Maybe originally, but now the demand for gasoline far outstrips the amount naturally found in crude oil. That's why they invented cracking.

If one day there ever were an excess of light components in oil, they could simply transform it into higher-weight molecules. Along those lines, one of the biggest uses for natural gas is for building polymer chains.

Your attitude is precisely why Trump is going to declare himself God-Emperor Of America and send the left to Happy Camps.

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Less coal burned in America means more coal for China to burn.

Most of the areas where Russia is fighting are full of ethnic Russians and they literally asked for Russian peacekeepers in 2022 because Kiev kept attacking them.

And it's quite likely that Trump will soon be invading Canada to protect the Western provinces from Ottawa. I suspect he's already set that up with Carney, since it will give him the most valuable parts of the country at very little cost.

Why would you send new tanks to Ukraine when they'll be destroyed in a few hours on the front lines? Might as well get a few hours of use out of the old ones that would otherwise be scrapped.

Imagine if instead of the left spending the last ten years campaigning to ban Christmas and force women to allow men into their bathrooms, they'd been campaigning against the power of billionaires.

If the Woke left didn't exist, billionaires would have had to invent it.

Oh, hang on, in many cases they did.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

I've only seen the first episode, where there only small hints that the flashbacks aren't set in 1950s.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

If it was reasonable I presume companies wouldn't be complaining because it would be as cheap as or cheaper than setting up their own payment system.

Not necessarily even that. Some friends tried to break into the movie business in London but pretty much everywhere required them to work for months as unpaid interns to have a chance of a paid job. Middle-class kids living with their parents could afford to do that, but poor kids couldn't afford to live in London that long without an income, and probably not even on the income they'd get from their first paid job if they held out that long.

It's another way that poor kids are kept out of certain lines of work.

China is a serious country. The West is (mostly) not.

The economics is largely irrelevant. China could be in just as bad a state as the West if they put people in universities based on sex or skin colour rather than merit, taught them that people can change sex just by saying so, and continually told them that China was evil and Chinese people should just disappear and be replaced by Indians and Africans.

> in many parts of the country schools are literally falling apart while good teachers leave the profession because they cannot afford to live on a teaching salary

Meanwhile, if you look at education outcomes against spending over the last few decades, outcomes in the US have become worse and worse as spending has risen.

People get their AI to listen to the podcast and summarize it for them.

Sperm stem cells make sperm cells and other sperm stem cells. If early in life, the donor had 5 sperm stem cells and one of them mutated, from then on 20% of new cells would be the mutated form.

This is not my area of expertise. I'm just offering a hypothesis.