The point is exactly that they’re trying. Despite the parade being attacked, the democratically elected government, and the police as an institution are supporting them. That is the essence of working towards freedom of expression and progress: The fact that the people in the parade are permitted by the government to express themselves, and protected by the government when they do so, even if popular opinion may be against them.

I absolutely agree that newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to label someone as a criminal before they have been sentenced. My point is that there’s a difference between reporting indisputable facts about an event, and reporting that those facts make someone a criminal.

Reporting that “Video shows person X shooting person Y”. Is different from reporting “Person X committed murder by shooting person Y”, because in the second case you are reporting that they committed a crime, when they may be acquitted of murder in court for any number of reasons. Reporting that “Person X allegedly shot and killed person Y according to this video” makes it seem like there’s any doubt about whether that happened.

I see the point, but still think it’s a misuse of the word “alleged”. There is no doubt here that the teacher was strangling the kid: That part is on video, and is true whether or not they’re convicted of a crime for it. Whether the strangling was a crime, or whether there were mediating circumstances that make it not a crime is what remains to be determined.

I just think we should be able to separate between “person allegedly committed a crime”, which needs to be proven in court, or “person did XYZ and there is video evidence and multiple independent eyewitnesses accounts of it”, which shouldn’t need to be proven in court.

I’m here to say that if there’s snow, skis win on practicality. Almost every winter, there’s at least one day when you will have some people skiing to work in Oslo, a city of 700 000 inhabitants, with a metro system. Because when there’s 10 cm of snow in the streets, skis are the quickest and easiest way to get anywhere.

I have to admit: If you (semi-)regularly use floating point comparisons in programming, I don’t know why you would ever expect 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 to return true. It’s common practice to check abs(a - b) < tol, where tol is some small number, to the point that common unit-testing libraries have built-in methods like assertEqual(a, b, tol) specifically for checking whether floats are “equal”.

Long range artillery has pretty hard limits, and once you approach the 100km range, time to target becomes a real issue, even for missiles that can be shot down.

Modern anti-air hat a range of several hundred km, and has been combat tested. More short-range systems (< 50 km) are in use (with huge success) every day in Ukraine. Of course bombers have also improved, but I wouldn’t put money on the bombers having improved relative to the AA.

Ps. I’m not the person downvoting you, I think you make a decent point, I just disagree :)

I specified “a reasonable distance from shore” because an important part of the point of a carrier is exactly that it can stay easily 100 km from shore and still strike far inland. If a carrier is in range of shore-based torpedoes, they’ve likely messed up long ago.

As for bombers: They’re historically the major threat to carriers, but I don’t see any modern developments that make modern bombers any more of a threat to modern carriers than WW2 era bombers were to WW2 era carriers.

Saying they were always more trouble than they were worth is a bit of a miss though: They completely dominated for a period, to the point where entire columns would be redirected or kept in port if intelligence arrived saying that a certain battleship had left port and was on the hunt.

As for the “modern” aircraft carrier: I think it will remain viable until we see a fundamental paradigm shift in how naval warfare is conducted. A carrier is at the centre of a carrier strike group, and is probably one of the most well protected places on the planet at any time, and can move at over 40 knots. I have a hard time imagining what could locate and take out an alert carrier in reasonable distance from shore, other than another carrier group.

Well, yes. That’s the thing: If you give up, you drown, if you keep going parallel, you never know when the tide might turn. If you’re 24 (that’s how I interpret your previous comment), you’ve only had the option of voting in one presidential election so far. In that election, progressives completed the monumental task of voting out an incumbent proto-facist. And for all of Bidens flaws, there can’t be much doubt that a lot has been heading in the right direction. Of course, there’s still a huge task ahead, but the previous election shows that Trump can be kept out of office, and the past three years show that things can get better.

Step 1: Forgiving student loans, Step 2: Working to reform the system.

Step 1: Pardon certain drug-related crimes, Step 2: Work to reform drug laws.

Step 1: Massive infrastructure investments, Step 2: More investment in public goods

Step 1: EO’s to protect reproductive rights, Step 2: Legislation to do the same.

My point is this: Biden has shown that he is working to make progress, and that he can actually get stuff done. The problem is that there’s a whole lot that needs doing, much more than anyone can do in two terms. We need to keep getting the best option into office, and we need to spend the next four years to ensure that the best option next time is better than Biden is now. If Trump gets four years, I fear that we’ll have a near impossible job.

To be fair: Europe spent 20 years and massive resources trying to improve the situation in Afghanistan, failed spectacularly, and were told very clearly by the Afghans that they should leave. I wouldn’t judge them for taking that message to heart and finally leaving Afghanistan alone.

In addition to cost (which I don’t have numbers for) there’s a question of efficiency: Geothermal heat it typically relatively “low temperature” heat, which makes for very inefficient power plants, especially in southern places like Italy and Greece, where there is little or no easy access to cold reservoirs (like the sea around Iceland).

Geothermal energy is the perfect source for heating cold places in winter, or otherwise heating places you want warm, but you need quite specific geological conditions for it to be an efficient means of producing electricity.

