...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

All joking aside, asbestos is probably a lot safer than the PFAs in everything we use instead of the old materials

I'm confident that if it were made our top priority it could be done. It would take years and cost a fortune. After many billions of dollars and millions of hours invested in this heroic task the most important question we should ask ourselves is WHY?!?

We could tackle other issues with this kind of investment. We could cure cancer. We could solve poverty, develop nuclear fusion energy. It seems futile to take a working codebase and refactor it just because arrogant ignorance doesn't grok COBOL.

Zero is pretty optimistic. Once you subtract the cost of all the mining and transaction energy the intrinsic value is pretty strongly negative.

You could experiment with lowering the heat after it reaches boiling. There is no reason to boil noodle vigorously unless you are lacking a hobby or need the brush with danger to make you feel alive. Some folks even turn the heat off after it boils and allow it to cook covered with a stir or two for luck. I started doing this and noticed zero difference to the end product.

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

There are cheaters known as spoofers who provide false GPS location to access game objects without physical travel. They can instantly teleport anywhere in the world. I can't wait until our AI overlords grant us this ability, just think how much time and energy will be saved when we don't need to waste time traveling and can just blink wherever we want to go!

Every new phone this happens: I get a useless alert, something about a stupid kid with the wrong parent 3 counties away, it's gonna be hot or windy or cold somewhere within 500 miles, an old person is confused in some city I have never visited.

I angrily turn them all off and forget all about it until the next new phone.

If by some freak happenstance I get an alert that is helpful or relevant I will leave it on. If it is stupid that's the last "emergency" I know about on that particular device.

Cans taste different. Try it! I suspect it is due to 2 factors, they use different plastic for the liners than the plastic bottleses, and the liner is thin with imperfections which result in metal contact. Modern cans will develop pinhole leaks because of this if they are stored for very long. The old cans from 20 years ago would last indefinitely but new ones will have a surprisingly high failure rate. I opened a 12 pack of seltzer water that was still barrely within the "best by" date and 2 of the 12 had lost pressure due to pinhole leaks! I routinely find a blown can here and there if I am not meticulous about rotating stock.

my ev car gets 5miles/kWh. my econobox gets 30mpg, so if gas is more than $3/gal the ev is cheaper (aside from other maintenance costs which add up fast)

The average EV battery is 1000 pounds. Even a tiny extension of 10% of the typical battery would be way too heavy for people to safely handle. I could handle 50 lbs if it was well designed but I don't know if most folks could. If they had 50 lb extension packs I would need to wrangle 20 of them to double my range.

Dropping one would probably ruin it. I remember hearing about swappable battery packs long ago but nobody has figured out a way to make it happen yet. Between how expensive and fragile they are and how tough they are to swap I am doubtful anything like this is in the cards until we get some huge advances in battery tech.

I was shocked to learn that handling cash is typically 2-7x as expensive as handling cards. It's at the higher end in poor neighborhoods where theft is more likely. link

I drive an elderly light sedan and a modern EV regularly and the dinocar stops noticibly shorter than the EV despite having lackadaisical brake and tire maintenance. The EV has monster acceleration but its weight (roughly 2x) makes stopping the victim of physics.

The EV has antilock brakes and 20+ years newer tech but still needs more room to stop! Normally it doesn't matter. I don't touch the EV brakes very often - usually once a month to keep them from rusting up. I drive single pedal using motor braking unless there is an emergency.

I don't understand your attitude. What else are you doing while standing there at checkout? I marvel at the folks who stand there doing nothing while the cashier rings everything up, then stand there doing nothing while the cashier bags everything up. If I'm at a staffed checkout I will bag things up myself and be out the door a couple minutes faster. Sure I am "doing work" but it ends up costing me less time and I am helping keep their margins which lowers cost for everyone. I do self checkout when available and am quite efficient at that. I help keep prices down, spend less time at the store and see it as a win-win.

It's all trade-offs. Wax paper is inferior in some ways - wax melts at low temperatures, can affect flavor, is less durable and strong, and might be more expensive than some alternatives.

When packagers make billions of units even fractions of a cent add up to real money so the incentives to minimize costs are intense. Even if wax was superior and cheaper it might be heavier, and that alone could make alternatives a cheaper solution.

It's a complicated issue and regulation is a good approach. We should test everything in our food chain and regulate it carefully. Industry keeps putting poisonous things into our food and water because it saves money.