So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.

What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?

The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.

From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.

But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.

These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.

If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.

In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.

On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.

But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.

Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.

I'm guessing the vast majority of ad benefits come from impressions rather than clicks.

I don't think I've ever clicked on a movie ad, but I'm sure a lot of my movie choices come from movie ads.

Same thing for other products, the ads annoy you, but when you go to buy something the one you've seen the ad for suddenly looks a whole lot more credible and familiar.

I think you've got it backwards.

In Canada the parties are far stronger than they are in the US and the individual MPs are almost irrelevant as they're simply expected to vote with their party, yet we seem to have a lot less of this kind of corruption and I don't think it's a coincidence.

Look at the emails, the guy was so compliant partly because he was relying on the MPAA for fund-raising, he's a state level politician dealing with the representative of the US media industry, of course he was playing ball. Just like if he was some individual legislator with a big group threatening to flood his district with money for his opponent, it's really easy for powerful interests to manipulate the government by picking off individual legislators.

If you make the parties stronger then the interests have to deal with the party instead of the legislator, and the parties are strong enough (and often incentivized) to tell the powerful interests to screw off.

Why aren't the locals buying bed nets themselves?

Supposedly $5 gets you an insecticide treated bed net that's good for 2 years, I know we're talking about very poor people but that sounds like somewhere where'd I'd expect a local industry to pop up.

We don't know how much anything truly costs, we're barely aware of what happens to solar panel waste the moment it's built, much less 10,000 years from now. We're just putting a lot more effort into figuring it out for Nuclear.

So if EDF is losing money that tells me the power might be underpriced, but even rising 30% they'll still be one of the cheaper rates.

Where are the subsidies? The EDF has its own finances. If it goes bankrupt maybe you could say the government subsidized it by losing equity but I'm not sure I'd buy that. Besides, all other power generation including fossil fuel and renewables are heavily subsidized as well.

You're talking about a pretty intense subsidy to justify that price, and other than the fact that the EDF is in financial trouble I'm not really finding any evidence.

It's underway though I don't know how much a full solution would affect cost. And realistically I think we overemphasize Nuclear waste because it's Nuclear, we generate lots of nasty industrial waste that we don't treat with the same paranoia.

Then why does France have some of the lowest energy prices in the developed EU and why are they exporting energy to Britain?

I mean it's not proof that France's electricity generation is fundamentally cheaper, or that Nuclear power has anything to do with it, but I can't find any evidence to back up your claims.

The other take away is to figure out why the non-experts don't use the expert approach already. Are the password managers poorly advertised or otherwise unwieldy? For instance I know a lot of sites have login windows that the Firefox password manager doesn't recognize.

Not going to happen, HTML email is a feature, a feature a lot of people find very useful and will not give up without a big fight.

Honestly this is a case where I've learned to reason heuristically. I've seen many studies of this nature, I don't know what the specific flaws in the study might be (though I can think of many potential ones) and I would be very shocked if in a few years this led to a clinically validated form of something that's recognizable as acupuncture.

Skepticism involves being skeptical about your own deductive abilities, this study shifts my beliefs slightly, but overall I realize I'm not qualified to accept this study as proper evidence.

It's not proof.

a) The electric current was critical and is not part of typical or historical acupuncture.

b) They showed one effect related to a point, acupuncture claims many more.

c) 42 rats in 4 groups. Not a huge sample size.

d) Acupuncture is a controversial subject where one might expect dubious research to occasionally be published.

At most this offers very mild evidence that is consistent with acupuncture being effective. Note this study is at odds with studies that find the points don't really matter.

If you were a good candidate because you were young & healthy that suggests there are higher risks associated with the robotic surgery but they were small enough they figured it was worth the convenience in your case. Of the paper you linked all I saw was the summary so it wasn't clear to me it corrected for doctors being potentially more risk-adverse with robotic surgery.

That's a very simplistic argument, "person X should be able to handle Y, therefore I'll assume Y has no cost" that completely misses what's happening.

Modern discrimination doesn't happen because of blanket policies, it happens because people are trying to extract marginal benefits like younger employees who may be slightly easier to manage, or male employees who are slightly more likely to watch the same TV shows as the rest of the team.