I buy stuff from AgenaAstro all the time, they are the best in the business. And know the Baader solar film very well. It is in fact the industry standard - it is widely used for telescope solar filters. The products in question are all ISO and NASA certified.
Amazon is simply screwing AgenaAstro not out of "an abundance of caution" but out of impulse and ignorance, and greed (they are keeping some of Panjwani's money for good measure). If they are just exercising their own caution, give him all of his money. Bezos can afford to take the astronomically small risk.
In fact they should buy his inventory from him. Let Amazon take the hit out its own "abundance of caution".
And of course he does have a security staff. Just have them keep order in an unobtrusive legal way, if he thinks people are "spoiling the party".
Unfortunately what security guards are commonly employed for by rich beach-fronting home owners is to make visits to the public beach so unpleasant that people just leave.
There is no law against security guards constantly haranguing people with lies about "you are violating private property" if all they do is talk. But it sure ruins your day at the beach.
Also - this whole billionaire tax-exempt foundation thing is a scheme to lock-in dead-hand control over a huge part of U.S. financial assets that will last in perpetuity. The actual disbursements from these foundations are lower than their annual accumulation, so they will grow untaxed without limit forever. It is no secret that the Gates Foundation spends money in ways that benefit Bill Gates personally.
There isn't really a need need. My city just went through something similar (private developer locking gate to stairway through their development to a public beach). If the California Coastal Commission tells you to allow access and you refuse, they can fine you up to $11,250 per day (about $4.1 million per year). Granted a billionaire could stave off bankruptcy while paying the fine for hundreds of years. But if it came to that, I imagine legislation would swiftly be passed increasing the maximum daily fine or raising it geometrically the longer you don't comply.
What might be better is simply to apply the fine to eminent domain and acquire a nice wide access path for public property (or confiscate the land outright as a penalty).
Sorry sir, you don't own that path to the beach any more. Your estate is now split in half with public property between. But don't worry, we won't restrict you from crossing it.
The bottom line here is that Amazon is introducing a retort pouch food product line - a technology that has been on the market for 40 years. It has been extremely popular around the world, and is found in U.S. products (I buy boxed retort pouch products at Costco all the time) though for some reason the U.S. public has preferred canned foods.
TFA calls this "the cutting-edge food technology" which is overselling it a bit. MATS is one of several advanced retorting systems for preparing the pouches, and has been in use in various forms for decades, and is similar in performance to other technologies like PATS (pressure assisted thermal sterilization) - a form of pressure cooking. In 2006 a patent was issued for a particular refinement of MATS, using a specific frequency (915 MHZ), which is being aggressively promoted by the start-up patent licensee 915Labs, but it is not clear this is really a big advance in a well established industry.
It is annoying having lazy clueless laymen's idle speculations being promoted to being a slashdot article.
Dark matter seems particularly to attract these sorts of totally uninformed wild guesses being thrown out to "solve" one of the deepest questions in modern physics and cosmology.
To all and sundry out there - if you just thought of it then the answer is "no". All possible known candidates have been thought of and eliminated. Whatever dark matter and dark energy are, it is nothing we currently understand. Even most promising theories seem to be failing at present.
The Agreed Framework, negotiated by Clinton, froze the DPRK nuclear program in place. All the facilities were shut down and placed under international inspection. This lasted for 9 years - from 1994 to 2003.
But in 2003 "Dubya" decided to put his swagger on and concocted the "Axis of Evil" in a State Of The Union speech lumping Iraq, Iran and the DPRK together as if they were an alliance, then decided that fall to abrogate the Agreed Framework and also make more blustering remarks.
Result - the DPRK kicked out the IAEA, restarted their nuclear facilities and three years later began testing nuclear weapons.
The Democrats, under Clinton, shut down the NK nuclear program.
The Republicans, under Bush, goaded them into restarting it - and once the genie was out, it could not be put back in.
