Wyoming has 20 billion tons of coal that is economical to mine today according to google, with 1.4 trillion tons in existence. Something like 240 million tons was mined in 2021. So several years worth are available right now.

Again, that depends on how you read the account in Genesis. Verse 1:1 records the creation, clearly. But does that mean that the rest of the chapter follows immediately in time? The way I parse it, the earth existed waste and void at some point after the creation of 1:1. Yet Psalms says it was created anything but void and waste. Taken in combination with Jeremiah 4 and Isaiah 14, this would imply a break in time between 1:1 and the rest of the first chapter which I feel shows the earth post initial judgment of Satan's rebellion. The rest of the chapter just records the restoration of the earth to a habitable state.

It isn't even completely certain that this judgment was worldwide. Perhaps Satan's empire was located in the Mediterranean Basin. The destruction alluded to in 1:2 could have just been located around the Mediterranean Sea when it filled - that sea is referred to as the deep in other spots. So it might not have affected anything in other parts of the earth, but just the huge destruction of the Mediterranean basin when the Atlantic poured in.

In addition, although reading the first chapters of Genesis makes it seem like the fall of man happened in just a few days, there is nothing to say just how long a time period passed between their creation and their fall. Six days of work is clear getting to the point of their creation. But then, it gets fuzzy. It also doesn't say when aging started - where the age of Adam would have begun to matter and be counted in years. After all, part of the punishment was to be cut off from the tree of life implying as long as they were in the garden with access to the tree they would have lived indefinitely. I'm of the belief that the ages recorded in the Bible for them were how long they lived post getting kicked out of Eden.

This fits nicely with the fossil record as well. There are many branches of the ancestors to modern man. They all stop within a very short, geologically speaking, period of time. Only modern man continues (or was created by God when the earth was restored).

We'll not know the truth till heaven. But I'm not of the opinion that the history God has recorded in His word would lead anyone to disbelieve in Him. Its purpose may not be science, but He also would not have wanted any excuses about science giving people an excuse to disbelieve the rest of the Bible's truth. This explanation works for me and makes things compatible between science and the Bible. It may not be completely correct, but it is close enough that I don't worry about it. It's kind of like Noah's flood. I see that as probably being the flooding of the Black Sea via the Bosporus. It didn't have to involve the whole world. It just had to involve the area where Satan's angels were trying to pollute the line of Adam's descendants to Christ. Noah just had to save the local fauna if it the flood was big, affecting his entire world, but not worldwide. From the middle of the Black Sea in an ark like boat, it would have appeared to his eyes as if the entire world was flooded, and that was what he recorded.

I'm not saying that God couldn't have created and placed every physical portion of the universe in such a way that it appeared to have been created billions of years ago but actually been done 6,000 or so years ago. It just doesn't seem like something He would have done. It seems more likely the deceiver would try to warp believers in the past into believing something that he could use today to get people to not believe in God.

Just my 2c.

The Bible says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1) Or, if you prefer new testament, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1-3).

The Bible also records a few thousand years of the history of some of the people on the earth, and includes limited prophecy about the future of mankind.

In no place does it say the earth was created X thousand years ago. Various religious leaders in the past made that inference, and it stuck with many, but the Bible never says that. In fact, when Satan tempts Adam and Eve in the garden, he is already a fallen angel. Isaiah implies he led forces from earth against heaven. Other spots imply he was in charge of Earth at some point in the past. These things require a much older time frame for earth than just that of man's history as recorded in the Bible. So there is disagreement even among Christians about just what happened.

The point of the Bible isn't to teach ancient history or to be a scientific textbook. It's to point people to Christ as Savior. It does a good job of that. If all Christians would live their lives with his teachings in mind, it would be a better place.

Everybody always forgets the ability to download a free book a month. Sometimes two. They might not be ones I would pick on my own, but I can usually find at least one of the selection that makes a good read. 12-14 free books a year is worth something as well, even if they are electronic so don't cost Amazon much to deliver either.

I guess nobody reads anymore. I tried to hit a book a day, just to see if I could do it, but maxed out at 355 books sufficiently good to rate in 2023. I doubt I'll try that again though. It was a bit rough. But still, even if you aren't crazy like I was last year, doesn't anybody read?

