Well, it matters *some*. Your time to break even on your solar farm investment gets longer the more energy you throw away. So the argument that storage is inefficient doesn't make solar *impractical* the way it would for something where you were paying for the feed stock, but you make *more* money with a more efficient battery.

Your mind leaps to the USSR, but in fact there are plenty of US-based cooperatives currently in operation, like Land O Lakes, Publix, and King Arthur Flour. Coops are particularly common in engineering, with its highly-paid and highly-educated workforce, e.g., CDM Smith (civil) or ESA (environmental).

The most common type of cooperative is the farmer-owned agricultural cooperatives (Sunkist), but there are worker owned cooperatives (Bob's Red [!!!] Mill), small business cooperatives (Ace Hardware) and even consumer owned cooperatives (Recreational Equipment Incorporated).

These are all highly successful *free market enterprises*, they just have some alternative ownership scheme.

Sadly, while Zuck appears to be a sociopath, he does not appear to be a dummy. He parlayed a modest contract programming job into one of the largest private fortunes on the planet, something that wouldn't have happened if wasn't a smart but unprincipled prick.

What we should be reaching for is a *slow* rate of change, one that human societies and natural ecosystems can adapt to smoothly. It doesn't matter if the climate ends up where it was five million years ago ... if that change takes a million years. But if it takes a *thousand* years, that's 1000x the rate of change. That thousand-fold difference makes a huge economic and environmental difference.

When I was a kid we had native brook trout in the streams near my house, but they were threatened by pollution. Then came the Clean Water Act of 1972, and now the rivers are clean enough for brookies, but the change came too late, the population was wiped out. You can't restock them because over the course of the last fifty years climate changed, and summer temperatures routinely reach levels these fish can't survive. If the *same* change from the last fifty years had occurred over fifty *thousand* years -- a rate that falls within the ranges of rates we see in the natural paleoclimate change record -- that's a very different situation. The trout wouldn't be extinct here in *my* lifetime, and in the year 52021 the range of the species would be about the same size, just a little north-shifted. Here at the southern end of that range we might even see heat tolerant subspecies emerge.

The brook trout is just a charismatic but economically unimportant species, but the same *kinds* of stresses are happening to ecosystems wholesale, and affect jobs that are tied to those ecosystems. Habitats are being overtaken by species that are disruption-tolerant -- poison ivy and oak, bark beetle, and fungi like coffee leaf rust. Now if the disease-free range of coffee were to shrink over a thousand years, nobody would notice; the price of coffee would gradually rise until it became something people drank in historical novels. But if that happens in *a hundred years*, coffee farmers lose their livelihood, economies are destabilized, and consumers experience loss.

Sure, simulating an *endless* volcano eruption will lower the amount of solar energy retained by the Earth, but the effect of that is not remotely like reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere. It'd reduce the amount of and spectrum of solar energy *received* by the Earth's surface, rather than reducing the amount of reflected energy *radiated* by the surface.

Don't you think that plants and microorganisms will notice they're getting light? Plants in a habitat that are better adapted to the new artificial conditions will outcompete plants that are adapted to natural conditions. Yes, on an *evolutionary* timescale it doesn't matter, but none of us live on an evolutionary timescale, and we could well spend the rest of *our* lives on a world that is transforming into a planet of weeds . Something like you suggest will reduce certain physical effects of global warming like sea level rise and glacier retreat, at the expense of disrupting every single habitat on Earth.

You're never perfectly confident in your data, if you could be then hard decisions would *always* be better off delayed.

I have no problem admitting the possible existence of unknown facts. I just have difficulty with the dismissal of known facts. Even *negative* facts -- the proverbial dog that didn't bark -- still have to be accounted for.

Ipsos did a poll last summer that found that 29% of Americans believe the Earth is visited by aliens, and roughly a quarter believed there's a crashed UFO being hidden in Area 51. It's fair to assume that virtually *all* of that crowd thing the Navy UAP videos are alien craft, and that's a lot more then "almost nobody".

Even educated people I know are saying, after watching the recent 60 Minutes segment on UAPs, that it's starting to seem plausible that we're dealing with aliens. I watched the segment too, and the thing that struck me is how *uncritical* the reporters were of the accounts. That's hard to do, given the high regard in which veteran combat aviators are held by the public, and from a professional expertise standpoint that regard is justified, but this is really something outside the realm of professional expertise, that's the whole point. This is where you want experts in fields like photogrammetry.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of fundamental stuff we don't know about, but I *also* think when we learn that new stuff it won't invalidate most of what we know in the contexts we have studied those things -- just like classical mechanics is still perfectly useful.

And along exactly those lines one detail in the reports coming from the Navy leaps out at me: the UAP is reported to move at high hypersonic speeds -- by "high" I mean above Mach 70. The "thing" (assuming it is a thing) may have been exotic matter and have exotic propulsion, but the air it's moving through is still plain old air, and there ought to have been an observable trail of superheated, ionized gas.

