The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it's only recently that civi...
Went back and checked: Walter was 50 at the start of the series. The series spanned two years of in-universe time, and he died at 52.
Anyway, the point stands. Cooking meth is a valid shared interest for an older man and a younger man to bond over.
I'd been on Reddit for 15 years, predating the Digg exodus. Actually, I find that my memories of the early days makes moving to Lemmy easier. Present-day Lemmy is already ahead of Reddit back when I started, both in terms of content and features/availability.
It's good for this to have an airing, but can I just say that Singapore is privileged to have such a small-potatoes issue to be considered a political saga? Even by the standards of Singapore's own history, this is tame: LKY's condominium-purchasing scandal from the 90s was 100x worse.
I think that's just how the US signs off on every meeting with world leaders.
The Ceiling of the Debt
Kevin McCarthy, Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, speaking in late May after striking a deal on the US debt ceiling.
Russia was always Turkey's number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin's botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it's become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.
Material degradation is a very serious issue for these perovskite cells, so it's a bit concerning to see it brushed off with a "lol we'll just have to see" comment. Also, these materials contain lead, so disposal/recycling becomes a significant concern.
The grim reaper is coming for old.reddit.com any day now.
Shutting down polluting businesses, relocating others away from where people live, and traffic congestion control are all valid approaches to air pollution control, used not only in China but around the world. Not sure why you need to put scare quotes around the word "solved".
Yeah. It also makes sense that the different nations are so culturally different, if they're spaced out over large distances. It can be rather inconsistent, because some quests have NPCs treating excursions all the way across the map like it's no big deal.
The latest event has a few examples of this, which was one of the things compounding my irritation with the (imo) subpar overall execution of the storyline.
Why China should be friendlier to its neighbours | The Economist
No country has more neighbours than China, with 14 land borders. It is a difficult group to get along with under any circumstances, but China’s flawed diplomacy is making the task even harder.
How big is Teyvat supposed to be, canonically? The last few "region crossover" events made it very murky, and the new summer quest got me wondering again. Is going from one end of the continent to the other supposed to be a crazy journey only a weirdo like the Traveler would undertake, or something that anyone can do, so long as they can fend off the monsters?
The people in charge of TNG by that point were creatively bankrupt. It would have been a fiasco.
Also, the idea just doesn't fit Star Trek. It isn't a comic book franchise, where fan-pleasing callbacks and crossovers are baked into the formula. In Star Trek media, callbacks and crossovers have tended to be some of the worst stories.
After seeing this, I thought I'd go over to the Play Store to leave a 1 star review. Then discovered I had already left a 1 star review (complaining about their shitty interface) a few months ago, which I'd totally forgotten about ;-)
Optical components are already used in some parts of servers, in interconnects. But I don't expect them to replace silicon for general purpose processing ever. One thing that's never noted in these scientific press releases is that optical components are huge. The wavelength of light is about a micron, i.e. a thousand times larger than the feature sizes of silicon electronics. This limitation can't be easily overcome.
I know this upsets a lot of people, but the ruling isn't without justification. $450B++ in government spending should not be accomplished through a legal loophole. (Quite aside from the fact that fiscal stimulus is the last thing the economy needs right now.)
for some fucking reason
The reason is that she expected Hillary to win and the satisfaction of the first female president appointing her replacement.
It's a great example of how these justices aren't as wise or smart as they seem to think they are.
I had that LOTR Choose Your Own Adventure book when I was a kid. It was amazing seeing it resurface as a meme all these years later.
This is part of a genre of science writing whereby a university's press release officer struggles to figure out what a professor is talking about, and translate it into hype. So the text oscillates wildly between impenetrable (the material offered by the professor) and eye-rolling (the stuff by the press release guy).
From what I can figure out, the "light-induced matter" here refers to polaritons, a phenomenon whereby the quantum states of light and atom mix, which has been known about for decades. Basically, these guys figured out a slightly nicer way to simulate these things on a computer.
If it was so irrelevant, the colleges would not have fought tooth and nail to maintain it. Anyway, the prior experience of individual states that have banned affirmative action indicates that the effects are not negligible -- it's responsible for double digit shifts in racial compositions of student bodies.
Things will depend on how the universities respond; one can imagine Harvard doubling down on ever-subtler ways to tag Asians as personality-free robots undeserving of consideration.
How big is your government? The Index of Economic Freedom is directionally correct at best
The Index of Economic Freedom is directionally correct at best
China’s campaign to regionalise supply chains is doing better than appreciated
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade deal which includes ASEAN, China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, is quietly making big inroads.
"It helps that the area where RCEP has made most progress—harmonising rules of origin for goods exports—matters a lot to the complex supply chain that runs across the world’s biggest manufacturing hub. The deal, in effect, creates a single market in the intermediate goods that go into final products, helping RCEP to prevent the so-called “noodle-bowl” of dozens of overlapping trade deals that exporters struggle to digest."
About 2,000 years ago, Roman soldiers buried a million nails in a four-metre pit. Why?
‘Neutral’ Singapore sees spike in Taiwan investors (SCMP)
Direct investment flows from Taiwan to Singapore peaked at S$7.21 billion (US$5.4 billion) in 2021 from S$3.69 billion in 2020, with the city state seen as politically ‘neutral’ amid tensions between Taiwan and mainland China.
Testing the limits of WTO security exceptions
How is the WTO managing the increasing use of economic sanctions for national security reasons? Tania Voon (University of Melbourne) explains.
The US has historically championed the WTO (and its predecessor the GATT), as an important part of the US-led rules-based international order. But over the past decade, this support has frayed. Nowadays, the US is even quietly sabotaging the WTO by blocking the appointment of new appellate judges, preventing the WTO from resolving trade disputes between WTO members. Notably, this policy is being carried over unchanged from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.
Rethinking Fiscal Policy: keynote by Larry Summers
Larry Summers gave a keynote speech at a Peterson Institute workshop on fiscal policy a couple of weeks ago. The take-home message: the long run US fiscal deficit is becoming a matter of very real, not manufactured, concern.
During the 2010s, many left and center-left people got used to ignoring worries about the deficit. Paul Krugman, for instance, frequently called out conservatives for concern trolling the deficit with the goal of pushing spending cuts.
But today, with a 10-year-ahead deficit forecast of 7.3 percent, including a 3.6 percent primary deficit (conservative CBO estimates), high interest rates amplifying debt service costs for the forseeable future, and no political will on either side of the aisle to reduce spending or raise taxes, such concerns can no longer be dismissed.
Summers isn't everyone's cup of tea, but he's really good at synthesizing big picture economic problems.