I really struggle to comprehend how you can debug hardware that is several light-hours away, let alone how you would proceed to split an OS (or whatever Voyager is running) into separate parts and then upload those parts to separate hunks of memory to make a functioning machine…

Also: What would they do if the code they uploaded was corrupted “in transmission”?

Yes, Covid-19 is still considered novel, but saying that we are dependent on evolutionary-scale changes to develop immunity is just wrong. The immune system learns to recognise infections relatively quickly, which is literally why vaccines work. It’s also why people typically only get infected by seasonal epidemics once in a season, because we quickly build a short-lasting “immunity” to the virus that is in season. Source: Masters degree in chemistry/biotechnology.

So your standpoint is that you want people to walk around making each other sick regardless of the consequences?

I never said that. I said that if nobody ever gets sick, the consequences are much larger when disease does spread. Just check the statistics for any country post-covid lockdowns, and you will se a spike in non-covid related respiratory disease. Plenty of doctors and researchers have pointed out that the reason was very little respiratory disease during lockdowns/quarantining periods leading to low immunity in the population. I want to minimise the consequences long-term, and I’m saying that I prefer to get mildly sick once or twice a year over getting extremely sick every other year.

And your reason for this is that you spent two weeks in bed?

It seems like you didn’t even read the whole paragraph. As I said, what I experienced wasn’t unique, but something we could also see in statistics over hospitalisations. I’m lucky enough to only have been in bed, but for people with preexisting conditions, the same infections could have been much worse. Again: If most people get mildly sick every now and then (as we always have) we prevent outbreaks from wreaking havoc and hospitalising a bunch of people when the do happen.

I’m not pretending coronavirus is literally a type of flu virus. It just happens to be a novel flu virus that we don’t have as much exposure and immunity to yet. There are plenty of historical examples of what happens when a population is hit by a virus that it has little or no immunity against, even though that virus is relatively harmless to those with immunity.

That is not an argument against vaccines, and it is not an argument against all the precautions that were taken when Covid-19 first hit. Those were both necessary for the population to build as much immunity as possible, with as few as possible deaths and as little as possible sickness.

It is an argument for the fact that Covid-19 must be treated differently now and in the future vs. how it was initially treated. It is now a virus that most of the population as some degree of immunity against (due to both infections and vaccines). If you doubt that that’s the case, just look at the reproduction numbers for Covid-19 outbreaks, which are still ongoing. In the initial waves, just a handfull of infections were capable of spreading to entire countries, killing thousands, within just weeks. If a handfull of people get Covid-19 now, that is no longer the case, even though we aren’t quarantining people. This is a direct result of herd immunity. Just like we have flu season, where different flu viruses spread in local epidemics, Covid-19 will continue to spread in local, seasonal epidemics in the foreseeable future (likely “forever”), but it is no longer the same threat as it was when nobody had any immunity to it.

It might have to do with the fact that by far most of the population has some degree of immunity now due to infection or vaccination, making the disease much less lethal than it was, and now completely comparable to other flu viruses. I don’t want everyone to freak out every time some mild disease is in season. Yes, it sucks to get a cold, and it sucks to get the flu, but if nobody ever catches them we will have very low levels of immunity in the population, making it far worse when people do eventually catch them.

After covid I was bedridden a couple weeks because of common colds. Thats never happened before. The amount of people hospitalised due to other diseases than covid also spiked (we have statistics for this). The reason was that very few people had gotten sick for two years, so nobody had any immunity agains anything they weren’t vaccinated against (which is most cold- or flu viruses).

a lot of people aren’t receiving the housing they prepaid for.

the hell world of trying to find a place to live in the US.

Your propaganda

I’ll just leave this here for you to think about.

If we’re able to make hydrocarbon-synthesis from CO2 efficient… we’re still going to need to source the hydrogen somewhere.

But if we do that using electrolysis (with renewables), and are able to create more energy efficient CO2 capturing processes, I could see synthetic hydrocarbons as a viable fuel option in the future. The thing is: They’re stupidly good at being stable, energy dense, energy carriers. We also have a lot of infrastructure in place to handle hydrocarbons already.

In principle, synthetic hydrocarbons could be part of a zero-emission cycle, where we capture CO2 and electrolyse hydrogen with renewable energy, and use the hydrocarbons as an energy carrier. But if we go that way, we’re definitely going to have to research efficient hydrogen production, and probably storage as well.

One of the advantages of hydrogen is that tanks and fuel cells can withstand a large number of “charging cycles” much better than batteries. Additionally, for ships, the amount of energy needed to move is so enormous that I fear we’ll have a hard time creating batteries that are feasible for long-distance shipping.

For short distance ferrying (including large, car carrying ferries) on the other hand, Norway has already implemented quite a few electric stretches. The major issue there is building the infrastructure to charge the ferries.

There’s a comment on another post with this article doing the math on this, and it seems like the net emissions (when you account for efficiencies) actually favour steam-reforming + fuel cells.