The boring answer: criminal investigative files generally aren’t released, so they’re compiled in a way that mingles information about victims with information about suspects and witnesses and others potentially involved in criminal activity, intentionally or unwittingly, directly or tangentially.

If you want to export a list of all names in the files, you’ll want to filter out victims for sure, and probably mere witnesses. You definitely don’t want to out informants and make them vulnerable to retaliation.

So most law enforcement agencies simply will keep everything secret. The idea of releasing names from the file was unusual, and it’s not surprising that Trump’s own people refused to follow through, especially when it’s highly likely that Trump was in that list of names.

It’s more complicated than that. Electronics and appliances are the obvious examples of things that have inflated much slower than average (or even deflated). Apparel and tools have inflated much slower. Energy generally has inflated much slower than average, but has shown a ton of volatility. Food and cars have inflated slower than average, but individual items might have followed their own path. Healthcare, education, and housing have gone up much faster than average inflation.

And the ratios don’t stay consistent over time. When I was a kid, burger meat was cheaper than similarly sized chicken breasts. Now the ratio is flipped. A plane ticket between New York and London is much cheaper today than in the 70’s. Even a tank of gas for driving from one state to another is way cheaper today than in the 70’s, in large part because of better fuel efficiency.

And anything labor intensive is inherently at tension with itself. A seamstress or tailor can only make so many items of clothing per week. Those clothes will have to cost enough to justify their pay, and the raw ingredient textiles used to make the garments. So if their pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, then the labor-intensive items they make probably haven’t kept up with inflation, either. Ideally, increased productivity would allow raises to not be absorbed into the price of whatever is being produced, but that doesn’t always happen.

Looking at old menus and catalogs shows that some things have gone up a lot in price, while others didn’t experience the same effect.

Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied

They’re basically the proto Pacific Islanders. It’s believed that their civilizations all trace back to a group of people from the island of Taiwan/Formosa, who learned how to sail over the deep ocean and set up new communities, bringing chickens, pigs, taro, coconuts.

They settled modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, as far west as Madagascar, to Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and most of the other Pacific Islands, as far east as Easter Island. Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamese, etc., are all Austronesian. Most ethnic groups considered native to these islands trace back to Austronesian expansion.

There are shared linguistic and cultural ties that showed that they had recent comment ancestry, that has since been confirmed by DNA genealogy.

You heard the man, fire any employee and expel any student who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

I would think that using fusion or fission for synthesizing elements is going to still be less efficient (among all resources, not just energy) than using the newfound abundant/cheap energy to extract those preexisting elements from mixtures that exist on Earth.

Take neodymium, your example. That’s pretty abundant in the Earth’s crust. It’s just that it’s energy intensive to extract it from the mineral formations that naturally occur. At that point it’s still probably much cheaper, energy wise, to separate a bunch of minerals into their constituent elements, rather than try to synthesize atoms through fusion and fission.

The fuel for it is the most common on the planet, if not the universe, requires no special refining

It is true that regular hydrogen (with 1 proton and no neutrons) fuses in the Sun, first to deuterium (2 protons combine into a nucleus that immediately decays a bunch of radiation and becomes a proton and neutron), then another hydrogen proton to create helium-3 (2 protons, 1 neutron), then two helium-3 nuclei fuse to create 2 hydrogen protons and a stable Helium-4 nucleus (2 protons, 2 neutrons).

But nobody on earth is trying to accomplish fusion through that difficult pathway. We don’t have the ability to create the pressures and heat to ignite that reaction.

The way all of these fusion projects are trying to achieve are deuterium (1 proton, 1 neutron) plus tritium (1 proton, 2 neutrons), to form Helium-4 (2 protons, 2 neutrons) plus a neutron and a bunch of energy. That is a reaction that human technology can ignite. So all the research goes into this particular reaction.

And for that, tritium is exceedingly rare. We can make it as a byproduct of fission reactors, from lithium.

