It's just another influencer-triggered "cancel culture" scenario. You see it at universities throughout the U.S. where comedians are kicked out before they can even begin their performance.

Wasn't the mammalian neo-cortex well known to be able to do that? The neo-cortex was supposed to allow mammals to envision scenarios in their heads and make predictions for things that were not immediately in front of them. As well as enter R.E.M. sleep.

Any pet owner will tell you their dog has dreams and is chasing squirrels in their R.E.M. state of sleep. Their paws move slightly in a running fashion, and they let out little quelps, like they're chasing something in the field.

Of course, there's a risk of anthropomorphizing behavior, but a brain scan of a sleeping dog can help put that to rest. And pet dogs are not an exception, any mammal should be able to achieve the same, and likely corvids and marsupials as well.

You are describing the era before clean emissions standards. Olden emissions was large in "soot". Black smoggy clouds of carbon-based ashen particles that were heavy and settled to the ground within minutes, leaving a sticky tar-like coating that built up like plaque over industrialized cities. When it rained, and you wore a white shirt, any runoff from rooftops would pick up all the soot and leave dribbles of soot on your white shirt.

Then clean emissions standards can into force, which means you have to combust cleanly (that is, all the carbon in the fossil fuel must combust with the O2 leading to CO2 rather than be partially-combusted and generate lots of other carbon-based molecules). So, now with clean emissions standards, our lungs no longer cough up in cities breathing smog and smoke filled air with all the carbon pollution we used to have. CO2 is not considered pollution since it is non-hazardous to human health (by contrast, CO (carbon monoxide) is hazardous, and soot and tar and other ashen particles are carcinogenic). CO2 was considered "clean" emissions. Easy on human lungs, great for plant food. But it, unfortunately, exacerbates global warming.

Would you feel the same way when your lawyer bills you for 30 hours but only worked 3 hours? Would you feel the same way if Uber billed you for a 3 hour trip when it was only a 20 minute trip? The company costs (especially payroll costs) are passed on to customers. If payroll is inflated through fake working hours due to "work from home" situations where many are really not working, that gets passed on to the customers.

It depends on the strain as well. If your county was mostly infected by the Alpha strain, then they're in better shape than if they were mostly infected by the Delta strain. And those who caught the relatively milder Alpha strain would then be fairly immune against catching the Delta strain.

In order to have a caste system, you need assortative mating, which will probably happen if a 'good' spouse can't take high-speed rail, go abroad on vacations, or fly, when marrying a 'bad' spouse.

I think you mean to say the people in western china (e.g. Xinjiang), aren't treated or considered as people by China.

Coins are not lost if the transaction isn't processed. The sender still owns the coins until the public distributed ledger says otherwise, which it won't until the transaction is confirmed and included in the block chain. The protocol has a "replace-by-fee" (RBF) where you can just re-create a new transaction with a higher fee than the old unconfirmed transaction and the new transaction, once confirmed, becomes the fate of the sender's coin, and the old transaction, if it ever gets processed, will be rejected as that coin has already been spent.

They just want more people to binge watch The Last Ship.

UFO in the military means something different than in pop-culture. In pop-culture, it means aliens and flying saucers, and ray-guns, and Martians. In the military, it means an unidentified flying object, including flights by non-cleared personnel like hobbyists or foreign surveillance drones. Every one of our "drones" in Afghanistan would be a UFO to the Afghan military if we didn't seek clearance from them first.

My guess is the name "UFO" wreaked of bad smell over the years and the military just changed the name and defunded the old one. They likely *still* want to investigate any sightings or blips on the radar to record when and where China or Russia are running spy drones over American soil or international waters, and hence whatever personnel are conducting those investigations are still funded, just under a better name than UFOs.

The transaction fees are variable and optional in the bitcoin protocol (the sender chooses the fee to use). The only issue is that most exchanges use a fixed transaction fee when sending to your private wallet or whatever address you request they send it to. These exchanges usually set it as 0.0005 BTC ($8.50 when BTC is $17,000). If they have to create a multi-transaction transfer to aggregate smaller sizes across multiple wallets, the fee can be 4x or 6x larger, so $34 - $51 per transaction, but that's usually only if the exchange has to send large sizes.

The exchange doesn't really care what the fee is set to, because they're spending your money, not theirs, and as a result they haven't updated their fees since when BTC was $700. This causes a game-theoretical problem because a lot of the transactions in the block are coming from exchanges, using large fees that they don't have to pay for, but now that means any smaller fee transaction queues up behind them since miners always process the biggest fee transactions first.

I'd say about one third of Bitcoin holders are religious zealots. It's a faith-based coin (like fiat), but for whatever reason, Bitcoin has cast a spell to amass a large faithful following, the "hodl"-ers who will not sell no matter what calamity ensues. Every dip tests their faith, and then their convictions get stronger. It's a bit like Stockholm syndrome, or Marquis de Sade's training, or any other enslavement process where you're rewarded after your punishment until you enjoy the punishment itself, no matter how brutal, or how long, on the faith that one day, some day, you may be rewarded as you have been in the past. In the absence of cult deprogramming or some rigorous method to cleanse them of their delusions, it will spread. I feel like a Roman watching the cult of Christianity grow and start banging on the gates. You know it's bullshit, you know they're insane, but they just might win...

Some may have starved after Magic the Gathering's Online Exchange (Mt. Gox) stole all their money.

Encryption without identity is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. The whole point of root certificates is verifying your identity and checking documentation of ownership of a website before they give you a certificate. If it were just encryption, sans identity, then https wouldn't accomplish anything, and any one in the middle can just encrypt with their own self-signed certificate and you haven't achieved a secure end-to-end session. A stolen certificate is rare, and when it does happen, there's a revocation process. This is similar to someone else finding out your password and you have to change the password.

Your illustrated problem of a teenager or someone else gaining access is not unique to digital certificates, the same is true with passwords, since passwords are generally used only once per session and the then the rest of the session assumes continuity of identity. If you go to the bathroom or leave your desk, those websites will assume whoever sits down next has the same identity. This is why most offices require employees to lock their terminal before going to the bathroom or leaving for a meeting.

In fact, passwords are generally considered less secure than crypto signatures due to the prevalence of keyloggers. Most secure websites generally recommend 2FA. You can essentially flip the precedence, so the primary login can be the crypto signature instead of the password, and the secondary authentication can be a pin, or mother maiden's name or any arbitrary security question & answer, only when you're doing some thing that requires 2FA like transferring money out of your bank account or changing the security settings.

If you've ever used kerberos or any other key management system, you'll realize that the password is only asked once when it has to read your password-protected private key from cold storage (disk) and thereafter it uses ephemeral keys stored in volatile memory and never bothers with asking for your password again until you reboot or shut down.