What does the A-380 have to do with the Panamax?

Is there some component of the aircraft that has to be shipped where the ability to put it on a sea going freighter actually imposes a size constraint?

Flextape can fix anything right!

Can't wait to see the new infomercial. We cut this Jet Liner in half!

Except no not really there is basically no evidence to support that claim. Got look at some charts the portion of the public with health coverage was basically flat from the 70s on, then it ticks up a little in the early 2000s, and into the 2010s (ACA era) it rejoins the earlier trend.

Almost any expansion in coverage can be credited to expansion of medicare / medicaid eligibility. Which is just the fully socialized medical model the ACA claims not to be.

So no there is no real metric that indicates the ACA was successful in any way.

I am not racist here, the racists are the ones given Obama credit for the fat-lot-of-nothing he did. They exist in both directions, people who run around saying he was the worst thing that ever happen are by and large expressing racist sentiment, but anyone claiming he was actually a good and at anything are equally doing so out of racial bias. The Obama did nothing besides be more Gorge W. Bush, and the ACA. The ACA failed, and failed completely.

Insisting it Obama is relevant is just lying.

Turning the senate into a state wide popularity contest, and fundamentally altering what the body was intended to be, a place where the States themselves were represented vs the Peoples house is hardly nutty.

Arguably the current system is not just flawed but down right nutty. The House provides equal representation where by each person gets roughly the same weight in voting for representation. On the other hand the Senate no-longer represents the States because they are also elected by the people but for some reason living in a low population states entitles you to extra proportional representation? WTF?

It does not fit into the 'we're actually a republic not a democracy argument' nor does it fit into the "on man one vote" argument. Its just crazy. Either the Senate should do what it was designed to do and represent the interests of State Governments or it really ought to just be eliminated as a body.

The theory behind the ADA is completely irrelevant. It failed, objectively by any measurable metric it failed. As I said maybe it was legislatively sabotaged. Nothing stopped Obama from saying this won't work as implemented, it isn't what I asked for, refusing to sign it and telling the legislature to try again. He did not do that, why well because it was never going to get past the legislature again and he wanted his name on something transformative. That isn't good leadership its pure vanity!

And no the divisiveness came from the President. He is the one who made those statements. He chose to use the pulpit to make fun of people. That is also on him.

As I said Obama wan't actually a bad president. He was and continues to be someone who is actually vapid and empty headed but does good job sounding insightful. Its an act, he is good at it. He also accomplished exactly nothing other than getting elected while Black. It is literally the only significant thing he did.

The other thing to consider is this stuff is not magic its a bag or numbers and software.

Its going to boil down to a 1A argument and ultimately government attempts to prevent the publishing, sale, SaaS offering of models is likely to look to the courts like "prior restraint" it probably won't fly, once someone with money decides to spend it lawyers without or without LLM assistance.

"Obama was one of our better presidents"

I don't understand where this sentiment comes from. He was a care taker president, and frankly a very divisive one.

The right gives him a lot of hate, but realistically Obama did not do much earn, just as he did little to earn any of the accolades he gets. He continued and expanded foreign conflicts he in inherited. He continued the recovery strategy and policy choices chosen by the out going Bush administration.

His signature health package is a completely failure on all fronts as far as the original stated objectives especially the top lines around cost control, universal coverage, and keeping plans broadly similar in terms of coverage and cost for those who already had them. You can say the legislation that got passed was watered down and what not but he signed as enacted so you can't give him pass.

He really started the identitarian political style that has taken hold today. Sure it was little longer form than the "meme wars" we get today but everything the man said tried to cross cut America by race, class, or some group like making gay marriage an issue etc. Don't forget the complete normalization personal insults in modern politics (or the return to Jacksonian politics however you view it) began with him as well "Bitter Clingers", "your brothers keeper", "you didn't build that", anyone? The line from Obama -> The worst of Donald Trump's behavior is pretty direct one.

