The lasers are really not the expensive part. You've been able to get fairly powerful laser tubes and matching power supplies for low hundreds of dollars for quite some years now, that's why there are cheap laser cutters available. The expensive part is everything else, plus profit for someone.

Weed-zapping robots are still very expensive, so yes, still cheaper.

Another question we could ask would be whether the total cost including ecological impact is less, but then we'd get into a debate which is unfortunately irrelevant to farmers who are trying to make a profit year on year.

Your +5 comment keeps the troll comment visible.

But as for real world harm Trump has caused there's a little over 500,000 dead children. That is the number of deaths caused by cuts to usaid since Trump took office. There is absolutely no debate whether these numbers are accurate the only debate is whether or not we should care since they aren't American children.

Even if you don't care about children outside of America I would like to think people are smart enough to understand that it's cheaper to drop food than bombs. On the other hand some people just really really love dropping bombs

Which is what basically everyone is going to do thanks to antitrust lawsuits forcing Apple to allow them to do that. At least in Europe I'm not so sure about the United States and how that will play out.

But my Netflix subscription is through Netflix not through Apple so Apple doesn't get a 30% cut. It's a little crazy that for the longest time they were.

I get that offering the store has value. There are Indies on steam who basically use valve as their entire marketing budget so the 30% valve takes is pretty damn good for them. Steam finds their customers for them and all they have to do is make the game and pop it up there. A marketing budget is typically about 50% of the cost of making anything so steam taking 30% is pretty damn good.

But it definitely would rub me the wrong way with subscription services. Although now that I think about it I wonder how it works when you sign up for an MMO from steam...

Right? About 1/5 of the world's fertilizer goes through that straight and unless it opens up real soon it's going to miss the growing season and we're going to have famines. One of the dirty little secrets of our current civilization is that we use oil byproducts as fertilizer and without those we can't grow enough food to keep the planet fed.

Now the good news is there is plenty of oil for several hundred years. But just because we have enough to feed everybody doesn't mean we will.

That makes Iran's threat on par with threatening to turn cities into glass.

One of the major problems in the world is people are too focused on showy stuff that makes good TV and not enough on The daily grind and all the horrible nasty little ways our world functions.

What the cool kids call the banality of evil...

If you're big enough to sue Bloomberg you're big enough to bribe Trump for a bailout.

Much much cheaper and much higher rate of return. Basically a guaranteed rate of return as long you don't cheap out on the bribe.

How many times have nuclear weapons been used? How sure are you that Russia's nuclear weapons work? How about america's?

But the fact that Iran can close the straight is a fact. They can do it without freaking out the rest of the world and without the incredible expense of maintaining a large enough nuclear arsenal that nobody decides to chance it and see whether or not those nukes really work.

Iran could have a couple of actual nuclear missiles but they would have to not only prove that they could hit countries that matter and targets that matter but also that they could maintain that capability. There would be a lot of doubt and questions around that that would always leave them open to invasion from people willing to roll those dice.

But all they need to do to close the straight is to drop a few mines and take some pot shots at some vessels. Pirates could do that let alone a functioning nation state.

The difference is between a threat that may or may not be able to be backed up and one that absolutely can be. That's why closing the straight is better than having a nuclear weapon. As an added bonus it freaks people out less so if Iran can return things to some semblance of normality we will all just kind of forget about it.

I don't coddle Nazis. Get fucked.

To which claim do you take exception?

Gas prices have gone up a bit but it's nothing they can't absorb. You can see that in Trump's poll numbers. They can keep telling themselves gas will come back down in 2 weeks.

So you can keep that up until the midterms as long as gas doesn't get so expensive that it prevents them from paying rent or mortgages or buying food. That's the point where they have to abandon dear leader but we're not anywhere close to that yet for those people.

Owning the libs is part of it. My God they love yelling TDS. But it's also sunk cost fallacy.

Yes, that's the point, and the other links support the point in an ordered fashion. Your analysis of the links in question explain why that is the case. The USA deliberately avoids looking at evidence in general, that's our SOP. For example when you see claims made by US agencies that there are no studies that show or there is no evidence that something is true, what it means is that they are discarding all foreign studies which do not check meaningless boxes that are required for our agencies to consider them valid.

You need to remember the take everything in the headline with a grain of salt.

The study isn't just saying that you think it's haunted it's saying that the ultrasound frequency these buildings emit puts humans on edge. As a consequence of that yeah if you are susceptible to believing in ghosts and scary things that aren't real then yeah you're going to be more likely to think something scary that isn't real is there and think that it is real.

But the headline of "ultrasonic waves admitted by some old buildings maybe unpleasant to certain people" isn't nearly as cool or is catchy or likely to make you engage and read and comment.

All I'm saying is whenever you see a headline you need to turn on your cynicism and critical thinking. Every single headline is always trying to manipulate you.

Only it's the strait of Hormuz instead of an actual nuclear weapon. And it's way more effective than any nuclear weapon they could ever get their hands on.

Iran now has the power to crash the entire world economy. All thanks to the staggering incompetence of one senile old man and a bunch of sycophantic hangers on and a bunch of people who couldn't figure out that making a known rapist and pedophile president wasn't going to end well for them...

The thing is so far about 40% of the country here in America has been completely insulated from this mess. It won't last but it's looking like it may hold out for them until after the midterms and then they don't matter anymore.

Fuck you, clown.

But muh states rights! Oh wait, I forgot those are only for slavery.