You should look into Bill Gates startup company that designed a small cost-effective breeder reactor that was meta-stable and would not produce weapons-grade isotopes. It was meant to be deployed in third world countries to generate local power and reduce the need for expensive and vulnerable transmission grids. Current reactors are expensive because A) they are using designs from the 1950s, and B) a HUGE portion of the cost is the paperwork burden of complying with government regulations put in place by anti-nuclear nutjobs to hamper and delay reactor construction.

I ROTFL whenever I hear someone call Trump a "fascist". Trump is the one supporting our constitutional rights, while the left wing of the democratic party is working hard to eradicate the rights to free speech, religion, and association. The most appalling part is the excesses of anitfa. People forget that the word NAZI is a contraction for the German Nationalsozialismus, or National Socialist German Workers' Party. The NAZI's were totalitarian socialists. Being a socialist does not in any way imply that you are not a fascist. Quite the contrary, Antifa is a virtual clone of the NAZI brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung), who broke windows, beat people up, and set fires to bully their opponents into silence.

Kanye West is back in the race. You MUST do a write-in vote for Kanye. If you don't, you are racist. And racism is the ONLY issue allowed to be discussed for the next four months!

There is a scene in the conclusion of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the "ultimate question" whose answer is "42" turns out to be "What do you get when you multiply six times nine?" This reveals that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Universe. Well get ready, because there IS something fundamentally wrong with the Universe as we conceive of it. It seems that it is relatively simple to demonstrate that the spontaneous evolution of life is a virtual mathematical impossibility. UNLESS... well watch for yourself : https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FMXaDDXYvbZM

Market capitalization is not revenue, and Stock price is not profit. Stock prices react to all sorts of influences, including an "irrational exuberance" for electric cars. Ford had annual revenues in 2019 of $155B. GM was $135B. Tesla was $24B, and only a fraction of that was from electric cars. Stock prices don't make products successful. It is SUPPOSED to work the other way around. But the stock market has become detached from all reality. Stocks climb simply because investors "feel" like they will go up, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, when other manufacturers begin to make cheaper electric cars, Tesla will hit the skids. This happened in the tech sector when the dot-com bubble burst. This writer lost a large chunk of his retirement when SGI (that cool graphics computing company that powered Pixar) went from $25 a share to 25cents per share when PCs caught up to proprietary UNIX servers in performance. Fame is fleeting and fickle, and it will abandon Tesla soon. And another generation of investors will learn what it is to be fleeced by hype.

If you think about it, using online voting will enable us to enter an age of real-time democracy. First we get rid of the electoral college, then we radically streamline Congress. If we amend the Constittution so that members of Congress only PROPOSE legislation, then let the public do the actual VOTING on each bill in real time, all kinds of problems get solved. There would be very little profit in lobbyists giving campaign contri-bribe-tions to candidates, since they wouldn't have any votes to be bought. Re-election would be a much more accurate reflection of the will of the people, which is what democracy is supposed to be all about. Of course, any technology have-nots would essentially disappear from public interaction, and there would be no incentive to reach out to them since their voting would only dilute the influence of the technology gifted, but hey, I'm sure there's a down-side too :-)

I may be an odd duck, but I don't like whisky. Scotch, Irish, Bourbon, Rye, or whatever. It tastes like furniture polish mixed with rubbing alcohol. People who are willing to pay north of $100 per bottle of aged whisky are a mystery to me. I simply can not fathom how they claim to like the stuff. If I should feel the need for a little alcohol induced relaxation, I go for Vodka. I read an article once that claimed that Vodka produces fewer hangovers because it has less contaminants known as "congeners" - from Wikipedia - "These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural)." So I should shell out big bucks for whisky because it has acetone and formaldehyde in it? Yeccchhh! You can keep it.

Looking at your sig line - "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph..." is for it to claim its constitutional right to be evil is being violated.

Being a hard-core engineering type, and probably slightly autistic as well, I have always viewed poetry as somewhere between mildew and feces in its contribution to human advancement. The "meaning" of poetry, as one comic put it "seems vague but is in reality meaningless". But hey, now that computers have mastered simulated porn, I suppose simulated poetry had to come next.

Lovelace worked for Babbage, and she was the one who suggested binary logic for his difference engine. Like a lot of "great men" he took credit for the work of his female partners.

The problem with VR (and 3-D) is that everyone's eyes are a slightly different distance apart. But to calculate the "perspective" view that makes 3-D three dimensional, the GPU must make an assumption about the distance between the viewing points. Even small errors cause the users brain to work overtime to cope, and the viewer gets dizzy, feels nauseous and gets headaches. People using 3-D and VR are often not able to articulate what is "wrong", but they emerge from the headset with a vague feeling of malaise, and don't want to repeat the experience. In spite of all the hype, VR just isn't ready for the mass market yet.

Has anyone considered that CO2 may be correlated with temperature rise because it is a by-product of the real cause of warming? Look at global usage of electric power, it correlates very highly with global temperatures, and CO2 is a by-product of electrical production. Remember that 99+% of the electricity we use in motors, computers, and cellphones ends up as heat. What if we are simply cooking the atmosphere with a zillion electric heaters? Renewable power may break the correlation between temperature and CO2, but electric cars will make the warming problem MUCH WORSE.

Not that anyone cares, but the technology to live below sea level has been around for centuries. Remember those wind-mills in Holland? They aren't making solar power, they are pumping the water out of farmland that is below sea-level. And about half of the City of New Orleans is as much as 10 feet below sea level, but they use electric pumps. The dire predictions of terrible consequences from Global Climate Warming Change are mostly speculative fantasy. Rising sea levels will be a nuisance, but one that we already deal with quite capably.

As I am sure that your petty obsession with punctuation has led to your own meteoric rise to... proofreader?

The mail sorting process is now almost completely automated. Even your local mail carrier gets the mail pre-sorted in trays ready for delivery. If you got mail addressed to another country, then the mail sorting computer saw something on the address which looked like your zip code. The polite thing to do is to write "delivered to wrong address" on the letter and toss it back into a mail box, scribbling over any barcodes on the cover will keep it from getting sent right back to you. From your description, it sounds like your mail is on a route that has been contracted out. Normal routes get a substitute carrier when the usual carrier is sick or on leave. Contract carriers have to make their own arrangements, and sometimes they don't. Contract delivery is a cost cutting measure, and is the source of a lot of customer complaints.