No one who owns fine art ever needs to sell it. No one who owns vintage cars ever needs to sell them etc.pp.. Of course, you don't need to sell your bitcoins. As long as they are non-distinguishable from random bit patterns, they don't affect anything. But as soon as you selling bitcoins affects the real world, the real world notices and keeps putting up rules, may they be physical realities or legal requirements.

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.

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.

I guess, it's the first one. It's the strong man he is posing at. "We'll take your precious Lake Ontario as punishment!" And many of his voters like the strong man punching holes in the walls the establishment has erected - even if it is only an established name. And his voters like symbol politics, so he gives them symbolism.

Apparently not. Otherwise, consumers would not buy all those additional features. Some people calling themselves car guys have claimed for a long time that too much technology in a car is a bad thing. But that's not what consumer demand tells the car companies. And if you look at statistics, car break downs per mile driven are in a constant decline. A 1970ies car at 100,000 miles was ridden down. A 2020ies car at 100,000 miles is just well driven in. Yes, people could fix the 1970ies car themselves. Just buy the manual and the spare part, and off you go. But that was a necessity, not a feature. Today, people want their Apple Carplay and their Android Auto. And that means you need a computer as your head unit. People want cruise control and good mileage, and that means electronic injection. Lambda catalysts have reduced car emissions, and unleaded fuel has severally brought down violent crime numbers 20 years later. This also required electronic injection. People don't want to crank down their windows, and that means electric window controls. People like their stability control, so the car does not go off the road uncontrolled if you make a steering mistake. People like anti lock brakes. Airbags and pretensioners have brought down road fatalities from their heights in the 1970ies.

Yes, you now need to be a learned car specialist to service a car. But you need service far less often, and your car is a better car in all other aspects.