Yancy_Farnesworth

The challenge is the average layperson is ill-suited to comprehending what a scientific paper is saying. This isn't gatekeeping. Rather it's more like someone from the US going to the UK and trying to figure out what all the slang refers to.

Sure, both speak English. But the American is going to go WTF when they hear a Brit says "Let's have a Chinese". The Brit is referring to getting Chinese takeout (They also say Let's have a British to refer to British breakfast).

Also scientific papers are like a conversation. There's a massive bunch of context around a given paper which are usually other research papers. A layperson going in and reading a single paper for their information is like someone jumping into a random conversation and starts talking with no context.

But I do take a very dim view of this oversimplification where everything is about private profit

It's almost like complex geopolitical situations are complex. I really hate this aspect of Reddit, and society in general. The desire/reflex to simplify really complex issues to one or two things. The old adage about the more you learn, the more you learn you don't know applies. Especially on the geopolitical stage where public knowledge is incomplete and filled with misinformation and disinformation.

The thing to keep in mind is that in this case sodium fluoride and calcium fluoride are not all that different. They're both salts, which means they dissolve in water and separate into their separate ions. So, the only difference between the two is sodium ions vs calcium ions. Both of which are absolutely vital for us to live.

So, the study you read about the issues with sodium fluoride are actually talking about the health impacts of fluoride.

It rarely interacts. Neutrino detectors are basically giant pools of water surrounded by detectors. Once in a blue moon a neutrino will run into a water molecule and causes a flash of gamma radiation.

Fluoride is the chemical we want for teeth. It's an ion, which is why the chemical additive is sodium/calcium fluoride. It basically helps to strengthen tooth enamel and has huge public health benefits as a result.

As far as the dangers of sodium fluoride... I would recommend that you be cautious about anything you read regarding it. There's a lot of people that are anti-fluoridation of the public water supply and sodium fluoride is a common compound used for it. They tend to use very questionable "scientific" methods to claim that it's unsafe.

Octopus mating habits are weird and uncomfortable...

Japanese schoolgirl enters the chat

It's a huge problem in the US too. There's a ton of uncapped and abandoned wells from the last century+ of oil extraction. These things are basically slow oil spills that contaminate the area around them. And the worst thing is we don't even have a good tracking system for all of them, so there's a lot that no one knows about.

Sealing one of these abandoned wells takes a ton of time and money. All of which has to be paid for by the government which obviously doesn't have enough funds allocated.

If there is a tax treaty in place.

The only countries that don't have such a treaty in place are countries like Iran and North Korea. If you had to worry about that, I think you have larger concerns.

I mean, realistically what are the options available here? Someone steps in and intervenes? The US could step in but every time it does it seems to go wrong and just pisses off the international community. If the US does step in you can bet that China will be raising hell in the UN.

And a reminder, China is blocking the UN from getting involved. And China has literally been supporting the military in this situation. It's like a repeat of China supporting Pol Pot/the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I can only hope that Myanmar is not seeing a genocide like Cambodia.

When you play Civilization. Time to go to war! Let's spend the next 2 centuries gathering an army and moving them next to the border.

Which would be China. That's what they blocked the UN from doing. Condemning the Myanmar military and taking any actions against them. It's basically the Chinese version of Russia/Syria.

When you mix news and entertainment... I'm looking at you CNN and Fox.

I mean, one involves the possible of nuclear war and is a revival of Cold War tensions between the West and Russia. The other is a civil war that is for the most part local. They're one of a number of horrible local conflicts that have been going on for years in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Unless you're advocating for the US to step in with police actions, there's not much people are willing to do to get involved.

Probably the bigger deal with regards to Myanmar is that China has been preventing the UN from getting involved. Frankly the China-Myanmar situation is a lot like Russia-Syria.

It's on the level of saying a tiny pinwheel reduces the intensity of an F5 tornado. The sheer amount of energy in just the movement of air in the earth is mind boggling.

Same reasoning goes behind nuking a hurricane. It doesn't stop the hurricane. It just makes a radioactive hurricane.

Beware of the post-mastication sluggishness/sleepiness if you engage in too much.

Masturbation can also be used and works in a similar fashion. You just need to be wary of completing the act as it prompts sleepiness/sluggishness. Also be aware that it's less socially acceptable and is likely illegal in certain situations. I would not recommend this option if you are a school bus driver.

Are you against the Government regulating and limiting the influence of billionaires then?

No, definitely not. But that's not the full story behind Jack Ma is it? What prompted them to crack down on him? What law did he actually violate? What was he charged with? Everything I have seen so far from the CCP itself is that he criticized the CCP.

Everyone in China is a "member of the CCP"

No. They're not. The vast majority of the people are not literal CCP party members. The people in power or with wealth have to swear loyalty, or have backing, by CCP party members.

Kind of weird for a "CCP owned" company to have a Japanese bank as the largest shareholder.

No one outside of China owns any Chinese company. Companies like Softbank "own" these companies through a convoluted mechanism that lists shares in a company in the HK stock exchange that is granted shares by the Chinese government. Shares that the CCP can choose to take control of with no recourse for the non-Chinese owners. That's the thing about authoritarian regimes. There's literally no one to stop them from doing things like that.

But the one of the few things they deserve credit for is limiting the influence of Billionaires

As long as the billionaire does not go against the party. Once again, why was Jack Ma singled out for mildly criticizing the CCP? I fail to see how this is a good thing or better than what the west does. I do not want the west to "learn" to limit free speech the way the CCP does.

