Being addictive isn't the only issue though. Whether they are chemically addictive or not, some people do basically make certain drugs into their lifestyle. I've met enough stoners to know that, whether or not there's any chemical addiction at play, they can still end up in a state that is functionally similar to addiction. Sure, they can quit, but they just don't want to and spending too much time in that state eventually does produce some pretty clear psychological issues. Paranoia and weird fixed ideas being some of the well known symptoms. Same with psychedelics. There can be psychosis, persistent hallucinations, flashbacks, etc. Now, some of those may simply be latent psychological issues that show up amidst the drug use. Certainly it seems like only a minority end up that way, but they are still real risks.

I will note also that most doctors have also never experienced a stroke, or major organ failure, diabetes, Celiac disease, Lyme disease, auto-brewery syndrome, gangrene, hypothermia, testicular torsion, etc. Nevertheless, they still tend to give good advice about those things.

Bit of a caveat on the non-flammable and non-poisonous. Like you said, it was nominally non-poisonous, until exposed to fire. At that point it became phosgene gas.

Also, your central argument is a bit dubious. We are talking about factors of up to thousands in terms of global warming potential and you pointed out yourself the relative cheapness of r12. If your question is why we can't just let economics steer us to ecologically better refrigerants, it seems like you answered your own question. Anyway, it turns out that CO2 itself makes a very good refrigerant and it is very cheap and widely available. It just requires heavier duty equipment to use. Sometimes, industry needs a kick in the form of regulations to move away from problematic materials. Heck, industry has frequently shown that it will follow the sunk cost fallacy and frequently not adopt new technology that would significantly reduce its costs and increase profits.

I think here we need to make a clear distinction between melt, and melt away completely. They are already melting, but that melting should take a long time to complete and the poster you replied to did say "as the ice sheets melt" rather than "once the ice sheets melt". Anyway, as they stand, those sea level rise predictions are already pretty scary. Not just for flooding, but how they affect ocean currents.

Some of the newer refrigerants lower the GWP to around the range of 30% or so of the old ones, which is a decent reduction. Others though, reduce it by factors of a thousand or more. Most of those have some drawbacks like flammability, require for heavier duty equipment, etc. but would make the global warming potential negligible.

Are you sure on that? I thought R1234yf was a homogeneous refrigerant, not a blended one. Are you sure you're not thinking of R-32A/R1234yf blends, which could experience the issues you're describing?

Well, one of them, R-744 refrigerant is 1X CO2 (a GWP of 1). That's because it's just CO2. It works just fine as a refrigerant, but it does require some high pressures in the heat ranges it needs to work in, so the equipment has to be fairly heavy duty. Then there are things like R-1234yf which is a Hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) rather than an HCL. Its GWP is just 4, so it is 4X CO2 (technically, it actually produces a strong greenhouse effect, but the GWP is also based on duration, and it breaks down really fast in the atmosphere). It would be really great since it has similar efficiency to R134A (which it is targeted towards replacing, except for the slight downside of being flammable (not terribly so, though). The GWP of R-290 is even better than R-1234yf and just 3, but since it's propane, it has maybe a little bit worse of a flammability issue. Then there's R-32, which is an HCL, but has a GWP of only 675 ("only" being relative of course since it is hundreds of times the others, and is also a bit flammable. The refrigerant it aims to replace, R-410A has a GWP of 2088, so R-32 is an improvement there, plus, slightly less of it is required than R-410A, so that also reduces the leak potential (which also means less global warming potential than R-410A, but that is not captured in GWP, which measures heat trapping potential over time per unit mass).

Then there are blended refrigerants like R454B, which is just R32 and R1234yf mixed in about a 2/3rd to 1/3rd ratio with a GWP of 466. The point of it is mostly economics, with a bit of efficiency gain. R1234yf itself is more expensive, and so are the compressors needed for it. So the blend allows for cheaper gas and cheaper equipment while still hitting a lower GWP target than the R-410A it is intended to replace.

I should note that, out of those, while the R744 (CO2) technically has a GWP of 1. If the gas comes from the atmosphere in the first place and the power to extract it comes from a non-fossil source, the virtual GWP for it should be 0. I note that because I also want to note that one of the unknowns for the other refrigerants is what the environmental cost is to produce them in the first place. For example, propane has a GWP of 3, but it is a product of natural gas extraction and refining, and a heck of a lot of methane is just dumped into the atmosphere in that process. Methane has a GWP an order of magnitude higher than propane, and it is difficult to even figure out how much methane dumping should be attributed to every gram of propane. Same goes for the other refrigerants. There are some externalities that may affect their real GWP.

