I was walking through the canteen with some classmates. One of them stole a sugar cube intended for coffee from the canteen. A teacher, apparently feeling Biblical, punished the whole group with an hour of detention.

Is there any actual evidence that Science lacks money?

That more money would actually help scientists do more interesting stuff?

Yes, there is a pretty strong correlation between R&D spending and scientific output. Even so, spending is only in the low single digit percentages of the economy everywhere. Societies could easily decide to spend less on decadent luxury and more on science.

Right now, do scientists actually have money problems making it difficult to conduct ambitious research?

So science is a high-risk, high-reward numbers game. You try more things, hire more scientists, and more science will happen. Most research doesn’t lead anywhere, but the small fraction that does leads to things you could just never get without scientific research. Yes, there are many (such as yours truly) who could have continued to be scientists but take jobs in industry because positions as scientific researchers are extremely competitive and there is not enough money to hire all suitable candidates.

English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.

Schnickschnack

They perhaps shouldn’t, at least not in these cases, but in practice they are either championed or condoned by an overwhelming majority of the population.

Sounds like violations of the constitution aren’t all that consequential then, doesn’t it?

I have never commuted by car, but I plan to get a car when I retire so I can drive around in the mornings.

Doesn’t the constitution also say something about things like attempting to overthrow the government, assisting foreign military forces in attacking domestic targets and taking bribes from foreign governments?

My story is similar to yours, though I just got a warning, not a ban.

The first warning was for “abusing the report function” after I reported a post defending Derek Chauvin. I stopped reporting to the admins after that, and over time grew increasingly uneasy with the direction of Reddit as a more and more fascist-friendly organization, and the willing and eager contribution of Reddit’s CEO to millions of Covid deaths left a sour taste (and a nasty cough).

I got the second warning about a week ago after I joked the US government should go into the White House and Melania’s lover’s residence to arrest them since Trump pardoned a drug dealer, by the same reasoning the US government used to abduct Maduro and his wife. This was “threatening violence.” That was the last straw, I quit Reddit after that.

It’s not even that I mind them erring on the side of caution, or in this case on the side of insanity, it’s the double standard that irks me the most. An obvious joke goes too far, but in certain subreddits (you know the ones) users can advocate ethnic cleansing, war crimes, etc. with reckless abandon.

A more equal society than the most equal to have ever existed (in modern times at least - some hunter-gatherer tribes are highly egalitarian)? No, I don’t think so, but the kind of issues Americans popularly hypothesize as reasons for low birth rates are just not relevant in these societies, and I don’t see lower inequality having much effect on the real reasons people have no or few children there.

The least unequal societies all have low birth rates though. While inequality is still a serious issue in these societies, I’m not aware of any evidence or mechanism suggesting addressing this would increase birth rates.

Most European leaders mildly criticized the invasion at best. Their response can best be summarized by this conversation between Karremans and Mladić when Serbian troops overran the UN enclave prior to the Srebrenica genocide:

KARREMANS: “I am a piano player. Don’t shoot the piano player.”

MLADIC: “You are a poor piano player.”

And how do you renewably generate the power for electrolysis without solar or wind farms?

The Wlz (which replaced the AWBZ) covers only a minority of total health care costs. Expenses were €29 bln in 2023. “Mostly privatized” is accurate.

Both the Netherlands and Switzerland have universal health care systems and negligible rates of lack of insurance. My point is just that private health insurance isn’t the (only) problem, as these counterexamples show.

Actually, many of those countries don’t have systems similar to Medicare for All. Netherlands, supposedly second in this list, has a mostly privatized system with mandatory insurance, so does Switzerland. France and Germany have semi-public and private health insurance companies. The US has bigger (and different) problems than merely the existence of health insurance companies.

For a laugh (and cry), you can have a look at which countries are above the US in terms of life expectancy. It includes the likes of Maldives, Costa Rica, Panama and Oman.

Discard the Brownshirts, their collaborators, and the Putin fluffers, and you probably won’t have many choices left.

Actually, we’re not a long way off from that. Hydrogen production facilities utilizing (excess) renewable electricity output are under construction as we speak. For example, a large project in Kazakhstan (which has large stretches of windy, sunny and empty steppes) is aiming to be online in 2030 with 30 GW of production going towards green hydrogen.