2
points
Clewza313
Joined 5,545 karma
- Chinese has tens of thousands of chengyu (pithy four-character sayings), it's hard to tell which one she used but maybe this:
http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/che...
- CCP is hilariously bad at PR, period. Their idea of pacifying unrest in Tibet is to put up a giant middle finger facing the Potala Palace and surround it with posters of Mao and Xi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Peaceful_Liber...
- The game changer here is SpaceX's Starship. If you can lift 100T to orbit in one shot, that suffices to deploy around 6 MW worth of the current solar panels we use for the ISS, which clock in at around 120KW/2T. Solar panel efficiency has improved greatly since they were designed and built, so even accounting for the overhead of assembly, refueling, the transmission component etc, 10MW+ per launch seems quite feasible, particularly if Musk gets costs down to the mooted $20/kg or so.
Charlie Stross does the napkin math here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-...
- It takes both engineering and leadership. There's no shortage of talent at NASA, but much of it has been and still is squandered over political machinations almost entirely unrelated to the task at hand. Case study: how the Space Shuttle was crippled by Air Force requirements that turned out to be completely unnecessary in the end.
- I remain genuinely confused about what river you are referring to here. The Johor River?
- For better or worse, that's exactly what happened, so Madison's policy appears to have been quite effective.
- That's kind of the point of the article. We used to think "endgame" meant eliminating COVID, now it's become pretty clear that's not going to happen and the best we can do is get to state where we can live with it.
- The only countries that have consistently managed to keep COVID at bay are China, Taiwan and New Zealand. All the rest of the former COVID Zeros, including Australia, Vietnam and Singapore, have succumbed to Delta, and it's a matter of time until the three holdouts do so too.
- McSweeney's had a great piece on the absurdity of outdoor dining enclosures: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-am-the-designer-of-thi...
- Singapore is a small island, and the mighty Singapore River, located on that island, is all of 3 km long.
- The key thing here is that it's Reliance Jio rolling this out. Jio is India's largest mobile operator, and in fact the world's biggest operator outside China, with 4x more subscribers than (say) Verizon.
- You're attacking a straw man of your own invention here. The Economist has devoted pages and pages to the Capitol attack, the COVID pandemic, climate change, social media, abortion rights etc.
I find it kind of sad that the US is so polarized that everything (like the Economist) that doesn't fit neatly into Democrat/left vs Republican/right is nonetheless forcibly pigeonholed into one of the two camps, with absurd results like you labeling the Economist -- historically a very liberal/libertarian publication -- some kind of right wing Trojan horse.
- Chinese characters (used in Japan as well) are interesting in that you frequently have no idea how to write them by hand, but if you use an IME on your phone/computer and can enter it phonetically, you can trivially recognize and select the right one.
- The change is for clearing individual cookies. You can still clear cookies per site.
- For better or worse, Australia is a federal state and individual states have a wide degree of freedom to impose rules on their populace.
I'm a little surprised we didn't see similar moves in the US, but COVID spread so quickly there that it would have been kind of meaningless. The maritime provinces of Canada, though, had a very similar arrangement at one point, effectively cutting them off from the rest of the country.
All that said, I do think Australia is on a very slippery slope here and the current government is no fan of civil liberties. The restrictions on leaving Australia are particularly indefensible.
- 12 points
- Shame about the clickbait title: something like "How SpaceX Starship makes orbital power solar stations possible" would be more informative.
- Joke articles (and let's face it, this is a joke sport) tend to attract joke edits.
Birth incentives don't work quite as well, because a $500 voucher doesn't go very far in a country where a public housing flat can sell for $1,000,000 and the schooling system is a pressure cooker mandating extensive paid tuition.