The highest estimate I have seen on when the radioisotope generator outputs drop to the point that they fall silent is 2030. Until the probe actually goes silent we need to keep in touch with the probes so they better be setting up a complete training system to keep qualified personnel around for the next 13 plus years. It might surprise us a go a little longer than expected.
We don't have anything else we can contact that will be that far out, and may not again in this century. At the point where they will probably go silent they will have been in transit for 53 years, and 50 years since they got their full energy kick - the largest any probes have ever received due to a double gas giant slingshot manuever*. There are no new super high-velocity missions even being floated that I can find, so it may be decades before anything of similar or greater speed is launched.
Future probes beyond Saturn will probably be orbiters instead of fly-bys, and all such trans-Saturnian missions will probably use advanced electromagnetic propulsion (ion, plasma, maybe even solar sail) that is still being developed or in the early stages of roll-out. An ion driven interstellar space probe would be neat, I'll bet there are a lot of interesting observations even of our own system, and experiments, that can only be made at great distances.
*Or velocity vector rotations if you want to be pedantic.
I recently bought an iPhone 6S, since I still use my headphone jack for all my headphones, and to plug into my car stereo. This may be my last iPhone if they don't stop this drive toward stupid design obsessions that leave out actual user needs and desires.
Brilliant. To solve the non-problem of having a small bezel-case they will bring the glass screen to the very edge of the device to ensure that when you do drop it, even a short distance, it will shatter the screen.
Why is it that Apple execs think that the ultimate ideal form for every device is to be wafer-thin and all glass, sacrificing every other design consideration for that single obsession?
If $10 Quintillion worth of asteroid minerals were brought down on Wall Street all at once, it would cause a huge crash in mineral value, an explosion of trading volume, and enough upheaval in the commodities market, one could call it destructive! In fact, it might crater the whole concept of commodities trading! That's why the old dinosaurs that run the finance sector are afraid of asteroid mining, it could spell their doom!
None of this would or could happen.
The figures you see slung about on the "value" of asteroids have a high level of bogosity. They are always arrived at by multiplying the estimated total metal content by the current market value of the metal when available in market-ready form on the surface of the Earth. No one prices Earth based resources this way.
The resource being estimated for that particular case was the iron-nickel content of the largest asteroid of that type (Type M), which is 16 Psyche, which is in the main asteroid belt (read - large delta vee to bring the material to Earth). The entire world iron steel market is about $800 billion, which is 1.6 billion tonnes of iron and steel with an average market value of $500 per tonne.
By this type of calculation a common piece of sedimentary rock is worth $75 a ton for its iron content (15% Fe content) and an average chunk of the Earth's crust (5% iron) is worth $15. And by this calculation the upper 1000 meters of the Earth's continental crust is worth $100 quintillion dollars.
Why haven't these wild financial predictions already happened, since we are sitting on all this valuable iron for the taking? Similarly try to interest anyone in paying you $7.5 million for the 10 meter thick layer of sedimentary rock and soil on your 1 acre property for its iron content. Its real value for this is zero.
More commonly people talk about obtaining platinum group metals from asteroids since, unlike iron, they are scarce on the Earth's surface and rocky asteroids are richer in these metals than the available ores on Earth, by a factor of 10X or so. This means that the value of the metal content at current market prices is around $2000 a ton.
The amazing thing you won't find in going through scores and scores of web sites, and papers, is the cost of either extracting the metals in space, or the cost of bringing the whole asteroid back to Earth. One of the few actual projects proposed to bring a small rock chunk (500 tonnes) to Earth is estimated at $2.6 billion, or a bit over $5 million a ton.
There seems little chance of actually being able to extract platinum metals, much less plain old iron, at a profit given that the ore value per ton of an asteroid is actually quite low. Multiplying a low value per ton by the high mass of an asteroid makes as much sense as a money losing sales operation "making it up in volume".
