Except it absolutely does. The original conclusion was that using black plastic cooking utensils could potentially expose you to a nearly unsafe amount of BDE-209 and that this was a cause for concern. With the math error corrected though, it turns out black plastic cooking utensils don't even remotely expose you to unsafe amounts of BDE-209, and are thus in all likelihood as safe for use as any other utensil. Kudos to the authors for noticing and correcting the error, but they should have gone the distance and admitted that their error made the fundamental thesis of the paper incorrect.

I dream of a lot of completely nonsensical, impractical, pointless things too. Can't fault Amazon for the same.

That sure sounds like yet another Windows feature that nobody ever even remotely asked for! Bravo Microsoft!

Personally if I were running the show in Tuvala I'd take whatever money they're throwing down a pit in metaverse nonsense and use it instead to invest in some flood barriers. Or, if that's too infeasible, then just give it directly to your residents so they can use it to flee somewhere at a higher elevation.

It's like holding a mass intervention run by and located in the favorite bar of all the alcoholics, and the bar owner spends the whole session sipping a martini and complaining that it's unfair to attack his sale of alcohol as the source of everybody's alcoholism. Has the bones of a decent sketch comedy bit I guess, but it's nowhere close to a serious attempt at solving a serious problem.

Realistically, that should factor into the "tons of CO2" removed calculations. If it removes 1,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per day, but its power draw from the grid results in 500 additional tons of CO2 being released power plants, then the "true" amount of CO2 being sequestered is half what they're claiming. And this isn't even getting into if the power draw induces *more* in grid emissions than it actually captures from the air, at which point this thing is less climate change revolution and more absurdist parody.

I'd like to see a minimum six-month record of your 77-year old ass working a 70 hour work week. And no, conversations with other executives about how the youth just don't want to work anymore do not count as "work" for the purposes of this exercise.

All these companies bought or built swanky towers for hundreds of millions - if not billions - in expensive trendy places like SF, NYC, Chicago, etc right before COVID, then had to send everybody home while they paid the electric and property taxes on empty buildings. Now they can bring everybody back, and the bean counters want to because it's the only way to justify their expenses. You can't just sell the things either, because who's spending that much money to buy an office right now that none of their workers will want to commute to? I'm sure the suits are also under enormous pressure from Wall Street too, since so many banks and investment firms have corporate real estate bound up in their portfolios.

Uh excuse me, it's not "pro-robocall". They prefer "pro-small business" as a much better dog whistle for their BS. Please get with the PR program.

Their irrational aversion to any form of nuclear power generation whatsoever has not only dumpstered Germany's climate goals by forcing them onto burning dirty lignite coal, but from a national security perspective utterly gutted Germany's energy independence and made them reliant on imports. The "plan" was to rely on Russian LNG while renewables amiable to the Greens like solar and wind were phased in, but then Ukraine happened and welp! Just utter incompetence.

"We spent all that grant money on executive bonuses and stock dividends because we actually never had any intent of investing in rural network infrastructure, and now that those chickens have come home to roost we expect the government to look the other way and give us even more money we'll use to enrich ourselves at the expense of the taxpayer."

A fundamental disconnect exists for Japanese women that discourages having children for the ambitious, intelligent, and highly educated. Once a woman becomes pregnant in Japan she's expected to totally drop her career to focus on being a mother and housewife to support her child and partner. Of course some do return to work and on paper support structures like maternity leave exists, but generally they're pushed heavily to leave the workforce and can face being stigmatized for returning to work. A natural result of those cultural expectations paired with increasing higher education rates for women is that more will hold off or avoid entirely having children so they can continue their careers.

It's also a way to shed older, more expensive workers without being explicit policies of age discrimination. After all who's more likely to accept relocation: the early 20's newgrad who's single and got barely any roots put down, or the mid-40's senior engineer who doesn't want to give up their mostly paid off house and go through the stress of their kids changing schools?

Ridership is broadly a combination of five factors:

Reach of Service: Does public transit get me to where I need to go, or at least close enough as to be convenient? If not, then it is of no use to me.

Speed of Service: Do I reach my destination in a reasonable amount of time, compared to other potential transit methods? If it takes an hour to get to work by bus but only 20 minutes by car, then I'm going to drive.

Frequency of Service: How long do I have to wait for the bus/train to arrive? If missing my train means I only have to wait another 7 minutes then fine, but if it means I'm waiting 30 minutes and would be late for my shift, that's a risk I may not be willing to take.

Reliability of Service: Is the service schedule kept to reasonably well with trains/busses reaching their destination generally around the posted time? If the bus routinely runs 10 minutes or more behind, or worse sometimes doesn't even show up, I can't risk it as a commuting option.

Safety of Service: Do I feel reasonably safe from harm on public transit? This is particularly an issue for solo female riders. Even if driving is less convenient I may still choose to do it if I feel unsafe or are actually a victim of a crime on the public transportation system.

If your public transit system is fast, frequent, reliable, safe, and gets people where they need to go, they will ride it regardless of cost unless you're talking astronomical commuter line rates (ie: >$10 per ride). Likewise if your system is slow, infrequent, unreliable, unsafe, and doesn't get people where they need to go, you're not going to get many riders even if you drop fares to zero.

None of which is to argue against eliminating fares in a vacuum, but you need to weigh the trade-offs. Many public transit systems rely on fares to operate, and if you compromise any of the factors I listed in the process of eliminating fares it's going to reduce ridership, not increase it, even as the price to ride drops.

The vast majority of pirates aren't doing it because they're nefarious or malicious in nature: they do it because piracy provides a better, more convenient product, or sometimes because there is actually no legal way of getting the product you want because it's out of distribution, region locking nonsense, etc. The reason piracy was so prevalent in the naughts was because it was vastly superior even when you factored out cost: you could spend time and effort going to a store to buy a DVD locked down with copy protections and with unskippable ad rolls prior to getting to the main menu... or you could fire up a torrent from the comfort of your own home and get a better version with no copy protections that you could play on any device, any time you wanted.

Streaming was supposed to be the radical counter to piracy. Yes it cost a bit of money, but it was even more convenient to be able to click on what you wanted and watch it immediately. No hunting down torrents and waiting for long downloads and having to store/manage tons of files. Everything you'd ever want to watch a click away. And for a while streaming delivered on this promise. However years of streaming services balkanizing, increased prices, additions of new annoying DRM and other user restrictions, the lack of quality in new content, and the shuffling/vanishing of old but still desired content means that once again piracy is looking like the better option. Netflix, Amazon, etc are killing the golden goose in search of the next egg and piracy is always there to fill the void when it happens.