Yes. China is trying to build a Falcon-9 competitor while SpaceX is working to make Falcon-9 obsolete.

Based on the summary this seems to be comparing government-funded space programs while ignoring the commercial space programs. A single Starship, for example, apparently has a similar internal volume to the entire ISS, though obviously it would shrink once you added life support and other hardware required for people to live on board for long periods.

But still, dock four Starships to a central module providing power and other requirements for long-term habitation and you have something with far more volume than ISS for probably a fraction of the cost of a single ISS module when it was launched twenty or thirty years ago.

The wet market hypothesis claims the Covid outbreak began in the Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

We now know from analysis of stored patient samples that it was in Italy by October 2019(*) and have inconclusive tests from September 2019 so it may have been there earlier. I also have been told by people working in medicine in North America that they have found positive stored samples from patients in October 2019.

So wherever it came from, it almost certainly did not originate in the wet market in December 2019 and appears to have been worldwide by October 2019. This explains the 'super-duper scary spread' in spring 2020 because it had been going around for months and as soon as they started mass testing they started finding lots of people who tested positive.

(*) And we already had pretty good evidence of this in early 2020 as an Italian virologist had been tracking an unusual respiratory disease through the winter before it suddenly became The Pandemic.

However, this is getting a bit off-topic for railways, unless it spread by rail.

Yeah. One of the reasons the buses suck so much here is because the bus drivers won't force the scumbags to pay the fare because they don't want to get attacked by scumbags.

Most of this kind of transport planning is created by people who think we're still living in a prosperous, high-trust society where people will obey their dictats. And we're not.

The only reason most people run Windows is to run crappy old Windows software from years ago. So the faster Microsoft kill backwards compatibility the sooner they kill Windows.

Which they probably don't care about as apparently most of their profits come from "The Cloud" these days. Which probably explains why Windows tries so hard to steal all my data and shove into "The Cloud."

I haven't tried it, but I've seen many people online say that they installed Windows 11 on 'unsupported' Windows 10 hardware. Few people care about the rest.

If I remember correctly, the Taliban began as a group protecting children from pedos. So it's possible but seems unlikely.

Yet apparently Windows 11 works fine without it.

I'm guessing it's just a way for Microsoft to create DRM that takes control of the PC from its owner?

It's good to see that you agree that the degree is only relevant as a line on your resume.

Wouldn't it be simpler to let people just buy Official Certificates of Smartness to put on their resume and avoid all the hassle of studying things that they will never use?

Also, your original comment isn't true. Small companies tend to be more interested in what people can do than what they have on their resume. I also know companies who have a blacklist of colleges they won't hire from so you'd be more likely to get a job if you don't have a degree than if you had a degree from one of those colleges. Big companies have HR who prevent the company from hiring the people who would be best for the job.

Oh, and some big finance company in the UK said they were no longer considering degrees when hiring people because they'd found degrees had no relation to how successful employees were in the company. I forget who it was but it was surprising to see them do so which is why I remember it.

"Get a good degree in a useful discipline and you have a safety net that will make it much easier to get a decent job. "

But will it?

Even if you get a degree in a useful subject there's no guarantee it will be useful in ten years. And if it is, you could just wait ten years and get the degree then if you need it.

Boomers told everyone to get a degree, so now the midwits rush to college and the college charges them as much as they can get away with, which is usually more than the lifetime benefit of the degree. Those midwits then go on to demand that people they hire have degrees so the next generation have to go to college too.

A system which was once useful has basically become a ponzi scheme which serves no real purpose other than making colleges richer.

Colleges used to hoard knowledge so they could charge people to learn The Secrets. Now all that knowledge is widely available to anyone on the Internet, so the only benefit of paying all that money is to buy a piece of paper which says you're now Officially Blessed by the High Priests of Whatever Subject You Studied. It's an insane system which is going to die, with only a few people going in future for subjects which require a lot of hands-on work with expensive hardware.

I also have a battery heater so any time the block heater is plugged in it's also heating the battery. Starting at 40 below zero is much easier when the battery temperature is above freezing.

That's weird, because Tesla owners here say they lose half their range in the depths of winter. So much that they can no longer drive many routes the could drive in summer because a single charger out of service will leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere.

So this problem has been known for a long time and was pointed out well before the current EV push.

Socialism with American Characteristics

Iowa's rolling farm fields of coffee

Yes. In the 50s Britons would drive a Morris Minor on single-track back-roads where they'd be lucky not to crash into a cow or another Morris Minor coming the other way which would likely kill them both. Now they do most of the miles in an SUV on motorways with three or more lanes on each side where cows are rare and so are head-on collisions.

True, tires are one thing the car probably won't warn about. But modern cars generally don't have other seriously dangerous defects unless there's a design flaw which probably leads to a recall or they're about to die from old age. Most of the 1980s rust buckets have been in scrapyards for decades now.

Most of the MoT repairs I had to make while I lived there were meaningless in terms of actual safety. "Oh, there's a bit of rust on the wheel arch and someone might cut themselves if they rub their hand against it so you'll have to spend a few hundred pounds to get it fixed."