pg_bot

While it is my personal belief that sodium cyclamate is safe for human consumption, (The US ban was due to a research study that linked consumption to an increase in bladder cancer of mice) you missed the point that I was making.

It is likely that both sides of the aisle have banned substances that are actually safe. It is likely that both sides allow substances that are harmful and should be banned. We should further review the areas in which we disagree as it is unlikely that the science changes across an ocean. It is much more likely that hidden incentives or bad methodology has lead to someone being incorrect. Whether you think the US or Europe is better or worse at food regulation is likely a biased opinion.

This article falls flat when it comes to providing actual evidence of harm being done. Both the EU and the US have products on store shelves which would not be deemed acceptable for human consumption in either respective region. I could write a scare mongering article about sodium cyclamate, a common sweetener that is considered a carcinogen in the US but is available for consumption all over Europe.

Considering that regulators are generally scientifically minded it's funny that there are so many discrepancies when it comes to what is safe and what is not. Perhaps we should look into where we disagree and try to figure out who is right and who is wrong.

If your pension fund can't handle an investment potentially becoming worthless you deserve to lose all your money. If you decide to take the risk on any investment, you get the rewards when things go right but face the consequences if the investment doesn't pan out. There's no need for taxpayers to be involved in this process even if the people losing money are teachers, orphans, veterans, or grandmas.

If anyone is interested in buying/importing modern pachinko machines or parts, my brother runs the largest pachinko importation business in the US.

https://clovercollectables.com/collections/all

Hmm this guy's focus on planetary movements and lunar geometry light up the parts of my brain reserved for detecting quackery.

I would bet that he got extremely lucky with his timing.

Tires are more complicated than a single variable. A large diameter tire with a small sidewall does not necessarily perform better than a smaller diameter tire with a large sidewall. The problem with the word "big" is where the tire is big matters and that seems to have been lost in translation.

Larger diameter tires won't necessarily help with potholes or badly maintained roads. All things else being similar, a tire that has bigger sidewalls will absorb the impact of driving over a pothole better than one with a smaller profile. So find a small tire with big sidewalls and you should be better off.

Better aerodynamics and lower rolling resistance which leads to a higher range for the vehicle.

Bigger wheels are generally a stupid idea from a performance standpoint. Smaller tires have better ride quality, cause less pothole damage, and are cheaper than larger ones. Big tires just look cool.

Faster charging with a shorter range seems to be a viable alternative. No one would care if their car could go 200 miles if you could recharge it in a minute and there were chargers everywhere. Engineers should be focused on making their cars lighter and more thermally efficient.

Big Pharma also pays billions in taxes to fund agencies like the NIH. While there are certainly a lot of shenanigans with intellectual property rights and market exclusivity at the end of the day we do get extreme value from pharmaceutical companies. If there was more competition, we would not see price hikes as often as we do.

It provides a bigger target for your fingers to hit on mobile. So if your design calls for people using small screens it generally is an improvement.

I've been taking a look at materials for creating a flywheel energy storage system and for the life of me I can't understand why people don't use basalt fibers as the material for the flywheel. It has similar properties to carbon fiber but is cheaper and heavier. Since the energy storage scales exponentially with speed but linearly with weight, it should make sense to optimize for materials with a high tensile strength. Basalt fiber is pretty easy to manufacture and there are tons of it all over the world.

I've been doing some research on flywheel storage systems like this one. Most use magnetic bearings to reduce friction. They should last more than 20 years with permanent magnets.

Why can't we just poke a few holes in the existing box to let the steam escape?

- The mRNA vaccine for HIV will be successful.

- Cryptocurrency will continue fading into irrelevance.

- Russia continues to throw the kitchen sink at Ukraine, but will lose ground in the Zaporizhzhia oblast. The war will be effectively over after the Ukranians recapture Melitopol.

- Belarus will revolt and Lukashenko will be exiled to Russia.

- Biden dies of natural causes.

- Inflation in the US will continue to fall back down to the expected 2% rate.

- Blitzscaling falls out of favor as more venture capitalists focus on fundamentals and due diligence.

- The next wave of big tech companies will be founded in cities that are not known for being tech hubs.

- Cryptocurrencies will decline to pre pandemic prices and will begin to fade into irrelevance for the general public.

