Sugar cane is a type of grass. Corn is a type of grass. What is "proper sugar" other than the desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass? What is high fructose corn syrup other than the not quite completely desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass?

Sure, the sugar juice maybe squeezed out of the stalks while the corn juice is squeezed out of the seeds, but in either case you're squeezing juice out of a particular species of plant in the general family of grasses and removing as much water as you conveniently can in order to make it lighter for transport.

In both cases you're doing it because the juice is a mix of sugar molecules in water. The exact ratio of glucose molecules to fructose molecules is different between the two juices, but both molecules are sugars and they are very similar to each other in general shape and constituent atoms as well as in how they are perceived by the human tongue.

I'm not suggesting you overindulge in either, but you're putting too much weight on the word "proper" when you write "proper sugar" as if that particular desiccated grass juice is the "correct" one.

If it were worthwhile, either one could be further processed to increase or decrease the fructose to glucose ratio to any desired ratio. It would cost money to do it, so there would have to be a good reason. But glucose and fructose are made of the same atoms, so converting either one to the other is just a matter of chemistry.

Alternatively, it's bioengineering. Instead of fabricating solar panels out of silicon to generate electricity to synthesize chemical fuels, we harness biological processes. I recall reading a sequel to E.T. where the aliens of E.T.'s species used entirely biological technology for everything, including constructing and powering their spaceships. The book was probably utter nonsense, I was very young when I read it, but the idea of engineering biological systems isn't absurd.

When you think of nanotechnology you probably think of Iron Man's suit assembling itself from nothing, but aren't mitochondria basically nanotechnology? How much smaller can a machine get than the cellular apparatus that read RNA and build molecules from the RNA instructions?

Engineering plants to produce liquid chemical fuel seems like a reasonable thing to do in a technological society.

Yes, it's been tried repeatedly. But keep in mind that the person trying would be, by definition, a sociopath, so they're only trying to wipe all the other sociopaths from the face of the earth.

Obviously, non-sociopaths never try wiping people from the face of the earth. So when the wiping is finished, you'll be left with the most successful of the sociopaths at the top and the non-sociopaths doing the best they can without turning sociopathic.

Personally I'd prefer strong rule of law, a low tolerance for selective enforcement, and a distribution of power. Minimize the amount of power that any one sociopath can have by handling as much as possible at state and local levels. Only give the federal government and executive branch the bare minimum of responsibilities that can't possibly be handled at a lower level.

And at a state and local level, have a process for eliminating laws if they aren't enforced with a high degree of consistency. If laws aren't worth enforcing consistently on everyone who is observed breaking them then they shouldn't be on the books. Figure out what rules really matter at each level of government and rigorously enforce them regardless of who breaks them. "Do you know who I am?" should be met with "Yes, and you ought to know better than to have broken that law, so you should get stricter punishment, not a free pass."

Currently the US federal government has way too much power and money, and the president controls way too large a percentage of that power and money. It makes presidential elections way too tempting a target for any sociopath to resist. So the only question is who is the most sociopathic and willing to go to the greatest lengths to get that position. I'm way less concerned about a sociopath winning a seat on the local town council or even mayor or governor.

Maybe "philosophical" isn't quite the right word, so let me put it another way. You say you value people, specifically you wrote "I think that people are valuable, and knowledge is valuable." So let's put a number on it. I'm a person. If I create a bitcoin wallet what number are you willing to transfer into my wallet to represent how much you claim to value people?

Or when you say "I think that people are valuable" are you referring to some definition of "valuable" that doesn't mean "worth a lot of money"? Because "worth a lot of money" definitely is one definition of the word "valuable", but I think you're using it to mean something totally unrelated. I referred to that totally unrelated definition as "philosophical" but I'd be willing to accept another word as long as we can agree that it is a second definition that is completely unrelated to the first definition.

Some people are "valuable" in the sense that I would be willing to pay them a lot of money. Other people are "valuable" but I wouldn't pay them any money.

If I met you in person and you weren't immediately offensive I might buy you a beer. I wouldn't buy you a college education. If the college education is "valuable" to you in either sense of the word then you should pay for it. If your college education is "valuable" in the financial sense of the word then maybe I'll end up paying you for the services you can provide as a result of that education. But you shouldn't expect other people to pay for your education if it is only "valuable" to you in the non-financial sense.

