I’m an American who was permanently living in the US until several years ago. I wanted to go to grad school, and my employer offered to pay 50%, as long as it was a related degree. I looked at programs in statistics (not my ideal, but it was a good overlap between programs my company would reimburse and ones that interested me) for a mid range state school nearby and it would have been something like $4-5k per semester out of my pocket all told.

For about double the cost to me per semester (so the standard full cost), I was able to buy plane tickets, cover visa fees and my entire cost of living for six months to study in my ideal program at a great university in Germany (it would be similarly expensive in many European countries and cheaper in many European or Asian countries).

The only reasons not to make that choice are that you don’t speak other languages (though many international programs are offered in English and even other anglophone countries have cheaper universities than the US) or that you’re too settled in the USA. If you’re not from the USA, what could possibly draw you there with an additional $100k fee?

I saw a documentary once where a wasp had a specific routine when arriving back home, and they showed the routine normally several times and then they showed the wasp doing the exact same thing after having been beheaded- no head to clean, but the wasp swiped its foreleg in the general area, then continued on the rest.

This was given as a difference between wasps and humans, or more generally, between instinctual and considered actions.

At first I worried a little, because I noticed how much I did on autopilot. Then I realized how much everyone does on autopilot and then I worried a lot.

I think if we were able to continue walking around without our heads, people absolutely would.

Give it twenty minutes

They’re accelerating the spread of major foodborne diseases, generally, actually.

It’s good to get the ball rolling on scientific research though.

So we’re basically all fucked, compared to what we’ve seen so far. I definitely ate more sugar as a young child than my grandmother, born just before WWI. My parents might have had more than me (though almost certainly not), but lots of places still had food rations for much of the baby boomers’ early childhood.

Solar energy is called “renewable” but ultimately the sun will burn out. What then?

I can’t speak to physics, but have you read The Last Question?

Yeah, but that holds as much water as my argument in macro 100 about gas being elastic because of how many people scoff at the shell price and look for a sunoco. I did it when I drove every day (in a city with a high density of gas stations), and I will now take other forms of transportation if gas is too expensive, but that’s not common behavior, nor is it normally logical (saving five cents per gallon, driving an extra five miles, and wasting twenty minutes is not a true savings for most people).

It’s technically true, but in an academically idealized market, it wouldn’t be.

Me lighting a cigarette: using this magical object only benefits the evil propagandist, why on earth would someone use it?

You should read the article.

Pancreatic cancer forms on and is generally preceded by a series of pancreatic lesions, and the participants were only people with a history of medically concerning pancreatic lesions and a genetic predisposition to pancreatic cancer.

It’s also a cure- that was how it was (so far successfully) first tested, and they’re only now testing it as a vaccine.

It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.

I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).

My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.

That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.

Yeah, I’m not under any illusion that it’ll be (literally) sunshine and daisies. The WHO estimates that 250k people will die annually because of climate change between 2030-2050 though, and (I sincerely hope) a shift in global power dynamics from something like this is unlikely to kill that many.

China will also be more focused on preserving stability in general as a global power than Russia or the United States, though this would probably be very bad news for Taiwan, if successful.

I agree that the effects for Europe are less clear. The EU is likely to benefit much more than Russia or the US, but it might lose power in comparison to an energy rich India or Indonesia. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, other places deserve a fair seat at the table, especially given the relative populations.

Especially if China’s the one controlling it. They’ll recognize the incredible benefit to the world and make sure as many people as possible are able to use it (I’m not saying they’re completely altruistic, they’ll also make it profitable and potentially predatory, but it’s still a net good for the world if we can largely stop using fossil fuels by mid century)

Holy shit, we might have controlled fusion generators soon?

Lots of ways

Yeah, I figured the prior person’s information would only be released when the new user provides the details for a valid email account. I’m (clearly) not a tech person, but that sounds relatively doable.

The problem with changing the terms is that you don’t know who’s going to join after you, so you don’t know that they want a song. You can look at that as the free market in action, but it’s also effectively a dead end for a purpose-built group.

It has also just occurred to me that people who want to commit fraud would also be interested in this, and perhaps giving them the opportunity to collect a bunch of potential blackmail ammunition is not ideal.

Yeah, I think you’re right and it’s unlikely that many people have such long friendships with people over entirely private media.

If you’re enjoying the hypotheticals, I’ve got another, but if they’re unhelpful/distracting, don’t feel obligated to indulge me. What if you had an open, anonymous community sharing a chain of emails, so each person joining the group would receive the email account made by the person before them and would make an email for the person joining after them? Obviously the feds could still infiltrate it, but they’d have a lot less data from any given user and they’d get the most data from the person who joins after they do, which they can’t control. Unless they monitor it 24/7 and get lucky, they wouldn’t be able to make sure every other user is a fed. That seems like it would also be relatively easy to detect, if every single time a new account joined, another immediately followed.

Oh, yeah. That’s a very real possibility. I assume trading only with trusted online friends (obviously one might trust the wrong person, but plenty of people have 20+ year old friendships with people whom they’ve never met irl, and ) would compound the problem by making your online network even more traceable?

Can we just perfect strangers this and I create zendayagirl67@gmail and you create shielaandstu@hotmail, then we trade?

Am I being very naive?

Further, why are the fonts unique? Why doesn’t every phone of the same model with the same languages have the same fonts enabled?

Somehow safari on an iPhone is also unique.