Step one might be to stop calling it the loneliness epidemic. Loneliness is an emotion, isolation is a condition, and we might even expect that if people felt lonely more often they would try harder to be social and actually be less isolated. This is also a network effect: my reaction to my loneliness affects someone else's loneliness if I go talk to them (or not).
If you're buying individual bottles, you're paying for the refrigerator. Otherwise you buy boxes and it's still very cheap. Spindrift is $6.49 for an eight-pack and LaCroix is cheaper. I haven't bought Coke in a long time, sorry.
Beer has done the same thing. A few years ago I could get any of a number of beers at Costco for $1 per can/bottle in a 24 pack. Now the cheapest name brand offerings are $1.33 per can and even the Kirkland brand is over $1. If I buy it at a standard grocery store, those same beers are over $2 each.
Far UVC is carcinogenic when it reaches living tissue. However, it has a very short mean free path so it doesn't, generally, reach the growing layer of skin. It's less obvious whether exposed mucus membranes (lips, nose, tongue) or the eyes are affected. It probably doesn't reach the lens of the eye, which is good.
That is not true. It can cause possibly eye irritation but animal trials have shown that it is not carcinogenic even to mucus membranes, eyes, and thin-skinned areas.
The tear layer only contributes a little bit--far-UV eye safety is mostly down to the fact that the 222nm only penetrates to outer epithelium (so cells that will be dead in a few days anyway), and the fact that your eyes get very little effective dose if you aren't staring directly into the lamp. You've got eyelids, eyelashes, eyebrows, hair, etc, so the effective dose to your eyes is actually much lower than the dose assumed by most safety standards (ANSI/IES 27.1-22, UL8802), which are fairly conservative. Check out this paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/php.13671
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
I think that depends very much on targeting discipline. If the bombs are surgically striking key regime figures and sites, hampering C2, reducing the regime's total conspiratorial power, and increasing latency in the regime's OODA loop, I imagine protestors would welcome the help. The mullahs have taken the people of Iran hostage and their goons are out on the streets killing protestors. Israel or the US metaphorically sniping the guns out of their hands would be a judicious and IMO proper application of military force.
On the other hand, if the bombing is indiscriminate, or has an unacceptable error rate (oopsie, those weren't IRGC command posts, they were kindergartens), then I would expect a rally-round-the-flag effect. If the sniper misses and hits the hostage, well... people are going to be unhappy.
Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic. An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change that.
I think we’ll eventually have some technology to make this realistic.
Supersonic flights powered by jet/rocket engines might not be it for all we know. IMO we are still pretty early in the history of aviation as a technology.
If you are already mentioning rocket propulsion, then you should know that Gwen Shotwell foresees Starship flying E2E (point to point on Earth) flights with paying passengers, competing with airlines. One hour to anywhere on the planet.
Hopefully we discover some sort of gravity physics/tech that makes chemical rockets obsolete!
I don't see Starship being useful for civilian transport use cases, but for military operations sure! But there's not much to distinguish a starship from a nuke launch during a war, so it remains to be seen whether that risk is worth it.
I can imagine Starship landing on a sea launchpad (in coastal cities), and the last 30 miles can be taken by a speedboat in half an hour. The sea usually isn't as traffic-jammed as land communications, and boats, unlike high-speed trains, don't require that much infrastructure.
Which is nonsense. Not only will rockets never have airplane reliability and safety for basic physics reasons, but that rocket profile looks exactly like an ICBM and nobody wants to let that confusion happen.
Airplane flight trajectories look exactly like a V1 missile, and even modern tomahawks could be made to fly such a profile. Or it could be a subsonic B-1B instead of a Boeing 747. Solutions to IFF have decades of development.
There's no mention of the underlying cell chemistry on the landing page or under the "battery" tab, and only three people listed under the "About Us" of which the only one who sounds remotely technical is Ville Piippo, so I punched him into Google Scholar and found this:
I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing jobs. The important question is whether they have positive externalities. According to one argument (which I'm reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy level is not obvious.
(OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)
Benzene is far more degradable than DDT. In fact the primary reason benzene causes cancer is because the human liver can metabolize it, producing the reactive carcinogen oxepin. It doesn't always degrade fast enough to prevent toxicity to humans or animals, but it doesn't last forever.
The British pound was displaced by the US dollar. Currently, the US dollar just doesn't have a proper rival. The euro, yuan and rupee are considered politically suspect (each for its own unique reasons); the pound and yen have too small a base. Without further transformation of the global financial system, the only alternative is for banks to hold a basket of currencies, and in such a basket the dollar would likely still play a significant, if reduced, role. This is a slow process because it means changing the nature of currency reserves from a single safe haven to a "nest". What this means for USG spending power is not immediately clear.
Ok, let's see - yuan isn't a freely traded currency, it's heavily regulated by China. From that alone it can not be used a reserve currency by anyone - unless they want to hand over all control over their assets to CCP.
The rupee is better, but there's not a lot of trust in Indian institutions globally, so black swan events are more likely. I can see it becoming a better proposition as India further matures and taps into its population more.
No, euro - that's a solid contender. Not only it's already used in a lot of countries, and therefore backed by more than one economy, the EU institutions are legit to a fault - they continuously refuse to seize Russian assets, because there's no solid legal grounds for it, despite all political will towards doing so.
That alone makes it far removed from being politically suspect in my book, unless there's some blatant case against the euro that I'm missing.
The main issue with the euro has been the stinginess of the ECB. The Fed always makes plenty of dollars available but during the Great Recession this was not the case in Europe. This is a problem for euro-denominated debt. (It is also a problem for the yuan.) The unusual political structure of the EU — not a single country — is also potentially concerning, as is its apparent dependence on the United States for defense.
> That alone makes it far removed from being politically suspect in my book, unless there's some blatant case against the euro that I'm missing.
Lack of integration/solidarity. A common currency is a pretty bad idea if economies are allowed to diverge (see previous sovereign debt crisis, there's no reason why eg France can't be the next trigger).
You need a common tax base, and solidarity across member (much more than the current state) to have an effective monetary policy.
The in-between status quo for EU really isn't great (either you need to keep building EU institutions/start having proper eu taxes and budget -- something that is not really popular at the moment--, or euro should be reconsidered). (From what I understand it's not really a controversial opinion in economic circles).
Who considers them politically suspect? I’m guessing the people who live in the countries that use them don’t, and on the contrary would increasingly be seeing the USD as politically suspect.
The people who live in the countries that use them aren't relevant, because we are talking about them as reserve currencies. What matters is whether other countries see them as politically suspect.
Gold's resistance to oxidation is pretty unique and valuable. Every metal with similar properties is also expensive — palladium is the most common and its price hovers around several hundred dollars per ounce despite being much less popular for jewelry or currency.
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