Was 'Star Wars' an American film? You'd think so.

Star Wars filiming locations

"He picked up Hyperlight Wasm from an infected tribble! He's dead Jim".

MESS = Management by Excel Spreadsheet.

Les Barker's "Voicemail" from "Guide Cats For The Blind"

Thank you for calling today

Your call is in a queue

I think you might as well forget

Whatever else you had to do.

I tried to like Perplexity and just couldn't make good use of it. Maybe I was doing something wrong but the responses I got were rarely any good.

We've been in a recession for 5 years

Also... we are currently in a solar maximum (in the 11 year solar cycle), during which we get more 'space weather' https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

During a Coronal Mass Ejection event, the ionosphere becomes essentially opaque to radio waves, including the bands used by satellites, https://www.esa.int/Applicatio... That means that ALL satellite communications fail. The SpaceX satellites fly quite low -- in the ionosphere in fact -- but all satellites are affected, even the ones way out in geosynchronous orbit, because the ionosphere is between the ground and them.

In other words, during a CME, all satellites are affected. Even the military hardened ones -- where hardening just means they don't burn out during a CME. Yes, you can still force some signal through, but not at the Gbps you get per wavelength in a cable.

Then there is a Carrington Event CME... which seems to occur very 100 years or so. The last one was in 1859...

This paper from 2021 looks at the challenges involved in using laser links to and between satellites. I think it's fair to say the technology isn't up to replacing the sub-sea fibre cables yet.

Denmark is the only country in the Nordic-Baltic region that is a net exporter of agricultural products, producing three times the amount of food it needs for self-sufficiency. [trade.gov Last published date: 2024-01-20] so it seems that for the Danes, at least, this likely won't make a huge difference. And from later on that page:

Denmark’s main annual agricultural imports from the United States are wood pellets (USD 156 million),... which would be addressed nicely by a billion tress I imagine.

Not to blindly defend erthyritol, we should definitely look at it closer. But "less bad" doesn't mean good. Sugar is still very unhealthy.

As far as history: let me give you an extremely quick rundown. Diabetes was known to the ancients, but was extremely rare until the 18th century, when British sugar plantations made it affordable. (The slave labor involved wasn't very healthy, either). That's when diabetes, obesity, and extreme amounts of tooth decay reached the British working class.

Sugar was a very popular trading commodity for native populations. And they were even less equipped to deal with it: tooth loss, diabetes, obesity and cancer skyrocketed in these populations soon after Western diets were introduced (British Empire medical records are a great source for this).

Maybe we are back to that 'over processed foods' problem. None of the sugar replacements can be made in your kitchen because they need to be 'refined' way more than cane sugar.

Sugar is a massively processed food, and it's subsidized to make it artificially cheaper. It's really easy to spot new threats, but we it's hard to recognize the dangerous things we do every day.

I'm sorry, but that's a complete non sequitir. Look at housing prices, inflation or anything else that's gone up in the last 60 years. The amount of change is completely orthogonal to personal choices.

The obesity crisis is the flip side of smoking cessation. People didn't just decide to stop smoking: doctors/government agencies/NGOs ran a decades-long pressure campaign designed to highlight the risks.

Starting in the 70's, many of the same well-meaning people started demonizing fat and protein. The USDA, doctors (who are really good at medicine and surgery, but not at dietary advice) started recommending less and less fat and protein. Bad pop science associated dietary cholesterol with heart problems.

Something had to fill that dietary gap: cheap (and government-subsidized) carbs from corn and wheat. That's just about all poor people eat, because it's all they can afford. And guess who suffers the most from diabetes, obesity, heart attacks etc? The poor. Are you still so sure it's a choice?

Be a better parent and teach your kid to pay their own way.

Portraying obesity/metabolic diseases as a personal failure instead of a health crisis that affects the MAJORITY of Americans is a very Republican move. Are you sure you're not voting for Trump?

> “The amount in sugar substitutes is thousands of folds higher than what is made in our bodies, so to call it ‘natural,’ it’s not,” he [study author Dr. Stanley Hazen] said.

And what is the amount of sugar in the diet of a typical American? If we compare that to the amount of sugar in the human diet since the beginning of time, would we consider that "natural"? What about those "natural" fruits? Most are giant sugar globes, deliberately engineered to increase sweetness and reduce fiber.

Based on the article description, this study does nothing but implicitly back the Standard American Diet. You know, the one packed with modern strains of corn, sugar, and wheat? Before we freak out about some new sweetener, maybe we should start asking ourselves why the MAJORITY of Americans have metabolic diseases. It ain't from eating a few grams of sugar alcohols.

As it is, this article is like freaking out about a purse snatcher when your entire government is run by the mob.

When the money involved in that small minutia is greater than the net worth of some countries then why on Earth would you be surprised?

There is zero reason to do business in the EU today. The entire EU is stagnating because of stuff like this. There is no innovation coming out, new businesses are practically nonexistent.

Really sad watching the EU become a Government version of Rambus that just sues everyone for money when the ideas run out.