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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/27/biden-trump-debate-democrats-reaction I share their concerns after last night's debate. To folks less acquainted with facts or the issues, Trump manages in a very shallow way to appear forceful, authoritative and verbally agile. Hoping listeners can peel away that layer and notice the lies, evading of many questions, and underlying lack of coherent policy ideas. Biden was painful to watch - he has declined visibly in the past couple years and he was never silver-tongued to start with. He seemed to struggle, often coming across as a grumpy old man, which obscured many valid points he made about his record v Trump's. The sense I had of someone desperate to get his words out and sometimes staring off in an odd way as if searching for an answer, and sometimes a suitable facial expression, is something I've seen in relatives and acquaintances on the cusp of dementia. Trump has always lived in a narcissistic fantasy world, but can feign normality. Biden is a long term resident of the real world but now looks slow on his feet, bumbling, and to be feeling his way through fog. I fear that undecideds who do not prize facts and evidence will be fooled by appearances and Trump's knack for hammering on his narrow selection of American Carnage themes. For the love of democracy and your country, Joe, please step aside at the convention and direct your delegates to someone like Whitmer, Newsom, Beshear, Harris, Booker, Klobuchar, or any of a dozen strong alternatives who show intelligence, competence, and authority.

Why don't you do a bit of reading about the energy transition? Many of the issues you mention are already being actively addressed, but you need to get a bit more granular in the applications to understand how they are tackled. Batteries for trains are one example. There are already battery operated trains for short shuttle services, where one can easily recharge the train at either end. However for long distance the obvious answer is indeed by providing a supply of electricity along the track, as has been done all over the world for a century already, either by overhead catenary or a 3rd rail. Ships are exploring ammonia as fuel, which is effectively a way to store hydrogen without needing to handle high pressures. Sail is being tried again, as a way to reduce fuel consumption rather than to rely on 100%. However, like trains, ship fuel consumption per tonne-km is very low so it is less high up the priority list than other modes of transport. Trucks and planes may need hydrogen or other non-fossil sourced fuel for burning, as batteries of any kind are inevitably rather bulky and heavy for very large power demands. So it is not and never has been all about batteries and, while the issue of (very rare) battery fires should not be dismissed, it is not a barrier to the take-up of battery technology. So I think we could do with a little less of the anti-EV propaganda videos from you on that point. Hidden agenda much, eh? 😁

It’s like an old joke about getting directions in New England - “You can’t get there from here”

As an English native, I would say "IN the last month", suggesting within a period of a month. A 'month' is a plurality of 'days'. The correct time to use 'on' is when describing singular days, In this context, 'days' represent a singular period-unit that is not considered divisible. So, you can't meet someone "In Wednesday", but you can meet them "On Wednesday".

Yes of course they would. In practice this state would never be reached, as government policies would be adopted by degrees to maintain a life for the population that avoided civil unrest.

Apart from vacuuming and mopping floors, there is still the cleaning of ovens, cookers, cupboards, basins and toilets, dusting, polishing metalware and so on(I have a Brazilian cleaning lady who does these things for me.) Also ironing. So there are still things to do without getting into food safety critical tasks. But my cleaning lady does this in 3hrs per week. So very poor use of a highly expensive robot, I would agree, unless it is shared among numerous households.

Can’t do that without a massive drop in population. My guess is the masses would rise up in revolt.

I would assume any half-decent robot would be able to clean itself, or at least be provided with a cleaning apparatus to do the job, without the need for laborious human intervention which would defeat the labour-saving objective of the robot.

How do you have a totally free-market capitalist economy if nobody has a job? People not earning money can’t buy things. Working? What’s that?

Just had a look on my Android phone (Android 13 OS) with Brave installed and gone on this site. No ads. Brave Shields, the built-in blocker on its own seems to do the trick. Click on the the lion icon up top to toggle it off for a site if it gets in the way of access. There are two levels of ad removal: aggressive and normal, and other options. If it's too stripped down for you, but works here, you could just use it for here and use Chrome for your other sites.

Without state or public ownership, eventually the largest private owners would own everything. Then they'd deal amongst themselves until one or two managed to buy up the others, and finally one would manage to outmaneuver the other and own it all. So 100% capitalism would eventually look like a monarchy or dictatorship, with everyone working for the king, who owns it all.

Android tablet. I'll try the Brave browser you mentioned. I do have an alternative browser, DuckDuckGo, which I would use more often in such situations but it's rather clunky and so stripped-down that it's missing features I am used to in Chrome. Thanks @Phi for All for checking. Liked your curly hair joke, btw.

OK. Cheers.

(For viewers across the pond - Several Conservative MPs, including the one for my own constituency, have been disowned by their own party for allegedly making bets on the date of the General Election before it was announced to the public. - "Things Can Only Get Better" by D:Ream was the anthemic song of the Labour party campaign that swept Tony Blair to victory in 1997).

What about the cats?

I am a native English speaker. Let me know what you had trouble with and I'll try my best to help you understand.

I lost quiz night by one point! The question was where is women's hair the curliest? The correct answer is Fiji.