Also, I should mention that the GWPs for these should be based on a 100 year scale from what I can find. There is a 20 year scale and a 100 year scale that these are normally measured on and the numbers can be different. Some of the gases can linger well past 20 years and some are basically completely gone from the atmosphere in a matter of days.

Am I the only one who accidentally read that as "Project Kessler"? Then went back and still kept mentally substituting Kessler?

While I am sure a surface excursion would be part of it, I imagine visitors to a lunar hotel would spend most of their time inside. A lot depends if the "hotel" is a cramped space where you sleep in bunks or something like that or if they hollow out (or use a lava tube or something) a space underground with plenty of space. In that kind of environment, people could have a pretty interesting experience with the lunar gravity. Imagine the hotel pool you could have, with guests practicing running on water, etc. Imagine the parkour course in a place where someone remotely healthy can jump from three stories up and land without a problem and anyone even a bit athletic could drop from six stories? You could have parallel walls and wall jump to the top, etc. So, depending on the actual nature of the accommodations, there could be a lot to see on the moon aside from an arid landscape with the Earth in the sky (which, as others have pointed out, might be plenty for some people).

Like most modern examples of this kind of thing, it is worth noting that the John Deere lock in involves the misuse of intellectual property law to push past the scope it should be limited to and break the conventions on what people should be allowed to do with their own property.

Sooo, not taking a stance based on belief is somehow the "doctrine of [my] religion"? Do you read your comments to yourself in your head as you write? Possibly after? You really should.

Notice what? That people don't like Trump? That's not some sort of revelation. It's also not a mental illness. It's a simple formula, people who are rude, vulgar, accused of multiple rapes of both adult women and children with at least strong circumstantial evidence (and one civil case with the conclusion that, in colloquial terms, he did commit rape), run fake charities that are so badly "mismanaged" that they and their family are banned from running one in the state, cheat on every one of their multiple wives, apparently wanted to get one of his daughters aborted despite there being no medical or financial issues, had his personal lawyer pay off a playboy model to get an abortion, make numerous misogynistic remarks, barge into the dressing room of teenage (from 14 up) girls to catch them in a state of undress when he was many decades older than them, import illegal immigrants to work for him in construction, import illegal immigrants to work for him as models, hang out with and treat like a super close friend someone he knew to be a child molester, be involved in a scheme to deny housing opportunities to people on racial grounds, repeatedly use fake identities to tell self-promoting lies about himself, break multiple promises to preserve things (protected architectural features, protected natural features/wildlife areas, etc.), falsely take credit multiple times for inventing common words and phrases, tell massive numbers of lies, etc., etc., etc. (and I am only stopping because this is so long, not because I'm remotely close to listing objectionable things) tend to not be liked by perfectly normal people. Basically, just about any single thing off that list will cause a normal person to decide that they like something, certainly most combinations will. Yet, somehow, saying that not liking Trump is a mental illness (one referred to as TDS that has a history as a partisan attack coming from explicitly Republican leaning media and Republican campaigns) is not partisan to you? However, noting that using the term TDS is, in fact, partisan is, itself, partisan to you? But it's actually something that "independents" recognize? And somehow, independents are a homogeneous group that you, specifically, represent? For crying out loud, I'm an independent. Why should I let you speak for me?

Once again, I provide a specific example, and you just utilize DARVO, but with no details. No, it wasn't Trump that lowered the bar, it was Biden, and he did it at an indeterminate time and place with an indeterminate action. Also, he must have used a time machine since Trump was President before he was.

Name dropping is not the same as citing. This is like on technical threads when someone basically blurts out "the laws of thermodynamics" as a reason for something without specifying how those laws actually apply to the actual question at hand.

See, the whole point here is that this is not an information silo. This is a discussion where, if you have specific information, you can provide it. The fact that you don't and just seem to be claiming that, if I weren't inside some posited information silo, I would just know the things you claim to know, suggests it is you that lives inside a silo. One were you are taking certain things as axiomatic truths that people outside the silo want actual proof and details for.

