Not just what bill gets paid, but who ends up paying it. The farmers that are facing cuts now are a tiny minority of the population. Given that the majority of voting people live in cities that only survive by the grace of massive farming operations and insane logistic systems and too many of them seem to think the current extreme variety of food just magically shows up in their local supermarkets and diners... Let's see if they realize the problem is theirs BEFORE it hits them on their plates and in their wallets.

I suspect obesity is the main difference between USA and NL, but that's mainly stereotypes talking :-)

I'm very interested in how the numbers here will develop over the coming week or two - given the increased testing since the first round, the fact we have record numbers of confirmed cases doesn't bother me much until we see that reflected in hospitalizations and deaths. The current semi-lockdown we have here doesn't seem to be helping nearly as much as the one earlier in the year, so the virus is starting to look rather seasonal... and that's a pretty bad thing with the 'horrible contagious' I noted above as it promises bad things for the rest of the winter.

We've all got older relatives and friends that are vulnerable to this thing. Mind you, the ones in care homes I talk to (over the phone, or skype/zoom when they can figure that out) are actually more worried about being locked in again (as happened earlier in the year) than being killed by COVID. Most argue along the lines that they're going to die of something anyway and they'd rather not spend a large portion of their last years in prison/solitary confinement.

So there are considerations like that, and there's the economic damage we're doing that will inevitably cost lives as well. Then there's the cost in lives caused by the delayed care for other things (e.g. cancer detection). Lot of lines that are horrible to have to draw, and you're likely to be wrong on one end or another whatever you choose. I'm glad I'm not in politics.

No easy answers. At the very least it's proving to me that we're no longer used to people dying of diseases except for 'normal' things like the flu - and note Influenza is probably overdue for another dangerous pandemic itself - and prone to panic when it happens anyway.

Being in the Netherlands... You realize that just by population size you get a certain amount of deaths as old age eventually catches us all, right? For the Netherlands it's about 152.000 a year. And we count EVERY death where the person had COVID, no matter what ELSE they might be dying off. The RIVM (Dutch version of the CDC) has the numbers split by age and the vast majority of deaths we have is in the 70+ age bracket. This thing is horribly contagious but not actually all that great at killing people without comorbidities (obesity, lung/heart issues, and especially old age being some of the main ones). That's one of the reasons everyone's actually worried about possible vaccination side effects - if this had a death rate like Ebola, nobody would care all that much about those.

The trick is to capture carbon in a sane way. There's very little point in building the technological infrastructure for it given that just planting more trees will accomplish largely the same thing. They're proven technology, even ;-)

In this case, it was more both sides breaking the spirit of it, and both occasionally accusing the other about also breaking the letter (don't think Russia was the only guilty party). Then there's a third guy, China, not even being part of it and leapfrogging both openly. Freeing the US from it makes sense - and given that China is right on their border and already has missiles like these, Russia is likely grateful for Trump officially pulling the trigger. So everyone's happy... except probably the Chinese who will likely see their Russian neighbor (officially) catch up rapidly now.

It's the second incarnation of Apple Without Steve Jobs, looking floundering and stagnant like the first time they tried that...

No, that would involve thinking that Putin doing it isn't so bad. Instead, given that I live in the EU, excuse me if Putin being open about doing Bad Things sees me worry about our own politicians pulling the same stuff on us. Because they rather joyfully are doing just that. They do seem to intent to be a bit less obvious about it though, given gems such as this: "Through this Communication the Commission seeks to promote a more transparent, trustworthy and accountable online environment (...). More specifically, signatories of the Code of Practice should agree to deprive “impostor” websites and websites hosting disinformation of advertising revenues. The signatories should also agree to (...) the development of indicators of trustworthiness of content sources, dilute the visibility of disinformation by improving the findability of trustworthy content and provide users information on prioritisation of content by algorithms." The only difference is that it might still be stoppable for a time here.

Yep, and the EU is already getting on the censoring 'fake news' bandwagon as well, and has already been caught applying 'fake' to 'politically inconvenient' a couple of times...

Quite a few things already, including one sufficiently novel that they gave him a Nobel Prize in Physics for it?

The fact that he thinks what he's working on now may be worth a second one may be somewhat wishful thinking on his part, but we can't properly judge the work's value until we see the patents - assuming we know enough physics to UNDERSTAND them.

No, they're launch sites because they're the closest (easily accessible) part of the US to the equator so the rockets get a decent boost from Earth's rotation speed. It's hardly rocket science... well, except it is. ;-)

Have a National Security Letter. We'll take everything please, and kindly remember the part that says you're not allowed to tell anyone.

Announced on Devoxx Belgium on wednesday by James Gosling, 'already' on Slashdot by sunday... Get on the ball guys.

Because this is a list of absentee voters, which by definition didn't expect to make it to the nearest booth come election day. Including a reason why - so scanning it for people that weren't at home (traveling) should be easy. Doesn't mean EVERYONE at the address is gone, and the information should rapidly get out of date the further from that date we get.

Let's just all switch to UTC and be done with the current mess already.

Or the 40K Imperial clock, that might be amusing...

In light of Ajit Pai's decisions and their influence on this disaster, I would like to borrow some words from a former president, and state that Ajit Pai is doing one hell of a job.