You're not three quarters as clever as you think you are being. While some sex chromosome anomalies leave the individual sterile, others do not. Moreover, even if individuals are in reproduction this does not mean that the individuals are polar opposites. Many plants are fertile hermaphrodites, while others are single sex, and there's an argument that other species have more than two sexes. Indeed, I recall a lesson in a population genetics class in college about a plant with many many sexes, any two of which can reproduce... I thought it was clover or lavender, but unfortunately cannot find a citation to substantiate that. Of course humans aren't plants, but they simply serve as an example of how complex seemingly simple systems really are.

This ignores the "right"'s extensive efforts to suppress voter rights, not to mention the inherit voter suppression of much of the population in our fucking electoral college that effectively lets land vote. This is only further exacerbated by distortion by several layers of first-past-the-post in most cases: whomever wins the most votes in a district wins the district. Whomever wins the most districts in the state gets all the marbles; except for Maine and Nebraska, there it's proportional. Whomever wins the most marbles is awarded the presidency. Even without gerrymandering, such repeated rounding errors stack up.

Your shaggy dog here is a bit of a straw man. The evidence was that the treatment was not working. Therefore your characterization is improper and you are instead describing laziness, stubbornness or bureaucracy, regardless of what label you (think they) applied.

Horseshit.

To learn maths properly - enough to do middle school math - you need to be taught it. You don't have to love it. You don't have to enjoy it, even. You just have to be taught.

Sure - it helps if you love it. But we're not talking calculus, here; we're talking algebra. Geometry. Not even trig. You don't need to love math to learn that.

To learn maths properly, you have to enjoy it, love it even.
You need to be stimulated by the curiosity of the unknown,
and the challenge of problem solving. You need to know
the hit your brain gets when you manage something.
It is like this with music: if you want to learn an instrument
over the years to a high degree of skill, you need to love
the instrument and enjoy the many hours of practice it takes.

Remove that positive reward-driven learning, and replace
it by fear-of-failure-driven learning, and as soon as the opportunities
to fail dry up, so does the motivation. So you get the people who
passed maths at 16 and then promptly forgot it all and never
touched it again.

Fixing that fear-of-failure problem by just removing the
fear-of-failure doesn't fix it. If the positive connection isn't
there, and there is no fear of failure, the student simply
won't be motivated to learn.

It's not rocket science. It's simple psychology.
But the people running the education system are
as inept at doing that, and understanding the psychology
of learning, as the kids are getting inept at doing
maths because it's being forced in the wrong way.

In an industry obsessed West, we want the school
system to reliably manufacture units of educated
teenagers who can be put to use by industries
that can't be done by robots and AI. This is tragic.

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

Itâ(TM)s definitely about the law requiring pricing to show the final price. I get it that tax rates are variable based on locality in the US, even within a state or a city. Thereâ(TM)s much less variability here in the UK (VAT is the same rate everywhere and only varies if certain goods are deemed worthy of a discount). No reason why taxed and tax free prices canâ(TM)t both be shown in the US. This is also common in some places here, especially where businesses will be buying items with a VAT exemption.

The only time I come in contact with Edge is in my Windows VMs or remote servers and I want to download something directly in to the VM on to the server, or I accidentally click on some Microsoft crap that opens the default browser. My annoyances:

• * It eventually forgets what my open tabs were from the last session. It does this frequently. I have tabs in Safari I've had open for for years, and that's the way I like. You fail Microsoft.
• * Configuring Edge is a headache. Default choices are shit and changing that involves going through too many steps.
• * Whatever the browser core, for decades now, Microsoft defaults to a busy noisy page. Their product manager must have been introduced to browsers in the late '90s when everybody had to have a portal. Most of my Windows access is to remote servers, so the last thing I want is it opening an animated page that kills the performance of the remote connection. Sure, it's not as bad as it was 20 years ago when latency was higher and bandwidth was lower, but still annoys the shit of me. Just give me a minimal page by default.
• * It's not even an independent product anymore. Using it means supporting Google. No thanks.

They couldn't make their browser successful when they developed it in-house. They had to make and cuts opted to wrap somebody else's browser, and even now, that can't make that successful.

Good luck getting FFmpeg running on a console from 1996!

Actually, at Demuxed 2025 recently, somebody did make a presentation detailing how they got a Sega Genesis (Megadrive) to stream and playback video. What an awesome hack!! Itâ(TM)s here: https://github.com/joeyparrish...

FFmpeg, written primarily in assembly language

Not even close. 90% C, 8% assembly, at least according to GitHub.

The Air Passenger Duty tax is significantly more expensive: https://www.gov.uk/government/...

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Rust has a complex and powerful algebraic type system. If used wisely, it can make invalid states impossible to express in the language. Part of the power is the capacity to use the language to make various classes of bugs hard, if not impossible to write. It's not a perfect fit for everything, but I think the 'Rust experiment' is going to happen and we'll see if memory safety and algebraic types are an overall improvement.

If society doesnâ(TM)t want this, they should pay more taxes and hire more police and spend on other schemes to provide more opportunities and education, etc. Doing it through the back door and hiding the cost in the price of your groceries is piecemeal and less effective.

I think you misunderstood my point. It was not to rely on a file extension, but the same definitions used by file(1)