Shopping for food daily and not keeping enough on hand for at least a week or two is a serious waste of time and also is quite frankly a dangerous situation to be in. There is no way I would ever not have at least a few weeks worth of canned goods, rice, beans, and bottled water on hand. Additionally, buying in small quantities is almost always more expensive. And buying at a small local store in a city makes it harder to get good, locally grown organic produce, fresh eggs, and meats. Most farmers markets tend to be located outside the actual city and closer to the actual farms where stuff is grown.

I don't WANT to live anywhere close enough to businesses to be able to walk to them. Give me rural or suburban. If any businesses are within a mile, that is way too close. And shopping on foot is totally impractical anyway if you buy any quantity of items -- or heavy items like cat litter or large bags of cat or dog food. I typically go to the grocery store for major shopping every couple of weeks -- and fill the entire back of an SUV, so that isn't happening on foot. Same for work, my typical daily driving is 15-25 miles depending on the day. Let people vote for where they want to live with their dollars and personal choices -- no tax dollars should be used to further walkability goals or any other society planning.

Amen to that brother!

Although far more energy intensive, the simplest answer is to just ensure that the processed waste is raised to or above 160F for at least 5 minutes. If designed properly, much of the heat could be recaptured and pumped back into the system prior to discharging the water into the environment.

My argument is that a private business that is a sole proprietorship or partnership are, in effect, an extension of the individual who owns them and, as such, they should be able to do as it likes, in all matters related to hiring, sales, etc. However, a public, loss limited corporation gives up some of its rights through the act of incorporation and the creation of an artificial business entity. I therefore believe that a corporation CAN be held to a stricter standard and the government has the right to set rules banning discrimination, selective hiring, etc. Additionally, I would go one step further and state that a corporation that expands into the "public sphere" beyond a certain point also becomes subject to additional restrictions, including being held to the same standards as the government is with regards to the 1st Amendment, etc. This is no different than how utility companies are often regulated in exchange for the monopoly status they often have. In effect, I am calling for the creation of a new class of "media utility" that would require government oversight to make sure their moderation and posting policies were free of political bias or censorship.

I agree completely. The issue is that a public company has, by it's own choice, effectively become the new public forum for political discourse. As such, I think the bigger issue here is that Musk actually even needs to do this to restore free speech in the first place. Personally, I feel that by becoming a publicly traded corporation with limited liability, Twitter voluntarily surrendered some of it's freedoms to the government and should be REQUIRED to comply with same free speech requirements that they are. I would love to see the laws interpreted such that ALL public/loss limited corporations were held to the same requirements as government across the board. If you want to remain a sole proprietorship without liability protection, you should be able to do as you please. but stricter regulation should be one of the strings attached to limited liability.

Free speech means just that. As long as it is not a direct incitement or and explicit call to violence, it must be tolerated in a public/political forum. This includes much of what many platforms are classifying as hate speech. Political speech is not meant to protect people's feelings. The issue is who gets to determine what is and is not acceptable -- and if you ask 5 different people what should and should not be allowed you will get 5 different answers. If the people on the far right are in charge, they often try to censor speech that they find morally disturbing. If the people on the far left are in charge, they often try to censor speech that THEY find disturbing. If we don't have open discourse from both sides, society does not work. And as far as trying to validate "false claims" or flagging articles as false, the same thing applies. One person's "truth" is often considered blasphemy by another. And, quite often, as we have seen recently, stories that were flagged as false (often by someone with a political agenda) are later found to have been true. The only option is to allow all speech from all parties and allow people to sort it out themselves. If it offends their sensibilities or they find some of it insulting or demeaning, they need to get over it and grow up (as do the people spouting stuff that is insulting and demeaning). I am completely in favor of Musk on this one. Of course, the board fighting his buy out may be part of his Plan B. As rejecting the buy out, at a very good price, is likely not in the interest of the stock holders, which presents an opportunity for them to sue the board. Additionally, as many believe Musk's Plan B is to start another platform, if the buyout fails, then Twitter's stock value is likely to plummet -- which makes refusing the buy out even WORSE for the stock holders. I have seen some people forecasting the stock sliding by as much as 50% or more if that happens, in which case, Musk may be able to pull off a leveraged buy out at a much lower price -- with the end result still being his ownership of Twitter. This should be interesting!

