Interesting point! I did not know that was the origin of their zone oddness. Thanks for that information.

Lots of other places drift west. Like lots of islands that are in the wrong zone for no real good reason. Probably silly reasons like past (or current) country ownership.

Stupid it may be, but there are a lot of places in the world that already do that and are effectively already going permanent DST. In fact, some of these places then also do DST again, making double DST. Don't believe me? Well, let's look at a time zone map:

Time zone map
Places that do DST

Consider the US state of Alaska. It is nominally in time zones -10 and -11 (check the water north and south of the state). But for some reason, the whole state is in -9. And for some reason, despite their high latitude, they also do DST. I guess they have so much, or so little, sun that it doesn't really matter if their clocks align to it, but then why change twice a year?

But a sparsely populated place not very interesting? Then consider China. Despite being 4 time zones wide, the whole country is in a single time zone (+8). The western border of China is in effectively triple permanent DST. Must be annoying to have solar noon at 3 in the afternoon. At least they don't do DST, through, and a lot of China's population is on its eastern side, which is in the right time zone for its longitude.

But maybe an authoritarian dictatorship isn't a great example. Then turn your eyes to France and Spain. They are effectively south of the UK and effectively in the GMT (+0) time zone entirely. But for some reason, they choose to be in the +1 timezone, giving them permanent DST. Then they also do DST in the summer, making it effectively double DST.

Basically, a lot of time zones "drift" to the west. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, some reasonable, some perhaps less so (the cynical part of me thinks it is older leaders trying to get younger people to wake up earlier and stop sleeping in, though it is actually hard to assign that much forethought to country leaders).

Interestingly, if you look at the DST map linked above, it is clearly just a European and US concept. Not to get too political, but I expected the non-thinking, white-things-are-bad, extreme TDS sufferers to loudly call for an end to DST now that Trump supported it so strongly, but so far that doesn't seem to have happened.

"For all they keep doing, the one thing they can't seem to do is make a checkbox to stop being harassed about updates."

You literally post this on every article about Firefox. Aren't you tired yet? I have replied numerous times that they are *NEVER* going to do that. And then I pointed you to using policies, which will disable updates.

So... what you're saying is that you are tired of seeing the same pointless message again and again over something that will never be changed? This has to be the most unintentionally ironic post I've ever seen!

Not disputing your points, but JPEG2000 is used pretty extensively in the remote sensing world (think overhead satellite imagery from companies like Maxar [was Worldview]). These images are often huge (think GB+), benefit well from the compression and especially the inherent res levels J2K provides. It is a common compression format in NITF formatted imagery files. A niche area to be sure, but it is used.

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

DST works by tricking people to wake up and get to their daily activities an hour earlier than they normally would. And it is sold as "giving" people an hour extra in the evening. They could do that without changing their clocks by just waking up at 5 instead of 6 and working 7-4 instead of 8-5, but most people don't want to wake up earlier. So we use DST to trick them into doing it.

Doing DST as a whole society also helps for people who don't have flexible hours for their daytime activities.

But i realized a while ago that the twice a year time change is the PRIMARY reason why DST even works. Because without the constant change, people would just adapt to the new timezone. Daily activities (like school and work) would shift to starting an hour later. Lunch would start being eaten from 1-2 instead of 12-1, as the new time would be when the sun is at its highest. Dinner would be 6-7 instead of 5-6, because that is closer to when the sun is setting. It would take several years, but eventually, society would shift its schedule to closer match the sun. And the way that DST "tricks" people into getting up an hour earlier would stop.

btw, your preference (and mine) for year standard time is the way most of the world works. Gray countries in that map do not do DST. It's really only US, Canada, Europe and a few other places. And I'll never understand DST in Alaska, which is already entirely in the wrong time zone.

The history of protein guidelines is a story of institutional convenience overriding biological reality.

It started deeply flawed (1970sâ"1980s)

1. Global standards were built on short-term nitrogen balance studies. They assumed that if a subject stopped excreting nitrogen, their body was stable. In reality, at low protein intakes (0.57 g/kg), the human body enters a survival shutdown. It ceases skin cell renewal, down-regulates muscle synthesis, and wastes lean tissue to make do with insufficient protein.

Then they Ignored the warnings (1980sâ"2000s)

2. Dr. Nevin Scrimshaw ran long-term studies proving that men fed these "safe" baselines suffered progressive lean tissue loss and elevated liver enzymes. The committees knew this, but ignored the data. Acknowledging it meant admitting that their mathematical framework for the Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) was fundamentally broken.

The sketchy committees (2003â"2005)

3. When updating these guidelines, committees settled on a median baseline of **0.66 g/kg**. They openly acknowledged in the fine print that this "apparent equilibrium" did not mean optimal health. However, raising the baseline would have triggered global chaos: international aid food supplies would instantly become legally inadequate, and national agricultural budgets would skyrocket. They applied a generic +25% buffer to reach the famous **0.8 g/kg** RDA to mask an insufficient baseline.