The specifics are a pipe dream but the general principle holds: if energy suddenly becomes more plentiful and cheaper by orders of magnitude, society will find a way to use that new plentiful resource in ways that we can scarcely imagine today. That’s always been true of new inventions, where much of the post-invention innovation comes in the form of finding new applications for a thing that has already been invented.

I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.

Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.

By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.

The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.

In the U.S., they meter gas by the “therm,” which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It’s a misconception that it’s equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.

BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Also, don’t confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.

Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.

It’s pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.

So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?

Unless you’re converting seconds to minutes, hours, days, years, etc.

Then you get things like watt hours. Or light years.

These fuckers act like they’ve never heard of Lina Khan. Let’s see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they’re so serious about tech competition maybe they’ll get on board with net neutrality.

And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She’s got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).

But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.

In static electric fields, sure. But the real world has rapidly changing electric fields, and mapping concepts like voltage or resistance to a time dimension starts to require imaginary numbers (and the complex analogue to resistance goes by a different name of impedance). And once you’re modeling electricity through those concepts, you can have high current in a particular moment in time where the voltage might not be high. Or where the implied voltage is very high but was actually more of an effect than a cause.

In other words, if you’re simply talking about “resistance,” you’re already in the wrong domain to be analyzing electrical safety properly.

Voltage and current are related, of course, but Ohm’s law is just a simplification of circuit theory for static circuits, and the version most are taught early on assume zero inductance and zero capacitance in the circuit. Drop in an alternating current, some capacitors and inductors, and you’ve got yourself a more complex situation, literally, with the scalar real number representing resistance replaced with the complex number representing impedance.

And when you have time variance that isn’t a simple sinusoidal wave of electric potential coming from a source, even the definition of the word “voltage” starts requiring vector calculus to even be a coherent definition.

So when I take a simple battery of DC cells to create a low voltage power source, I can still induce current using some transformers and inductors (which store energy in magnetic field) and abruptly breaking open the circuit so that the current still arcs across high resistance air. That’s the basic principle of how a spark plug works. In those cases, you’re creating immense voltages for a tiny amount of time, but there’s never any real risk of significant current being pushed through any part of a person’s body. And as soon as you draw off some of the current, the voltage immediately drops as you deplete the stored energy wherever it is in the system.

And anything designed to deliver an electric shock to a person (or animal) tends to be high voltage, low current. Tasers, electric fences, etc.

So it’s current that matters for safety. A high voltage doesn’t always induce a high current. And current can cause problems even at relatively low voltages.

when he emigrated to New York

New York City?!?

Yeah, a nuclear blast is gonna be totally deadly within a particular radius, no matter what you do. And then at some larger radius, everything outside that radius will be safe, regardless of what you do. So the area in between is going to be the area where the response can make a difference.

And as you mention, the area of the “can actually make a difference” zone is much larger than the “dead-no-matter-what” zone, because it scales by the square of the distance. So if the outer safe radius is twice the inner death radius, the area of the in between zone is gonna be about 3 times the size of the death zone (π(2r)^2 - πr^2 = 3πr). If it’s 3 times the radius, it’ll be 8 times the area.

There’s no legitimate reason to intentionally take losses (or refuse to take revenue) for tax reasons, though.

If you lose $1000 and get a tax benefit worth $200 on those losses, it’s still a net loss of $800, so you should rather get at least some money back. Getting $500 back might mean that you lose $500 and then get $100 back in tax benefits, so that your net loss is $400 instead. That’s an improvement over losing $800, so it’s worth doing.

More likely, the contracts around the movie had them needing to pay rightsholders, actors/writers/directors, and producers based on certain formulas on the gross revenue, or would be contractually obligated to spend a minimum on marketing and promotion if there was going to be a release, etc.

Taxes just alleviate the degree of losses (or reduce the amount of profit), which can change behavior around risk taking, but it wouldn’t make sense to abandon a finished movie solely for tax reasons.