I'm a tourist from the east coast. I've been to SF a couple times over the last 20 years, and I have to say that I honestly didn't find much to do in the city that needed more than a solid day or so. Then everything is so damn expensive from my non-California point of view, and eventually you want to see stuff that's farther out (Napa Valley, the coast, etc) but if you ride back to the airport to rent a car (I would never drive into downtown) you then have to deal with all the traffic and long bridges with tolls. Now any time I come back to visit California I find that airfare is cheaper if you fly to LAX (or even Vegas) and drive across the desert to wherever you want to go.

Weird that your loosely related anecdote about a house doesn't correlate with their anecdote about a shady condo developer who left residents saddled with costs for remediation of issues related to shoddy construction?

I think I recall (it's been 2 decades since I read the books so my memory is unclear on this) that the sandworm food source issue was lampshaded away at some point in the story? At least I swear I remember there being some passage where a character muses on this but doesn't reach any meaningful conclusion.

I also remember there being some explanation in the second or third book about how the flatworm-like larval stage of the sandworms link together in a subterranean "skin" that holds down the water table and keeps the planet arid so that the adult worms don't die. Or maybe I'm misremembering that? I didn't really enjoy the later books enough to want to read them again in search of an explanation.

"...There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator."

That's exactly why I'm hopeful that this idea is dead in the water. It's already received a ton of bad press because word slipped that it's being called surge pricing which has a negative connotation to consumers, when in reality this exact same thing has already been happening. Sonic has a "half price happy hour" where they raised the prices of their drinks FAR above the inflation rate but give you a discount if you visit at certain times and use the app. In fact, most of the chains have been trying to push people to their app by offering "discounts" that are in line with the old price, and jacking up the price for everyone else.

Evil people figured out how to use religion to manipulate gullible people to gain power. It's been going on for thousands of years and this is just the latest iteration.

Welcome to Alabama. Yes, actually, for drinking a beer she will be judged by her friends and family who will gossip about it as they sit in their church pews on Sunday. I know many people who consider any form of alcohol the devil's drink and anyone who consumes it in any amount is living in sin and therefore should be treated accordingly.

We have a saying, "go fishing with a baptist, and they'll sit in the boat and drink all your beer; go fishing with two baptists and you'll have all the beer to yourself."

Have you ever been near an oil refinery? I'll take the paper mill.

Yeah sure the sulfide smell coming out of a paper mill might stink, but it's not as harmful to your health.

I don't know much about it and am genuinely curious, why is CO2 needed in the process? My understanding of it is that some of the methods for generating elemental hydrogen can produce CO2 and the hydrogen combusts on exposure to atmospheric oxygen to produce water vapor. Years ago I worked in a facility that had a hydrogen tank on which we had a leak detector that (if I remember right) used an IR sensor to spot the heat from spontaneous combustion of hydrogen as it mixed with air, since the flame is hard to see with your eyes and does not produce CO2.

I'm far from an expert here, but from what I've personally seen from touring manufacturing and MRO facilities, my understanding is that this is exactly the standard of quality control that they are held to.

Maybe so, but no matter how old I get I will NEVER lick my fingers before turning the page in a book...

Even better, buy your own espresso machine (I have a Breville Barista Express) and make your drinks at home. A good quality machine will set you back several hundred dollars, but if you buy a lot of coffee shop drinks it can pay for itself within a year. You can also find them on the used market or sometimes even find a used machine from a local cafe.

Then, buy whole beans from your local coffee shop or roaster (most of them that roast in house will sell them by the pound) and before long you'll be able to impress your friends with your barista skills. You can also experiment with different drink combinations, or adjust the sugar to your liking - a good quality bean freshly ground and extracted properly along with the right milk IMO doesn't even need any sugar added at all.

Well then I suppose we could also snap our fingers and convert every gas station to electric charging stations too and your imagined scenario would be moot.

Dude, have you even bothered to look at the screenshots and side-by-side comparison? "Elements of plagiarism" is one thing, this is "I'm gonna copy your homework but I promise to change a couple words before I turn it in."

Personally I think the 777 or the A350 would be a better replacement for the 747, But the A380 came along early enough in that replacement cycle and was appealing to the proponents hub-and-spoke model (that's the economics I was referring to). That model is outdated in places like North America or Europe, and coincidentally many carriers relied on the 747 to fill that role even for cross country flights (it used to be common to see a 747 on routes between the east coast and California, for example).