Next you have to consider just exactly how Trump 1.0 got elected, he did by animating not just a lot of generally non-participatory voters, but one that nominally would have been Democrats. I still say policy-wise Obama and the legislative leadership of the period were lightweights but non the less whatever they did or did not do between 2008 - 2015 left enough American's feeling left behind they bolted from progressives to a GOP platform with a little populism injected in, hardly an endorsement for a two term president who enjoyed his own party controlling at least one legislative body throughout most of it.

In all seriousness take away the title 'first black president' and ask yourself would anyone anywhere along the political spectrum still consider the man remarkable? I think the answer is without that the man is a foot note.

Sigh. Ontogeny is NOT evolution. It is not the same thing as having a low MHC diversity due to a genetic bottleneck as well as lacking tens of thousands of years of evolution to a pathogen. Not the same at all. It's silly to even suggest that. Epigenetic shifts in an individual do not create new HLA genes.

Consider COVID. Novel bat coronavirus, nobody had preexisting immunity. Did everybody die? No. Because we had high HLA/MHC diversity, making it easier to target SARS-COV-2 epitopes. Native Americans lacked this diversity. It left them ill prepared for novel pathogens.

Also, you seem to believe that any disease you've never encountered before is fundamentally dangerous to an adult. That's simply not the case. Rhinovirus is intrinsically mild. It's an upper respiratory infection; it's not adapted to lower respiratory or systemic infection. It's not ebola. It's not going to become like ebola just because you've never caught it before. If a rhinovirus strain was reintroduced after 200 years after having been eradicated, we'd all get a cold, but by and large, we'd be fine.

And what would happen if Yamagata reappeared? We'd just add it back to our flu vaccines. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Yamagata wouldn't be catastrophic without that. You do not have to catch every Influenza B lineage at all, let alone every year. If you had been infected with B/Victoria and you were exposed to B/Yamagata, you'd have little sterilizing immunity against it - you'd very likely catch it. But your past exposure to B/Victoria is still greatly protective against hospitalization and death; B and T immunity against NA and the HA stem and stalk are conserved.

And this is about whether or not to catch every lineage. Well guess what, even with air filtration, that's still going to happen. Air filtration only has a meaningful impact for people at a distance, not people close together. It's about protecting the person across the room, not the person you're standing 50 centimetres away from. What it does change is how often you catch them. And if lineages or whole viruses go extinct, that's great. Worrying about some sort of reintroduction 200 years later is just inventing your own unrealistic misery when we have actual pandemic threats to worry about.

Most of those cars were not so tall though, and you could see out of them. If there is a 7 year old standing in front of your 70's GM A-body you can see them.

Belt-lines in cars got really high because that is how you achieve that roll over safety rating.

As a driver I hate that every sedan and SUV has these super high belt lines and wide as my head A-pillars now. Every time I get in my 80s classic on the weekend it reminds me how much my visibility is in fact impaired in my daily.

Do and realistically am I much safer in my 2020's car - yes, do I also belive I am more likely to be involved in some for of accident because I can't see as much also yes.

Most common case country T intersection with yield on one road and no stops. (Probably the most dangerous type of intersection) There will be a 30 yard long space along the perpendicular road, that is a blind spot because of that thick pillar. Obviously that leads to the only safe driving practice being, be slow enough to come to a complete stop at the intersection until you are near enough to see completely down the road looking over your shoulder. Which by extension forces you to approach quite slowly or subject you and your passengers to uncomfortably short stops, should there be another vehicle approaching.

Meanwhile in the vintage car with A-pilars just bulky enough to hold up the roof, there basically isn't a blind spot large enough to conceal a vehicle or cyclist for any period of time, so they will be detected on the second look if not the first, and you able to see for miles down the perpendicular road over top of the soy beans..

Modern cars kind of suck for driving..

There are ethical questions here thought.

Some might argue that as the purchaser the vehicle owes its safety optimizations toward those owners/operators. You bought the machine the best product should do what you ostensibly would want it to, and that is safely transport you and yours wherever you are going.