It's not irrelevant to the assertion made: that "lawfare" in that context is just a whiny excuse for being prosecuted for crimes by Republicans. Republicans frequently seem to use a form of what could be termed "lawfare" in constant attempts to use obscure loopholes, obscure legal reasoning, or the simple fact that things like the constitution has no teeth, allowing them to simply repeatedly ignore it. Not that they're the only ones who abuse the law like that, but Republicans have been really leaning into it for years.

It is also interesting that you say that his prosecution has nothing to do with Trumps. I was expecting you to claim that his prosecution was all part of a plot to persecute Republicans affiliated with Trump.

Also, which false claims against Trump in the Mueller investigation are you talking about? The Mueller investigation explicitly avoided making claims against Trump citing DOJ policy forbidding indictments against a sitting President. It was very clear that the report couldn't and wouldn't make claims about Trump being involved in a crime (though the language was also pretty clear that it was, in no way exonerating him. You claim to be big on primary sources, but that is something anyone who has read the report should be aware of.

How was it delivered fraudulently? Who was the fraud against? Was the person delivering it to the FBI defrauding the FBI? You need to be a bit more specific. It was delivered to the FBI without any concealment of what it was and where it came from. It was known that it was opposition research gathered by a former British intelligence operative.

The first part of that statement: "Wrong." is about me stating that they did not use the dossier in court. Then you go on about the "goal in the lawfare", which has nothing to do with the first part. So your only answer is literally just: "Wrong." No explanation of why it is supposedly wrong. No facts, no details, just nothing.

Sure. As I have already pointed out, in 99.96755% of cases, the FISA courts grant a warrant for the request. It boggles the mind to even consider the possibility that their standards are so incredibly stringent that the evidence provided was lacking.

Only you seem to be claiming that it's fraudulent. There was sufficient credibility for the FISA court. Also, how is the police informant scenario a "straw man"? You keep using that phrase, I don't think it means what you think it means.

You can keep telling yourself whatever you want, but there's never been any evidence of any outright fraud. Just verified and unverified information with the standards of what counts as "verified" up for debate. The evidence provided was and is sufficient for the warrant.

Wow. Talk about wallowing in ignorance. I mean, not being able to look up the numbers yourself is one thing, but not even knowing what the numbers actually are supposed to represent, even though it's right there in my post. To clarify, since you seem to have somehow missed it. The "99.97%" is not about any percentage of evidence being fraudulent (I can't really parse your sentence to quite figure out what you're even claiming there, but it's clear you're talking about fraudulent evidence. The "99.97%" is the percentage of FISA warrants that are approved. In other words, the percentage rejected is vanishingly small.

Or in other words, you can't actually stick to what is actually being discussed, you have to distort whatever the other person is saying to twist things so that you can write about your own pet peeves.

You do understand that operatives in US campaigns accepting money from foreign governments intended to "soe [sic] chaos" is still something that is a perfectly legitimate basis for an investigation, right. Of course, plenty of sources seem to confirm that the Russians did, indeed, favor Trump as their candidate. While I know that Russian state television obviously lies a lot, they certainly claim that Russia influenced the election and owns Trump a lot. Also, the Mueller report very specifically did not exonerate Trump.

Regarding IP law, including copyright, I think we agree that, if it is a "necessary evil" current versions of it have gone way beyond the 'necessary' part.

Fairness is certainly a question, but clearly many people have differing philosophies on what "fair" is or if things need to be fair at all. There's a comparison in this situation to the Luddites. Frequently maligned as anti-technologists, they were actually in a situation very much like what is being described in that article. Many people today are fond of pointing out that the mechanization they were worried about ended up creating new jobs and industries, etc. The reality though is that such things only happened in the long run. The immediate result, as predicted was poverty and starvation for the workers.

Sure, but my point is that you're classing that as not being rent-seeking, but the actors negotiations as being rent seeking. I don't see much functional difference between the two situations.

Well, that becomes very confusing, actually. The fundamental problem for me is the question of whether "Intellectual Property" is property or if it is an artificial monopoly and fundamentally rent-seeking. My personal take is that it is very much rent-seeking. It gets tricky though because most economists essentially treat intellectual property as natural property and not inherently rent-seeking. It clearly meets a lot of the criteria, and it is literally insane to think that the way many Intellectual Property heavy industries like Pharma work with clearly abusive and rent seeking behavior like creating "patent thickets", etc. is not squarely in that realm. However, I am actually mostly alone in the woods on this. The majority view seems to be that intellectual property is like a natural property right. It's tricky, of course, because property rights are always artificial monopolies anyway.