This leads to me to think that the way the scenarios were strung together doesn't fit any explanation of a single "thing" tying togther all the observations made. If you told me someone set of a nuclear bomb over the Eiffel Tower, and I look out the window and see the Tower still standing, I'm pretty sure that didn't happen because it should have left observable consequences. It doesn't mean you didn't see something, but whatever it was, wasn't a bomb.

I agree. It really is notable that he's been able to bring outside money in while still keeping control of a majority of voting shares; it almost never happens that way. If you can manage it though, and you don't act prejudicially toward minority shareholders, those shareholders don't have any basis for complaining; they got what they paid for, which is a minority stake.

I do think there is a legitimate political concern whether one individual should have so much power, but that is an question for Facebook's *users* to ask themselves.

The Salk Institute did some in vitro demonstrations a few years earlier, but Kariko really tackled the problem of delivering the vaccine in vivo. Moderna was founded in 2010 specifically to exploit her research research results. Biontech is a German company founded around the same time, around the research of Turkish researchers who were working on the idea of targeting cancer.

So it absolutely was an international effort, but there's no question Kariko was critical in making it happen.

You can't conjure a technology like this out of thin air just because you need it right away. It takes years and years. We got lucky; if COVID-19 came out in 2009 instead of 2019 we'd have been screwed. Just take a look at this paper from 2018:

[mRNA vaccines'] application has until recently been restricted by the instability and inefficient in vivo delivery of mRNA. Recent technological advances have now largely overcome these issues, and multiple mRNA vaccine platforms against infectious diseases and several types of cancer have demonstrated encouraging results...

.

In January 2020, Biontech and Moderna had been working on mRNA technology for years and the technology was just on the cusp of being ready for prime time. Moderna had its vaccine design ready literally hours after the virus's genome was published. There's no trial and error with this kind of vaccine, it's less like an immunological shotgun blast and more like a molecular sniper's bullet. Oxford and J&J's vaccine are both transgenic adenoviruses, another precisely engineered molecular biology attack.

The Trump administration deserves credit for expediting the approval of the clinical trials and issue an EUA immediately after the Phase III trials. Those things were blindingly obvious things to do, but you still have to give them credit because you can't take obviously right things for granted. But contrary to Trump's claims, he was not responsible for the quick development of the vaccines. The was the culmination of nearly thirty years of hard work. Katalin Kariko developed the idea back in 1990 and spent decades as a lowly adjunct professor pursuing it. If she does not win the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2021 the prize will be meaningless.

Whether it is perjury or not has nothing to do whether it is as statement given before the court and everything to do whether there is a legal obligation to be truthful in your statement, which there does not appear to be for DMCA takedowns. There's a curious asymmetry in the language describing the obligations of the parties giving a DMCA take down notice and parties filing counter-notices:

From 17 US Code 512, the party giving notice provides:

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

but the party giving a counter-notice provides:

A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.

Note the different wording. On the face of it, it appears the party giving notice commits perjury only if it falsely claims to be authorized by the owner, not if it makes other lies in its statement. The party filing a counter-notice commits perjury if it makes any false statements. I can't find any instances of anyone facing criminal charges for filing a false takedown. There are *civil* cases though claiming damages from fraudulent takedowns.

This law appears designed to protect the rich and only the rich. Anyone who is the victim of a crime can refer the crime to authorities, but seeking civil damages can take millions of dollars.

This is the same complaint my anti-vaxxer niece used to have about "our science" being suppressed.

Science has plenty crackpots -- biologists who believe in creationism for example, or geologists who believe the Noah's ark story is literal truth. They still get to be scientists and publish in real journals, but they face Sagan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence burden in any scientific forum. On social medial you get the crackpottery completely unfiltered.

Medicine is even worse. Every quack out there has gone to medical school and is a "certified doctor". The last administration took medical advice from a doctor who believed that gynecological illnesses are caused by demon sperm insemination. Are we to take that claim seriously because she was certified to practice by the Texas Board of Medicine? Of course not all quacks have that kind of dodgy background. Some quacks are genuinely accomplished in their field of specialization, but you would be ill-served to take the advice they dish out in the media.

Big tech has only one real bias: whatever maximizes profits.

Technology and media specialization wraps people in eyeball-trapping blankets of confirmation bias, so people with anti-trans, racist, or anti-science views are blissfully unaware how unpopular those views are. Even though trans people are one of the most widely reviled groups in the US, "wide" is relative -- polls show that fewer than 1/3 of public views the group negatively, and if you look at the most economically valuable media consumers (young adults), that figure is even smaller.

Tech companies are data driven. All things being equal they'd like to cater to everyone's views, but they can't hide the fact their vectoring both anti- and pro-trans views to the other side. They've got to offend one side or the other, and looking at the data they've decided they can better afford to piss of the anti-trans people. Now politics is a slightly different story; in politics it's the opinions of people over 60 who matter the most; in commerce it's people under 30.