Trump was mocked heavily by folks right here about the creation the new arm of service. And yet we now have a critical information tool at out disposal as well as a centralized tracking authority.

Well, construction was started 5 years ago, before Trump was in office. I doubt that changing its name affected the success of the project one way or the other.

YouTube's "auto-generated" closed captions are often ridiculously inaccurate if they are intelligible at all. I can only assume this is the best they can do, since YouTube is one of their premier advertising platforms, and it doesn't make sense that they would use inferior technology that would (and does) turn off viewers. If they are using the same technology, I'm not optimistic about this.

The US government has failed to prioritize testing and make sure tests were available. There were numerous labs around the country capable of developing tests that sat idle or were actively hamstrung due to the absence of leadership. Other countries with much lower GDPs and access to technology were able to more rapidly deploy tests to the population. The US has objectively failed and continues to fail to this day.

To see just how bad the testing situation is in the U.S. relative to other countries, check this out: https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2020-03/corona-virus-tests-8-countries.jpg .

We've been testing SICK Americans.

Only some sick Americans. The testing rate in the U.S. is far less than in many other countries, indeed a shameful embarrassment for a country supposed to be a leader in biotech. See https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2020-03/corona-virus-tests-8-countries.jpg .

It might be interesting to look at what's happened with some of the new TLDs. One DNS provider, which is usually known for somewhat discounted rates, is asking $2399.95 per year to renew .car and .auto TLDs. Source: https://www.domainmonger.com/register-domain/. You can see that renewal prices vary all over the place depending on TLD, with prices presumably marked up from the wholesale price the TLD registry owner decides to charge.

I'm sure Ethos Capital is looking at numbers like that and salivating. Their primary goal will be to recoup their $1.1 billion then maximize profits. If not-so-rich .org's have to drop their domain names because they can't afford renewals, so be it, as long as enough richer .org's make up for it at the peak of the profit vs price curve.

I think Ethos has promised to limit price increases to 10% per year for the first few years as an incentive for the deal to go through, there's no telling what will happen after that. Even 10% is far faster than inflation. And shouldn't prices be going down? Just what work is involved in maintaining a database with 10 million .org records, which (as I understand it) is mostly kept updated with automated feeds from DNS service providers?

(BTW I wonder what PIR's plan is for the $1.1 billion they'll get.)

That is why viremia that are highly infectious and also kill their hosts tend to disappear quite rapidly.

Viremia is the condition of having viruses in the blood ("-emia" like "anemia"). I think you mean viruses. Also, "viremia" is singular; the plural is "viremias".

Income seems like the wrong thing to base it on. A rich person who doesn't work might have zero income in a particular year, so they'd pay less than the average working person? Basing the fine on net worth would probably be a much better motivator.

yyyy-MM-dd, which is a text sortable format.

Not only sortable, it's much less prone to ambiguity (some countries use dd/mm/yyyyy).

Without getting into the discussion of whether yyyy first is best for humans, let me mention that growing up I was exposed to American, European, and Brazilian ways of writing dates. What I noticed is that Americans, who use mm/dd, usually use a "/" for the separator, and the others who use dd-mm more commonly use "-" or ".". That's been occasionally useful to determine that 12/3/2019 likely means Dec. 3, whereas 12.3.2019 more likely means Mar. 12, in the absence of some other clue. (Another clue is when the handwritten digit 1 looks almost like 7 and the digit 7 has a stroke through it, it favors dd-mm.)

FTA: "When you close your eyes, you still see the content displayed" [says Steve Sinclair, senior vice president of product and marketing].

How long will it be before it is used as a torture/reeducation device? No more need to clamp your eyes open like in A Clockwork Orange.

Capital gains taxes represent investments that involved risk. There should be zero capital gains tax.

By this reasoning, lottery or casino winnings also shouldn't be taxed. Actually, almost anything that makes a lot of money involves risk, so it shouldn't be taxed. Only hard-working people earning a steady salary should be taxed, right?

I have signed it at https://savedotorg.org/. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about this organization other than what's stated on their web page. Use your own judgment.)

The neurons in bird brains are much more densely packed than in mammalian brains. This presumably evolved as a necessity to achieve light weight for flight. See Bird Brains Have as Many Neurons as Some Primates

"The requests, outlined in two search warrants obtained by Forbes, demanded to know which specific Google customers were located in areas covering 29,387 square meters (or 3 hectares) during a total of nine hours for the four separate incidents,"

So Google's users are "customers"? I thought they were the product.

I would agree it's hard to keep continual focus in a self-driving car for more than a couple of hours, for the reasons you give.

This might seem controversial, but would it be an improvement if the safety driver was allowed, or even encouraged, to watch a TV show projected semi-transparently on part of the windshield? Then at least she would constantly be looking in the direction of the road in front of her, and hopefully a reflex would kick in if an obstacle suddenly appeared.

... Damage from mining for its batteries alone is yuge and then there is end of life battery disposal. In 20 years what is the world going to do with the millions of no longer usable vehicle battery packs?

Recycle them to eliminate the mining?