Is that sarcasm? I can't tell if that's sarcasm.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politi...

(yeah, yeah. They still have to be US citizens. But dual citizens also have to pay US income tax. Only the US and Eritrea levy income taxes on citizens that live abroad. For every other country, it's based on residency.

Oh, the US also levies income taxes on foreign residents, too.

It's called "Jury Nullification."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A jury may acquit a defendant even if they believe the defendant committed the crime. They would do this in the event that they thought the law itself was unjust (or really, for any other reason whatsoever).

A jury cannot be punished for giving a "wrong" verdict. And thanks to laws around double jeopardy, the defendant may not by tried again for the same crime.

Unfortunately, it's already working very much against you. You're in the prime earning years of your life, but high housing costs are gobbling up your fortune, making it more difficult for you to amass savings on which to retire.

If you _do_ happen to own any property by the time the housing bubble bursts, suddenly your net worth is going to drop precipitously, and you may even have trouble servicing the now-underwater loans that allowed you to acquire that property.

Your odds of any inheritance being worth much are dropping, as most households have a significant amount of their total assets rolled up in their housing.

Even if you did manage to save money, and now houses are cheap, they're cheap because they're in empty neighbourhoods, where all the boomers died and left empty houses, owned by the banks. Those are not pleasant neighbourhoods in which to live. You'll get fewer municipal services due to the smaller tax base to fund them. Blocks of empty houses are also frequent targets for thieves and illegal salvagers.

The future does not look rosy at all. Maybe we'll get lucky and enough coastal housing will be wiped out by rising sea levels that we won't face quite so devastating a bubble.

If you're looking for a power armor fix, you need to check out The Expanse (currently 3 seasons available on Amazon Prime, or, 3 seasons available on your favourite bittorrent client).

Then, once you've watched it all and are begging for more, go and read all of the books by James S. A. Corey that the show is based on.

It's hilarious that you think the NHS has modern hardware :)

Hold up, I think you've got this backwards. Or, at least, you're not going all the way to the proximate cause for the tariffs.

The first tariffs were put in place by Trump, on Chinese goods, in an attempt to "correct the trade imbalance that the US has with China." In other words, China ships more shit to the US than the US does to China. The Chinese then imposed retaliatory tariffs on US goods. The US then imposed retaliatory tariffs on more Chinese goods. The Chinese then imposed more retaliatory tariffs on US goods . . .

Basically, the US Commander-in-Chief has ordered every new tariff, and has been the one to escalate the tariffs beyond parity each time. If anyone has the responsibility for cooling the trade war, that responsibility sits firmly in the White House.

RTFSummary - He's spending money on space so that resource extraction and manufacturing can move to space, in order to be able to preserve "The good [planet]."

Rough cost-based math. Average electricity price in Berkeley is 16 cents per kWh. 1kWh is roughly 3400 BTU. Average gas price in Berkeley is $11.60/1000ft3. Burning natural gas yields about 1000BTU/ft3.

You can get ~72kWh for the price of 1000ft3 of natural gas. That 72kWh is equivalent to about 250,000BTU.

Your heat pump would have to have a COP of 400% to be less expensive to run than a natural gas heater (modulo heat loss to exhaust, initial capital costs of systems, etc etc etc).

From a homeowner standpoint, the energy costs of the two heating systems are very similar.

They use two sources of energy: electrical energy to run the compressor, and the thermal energy outside to provide the heat. The "efficiency" that people speak of is the Coefficient of Performance (COP), which is a measure of the amount of heat energy that can be added to a home for a given electrical energy input. This is used to specify the units because the heat energy outside is free, but the electricity costs money.

The COP is dependent on the temperature differential between inside and outside. As it gets colder outside, the heating COP decreases, because the compressor has to work harder to move the heat to inside.

It's not a violation of thermodynamics, sadly.

which is highly volatile, and based on thin air. It also facilitates unlawful behaviour, such as the drug trade and other illegal activities.

They're talking about the COP - the Coefficient of Performance. It's the ratio of useful heating or cooling provided to the work (energy) required.

Direct heating can never be more than 100% "efficient," yes, because you're turning one form of energy (electrical or chemical) into another form of energy (thermal).

Heat pumps instead _move_ thermal energy around. And it turns out, if you push 100W of electricity into a heat pump, and the temperature differential is low enough, you can move 300W of heat from outside the building to inside the building. This gives a COP (or "efficiency" of 300%.

The OP is correct, heat pumps can be much more efficient than direct heating, in terms of power required to warm up your home.

Note that this doesn't break any laws of thermodynamics, it just accesses another source of energy in addition to the electrical input - the thermal energy that is outside the house.

Not to mention the generally agreed upon impracticality of taking the train across oceans. Yes, I know, there are ships but a ship is not nearly as fast as a train. Even slower if they can't burn fuel oil.

That's right. Only 70% of all plane travel in the US in 2018 was domestic. If we can't do away with 100% of the planes, it's not worth trying to replace any of them with high speed rail, right?

. . . that Chrome won't eat it all.

Here's the part you're missing:

Employer A pays you $X/mo, and pays for your health insurance at $Y/mo. Between when you started working at A and now, you were diagnosed with mild cardiovascular disease.

Employer B offers you a job for $Z/mo. Unfortunately, if you move to B, you lose your health insurance through A. And because you've got cardiovascular disease, that counts as a pre-existing condition. Now you either _cannot_ get health insurance through B, or the cost is astronomically higher.

Given the ridiculous number of things that count as pre-existing conditions in the US these days, it becomes very difficult to change jobs because of that astronomical cost/lack of coverage.

If the US implemented a single-payer health care system, you wouldn't be changing health insurance providers when you change jobs, so there would be no "pre-existing condition" clause activated.

So you think the pain of not being able to conceive doesn't count as human suffering? A woman who desperately wants to have a child, but is medically unable? Not very compassionate of you, there.

As far as curing cancer goes - are you working towards that? What contributions have you made to eliminating cancer? The truth of the matter is that different doctors have different specialties, and they work within those disciplines.