Don't confuse the two definitions and think that because your education is valuable to you in a non-financial sense that other people should be compelled to pay for it in the financial sense.

And if you paid for it yourself (or if your parents paid for it) that's great. But if your degree was enriching to you but other people were forced to pay for your enrichment then that's less great. My grandfather was enrolled in classes from his eighties and nineties because education is enriching, but he had the money to be able to pay for it. I would strongly encourage everyone to get any education that they can afford to pay for.

They are, but the word "valuable" has two different and mostly unrelated meanings. You're referring to an abstract philosophical value. But the word "valuable" also refers to how much a person is willing to pay for a thing. People aren't always willing to pay money for the things they consider philosophically valuable.

If your degree has great financial value then you wouldn't need somebody else to pay for it.

The disconnect comes when you say something has great philosophical value but you can't or won't pay the financial cost of it. Your assessment of the financial value is different than your assessment of the philosophical value. You say it has great value (referring to philosophical) but when presented with the bill you suddenly don't think it's that valuable (referring to your willingness to pay). Or maybe more simply, you think that because something has great value to you, somebody else should be willing to buy it for you.

"assigned to them"? What an absurd phrase. They bought it, they paid for it. They may have paid to have it built in the first place. Or they may have paid someone else who paid to have it built and only did so because they were confident that they'd be able to sell it when they wanted to. Maybe they inherited it from somebody who bought or built it, confident that they'd be able to leave it to their children after their death.

Landlords don't have property "assigned to them". Where did you ever get that notion? Nobody would ever buy or build anything as expensive as a house or an apartment building if they thought it could be taken from them without compensation. Buildings exist ONLY because the people building them and the people contracting for them to be built are confident in the existence of property rights that guarantee that the building can be exchanged for money, whether rent or sale, at the owner's discretion.

If you take away the confidence that the owner of a building can exchange it for money, whether in the form of rent or sale, then you destroy the construction industry. The residential construction industry simply cannot exist if people who would pay for residential construction believe the legal system won't support their plan to exchange a building for money.

Also, the statement "a landlord doesn't do any labor" shows a profound ignorance of landlords. A really staggering level of ignorance that really really raises the question of how can a person be so fantastically ignorant.

But you can choose not to become a doctor, or a construction worker or a water treatment plant worker.

If it becomes possible to demand certain goods and services with no obligation to pay for them just by saying "it's a human right to receive that good or service" and no recourse for the provider of the goods and services when people flagrantly take what they "need" with no intention of paying, than it'll become obvious that those are the sort of goods and services that nobody should go into a career of providing.

Confiscating the work and property of people who currently have it is pretty much a one time thing. After you've made it clear that anyone providing those things is subject to having them confiscated without compensation, you pretty much kill any future hope of new people going into those lines of business, and anybody who can get out of those lines of business will be looking for alternatives.

If you're satisfied with never another apartment building being built, and with never a house being built without the future resident paying in full in advance, then go ahead and try to make it legal to for any current occupant to stop paying and claim that their current occupancies justifies their forever future occupancy.

But if you think it might be nice for new buildings to get built, don't try to justify why the moment somebody moves into it, the people who paid for it to be built have no recourse to compel payment from the people who will live in it.

I have read documentation that was clearly written by somebody who thought nobody was ever going to read or use it. It was worthless, but it sure would have been nice to have some actual useful documentation. This was pre-LLM by at least a decade or two, so I'm pretty sure it was written by a human who generated "slop". And now I'm not sure how to differentiate "AI slop" from human "slop".

No, they can just sit idly by and let the Republicans do what they want. If that's your preference, enjoy, because it's what we've got. Depends if you want to solve problems or just enjoy being able to assign blame. I think a lot of people enjoy being able to assign blame.

In many states it didn't really matter, Trump wasn't going to win the electoral votes. But if you live in a state where a republican win was a sure thing, you had better options than just handing over your state's electoral votes to Trump and saying "not my fault, I'm a democrat"

But what if it doesn't require a meeting?

