Two things on masked deaths: 1) Some large percentage of deaths happen within a small radius of the home; I can see those going up as reduced work and social loads leave more time to experiment with dangerous home improvement tasks. 2) Liquor stores never closed, but AA (and much of the rest of mental healthcare) has been out of business for months. Plenty of ways to kill yourself at home, all at once on purpose or slowly out of self-neglect, just because you haven't heard a friendly voice in 4 months.

I mean, they could do what coal and gas plants do and just release the waste directly to the atmosphere and nearby waterways (coal ash is no joke). That it is actually practical to retain and sequester the waste from nuclear power is one of its principle benefits.

Um ... per capita has actually been a crucial concept missing from 99% of reporting on the pandemic (including that fancy web page from Johns Hopkins). It's pointless to compare numbers based on arbitrary groupings with populations spread across multiple orders of magnitude. Obviously more people are going to die in Sweden than San Marino, there are 300 times as many people there. But if 100 per million die in Sweden and 50 die per million in San Marino, you can draw a conclusion about the relative situations.

I think people seem to not understand how cookies work. It's a client-side feature; you can configure your browser to discard them immediately, return garbage, whatever. In fact, the grocery store analogy is pretty apt: many stores give you a discount if you present a store card, ie a tracking code, when you check out.

Free time is the wrong way to think about it. Right now, we have massive unsolved problems in how we can produce energy, how to dispose of or reduce waste, in how to keep from dying of cancer and other diseases, the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, we have a huge part of our population wasted standing behind counters asking "fries with that?" over and over. Those revolutions you spoke of freed up labor from food production, from manufacturing, from clerical work so that it could be put to use inventing sanitation, artificial lighting, fast transportation, and the other wonders of the modern age.

People are wrong when they say a person only uses 10% of their brain, but it is absolutely correct to say that humanity as a whole is barely using 10% of its collective brains.

What gets me with the ads is the same thing as with terrestrial radio: why do they play several ads in a row? If I knew I was getting back to the music or whataver program after 30 seconds, I'd listen through, but when it's going to be a few minutes I change the channel or turn it off. I understand bigger breaks in TV, where the content doesn't break up easily, but music is already in 3-5 minute chunks.

Actually a number of parts on most cars are labelled with the VIN to limit the value of stealing the car and chopping it up for parts (though obviously there's still some money to be made, since that's what this gang was doing). This is where the term "numbers matching" comes from in the classic car community: when all of the serialized parts of the car match the original VIN, the car is "truer" to the original delivery. I simply gave the windows as an example of a part visible without too much suspicious effort.

On my car, the VIN is also etched into the corner of each of the glass pieces. Since you also need to regularly supply a VIN for registration, service, and even sometimes to take the car onto a private lot, the best thing would be for Chrysler to require something more private in order to get the codes for the key and the computer :/

There are 12.4M bitcoins, valued at something like $400 each. That means that the bitcoin network is tracking something like $5B in value. This is three orders of magnitude smaller than the value tracked by the computer systems of those major banks, even if all of their computing power were needed for the task. In reality, the vast proportion of that power is spent predicting the most effective enterprises in which to invest that value. Even accepting that high-frequency trading is of dubious economic benefit, there are still real economic decisions being supported by the computation.

Um ... you don't need a remote station. There are 4 reactors, and only the one failed. The other three units were operated into the 90s.

Sure, release-day games are just as expensive if not more expensive than they were in a box, but things like Steam sales and the Humble Bundle make games that ordinarily you'd pick up used available for even cheaper than the used market, and get at least a little money to the creators (at the very least, it credits the creators with long-tail sales they can reference in the future).

I've seen this statement made several times during this debate, and wonder where it came from. While the owner of the phone is dead, presumably it along with his (or her? do we know which shooter's phone it is?) other possessions passed to their estate. Perhaps it was taken as evidence, but evidence is taken for protection from alteration until it can be presented in court, not as the property of the state (and even in the case of evidence, what trial is it being held for? We know who did it, and it is unlikely they will ever be indicted since they died in the act). Is this some interesting new application of civil forfeiture?

If this concrete mixture actually does sequester the waste for 100k years, we're actually making so that no one needs to care for 5000 generations. And, as other posters have indicated, in a fraction of that time, there will be more to fear from natural rocks.

Ironic name, no?

I also thought that going back to barge landings seemed like an unnecessary complication, as I was under the impression that the reason the first two attempts were at sea was because that proof-of-concept was needed to get permits for a ground landing. Today during the webcast, though, they clarified that for polar orbits such as this, they need to launch from Vandenburg in California, and there isn't a convenient piece of ground to land on.