robotrout

    Welch says, "but [can also] find cancers that were never 
    going to matter."  That's because some cancers grow 
    slowly and never become dangerous, he says. 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10549-018-4691-4

At 0.1c, that 40 years will just whip by for the travelers themselves. To them, it will only seem like ... 39.8 years (doh!) No help there.

Attacks on free speech in USA and Europe have nothing to do with offensive language and everything to do with control. Be careful what precedents you set and what things you celebrate. Pendulums swing.

Are you referring to this? I don't think anybody tried to censor her for this, even though it was incredibly offensive. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/tlaib-going-to-impeach-mo...

I used to travel with a Chromecast so I could cast in my hotel room. I finally gave up, since it never worked in any hotel I stayed in.

Censorship seems to be coming from the left. I think it makes sense for everybody to maintain as much privacy from .gov as possible.

Radio Shack used to always want a bunch of information from you for their database, whenever you would buy anything, cash or not. It was good training in refusing to participate in data harvesting that, 30 years after my first nervous "No", is more relevant and necessary than ever.

Most people in the west have no idea the holodomor genocide of millions by the Bolsheviks (much of whose leadership and financing was from New York) ever occurred. His downplaying of it is doubtless partly responsible.

The original income tax was also promised to be only a tax on the rich. These things have a way of finding the non-rich eventually.

Also, remember in 1970, the bank secrecy act put in place a $10,000 threshold for deposits or withdrawals, that were not reported on a "suspicious activities" list. This is also where we got the $10,000 travel disclosure rule. You will note that in 50 years, that threshold has not budged, putting non-wealthy people and transactions under the microscope. These laws are not adjusted for inflation, and we all expect there to continue to be inflation at the current or even an accelerated rate.

In the vastness of a universe as large as ours, polka dotted unicorns are probably very likely. But it's still unlikely to actually encounter one ... you know, because they're polka dotted unicorns and because the universe is so big...

What I mean is, your argument doesn't make any sense. Just because the universe is big, doesn't make unlikely events more likely to be stumbled upon.

If they're all like this one, that would be puzzling indeed! Well done Mr. Spock!

So, two masses were close enough in relative velocity and vector, that one of them didn't careen off the other one, and instead, allowed the weakest of all known forces to bond them together as they hurtled at high velocity through space.

This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me. I'm not saying it's artificial. That would be even more unlikely, by orders of magnitude. Just saying "Wow!".

I fear the Goog, even when they bear gifts.

This is new. Coauthored by a NASA scientist. Check it out, I think you'll be interested. ;-)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.02692.pdf

    4 Conclusion
    We have shown a strong correlation between solar and 
    tropospheric variability, in that swings from El Ni˜no 
    to La Ni˜na are related to the phase of the solar 
    cycle’s “fiducial clock,” and that that clock does not 
    run from the canonical solar minimum or maximum, but 
    instead resets when all old cycle flux is gone from the 
    solar disk. While the exact mechanism remains to be 
    elucidated, changes in cosmic ray flux appear to the be
    the driver of these ENSO swings.
    
    Finally, in the absence of sensitivity to solar-driven CRF 
    variations in current coupled climate models, we have a year 
    or so to wait to see if this indicator pans out. However,
    should the coming terminator be followed by such an ENSO 
    swing then we must seriously consider the capability of 
    coupled global terrestrial modeling efforts to capture
    “step-function” events, and assess how complex the Sun-Earth 
    connection is, with particular attention to the relationship 
    between incoming cosmic rays and clouds/ precipitation over 
    our oceans.

Even if we were to stipulate his 10% number, that's 4.3% of cloud formation based on cosmic rays. Not insignificant.

Your repeated contention that pollution aerosols are of equal magnitude to cosmic rays contribution requires a large helping of evidence to back it up, given the huge quantity of cosmic rays that impact the troposphere.

I'm not certain how to respond to such a non-argument in such a biased forum as this one. I would respectfully just point out that on this subject, you are in a filter bubble, which you obviously have made no attempt to escape from.

From your quoted article.

    This work offers a new understanding of global particle 
    formation as based almost entirely on ternary rather than 
    binary nucleation, with ions playing a major but subdominant 
    role. Our results suggest that about 43% of cloud-forming 
    aerosol particles in the present-day atmosphere originate 
    from nucleation

There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible for temperature increases on Earth, Mars, Triton, Jupiter, and Pluto.

