For consumables you're right, but you can often get great deals on "durable" goods where quality isn't an issue. Paper plates: bad idea, but cheapo dishes? Fantastic. Sunglasses that you just want to block the sun and don't care what they look like? $1.25 last time I was there. With many things, it makes sense to buy a more expensive but higher quality version, but some things the rock-bottom cheapest piece of crap is just fine, and the only places that will come close to dollar stores are Temu and AliExpress.

What?? "Spin and hyperbole"?

Are you somehow unaware that the most powerful person on the planet won that position largely on the strength of blatant, bald-faced lies? He has proven, dramatically, that there are absolutely zero repercussions for outright lies. Or naked corruption for that matter.

I guess you're free to call me an idiot if you want. But literally the first hit on Google backs up what I was saying: As of August 2025, the corporation is facing several lawsuits in the United States for alleged failures to protect children. at least 30 people have been arrested since 2018 in the United States for abducting or sexually abusing children they had groomed on the platform. Per https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... Are those stats significantly different than anywhere else? I don't know. But it's clearly not zero. Of course the vast majority of other players are safe, but pretending that means the problems aren't real is stupid. FWIW, my kids play Roblox on something like 4 different devices. Sometimes I play with them, I talk to them about what they play, but frequently they're unsupervised. But they know their play is contingent on following rules, the most important of which is that there is never chat with anyone they don't know IRL. But those rules apply to all of their Internet access.

They're not going after Roblox because of the content. (Well, not the people you're talking about. Copyright/trademark infringement on Roblox is mindblowing.) They're going after Roblox because of the many documented cases of predators using it to target kids. They know this is a platform where they can easily communicate with damn near every kid, so it's an obvious target.
Of course, parental oversight can pretty easily eliminate that threat, but that doesn't really happen.

I could let it go once assuming a typo, but since you wrote it twice: it's *ensure*.

Right, because every phone has enough processing power to decode a 4K stream, display it, record its own screen, re-encode that, and send it to the TV. And enough battery life. And the LAN half of the wifi has the bandwidth to handle 3 4K streams (router to phone, phone to router, router to TV). Yes, the implementation has always had problems, and it may be niche, but there clearly is a use case.

As I said,.you can invent all the hidden forces and particles you want, but one of them needs to fit the CMB, BAO, baryogenesis, and other data. Your comment about the CMB saying nothing about dark matter makes me pretty sure you're just a troll, but in the slim.chancw you're not, look up the Lambda-CDM model. The power spectrum of density fluctuations in the early and late universe is impossible to achieve with only baryonic matter. Cold dark mater freeze out is the model that fits the data best by far.

I believe the parent meant "at most weakly". Zero interaction would also support the rest of those statements.

The author didn't make any extraordinary claims. As usual, the clickbait article makes up a whole bunch of claims not found anywhere in the paper.

If there is, it is extremely weak, below the scale of Higgs interactions, on the scale of gravity. So sure, you can invent all the extra forces you want, but to what end? If you posit that it interacts strongly with itself through some unseen force, it no longer fits the data from the cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations. The best fit to the data is a particle that doesn't interact with baryonic matter or itself.

That said, there are models that suggest some excess density of dark matter in the sun, but it would have to be something exotic to ever be able to detect it.

Think about it this way: there have been many articles here about idiots wanting to put datacenters in space, and each one is full of comments about how hard it is to cool things in space, because you can only do it radiatively. That's the key. For two particles to collide and stick together, they have to lose enough energy that the system gets below the molecular (or nuclear) binding energy. Normal matter does that by releasing photons, but dark matter cannot do that. (Vanilla dark matter can't interact with photons at all; dark matter in the study here must have some very small annihilation cross section, but it's small enough that it still can't efficiently cool that way). At early times following the big bang, dark matter would have been in thermal equilibrium with the rest of the universe by exotic creation-annihilation channels. Once the temperature of the universe dropped below the mass of the dark matter particle (and yes I can use temperature and mass interchangeably because c=1), the dark matter "freezes out" at that high temperature. (Googling "dark matter freeze out" will get many better explanations of this topic.) Because the dark matter is now decoupled from the rest of the matter in the universe, the only way it can cool further is by the expansion of space itself, but there's no way it can "clump".

Fun fact: the rotation of solar systems and galaxies is a direct consequence of this physics. When early proto-galaxies form, they are large, roughly spherical, and have very little, but non-zero, spin. As they condense, they emit photons, which remove energy from the system. But photon interactions preserve angular momentum, so the total angular momentum of the galaxy must remain constant. That means as they get smaller, they speed up, just like the ice skater pulling their arms in. The flattened spheroid shapes that remain are the lowest energy configuration that preserves total angular momentum.

First off, it's not direct. Direct evidence for dark matter would come in the form of ultra-low-background particle detectors we have running in deep underground labs in Canada and Italy. Astrophysical signals are indirect. The paper is very clear that they are talking indirect evidence, so whatever journalist trying to drive up clicks is either an idiot or dishonest, probably both.

For those who don't follow this kind of thing for a living, this exact signature was investigated ~10 years ago, Dan Hooper then at Fermilab being the most visible face. At the time it was considered quite compelling and everyone was getting excited. Then further analyses concluded that the signature they were seeing was more likely to be from millisecond pulsars. Lo and behold, the paper contains this statement:

So this paper is a rehash of ten year old work using a bigger and more well-understood dataset, which is great! And he gets a result consistent with the previous analysis, that there is indeed a gamma-ray excess that is consistent with the expected dark matter halo density distribution. And the author points out that there are other possible explanations, and certainly does not anywhere claim direct evidence for dark matter. This is good, solid science, but is in no way remarkable. Worthless science journalism getting all the details wrong in favor of clickbait is nothing new; what I don't get is why anyone thought it worth reporting on in the first place.

That is somewhat encouraging. However, I have to question what's going on there. How can you be science literate without being math literate?

It does not take unusual talent to master middle school math concepts. That's a failure of education, not some Idiocracy-level population shift.