You're buying something of value and you might be underestimating or overestimating the value of that thing but you're still getting the thing. Specifically you are buying ownership in a company.

That's not gambling. You don't get paid based on the outcome. You get paid based on the relative value of the company.

Now if that system isn't working very well for you no shit, we have been deregulating markets for the last 50 years what the fuck did you expect? But that's not a problem with the underlining system that's you refusing to do the maintenance the system needs to function properly. If you stop changing your car is oil it's going to break down.

Gambling is when you are paid based entirely on whether a predetermined outcome happens or not. That is definitely what gambling is. You do not own anything. So you only get paid if the event happens. And there is a specific event that has to happen for you to be paid. That is gambling.

Someone has already pointed this out, but it bears repeating. For that to actually be true, they would need to cost more from the budget than they add to it through both direct taxation, and the tax revenue generated through the effects of their labor and other economic activity on the GDP. Virtually all studies show that they're actually a net benefit there.

Perhaps for the LEGAL migrants...but not for the ILLEGAL migrants...they are a burden on the US taxpayer.....they're usually paid under the table, off the books and are the ones clogging up our ERs and classrooms.

Even without the context we all know who I'm talking about.

I bring it up because dear God this administration is corrupt and in light of the subject of this comment what the hell was anyone expecting?

I think the real problem is about 25% of the population of any given country or dyed in the wool assholes.

From there all you have to do is push people to enough desperation that their brain stop working right. People under enormous amounts of pressure don't suddenly get better or smarter. They make bad decisions and they make more of them.

Like believing a famous pedophile who bankrupts everything he touches is somehow going to reduce the cost of groceries. Somebody who can think straight knows better than that.

It could also just be money laundering. I've seen several of these absolutely enormous thefts and they're so large that it's basically impossible to get away with it. You can't move hundreds of millions let alone billions of dollars like this and not have it be readily traceable.

If they catch the guys who did this then yeah we will know but if they haven't caught these guys in a few months then it's either North Korea or one of the other nation states or it's just money laundering. Honestly the money laundering could easily involve nation states like Russia or Iran or North Korea.

But,, but, but.....I thought "Data Centers == Bad"...?

Ellison's Paramount Skydance Warner Bros Discovery - and movies/TV can be very subtle in pushing a narrative or shaping public opinion.

As opposed to all the subtle (and lately not so subtle) narratives the current folks have been pushing for years now?

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

You go to the right schools and you meet the right people and you get to pretty much do whatever you want. And you get into the schools because your parents get you there and their parents got them there.

If the working class had half the solidarity of the Epstein class we would live in a Utopia

It's not a product it's capital. It's not something you sell the people it's something you use to make things.

It's a labor saving device. Automation. In other words a job killer.

There are studies that clearly indicate that factory automation is responsible for approximately 70% of the Lost middle class jobs since the 1980s.

We have been automating away high paying jobs as fast as we can for decades and AI is just another extension of that.

The Epstein class doesn't want to sell you products. They don't want to have you as an employee. They look back at the Kings and emperors of old and say, that should be me. I shouldn't be dependent on consumers and employees.

They are planning a new world and you're not part of it.

And because nobody gets it unless I say it this way, like George Carlin said it's a big club and you ain't in it.

For some reason one Carlin says that everybody understands but when I explain it it's right out the window.

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

lol- are you trying to mansplain what I've already told you to me?

You truly are hilarious.
The Nile Delta, also, is not a desert.
Because the amount of groundwater there prevents it from being arid. The amount that falls from the sky is utterly irrelevant.
Tulare basin is the same. Little water may fall from the sky, but it has an absolute abundance of ground water.
Lush marshlands are not deserts.
You are fixated on this idea that a desert is defined by a certain amount of rain that falls from the sky, and that's quite simply wrong.

Your point, was that they are "trying to grow pistachios in the friggin desert", as if the water to do so were being pumped in from some faraway place.
As if the Tulare Basin didn't have abundant water.

As I said, they don't grow them in the fucking Mojave.
You said a thing that was wrong, and you're trying to defend it to the death, and it makes you look ridiculous.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.

IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.

(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)

Yep. Back in the early days of Slashdot, when helium usage would come up, I'd grumble about how wasteful the medical industry was with helium.

It still uses a lot, but it's nowhere near as wasteful as it was before.

Yes, like the Nile Delta, water flowed in from wet regions further away to the desert and near-desert lowlands, and humans began using it for agriculture. Around the Tulare Basin, there's dozens of inches per year in the mountains due to orographic uplift, but only half a dozen in the lowlands. The problem is that farmers first consumed the water from the mountain-fed local rivers and are now consuming water shipped in from as far away as the Oregon border and drawing down groundwater much faster than it's being replenished. At the same time, the mountain rivers are becoming less reliable as climate change leads to snowpack melting earlier. As it stands today, it is not sustainable. More water is being used than is long-term available.

Indeed, I have no clue what you think you were trying to prove with this link:

The conversion of this water system to a lake-and-slough wetland to agriculture began in the mid-1800s when European settlers began to build canals and diversion structures to irrigate their crops. This early irrigation infrastructure upstream from Tulare Lake slowly cut off the lake from its source waters, shrinking the lake's footprint. By 1899 - less than 50 years after irrigation was initiated - Tulare Lake went dry for the first time in history.

They were overdrawing the rivers *even before the 20th century*.