Why was the epoxy and cloth patented? I googled Germetall-1 and found it's apparently a patent on the materials and technique. The gist of it is that they soak some cloth in epoxy and cover the hole. I've done this with a broken toenail (though for that use case, cyanoacrylate is more biocompatible than epoxy).

Anybody else know more details about what's new with this technique? It sounds like a standard composite use.

I toot my own horn to make the point that I'm not someone whose goal is to amass as little knowledge as possible.

Once in a while I read a textbook, motivated only by curiosity, and I'm often taking a protracted dive into a new area for some complex hobby. I don't think reading a clock is the same type of knowledge as that which we nerds prize. It's not the kind of knowledge that impresses me, or whose lack I judge. (On the other hand, if you haven't done some deep thinking about philosophy, what even are you?)

I believe you are mistaken. Reading an analog clock is not a life skill anymore, since they are all but extinct, or are superfluous to some nearer digital clock. It's the same as understanding 24-hour times--quick, is 18:00 clocking off time or time for a relaxing evening movie? It's critical, yet some people can't do it. (So it's not actually critical, is it?)

Right, so if you have to bear your own risk, living there has negative net utility. But people do it, and assume FEMA will bail them out. That's a moral hazard, with the government (taxpayers) providing the hedging. Though I have no personal knowledge of this. Is that accurate? And who gets the profit, the buyer or the seller? (Is it priced like land and a house or like a disaster zone? I assume it's intermediate, which equates to both parties getting some undeserved profit--the seller now, the buyer later if they can guilt the government into rebuilding their house.)

Keep in mind a perpetual payment stream is worth the same as some lump sum. A perpetual payment stream does not have infinite value because future payments are discounted (having less value now), and the area under the curve is finite. It's a geometric series.

To add to this, the screen time prohibition is much more about the mental response to modern entertainment than the light. Yeah, the light should be dimmed, but doomscrolling or TV is almost always going to delay sleep.

So if the area were already flood drainage relief (both flooding too much for a house and aiding drainage), you would advocate building houses there? You can't have it both ways. Either it's better to be houses or it's better to be flood drainage.

There's an argument to be made that they're taking advantage of taxpayers, by buying a known lemon that's expected to be taken care of by the government. (But this doesn't actually work out mathematically since if the seller and other buyers expect it to be taken care of by the government, it will be priced similarly to a non-lemon.) Probably, actual selling price should be taken into account since you shouldn't reward people for cleverly finding a low price that depends on perpetual government largess.

Coffee may be addictive, but it improves long term health and short term quality of life. It's like being addicted to going to the gym for a moderate workout 3-4 times a week. (Tea is similar, though the health-promoting compounds are different.)

About nicotine in the office: ugh. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. I don't like it when my coworkers bring junk food to the office to share, for the same reason. It's a more moderate version of having dangerous drugs in the office. But now a company is bringing actual dangerous drugs. Nobody's going to overdose, but people will end up addicted and it will contribute to heart disease. Hopefully they will stop before they shorten someone's life. (The common legal test for causation is "but for", as in "But for the company giving out nicotine, would the plaintiff have become addicted?" Unfortunately it's harder to answer if a decades later heart attack would have occurred if not for free nicotine. There is a true mechanistic answer, but we can't presently prove it.)

"academia works"?

You think Academia ever accomplished anything at all?

Good. You're finally getting the picture that American crony Capitalism sucks rocks and considers immigrants to be barely better than slaves.

With millions of citizen tech workers laid off in the last 3 years, fewer foreign workers is only good news.

PLEASE avoid the United States. We're going through an existential cultural identity crisis right now, and don't need your third world kleptocracies, we have enough kleptocracy here.

"Invade" is a very gentle word to describe what they did.

Let's also talk about how they must be fucking saints to dump all this money into shooting down incoming rockets and drones. If an enemy launched a sustained rocket and drone strike on the US, we would push them back to the stone age if that's what it took to stop the attacks. Shooting down incoming munitions? That's far too kind a response.