Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?

How do you come to that assumption?

By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?

A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.

Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

Calories measure only the physiologically available energy, thus the calorie intake from cotton is essentially zero.

On the other hand, if they're doubling capacity, then you only need half the number of cycles (it actually even works *better* than that, as li-ion cells prefer shallow charges and discharges rather than deep ones - but yes, fractional charge cycles do add up as fractional charge cycles, not whole cycles). If you have a 200km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 10% of a cycle per day. If you have a 400km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 5% of a cycle per day.

Top commercial li-ion capacities are about 30% more than they were 5 years ago. And today's batteries include some of the "advances" you were reading about 5 years ago.

I'm sorry if technology doesn't move forward at the pace you want. But it does move forward when you're not looking. Remember the size of cell phone batteries back in the day?

you're making an absolute judgment on the entire society

Show me where I did that.

makes your arbitrarily determined authority

Again, stop making shit up. There is no authority, but there is such a category as developed countries, which the US belongs to, who all legislate openly such that you can track trends, political movements, ideological shifts, legislation and make comparisons.

And if you can find someone who's job is to track those very things and measure them against each other who will happily assert that the US looks leftist compared to most other developed countries, by all means, please do point him or her out of to me. That would be a rare and welcome treat.

i didn't notice the "arbitrary society {XYZ} is the authoritative definitive determinant of ideology in the world against which all are judged" icon floating above your head

Probably because that never happened, so don't be too hard on yourself.

what international standards? saudi arabia? malaysia?

If you bothered to read a little further, you would have caught the "developed countries" part. HTH.

those are just arbitrary points, not Magical Authoritative Determinators of Ideology, Anointed By God, which you apparently believe for some ignorant reason

Assumes facts not in evidence. Thanks for the bad faith.

the truth is, every society has some who resist change, and some who accelerate it. the center is determined by the center of that society, at that time. and this center is always moving. and it is the only logically valid measure of center, left, and right. for that given society. at that given time

Hence why, currently, and for a a while now at least, the US has been regarded as more conservative than most other developed countries. You're not refuting any points with this.

if you really reached for some magical bullshit measure of ideology globally, rather than society-by-society (the only valid measure), then the usa is actually a moderate middle-of-the-road country

And if you actually bothered to read what's got you frothing so much, you'd find that nothing like that has actually happened. Best of luck.

It can, but you have to have at first a clue of what you are doing. To know how to scale back a 100 MByte code base, you have to know the 100 MByte code base first, and you have to have lots of experience from coding within the 100 MByte code base, or from coding in a similar environment and with a similar goal.

To know how to scale back a large government, you have to know first what the government is doing, how it is doing what it does and why it does what it does, at best from your own experience in this government, or from working in another government.

Some outsider with big words but no experience is very likely screwing up big time, because he has no clue about most of the very important details. Yes, sometimes you find that wunderkind who is able to pull the stunt and get a new new code base working. But it surely has coded before, it has a general idea what's the point of the whole thing, and it is able to fastly get a strong team together pulling in the same direction. And sometimes you find that person who is able to redo a government as a relative outsider, but that person needs strong experience in how to govern something, and it has to be able to get a strong team together which pulls in the same direction.

And here the parallel between the government and maintaining a code base ends. Because you can create a new codebase while the old is still running. But you can't start a new government and get it up to speed while the old one is still running.

By international standards, even the Democratic party is to the right on a lot of issues (mostly economic at this point) than the rest of the developed world.

Haven't checked out any polls lately, have we?

The percentage of Americans supporting same sex marriage has been above 50% for a while now.

A president who runs on a "massively cut government" platform is like the junior coder who claims to be able to redo the whole 100 MByte source code project in his spare time, and cut it down to 1.5 MByte in size.

If his spare time project will ever be more than some example routines of peripherical functions and a completely overengineered interface full of place holder code and TBDL comments, then it will take 10 years to get some preliminary modules in production, and you will end up with two codebases of 150 MByte each, partly incompatible, but so interwoven that you can't never get rid again of at least one of it.