It's completely relevant. You may not be driving from A to B daily, but deaths on interstates do occur and many times it is due to fatigue (or unexpected obstacles like deer, antelope, or escaped cattle or sheep trying to beat you across the highway or just standing there looking dumb). In some parts of the country it's a matter of coming over a blind hill or around a blind turn and having a slow moving tractor right in front of you, although rarely on an interstate. All can lead to deaths.

All of these deaths add up, and even though you may not be affected by them directly as you don't do that kind of driving, it doesn't mean they don't influence the death statistics. It has gotten better with electronic logging for freight haulers, but it doesn't fix people who should pull off for a nap thinking they can make it to town C and finding they can't. And sorry to say, but when an 18 wheeler hits a deer there isn't much damage to the truck and the driver is fine. If a tiny car or motorcycle hits a deer at 80 mph or higher, the occupants of the car usually end up dead. Size matters when an accident happens. Low to the ground, aerodynamic, really safe hitting some similar vehicle, only means the animal goes through your windshield. If you're in a tall pickup, that's less likely to happen. I know that animals are an issue everywhere, but antelope are a particular problem in my state. They have tremendous acceleration, and are always sure they can beat you across, regardless of how fast you are going. Even if they're right, the surprise can put you in a ditch or rollover in a heartbeat.

The 18 wheeler comment is also relevant. They are rare in Japan. Most delivery vehicles are much smaller as well for local city deliveries. This gives better visibility on the roads as well and leads to fewer accidents and greater ability to survive an accident. Driving behind a triple trailer in the wind where the last trailer is weaving mostly back and forth in the lane of traffic it's supposed to be in is also an issue. Maybe you don't see them in your daily driving, but they're a thing across a large part of the country. Passing doubles or triples if they end up routed to a two lane state highway for some oddball reason is also much more dangerous than typical city drivers in metropolitan areas with low speed limits would ever notice.

Finally, I'd say that road design isn't as much of an issue in most places unless you're exceeding its posted limits or driving insanely in bad weather conditions, but road upkeep certainly is.

I suspect less to do with the vehicle, than a combination of other factors. 1) DUI deaths 2017 stats Japan 5.6%, U.S. 29%, 2) Distance to travel. Japan is about the same size as California. Population density Japan 876/sq mi, California 258/sq mi, U.S. 96/sq mi. The U.S. has much larger distances to travel with much lower population density, which leads to two things at a minimum: Faster travel speeds on average and greater probability of losing concentration while driving across large chunks of sparsely populated areas.

Vertical isn't as irrational as you think. With an UHD monitor in vertical 2160x3840, the effective width is still greater than the old effective width of a normal monitor say 1920x1080. So you don't lose anything from an older monitor landscape configuration. The vast majority of the work I do (e-mail, most websites (and particularly financial stock websites where I utilize graphing) aren't particularly wide. Many websites even throw away most of the available horizontal with wide bands of white on either side. Financial stock graphs frequently dump technical indicator graphs below the price graph and work down. Documents I'm writing or reading that eventually end up on a printed page also benefit from having a screen match the normal layout of the printed page.

At any rate, a vertical monitor orientation saves much more paging up and down than I feel I lose for the occasional spreadsheet where I may have more columns that now require scrolling. Even there, most of them also have predominately more rows which again you can see more of with the monitor vertical.

Don't call us irrational unless you've tried it. Gaming is about the only reason to have a landscape view and that's only because the games are designed for it. I don't game on my computer, so that isn't a reason to be tied to landscape.

Without a high resolution monitor, I'd agree with you. But these days, that is no longer an issue.

It's also so ingrained that it should be the other way that when my 3 yr old grand son came in and saw my now vertical monitors he declared that was "wrong" and wanted grandpa to fix it immediately.

Or, another solution since our fertility rate isn't that great and we don't want to end up like Japan giving economic incentives to try to get young people to immigrate would be to open up immigration legally thus reducing the money spent on stupid ideas like the "wall", increasing the tax base, and move forward.

This is the main issue I would think. If you run AI on your own corporate code base subset that has no external license issues, then helping out a new project would be great. If you are relying on some search engine's returns, it is almost certain that the code it examines to come up with the answer will be from GPL'd or if you're lucky BSD licensed code. So even if it's correct, it still isn't usable unless you know the license it was created from and are willing to allow the terms of that license to apply to your derivative work.

