No, it wouldn't, at least not for physical stores. The store knows what taxes are on all the goods it sells (it must), so all it needs so is update the tag with the total price with tax. Chain stores already do per-store pricing, so it wouldn't be onerous even for them. In fact this is already done for one type of good: gasoline. All gas stations (at least all I've ever seen or heard of) in the US display final prices after tax. And gas taxes are even more complex than normal sales tax. Displaying post-tax prices would be easy for stores. They don't do it because they don't want to do it. Online stores would be a bit trickier, because tax rates can change based on location, but again most online retailers these days are setup to collect taxes (due to some states requiring it) and could easily update prices based on shipping addresses.

But the whole crux of the argument is that the simulated universe can itself create a simulated universe. If a simulation only simulates part of the universe, that simulated universe will only be able to make even more limited simulations, and the whole "there are more simulated universe than non-simulated ones, so we're probably in a simulated universe" quickly falls apart.

More like 0k student loans. Well, maybe some loans from undergrad, but postdoc means you've got a PhD, and any PhD worth having is paid for + a stipend, even in the humanities. The actual postdoc position salary varies heavily by field and institution (I know one person in STEM who made $85k a year, but 50-60k is more typical). And no, student loans don't defer once you're a postdoc, as it's not considered a student position.

It's because if they blame the budget, then in the employee's eyes, Microsoft is at fault. If they shift the blame to the employee's performance, then in the employee's eyes they are the ones at fault. Or at least that is what Microsoft is hoping will happen. It's pretty bog standard emotional manipulation tactics (usually easy to recognize from outside, can be really hard to see when it's happening to you though).

LEO to GSO to Earth (and back), to be precise (they already did LEO to ground directly back in 2014). And yes, reading the article they're pretty explicit about wanting to use this for various space missions: part of the tests include using this one some lunar missions past and future.

The SpaceX links are (as far as I can tell) purely satellite to satellite links. NASA is testing a space to ground link, which is a different (and harder) thing.

In the US, a security is any tradable financial asset. NFTs are tradable, and they are being traded as financial assets. Therefore, they are a security. The fact they're based on a collectible or work of art is irrelevant: in fact there are artwork-based securities. Those securities are generally based on a portfolio of artwork, but one could conceivably make, say, a Mona Lisa security that represented a fractional ownership of the Mona Lisa. The artwork or collectible itself is not a security (in much the same way a company or physical asset like gold is not a security), it is the certificate of "ownership" that is the security, which in this case is the NFT (ownership is in quotes because NFTs don't really own anything).

There are actually quite a few: muons are produced in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere (the rate at sea level is about 1 per square cm per minute, much higher than the LHC rate). But they're pretty easy to filter out: they're going downwards, the muons they're looking for are going sideways. A few can make it though from the horizon, but since those muons have a lot more atmosphere/earth to travel though, they're a fairly small (and extremely well measured) background. The LHC neutrino experiments are also underground, which blocks the cosmic ray muons a bit.

Not quite. Their speed is very very nearly c (something like 99.9999%), but it's not exactly c. Neutrinos actually have mass, so their energy and momentum depends on speed almost exactly like any other massive particle (I say "almost" because their relationship with mass is complicated, and a bit different from most other particles).

As far as detecting their energy, it's hard. You can't directly observe the neutrino. You instead have it hit a target and produce a secondary charged particle (usually an electron it knocks off an atom, although in these experiments though it produces a muon). That particle can then be tracked and measured pretty easily. This doesn't give you the energy of the original neutrino, but it gives you a minimum energy at least, and if you collect enough statistics you can reproduce the spectrum of the incoming neutrinos.

Pyrolysis is performed in the absence of oxygen. Can't get CO2 without oxygen. The entire goal of the process is to reduce to mostly carbon without burning it off.

Very little, I only looked at the Wikipedia page which listed the first controversy as appearing in 2022. A Google search also doesn't reveal any earlier controversies either, though the results are spammed with the recent issues. If you have evidence of controversy prior to 2021 I'd suggest you provide it.

Verifying the data used is not (and has never been) the responsibility of the publication or peer reviewers. Peer review judges a paper based on the paper itself (at least it's supposed to): is the conclusion supported by the data in the papers, is the analysis properly done, is any needed data missing, are the results notable and worth publishing, etc. It cannot, does not, and is not *meant* to catch fake results (except for the most obviously fake results). Obviously the reviewers can and will reject papers from authors known for fake/plagiarized results, but thats not relevant here: then first controversy around the author didn't come out until after the paper was published. The process for finding fake results is what it has always been in science: replication. There is a very strong institutional incentive to not fake results (since nothing will kill a career faster), so faked data is pretty rare to begin with, but replication is the only reliable way to find such issues. And it's pretty much guaranteed to happen in cases involving prestigious work like room temperature superconductivity (another reason for it's rarity).

Tritium doesn't concentrate like that. It's part of the water and chemically (nearly) indistinguishable from normal hydrogen, so life inside tritiated water won't preferentially accumulate it. At worst the concentration of in the body will be at equal with the surrounding concentration, and that holds all the way up the food chain inside any contaminated environment, so concentration isn't possible. Humans who eat seafood from that environment will get some tritium from the hydrogen in fish fats, but (again, at worst) the concentration will be that if the water, and humans only get a small amount of hydrogen (and therefore any possible tritium) from the food they eat. Lead and other heavy metals accumulate because they're not part of the normal biological cycle, so they stick around in the body. Tritium doesn't.

You're forgetting (or perhaps never realized) one of the fundamental tenants of fiction: depiction is not endorsement. That's true even if the depiction isn't obviously negative: Heinlein in particular likes to depict things from the perspective of characters who have found success and achievement within the world, so of course that character isn't going to view the world as bad. But that tells you absolutely nothing about what Heinlein actually thinks about, well, anything. Just taking The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers he'd have to simultaneously be a militaristic fascist and a libertarian anarchist.

His works aren't supposed to be saying "hey this is an ideal universe", they're about exploring things that might happen and the some of the consequences of those ideas. Like Starship Troopers, for example: he's not saying that citizen service is the optimal solution government rule, he's exploring a possible alternative to universal suffrage. That alternative has some good things about it (such as requiring citizens to be invested in society before they can vote), and some bad ones (for e.g. former military tend to all view the universe a specific, not necessarily correct, way). That's one of the things science fiction is about: exploring interesting ideas and concepts, not necessarily because they're good ideas, but because they're interesting ones.

Because claiming the 2020 election was stolen isn't prohibited? You're free to claim that all you want. You can even file dozens of lawsuits over the issue (though if you want to win said lawsuits, you'll need to, you know, actually provide evidence). What you're not free to do (or shouldn't be free to do, anyways) is call up a governor and tell him he needs to "find" a bunch of extra votes for you, or make specific defamatory claims about a voting company, or, you know, assault a nations capitol and threaten to hang the vice president if he doesn't do what he wants, while murdering a policeman in the process. Those are the things that aren't allowed.