Replace the fluffy essays with hard testing, like gaokao in China. You want to demonstrate how you overcame the adversity? Then demonstrate it by passing a high-stakes test.

You absolutely can do that, online. A combined model where you study online, and then transition to on-campus might be a good approach.

It actually is not! Iron smelting needs temperatures above 1500C, while lava tops out at around 1200C.

Hydrogen has disadvantages. Unreacted hydrogen embrittles the resulting metal, and it can also chemically react to form hydrides. All these issues can be solved, but it's not trivial.

There's a grim Russian joke: "It was found at the autopsy that the cause of death was autopsy". This is pretty applicable here.

It's no longer illegal if you are a friend of Trump.

Europe imports a lot of services from the US. In fact, the trade deficit between the US and Europe is insignificant (less than $50B a year).

He also eased some of them. More importantly, by the midpoint of Biden's presidency, Chinese companies learned to work around the tariffs. Mostly by exporting through Vietnam or Malaysia.

Three Mile Island _was_ a full-on meltdown. That was contained by the containment building, just as designed. Minor radiation leakage was due to a release of overpressure that allowed some iodine and cesium to escape.

What do you think can explode on a nuclear power plant? For your reference, Three Mile Island buildings also successfully contained a hydrogen explosion.

They certainly do. Nuclear power plants in the US pay around $1B a year for liability insurance.

The worst case accident for the current generation of reactors: Three Mile Island. In other words, no lives list, very minor radiation leakage.

No operator wants to _lose_ a reactor and all of the future profits.

COBOL implementations have functions like "INTEGER-OF-DATE", with various starting epochs. IBM uses the Gregorian calendar epoch (1582). Julian Days are also a common approach, with the Modified Julian Date having an epoch at November 17, 1858. It's certainly plausible that Social Security uses 1875 as the epoch.

Never mind, that Social Security likely actually has information about (dead) people who would be 150 years old at this point. The first payment went out in 1937, and somebody 100 years old at that time would have an entry around 190 years old.

That's because COBOL uses 1875-05-20 as the epoch ("zero date"). So anybody with "age undetermined" will be shown as being ~150 years old.

"You're saying this as if it's a bad thing", signed, 50% of the US.

"There's no way this can go wrong, we thought of everything!" - every zombie/disaster movie just before the containment fails.

China has been having more engineers in training than the US has engineers in total. You can see the results with DeepSeek. All while the Chinese government pumps hundreds of billions in subsidies for the high-tech sector.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to terminate and claw back funds for the CHIPS program.

So China has more and more STEM students, and the US has more and more MBAs. Guess who's going to win?