If people are saving and investing, companies have more funding to put into capital equipment. Let's apply this to your thought experiment:

In one country, people might spend their money, enjoying more consumer goods, but end up all relying on a single overworked farmer to feed them all. In the other, people might invest their money, some of which goes into developing a better combine harvester, so their lone farmer has better equipment to make him more productive.

In the case of Japan, this manifests itself as a heavy investment in robotics, to make up for the lack of able-bodied young people.

Alright, I'm convinced: I've just donated to the FSF for the first time.

Radio receiver technology has changed dramatically over the last few decades: modern receivers have far lower noise and wider bandwidth than their predecessors. But this doesn't necessarily contradict your point, because it's mostly about development of the receiver electronics and the precise shape of the feed horn, neither of which substantially changes the weight of the complete package.

However, while the performance of cryogenically-cooled receivers has improved, the performance of uncooled receivers has improved faster, so the performance gap has shrunk, and an uncooled receiver is now a reasonable choice for a telescope. The new ASKAP telescope featured in a more recent Slashdot story, for example, uses uncooled receivers. I've seen the ASKAP receiver packages; I'd guess they weigh about half a tonne.

You're correct that a maser is required to provide a stable clock signal, but this doesn't have to be in the receiver package unless you're working at very high frequencies, which Arecibo doesn't. You can stick it in an adjacent building, and run a cable from it.

All that aside, 900 tons is *ludicrously* heavy for a radio receiver, regardless of the technology involved. The heaviest focus cabin I've seen, with multiple receiver packages, each with its own cryogenic cooling system, was no more than 20 tonnes. I suspect the correct answer is given by this poster who says that the heavy part is the radio *transmitter*. Without that, it can't operate as a radar system, but it's still a perfectly functional radio telescope.

I'll put in a plug here for PC Part Picker. (I'm not affiliated with it: I've just used it and found it useful.)

Use the "System Builder" link. Add a motherboard (from a list of 3294 options). Choose to add RAM ... and it'll only show you compatible RAM. It'll even handle (though I haven't thoroughly tested this) obscure compatibility issues like whether there's room for a particular aftermarket CPU cooler within the case you've selected.

That's actually a really good idea. In general, material can escape not just by passing the Lagrange-1 point, but by passing in any direction beyond the boundaries of its Roche lobe. (The L1 point is the inner apex of the Roche lobe.)

To actually (fail to) answer your question: I don't know whether it's significant it is in this case, but this process - Roche lobe overflow - is important for the loss of mass from stars in binary systems.

Most of the gas in the universe is made up of light molecules like hydrogen and helium. A small planet like Earth doesn't have enough gravity to hang on to them: our atmosphere contains only heavier molecules like nitrogen and oxygen. A larger planet has enough gravity to accumulate a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, becoming a gas giant. In fact, hydrogen and helium are so common in early-stage stellar systems that this is more-or-less inevitable.

So, the authors reason, this planet probably formed as a gas giant, then had its atmosphere stripped away somehow. It's possible, as you suggest, that it never was a gas giant ... but that would require some very strange conditions in its formation, so they're treating that as less likely at this point.

(Consider an analogy. You find a chicken skeleton. You have, in a sense, zero evidence that it was once a chicken ... but it's still a reasonable working assumption.)

All other planets we've seen thus far have been either small, rocky planets (like Earth) or big, gaseous planets (like Jupiter). Our theories about how planets form are built around this observation: big planets, we think, have a strong enough gravitational field to hang on to a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, whereas smaller planets can only hang on to heavier gases like nitrogen, which are much less abundant, so small planets end up with only a thin atmosphere around their rocky core.

This is the first big, rocky planet we've seen, so it's an anomaly. Why didn't it collect a big, thick hydrogen atmosphere? Did it form in a region in which hydrogen was particularly scarce? Or did it form with a thick atmosphere, but have it stripped away by a powerful stellar wind?

If we saw a small, gaseous planet, that would also be an anomaly - but small planets are much harder to detect, so I don't expect such a discovery in the near future.

Two points. Firstly, the Tuskegee experiment did withhold treatment for syphilis, but it didn't infect anyone. Still bad, but there's a vast ethical gulf between what they actually did and what you're alleging.

Secondly, the Tuskegee experiment withheld treatment for syphilitic black *men*: its formal title was "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male". For some reason, when it's brought up, people emphasize the racism, but completely ignore the sexism.

This is a tricky problem. On the one hand, dressing up as a Star Wars character is awesome, and particularly in-theme on May the Fourth. On the other hand, a Stormtrooper costume is armor and a gun, which can be particularly scary to people who aren't familiar with Star Wars (of which there are a few).

The 501st Legion is a club of people who like dressing up as Stormtroopers, and they've spent a lot of time doing it, and figuring out what can go wrong and how to stop it. Their Trooper Survival Guide is here. One of their rules is "Never troop alone": anyone dressed as a Stormtrooper should be accompanied by a handler whose job it is to explain to bystanders that it's just a costume, make sure the trooper doesn't accidentally walk over any children, help the trooper if they fall over with heatstroke, etc. The costume restricts the wearer's hearing and vision, so having an unencumbered handler is really important for dealing with problems like this.

