The employees still get screwed in a lot of cases, because most contracting companies don't have the resources to just pay all of their technical employees on indirect funds for 8% of the year (if they did it would mean that their overhead rates are too high), and just switching them to another actively funded contract probably screws over the customer on that active contract, because you can't just switch in a ton of temp workers for a month and expect to get a month of extra productivity.

Viewing it that way completely misses the reality of the situation that China is still in the process of industrialization and modernization which has already taken place in countries like the USA, and that as a result of that the US emits far more CO2 per capita.

Countries like China would not sign an agreement where the US gets to burn masses of fossil fuels for many decades to speed up industrialization (which it already has done) but other countries are not allowed to increase their emissions at all. Pretty much every nation agreed to a reasonable long term plan based on where each country was in its industrialization process.

Your view appears excessively adversarial - this isn't about US vs. China, everybody including the US will lose if the US does not start reducing CO2 emissions. The only way we can hold China to their long term plan is to hold ourselves to our long term plan. China has more long term thinking that the US does currently, so they will probably keep to their plan anyway, and they will leapfrog over us in energy technology and infrastructure if the US stays stuck in the fossil fuel past.

Actually, those very models (Tree rings, Ice cores) are constantly adjusted so that they better fit surface temperature records over the last hundred years.

Those tricky scientists, constantly testing to find the weakest points of their models and improving the models so that they get better over time! Although your assertion that data was massaged out of the record is puzzling.

And sure there are problems in all areas of research like you say. But as I'm not personally an expert in climate modeling, I'm comfortable deferring to the experts and believing that by releasing hundreds of millions of years of stored carbon in the space of mere centuries (i.e. at a rate millions times faster than it was stored) we are likely to influence the climate.

Interestingly, the planet's rate of carbon storage in the form of coal also slowed down significantly when fungus evolved the ability to break down lignin (~290 million years ago), which suggests that natural processes will be slower to store that same carbon today. A system like the Earth operates best in steady state - carbon is continually released and captured in a balance. We are throwing the balance way off currently.

It's all about ratios. Using a high gain antenna pointing directly at the satellites will improve the signal to jammer ratio. It could improve things by 10x, 100x, even 1000x. Then the jammer just needs to increase its power or focus its signal on the target more narrowly to increase the effective jammer power, and we're back to square one. The jammer has an easier job here because the GPS satellites are further and broadcasting over a wide area and through more atmosphere, the jammer can be closer and more focused, and on a ground or air platform the jammer will have access to higher transmitter power levels per dollar invested.

The problem here is that any "network" of tunnels that intersect or have lots of stops are NOT fast do to simple physics and passenger comfort. There are a limited amount of acceleration you can use and if you have to stop every four to eight blocks that's going to significantly limit your speed. Subways have this very limitation now, Musk hasn't fixed that or has any novel ideas about addressing any of this.

This one one of the specific items that he has thought about. The plan is for each "skate" to be express - from start to destination with no stops in between. Each station will be in a side tunnel to allow for comfortable acceleration and deceleration without impacting other skates using common tracks.

At the moment such a method is probably too expensive. Musk plans to reduce the cost of tunneling enough to make it feasible. Whether or not he can make it viable remains to be seen.

Apple does attract a bit more negative attention. But most people look at a story like this and nod to themselves and think something along the lines of "that seems reasonable for [company] to do, because their employee broke their contract and may have caused brand damage" where [company] is Samsung or Apple. But most of these people don't bother commenting. The commenters are the ones who have a bone to pick with somebody in the story.

There's not much point in getting worked up about negative comments online, they're not necessarily representative of common or broadly held opinions.

Never say never, people are clever and dedicated. The best current technique is a variation on current extruders used for veggie burgers. It utilizes shear force to cause muscle-like fibers to form:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/gree...

