>"You bring a valid point about âoesodaâ, but your point is pretty damn new too. Most âoehealthyâ soda options available today didnâ(TM)t even exist a decade ago."

Some did. The most significant being RC brand (sold as "Diet Rite"). They had several flavors, my favorite being white grape. That is really hard to find now for some reason. I also prefer sucralose-sweetened vs. aspartame. Again, that will narrow choices down a lot. Stevia-sweetened just doesn't taste good and is quite expensive. Would love to try a monk-fruit version, but I haven't ever seen one.

>"And the overwhelming amount of âoesodaâ dispensers available at fast food places and restaurants are NOT offering healthier options. Its filled with the usual suspects."

That is very true. You can opt for sugar free just about everywhere, and have been able to do that for a long time. But that is about as far as you can take it. I just drink water. Saves a lot of money, too. Which, I admit, I then often blow on a sugar/calorie-laden dessert. Oh well.

As for sugar (of any kind), the worst thing you can do is consume that BETWEEN meals, without substantial food. It will spike blood sugar, mess with metabolism, ruin teeth, encourage weight gain, etc.

>"That's great that you drink mostly water."

It isn't exciting, but ya get used to it.

>"But the important question is which Linux distro did you install on your grandmother's computer? And is Grandma still on speaking terms with you?"

My grandmother died when I was in college, decades ago. She never had a computer. But when my mom got a computer, at that time I installed Mandrake. Later Mageia. Then Mint. But she hasn't used a computer in a few years now due to AD.

>"Drinking approximately one 12-ounce soda per day was associated with an 8% increase in type 2 diabetes risk and 2% increased risk of ischemic heart disease."

That was an example. It actually was referring to sugar-sweetened drinks. It wasn't all "soda" or just soda. And not all sodas are the same. Some have sugar, some have corn syrup HFCS, some have caffeine, some have aspartame, some have sucralose, some have sodium, some have artificial colors, some have artificial flavors, etc. The only thing they all have in common is water and carbonation, both of which have no negative connotations.

Me- I mostly drink water. But I have a soda sometimes once a day. And my selection has no sugar or HFCS or any calories, no caffeine, no sodium, no color, and no artificial flavors. They are harder to find, but not overly so. Sure, water would be better, but that can also be boring.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

I know that a decade or so ago we did not have the ability to detect and monitor all objects capable of destroying life on Earth yet. Do we now have that ability? Are we now identifying and tracking every potential candidate of that kind, or is that even possible?

>"Honestly I'd only ever heard of her in some clips of South Park; I had no idea it was a real person."

LOL, me neither. Just South Park. Never heard actual Lorde music, not only because I didn't know it existed but also because I probably wouldn't detect any good music present. A lot of stuff out there people listen to, I would hardly even define as music.

I have been buying CD's since they came out and have many, many hundreds. I think only once have I ever encountered a disc I could not rip. And I think that was just a production run error and had the disc replaced.

>"Why do you need to own a song? It's a form of entertainment. It is fungible and easily replaced with another song. "

That entirely depends. Music quality has gone down steadily my entire life. The older songs can't just be replaced by some other song if you are picky. Much of it is truly excellent and unique. I hand-screen and rate every song I listen to, deciding what to keep "forever" and what to not even bother ripping. Even carefully selecting which artists to screen, my rejection rate is currently probably over 98% (meaning I would never want to hear it again). In my collection, maybe 2/3 of the songs could never be replaced by something else as good.

Nothing wrong with having different ways to "consume" music. But mine is to spent a crap-load of effort carefully screening every now and then, buy only what I like, carefully store it permanently with lots of backups, and then generally listen to my collection at random, locally-stored on all my devices.

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

You are correct that China is overpopulated at 4x the people in a land area less than 3% larger than the US. That makes their per capita CO2 numbers look better, but doesn't change the fact that their number is going up while the US is going down.

Their one child policy was a disaster and there's no ethical way to reduce their population by 75% but the climate doesn't care that they are breeding their way into outpolluting the US. The CO2 production needs to come down and the fact that some countries have much higher population density than others isn't an excuse for those countries to be allowed to drive the CO2 production up.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

>"A car's repair history matters, as does the odometer."

The funny thing is, the odometer-only-metric is so outdated. I have wondered for decades why it hasn't been updated to at least include number of engine starts, and total runtime hours. Combined with distance, those three metrics would say a hell of a lot more about the vehicle.

Anyway, it is true that something like that on a laptop is likely some elaborate excuse to manipulate the market or screw the consumer. The SSD and battery wear/health, we can already read. I am not sure the CPU or RAM actually "wear" like other components do. Fans and power supplies, maybe? But I can't even remember the last time a power brick failed, outside of a cord or plug being accidentally damaged. They are easy to replace, and now that they are all moving to USB-C, they are fairly universal.

I wouldn't ever buy an HP laptop, anyway, being a Lenovo Thinkpad snob, myself. It is my favorite brand/line for loading Linux. Especially fond of the newer AMD ones.

>"Windows 11 has alienated users with perfectly functional older machines, prompting some to stick with unsupported versions or abandon Windows entirely." ...by installing Linux. There has never been a better time. Funny how the entire article (and summary) glossed over that.

But fear not, the same Tom's Hardware does has a separate, earlier, article on that: https://www.tomshardware.com/s...