HelixDab2

A complete bodysuit depicting the Shimbara rebellion and Amakusa Shirō. Not because they were Christian--duh--but because they fought against the repressive Tokugawa regime, even if they ultimately lost.

The essential problem is that the people working now are paying for the people that are retired. It would make more sense for the gov't to have taxed the people prior to their retirement, and have invested those taxes, so that in their retirement they would be getting out what they had previously paid in. And switching over to a system like that would require double taxation on the population now, which will make such a proposal very unopopular.

But if your retired population is growing, and you have fewer people working, then you either need to increase the retirement age--so that more people are paying into the system--or increase the taxation overall. If I recall correctly, Denmark has been seeing a negative population growth; that's a real problem for retirement schemes that rely on current taxes paying for retirees.

Is this fair to people that have been working in trades and have beaten up their body for 40 years? No. Likewise, it's not really fair to people that have working in white-collar jobs that may still be more than capable of excelling at their job, and still want to work. (My dad had mandatory retirement at 72 due to company policy; he immediately got re-hired as an on-site consultant, and has been doing that for over a decade.)

EDIT - this is a huge problem in the US. The social security taxes now on working people are immediately paid out to retirees. SS benefits go up to account for inflation, but the amount coming in is decreasing because population growth has slowed. Without major reforms, social security in the US won't be solvent by the time I retire, IF I ever retire.

It's statistically correct, but not specifically correct. It doesn't tell you for certain that you, personally, have too much body fat (or too little fat/muscle), but it's a good indicator.

And that's really what you're looking at; you're trying to figure out if you have more body fat than you should.

Harpendens skin fold calipers--when used by a trained professional--will give you a more accurate measure of your overall body fat percentage. And InBody scale will measure bioelectrical impedance (essentially running a low-voltage current through you and measuring impedance) to give you a fairly accurate measure of your body fat percentage, but how well hydrated you are can significantly affect the reading. Hydrostatic underwater weighing was long been the gold standard for measuring body composition. BUT dual x-ray absorbiometry (DEXA) has overtaken it, because it's significantly easier on the person being tested.

That said, body fat alone doesn't tell you if you are actually healthy. You can be fairly low in body fat, and have horrific cardiovascular fitness. And being exceptionally heavily muscled, (say, 200kg, at 7% body fat; Mr. Olympia levels of muscle) doesn't appear to be healthy on your joints and heart either in the long term.

I've had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so...?

You can use DOT 5.1 to significantly increase that wet boiling point, but it's expensive for normal car use. I usually use it in my motorcycle, since I've experienced brake fade on that before, and it's... Not fun.

Depends on how much you drive, and what the recommended interval is. If the interval is 7k miles, and you drive 18k in a year, yeah, you need to change the oil 3x/year.

It seems to me that counting the number of cycles each makes, and basing your intervals off that would make more sense than mileage. If I'm constantly running at high RPM, that should require more frequent oil changes in terms of mileage.

I think that most of the trains in Chicago run late at night, although far, far less frequently. I remember taking the green line with my bike late at night, drunk, and riding the mile or so north to my home through some moderately shitty neighborhoods (a bit west of Garfield Park, if that means anything to you). I lived in in a pretty rough area; there were definitely no taxis waiting for fares near the train stations (or anywhere!), and there weren't any e-bike or scooters in that area either. It was just rough getting around the Austin neighborhood in Chicago late at night without a car.

You can do that perfectly safely with chicken IF you cook it sous vide first. You could run it at 130F for about four hours before grilling it, and it would still look very raw, although the bacteria would all be dead.

It's been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I've forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)

It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.

Emissions are a large part of what's causing the habitat destruction, depending on where, specifically, you're talking about. For instance, the warming oceans are caused by the increasing CO2 levels, and warming oceans and ice cap melt is causing massive changes in weather patterns, which in turn, is leading to droughts, floods, increased wildfires, more and stronger hurricanes, etc. Deforestation in the Amazon is still an ongoing problem, although I understand that the president of Brasil has instituted a program that takes land back from ppl that illegally burned forests to turn it into grazing land. (I think seizing the cattle would help too; the large-scale rancher that do that need to be bankrupted.) Microplastics are definitely A problem, but I don't think that we know how much of a problem they are yet, in that we're not entirely sure how increasing levels of microplastics in animals, etc. is going to affect them in the long term.

So. This one is complicated.

Part of the issue is that we want to have an auto industry in the US; being utterly dependent on a foreign country for the majority of your transportation isn't a great idea. Yes, the big 3 auto companies should be doing basic electric instead of high-end luxury electric (...that usually doesn't work super well...), but they need to get competitive in that market. Super cheap electric cars from China would undercut the US auto companies so badly that they would likely end up being bankrupted. At that point, Chinese companies could charge whatever the fuck they wanted, because we'd have no options.

And, more than that, the big 3 auto companies directly employ about 600,000 people, and millions more indirectly (as parts suppliers that do nothing but supply the auto companies); losing those companies means losing millions of jobs. And not just jobs, but often union jobs.

There's a certain value in trade agreements, as well as a certain value in protectionist trade policies. But, in this case, it would make more sense for the gov't to take partial ownership of the big 3--through stock purchases--and fund development of competitive EVs. Much like China does through their domestic economic incentives and subsidies.

...And then also fund public transit infrastructure.

Sure, you can get from Savannah--a major city--to Boston--also a major city just by taking trains. That's a great case for public transport.

But as someone else pointed out, can you get from one side of Savannah to the other efficiently, at off-peak times? I lived in Chicago for over a decade, and while the transit system isn't great, it's not bad. I lived in the Austin neighborhood (if you know Chicago, you know that's not a great area); if I went to see a concert at downtown without driving, I had to walk about a mile and a half to get home, because that was the closest train stop to my home, and busses in my area stopped running at 11p.

Where I live now, even if trains ran to my town (and they technically do, but it's only freight), I would have to travel 15 miles to get to the train. And that 15 miles from where I live to the train is also about 1500' of elevation loss. That's pretty great for riding a bike there, and really, really sucks for getting home. Especially if I have groceries of any kind.

I agree that we should have better public transit, and I agree that the cost is a net public good. But that doesn't solve all transportation needs. It may take a large bite out of them, but it doesn't fix all of them.