In any case, intellectual property rights of the actors are only one of the questions at play there. They apply because the reality of many of the synthetic actors is that they are very often absolutely developed by sampling real actors (even if not done intentionally, that's how the AIs learn). It gets tricky of course, because that's how humans learn too. There's a lot of precedent for this of course: Betty Boop (based either on Esther Jones, or Helen Kane, who copied her, depending on point of view), Ariel (based on Alyssa Milano), Ursula (based on a drag queen named Divine), Mickey Mouse (a bit of an amalgam of Buster Keaton/Charlie Chaplin and black and white minstrel shows but also from copying Felix the Cat), Bugs Bunny (based on Clark Gable and specifically on one of his characters, along with some Groucho Marx, etc.), etc., etc. Performers have had their likenesses, characters, performances, etc. appropriated for a long time and without much success in demanding compensation early on. Now trademark law and a patchwork of other laws protect likeness and publicity rights. For better or for worse though, most economists, who are the ones who tend to define what is and isn't rent-seeking, view that more like natural property rights. Or, at least, they see it as one of Adam Smith's "necessary evils" and therefore not rent-seeking.

The meat of the issue though, is that this is really about a union dispute, which is fundamentally a business negotiation. The actors are providing value, and they are demanding compensation for the value they provide. One of the suggested compensation, is a cut of profits from AI actors. The potential rent-seeking complaint then is that they are demanding, in exchange for the value they are providing, a cut of revenue that they do not directly generate. For this, they would have a contract. Fundamentally, this does not seem much different from the example I provided earlier of landlords demanding not only a fixed rent, but a variable cut based on the revenue the merchant generates. That boils down to "they are demanding, in exchange for the value they are providing, a cut of revenue that they do not directly generate. For this, they would have a contract." You previously wrote, in regards to this example: "Whether it's proportionate to the the payments received, while that's a contract and that's between the two parties." The article you link here is about a contract negotiation, so it seems that the same principle should apply. If my original example wasn't rent-seeking, then why would this be?

Also, since you use the term "regulation", I am not sure if you are misreading the article or I am misreading you. Are you using "regulation" to mean something other than, for example, a rule from a regulatory agency?

As I understand it, the Line plans for a maglev train. The quoted speeds for end to end travel, for example (20 minutes) would be slightly faster than the faster passenger trains on record, which are maglevs. That was what I was envisioning for both the trains and the modules above. Sorry I wasn't more explicit. In that case, the "engine" would mostly be in the track itself. Even without maglev, neither the train or modules would use internal combustion engines. Electric motors, whether rotary or linear - in the case of a maglev - do experience an increase in efficiency as they get larger like ICE motors. However, that increase basically plateaus at a much smaller size than it does in ICE motors, so the motors themselves in the modules would have pretty much the same efficiency as a train. The other efficiency losses are from friction. There's rolling friction, however, the main reason for rolling friction differences between cars and trains is due to steel wheels on steel tracks vs. rubber wheels, but both the modules and the train, regardless of method (maglev or actual track) would use the same method. The other rolling resistance difference would be due to the far greater weight of a typical train compared to the contact area of the wheels (both to the track and the bearings). Part of that is still due to the steel wheels bearing more weight, but the weight itself plays a role, but this is passenger rail, which will be much lighter. There are also considerations around braking, but regenerative braking negates those. That just leaves air resistance, and I covered that with the modules being able to form temporary unlinked trains. So, overall, I think there would be very little efficiency difference.

For maintenance, if it's not maglev, I will grant you that could be a lot of maintenance. For maglev, though, it shouldn't be that different in terms of maintenance levels. Anyway, in either model, the modules exist, so have to be maintained, even if they get more mileage in a modules-only configuration.

Overall I would say that there's probably a little less efficiency and a little more maintenance in a modules only configuration vs. modules+train, but I don't think it's that much more. Plus, let's not forget the complications and maintenance (not to mention potential safety) issues in the docking/undocking from a train compenent and also with maintaining multiple systems. Neither of us can say for sure without extant systems to compare, of course. Ultimately, you could probably do either, I just feel the train might be a bit redundant.