Premature babies are surviving after being born/removed earlier and earlier, so this technology is quickly advancing, and may be viable. My nephew's baby daughter was born almost 4 months premature due to her mother's emergency surgery for a brain infection, and was so small, she comfortably fit in her father's cupped hand at birth. She is now a happy, inquisitive, healthy 2 year old with no complications; hopefully her inquisitiveness develops into an interest in science. ( her mom is healthy, but still on meds to prevent seizures, and is in the process of getting her Driver's license back )

In the future, perhaps. I know that there are attempts at that with some encouraging results, but I think most successes were time limited and involved early stages or extreme premature extractions. Development from fertilized egg to full gestation has not been demonstrated yet. And extracting a fetus intact is rather disruptive (involves opening the uterus, hooking up ECMO and so on). I.e. even if the technology matures, it would be major surgery requiring a rather large set of circumstances to make it necessary. E.g. extreme danger/complication of pregnancy to the mother but strong desire to keep the child.

Adoption of course. Maybe the legal adoption of unwanted children before they're born could be introduced. In a large hospital near where I live, girls go into the maternity unit for abortions. However, I don't know if it's on the same floor but certainly in the same building there's the Southwest Regional Fertility Clinic, which is for young couples who are having difficulty conceiving a child. Same building: Abortions... and Fertility treatments. A rather Orwellian irony? Wow! thanks for your story, that's encouraging🙂 That's not the issue I raised here. I just wanted to know if it was theoretically possible to transfer a child from one womb to another. Or maybe a child can be born as soon as a mother knows she's carrying him? I guess even if he's just a cluster of cells it's just a question of maintaining temperature, with blood oxygen and nutritional supply, so maybe that's a future possibility. Perhaps one day women may be able to have children without the aggro of a 9 month pregnancy. cheerz GIAN🙂

I'm now looking 1000's of years into the future. There is no way there is enough fossil fuels left in the ground to keep cars going for 1000's of more years at the rate we are using them today. The sun, a big source of energy, has about another 5 billion years to go before burning out for good. I don't want to pay out of pocket any more for energy costs than I really have to while still maintaining my modern civilization living comfort level. Automobile makers started putting "cats" in cars around 1974 to cut gasoline ICE emissions.

How do you know if she's telling the truth? I'm not saying she's wrong, I'm saying you're not thinking for yourself; who you believe in, depends on what you want to believe, which depends on your satisfaction of life. In a brave new world, a perfect authoritarian thinks for everyone and everyone is happy about it.

Quantum mechanics does not make sense, as some scholar of this discipline said, that if you say you understand quantum mechanics it is because in reality you have not understood it yet. I think it was Niels Bohr, but perhaps I'm paraphrasing a bit what he said. And perhaps quantum mechanics is not only counterintuitive, which would be the least of it, but even absurd, but observable. That such a small particle contains so much energy does not seem understandable, just because you accept it because it is what you observe does not mean that you understand it and can explain it reasonably. Regarding the speed of light, I understand that this has happened, since objects in the universe are observed in places that should not be found according to the current standard model. Quantum tunneling or Cherenkov radiation are also mentioned. In summary, my proposed hypothesis is that the energy of atomic reactions would come from other points in space-time and would not be contained in subatomic particles as previously thought. Upon entering these channels, the subatomic particles stop being influenced by time, since the channels would be like insulating boxes that separate objects of these magnitudes. So contrary to what one might previously think, that subatomic particles could be in two states at the same time, or be faster than light by their very nature, the hypothesis in question proposes that this is not the case and that what What happens is that they leave the observable space-time zone by entering an isolated bridge or channel that separates them from the magnitude of observable time, where time would not have the same influence.

Then Bohr would be treating Einstein as an inexperienced person in the quantum field, who, furthermore, as far as he knows, never fully understood or assimilated it. My point is that quantum mechanics, as a scientific discipline (human understanding), is meaningless and not only counterintuitive, it is simply absurd. For this reason, I think that the observations made are not precise enough to understand the quantum phenomenon in a satisfactory way, to really understand it. You may not even consider my proposal as a hypothesis, but you could not satisfactorily contradict it either. I notice that quantum mechanics is like going back to the scientific past and seeing those who realized that there were natural phenomena, and took advantage of those phenomena to develop technological systems, but were incapable of understanding and explaining them adequately.

The worst thing about abortion and birth control -which are both consequences of secularism (NOT atheism) and commercialism is that they're sooo boring. Until about 150y ago, I guess birth control wasn't needed much (it was there, but not much) because in order to have 3 or 4 surviving children women had to conceive all their childbearing years. (In the 17thC, King James VII & II fathered 27 children. Only 8 grew up, and only 4 reached old age) If women did that now the Earth's population would be 150 billion in 20y, so a major population problem. In the 1970s it was said that by now 2024 people would be living on other planets. We're not, and for all our science & tech modern life is all sex and shopping (yawn.) No abortion or contraception, and we'd be having this conversation in a pub on Mars. Birth control stunts progress Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

I don't know much about science but I think many humans desire practical and affordable energy forms for modern living conforts that are not harmful to health, safety or the planet as a whole. Any possibilties, not just batteries, should be put upon the open table here. There is still the possibilty that man will chiefly go back to horse and buggy again for land transportation and sailing ships for sea freight before he becomes totally extinct from this planet. I came up with the term CRESTAS which is Spanish for "crests" as in the crests of waves. This should be our future energy objective. Clean Renewable Energy Solution That's Also Safe Yes, car lithium-ion battery fires are rare but very horrible whenever they do happen. Typical car gasoline fires are much milder by comparison to lithium-ion battery fires. I refuse to willingly get into any vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. I'm still optimistic about the solid-state batteries for automobiles.