Where's Bert bot?

Technology "advances" to the point where a civilization has to expend 3.5 whatzits to acquire 1.0 whatzits, and it isn't even approximately sustainable.

woke, adj. - "Not a knee-jerk reactionary like me."

I'm curious, why have the Mac Mini at all? You can plug the laptop into a dock and use the same monitor and keyboard, then take it with you.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

That 1.2 million when spread across a career in which you will work 60 hours a week, but only be paid for 40, doesn't really amount to much. When you consider the toll that such a lifestyle will take on your health, you won't even break even.

A 60 vs 40 hour work week is 1000 unpaid hours every year. Over the course of a 40 year career, that's 40k hours, or about $30/hour. Which means that any blue collar working making $20/hour or more will actually be making more per hour whenever they work overtime.

You mean like these dumpster fires?

Mmm, I see the problem. I was thinking of the defined contribution style pension where, on retirement, you sell your holdings and buy an annuity with the proceeds, which then pays out a fixed sum for life. Someone managing such a fund is expected by their investors to take a long term view -- and isn't responsible for monthly payments to those who have already retired. If what you have is a single fund for both current and future retirees, then those currently drawing a pension may end up with a louder voice than those who are still working, although in principle they shouldn't.

That seems a little exaggerated. A pension fund has investors who are 30, 40, 50 years old and have many decades before they retire. Those investors want capital appreciation and for there to still be a high quality company to pay out dividends once they retire. Even a retiree aged 70 could live for many more years. The pension funds could certainly take a long term view. The trouble is that nobody really knows what that means. There isn't an easily quotable metric for it as there is for dividends or EBITDA.

My thought experiment is, what if two black holes were approaching each other very rapidly on a not-quite-collision course, so that the sides of their event horizons briefly overlapped as they passed. Would they stick together?

ISTM that if anything was inside the overlapping area they'd have to stick, since otherwise that thing would be escaping from one of them. But is there anything there? Maybe something that just now fell in and hasn't had time to fall to the center? Or, is there quantum foam inside a black hole, and if so, would that count as "something" that would force the black holes to stick?

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

I was hoping to learn more about the physics of sex.

By something that's not alive, I suppose?

Ah, thanks. I didn't know you could borrow shares.

The only surprise is that he isn't selling autographed Trump bibles.