The article also quotes an Ohio farmer who complained that "You live in the country, and you want to be away from all the hustle and bustle. I kind of look at it as if they're sticking a warehouse or a factory here."

Or if they started growing all their food there...

Sorry, but unless you're strictly living on subsistence agriculture, then your income/existence is predicated upon meeting the needs of other people in other places. That's just life. If demand and profitability for wind or solar outstrips demand for new beet farms, then there will be new wind farms, current regs be damned.

Also, the time to build out is *before* demand, not after it can't meet demand, at which point it's too late. You know, unless Intel is short on this whole "integrated circuit" thing and believes it's just a fad...

Of course they're trading in currencies other than the dollar, because they're evading, or trying to evade, sanctions, not because anyone wants Yen. The Yen fell over 15% against the dollar in 2023, so if you made that "investment," you lost big. You just lost *much less* big on your otherwise-impossible oil and gas sales (Russia and Iran), and you saved a lot on those purchases (China and India, mostly).

Yes, things can change long-term, but increased Yen holdings by central banks is more of a "keep an eye on this," signal than a "sky is falling" scenario. I don't have a better crystal ball than anyone else, but I expect a regression closer to pre-Ukraine War norms when things stabilize. Either that or the whole thing will go tits up and currency will be moot.

Right, and if society can't learn from the mistakes of its members, then it's doomed to (re)experience the consequences until it does. It's not like Hans even came up with these ideas; he's just suggesting that it might benefit all of us to have them as part of a standard curriculum, and I'm in agreement there. Social Studies seems like the obvious place, since almost none of it is actually about social skills as it stands, instead teaching facts, names, and dates for rote learning. Perhaps if we focused more on interpersonal skills and conflict resolution, we could lower the levels of animus and dehumanization in our country. Maybe not, but it seems like a significant upside with minimal downside, unless memorizing the ordinal, date, and duration of Martin van Buren's administration is, in fact, something I unconsciously use every day, which is a possibility I'm certainly open to if anyone cares to explain.

Porn mostly shows what people are willing to do for money. It might provide some awareness or validation for kinks, which is fine, but I wouldn't call it education per se.

Maybe the Sears catalog will make a comeback. Mmmmm, Sears.

The sudden retreat, however, comes as a surprise.

Does it, though?

An inability to do proper risk/reward assessments and agree to minor unpleasantness now to avoid major unpleasantness in the future is a significant issue for humans.

This is a solved problem; it's called governance. The perceived risk can be raised through regulation, enforcement, and publicizing those efforts. This isn't rocket science, but unfortunately it requires either a benevolent dictator, or else the collective societal will to establish institutions with resources and resistance to corruption in order to be effective.

No, they wonâ(TM)t. Weâ(TM)ve already been through all of this with IM clients on desktops. At the end of the day, this is Appleâ(TM)s infrastructure, iMessages travel over Apple servers, and Apple have no reason or requirement to allow anyone else to use it, especially when it costs them real money. I love to cheer for the little guy, but this is not the way, and itâ(TM)s never going to work, at least not reliably enough to be viable.

Bitcoin and similar cryptos have never included "untraceability" as a feature. Quite the opposite -- with a public ledger it's very straightforward to trace transactions. Mixers obfuscate things well in theory, but only marginally in practice, especially when records can be subpoenaed. You might be able to squirrel it away into one or more "anonymous" wallets, but as soon as its used for anything, it potentially becomes traceable again. And if you have a half-billion dollars but can never spend it, then what do you really have?

I mean I think the explanation is pretty clear -- the US has a small set of carriers that move in lockstep and compete only notionally.

So why isn't mobile data cheap in New Jersey? And how do you explain Italy at #2, with a large rural area and significant rural population?

I dunno about a tipping point, but I'm definitely reluctant to buy *any* car right now. I suspect ICE cars will depreciate rather quickly from lower demand, but EVs will probably depreciate rapidly as well due to battery degradation, economies of scale and process and material improvements on the manufacturing side. Ugh. Maybe E-ZPass will start giving away "free" EVs with valid trade-in and a 10-year commitment to drive at least 40 times per day.

Yes, this specific death was a suicide, but there have been 98(!) deaths already, and 7 were deemed suicides. Meanwhile at-grade crossings were cited explicitly or implicitly (collisions with vehicles) in at least 20 of those deaths. Honestly, all train tracks should be entirely separated from roads. Even if you don't care about the lives of idiots who try to beat trains, there's the cost of the lost hours for everyone riding (or unable to ride) the train after a collision, and the fact that collisions with vehicles can and do cause derailments.

The pressure across the membrane is exactly the pressure difference between the freshwater column and the saltwater column.

Exactly, and that pressure will equalize (i.e., approach 0) without an external force continuing to act on it. Where does that force come from? A membrane doesn't magically generate a force -- that's Maxwell's Demon.