Laws which require backup noises apply to vehicles where there is no person operating the vehicle who can reasonably see behind them. That's why they are on trucks and buses. They also only apply to commercial motor vehicles, which these are.

The charging stations shouldn't be located in these places, and they should also be designed for pull-throughs. Even if there weren't a noise issue (which there won't be if they aren't installed in dumb locations) there still would be other reasons to do it.

It does, but these people don't work on sense. The idea that we live in a meritocracy is a deluded one. They are not at the top of the financial ziggurat because of merit, but because of a lack of it — they will do anything to anyone any time for money.

How have you gone this long without ever once hearing of Rome?

There is no pro to doing it within the atmosphere.

We could potentially put something at L1 to reflect sunlight. An "angular soletta" was proposed in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. In that case it was for the purpose of increasing insolation on Mars, but the same nonexistent technology could in theory apply to reducing it on Earth. The idea was nested truncated cones of flexible, reflective material. Altering the angles of the cones would allow redirecting sunlight.

In a way this is a worse plan than solar power satellites because it actually could be used as a weapon. Solar power satellites can simply have fixed focus, and be defocused so that they cover an area instead of targeting a point, and then they cannot be used as weapons at all. The same does not apply to this idea. You could focus it and burn up cities. But it also doesn't involve putting crap into the atmosphere.

Stephenson writes books for advanced readers. Those who read quickly will enjoy them more.

Good eye, this is not The Real World. It's the made-up world of finance.

However, it makes sense to pay them well. You have to pay these people a lot or they will steal from you.

What a shit take, huh?

No part of that was a lie.

If you disagree, post a citation instead of modding me down with a sock puppet account.

This is true of everything. If you want to ban kids from social media because of this then it's no less logical to ban them from everything else. A parent's job is to teach children to successfully navigate a world in which "everyone" (statistically, nearly) is trying to take advantage of them, not to keep them locked in a box.

And Russia can't build tanks like they used to either because lots of the tank parts were made in Ukraine, too.

He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.

Your first full paragraph is 100% opinion. Run along now.

I bought a nice pair of gloves this year with ChatGPT, but when they arrived I found that they each had six fingers.

I guess this is it. I wasn't able to force myself to listen to the whole thing, but then I'm an old fogey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The chlorophyll in plants is finely tuned to absorb specific wavelengths of light. It already has a hard time with green light compared to blue light, and it's simply not going to work at all with radiation that has wavelengths that are orders of magnitude shorter. Chlorophyll acts like a little antenna that gets excited by certain light frequencies, but ionizing radiation would just blow the chlorophyll molecules apart and destroy them.

Taking advantage ionizing radiation is going to require a completely different mechanism than plant photosynthesis, just like you can't use glass lenses or parabolic mirrors to focus X rays or gamma rays. Plants probably have no more chance of having such a mechanism than fungi do.