There does seem to be a limit - we have found 0 life in the Dallol Geothermal vents in Ethiopia, which are simultaneous highly salty, highly acidic, and highly hot pools of water.
Problem is that the Federal Highway Association only spends for new projects, not routine maintenance (please check me on that though).
Therefore cities who need maintenance done will bundle routine maintenance they can't afford with expansion (lane expansion, streamlining). This lets them access federal dollars they wouldn't otherwise get.
Over decades, this has created a lot of infrastructure that isn't financially responsible as stuff has just gotten built and built and built. The ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) always grades the overall US as a "C" or worse for maintenance.
Part of the problem is that building things is sexy, maintaining them is harder and not sexy. Lotta money and focus on new stuff, maintenance is a secondary concern.
I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "
Public signage with words was basically nonexistent in the pre-modern era. Why bother? The overhead of getting literate people was reserved for the stuff that couldn't be communicated in symbols, like keeping records for the taxman or contracts to prevent future land disputes.
For pet project folks, I used to think "person who's excited to refactor the entire codebase because they're excited by some new technology they read a post about, but doesn't actually understand the codebase nor the technology" was an exaggeration until I got one as a team lead.
Wasn't it right next to a military base, and previously used as part of that military base? And therefore a reasonable part of the targeting list that should've gotten more scrutiny but just didn't?
This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
I don’t understand your attitude. The slaughter of hundreds of children seems genuinely inherently upsetting and unacceptable to me. I don’t see why an element of negligence would make this something to just “not pontificate on” in a court of law or in public discourse.
How exactly does an atrocity "trigger" a bombing of a school? Do you feel entitled to some atrocity credits when your opponent commits an atrocity? Fill in the gaps for me.
You're implying it was intentional, when it clearly was not. I'd be OK with calling it criminal negligence.
My annoyance was the focus on something that aligns with a narrative some people love to push (US bad), and ignoring the bigger issues that actually plague the Iranian people that just get ignored because no one actually cares.
> This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
If a soldier on the ground had called in the airstrike, there is a good chance they would be in military prison.
The fact that the administration itself did it means nothing will happen.
Always know what you're shooting at, especially if it changed purposes over a decade ago.
Those feel very ink-blobby - like they were drawn by someone who can barely hold a pen stick-stopping across each line and then redoing parts of each line to correct mistakes. Looks elementary schooler.
I prefer Excalidraw look and feel - a couple of smooth and mostly straight lines per line, which looks more like intentional competence with a quick and imperfect tool.
The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now?
> They are also less likely to start random wars
EU lack of aggression, to defend themselves physically, economically, or otherwise, has been criticized constantly - slow and late to react to the Russian invasion, slow and late to react to new technologies like AI, electric cars.
Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition.
The grass definitely looks greener though, especially if you've been in one pasture a long time.
> The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now?
Depends how you define it and what you count.
Do you take the union of the English and Scottish parliaments as breaking continuity or not? What do you define as democracy? If some of the population (women, slaves, etc.) are excluded from the electorate is it a true democracy?
> isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now?
It is the one the most at risk of ending right now.
> Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition.
It is unrelated claim, but they do have better solution for that particular problem. The governmental shutdown seem to be about the most easy to abuse way to do it.
I think they do have large problems too. And they may fall too, AfD won local elections after all. It is dubious whether Orban run Hungary was really democracy and electoral system was not reformed yet. But in this very moment, the one crumbling and dismantling itself the fastest is not UK nor in Europe.
The US government is only the longest continuous democracy only if one believes that the US is still a democracy. I've read some decent arguments that the US stopped being a democracy with the McKinley administration, and others that the US ceased to be a functional democracy during the Second World War. In both cases, the claim was that the USA became an imperial oligarchy.
It is questionable whether any democracy truly exists at this point as I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state.
> I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state.
To be fair, I've seen no nation where the people make their will known. Does a democracy depend on actual action or only theoretical possibility? It seems from my observance that most people consider democratic nations to be democratic not because they practice as such but because it is believed that the people have the opportunity to exercise democracy if they ever choose to.
I suspect my oldest memory, of me getting into a booster car seat as a child, is no longer the actual memory, but the accumulated imaginings of me trying to remember that specific memory, masquerading as a memory.
Comet Hale-Bopp is definitely a case of this for me. Although I remember a few interesting things about the process of seeing it, I have no idea of what it looked like to me.
I can remember the neighbors standing slightly in our yard and then explaining to my parents the comet and pointing it out to us. I can remember at some points that followed being aware of the parallax effect as it seemed to appear on either side of my other neighbors’ house as I walked up and down the driveway.
But just a year or so later, I knew that the picture in my memory was more like an illustration of a comet. The accurate image was completely gone even though the memories surrounding it remained, and in the place of that image was something that I had imagined.
As per the article they're slowly shuttering the project, but I assume AlphaFold itself is still available and usable?
I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?
reply