Finally, there is the basic economics of the markets. The value of the world iron market is $800 billion, the value of the world platinum metal market is about $30 billion. If you can introduce these metals at a cost much cheaper than current prices (there seems no chance of this happening with asteroid resources in the foreseeable future) then the cost will drop, usage will rise, existing producers will be put out of business, but there the size of the market is not going to grow very much. The market is not suddenly going to fork over a trillion dollars a year for cheap platinum, or ten trillion dollars for super-cheap steel.
Producing such beers typically requires maintaining an historical process, at a fixed location, since the colonization conditions are uncontrolled yet very specific for the product. Its difficult to introduce innovation without risking the result.
One Belgian lambic brewer needed to move out of their historic wooden structure for a larger one, so they dismantled the old building and re-erected it in pieces inside new one, to provide the same environment as much as possible.
BTW - one of the service White Labs provides is "strain hosting". If you are a local brewer and you have your own special culture you use, you pay them to maintain that culture for you so that it does not get contaminated or die out.
... "professional" brewers do know exactly what's in their beer?
Yes. And even serious amateurs do. Modern beer fermentation practice is to use fermentation conditions that are sterile (or nearly so) and the introduction of a very specific yeast strain, chose for the specific result desired.
On my desk in front of me is a vial of White Labs WLP099, Super High Gravity Ale Yeast. This strain, WLP099, will provide the exact type of fermentation I want. White Labs, one of the best brewing yeast companies, maintains sterile labs and propagation systems to maintain their extensive library of strains.
If the flowers really look blue, then they are blue. However many (perhaps most) flowers "called" blue actually have red components in their color, and are thus some bluey shade of purple of violet. Blue flowers definitely exists, but are a minority for both evolutionary and (related) biochemical reasons.
The principal claim of "few blue flowers" is really about the commercial flower trade. The major flowers sold by florists are roses, chrysanthemums, carnations, lilies, and gerberas none of whom have any true blue varieties. The blue flowers that do exist naturally are not good commercial flowers - ephemeral, small, difficult to grow, etc. This invention introduced a true blue color, with no red component, in one of the most widely grown commercial flowers.
The evolutionary and biochemical reasons for the scarcity of blue is that the reason that flowers are colorful is to contrast with vegetation. For this reds are favored since this were chlorophyll absorbs light most strongly, creating the strongest contrast so evolution has favored anthocyanin chemistry that tends to the red end of the spectrum. Given these factors red-free blues are scarce.
NB. Notice that I did not say that reds are favored because plants are "green". The reason I did not is that human visual perception is irrelevant to flower colors, which evolved to attract insects not humans or any other mammal. Humans have a very biased view of color due to the way our visual systems work - our color perception is especially sensitive to green, and insensitive to red, and in addition uses an opponent color perception mechanism that boosts the perceived contrast (green and red are opponents in out visual system). Our color perceptions are really bad measures of the actual wavelength reflectivity of things.
Polio is still on the vaccine schedule everywhere in the U.S. because - you know - it hasn't been eradicated from the entire world.
You may be thinking of small pox which does not exist outside of the freezers in two high security labs. We do not vaccinate against that.
Think about it. If we stopped vaccinating for polio because it "has been eradicated everywhere except for a few small areas of two countries" then we get an entire generation of people with no immunity. One of those people is eventually going to travel to on of those "few small areas" some day (even if no one from those areas ever comes here), and then will come back. BAM! It is like the Salk vaccine was never invented as a wave of polio cases sweeps an entire generation, all at once.
While this sample is going to have a much higher ratio of injured brains to non-injured brains than the general NFL population due to selection, the extremely high ratio of 110-to-1 (and 10-1 in a broader population that was studied), makes it unlikely that there are not a lot of former players out there with less severe brain trauma that are not getting flagged as brain damaged.
Pressed by Bradley for specifics, Melvin said he understands “some of the reading material is borderline pornographic.” And he said the program uses “fuzzy math,” substituting letters for numbers in some examples.
