There is no Biden election gamble. US presidential elections happen every 4 years whether Biden (or any other president) likes it or not.

It’s a Macron election gamble because he actually called the election himself to try to benefit himself. This might turn out to backfire.

Is there any evidence that living legumes make the nitrogen they fix available to other plants nearby? I thought they locked it up in root nodules and it only becomes bioavailable if you chop and drop the legumes so that the nodules break down and release nitrogen into the surrounding soil. Otherwise the legumes are just going to use the nitrogen for their own growth.

Yes, it’s actually huge. Especially for maintaining a weapon as complicated as an Abrams tank. If it can be repaired close to the front lines then that has the potential to cut days off the turnaround time compared to towing it over to Poland.

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

I think that's debatable. Personally, I went to university and had a great time there. Apart from learning, that phase of my life had lots of events, parties and spending time with friends. I always saw it as a priviledge that I had the opportunity to gather so much knowledge. Especially as school and university are paid for by the state where I live.

When I said no one, I didn’t mean literally zero people. I’m sure if you announced a project to launch a manned spacecraft into the sun you’d get people volunteering for the suicide mission. What I meant is that you’ll never get enough people to do it based on personal interest alone.

For every person like you who loved studying engineering in school (with all the 7 course per semester schedules, insane 8 hour days in classes plus 40+ hours of homework, “hell week” of nonstop midterms, and brutal “weed-out” final exams) there’s going to be thousands of others who just won’t bother because the pay is no better than what a janitor makes. Heck, why not study philosophy or medieval history instead?

And then when you get past school you get to the real problem: many of the jobs in these fields are incredibly dull. People might go to aerospace engineering school with big dreams of designing the next Concorde jet, yet find themselves doing nothing but paperwork review for Boeing. You think the Boeing safety scandals are bad enough in today’s capitalist world where the company is motivated by profit and the engineers are highly paid? Try getting anyone to take safety seriously when you pay everyone the same so there’s no real disincentive to avoid getting fired.

And that’s the other elephant in the room with engineering. In civil engineering the lead engineer has to sign off (and stamp with their professional seal) the plans for a project. If the building later collapses that engineer can be held criminally responsible (and face jail time) should the design be deemed unsafe by the investigation. Without paying the lead engineer any more than a junior engineer, how are you going to get anyone to accept that personal risk on themselves for no compensation whatsoever?

This applies to many other critical jobs where health and safety are on the line. Similarly for jobs where the worker is risking their own life. If you can’t compensate them for this additional personal risk (financial, criminal, or life and limb) then you’re going to have a very hard time finding people to take the job.

The other side of the coin is that some jobs will become extremely popular just because they are more fun to do. Since you can’t pay these folks any less to do the fun jobs, you’ll have a hard time deciding who is allowed to do the fun stuff and who gets stuck with the boring/dirty/dangerous/disgusting/undesirable jobs.

For example, actuarial science was a very popular major to study at my university. The field is competitive to get into and highly paid. However the job itself has a very high turnover due to people voluntarily choosing to leave! The work is so damn boring that even with high pay they can’t convince people to stay! With low pay the problem is going to be even worse. You’re going to have to lower the bar to let less intelligent/skilled people into the job but that is not likely to turn out well because the job is very technical to begin with.

*Uninstall Windows, problem solved.

FTFY

It makes me so depressed thinking about how many thousands of Ukrainian lives could’ve been saved by just giving Ukraine full and enthusiastic support immediately instead of dragging it out this long.

That’s just ridiculous to me. Why? I have had fries plenty of times which were way better than McDonald fries and all they were made of was potatoes, oil, and salt. The perfect French fry doesn’t need anything other than that. It’s all about choosing the right potato variety and then it all comes down to cooking technique.

The fact that McDonald puts anything else in their fries just makes me shake my head.

I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.