The article mentions that he was telling this to the president of the UFC, so not really since thats sports type fighting, not military stuff like the french foreign legion is. It sounds more like just an attempt to make migrants sound threatening by declaring them to be physically tougher than other people.

I’m aware that it can analyze chemical composition (I work in a factory that relates to such devices), but I’m unaware of them being able to detect things like weaknesses in a grain structure, the devices I’m familiar with at least would just tell you if a piece of titanium has other elements contaminating it. Unless there’s more that can be done with them than I’ve had explained to me, which is possible

Presumably there must be something physically different about the weaker titanium, like a different structure of all the crystals in it or something? Is there any way to measure that?

For this particular case, he couldn’t pardon himself because the president can pardon federal crimes, but in this case the crime is in the New York state court system, so the governor of New York would have to pardon him to my understanding.

I have a suspicion that we might see some interesting hybridization of the plant based and lab grown meats at some point. Tissue culture is expensive, and while Im sure the price can be reduced, Im doubtful that it will get cheaper than plant protein is. However, it can potentially taste more like real meat than plants, seeing as, well, it is real meat, just assembled differently. Potentially then, one can probably mix in some percentage of plant protein (or possibly mycoprotein as well) in with the meat in ground meat type products like burgers, without the flavor changing too noticeably, and get something mostly the same with a lower cost.

Eh, since going vegetarian in the past year or so, I’ve found that a lot of the meat substitutes actually are pretty good, depending on how you use them. It’s not usually so perfect that one cannot truly tell, sure, unless it’s a dish where the meat flavor is heavily affected by spices and similar like with chili, but I’ve definitely found types of substitute bacon, or burgers, or ground meat that taste quite good. Though in my experience it’s usually been the cheaper or simpler ones, like black bean burgers or tempeh bacon, that taste best. Not the same, but similar enough to be tasty in broadly similar ways.

I’ve heard of them before, but my assumption was that whatever factor about fast food had killed them off, probably would still be in play to prevent them returning unless optimized even further somehow

This does bring the question up in my mind of what a restaurant that wasn’t a luxury would look like, ie, something that sells ready to eat food at prices that make it competitive with cooking at home, and which is healthy enough to eat on a daily basis without ill effect. My guess is that it would be largely a matter of having to carefully choose recipes that both use ingredients that are cheap in bulk, and able to be at least partially automated to keep staff costs low, but which are still nutritious and rely on minimal processed ingredients. Probably soups and chili and the like I’d imagine.

From the light’s point of view, that distance should get reduced to zero due to length contraction anyway if I’m remembering correctly?

It’s not even implicit slavery, the amendment that makes slavery unconstitutional explicitly makes an exception for criminal punishment.

Ah, sounds like someone going for the herostratus approach to fame

If theres anything that I took away from my 3 years of trying to get a physics degree before burning out on it around covid hit, its that like half of physics seems to be just figuring out what approximations you can safely make to turn something infeasibly complicated into something that can actually be worked out

Japan was nuked at a time when the realities around nuclear weapons (namely, the hostile nation having them too, or an ally of theirs) were different. The strategy around them is dramatically different now from then.

The point of building nukes isn’t really to launch a nuke at someone, it’s to make others decide that attacking you is too risky. Missile defense isn’t perfect, so even if it probably would stop them, there’s still a risk one gets through, that someone would have to take into consideration before launching an attack. It’s even more a threat against Isreal, since they have less time to intercept, and even one missile getting through would destroy a comparatively larger fraction of the country, being that it’s fairly small.

I mean, if you were the leader of a country that was under active invasion by a enemy with numerical and firepower superiority, would you not do the same? Given the circumstances, he’d arguably be failing his people if he did not pursue whatever avenue to get more aid that he can

I mean, having a hostage generally implies your intent is to hold that person captive in exchange for a demand being fulfilled, after which point you at least claim that you will release them. Presumably, Israel doesnt intend or claim that it will release those it has imprisoned even if it gets what it wants, so calling them hostages wouldnt really be accurate. One could call the people held by Hamas prisoners too I suppose, since that just implies them to be held against their will, but as they are explicitly being held in order to be used as a bargaining chip, calling them hostages adds more information about the situation than just calling them prisoners too would.

Youre wrong on all counts there, but most importantly to the actual topic of discussion, a negotiated settlement in which the aggressor is just given some of the territory they are attempting to conquer (which is exactly what a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia as the war has gone thus far would have been, because what else could Ukraine have possibly offered to convince Russia that it was worth it to give up their attack?) is not a wish for peace, its a wish for appeasement. It sounds like peace at first glance, sure, but by rewarding aggressive action, it gives every incentive for the aggressor to simply attack again later, in the hope of gaining more concessions. If this kind of policy led to peace, there never would have been a second world war. I do not like war the way you seem to think, but I do not want it tomorrow either. Ensuring that there is as little incentive as possible for those with the means to start them to do so, requires that those that start wars are not allowed to gain by doing so, and Russia has indisputably started this one, therefore to ensure peace, it must lose.

It would be great if all peace took was for everyone involved to sit down and talk, but as you say, the world is not like that.

Is that really the best response you can think of?

-“Give me your home.”

“Wtf, no!”

-“Well then I’ll kill you for it then”

Some random observer: “I wish they’d negotiated and just given the guy half of their home, then we’d not be in this situation…”

Oh I wasn’t suggesting we should stop the pursuit. I just think it won’t be a magic bullet for solving our energy needs the way some proponents seem to suggest it will be.