Yeah, all those "x's" intemingling with numbers. It's X-rated math that's what it is! Pornography!
The Republican Party's power is based largely on the manufactured consensus of the fearful, ignorant...
And there is a lot of solid evidence that this not an exaggeration. Five Thirty EIght did a nice analysis of Trump voting areas by education level, and the results are striking - Trump swept the most poorly educated half of America. It may not be fair to say that the stupidest Americans elected Trump, but it is true that most ignorant Americans did.
In all future economies we will have going forward if you want a job you better have a good education. High education jobs are far from universally safe from the Cybernetic Revolution, but the education will be necessary to seize the new opportunities that arise.
So we have the situation that even as the jobs drain away from the working class, the right wing is turning against higher education which is the best tool known to escape from hardship.
What do they expect will keep them absolute destitution if there simply aren't enough decent paying jobs to go around? There is the idea of the Universal Basic Income - but such a socialistic policy of just giving hand-outs to takers (as they themselves would say) is everything their political party is opposed to.
the US Government believes all moon rocks are their property and aggressively pursue everyone who has one. SWAT teams and FBI sting operations -- for people who were *given* a tiny piece of moon rock by NASA 40 years ago.
The U.S. believes the Apollo mission rocks are government property because they are. The U.S. government paid to bring them here, and have clear legal title to them. They have never been offered for sale.
If you want to buy a moon rock though there is not problem. Lunar meteorites are available for sale (I have a small piece of one), you can order one today if you like. A micro-mount specimen isn't even very expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
No he is absolutely right - for the actual total eclipse. If you use solar filters for that you will not see anything.
No one who has actually seen a total eclipse of the sun is disappointed. No one.
I buy stuff from AgenaAstro all the time, they are the best in the business. And know the Baader solar film very well. It is in fact the industry standard - it is widely used for telescope solar filters. The products in question are all ISO and NASA certified.
Amazon is simply screwing AgenaAstro not out of "an abundance of caution" but out of impulse and ignorance, and greed (they are keeping some of Panjwani's money for good measure). If they are just exercising their own caution, give him all of his money. Bezos can afford to take the astronomically small risk.
In fact they should buy his inventory from him. Let Amazon take the hit out its own "abundance of caution".
And of course he does have a security staff. Just have them keep order in an unobtrusive legal way, if he thinks people are "spoiling the party".
Unfortunately what security guards are commonly employed for by rich beach-fronting home owners is to make visits to the public beach so unpleasant that people just leave.
There is no law against security guards constantly haranguing people with lies about "you are violating private property" if all they do is talk. But it sure ruins your day at the beach.
Wish I had mod points for this.
Also - this whole billionaire tax-exempt foundation thing is a scheme to lock-in dead-hand control over a huge part of U.S. financial assets that will last in perpetuity. The actual disbursements from these foundations are lower than their annual accumulation, so they will grow untaxed without limit forever. It is no secret that the Gates Foundation spends money in ways that benefit Bill Gates personally.
Right you are! The only "taking" involved here is Khosla's attempt to steal a public easement.
There isn't really a need need. My city just went through something similar (private developer locking gate to stairway through their development to a public beach). If the California Coastal Commission tells you to allow access and you refuse, they can fine you up to $11,250 per day (about $4.1 million per year). Granted a billionaire could stave off bankruptcy while paying the fine for hundreds of years. But if it came to that, I imagine legislation would swiftly be passed increasing the maximum daily fine or raising it geometrically the longer you don't comply.
What might be better is simply to apply the fine to eminent domain and acquire a nice wide access path for public property (or confiscate the land outright as a penalty).
Sorry sir, you don't own that path to the beach any more. Your estate is now split in half with public property between. But don't worry, we won't restrict you from crossing it.