Others might say we operate cars/trucks in public space some of which belonged to pedestrians first and buying a car does not confer upon you some right to impose safety risks on them.

I would argue that we are car-centric society. We have 100 years of social decisions that went for the automobile, the default policy position on subjects related to automobiles should go in favor of automobiles and their owners/users until we have had a broader debate on if the collective we "General Welfare" remember *want* a society/economy built less around the automobile.

I guess I should be more obvious with the sarcasm in the future ;)

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

Sigh, need an edit button. :P (But yes, it would be nice if more people actually cared about ensuring the accuracy of what they write and would do that before spouting off scientifically ignorant statements. I rather wish browsers had a "fact check" text box would flag in red any factually questionable statements the poster is making, with a mouseover note explaining what's wrong, with references)

"âoe" - what are you pasting from? Google Search AI? ;)

Naive vaccine approaches do struggle with long-term sterilizing immunity against fast-mutating viruses like influenza, COVID, rhinoviruses, etc (but non-sterilizing immunity from vaccines is actually quite effective at preventing the worst consequences!). Which is why new techniques are being developed to cause the body to target evolutionary-conserved regions of the pathogens rather than the "immunologically easy" (immunodominant) epitopes like COVID's RBM, influenza's hemagglutinin's globular head, and such. These regions are easy for the immune system to "see" and target, but at the same time, the virus is also evolved to be able to shuffle them easily, so you need vaccines designed to train the immune system to attack the parts that the virus can't readily change without breaking things. Some include things like having the vaccine present a large number of very different RBDs at once (making it easier to develop immunity by attacking the evolutionary-conserved regions instead), glycan masking the variable regions, and so forth.

True. But we were never "meant" to be locked inside with lots of other people, continuously breathing recycled, stale air over and over and over again.

Nonsense - Upper Paleolithic excavations of early-modern human villages show that rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers in loose tribal bands as previously believed, they instead lived densely packed high-rise apartment buildings built of sinew-bound mammoth bone trusses and clad in hides.

In fact, a recent dig in southern France unearthed what researchers believe was a "co-living" mammoth-bone complex, where millennial Cro-Magnons paid a monthly subscription of two reindeer carcasses for a micro-alcove. The site contained numerous preserved slate tablets detailing how the "open-concept communal hearth" was always occupied, the resident shaman's smoke-signal network was frustratingly slow, and the neighbors upstairs kept pacing around in uninsulated, heavy-soled mammoth-skin boots at three in the morning.

The pressures facing the human body in modern society have not changed at all, so we should change nothing in response!

Look at how many Native Americans died from their first exposure to various European diseases.

Yes, they had genetic disadvantages in dealing with European diseases, having had a low MHC diversity due to the Beringian Bottleneck (particularly HLA genes), combined with no evolutionary pressures from European diseases. Is your belief that children evolve in the process of becoming adults?

To be clear, this isn't the only problem that they had. It is also true that many diseases are more severe if first contracted as an adult instead of as a child, Europeans had contracted many of these diseases as children, while the native populations were encountering them at a broad range of ages. But there's a massive difference between "being exposed less often" and "not being exposed at all", as if you're living in a hermetic bubble. We all saw during COVID how hard it is even with extreme precautions to stop airborne virus propagation from person to person. Even if you significantly clean the air, people are still going to get infected with them as children. What you change is how frequently people get reinfected. And it's a myth that you need to keep catching the same disease every time it comes around to maintain immunity. T and B cell immunity against severe outcomes is far more durable than that.

There's also some nice side effects from reducing the rate of infection. During COVID, we literally drove one of the major influenza lineages extinct with our infection control measures. Now flu vaccine makers don't need to try to target it anymore - it simplifies the job of making effective flu vaccines. Having consistently good infection control measures (without inconveniencing people!) will likely heavily genetically bottleneck many airborne diseases, and may outright drive some extinct - which makes the work of targeting the remainder easier.

Air cleaning doesn't stop you from infecting the person you're talking to. What it does do is stop you from infecting a person across the room. And that's a good thing.