Well, yeah, but those are still cities. Almost twice as many people live in parts of cities that are not "dense urban cores".

And the dense areas involve apartment complexes with hundreds or thousands of units and interior halls, so they're not delivering one package to the building; they're delivering a hundred. It wouldn't make sense to send drones for that.

But if you can handle the suburban sprawl with drones, that's a huge logistics win, because that's where all the time is spent — not by somebody going to an urban-core building and dropping a hundred packages in the mail room, but by somebody going to a hundred individual houses and dropping off a hundred packages one at a time.

You're not misreading it. It is individualized. Different cancers express different antigens, and the mRNA vaccine needs to construct something that expresses those same antigens to train the immune system to attack them.

The nice thing about mRNA, is that it is potentially relatively cheap to synthesize mRNA strands and replicate them. It won't be hundreds of dollars, but it won't be millions, either. Right now, I think it's hundreds of thousands per patient, but that will go down over time as they streamline the process of taking a sample of the tumor and determining an mRNA gene sequence that matches said cancer. And economies of scale on the equipment will also probably help.

It may also be the case that it becomes less individualized over time. At some point, we might reach the point where they have a bunch of pre-sequenced antigens that are all ready to go, and someone just keys in a list of antigens, and a piece of software spits out the mRNA sequence. At that point, it is still individualized, but with a much, much more streamlined process for generating it.

Note that I don't work in this field, so take all of this as the opinion of an educated layperson observer. :-)

And by that, you mean X is bad for our democracy because it is a for-profit corporation. Free speech and corporate fiscal sponsorship of that speech have been at odds since time immemorial. The problem is that the corporate sponsorship seems to be winning and the free speech seems to be losing, drowned out by the voices of those who have more money, more bots, etc.

About 20% of Democrats own firearms. So no, they won't. But implying that Democrats are going to be up in arms because they're somehow so fragile that the idea of people using firearms would cause them crippling pain is rage baiting. Please stop.

They are going to hear people who have not actually read any of the scientific papers tell what a bunch of people pushing an agenda on YouTube claim is the truth about COVID. FTFY.

Does anyone actually disagree with that?

What migrant crisis? You mean that immigrants initially may cost more than they contribute, but in the long term, contribute more than they cost? This is just an economics lesson and has zero to do with ICE rounding people up who are legally allowed to be here and who have harmed no one, terminating their right to be here, and deporting them, often to countries where they are then immediately imprisoned or killed, or to countries where they don't speak the language, or other fundamental human rights abuses. This has zero to do with the upsurge in underage pregnancies occurring in ICE detention because of illegally unsafe conditions. This has zero to do with deaths occurring in ICE detention because of illegally denying prisoners access to adequate medical care. And so on.

What you're missing is that the left doesn't object to deporting dangerous people. The left doesn't even object to deporting people en masse so long as they are granted their constitutional right to a fair hearing and due process. What the left objects to are gestapo tactics, illegally rounding college students on valid student visas in the middle of the night and deporting them on a bench warrant obtained under false pretense, locking people in cages at density that exceeds what any sane person would consider humane treatment, illegal discharge of firearms resulting in death of unarmed civilians, and any number of other criminal acts committed by ICE in their war on non-white people.

If you want to change policy, change policy. But change it above the board, through actions by Congress, and make those changes explicitly non-retroactive. Don't treat people like garbage. If you do that, the left won't have a problem with you. They might disagree with you, but they will not be offended by you. What offends the left is when the right shows disrespect and contempt for them. And they should be offended by that, because not respecting others is per se offensive.

They're going to dislike it because disrespecting people is a sin. They might not use the word "sin", but the moral argument is the same.

Do you think H1-B reduction is a left-right thing? It isn't. It's a corporate-sponsored-politicians versus everyone else thing. The voters on the left don't like H1-Bs, either. They just dislike them for different reasons than the right does. The right dislikes H1-Bs because they bring in more immigrants. The left dislikes H1-Bs because they trap immigrants in jobs and make transferring hard, which makes it possible for companies to mistreat them, not pay them a fair wage, etc. The only people who like them are the ones who are in the pockets of the companies that take advantage of them as a cost-reduction tool.

Not many people in the U.S. like communism. The problem comes from folks on the right painting everything they don't like as communist, and from painting socialism with the same brush. They are not the same. Socialism is a spectrum, with the moderate end wanting things like guaranteed medical care, K-12 schooling, TVA, police and fire protection, etc. and the extreme end wanting governments to buy all the big companies and give the money back to the people.

A lot of folks on the right paint even the moderate end as communism, which is an attitude that's far-removed from any reasoned analysis of objective reality. And they do this because blowhard politicians use the word "communism" as a shibboleth/dog whistle, along with words like "woke", "DEI", etc., deliberately distorting the meaning of words to score cheap political points. It's not the positions the right takes that offend the left. It is the massively distorted caricatures of the left's positions that the right has to use to scare people into voting for them.

I haven't seen a whole lot of truth coming out of X. I've mostly seen a lot of people who think they're speaking the truth, whose entire premise could be torn down by a mountain of studies proving conclusively that they're wrong, were it not for the fact that the people arguing the other side are also arguing from ignorance. To be fair, this pretty much describes political discussions on the Internet in general, not just X.

This is kind of the nature of things. The older people get, the more set in their ways they become, and the less they like change. So basically, people become more conservative as they age, and less tolerant of things they don't understand. They also accumulate more wealth and favor keeping more of it (fiscal conservatism). And so on. This is generally a well-understood phenomenon.

