Just vague memories from a random on the web. But IIRC, they were not welcome in part because of corruption of the previous leader’s administration, and one of the first things Zalensky did was crack down on that.

The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it’s just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.

Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

Exactly, it was (very relatively) cheap and quick. And they figured when, not if, it breaks, it will be again quick to repair. And it is interesting tech that could be useful down the line that they may figure is worth the cost in training alone.

Remake it from the ground up instead of using the busted Gearbox port, and I may be interested.

The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.

More like a life of alcoholism seems like. Did he lie to his doc in the doc about his alcohol consumption after they told him his liver was in bad shape?

I agree, but it isn’t so clear cut. Where is the cutoff on complexity required? As it stands, both our brains and most complex AI are pretty much black boxes. It’s impossible to say this system we know vanishingly little about is/isn’t dundamentally the same as this system we know vanishingly little about, just on a differentscale. The first AGI will likely still have most people saying the same things about it, “it isn’t complex enough to approach a human brain.” But it doesn’t need to equal a brain to still be intelligent.

Yeah there was a compress all your favorites into the device bit, and cashing in on the semi-current trend of check out how cool it is to crush stuff bit, and they just didn’t connect.

It helps that when one uses them on their own land, they are more likely to carefully track where they were used and can conduct cleanup operations when feasible.

There are already places that use IRV in the US and there has never been a significant issue with this. IRV is certainly better than what we have, but for my money, I think STAR is the way to go, there’s still issues with strategic voting in IRV with situations that make good-faith votes hurt the voter, but it’s still a lot better than the circus we have now.

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That’s why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.

This isn’t the same. Host nukes is not owning nukes, they seems to be proposing housing US nukes that Poland would not have control of, or be able to launch. With no launch codes, they aren’t a valid deterrent to conventional war, unless the world is convinced the US would use them to protect Polish sovereignty, which would obviously not be on the table.

Arguably, patches started even earlier. It wasn’t uncommon to release another whole title that was basically a bug/balance patch. See Japanese Pokemon Blue, and all the various Street Fighter 2 versions.

This is exactly where the vaunted invisible hand is actually meant to come into play. Even if they don’t directly benefit, the increased fulfillment of those that do benefit will drive up demand for those jobs, which will reduce demand for these jobs. And so they will have to compensate for reduced demand by offering more to keep people there.

It’s a farce they put on specifically to distract their base from the war on the poor.

Our instead of Trump.

Yeah, would probably like to see ranked choice swapped out for something else too. My preferred tool is STAR, but there’s a lot of other options. The biggest benefit of RC is it isn’t as bad as what we have, which is good, but it isn’t great.

My go to recently has been some solitair.

Nobody wants to deal with the short term issues it raises, aside from the moral police issue. Legalizing it actually increases trafficking in the legalized area, while reducing it in a larger area outside the legal one. This only happens because it’s an island of legality, if it was legal everywhere then trafficking would drop much more everywhere. But Nobody wants to invite the temporary increase by being the first. Germany, for example, has higher sex trafficking than most of Europe. It also ignore the difficulty of regulation, there’s a reason it is so prevalent, even where illegal. There is always going to be a strong pressure on vulnerable women, and enforcing the regulations can be incredibly difficult.

That’s not to say it shouldn’t be legalized. But these are the challenges it faces.