The bottom line here is that Amazon is introducing a retort pouch food product line - a technology that has been on the market for 40 years. It has been extremely popular around the world, and is found in U.S. products (I buy boxed retort pouch products at Costco all the time) though for some reason the U.S. public has preferred canned foods.
TFA calls this "the cutting-edge food technology" which is overselling it a bit. MATS is one of several advanced retorting systems for preparing the pouches, and has been in use in various forms for decades, and is similar in performance to other technologies like PATS (pressure assisted thermal sterilization) - a form of pressure cooking. In 2006 a patent was issued for a particular refinement of MATS, using a specific frequency (915 MHZ), which is being aggressively promoted by the start-up patent licensee 915Labs, but it is not clear this is really a big advance in a well established industry.
It is annoying having lazy clueless laymen's idle speculations being promoted to being a slashdot article.
Dark matter seems particularly to attract these sorts of totally uninformed wild guesses being thrown out to "solve" one of the deepest questions in modern physics and cosmology.
To all and sundry out there - if you just thought of it then the answer is "no". All possible known candidates have been thought of and eliminated. Whatever dark matter and dark energy are, it is nothing we currently understand. Even most promising theories seem to be failing at present.
Lets have some real history here.
The Agreed Framework, negotiated by Clinton, froze the DPRK nuclear program in place. All the facilities were shut down and placed under international inspection. This lasted for 9 years - from 1994 to 2003.
But in 2003 "Dubya" decided to put his swagger on and concocted the "Axis of Evil" in a State Of The Union speech lumping Iraq, Iran and the DPRK together as if they were an alliance, then decided that fall to abrogate the Agreed Framework and also make more blustering remarks.
Result - the DPRK kicked out the IAEA, restarted their nuclear facilities and three years later began testing nuclear weapons.
The Democrats, under Clinton, shut down the NK nuclear program.
The Republicans, under Bush, goaded them into restarting it - and once the genie was out, it could not be put back in.
The highest estimate I have seen on when the radioisotope generator outputs drop to the point that they fall silent is 2030. Until the probe actually goes silent we need to keep in touch with the probes so they better be setting up a complete training system to keep qualified personnel around for the next 13 plus years. It might surprise us a go a little longer than expected.
We don't have anything else we can contact that will be that far out, and may not again in this century. At the point where they will probably go silent they will have been in transit for 53 years, and 50 years since they got their full energy kick - the largest any probes have ever received due to a double gas giant slingshot manuever*. There are no new super high-velocity missions even being floated that I can find, so it may be decades before anything of similar or greater speed is launched.
Future probes beyond Saturn will probably be orbiters instead of fly-bys, and all such trans-Saturnian missions will probably use advanced electromagnetic propulsion (ion, plasma, maybe even solar sail) that is still being developed or in the early stages of roll-out. An ion driven interstellar space probe would be neat, I'll bet there are a lot of interesting observations even of our own system, and experiments, that can only be made at great distances.
*Or velocity vector rotations if you want to be pedantic.
Virginia Postrel is my favorite columnist. She is the literary equivalent of John Stossel.
Thanks for pointing this out. I fully agree. Postrel is exactly like Stossel.
Stossel is an ignorant corporate shill and a flaming jerk, but if that floats your boat then so be it.
I recently bought an iPhone 6S, since I still use my headphone jack for all my headphones, and to plug into my car stereo. This may be my last iPhone if they don't stop this drive toward stupid design obsessions that leave out actual user needs and desires.
Brilliant. To solve the non-problem of having a small bezel-case they will bring the glass screen to the very edge of the device to ensure that when you do drop it, even a short distance, it will shatter the screen.
Why is it that Apple execs think that the ultimate ideal form for every device is to be wafer-thin and all glass, sacrificing every other design consideration for that single obsession?
If $10 Quintillion worth of asteroid minerals were brought down on Wall Street all at once, it would cause a huge crash in mineral value, an explosion of trading volume, and enough upheaval in the commodities market, one could call it destructive! In fact, it might crater the whole concept of commodities trading! That's why the old dinosaurs that run the finance sector are afraid of asteroid mining, it could spell their doom!
