What planet are you on where people care more about the Internet than oil? The planet of your mom's basement?

In case you haven't noticed, Iran has already cut off its citizens from the Internet. Threatening to cut them off is like threatening to cut off cruise ships from Iowa.

Bermuda is a great example of water catchment systems done right - every home has water catchment and collection, by necessity.

Interesting, but reductive. Our whole society is built on shared delusions. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, grind down the world and strain it through the finest sieve and try to find a grain of capitalism, molecule of law, an atom of justice, a quantum of mercy, an iota of love. Yet we believe in shared fictions to make our entire existence bearable, to make them mean anything. Believing in the supernatural and higher powers is part of the same inextricable human instinct for belief.

In fact, psychosis itself is the result of natural variation in a population that must be calibrated to produce enough belief to keep human society going. Just as obsession is the result of natural variation in a population that must be calibrated to produce enough drive to keep society going.

And since these things aren't going anywhere - the rate of schizophrenia is about 1% in the general population - we must carefully regulate the things we know exacerbate or trigger psychosis, just like with anything else, like cannabis in children.

It's not gone. Clearly you have never actually used it, or you would know that. Nice troll.

Ah yes, the famous Watergate-gate.

I'm not sure which station you saw this at, but none of the stations I've been to, and I've been to most of them along the Northeast Corridor mentioned in the article, as well as elsewhere around the country, have a difference in height between the train and the platform. What you experienced sounds very rare.

I agree with you, becoming more like the United States in every way would not make Europe better. There are many things I would not want to imitate, like strip malls, Applebee's, and completely privatized healthcare.

That said there are many things we could learn from the United States, especially around stimulating growth and innovation. Sweden since the 1990s is a great example how you can liberalize your markets, loosen regulations, spur innovation, and reduce tax burden all without completely blowing up your welfare state. Other countries could learn from how to make their economies more competitive without losing all the social benefits they hold dear.

Not all RBC-size particles are created the same. RBCs, for example, biodegrade in a few hours. Plastics don't biodegrade for hundreds of years.

The material here is SrAl2O4:Eu2+,Dy3+ (SA) coated with H3PO4 to prevent hydrolysis and biodegradation. So it's a metal compound, not a plastic. The core compound is well-studied and biologically inert, and the phosphorus is very common in cells. The core compound is inert, sort of like a fine dust.

By contrast, the concern with microplastics is that they can mimic various endocrine compounds (since plastics are organic) and cause endocrine disruption over the long term.

Both types of particles might cause low-level inflammation if they build up, because they're hard to naturally clear, but the metal compound will not interact with the body, whereas microplastics can interact with the body in various unpredictable ways.

Obviously we won't know any health effects until these are much better studied, but we also can't lump all micrometer-sized particles together - these clearly behave differently than microplastics.

We can ask them - far more Europeans migrate to the USA than Americans to Europe. I know, because I was one of them. Don't base your idea of living in Europe on your one-week vacation to Paris or Milan, or on what you read from people with an agenda. Some things back home are better, many things are worse.

Literally none of the things he mentioned in his post are accurate. I wrote a more detailed reply above, but - don't believe everything you read on the internet, folks!

Ironic that you criticize historians for bringing up inconvenient truths when you bring up all falsehoods:

1) The distance from Egypt to Canaan is ~250 miles. No human could walk that in 2 days. Yes, Exodus is not historical, but your take on it is even falser.
2) We have detailed records of the Continental Army. Almost all soldiers were small farmers, laborers, and tradesmen.
3) The colonists were deeply engaged. Although 20-30% were neutral or loyalist (some sources suggest 1/3 loyalist, 1/3 neutral, 1/3 patriot), there were widespread boycotts, riots, and local militias, especially in New England, and the war was hotly debated.
4) Volunteers turned out in huge numbers. Early battles such as Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill were fought almost entirely by volunteer militias who were almost completely unpaid, or only symbolically paid. As the war dragged on, recruitment waned and pay became more consistent but there were never any drafts until 1777.
5) The volunteer army was sometimes ineffective (such as at Camden), but they were effective from the start at guerilla warfare, and later in the war, especially Valley Forge, they became a highly effective force in formal engagements, winning victories such as Saratoga and Yorktown.
6) The Continental Army never employed paid mercenaries, only irregularly paid volunteers fighting for their ideological beliefs. Only the British side employed mercenaries, such as the Hessians.

Overall, you have no business talking about truth one way or the other given how completely you avoided it right now.

I vividly remember a CS homework assignment back in college where we had to get a word frequency table for a corpus to try to identify authorship. We had to do it in Java. I sanity-checked my work before I started by doing a tiny shell one-liner (something like tr '...some punctuation regex...' '\n' | sort | uniq -c). The Java program was maybe 50-100 lines and ran ten times slower. I learned a lesson all right, not necessarily the intended one, but one which was useful in my computing career.

It will be the end of chrome as a product. Granted, smart people moved off that shit years ago.

As Heinlein said, "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."

Nothing but a truly massive fine will stop them picking and choosing which laws to obey. A billion is a drop in the bucket, the cost of doing business. A hundred billion, maybe they'll pay a bit more attention.