They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.

They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.

Donald Trump handed Iran the Strait of Hormuz to close at will. That was nuke enough for the Iranian regime to survive the next decade.

No, there is not. If you are not working in B and living in A, you are not generating demand for a daily commute between A and B. The demand only arises if you are actually moving to A and taking up a job in B. If for instance, house prices in A are too high for what a job pays in B, there is also no demand for a daily commute between A and B - completely independent how many lanes the highway between A and B has.

It does not.

As Google did, you can also do the math. Duane Arnold had a net power output of 581 MW or 14 GWh output per day. To store 14 GWh of electricity right now, you have to pay about US$560 Mio (or $40 per kWh). With the 1.9 billion dollar grant, you could build enough capacity for four days of continuous rain. And differently than a nuclear power plant, this battery capacity could do power arbitrage, charging when electricity is cheap and provide it when prices are high, generating revenue and at the same time damping electricity price pikes and stabilizing the grid.

This is not exactly true. Demand for traffic is not static and just sitting there, waiting to be fulfilled. Demand indeed can be induced by an offering. If you know that from point A to point B, commute times will be X, you think twice about moving to point A if you work at point B, or taking up a job at point B, if you are already living at point A. But if due to road construction and adding a new lane, traffic times will lower to X-t, suddenly living at A and working at B will become viable, people living in A will work at B, and traffic between A and B increases, and travel times will no longer be X-t, but increase, until they reach equilibrium again at X, which was the prior cutoff point.

The same happens to businesses. A business incorporated at A might think twice about offering services at B, if roundtrip times are X. But if an additional highway lowers the travel times to X-t, it becomes a business case, until the additional demand has eaten up the advantage, and we are back at X times.

Gerhard Mercator was Flemish, not Dutch, and in 1552, he went to Duisburg, todayâs Germany.

Problem is: the international Date Line is not straight, and it does not follow 180 degrees West/East.

You can calculate the average size of the expected small density differences in the 3000 K hot plasma, and for each Dark Matter model, which vary for instance by amount of Dark Matter or properties of Dark Matter, you get a different distribution of those differences. The actual differences physicists measure fits a model, where there is five times as much Dark Matter than baryonic matter, and the Dark Matter does not interact with itself or normal matter.

A lot of it comes from the Cosmic Microwave Background. It is nearly, but not fully the same everywhere we look. There are minuscule aberrations at the 10 to the power of minus 4 Kelvin, and they have certain frequencies. The frequencies are consistent with a medium where normal matter has a temperature of about 3000 K, but is embedded in a type of matter which does not interact - neither with itself, nor with normal matter.

To be frank, physicists have a whole list of things it can't be, because otherwise, they would be able to see the effects of it. This is a common misconception, to confuse not knowing what it is with knowing what it is not.

And they can rule out interaction of Dark Matter with itself on a large scale of magnitudes, e.g. everything above the Weak Force.

You are entirely correct. I took another look at what the law actually required and I am definitely crying wolf (at this point). Thanks for taking the time to point this out to me.

There is definitely a slippery slope there, but I agree with you, California is far enough away from the event horizon of that slope that my histrionics are not warranted. Not only that, but the carve out for Linux actually is helpful. Thanks once again.

It was. The problem Democracy was not designed to address is a completely different one. To trust Democracy, you have to feel you benefit of it. For a long time, living in a democratic country meant improving your standard of living, slowly but steadily. Respect for the current system of government comes from the system of government benefiting you. It's aligned with the Golden Rule: Don't do unto others what you don't want to be done to you. The system of government sets boundaries of things you can do, and you respect them because you don't want the same things happening to you. You respect Democracy, because if the current government does something you don't want, you can always publicly complain, elect different officials or run for office until your grievances are addressed.

Several decades without real improvement of the standard of living for the average citizen has shaken the support for Democracy, because people feel Democracy has failed them. They no longer insists on upholding the rule of Law, because there is the impression that the Law benefits the wrong people. Decades of sentiment, reiterated in countless movies, novels, documentations and opinion pieces, have consolidated to the general view that government officials and politicians are either incompetent, grifters or blocked by countless laws and regulations to do something for you -- and this view is now so ingrained that people don't expect anything anymore from Democracy and are ready to try something else. The U.S. has broken the promise of your pursuit of happiness, and the pundits explain to you it's your fault. Throw out the rule of Law, throw out the balances of power, throw out elections in general when all they apparently do is benefiting the wrong persons.

Actually, it was. The whole point of a democracy is to have non-bloody rules to get rid of an unpopular government. The more hoops you have to go through, the less democratic a system is. At the end of Dashiell Hammett's "Glass Key" (the novel, not the movies), Paul Madvig comments that this time, the other side will win the election, and he will lie low for four years until the next vote. And yes, Paul Madvig is a self-serving grifter.

The companies in question are going to get in serious legal trouble if they fail to comply in verifying the ages of their users. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all going to give these companies an API that will move that burden from themselves to the makers of the operating system. Discord, to use an example, will be able to say that they asked Microsoft, Google, and Apple to verify ages, and then that they relied on the information that they were given. What's more these companies actually want to know the age of their users. This information is valuable, and they will be able to use it to target their customers with advertising.

What's more, every bad actor is going to try and target this exception. Linux traffic will end up in the same bucket as bots, predators, and any other malicious traffic. There is nothing in the current exception that requires companies to work with Free Software. My guess is that if your operating system can't do age verification that is blessed by Microsoft, Google, or Apple that most sites will simply block your traffic.

This is going to end up being a huge step backwards for Free Software clients.

Social media sites are going to get in trouble if they can't verify ages, and they want the age information so that they can sell it to advertisers. Microsoft, Apple, and Google are going to create APIs that the various services are going to trust. If your alternative implementation of the API response isn't signed by a key controlled by Microsoft, Apple, or Google it will be blocked outright. This loophole is not a victory, it is a huge defeat.

These operations can get in actual legal trouble if they don't gather this information. Plus, it is in their best interests financially to gather this information. Verified age information is ridiculously valuable to them. They want to be able to get your verified age, and now they have a legal reason to require it. Plus, every bot, actual predator, and other bad actor is going to try and climb through this Free Software exemption. The overwhelming majority of traffic that can't provide a response signed with a key by Microsoft, Apple, or Google is going to be crap, pure and simple. This law doesn't say anything about requiring that the service work with Free Software. Instead it puts Free Software in its own little ghetto. One thing is certain about ghettos, they don't put you in a ghetto for any reason but to be able to discriminate against you.

It is far more likely that a year from now Linux will be unusable for sites that require age verification, than it is that Linux will be the loophole that websites allow ti work despite not having "certified" age verification. Microsoft, Apple, and Google didn't fight this because they know that this actually strengthens their grip on operating systems. From now on, any device created by people that want to potentially do business in California (ie, everyone), is going to have to find a way to get a "blessed" age verification API by one of the big three. If they can't get that blessing then their fancy new device is unlikely to work on any service that has personalized accounts.