Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Most of the world is not Northern Canada, which must be where they got that number from. Maine averages 4.55 peak sun hours per day, and is the northereasternmost state in the continental United States. Even Washington state is at 3.95.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

So the solar generation function of a panel is no sun, no power, partial sun, no power, peak sun hours, full power.

Well, I guess that you're the expert.

So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range

Maybe that's enough to get you over a time zone or so so that you get an extra hour of "full sun"? ;)

After all, it's not like trailers are ever sitting idle during loading, unloading, or waiting for loads. Always moving, doncha know.

Once and for all people: "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of "it is." "its" is the possessive pronoun, which was intended here.

Yes, it is. Now think of the rule for possessives with every other type of noun (ordinary and proper) - " 's ". It's like the "i" before "e" except after "c" (and sometimes "y") rule, irregular verbs, and a host of other landmines in writing down the English language.

It doesn't help that there's a group of people actively miseducating kids about pronouns and demonizing references to them. His, hers, its, yours, theirs, and ours are all bricks paving the shoulder of the road to hell.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

So embarrassed by the crap that you have to make up that you're posting AC? What are these free business loans only "illegals" qualify for, and where can I apply? Yo quiero links!

How does a society treat its citizens, specifically parents and children?

Autism -- is human psychology being maladaptive because of this situation. Parents aren't there for their children to imprint-upon. The psychological distress is real. Depersonalization is a result.

This depersonalization happening during acute childhood development phases, exacerbates the problem of social disengagement.

People should be treated as people, not chattel.

Hard to say. When comparing the deaths from covid in the US and Norway per capita, there are approximately 890 k extra deaths in the US. That's obviously not all Trump, though. Norway has a much better health care system, and a much smaller percentage of idiots. And while the latter obviously caused Trump, it's not set in stone that the latter caused the increased mortality in the former by making them refuse vaccines, ignore mask mandates etc. There's more correlation than causation here.

Also, here's a rare gem - Trump did something good with operation Warp Speed.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

The current GOP is not left. They're extreme right at the moment - fascist-adjacent is not "minimal state". There's nothing conservative left, it's been consumed by right wing populism with a mix of fascism The current administration. It's corruption, populism, fascim, racism, disdain for knowledge, and plain stupidity in an ugly mix.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Wouldn't the OpenJDK versions of these be supported by enterprise Linux vendors, like Red Hat or SUSE?

Granted, I don't see the "ELS-1" (extended life support) for the newest ones, but I'm unaware of whether that is because it hasn't been set yet or because there won't be any - unlike the previous OpenJDK versions.

Under this administration, you know the underlying cause is they didn't pay off Trump, his family, and his cronies.

It's sickening how corrupt the US has become. Sure, one can argue it's been bad - but Trump has turned it up to 20, on a scale from 1-10 - just bulldozing through any limits one thought existed. "Want a pardon? Sure, buy some millions in Trump coin and it's yours." Or just giving himself a giant slush fund via a settlement with his underlings.

You pay for them in Norway too, unless you're a health care worker in contact with patients or in one of the at-risk groups - old people, people with chronic diseases etc.

Some employers will offer them for free - it's common for kindergartens and consultants, for different reasons. The cost is usually around 30 - 40 USD.

Whole milk isn't much of a problem - as long as it's pasteurized. The brain worm is hawking raw milk.