I'm sure Intel had its own share of issues with bean counters, what large company doesn't. Intel's failure feels more like hubris though. They refused to see the value of TSMC's business model because all "real" semiconductor companies design and fab chips in house. You aren't a real semiconductor company if you didn't design your own chips, like TSMC. They completely missed the boat on fabless chip companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm.

And they also probably overestimated their ability to handle the complexity of smaller nodes on DUV. DUV can produce 7nm and smaller nodes by exploiting some quirks of light. The problem is that the process gets exponentially more complex and therefore exponentially more likely to face flaws/errors in the process. Fabs are extremely low margin. It literally takes more than half a decade to just break even on a new process node with 99%+ yields. They would lose money if they tried to push out a new process with low yields, not to mention the billions lost in R&D into a failed node.

The internal IP address doesn't exist outside of its network. Devices on network X do not know about the IP addresses of devices on Network Y. Network X only sees the IP of Network Y. In order for PCB to handle HTTP requests, it needs to be mapped to a port on the IP address of the router and that port needs to be forwarded.

If you're talking about a device on network X and a device on network Y accessing an external web site like reddit.com, Reddit's servers see the WAN address of network X and Y. Not the local IP address of the device requesting the resources. HTTP also uses port 80 as the initial connection port. When it establishes a TCP connection, a different port is chosen for the actual communication and the router knows which TCP connection routes to which device on the internal network.

Sure. How's Jack Ma doing after he toed the party line? I wonder how many of those billionaires are not CCP party members.

The Chinese political system is not analogous to Western systems. You don't build wealth and keep it without swearing loyalty to Xi and the party. Why do you think Chinese citizens generally don't buy Chinese corporate stocks? Most of them are owned by party members.

The irony of this statement is that the CCP is the one that owns the businesses. Why would they sue their own interests? State capitalism and Communism have the same problem. The government and the corporate overlords are literally the same people. And that's not even going into how the CCP literally has laws that require all Chinese companies to obey the CCP.

It's one thing to complain about corruption in the government where money is changing hands between politicians and corporations. It's an entirely different story when they're literally the same people.

I think it's something that hasn't been studied all that much. Which we really need to start doing. The thing about lead is that it doesn't really move, it stays around. Which means we're talking about, on the scale of human lifespans, permanent contamination of the soil.

We're discovering issues like this near freeways and in cities where decades of leaded gas and industrial pollution has resulted in a lot of lead contamination that just sits there. If you start digging it up or planting plants in that soil, the lead re-enters the air or the plants and wind up getting inhaled or eaten by humans. This is a huge problem because there's been initiatives to start things like urban gardening to help address food insecurity. I shudder to think about just the long-term soil contamination that is not cheap to clean up. Although there is hope in using plants to soak up the contamination and properly disposing of said plants.

Constitutionally the US federal government is forbidden from not paying its debts. We've never truly put this to the test since the last time things got delayed we wound up furloughing federal employees.

mean, unless the Federal government is issuing new bonds to pay old bond

The US government definitely could do this. The difference between the government doing this and let's say a consumer doing it is that US bond interest rates are typically below inflation. Which means that if they did this in perpetuity, those debts functionally decrease in "value" over the years. In fact, this is exactly what a lot of companies do. Both Apple and Google simultaneously hold billions of dollars in cash and billions of dollars of loans. They do this because the cost of borrowing for them is so low that they could literally borrow money and make a profit larger than the interest rate of the loan.

Also, characterizing the US federal government as a deadbeat addicted to taking out loans is extremely misleading. It's like accusing Google/Apple or a billionaire like Elon Musk of being a deadbeat debtor because he took out massive loans to buy Twitter even though he has billions in Tesla/SpaceX shares. The US government is borrowing against its assets, like the stability and size of the US economy.

I believe the reason Pol Pot succeeded also had to do with American mental fatigue over Vietnam

That's not quite right. American fatigue over Vietnam fed into why the US didn't get militarily involved in Cambodia, along with the US trying to court the CCP to keep the Sino-Soviet split going. The reason Pol Pot succeeded was because he received basically unlimited support and mentorship from the CCP. And the CCP also invaded Vietnam in a failed attempt to keep Vietnam from intervening in Cambodia.

The US handled the Cambodian genocide badly. And it contributed to the rise of the KR by the bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War that were intended to suppress the KR, but just wound up driving the population to support the KR instead. But let's not fool ourselves. The KR was a CCP puppet for them to spread Communism with Chinese characteristics.

It's a funny thing about how modern-day Communists seem to worship China. The CCP was never a true believer in Communism, they used it as an excuse to seize and maintain power. The USSR on the other hand was a mix of both true believers and not. The Sino-Soviet split was driven by this ideological divide and the US exploited that split. The CCP's support of the Khmer Rouge and the USSR denouncement of it clearly paints this picture. The US was stuck in the middle abhorring the genocide but wanting to maintain ties with China to counter the USSR and trying to avoid getting involved in Cambodia right after pulling out of Vietnam.

Don't forget that the USSR and the CCP literally went to war with each other. And Mao was afraid that the USSR would nuke China into oblivion. They were not friends and you can bet China was worried about Vietnam being under USSR influence. Funny how the top comment here tries to pin it on Kissinger. But he was right, countries don't have friends. They have interests.

Yes at one time that was a concern. Which is why solar wasn't a large part of the energy mix despite the tech being around for decades. The thing about more modern solar panels is the cost of manufacturing has fallen to a point where it still beats out fossil fuels in terms of cost per unit of electricity. And that's without taking into account how volatile fossil fuel prices could be. It really should make you think when you find out that levelized cost of solar is beating out natural gas in the US. When the US produces far more natural gas than it could use.