What if I intend to send you an email after the meeting, but might decide to use a group text chat instead and will only resort to scheduling a meeting if it turns out that it's taking too long to reach an understanding via written communications.

"Touch base offline" means "We need to resolve this, but not right now, and we don't need the participation of everyone on this particular call in order to work out the details. The answer or decision is important, but it's a better use of everyone's time to continue on to the next topic right now without agreeing on that answer/decision." but it doesn't imply a specific form of communication or a specific time. "Touch base offline" is a lot more concise than trying to precisely express exactly how that not-right-now decision/discussion will take place.

Oh, and what makes you think that "workflow" and "task" are interchangeable? The workflow might be a diagram I plan to draw and send to you after the meeting which may or may not require a phone call to fine tune the exact steps in the diagram. "Meet to discuss this task" might be entirely incorrect. A workflow might include a series of manual tasks by different teams or it may require some automation to be developed or it may just be how you and I plan to organize and distribute the work between the two of us. It might be that somebody mistakenly thinks "workflow" and "task" are synonyms, but it might also be somebody who actually knows what they're talking about.

Not just your house. In my neighborhood somebody had an ICE car parked in their garage. It caught fire and not only destroyed their home entirely but did enough damage to the neighbors on both sides that their homes were also condemned.

That was probably over ten years ago and it's all been rebuilt now, but it took over a year. It would suck to lose your home for a year because your neighbor parked an ICE vehicle in their garage.

Still, everybody around me does park their cars in their garages and a lot of them are EVs, although fewer than the ICEs, and there was only one fire in the 25 years I've lived in the same neighborhood.

So the score is:
1 ICE fire destroyed three homes
0 EV fires destroyed zero homes

Of course they can, it's one of the only two things they do.

Non-rechargeable batteries do one thing: generate electricity from chemical reactions.

Rechargeable batteries do two things: generate electricity from chemical reactions and consume electricity to drive chemical reactions from a lower energy energy state to higher energy state.

Are you maybe confusing batteries with capacitors? You might be correct in saying that capacitors cannot generate electricity since they simply allow electrons to move around in a way that transfers energy into and out of an electric field. But batteries definitely do not contain all the electricity that flows out of them, they generate it on demand from chemical reactions that generate an electric potential.

I suspect that most people neither under nor over estimate the size of Africa because most people just don't care enough to estimate the size of Africa.

But I'm at a complete loss as to why you think estimating the size of Africa has anything to do with estimating the potential of Africa. Centuries of history provide strong evidence that size of countries/continents/islands has very little correlation to what they have the potential to accomplish.

And estimates by foreigners of the size of countries/continents/islands has even less to do with the potential of those countries than their actual size does.

Do you think Taiwan or Japan or the UK have been negatively impacted by people looking at maps and thinking that they're smaller than Africa? I don't think people looking at maps and saying "that region isn't very big" affects the region's potential negatively at all, and making it look bigger on the map isn't going to undo the non-existent negative impact at all.

Snowflakes as a form of frozen water are very beautiful, so using the word as an insult is weird.

With a very specific interpretation it is a valid insult, but neither SirSlud nor the Anonymous Coward I'm replying to seem to know what that interpretation is, so they both are failing pretty hard in their attempt to be insulting.

Kind of like trying to insult someone by calling them a star or brilliant or genius or gorgeous. Any of those words could be an insult under certain circumstances with the right context, but just throwing the word around in the wrong context isn't a successful insult.

Close to true. There are two main types of companies, non-profits (often referred to as 501c.3 in the US after the relevant section of the tax code) and for-profits (including a variety of structures such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs as well as as publicly traded)

It's pretty much a tautology that if you create a for profit company your primary goal is to make a profit. Lots of non-profit companies are simply trying to not lose so much money that they can no longer do whatever it is their primary goal is.

If you weren't trying to make a profit by doing any given activity, you'd probably just do it and not bother with the paperwork and legal fees of creating a company.

Same goes for anyone with a job, BTW. You can generally work without getting paid, it's called volunteering and lots of people do it. If you've got a job it's because your primary goal is to get paid.

Companies aren't sentient, they're just organized groups of people working together. Groups of people are just like individual people, some are working for the money and some are working because they want the outcome of the work even if they lose money in the process.