The momentum is the same, the impulse (and therefore forces) are very different. The bullet is propelled down the barrel gradually - the force is spread through the entire time it takes the bullet to travel the length of the barrel, the reaction forces are applied to the stock gradually, and spread over the area of contact between the shooter and the gun.

A bullet stopped by a vest/plate has a much larger impulse. The bullet needs to be stopped essentially immediately, rather than gradually slowed down over a length equivalent to a rifle barrel, otherwise it kills you. The force is also more concentrated, occuring over the cross-sectional area of the bullet, rather than over the entire contact surface with the rifle.

The issue isn’t forwards, it is down.

You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.

To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.

Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.

Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.

You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.

2000 Bezos or about 4x the GDP of the planet.

People just need to invest and stop blaming others for being broke SMH.

Invest one penny at 3% per year, who can’t afford one penny? You’ll have $68 billion in just one thousand years. Poverty is a choice.

But if you could see them, they could see you …

The issue is how the constitution lays out the choosing of a president. Pence had to certify the results, if he had refused to do so for long enough, then that session of Congress may have ended without choosing a president.

At that point, the Constitution prescribes there is a contingent election in the House, where every state delegation to Congress gets 1 vote. There are more red states than blue states -> Trump wins.

Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.

For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.

And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == ‘whru686’, it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.

Yes, you. And me. And probably most of the people reading this, who live in the US or another Western country

Not quite. 1% of global population is ~80 million people. There are about a billion people in the highly developed nations (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and some minor others). So the top 8% of the golden billion, if we assume all in the US, the top ~25% of the country.

Intentionally did not talk about Vance, I was merely responding to the idea that using past prices adjusted for inflation compared to current prices isn’t that straightforward.

Thanks for the lecture, appreciate the tone.

I see the point you are trying to make, but inflation doesn’t quite when that way.

Comparing the prices of the same commodities at two different points in time is literally how inflation is calculated, the increase from $1.50 to $4 is real.

Now, what the inflation-adjusted dollars are telling you is that if eggs had only increased in price commensurate with general inflation, they would have gone from $1.50 to $2. The extra $2 increase is above what a consumer would expect given the general increase in the prices of everything else. If someone (magically) had a salary that increases with inflation, they would find eggs today to be a larger fraction of their spending if they kept the same level of consumption.

Eggs are more expensive both in absolute and relative to other products. The reasons for this are complex, but due in no small part to people continuing to buy large quantities of eggs even when they were heinously expensive in the early days of the pandemic. The market absorbed that information and came to the conclusion that eggs were previously undervalued.

Just jumping in to say that red soils are not very fertile. They are nutrient-poor in the necessary macro-nutrients (nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus) and have a very poor ability to retain water. They are very rocky - little organic matter content - which limits both water retention and cationic exchange capacity (affecting N+ and K+ bioavailability), and tend to be acidic.

Cultivation is possible, but it requires large amounts of fertilizers and soil conditioning agents (liming to raise pH and add calcium, addition of organic matter). In effect, recreating an artificial soil that is closer in nutrient availability to the black soils present in the world’s most fertile regions (which today are also heavily fertilized).

If the VP spot is vacant, the president selects a new VP who must then be confirmed by the House and Senate; per the 25th amendment:

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

The argument the person above you is making is that they also profit off people who never file claims in the first place. In fact those people are more profitable since they do not consume labor to process claims.

The Byzantine system of rules and coverage exemptions exists to disincentive people from filing claims just as it exists to give leeway to deny them.

Of course the overall point that paid claims must be less than premiums charged (and investment income) is correct.

The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.

Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.

You haven’t really described what you are imagining.

Proper “AI”. No more coding, you just tell the machine what to do and it will do it. I don’t think in the physical world but computers and every profession that is not physical will be much rarer. Either pivot to AI Management or be the arms that the AI “guides” through a task.

Telling a computer specifically what to do and how to do it without making mistakes is coding. Programming is a level above that, in designing the architecture of how to approach the business problem.

What the other commentator is saying, is that simple being able to tell some model ‘build an app that does XYZ’ requires AGI because that set of instructions is not complete - the machine requires outside knowledge and the ability to make judgement calls in order to complete it.

If that isn’t what you meant, it is at least what you said. The breakdown in communication here, between humans, should also serve as another reminder how difficult it is to convey an idea to another entity and how that problem will remain difficult for a very long time.

Harris and Walz aren’t Millennials by any stretch. Harris is 59, Walz is 60. Spring chickens compared to Biden and Trump, but still 20 years removed from the oldest Millennial cohorts.

Beyond making them look horrible, they were marching towards a court ruling against the forced arbitration clause.

Once there is a precedent for the clause being unenforceable, the clause ceases to be a deterrent to legal action - every claim would be litigated at the very least to settle the question of whether arbitration is required in a specific case.

The US is the world’s largest oil producer. The US, however, does not export the most crude oil, but instead exports large quantities of refined products (gasoline, diesel, etc.).

The US was the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in 2023.

DnD good and evil are distinct from common usage of the terms; they are cosmic forces, objective truths. Each action reverberates through the higher and lower planes and tilts the scales towards victory for one side or another in their eternal struggle. This lore doesn’t leave a ton of room to change the alignment of entire races (and that is by design, structure makes it easier for people to get in to the setting).

But this is just in the established settings, any DM is free to homebrew any setting and justification they like.

Note that I am not trying to defend this as the height of storytelling, it isn’t. It is a consequence of how the setting is justified - with deities being active participants, having specific rules for granting and revoking powers, and the physical presence of higher and lower planes embodying perfect conceptions of ‘good’, ‘evil’, order, chaos, etc. All of this can be changed, and again any DM is free to change it, but the ‘deep lore’ of the established settings over the past 40 years is drenched in this stuff.

One way to consider it is simply - the Drow aren’t evil because they are Drow. The Drow are evil because their culture promotes actions that align with the literal true definition of evil that is present in the setting. Evil doesn’t mean bad, it is just a label aligning with some physical rule of the universe. Just like the positive charge of a proton and negative charge of an electron are labels for physical rules of our own universe. Positive isn’t any better than negative, but they are inherently distinct.

FAF absolutely benefits from action spam, to the point where it breaks the game balance.

T1 assault bots lose to T1 tanks, and they are supposed to because they are half the price and much quicker to build. You can dance them around if you click enough and they will dodge the tank shells… a few micro’d bots can then defeat 10s of tanks. That swing in mass efficiency is already enough to decide the game on maps smaller than 20km.

RTS will always benefit from intensive micro because time is another resource. Doing more actions, assuming they are of positivity utility, gives an advantage over an opponent who does not.