I have not seen any government analysis of costs. To ramp up the number of electric vehicles is not ONLY going to require more charging stations. It does not take many charging stations to require an additional power substation to be built, and those are not cheap. Besides, with rolling blackouts predicted for this summer, we seem to be pushing the limit on the electric power we have now. Where's the extra power going to come from for all those new electric vehicles? In LA, the number of electric vehicles is less than 5% of the total number of cars/trucks. Electric cars are still way more expensive than gas/diesel powered vehicles, so it is going to be hard to get much beyond the "early adopter" numbers. It seems to me that the administration is just ignoring all these problems in order to virtue signal. It's another case of government picking winners and losers, not allowing the market to operate.

I am perplexed that everyone seems to be down on the unvaxxed since vaxxed people can get infected (at a lower rate) and are equally able to transmit the disease. (The CDC admits this. See Lancet Infectious Diseases October issue for latest confirmation.) Early treatment with re-purposed drugs (ivermectin, HCQ), plus erythromycin, zinc, vit C, and other is MUCH better and don't have the danger. If the standard treatment in the US is so good, why have we lost 2200/million while Bangladesh has only lost 171/million? Many African nations have numbers less than 50. (Look at statisa.com). It has long been known that VAERS under-reports by a factor of 10 to 100. Pharma companies and CDC prefer it that way so that have frustrated all efforts to convert it from a passive system to an active one. Finally: the omicron variant is highly contagious and not very deadly. It is an "escape variant" likely produced by massive vaccinations. Hospitals report now that infection by omicron is "decoupled" from hospitalization (great jargon passed to me by my RN daughter.) BTW I'm not a tinfoil hat rube. Ph.D biophysicist with several years research experience at two medical schools.

I'm not sure 'first-world levels of medical care" are an advantage. The US has suffered 2395 deaths per million, while Bangladesh has lost 172 per million, according to Statista.com. At the risk of getting flamed, might that have something to do with the fact that Ivermectin is an over-the-counter drug there, which most of the population takes regularly as an antiparasitic?

I would not blame an "anti-science" mindset solely on Trump. Hydroxychloroquine has been used effectively to lessen symptoms, until Trump said it was a "game changer". Then the press trashed it because Trump supported it. Even The Lancet published a bogus study claiming heart danger, which they had to retract 2 weeks later. HCQ was approved 65 years ago by the FDA and has been considered safe ever since. When a group of physicians calling themselves the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) gave a presentation to a Senate committee in December, they were boycotted by Democrats as being "anti-vax". Moreover, the New York Times published a hit piece three days before the hearing, making the same accusation. Nothing in that column was true -- these docs are not anti-vaxxers, but they have developed protocols which have been shown to greatly lessen the effects of COVID. One of the components is Ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug (like HCQ). These docs submitted a research paper to a peer-reviewed journal (I forget which one) and asked the NIH to review it. I have heard nothing since. Follow the money! Tens of thousands of lives have been lost because of suppression of information like this, presumably at the behest of pharmaceutical firms who are afraid that effective protocols would lessen the push for vaccines. A friend of mine got COVID and was sick for 12 days. He got no HCQ, no ivermectin protocol, just remdisiver after hospitalization. Well guess what, HCQ and ivermectin about about 10 bucks a treatment, where remdisiver is $4000. Again, follow the money. It's not strictly Trump's fault, since many congressmen on both sides are financially supported by big Pharma and big Tech.

We are being a little too U.S.-centric here. The slowdown of first-world economies is having devastating effects on Africa and Asia. The UN World Food Program is saying "The impact of lost tourism revenues, falling remittances and travel and other restrictions linked to the coronavirus pandemic are expected to leave some 130 million people acutely hungry this year, adding to around 135 million already in that category." As a small example, the tulip market has cratered, destroying income from those in Africa who rely on tulip sales. Moreover, worldwide (including the U.S.) there is a significant increase in spousal abuse, child abuse, suicide, clinical depression (especially among the aged) and other effects of social isolation. The compassionate response on our part would be to get people back to work as soon as we can, accepting a reasonable increase in COVID case rate. As another poster said, the total number who EVENTUALLY get the infection will be a little less if we continue "flattening" the curve. How much less may be insignificant compared to the human suffering generated from being overly cautious in re-opening. COVID deaths are only a small part of the picture, folks.

How is this a story? Mercola made a lot of money, yes. Is there an implication he made it dishonestly? That he was somehow hoodwinking people? Does anyone have any evidence of this? If Mercola wants to shine a light on vaccines, he has the right to put his money into whatever legal "cause" he wants. I have been in the research game (biophysics & biochemistry, at two medical schools). Even with such small-potato research there is a lot of politics. With BILLIONS of dollars at stake, there are sure to be some damning research results that are suppressed. You don't have to look very far to find evidence of this. Moreover, as my title says, Michael Bloomberg donated $38 million to an anti-gun group recently. Are any Slashdot readers complaining about that? It's called FREEDOM and TRANSPARENCY and that's how the truth eventually prevails (I'm an idealist, yes). If you don't want it, are you going to suggest that the Federal and State governments become the arbiters of where people can spend their money? Sheesh.