The police in this case are at fault, I think, for overreacting to someone with a toy gun. But the business is also at fault for not having a handler: they failed to follow basic safety procedures that have been refined by decades of trooping experience.

Yes - sorry, I omitted this for simplicity.

I'll grant you that the baseline number of non-COVID deaths may be increased or decreased due to the pandemic, which makes my assumption invalid. But there's limited scope for the former, because the attributed COVID deaths are certainly true COVID deaths, and only a small fraction (~25%) of the increase is unattributed. And if we take the latter to the extreme - if we assume that every single death during the outbreak is due to COVID - then the COVID death rate is still only ~2-3x the attributed figures, which doesn't support the "certainly far far worse" claim by the GP.

So I think my point stands.

Two problems with this. Firstly, we have numbers for the UK which contradict this. See this (sourced) plot. The red line shows attributed COVID-19 deaths, the black line shows total deaths this year, and the grey dashed line shows the baseline for total deaths (averaged over the last 5 years). If every COVID-19 death was being properly attributed, the red line would match the difference between the black line and the grey line. It doesn't, quite, but it indicates that something like 50-75% of COVID-19 deaths are being correctly attributed - so the real situation certainly isn't "certainly far far worse" as you've claimed.

Secondly, why have you singled out the UK here? Do you have any reason to believe it to underestimate the COVID-19 death rate compared to any of the other countries on this list?

(For background, I would expect a Slashdotter to see disproportionate criticism of the UK from the combination of two effects: it has an English-language press, so Slashdotters will disproportionately hear about it, and it has a right-wing government and a predominantly left-wing press, so that coverage will be predominantly critical.)

You haven't followed this logic all the way through. To determine whether the GP is correct, you need to check whether the death rate has increased by more or less than a factor of two. If it's less than a factor of two, then deaths due to the pandemic (from all causes, including people dying of unrelated causes because the hospitals are too busy) are fewer than the background deaths we expect anyway.

On this point, the mainstream media are essentially useless, but I was able to find a (sourced) plot here, showing the all-causes death rate for England/Wales (presumably NHS data) for 2020 compared to a 5-year average. The increase is about 80%, which supports the GP's statement that the background death rate kills more people than the pandemic - but the latest data are from just before the pandemic death rate peaked, so it's possible that it might just edge over 100% when all the data are available. Either way, it's pretty close.

It's funny how, ten years ago, Venezuela was an exemplar of perfect socialist society, with the means of production benevolently managed by a central government ... and now, somehow, the factories and companies are all still owned by the evil rich people. The government has been patient with them, but now they deserve no further forbearance ... this starts to sound familiar.

My model for this is that the government ran out of rich people from whom to extract wealth - and to distract from the resulting economic disaster, started making up the stories you've related, about the Evil Rich People running the country, tax evasion, foreign-backed coup attempts, etc. My model, like yours, explains the existence of the sort of rhetoric that's in your post - but it has the advantage of also explaining why socialists were so enthusiastic about Venezuela ten years ago.

Germany didn't outright ban emigration until 1941. Venezuela hasn't, yet. But both imposed punitive taxes on anyone leaving, blamed the emigrants for everything wrong with the economy, etc. Note also the antisemitism in both cases.

I think it's difficult to take an apartment out of the country in any case.

In 2008, I went (out of curiosity) to a meeting of the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network in Sydney. They called one another "comrade", and praised the "revolutionary" government for bringing "socialism" to the country. Those words are all direct quotes. One topic raised in the meeting was a new policy in which new recruits to the army were required to sing songs extolling the virtues of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (*not* the country as a whole). Attendees of the meeting were in favour of this move.

In 2013, Jeremy Corbyn - the explicitly socialist leader of the Labour Party in the UK - said that "[Venezuela ...] showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things: it's called socialism; it's called social justice". You can see more praise for Venezuela from the extreme socialist Left.

In 2020, cusco on Slashdot said that the economy of Venezuela is "overwhelmingly capitalist". I've heard similar sentiments from other far-leftists, but only in the last year.

This is the pattern. A country has a socialist revolution, and they take money from the rich to give to the poor. The far left around the world talk about how marvellous it is that the socialist government is making things better for the poor - and usually it does, at first. But then the rich run out of money and flee the country with what they have left, and the poor are accustomed to their improved standard of living so the military cracks down on them, and you're in the socialist dictatorship phase. And as the economy collapses, the same people who praised it as an examplar of socialist superiority will talk about how capitalist it was all along - clearly, not real socialism.

Pay attention to the rhetoric. When they say that wealth is being, to quote the parent poster, "illegally exported by the corrupt ruling class", and start to seize it, you may be too late to leave with your possessions, but you can probably still leave with your life. The worst example, of course, is socialism in Germany, where the Nazi government imposed the Reich Flight Tax on their own fleeing "corrupt ruling class", by which they meant Jews. But of course, as the rhetoric goes, in retrospect that wasn't real socialism.