None of this would or could happen.
The figures you see slung about on the "value" of asteroids have a high level of bogosity. They are always arrived at by multiplying the estimated total metal content by the current market value of the metal when available in market-ready form on the surface of the Earth. No one prices Earth based resources this way.
The resource being estimated for that particular case was the iron-nickel content of the largest asteroid of that type (Type M), which is 16 Psyche, which is in the main asteroid belt (read - large delta vee to bring the material to Earth). The entire world iron steel market is about $800 billion, which is 1.6 billion tonnes of iron and steel with an average market value of $500 per tonne.
By this type of calculation a common piece of sedimentary rock is worth $75 a ton for its iron content (15% Fe content) and an average chunk of the Earth's crust (5% iron) is worth $15. And by this calculation the upper 1000 meters of the Earth's continental crust is worth $100 quintillion dollars.
Why haven't these wild financial predictions already happened, since we are sitting on all this valuable iron for the taking? Similarly try to interest anyone in paying you $7.5 million for the 10 meter thick layer of sedimentary rock and soil on your 1 acre property for its iron content. Its real value for this is zero.
More commonly people talk about obtaining platinum group metals from asteroids since, unlike iron, they are scarce on the Earth's surface and rocky asteroids are richer in these metals than the available ores on Earth, by a factor of 10X or so. This means that the value of the metal content at current market prices is around $2000 a ton.
The amazing thing you won't find in going through scores and scores of web sites, and papers, is the cost of either extracting the metals in space, or the cost of bringing the whole asteroid back to Earth. One of the few actual projects proposed to bring a small rock chunk (500 tonnes) to Earth is estimated at $2.6 billion, or a bit over $5 million a ton.
There seems little chance of actually being able to extract platinum metals, much less plain old iron, at a profit given that the ore value per ton of an asteroid is actually quite low. Multiplying a low value per ton by the high mass of an asteroid makes as much sense as a money losing sales operation "making it up in volume".
Finally, there is the basic economics of the markets. The value of the world iron market is $800 billion, the value of the world platinum metal market is about $30 billion. If you can introduce these metals at a cost much cheaper than current prices (there seems no chance of this happening with asteroid resources in the foreseeable future) then the cost will drop, usage will rise, existing producers will be put out of business, but there the size of the market is not going to grow very much. The market is not suddenly going to fork over a trillion dollars a year for cheap platinum, or ten trillion dollars for super-cheap steel.
Producing such beers typically requires maintaining an historical process, at a fixed location, since the colonization conditions are uncontrolled yet very specific for the product. Its difficult to introduce innovation without risking the result.
One Belgian lambic brewer needed to move out of their historic wooden structure for a larger one, so they dismantled the old building and re-erected it in pieces inside new one, to provide the same environment as much as possible.
BTW - one of the service White Labs provides is "strain hosting". If you are a local brewer and you have your own special culture you use, you pay them to maintain that culture for you so that it does not get contaminated or die out.
... "professional" brewers do know exactly what's in their beer?
Yes. And even serious amateurs do. Modern beer fermentation practice is to use fermentation conditions that are sterile (or nearly so) and the introduction of a very specific yeast strain, chose for the specific result desired.
On my desk in front of me is a vial of White Labs WLP099, Super High Gravity Ale Yeast. This strain, WLP099, will provide the exact type of fermentation I want. White Labs, one of the best brewing yeast companies, maintains sterile labs and propagation systems to maintain their extensive library of strains.
If the flowers really look blue, then they are blue. However many (perhaps most) flowers "called" blue actually have red components in their color, and are thus some bluey shade of purple of violet. Blue flowers definitely exists, but are a minority for both evolutionary and (related) biochemical reasons.