Since posting random meaningless statistics seems to be in for complaining about how bad inflation is, Friday a group of 4 adults and 3 kids went out to eat at a sit down restaurant for about $15/head. Still crazy expensive compared to when I was a kid - the whole charge would have been $15 then. Don't get me wrong. Inflation sucks. But if you don't go out to eat every night, who cares. If you are going out to eat every night and lunch, then inflation could be 0 and you still would be falling behind. Eat at home - microwave if you have to for variety or if cooking would yield leftovers you'd have to eat for days on end. If prices are crazy high where you live, move. There are much cheaper places to live in the US than the coasts.

Speaking strictly of restaurant costs, the COVID shutdown seriously impacted their bottom lines. Prices are likely to be higher at restaurants for quite a while just trying to recover their lost profits during the shutdown.

The WSJ had a good opinion piece about a month ago. Summarizing, nobody wants deflation. Deflation usually comes due to depressions and major recessions. No, the prices aren't going to drop back to what they were 5 years ago, 10 years ago, a century ago. Some will fluctuate up and down with transportation costs and the like. But the net direction for prices is always going to be up. The people this hurts are those on fixed incomes with no savings invested in stocks. If you're working, your wages will generally keep up with inflation or you'll switch to a different employer so they will.

Healthcare costs are affected by inflation like everything else. Regardless, one of the biggest reasons insurance premiums increased post Obamacare is that kids were now covered on their parents insurance plans for many more years. Pre-Obamacare, many dropped off their parents plans and then being mostly healthy saw no reason to be insured at all. You can't blame the insurance companies for charging for the increased risk and cost, because broken bones, pregnancies, and illness doesn't really care about your age - well pregnancies have a limit - but otherwise...

We should have a single payer system where all are covered at some known level of care - pick a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum plan from the single insurer (who gets to bid on managing the pool) or let the government run it, pay your premium the risk you are willing to take on yourself, and you only get to change every n years to prevent picking a better plan if you get sick. Adjust premiums for everyone based on expenses in the last year and expected changes in demographics. No silos of care - PPO, HMO, et cetera. Choose any hospital or medical facility in US. Reimburse doctors and facilities on cost plus, adjusting to average cost in region and outcomes or something. Doctors and medical facilities win because they know what they'll be reimbursed based on the plan and only one insurer to deal with.

With all basic and preventative care covered, hopefully more very large expenses would be reduced by things being caught earlier. Would the transition be easy? No. Dealing with fixed costs and loans for education would be difficult. But post change - say 20 years - it would be better. Other countries have done it and survived. They still have hospitals and doctors. Why don't we think we can?

But, if you actually read the Old Testament, you will find it has many, many verses on murder and what constitutes it and accidental murder and what constitutes it. The only verses that even come close to dealing with an unborn child is found in Exodus 21:22-25 where it states that if two men fight and cause a woman to miscarry, the husband of the woman has the right to take those who caused the miscarriage to the judges for a civil fine. They don't face an accidental murder charge. If the fight and subsequent miscarriage causes the woman to die, then the accidental murder charge would follow.

I'll be among the first to say that Jesus, in His discourse, laid out many sins from the Old Testament where He would say something like "You have heard it said that ... but I say ..." where his rules were tougher than the Old Testament required. But this one isn't singled out. I leave it to the Holy Spirit to guide you whether abortion would qualify. But the Old Testament seems pretty clear that until the child draws its first breath after birth, when it becomes a living soul, it doesn't enjoy the same protections under the law. Jewish faith seems to follow this, and they should know.

I'd like to see fewer abortions. I'd like to see more Christians full of the Holy Spirit with signs and miracles following with sufficient faith that God would heal any birth defect or problem that could occur. That we don't is not an indictment of God. It's an indictment on Christianity. I'd also like to see the all Christians let the fruit of the same Spirit shower mothers in hard situations with love and help for a few years instead of turning their backs once they have made or been forced due to circumstances or location to make the "right" choice. Some churches are particularly good at that, but many are not.

The problem with leap milliseconds or leap nanoseconds would be the size of the conversion file required to hold all the changes. As it is a leap second every year or so is pretty small. Seems completely pointless to go from leap second to leap minute. The skewing wouldn't likely be uniform over all devices leading to problems. Skewing a second and not doing it completely in sync seems less error prone than the other.

In theory yes, but without term limits for Congress or the Supreme Court, checks and balances are hard to really maintain over time. Balance, once shifted, is hard to shift the other direction - or even back to center.