That happened to me with a super cheap laptop I bought temporarily while I was waiting for a proper replacement to arrive. I set up windows and just went ahead and created a throwaway microsoft account to get through the install. I was going to set it up to dual boot Linux, though I didn't have a lot of use for the windows partition. I ran into exactly the problem you mentioned after the Linux install. At that point it turned out that, although I had recorded the password I set up for the Windows account, I hadn't bothered to remember what the e-mail address was. I don't recall completely, but I think the laptop was functionally bricked at that point (there was probably a way around it, but it just wasn't worth the trouble).

A good move back then. Unfortunately, the diseased intellectual property system in the US means that would be a tragic mistake today. For one thing the US moved to "first to file" which means that a modern Salk could simply be undercut by whoever came along and filed a patent on his invention first. Literature search? The patent examiner would just examine existing patents as "the literature". Not to mention that hundreds of patents would be filed around the one invention to make sure that no other medicine could be produced that remotely does the same thing. Oh, and the FDA would ensure no generics for a decade after the patent expiration.

Let's look at some of the biggest US pharma companies and the reason for their success. For example, Abbvie. Their main claim to fame was the drug Humira. Developed in the UK and Germany. They acquired the patent, then created a whole bunch of new patents to extend the life of the expiring original patent by basically patenting around the original patent for all kinds of different formulations, etc. They massively raised the price of the drug.
Their other big profit-center drugs include Skyrizi, which they acquired from Boehringer Ingelheim. Also Rinvoq, which most information says was developed by "Abbvie scientists", but if you look at the patents it is clear that scientists at pharma companies in India, China and others were involved and that the Abbvie scientists directly involved also came from around the world.

Eli Lilly's biggest drugs are GLP-1 drugs. They're just the latest iteration in drugs that have been around for 40 years or so. As usual, the list of inventors of those drugs is complicated, but it's quite international.

The simple fact is that roughly the same amount of new drugs are invented in Europe as the US and many of the researchers in the US are people who moved to the US do to research. That development could be done anywhere. There's nothing special about the US in that regard and most of the actual inventors are largely working for a salary. The vast majority of the money in the pharma industry is not going to the actual scientists who do the real work. What does happen with the profit motive in the industry is exactly what I illustrated above, where the drug companies get their hooks in things, create barriers to the public getting their hands on life-saving medications at reasonable prices, and abuse intellectual property law to ensure that there's no competition. Please try to avoid crowing about free enterprise, etc. in a system that is dominated by artificial monopolies.

It walks (rolls?) like a wooden duck, quacks like a... Do wooden ducks quack? Maybe well made ones, but are the components that do the quacking made of pure wood? Does that still count? Anyway. You're certainly right that for all intents and purposes, at least related to structural uses, burning it as firewood, etc. it might as well be called wood. Officially though, it is woodlike rather than being wood because true wood grows in rings, which monocots don't.

You have a point about YouTube (not that good information can't be found there, but still, you have to take Sturgeon's Law and ramp the 90% to up past 99%). Also, all complex plants have Xylem and Phloem. Only things like moss, etc. don't. Even ferns have xylem and those are generally not considered wood. The actual definition is a bit tricky though. The presence of lignin is necessary, but not sufficient usually to be considered wood (ferns also have lignin, for example). Lignin is basically a composite material of lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose. Wood is composed of xylem containing those components, but it needs to form a compound structure with other xylem to be considered wood.

Ultimately, bamboo is not considered to be wood, but rather to be a woodlike grass. Note that bamboo, for example, does not grow in growth rings. Of course, this is all splitting hairs. Bamboo is woodlike enough that, functionally, it shouldn't matter if people call it wood or not. If we want to score it, Tony Isaac is more right than Sabbede here, but it makes little functional difference.

That map is about soil quality. There's more to farmland than soil quality. Agriculture distinguishes between fertile and productive. In fact, many highly fertile soils across the world are that way specifically because of long periods of poor productivity increasing their fertility. Now, the areas you are talking about can be considered both fertile and productive, but the high productivity is from supplementing with fertilizers and especially, supplementing water. That's why the watersheds are running dry and the water tables are dropping across the whole region. So, it really isn't great farmland absent supplementation. It's a farce to say otherwise.

Pssst... aren't you guys supposed to keep yourself a secret from the humans?

It is not clear that we will continue building them at the current pace once the bubble bursts. Also, considering that LLMS are something like 5 orders of magnitude more power hungry than the human brain for equivalent tasks, it seems like there's a lot of room for improvement in power efficiency. A couple of orders of magnitude more efficient and the power usage becomes pretty negligible. Of course, all of the investment into AI facilities also becomes an obsolete sunk cost that we are pretty much all guaranteed to have to pay for in some way (same is pretty much true when the bubble bursts).

Quite aside from the fact that you are grossly overestimating the cost of the even the most technically sophisticated solution, you are suggesting that doing absolutely nothing because there isn't really a problem (which I have stated again and again is my actual position) will cost a million dollars. Aside from that, the parking lots we're talking about already tend to cost millions.

Not really sure what to reply to that. I would have to write a page worth of possible interpretations and respond to each one, knowing that what I write is just not going to be read anyway.

Got it. So no immutable law of nature and nothing even similar.

I'm the one who can't be taken seriously? I can't even tell if the above is a straw man or if you just have really poor reading comprehension.

Hmm. They might actually have meant that they will actually reduce the amount of fuel rather than increase it though. The pilot might actually prefer to have a lot of extra reserve, but needs to reduce it if someone too heavy gets on the plane.

The poster you are replying to did not say that normal people should subsidize them. Try reading the whole post.

I would probably put my money on the SCOTUS, at least 5 or 6 members of it, contorting themselves in some way to make it so Trump needs some other excuse for future tariffs, but still finding some way to make it legal for the tariffs collected so far to stand.