- Putin dies, Russia is destabilized.

- A new covid variant emerges from China, no one in the Western world will care.

- Everyone will talk about deglobalization, but in actuality the world will become even more globalized.

- 2023 will be the year a lot of people in 2030 will look back on as a golden age for new company formation.

- The US will see an openly atheist presidential candidate or a Senator will come out as an atheist.

It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen. Store it in a container and let it expand later and you can turn a turbine. There's no issue from an environmental standpoint since you are converting air to air. You can build a cryobattery literally anywhere on earth with off the shelf components.

Malinvestment

You would need several scientific breakthroughs to make hydrogen economically viable for transportation. It's expensive to generate, it embrittles storage containers, is highly flammable, and there's no existing infrastructure that you can piggy back off of. Right now it is a dead end.

You might want to seek out a direct primary care clinic.

I would guess that there's too much work being done at runtime. I would expect all of the data to be cached in such a way that it is a read operation without any transformation. It's doing multiple lookups and unnecessary maps when the data should just be formatted a single time and cached. You could even skip the JSON transformation by just doing it once if you want to get super fast.

The elixir implementation seems super slow. The first thing that jumps out to me is that we should be using streams instead of just reading the file. The second would be the `schedule_for_route` which should just be a GenServer lookup instead of reading from ets.

It's highly unlikely that we will enter a sustained period of low growth. It is too advantageous for all parties to continue interconnecting economies. Any country that chooses to isolate themselves from the rest of the world will find that it is much more difficult to be self sufficient than they imagined.

I'm no fan of the Jones Act, I think it should be repealed in its entirety. However, there is a political reality that several special interests are united in keeping the law on the books.

I think a better solution would be to amend the Jones Act to remove the American built requirement. I'm fine with American flagged and crewed ships if we want to ensure that we have available merchant marines. (which we don't have now) However, there is no such thing as an "American built" ship anymore. The ships we "build" in the USA have had their design and critical components outsourced. The only thing we do is assembly, and that is the easiest part of shipbuilding to ramp up in a war.

You can sell this plan to the defense department by stating that you will actually have ships and crew members if you need them. Right now almost the entire fleet of Jones Act ships is reaching their end of life and there is a point which we will reach soon where they will go extinct.

There's been a tendency in the art world in the last 50 years or so to defend every work and dismiss any criticism as someone not knowing what they are talking about or being a philistine. Yet it is also widely accepted that the entire field of visual arts has been in a malaise for quite some time.

There are failures in every walk of life, yet no one in the art world can accept that a work of art can be a failure. I think this mentality is partly responsible for the general decline in the public perception of modern art.

I've seen enough, I don't need to see anymore to tell you it's bad.

After looking at the linked images, I am terribly underwhelmed by the project. The only significant thing about the work is its size and honestly who cares?

What a colossal waste of time and money.

My response is to "I have nothing to hide", is that isn't what you're giving up when you give away your privacy. You should be comfortable with "never needing to hide anything in your past, present, or future". The future is impossible to predict and actions that could be innocuous today may cause a great deal of trouble for you in the future. You give up that right forever when you lose privacy.

I'm astounded that we still don't have proper lazy loading of stylesheets in 2022. We have async and defer for scripts but nothing for css. There are a bunch of hacks that exist, but none of them work if you want to use a strict CSP. Even if you use it then you have to worry about a FOUT instead of automatically loading the stylesheet from the browser's cache.

Inlining critical CSS is madness for any project that is above a certain scale. Maybe you can do it for a single page, but in my experience the results are not worth the effort. You can make your site exceptionally fast without it.

A wifi router is not likely going to make a huge difference in your electricity budget. If you want to make a dent the most cost efficient ways are typically replacing lighting with LEDs, and improving the insulation of your house. Heating and cooling typically consumes 30% of your electricity budget.

After that I would take a look at your refrigerator and water heater.

I think that everyone who has kids should teach them about gambling at a young age. Teach them how to play blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, sports gambling, etc. You can sneak in math lessons in a way that can be entertaining, but the greater lesson should be that the house always has an edge on the player.

While gambling can be addicting, I don't think the correct response is to make it illegal. Perhaps there should be more regulation regarding the amount you can wager within a year, but keeping things underground is IMO worse for society.