TVA's Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Plant near Chattanooga doesn't get anywhere near enough attention or credit.

"although China has yet to decide how much it's (going to charge) to help Russia"....there, I fixed it for you.

Bingo -- we have a winner! The private Axiom Space mission is already scheduled to launch for a 10 day mission to the ISS on March 30 with a crew of 4. All NASA would need to do is contact them about allowing him to utilize one of the empty seats on the return trip. Then they wouldn't even need to alter any of the other return schedules for the other astronauts already up there.

The point you are missing is that this is how EVERY virus and pandemic has progressed throughout eternity. with or without vaccines. Yes, new variants will arise -- which has NOTHING to do with "humans mutating the virus" -- just due to normal RNA transcription errors plus the occasional recombination with other viruses and variants. The point is that any new variant that is either less communicable than Omicron and/or more lethal, will generally not take hold because it will not be able to compete and exposure to Omicron will give enough natural immunity to protect from later variants. So, if a new variant does arise, then it likely will be, if anything, LESS pathogenic than Omicron, not more. Killing your host or making them too sick to go out and spread the virus is the WORST thing for a virus to do, evolutionarily speaking. It is very rare, almost unheard of actually, for a virus that is endemic in the population to randomly develop new strains that are more deadly. Typically, just the opposite happens. The viruses that cause pandemics generally occur when a virus initially makes the leap from a different species to humans, who have no natural immunity to it. It is then a tug of war for a couple of years as the virus adapts to the host and our immune system adapts to the virus. At the end of this battle, one of three things typically happens: the virus mutates to a strain that has so many errors that it basically breaks down and dies out (which may be what has actually happened with Delta in Japan), the virus mutates into something so mild that it becomes endemic to the population (i.e. yet another common cold virus), or the virus in very rare cases adapts so well to the host that it can live in them almost forever without causing serious illness except when the immune system weakens (e.g. varicella -- chicken pox/shingles). From everything I am seeing, one of the first two cases is what will likely happen with COVID19. SARS-1 likely went the first route, which is why it essentially disappeared completely. COVID19, at least in the case of Omicron, looks like it may have had a "fortuitous" (for both us and it) case of recombination where it swapped a sequence of 9 RNA codons with a cold virus in one of its hosts -- which essentially made it more like a cold, in ways that were good for both us AND the virus. Welcome to evolution.

The Nintendo NES would have been a much better system if they had actually paid Magnavox/Philips the patent royalties they were due upfront, rather than requiring Magnavox to sue them (after having already sued Atari, Coleco, et al). They then did it again with the Wii controller and Philips had to sue them yet again. People tend to forget about the Magnavox Odyssey system, which predated the NES by over a decade. Several patents came out of this projects even after the initial Baer patents that covered only Pong itself -- including ones that specifically covered collision detection and methods for combining chroma and luminance to enable color in a consumer video game. Jeff Lukkarila, who's name is on the patents, never receives the credit he should be due for these contributions.

We still have a sign up at one of the companies I work for that says "New employee motivation plan: work or get fired." And, thankfully, I live in a right to work state, so they can fire anyone pretty much anytime they want to.

There is a big sign on the wall at the office I work at "New employee motivation plan: work or get fired." I think that sums it up nicely, especially for more menial labor jobs that can be automated -- and will be soon, if the Gen Z crowd keeps acting like this. We need to strip away their safety net of handouts and government subsidies and then let them see how well things go. Hunger makes a great motivator.

Sadly, at one place I work, we still have a working PDP-11/70 with an old RM02 platter drive that we have to fire up every few years to generate data tables. The executable program still works and runs, but the source code to ever rebuild the software that generates the tables was lost literally decades ago. We aren't even sure at this point what language the original source code was in (we suspect it was COBOL).