisoning? That is a ridiculous conspiracy theory. Clearly they'd use a nerve agent like VX instead.

Melt point, wear, deformation, plasticity? Just because something has a high tensile, shear or compression strength doesn't say much about it's other qualities.

So the AI will only emit a quarter cup of sweat or less in a code review meeting?

What Thelasko said, but specifically the lasers are just a component in a much larger system and are specifically for very short range rockets/missiles. This is not the multi-mach stuff, this is taking the dumb rockets off the board in a saturation attack so the counter missiles can focus on the target the lasers aren't optimal for. It's about reducing overall costs to intercept.

Well, not only is there a treaty clause about political crimes in the Thailand-UK extradition treaty, but there's also a list of crimes that extradition is limited to and neither defamation nor lèse-majesté is on that list.

Nah, 90% of all planes, but we worked really hard to saw off the back 10% of our airplanes this week.

We desperately need a Constitution that makes our democracy representative. A lot of the reason for social unrest and corruption is that the Republicans at the national level (and the Democrats in many states) can elect clearly unfit or corrupt candidates because rural power is so ridiculously overrepresented in this country. I'm not talking just about the weirdos that every party has, but about people like Duncan Hunter who actually won an election in 2018 when everyone knew he misappropriated funds. In 2020, Hunter was pardoned by Trump. Between gerrymandering and overrepresentation of small states we literally cannot hold people accountable for criminal behavior. Perversely it doesn't appear that the GOP needs to actually do much to represent the needs of small and rural states since they hold such a lock on power there.

How are you accounting for the cost per use of physical books, rebinding and replacement of damaged books, staffing requirements, furniture and fixtures, building costs etc... ? I admit some of those costs (space, etc...) are effectively sunk costs, but in the very long term I'd think libraries that can transition to more digital books would have reduced staffing requirements, and either be able to reduce the size of future branches or allocate more of the branch to friend of the library bookstores or make a cafe available for patrons.

Well, it depends if you want more free speech from distributed networks of bots or more free speech from individuals.

Is it tyranny if the majority of the populace supports it? At some point people who cry tyranny are raging against humanity, not the government.

I want someone who will talk to conservatives and liberals, not someone who will talk to the GOP and Dems. That may be a small distinction, but I think it's becoming more and more important. There are two ways to get good policy, crowdsourced majority opinion or relatively unbiased experts. The latter is almost impossible to come by in a biased selection process, and the GOP is increasingly opposed to representational democracy because of the legacy of disproportionate political power held by rural states and their own loyalties post southern strategy.

I got 21 years of driving out of both of my and my wife's ICE cars, and just rented an EV to see how easy it was to live my life with one. Gotta say it was a little bit of a pain in the ass for me as an apartment renter, but I would totally buy one as a _second_ car even so. A PHEV on the other hand would fit my needs perfectly in one car as an EV when I'm doing local errands and a good long range car when I'm taking a trip but don't want to rent a gas car to use for non-EV use cases. If I had my own home to put in an L2 charger I'd go EV and just rent a car for the occasional road trip. Some place that rents genset trailers might be worth it if they could be used to charge as you go. I don't know if the numbers($) would work out for that though.

That said, people buy trucks all the time to drive around everywhere even though they only haul loads once a year and would be better off with a car. Emotions and status and personal style seem to matter too much in auto buying.

Two shots of mRNA vaccine are more effective against COVID for at least six months than two shots of Polio vaccine are against Polio. If that's a 'placebo' I'd expect to be tripping over iron lungs right now. Even the Smallpox vaccine is only 99% effective. The other half of the picture is that people have to take the vaccine at a high enough rate that we reach herd immunity and you have to have a public health policy that allows for quarantine and/or isolation until we get there. We aren't lacking the technology to solve Covid, we're lacking the political and cultural will. We tackled measles which has at least a fourfold higher R0 value, requiring 95% of people use a vaccine not much more effective at two doses than the COVID mRNA vaccines. If we tried to tackle measles or smallpox today we'd fail, with the same effectiveness of vaccine we used previously. Wherever or however COVID originated, and whatever missteps the CDC and others have made in the past it is a Republican disease now, and only changing the minds of Republicans will solve it. "Natural immunity" will just get us more variants. Hopefully, if we're really lucky, they'll be less deadly variants and the spike proteins won't mutate into something the vaccine can't deal with.

https://www.path.org/articles/understanding-journey-herd-immunity/

This isn't all people taking too much time to come downstairs from an office or apartment. Some of it is time to load a wheelchair in a car while they are at the curb already when the car pulls up, or the car stopping a quarter block away and making a blind person come find the driver. To the extent that Uber fails to require contractors to be adequately trained, or fails to specify vehicles need to be able to accommodate wheelchairs either without collapsing them or by granting additional time, Uber is absolutely at fault. Buses and taxis have been handling this for decades, Uber doesn't deserve a free pass.

Microsoft should have a home license that obligates people to update versions and a professional license that lets you opt-out if you want.