Hasn't anybody else had a bad experience with vaccination? When she was 2, my daughter got seizures due to the MMR vaccine, and continued to have them every time she got a fever, until she was 6 years old. I'm talking about stiffening up and her eyes rolling up, for a minute or so at a time. We told the pediatrician and he was not even surprised, saying "Oh, we'll just leave about the Rubella part next time." We did not give him a chance for a next time. I'm not dumb -- I have a Ph.D in physics and my research area is biophysics. Some people are lazy and they simply label vaccine sceptics "anti-vaxxers" so that they can just dismiss them and substitute labels for thinking and "due diligence".

In the 60's and 70's, in my NE Oregon high school, a sizeable number of guys drove their pickups to school with rifles in the gun racks (remember those?) After school they would go hunting. They might have gone duck hunting before school. (I never understood the charm in getting up at dark and freezing your tush off to shoot a bird whose meat needs to be smoked to make it edible.) Those in wood shop would often bring their rifles to decorate the stocks, or even make new ones. Nobody thought of shooting anyone. We all felt safe around guns. So what has changed? The guns have not materially changed. It is the people who have changed. It is a societal problem which is multifaceted, including neglectful parenting, kids being raised by single parents (like my daughter), the emphasis on "rights" while ignoring "responsibilities", and manifold other causes. Understandably, lawmakers would rather not address this complex an issue. They just want to pass ineffective laws which make our lives even more burdened with government oversight and regulations.

As a parent whose 2-year-old daughter got seizures in response to the DPT vaccine, and was later diagnosed with dyslexia, I'm rather sympathetic to those on the side of freedom. The SCOTUS has ruled the "vaccines are inherently unsafe" and that is why there is a federal fund to "compensate" parents who children were damaged by vaccine injections. This is an incredibly complex issue, and it is made more complex by the misinformation promulgated by pharma companies who make multiple billions from vaccines. Just follow the money. By the way, the "herd immunity" argument does not really hold water. A typical vaccine is effective for maybe 10 years. That means there are many diseases for which maybe 50% or less of adults have effective antibodies. And yet we don't see huge epidemics. Parents who choose not to administer certain vaccines are not ignorant, fearful luddites. They are generally better educated than the general population (there's a paper on this -- don't have it at my fingertips.) Do the research, people. There are plenty of reasons to limit vaccinations, and there is no reason to give in to the fear tactics of politicians and the AMA. By the way, I'm a biophysicist (Ph.D 1978) and know only too well how the BIG money from pharma can and does squash any research that would threaten profits. The religious question is only a small part. This is an issue of individual freedom and freedom of information on which to base choices.

Such a tiny lens is going to run into problems with diffraction. Perhaps 100 um is usable, but the image won't be crisp. There is a reason insects have compound eyes. The devices that get around diffraction-limited imaging are scanning-type devices, like tunneling scanning EM.

Impressive! Predicting not 2, not 2.0, but 1.99 per 100K! And 4.46 per 100K, etc. Anybody who believes that kind of precision does not understand statistics. And anybody who would publish it is not (in my eyes) credible.

My wife's computer also. Spent 1-1/2 hours with MS tech support to get it working. Actually it said I COULD revert to W7, but it would take quite a while. I decided to just go with 10 since I was going to do so before the "free" upgrade period was over. But it was pretty sneaky of MS.

Or "guess". But not "theorize". Ah, the pain.

My daughter teaches in the state of Washington; There, they mandate testing via computers, I suppose for "efficiency" and because Bill Gates generously and altruistically gave them lots of computers. So what happens? They only have enough computer stations to test 1/3 of the students at a time. So for a period of 3 weeks each semester, 1/3 of my daughter's students are missing -- a difference 1/3 each week. Students are losing a huge amount of learning time taking these mostly meaningless tests. In Denmark, they don't even test grade-school students at all some years, and they out-learn our students by every measure. Their teachers are free to teach, and free from teaching to the test. It gets worse. The State of Washington's solution to increasing teacher competency is not to pay them better or increase the rigor of teacher training in the universities. It is to recently mandate that all teachers pass National Board Certification every 5 years. My daughter says that amounts to doing a master's thesis every five years. I am not opposed to lots of education for teachers -- I have a Ph.D in physics -- but this is just nuts. Washington's non-elected apparatchiks have apparently been taking advantage of that state's easy access to weed. They will only succeed in driving talented teachers out of education altogether, and leave behind those who really don't care but like the security and benefits.

After 30 years of teaching university physics, I have noticed the slow slide in ability to work with numbers among those fresh out of high school. (Heck, even college seniors.) They are crippled by calculators. My kids were required to have graphing calculators in high school --- what a joke! All they learned was how to punch a sequence of keys. And yet the math teachers loved it because it FELT like they were somehow cutting edge and really doing some good. HS graduates would be much more "numerate" if we just banned calculators from math classes in the public schools. This opinion is shared by many of my colleagues. (I have not done a real study of their opinions, so I won't say "most".)