I agree with this. I went primarily vegetarian for a few years, mainly for environmental reasons. I ended up going back to meat when I was working a job where the cafeteria on some days had no good vegetarian options. Now I still eat a lot of vegetarian meals and less meat than I used to. Mostly that ends up being dishes that don't imitate meat at all since fake meats usually fall very short of the mark. But I'm very open to fake meats that are tasty and meat free.

While thousands of dollars on customized luxury pens and journals is not a single large expense it's part of an overall pattern of wasted of government money in the current administration. I don't think it's necessary for hundreds of dollars in gifts to be handed out to foreign environmental policy heads. This is something the Republicans supposedly care about more than Democrats, though Republicans' actions seem to speak differently while in office.

I would expect the government to operate efficiently at all levels up to the top. Leadership is by example, and if people see their leaders being wasteful then they're going to want to start being wasteful with taxpayer money too.

And also important, the current executive policy at the top and at the EPA is deliberately moving us away from a leadership position on the world stage on most matters - military, environment, and democracy to name a few. Our worldwide partners don't care about fancy pens being handed out, they care about what we're doing about the environment, with our alliances, treaties, and with world security and politics. A pen won't magically make them like us.

The emergency services would have to carry around 1 MW resistors to use as the energy sink, and those things are not small or cheap

I'm not sure that's fully correct. First off the max Tesla car battery output is about 400 kW, so you wouldn't discharge at 1 MW. That would cause the battery to overheat. That peak discharge is also limited by the battery liquid cooling system which may not be trusted after a crash, so presumably you'd slow it down, as a guess I'd say ~100 kW. So a Tesla with the largest battery fully charged could be discharged at this rate in an hour.

I easily found a 100 kW load resistor which fits in a 1 meter cube, decent size but not huge (https://www.aggreko.com/en-nz/products/generator-rental/load-bank-rental/resistive-load-bank-100-kw). Inconvenient to carry around, but since there's demand somebody may design a more compact model for emergency services. It's only limited in size by cooling capacity. The construction is also relatively simple, much like a convection toaster oven (heating elements + fan).

It's clear that it's going to be a learning experience and infrastructure requirement for emergency services as electric cars become more common, but none of this is a showstopper.

Yes, standard cotton white shirts, especially thin ones, are surprisingly bad at blocking UV since they don't absorb it. Luckily there are plenty of shirts and clothing items designed specifically for their UV blocking properties.

When we allow foreign students to attend our universities we also get a lot of the cream of the crop from these countries who end up staying here and getting highly productive jobs or start companies. Lots of PhD students in US universities are internationals, and a lot of them stay. Staying after their PhD is also not guaranteed - they need to demonstrate a certain level of productivity as a researcher and get sufficient letters of recommendation.

Sure, some of them will go back to their home countries having learned something. But before that happened we skimmed a lot of top talent from those other countries. Even if they go back to their home country that's not necessarily bad for the US. It's part of the US's "soft power", which Trump seems determined to make us weak in.

Yes China emits a lot of CO2, but your assertion

Until then it doesn't matter what the US, UK and EU do.

is simply wrong, for two reasons.

1) The US and EU/UK together emitted 80% as China in 2015 (I haven't checked more recent years). This is not surprising as China has more people that the US + EU. Therefore US and EU are not negligible and their CO2 output absolutely matters.

2) It takes time to change infrastructure. China is making massive investments in renewable energy, though they have a long way to go. All of the major CO2 emitting nations must make investments starting today so that over time the energy portfolio shifts, it's not possible to change all once. The US also has a long way ahead because its per-capita emission is one of the highest in the world, about double that of China.

The increased prevalence of extreme weather events, the loss of trillions of dollars in infrastructure in coastal regions (where most people live in the US and around the world), the changing weather patterns obviating current highly optimized and productive agricultural regions and technology/practices are all a heavy human price to pay for warming up regions that are currently cooler.

Humans, and natural life, can probably adapt to a new warmer world, but the massive infrastructure investments necessary and ecological changes necessary suggest that extremely slowly is the best speed for this change.

That makes a lot of sense, and it would make it more similar to trademarks: enforce your rights or lose them.