The principal claim of "few blue flowers" is really about the commercial flower trade. The major flowers sold by florists are roses, chrysanthemums, carnations, lilies, and gerberas none of whom have any true blue varieties. The blue flowers that do exist naturally are not good commercial flowers - ephemeral, small, difficult to grow, etc. This invention introduced a true blue color, with no red component, in one of the most widely grown commercial flowers.
The evolutionary and biochemical reasons for the scarcity of blue is that the reason that flowers are colorful is to contrast with vegetation. For this reds are favored since this were chlorophyll absorbs light most strongly, creating the strongest contrast so evolution has favored anthocyanin chemistry that tends to the red end of the spectrum. Given these factors red-free blues are scarce.
NB. Notice that I did not say that reds are favored because plants are "green". The reason I did not is that human visual perception is irrelevant to flower colors, which evolved to attract insects not humans or any other mammal. Humans have a very biased view of color due to the way our visual systems work - our color perception is especially sensitive to green, and insensitive to red, and in addition uses an opponent color perception mechanism that boosts the perceived contrast (green and red are opponents in out visual system). Our color perceptions are really bad measures of the actual wavelength reflectivity of things.
Polio is still on the vaccine schedule everywhere in the U.S. because - you know - it hasn't been eradicated from the entire world.
You may be thinking of small pox which does not exist outside of the freezers in two high security labs. We do not vaccinate against that.
Think about it. If we stopped vaccinating for polio because it "has been eradicated everywhere except for a few small areas of two countries" then we get an entire generation of people with no immunity. One of those people is eventually going to travel to on of those "few small areas" some day (even if no one from those areas ever comes here), and then will come back. BAM! It is like the Salk vaccine was never invented as a wave of polio cases sweeps an entire generation, all at once.
While this sample is going to have a much higher ratio of injured brains to non-injured brains than the general NFL population due to selection, the extremely high ratio of 110-to-1 (and 10-1 in a broader population that was studied), makes it unlikely that there are not a lot of former players out there with less severe brain trauma that are not getting flagged as brain damaged.
Pressed by Bradley for specifics, Melvin said he understands “some of the reading material is borderline pornographic.” And he said the program uses “fuzzy math,” substituting letters for numbers in some examples.
Yeah, all those "x's" intemingling with numbers. It's X-rated math that's what it is! Pornography!
The Republican Party's power is based largely on the manufactured consensus of the fearful, ignorant...
And there is a lot of solid evidence that this not an exaggeration. Five Thirty EIght did a nice analysis of Trump voting areas by education level, and the results are striking - Trump swept the most poorly educated half of America. It may not be fair to say that the stupidest Americans elected Trump, but it is true that most ignorant Americans did.
In all future economies we will have going forward if you want a job you better have a good education. High education jobs are far from universally safe from the Cybernetic Revolution, but the education will be necessary to seize the new opportunities that arise.
So we have the situation that even as the jobs drain away from the working class, the right wing is turning against higher education which is the best tool known to escape from hardship.
What do they expect will keep them absolute destitution if there simply aren't enough decent paying jobs to go around? There is the idea of the Universal Basic Income - but such a socialistic policy of just giving hand-outs to takers (as they themselves would say) is everything their political party is opposed to.
The fact that Linus has only made a minor comment rather than a vulgar tirade should be telling to all.
So... Linus is praising it with faint damns. Okay.
Given Linus's legendary abusive style that could be a valid argument, but I'd be happier with a stronger endorsement.
the US Government believes all moon rocks are their property and aggressively pursue everyone who has one. SWAT teams and FBI sting operations -- for people who were *given* a tiny piece of moon rock by NASA 40 years ago.
The U.S. believes the Apollo mission rocks are government property because they are. The U.S. government paid to bring them here, and have clear legal title to them. They have never been offered for sale.
If you want to buy a moon rock though there is not problem. Lunar meteorites are available for sale (I have a small piece of one), you can order one today if you like. A micro-mount specimen isn't even very expensive.