White dwarfs are composed of electron-degenerate matter. With most matter, volume changes with temperature. This is a natural check on nuclear reaction rates - as they increase, they heat up their environment, causing it to expand, reduce density, and slow the reaction. But degenerate matter's volume is almost independent of its temperature, so it lacks this natural counterbalance; degeneracy pressure is what keeps its volume, not thermal pressure. As a result it tends to be kind of... explodey ;) You have to get the temperature so high that thermal pressure becomes relevant again for it to meaningfully expand.

It's true you're paying about the same for a AA battery in the hardware store than you were 30 years ago, if you account for inflation. However a 1990s AA battery would have a capacity of around 800 mAH whereas a modern AA battery offers 2000 mAH or more for the same (adjusted for inflastion) price. So while it *looks* like you're paying more for batteries, you're not if you account for inflation. If you actually look at the number of batteries you to buy over the course of time to power some device, you're actually paying less than 1/3 the price *for the stored energy you get*.

In any case we're not talking about the primary (non-rechargeable batteries) you are buying in the hardware store. We're talking secondary (rechargeable) batteries. In secondary cells the price/per capacity deflation is dramatic. The cost of kWH of lithium ion battery went down by 92% since 2000 [source]. Projections are grid storage costs will continue to drop at dramatic, albeit at somewhat lower rates, so we'll see a cost reduction of about one half in the next seven years [source].

Note this is a conservative projection of of lithium ion technology's evolution. There are multiple promising technologies in the pipeline that could significantly beat this projection. Some of these technologies (e.g. molten metal batteries) promise to be an order of magnitude cheaper if the bugs can get ironed out.

Hypothetically possible... but an incredibly risky way to get someone to kill themselves. I mean it's not the "take the bank manager's family hostage" gambit because the potential victims can never know what could have happened.

Yet, you still need to convince the person you're serious, and if you manage that, well then they might just go to the FBI and now you're in piles of trouble (especially if you follow through, which the person would realize).

And again, even under duress I suspect it's pretty hard to get a non-suicidal person to kill themselves. Especially if there's no real motive. Like did they think he was going to say something incredibly damaging on that 3rd day that he hadn't said in the 7 years since he first filed his complaint?

How about an alternate theory. The guy who had been under severe stress for years, possibly around the time of the trial he considered suicide but decided against it and in a moment of resolution that he would live he made a call where he declared he wouldn't kill himself.

Then, sometime later, the suicidal thoughts returned, and when faced with the prospect of more testimony he killed himself.

That's probably not exactly what happened, but it makes a lot more sense than the conspiracy theories.

The hotel staff literally heard the shot at 9:42 am.

And how do you imagine that hit worked? Can you even contrive a movie scene that doesn't sound ridiculous and needlessly depend on good luck? I mean just go stand in a hotel parking lot, just how sure are you that not only is no one is watching you at that moment, but no one is going to walk to a window or wander around a corner to see what was up with that gunshot they just heard?

Investigate for sure, but people suffering anxiety and PTSD, about to go into court for an extremely stressful deposition sometimes do kill themselves.

Boeing still bears a lot of responsibility for his death as they were literally trying to apply enough pressure to break his spirit so he wouldn't talk. But it's very unlikely they pulled the trigger.

Also, I'm not a professional hitman, but if I were to murder someone and stage it as a suicide, I'd do it at night. I'd fire the gun and slip out the door or window, or I'd maybe even spike their drink if I knew the pharmacology well enough.

I wouldn't shoot them at 9:42am in a hotel parking lot. There's a LOT of ways for someone to see you in that scenario.

Putin's Nuclear policy is very clear. Allow lower level politicians to make big nuclear threats. And even make slightly vague and indirect threats yourself.

But don't say anything that would clearly commit you to using Nukes as part of your conquest of Ukraine (and holding of currently occupied territories) so you don't have to backtrack if things go south.

War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

There's already an app you can use to make consensual nude images, it's called a camera.

If you need generative AI to create the nude then it's non-consensual or a very weird edge case of people making their own fake nudes.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?

They're laying out their plans for up to the end of the decade. You think this is just a fraction of their NA plans, that they're hiding things from their giant "Look, We're Doing EVs!" press release?

If it works for them, are they wrong?

Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.

73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.

Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.

Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?

When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.

Treat the watermark as a badge of pride.

It's also combined with the Android part in order to stream content. Which certainly means third party content, but also it will heavily push it's own Google content/store. Which is why it's better, thought getting more difficult, to keep the streaming device independent of the TV.