567 karma · joined August 23, 2011
Maybe you don't know about LIHKG posters being attacked in the UK [1]. The CCP has teams of operatives working overseas specifically for this purpose [2]. If they will physically attack you for writing a few posts on a forum, you should certainly expect to be murdered by "car accident" while raising funds for a $100 million film.
If this works like they say, then it's cause for hope.
There's also the very real possibility of forest fires releasing huge amounts of carbon at once. Even dead trees preserved in peat bogs could burn and release carbon in this manner.
Rocks have their own weaknesses such as ocean acidification, but relatively speaking they're much more stable.
Current carbon emissions are over 10 billion tonnes per year, so the capture speed will have to exceed that by however much required, probably something like 10x as much. If a process could be scaled to capture 100 billions tonnes of carbon per year, it could be a viable way out of the mess.
Is it even possible with current technology given unlimited funding and political will? For example, if insoluble carbonates could be synthesised from atmospheric carbon dioxide, that could be a form of long-term carbon storage.
Therefore the only thing they could do is to keep showing up in support of the demands for as long as they could personally afford to do so, and try not to pay attention to the methods of others when they already knew that all methods were probably going to fail.
If one of these activist investors happened to have lent a stock out, which then failed to deliver, what is the worst consequence they could inflict on the borrower? If no consequences are available, then how do short squeezes happen?
To spell it out more clearly, here is a great place for one's opponents/competitors to be stuck in - authoritarian enough to eliminate any advantages of liberty, but not authoritarian enough to be efficiently coordinated.
While the mainland-China version of simplified Chinese is based around Mandarin, written Chinese is most definitely not Mandarin. 裏 is not 里. 只 is not 隻. 后 is not 後. They might sound the same in modern Mandarin but that is where the similarity ends. Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese.
I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
RNA viruses do change quickly, but influenza's probably on a different level with its multi-segment, randomly assorted genome.
Personally I haven't yet imagined a way out that satisfies all sides. The fear of police seems deeply ingrained in the population and no current or former protester believes they would be treated fairly if the movement abandons any of the demands. The government, fearful of reprisal from the ruthless Beijing elite, are unwilling to grant any concessions to the protest demands. The police are also deeply fearful of an independent judicial investigation into their activities, and must maintain a state of disorder, increasing the government's dependence on police so that they will not launch an investigation. It seems like the situation has reached a Nash equilibrium and the whole ship is doomed to continue sinking.
Perhaps the most important factor in these communities is that most content is junk anyway, requiring mental effort from the reader to remove and avoid. That's what the whole voting thing is for. An advert would be "superjunk" - unwanted content that also has editorial control. It might be an illusion that a community is full of value to be skimmed off, when reality is that the junk is at barely maintainable levels and a little more might push it over the brink.
Bad outcomes for gene drive are either that it doesn't work, or the mosquitoes go extinct in nature and cause more ecological issues by their absence. The worst problem is fixable by keeping live specimens for reintroduction. In fact, since malaria is the target and not the mosquitoes, reintroduction might be a good idea after malaria becomes extinct.
Bad outcomes for the fungus is it becoming uncontrollable and starts killing other insects. Reintroduction becomes impossible without engineering a new, immune mosquito. Or that evolution backfires on the spider and causes them to go extinct. Or all of those happening together.
Comparing the two, the fungus has all the downsides and more, with zero upside.
Although people with Down's syndrome have a high likelihood of passing on Down's syndrome if they do have children, inherited cases are extremely rare.
> Everything on the right side of that equation can be determined to extraordinary precision: The current and voltage by using quantum-electrical effects that are measurable on laboratory instruments; the local gravitational field by using an ultra-sensitive, on-site device called an absolute gravimeter; and the velocity by tracking the coil's motion with laser interferometry, which operates at the scale of the wavelength of the laser light.
Current is measured in amperes, derived from the charge (in coulombs, defined from the charge of a proton) and time (in seconds, defined from the vibration of a Cs atom). Gravitational acceleration is measured in ms^-2, derived from length (in metres, defined from the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in a second) and time. Velocity is also derived from length and time.
With these new defined constants (including the Planck constant), all of the instruments could now be calibrated by observing natural phenomena and a whole lot of counting.
Speaking as an owner of very few items of clothing, just one item with inadequate pockets causes a lot of inconvenience, so my tolerance for them is zero. Manufacturers of inadequate pockets can wipe this segment right out of their market - although I only have evidence to confirm segment size of 1.