If you mean that ragebait baits younger people more, you're probably correct. Older people at some point realize that they're not going to change anyone's opinion when it is so thoroughly unhinged in its presentation, because that means they aren't presenting an opinion because of careful thought, but rather because of conditioning. So it's usually a waste of time to reply at all.

IMO, rage baiting and echo chambers are basically two sides of the same coin. It's either deliberately provoking them to condition them to attack anything that disagrees with their opinions or it is regurgitating opinions. If anything, rage baiting is the fire that tests the echo chamber. It fuels it. It creates it.

I'm okay with engaging with challenging opinions. This is not the same thing as rage baiting. A challenging opinion requires actually giving reasons for that opinion, supporting evidence, etc. Rage baiting is assuming the contrary without supporting evidence, acting as though everyone knows that it is true, and accusing people of being stupid if they disagree. The two have very little in common. It's the difference between arguing with an intellectual and arguing with a deliberate troll. One can change opinions, or at least refine them. The other is just a bunch of talking heads shouting at each other.

What if there are no politicians that we don't hate infinitely?

It's a statistically correct statement, at least post-1973. When asked what the main consideration for joining was, money was the top answer, and IIRC more than half gave that answer. The military is a steady job and provides other financial-adjacent benefits, such as the G.I. Bill paying for higher education. And when there aren't so many steady jobs out there, that makes it more compelling.

Not saying it's the only reason, just that it is one of the larger influencing factors in how well the military is able to recruit.

I mean sure, I might die in a pointless war in Iran that wouldn't have been necessary if the same guy who started this war hadn't ripped up the nuclear agreements we had previously with Iran the last time he was in charge, but think about getting to play a video game for FOUR WHOLE DAYS!

But in all seriousness, the main motivation for joining the military continues to be money. So I guess if they were planning to play GTA anyway, that's like extra free money, so maybe it might tip the balance for a few people... but I doubt it will rise above the noise floor. Politics, active wars, etc. also don't usually rise above the noise floor, surprisingly.

The only big factor in recruiting is the economy. When the job market is good, recruiting drops. When the job market stinks, recruiting increases. So if they really want to increase military recruiting, all they have to do is tank the job market further, and it will happen naturally.

Even on a phone, if you're playing an album, you're playing an album. You search for it once, not over and over. A 15% increase in fatalities, if this isn't just noise that will regress to the mean after more data comes in, would point to people being distracted for an extended period of time... you know... by actually listening to the music and paying attention to that instead of to their driving.

Faces are way less unique than fingerprints unless you are using a camera with such high resolution that you can see the individual hairs, pimples, birthmarks, moles, freckles, and other tiny details, and even then, only if you are analyzing it at that level of detail after using fixed points to unwrap the image into a flat UV map for comparison.

Statistically, no two people have the same fingerprint, so it's just a matter of comparing enough points to achieve the desired confidence level. At a shape/structural level, lots of pairs of unrelated people have faces that are too much alike to reliably detect the difference, likely because there's not as much genetic diversity as one might assume.

Compounding this is the fact that a fingerprint is detected by being pressed flat against something, whereas face shape has to be recognized from arbitrary angles.

Any approach that does not stitch together multiple camera angles to get a complete image of the entire face and then unwrap it into a high-res UV map and then use the result as a secondary filter pass after structural comparison is doomed to fail frequently when presented with an adequately large number of people. There are simply too many people that look far too much alike even within a fairly small geographical area like a state or small country, much less the entire world.

Accuracy is the wrong number to give. Accuracy is right answers over wrong answers, without any info about whether they were false positives or false negatives. What you really want is a relationship between the number of false positives and by total positives, or perhaps the relationship between false positives and total negatives. The latter is called specificity (true_negatives/ (true_negatives + false_positives)), and gives you an indication of how likely people are to be falsely accused. This needs to be incredibly low.

But the better number would be false_positives / (false_positives + true_positives), because that would tell you how likely it is that someone flagged is really the person in question.

Either way, for this purpose, the only rational way to use the tech is to watch flagged people more carefully. Trying to escort them out of the store is going to be a disaster of false positives, for all the reasons previously mentioned (look-alikes, limitations caused by camera perspective, etc.).

and ruling somehow only applied to some carriers. So now the supreme court official says different rules applies to different carriers.

False. It is still indefensible, because it is a problem of Apple's own creation. If Apple wants to charge for it, that's fine, but only if they also allow their devices to download apps from somewhere other than Apple.

For in-app purchases of content, it already works that way, of course, but I'm assuming this isn't what is being discussed here, because it would be particularly heinous of Apple to want to charge up to a 15% tax on content that it had no involvement either in payment for or distribution of.

Sounds like they're going for the Amazon model — sell at a loss for years until the competition withers, then stop selling at a loss.

Ground effect requires being at lower altitude than the wingspan. Unless that plane is a quarter mile wide, ground effect doesn't play into it. And if it is a quarter mile wide, you'd better hope it doesn't fly into any populated areas. :-)

As others have pointed out, gaining altitude requires some extra energy, but over the duration of the flight, you use less fuel because the air is thinner, resulting in less drag. (This assumes that your propulsion doesn't lose efficiency to match, of course, but I think you can compensate for some of that by changing the blade angle. This is way outside my area of expertise, though, so I'm not entirely certain about any of this.)

One reason not to go to higher altitudes is that it has a range of only 125 miles. The hybrid drivetrain (500-mile range) doesn't exist yet, I don't think. With such a short range, you'd use up half your battery power on the ascent, so the benefit from more efficient travel at altitude would be lost, and you'd likely end up with even lower total mileage.

But 2,000 feet still seems awfully low to me by a factor of four or five. Dunno.

Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.