I was not making a judgement about whether the current system in the US is good (it's not).

However, there are *always* going to be limits to how much healthcare you get from a shared pool. If you're 6 feet tall but feel that you ought to be 6'-2", there is no conceivable healthcare system anywhere that is going to pay you to get bone extension surgery. Likewise, no insurance plan is going to pay to get you a Michael Jackson-style nose. However, you could have those things done on your own dime. So what I said is 100% accurate.

"But those aren't medically necessary!". Well, that's a judgement that's always going to be made somewhere. People disagree on what is necessary enough to draw resources from the shared pool, so it becomes a political process. But no matter what, somebody making decisions on coverage is not going away.

All insurance, public or private, rations healthcare. The only way that healthcare won't ever be rationed is if you pay for it yourself, which you're always entitled to do.

It turns out that the hardest part of this project wasn't designing the model or training it. Instead, it was hunting down the peripheral equipment to transcribe it onto paper tape so that it could be loaded onto the FAA's Sperry Rand mainframe running in a basement somewhere in Maryland.

Dating people at work is generally OK as long as one doesn't report to the other directly or indirectly.

HR usually wants to know so that they can rearrange the corporate hierarchy to avoid such unseemly conflicts of interest. It's their business because it's unfair to everyone else under that dating boss if one of their colleagues is exchanging "special favors" with the boss.

You've obviously never held a real job.

Every company that I've ever worked for over the decades made this kind of policy 100% clear to new hires, and some of them repeated it at least annually (along with other boring annual training on things like not sending sensitive tech to places like China).

But that's a problem which only appeared when UPS systems and large battery storage grew beyond a certain threshold. For a long time, it was fine to have the system checking the battery every minute, because not many battery systems were deployed to begin with and even less were constantly online and synchronized via NTP. And at some point in time, a single battery was added which was the last straw to break the camel's back.

It's a little more subtle. Fructose tastes sweeter than Glucose. Per serving you need less fructose for the same sweet taste, so you can label the food with lower calorie numbers. At the same time, fructose does not appeases the hunger as much, so people tend to eat more. But because the actual sugar in the blood stream is higher than the pancreatic system believes it to be, it throws the body off and causes it to become more and more accustomed to higher blood sugar levels, increasing the chance for diabetes 2.

Non-glucose sugars are really to blame here. As the pancreas reacts to glucose only and not to fructose, lactose, galactose and all the other sugars out there, high fructose corn syrup was a method to smuggle sugars beyond the appetite controlling system.

To me, that is basically an acoustic Stockholm syndrome. Motorcycles with their open engines are necessarily very loud to the rider. Like the hostages start to love their captor, motorcycle riders start to love the sound to cope with the fact that they can't flee it.

I'm just super impressed that he could generate any kind of video at all with his VIC-20.

"Return of the Return of the Living Dead" ?

Yeah, they'll recruit outrageously popular AIs to draw crowds at the cinema.

You are deeply mistaken. Denmark is the next state to go fully electric for new cars. Belgium and the Netherlands are following suit, with Finland close. Germany is at 37% right now (numbers from October 2026).

And that's just cars. Some countries don't buy diesel busses anymore (Denmark, The Netherlands, Luxembourg), all new busses are electric there. Long distance trucking is getting electrified already. Nanno Janssen, a truck operator in Northern Germany, runs 70 electric trucks already (and no, not Tesla Semi. But the likes of Scania, DAF, MAN, Mercedes Actros, which are available for a few years already). German Youtuber Electric Trucker has a video blog running since two years, where he reports his long distance drives all over Europe from Turkey to Spain and Scandinavia with electric trucks.

The reality has moved far more towards BEVs already as you seem to imagine.

Critical means that the supply of this material determines the whole production chain, because the supply of all other materials for the same production chain is better. How the supply of the material is limited is not relevant for the material to be critical, just that it is, which makes this material the kriterion, the means of judging.

But for most of Europe, sales of gas powered cars are going down, while the total number of cars sold is increasing. At the same time, most of the BEVs sold in Europe are actually made by European companies, by Volkswagen and its subsidaries (SEAT, koda), by BMW, Mercedes, Stellantis and Renault. U.S. based Tesla alone has more market share in Europe than all Chinese brands together.