While CO2 promoters point out the fact that solar irradiance changes are relatively small over time, they ignore that those same irradiance changes correspond to changes in solar magnetism, which means changes in cosmic ray incidence on planetary atmospheres. It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation.

It's really not as clear cut as you have been taught.

I agree. It has to be obvious to those in charge that this debt bubble that every single country is blowing cannot continue to grow forever, yet no country has succeeded in halting or even slowing their debt growth.

They're trapped, as you say, by each other. None can get off the ride before the others do. They will all need to fail together in a worldwide economic collapse, or agree unilaterally on some sort of global debt reset.

But that's not how grownups should run a planet, and it will doubtless lead to a lot of human death. It's already lead to uncontrolled growth that has damaged ecologies, fisheries, and aquifers for thousands of years to come.

Systems that depend on infinite population growth seem like a bad idea. Mayors of cities who constantly need to grow their population base to prop up housing prices, all the way up to countries who constantly need to grow their population base to prop up entitlements ponzis. At some point, you end up with an unstable system that will fail catastrophically. While you wait for that time, the average quality of life decreases incrementally for all (till the collapse, when the quality of life may collapse all the way to death for many).

Non-debt based monetary systems (gold, bitcoin, etc) will result in slower growth, since developers and governments will need to wait until they can attract enough saved capital to start their projects. This is why people turn up their noses at these systems. But is slower growth really such a bad thing?

I am pleased that you sound like you feel that would be a bad thing. Communism is being sold as a cool thing by Bernie Sander, Ocasio-Cortez, Antifa, and others. If that view becomes mainstream, it won't end well for any of us.

The thing that struck me was her age. She's 35. I like to tell people that I went from being young to being old in one birthday. There was something really significant about that birthday for me, that seemed to carry me instantly across the mental threshold from "having all the time in the world" to "you're old now".

Of course, now I'm much older, and think of 35 and even 40 as being young, but I do remember it as being a big deal at the time.

This woman reached that age and freaked out, since she evaluated where she was at in life and decided she was behind. It's definitely an age where you do take stock of your progress. At least it was for me.

That's a good attitude comrade. Congratulations on earning an additional 10 points to your social credit score! Now you can enjoy the 2nd class cabin on our country's numerous, punctual, and well maintained trains. Keep up your outstanding and patriotic attitude and you'll be riding in the luxurious and stylish 1st class cabins in no time!

When we constantly pound the table and shout that all people are all exactly the same, they often self-identify as oppressed victims, if they look around themselves and see others that are better off than they are.

This is a recipe for societal tension, although it is handy in politics.

Minorities and non-minorities alike, after having been assured that everybody is exactly the same, often feel that they have been cheated in some way. This is sadly often used by politicians to marshal them against their fellow citizens in the next election or referendum.

Those studied in this article were all white.

Yep. It was easy for us to topple Libya, and we almost succeeded with Syria as well, if Russia hadn't stepped in. A secular government is easy to stir up the fundamentalists against, to use them as foot soldiers in your regime change operation.

They won't have as much luck with Iran, since it's government is so strongly aligned with the fundamentalists, the pool of willing cannon fodder will be smaller.

I hope, at some point, these illegal regime change operations that the US and other western countries have been involved in for so many decades, will eventually stop.

I am pleasantly surprised that communist atrocities are actually published in the New York Times. It is so important not to forget and whitewash history.

After reading the book "A Piece of the Sun - The Quest for Fusion Energy", I came to understand just how hairy these reactors have grown. A simple idea has needed to have layer upon layer of complexity added to it, up until the point that I'm not sure it would be viable even if it did work in the lab.

Not only will each commercial reactor, should anybody attempt one, be extremely complex and therefore non-robust, but there's still the issue of neutron contamination, making the whole thing brittle and ready for the nuclear waste disposal team to rip out most of it in a few years time.

It is politically useful to pick at partially healed wounds to make them bleed again, rather than allow them to heal completely. I hope that MLK would have fought against the current trend of re-opening those wounds and undoing any healing that had already begun.

Perhaps this wont work because the MASSSIVE heat sink required

Perhaps not! Thanks for running the numbers.

The premise of the article was to use a capitalist supply and demand metric (salary) as a way to fairly allow merit based immigration. I think that strategy makes a lot of sense, and was making the point that our hypothetical midwest company should not be allowed to scuttle the non-gameable merit-based proposal in favor of something more political and squishy. Our hypothetical midwest company can either pay enough wage to get the employees it needs, or it can't, and if it can't, capitalism has a solution for that. (creative destruction)