The US - within living memory - used to be a high trust society.

Of course, no, it wasn't perfect but I grew up in MN. You could leave your car running outside a Target on a bitterly cold January day and it wouldn't get stolen. In the small town I grew up in, it was pretty common to 'run a tab' at the local grocery so if you needed to stop and get stuff but turned out you forgot your wallet, etc they'd just note your name and the amount and you'd come back in (usually as soon as you could, as it was embarrassing) and pay off your tab.

Wouldn't this be a normal stage on the process of condensation from "cloud of particulates" into a solar system? If this cloud is spinning and will ultimately segregate into distinct planets, presumably at some point in that process those protoplanetary bodies are reasonably discrete but not yet condensed. What am I missing?

Fwiw Jupiter is the largest a body can be before it becomes a brown dwarf; that is, adding mass doesn't increase the diameter any longer it just increases in density due to electron degeneracy.

"From each according to his means, to each according to their need" is that ... pretty much what you're talking about?

What's your "fair share" of taxes, btw? Do you think someone earning $3/day in Mogadishu would agree that you're paying your "fair share"? Should we tax those unrealized 401k benefits you have sitting in an account somewhere? They're just as tangible 'wealth' as (most) of the $billion/$trillion class's 'wealth' you know? 20%? 25%? that should clean you out of that 'excess unjustifiable wealth' in a few years yeah?

And are we allowed to collectively decide on our priorities any more? My understanding that a fair number of things that are democratically unpopular have become law/reality "for our own good" per our betters in Washington DC? (Both GOP and Dems, to be clear)

"And as bad as the cold and flu can be, there are kids who are going into debt with their school over getting breakfast." The US govt spent something like $4.6trn on COVID. You're saying that should have been spent on school lunch programs instead? It certainly would be enough to feed those kids!

Indeed, solar and wind have taken great strides.

I'm not happy about much of that being driven by tax breaks and subsidies BUT I'd also very much like those tax breaks & subsidies to be pulled from fossil fuels as well (including the indirect subsidies they both get).
Let the systems genuinely compete.

Anyway: Solar and wind may be growing hugely but that's largely a factor of a tiny starting point. To see the IMPACT, we have to look at it the other direction:
In 1995, 77.1% of global energy was provided by fossil fuels.
The latest year I could find solid numbers for, 2024, that's down to....76.4%.

0.7 in three decades isn't meaningful; it's practically a rounding error.
I would be happy to embrace new nuke techs as it feels like it would be faster than waiting on solar/wind+batteries.

... I'm sure the executive that championed it has certainly been fired just as promptly without any sort of golden goodbye package.

Obviously?

If an LLM attorney is smart enough to actually check that the cases they reference actually exist, we can be confident than they're better than a certain percent of human lawyers.

Let's keep our focus on the people behind these projects, shall we? Not the caterers, the electricians, the plumbers, or the company that mows their lawn. They're just trying to pay the bills man.

Yes, I get it, if it's your holy mission to oppose AI datacenters sure, you go right ahead and chain yourself to the front gate. But the fact is that most people don't have the luxury to morally evaluate their job for nuances of "whatever is bothering reddit today".

"... football-field-long ovens for drying layers of material that have been dissolved in solvents..."

Hyperbolic language meant to spur some sort of emotional reaction, I guess?
This process : deposition of a dissolved solid and then the solvents being driven of by a long, gentle drying process, is pretty common in industry as a method. For example just about every self adhesive product uses this process for its release coating.

Did you miss my second to last sentence entirely?

Perhaps you could crawl out of your side-bias and recognize that BOTH OF THEM ARE SHIT.

Oh look, more evidence of the ideological capture of slashdot.
A call to murder the president, +5 informative.

I mean you guys have tried what, 4x now? It's always ultimately about murder when the leftist nursery school doesn't get its way.

"too many" being once.

"the American rightâ(TM)s hostility to democracy" you say?
Do tell.

So if we're talking sides, which "side"
- invaded social media spaces, and then emplaced high level government agents within the relevant companies SPECIFICALLY to guide "public conversations" in the directions they prefer?
- pushed for vote-from-home, the most beautifully-crafted system if one wanted fraudulent voting?
- pushed for electronic voting, again simplifying and enabling large scale fraud?
- manipulated information, media, reporting and hid any information that called into question the mandated "It came from bats" COVID theory? And then worked hard to kill/hide the fact that the US actually funded gof work at the lab it seemed to come from?
- spent years telling us how far apart from each other we were allowed to stand?

I don't think Trump and his crew of morons is any better, but the idea that one side is better than the other is laughable.

Some would agree that yes, what was going on was inexcusable.

You "You used an AI"
(provides actual source)
You "I don't like that source"
Also you: I'm disingenuous as fuck.

While I'm sure we all appreciate the ä宣éf's opinion, lying about gross economic statistics and manipulating currency is fundamentally non-capitalist.

I'm not going to disagree with you that Western governments have done so themselves sometimes (for example, the US unstated policy for at least 50 years after WW2 was to keep the USD overly strong as an 'invisible subsidy' to our western economic partners, making their manufactured goods more price competitive; US consumers got cheap goods, foreign economies got to build their factories and economies), but China's economic manipulations are ceaseless and utterly one-sided.

I think everyone understands that fundamentally, dictatorships HAVE ALWAYS been potentially more nimble, more efficient, and more consistent.

At a longer view, the question is if the costs are worth those improvements.