"Persian" is a culture and language. "Iranian" is a nationality. You're right to emphasize that it's the state that violates human rights, not the culture. Though the culture almost certainly enables it.

it wasn't applied to other scandals until the Clinton administration when he was involved in the Whitewater scandal.

Well, give or take a couple dozen -gates.

And by "Clinton administration when he was involved in the Whitewater scandal" I guess you mean Bill Clinton's state governorship in the early 80s, when Whitewater corp was active? Because the actual scandal broke when he was a presidential candidate in 1992, not president.

Being ignorant of history in general is one thing. Being ignorant of your own history, especially relatively recent history, especially when you're from as supposedly patriotic a country as the US is another.

Can they actually be fabricated with known manufacturing processes?

Probably. The feature sizes for visible light tend to be in the range of the same lithography we use to make chips. See their references 3-5 for examples, including actual manufacturing.

I would like it better if they had actually fabricated some of these lenses and provided test data.

This is not how science works best. There are scientists who like to collect work over years or decades, turn it into a complete "story" and publish an uber paper at the end. That approach hurts all the people who work on the project except for the lucky ones who put on the finishing touches, and it's bad for the field in general, wasting time and money. Frequent publication is good for science.

Lucas was just echoing history. Julius Caesar accumulated ridiculous amounts of power because he got stuff done then, when he got killed for it, his heir got to be emperor, in a society that famously hated kings, because he ended the chaos.

Hitler got himself appointed dictator because he cracked down on street violence... created by his followers.

Mussolini (said he) made the trains run on time.

Legally, no. The US constitution itself limits the president's term, and an 1845 law sets the actual election date.

However, you might have trouble voting if, say, there were some guys with guns in your city that were skeptical of your need to be walking around. Lots of states have quite a bit of experience with that method.

Or if you're in prison (except in Maine and Vermont), or on parole or probation in about half the states. Or if you've EVER been convicted of a felony if you're in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky or Virginia.

Or, since only about half the states actually require their electors to vote according to the popular vote, you could just, you know, encourage them to vote a particular way.

There's the ever popular armed-marine-at-the-ballot-box method too. The US has some experience with that.

Lots of options!

That is in fact the way it used to work. US presidents were sort of nobodies. The chief civil servant, if you will. The powerful, famous president started to be more of a thing after WWII.

If it makes you feel better, studies of the US courts, and the supreme court in particular, generally find that it's much less partisan than you might expect. Joe Blow, the media and politicians really need to stop talking about it in partisan terms though, including the nomination and confirmation processes.

Looking forward to seeing the Federal Reserve fired every four years. That should provide the stability needed to arrest the "world's reserve currency" from it's fall from 100% to ~50% of actual world reserves.

Yes, the -gate habit comes from the Watergate scandal. Watergate was during Richard Nixon's second term as president, in 1972-4. He was a Republican, and resigned the presidency before he could be impeached. The name comes from an attempted break in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC that ended up uncovering a whole pile of shady stuff Nixon had been up to.

Are Americans actually this ignorant of their own history?

Aw, I'm disappointed there's no reply on Zuckerberg's origins.

Everything's an AI artifact. It's not like lazy people who slept through high school chemistry have been punching unit conversions into calculators for generations.

You can use the UV light. You need different material with a different bandgap. Basically a whole other panel, stacked on the first. But before you go after that 5% UV you're going to want to go after the blue, and probably the red and some of the near IR.

They're called multijunction solar cells and they're used in places where you need maximum efficiency, like in space. For regular use, single junction cells are much more popular because a single bandgap panel absorbing at the maximum solar emission is going to be more efficient price-wise than a multijunction cell where the extra bandgaps are in lower emission ranges.

Oh dear, I'm sorry I didn't read this before replying above.

Zuck was one of several government projects along the same lines back then, and he got lucky, that's all.

So is he a CIA operator indoctrinated from birth a la The Bourne Identity, a genetically programmed clone, or a straight up android?

"Free market" is a stupid propaganda cliche that is devoid of meaning.

Uh huh. Is this one of those "propaganda I don't believe" Instagram slideshows?

Free markets exist and are pretty widespread. They require government intervention to maintain. Adam Smith himself called that one of the primary functions of government in the economy. American corporatism isn't the only system in the world, and authoritarian "democratic oversight" as suggested by the OP is definitely not a good alternative.

It's sad that some people fall prey to their darker nature, but not surprising. I try not to blame them. Fentanyl is the a sad inevitability as well: until recently, the cheapest drugs to produce and transport weren't that dangerous. But discovery of fentanyl is like the discovery of nuclear fission: you can't undo it.