Nothing against a utility promoting itself by pointing out what it has achived, such things do need community support. However promoting the current CEO is clearly a form of political advertising for the benifit of the CEO, not the utlility. The full amount should be recovered from the CEO, after he is sacked for (legalised) embezzlement.

Nothing wrong with subsidies provided everyone is subsidised equally. Subsidising FF and renewables is not the same thing, FF are already have a huge subsidy in that it costs nothing to pollute the commons. Any moron can construct a free market via regulation, the hard part is constructing one that doesn't eventually kill us with our own greed.

Fact checking is good advice, you ought to try it sometime.

An incompetent comedian blames his audience.

"Universe" = everything.
"universe" = everything observable.

But that grammatical rule breaks down if you put the word at the start of a sentence.

Probably wouldn't work with my dog, it would just eat the rubber band.

Yeah, confused the hell out of me too the first time I heard it back in the 80's. If you search the "starts with a bang" website you'll find a well written article that explains why. Oh and 46 is the radius from our POV, so it's actually 92 "across".

Objects cannot move relative to each other faster than light but the space between them has no such restriction. Hyper Inflation lasted until the universe was about the size of a basketball. The big bang didn't end with (hyper) inflation, it is still happening and the universe is still inflating. The boundary to our modern universe is expanding away from us at the speed of light. So, two observers on opposite sides of our visible universe will be speeding away from each other faster than light. Only an observer in our position can see that the two observers at the opposite "edges" existing simultaneously.

Big fan of Starts with a Bang for many years, I must ask Ethan why cosmologists have ruled out the idea that our universe is the interior of a black hole. Neil deGrasse Tyson claims Einstein's equations can be interpreted to mean there is a different universe inside a black hole but he doesn't elaborate. If anyone else knows of a good reason as to why our universe can't be the interior of a black hole then I'd love to hear it.

At least that explains why in this universe GWB doesn't punch himself in the face every now and then.

Indeed, there's a good reason the paper is known as the daily fail to people in the UK.

Yep, and no matter what you think of Edison, the modern research lab was primarily his invention. A modern lab tends to know what it is looking for (eg: practical light bulb) and is all about the finding the steps to get there (trial and error), compared to say Newton who mainly followed his own curiosity. The trick to being a lead researcher is finding a rich problem space for the students to work on that will attract grants.

George Washington decreed every landowner put aside up to five acres for hemp production to feed the new navy's hunger for rope. The drug ban arose from the fact hemp was standing in the way of profits from the new wonder thread Nylon (NY + LONdon), yet to this day nylon rope is avoided by mariners because of it's brutal effect on waterlogged hands (feels like razor wire).

In the tiny nation of Bhutan weed has "invaded", the stuff is like carpet and is impossible to eradicate, the local buddhists don't often consume it themselves rather they consider it free pig food. Or as their foreign minister once put it; "In our nation, the pigs really do fly".

It did not take 150yrs to end the alcohol prohibition experiment and it ended the same way as marijuana prohibition is ending now, the states lead the reversal. The problem for all nations at the federal level is international treaties. Weed was originally demonised by the US for industrial purposes, if the new wonder thread nylon was to succeed economically, hemp production needed to be restrained. People bought the propaganda because it was marketed as a "mexican problem" in the same way Germany marketed the "jewish problem".

Weed doesn't treat cancer it's mainly used to treat low appetite that comes with the drugs that do treat cancer. It also "thins the blood" (as does aspirin), so best to stay away from it before surgery.