4. The truth comes out (2007â"Present)

4. In 2007, researchers using advanced isotopic tracers bypassed the old nitrogen math entirely. They proved that the true baseline requirement is **0.93 g/kg** and the actual safe intake is **1.2 g/kg**. The official guidelines remain an open secretâ"a bureaucratic fiction frozen in place to protect policy, not human health.

With 1.2 g/kg you see that most Americans are below the true requirement. With a mean of 0.98 g/kg it makes sense why so many Americans need to eat more meat.

There is a typo:

The average should have been
Average: 0.98 g / kg / day between both sexes.

1.07 g / kg / day for men.
0.89 g/kg / day for women.

Average: 0.98 g / kg / day

Otherwise the same arguments stand.

Phillips, Chevalier, & Leidy (2016): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... Fulgoni (2008): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... (Note: Abstract text overview is indexed under PMC5347101)

The average amount of protein eaten:

1.07 g / kg / day for men.
0.89 g/kg / day for women.

Average: 0.89 g / kg / day

The Scientific Case for a Higher RDA
The traditional protein Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of 0.8 g/kg/day is increasingly viewed by nutritional scientists as an outdated metric. The core evidence for raising this baseline includes:
Flawed Methodology: The 0.8 g/kg standard was built on nitrogen balance studies, which only measure the absolute minimum amount of protein required to prevent lean tissue wasting and clinical deficiency.
Modern Metabolic Tracing: Utilizing the Indicator Amino Acid Oxidation (IAAO) method—which tracks breath markers to find when the body's amino acid pathways are genuinely saturated—studies show that metabolic requirements for healthy, sedentary young adults plateau closer to 1.2 g/kg/day.
Functional Outcomes: Massive clinical reviews show that a range of 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg/day is required to optimize actual health outcomes, including triggering satiety hormones, managing weight, and preserving skeletal muscle mass.
Consumption Patterns vs. the Optimal Range
When evaluated against how people actually eat, the current 0.8 g/kg/day guideline creates a false sense of dietary adequacy.
[Deficiency Minimum] 0.8 g/kg/day (Current RDA)

[Actual Intake] 0.89 g/kg/day (Average American Consumption)

[Optimal Function] 1.2 – 1.6 g/kg/day (Modern Scientific Consensus)

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) shows that the average American adult consumes roughly 0.89 g/kg/day. Because this number clears the official 0.8 g/kg baseline, public health dashboards register the population as "adequate" in protein intake.
However, because 0.89 g/kg/day sits completely below the 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg/day optimal range, the typical consumption pattern leaves the majority of Americans in a functional deficit—meeting the bare survival minimum while missing the threshold needed for metabolic health and muscle preservation.

In addition men have more proportional muscle mass and higher metabolisms.

A back of the envelope calculation:

1. Variables (Percentage Beyond Average)
        Metabolism Advantage: +3.75% (Multiplier: 1.0375)
        Lean Mass Advantage: +8.75% (Multiplier: 1.0875)

2. Compounding the Advantages
      1.0375 × 1.0875 = 1.12828125 (+12.83% Total Scaling Factor)

3. Applying the Scaling Factor to Baselines
        At a Survival Baseline (0.8 g/kg average):
          0.80 g/kg × 1.1283 = 0.9026 g/kg (Minimum for Men)

        At an Optimal Baseline (1.3 g/kg average):
          1.30 g/kg × 1.1283 = 1.467 g/kg (Optimal for Men)

This supports the contention that broadly speaking we need more not less protein ergo meat. Especially men.

Here are your requested sources.

1. Houston DK et al. “Low Dietary Protein Intakes and Associated Functional Limitations in an Aging Population.”
   Cross-sectional analysis linking lower protein intake in older adults with more functional limitations and poorer strength.
2. Hess JM et al. “Low Protein Intakes and Poor Diet Quality Associate with Functional Limitations among US Adults.”
   US adults with lower protein intake had poorer diet quality and more self-reported functional limitations.
3. Phillips SM et al. “Protein Requirements and Recommendations for Older People: A Review.”
   Review arguing that older adults likely need more protein than the standard RDA to preserve muscle and function.
4. Low protein intake, physical activity, and physical function in European and North American community-dwelling older adults: a pooled analysis of four longitudinal aging cohorts
   Higher protein intake was associated with slower physical function decline and lower likelihood of mobility limitation in older adults.
5. Low Protein Intake Is Associated with Frailty in Older Adults
   Meta-analysis finding that higher protein intake was inversely associated with frailty in older adults.
6. Low Protein Intake Is Associated with the Risk of Functional Impairment in Older Adults in an Age- and Gender-Specific Manner: A SHARE-Based Study
   Large observational study reporting age- and sex-specific links between low protein intake and later functional impairment.
7. Low protein intake, physical activity, and physical function in European and North American community-dwelling older adults: a pooled analysis of four longitudinal aging cohorts
   Pooled longitudinal cohorts showing higher protein intake was associated with slower physical function decline in older adults.
8. Poor Dietary Protein Intake in Elderly Population with Sarcopenia ...
   Study describing low protein intake as common in older adults with sarcopenia and related muscle-health concerns.
9. Impact of increased protein intake in older adults: a 12-week double ...
   Intervention study examining whether increasing protein intake improves outcomes in older adults over a short follow-up period.