That is true. It looks like they planned originally for 500 meters tall, so it's 340 times as long as it is tall. Depending on font, you could fit in the range of 500 characters on there. Might be a bit different for Arabic, but should definitely allow a nice long piece of text. Aside from being able to put graffiti on it, or use it as a billboard, I suppose sometimes you don't need a specific reason to build things to the artistic vision you want, even if it's not as practical. I mean, look at skyscrapers. We have skyscrapers now shaped like big Easter eggs, irregularly stacked blocks, and concave mirrors that focus the suns rays to scorch the puny humans who scamper below like so many ants! It's a logical extension of the "curtain" design of skyscrapers (all the heavy steel and concrete structural elements as an inner core with the glass fronted exterior being, more or less, a "curtain" functional facade on the outside) when they went from looking like concrete pillars to crystal towers. Despite that kind of basic construction making elaborate shapes easier, it still costs more to build them that way. Somewhere along the line, someone ends up paying tens or hundreds of millions extra to fulfill some architects artistic vision. So, if they want a big wall as a city, I suppose. Of course, if we are going to go by the rule of cool, I can think of things that are cooler (to me, anyway) than a giant wall.

Definitely. A lot depends on how open the space is. In a well enclosed space, the air moves with the walls, but there's a differential in speed between different "altitudes" that might lead to airflow, but probably mostly predictable. In open spaces it gets pretty complicated. I mentioned the weather problems in an O'Neill cylinder earlier which the classic design for includes a giant open space in the center. Basically, you have the air being stirred by the "ground" and at the ends, so that would induce the air to spin, but how would the spinning air interact with itself and how much affect would the spin have on the air at the center? There's no real gravity to speak of, so how air density would vary is up in the air. Heat rising is based on air pressure/density dropping as you go "up", so it is unclear how heat would move around the system, etc. What rules falling precipitation would follow are unclear because it's unclear what the motion of the clouds would be like relative to the "ground".

That also raises the question of how big the "tunnel" for the train needs to be. If it has transport modules that detach and connect to it with passengers, then it doesn't need a platform, but it does need at least one parallel track and then at least double that for both directions Probably more than double it to service more actual stops and to have trains with offset schedules since the train takes so long to get from one end to the other. Of course, if there are modules that sync up to and join the train, that means they can move independently as fast as the train. Then there's little point in having the train in the first place, except for dealing with wind resistance, and the modules can mostly handle that by forming dynamic unlinked trains out of modules heading in the same direction. The modules just go where they need to. Directly from point A to point B rather than getting on a train that needs to make stops, etc. The vehicles can still use some sort of "track" so they are not quite independent automobiles (though they should be able to switch tracks while in motion), and their travel is scheduled by a central traffic system.

However the transportation is managed, it's still far less efficient in many ways than clumping it all together. Consider all of the redundancy in materials inherent in all of that perimeter! Of course it could be done, but it is not clear what the benefit of building it like that would be.

Apparently they had some fun freefall competitions on SkyLab. Can't do the same on the ISS because it is so cramped by comparison. Even though Skylab is technically smaller, there was a much larger space in it because it was much wider and topographically closer to spherical (it was a cylinder, basically, but a fatter one than the ISS) whereas the ISS was mostly linear and stretched out... (and now I've worked back around the same issues as the Line again). On a rotating space station though, You wouldn't really drop "down" like on Earth. You would "fall" in a curved path that should hit a wall instead of the "floor" (unless it's a really wide conical section). Not to mention, in a section that "high" what would the air be doing? Of course, what you could do is fly in a big enough open space. Descend too "low" though, and you could pass a point of no return and end up "falling". I suppose there could be some interesting opportunities for extreme sports. Might have to unlearn a lot of things that are intuitive on Earth.

Then, there's also what you could do if you brought a motorcycle and there were a track inside a torus space station. Let's say it goes at 2 RPM (about the right spin for virtually anyone to adjust, but not slow enough to make the station garguantuan... well, even more gargantuan. That means it has to be about 450 meters across and about 1.4 km around. So, that means that the tangential speed of the torus is about 168 kph/104 mph. You can hit that on a motorcyle. Go one way and you hit two G's. Go the other way and you take off.

Well, going through the whole thread, the only "content" I can find from you is a brief mention of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center and root cause analysis. So, you could have contributed more. So I wonder why you didn't. I certainly don't think I have written anything that isn't factual. Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of opinion. With the same evidence at hand, we seem to have come to different opinions. You think NASA has made a major turnaround in safety culture, I think it is mostly just window dressing. We will just have to have differing opinions.