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  • Both Roberts and Barrett joined the liberal block on this vote, and as a 5-4 ruling both of them were required to get to a majority. That only Barrett is getting social media energy over it says something.

  • My understanding is the most benefit is to children whose teeth are still growing, then secondarily to adults who have substandard dental hygiene. An otherwise healthy adult with good dental care routines is the least impactful case.

    Going off on the tangent of distilled water: distilled water can reduce overall minerals in the diet. From WebMD https://www.webmd.com/diet/distilled-water-overview

    Distilled water lacks even electrolytes like potassium and other minerals your body needs. So you may miss out on a bit of these micronutrients if you drink only the distilled stuff. Some studies have found a link between drinking water low in calcium and magnesium and tiredness, muscle cramps, weakness, and heart disease

  • It's happy you are maintaining all the relationships that are important to you without conflict, but sad your blood relatives are missing out on knowing they have a great in-law in your spouse. Not knowing any details I have no idea what is best, but hope you all stay happy to be family!

  • Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like "buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian", just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.

    Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it's more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.

    As far as "how is Japan adjusting" to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can't be automated.

  • There is a surprising amount of empty space between atoms, and even inside atoms between the electron orbitals and the nucleus. Small black holes are so dense they mostly fall through this empty between-atom space and don't actually hit anything. Even in a matter-rich environment like inside the Earth, you'd need a black hole with more than half the mass of the moon to be large enough to eat matter faster than it loses matter to Hawking radiation.

  • It's wild that there is so much space between atoms (and inside them, between the elctron orbitals and the nucleus), and black holes are so incredibly dense, that a small black hole can fall all the way through the Earth and not hit enough matter to gain appreciable mass.

  • Sun God

    Jump
  • There was a time people thought Mercury would have some "twilight" acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.

  • Someone with the skills and knowledge to clean up 150-year old typographical errors in one particular table in the Social Security database system would probably provide more benefit to the taxpayers covering their salary by doing some other task.

  • People tried staying and being an "inside" ally during Trump's first term. In the end, it just helped his administration maintain a veneer of competency.

    Leave. Let the institution fall. Collapse of the systems people rely on is the only way to gather overwhelming popular support to contain Trump's destruction.

  • It’s a slow day in some little town... The sun is hot… the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich tourist from back west is driving thru town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store. The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit. She, in a flash rushes to the motel and pays off her room bill with the motel owner. The motel proprietor now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money & leaves. NOW,… no one produced anything…and no one earned anything…however the whole town is out of debt and is looking to the future with much optimism.

    That version from here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html

  • It's not just the uptake, it's whether it stays at the surface, ultimately releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases, or sinks to the ocean floor, thus locking up the carbon in oceanic rock.

    We have a good handle on understanding the uptake. It's the float vs sink part that has the critical uncertainty.

  • To work as a carbon capture mechanic, iron fertilization-driven algae blooms would have to die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thus locking up their carbon in oceanic rock.

    The concern is they would die and float, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases. Then we would have all the effort of the fertilization, all the ecosystem disruption of the algae bloom, and maybe negative benefit as far as carbon since the ecosystem disruption could mess up carbon sinks that were actually working.

  • People who were documented immigrants at one time, and served in the US military during that period, can become undocumented later. Military service can lead to citizenship, but the process has a lot of barriers and many people slip through the cracks. It is embarrassing as a country that we deport war veterans because they missed some obtuse paperwork deadline.

  • YouGov does polls like this with email invitations. You fill out your demographics, and they send out invites as polls become available. It is mostly polling on brands, but a significant minority of the polls are on political topics.

  • Myopia seems to be far more of a childhood environment thing than a genetic thing. For a long time it was thought to be from too much close viewing (reading books, sitting short distances from screens), but more recent research suggests it is more from lack of sun exposure. UV light prompts the formation of dopamine, and higher dopamine levels in the eyeball are required for it to maintain the optimal round shape as it grows.

  • My sympathies for that rough experience. I hope you have a wider family and friend group that supports you taking care of yourself, and have or will find a better match of romantic partner.

  • Not the person you replied to, but just listening and allowing the person to express themselves and feel heard goes a long way. Getting it all out to someone and not being bottled up inside your own head can be a huge relief, even if the problem itself remains the same.

    The instinctual reaction is to want to offer fixes. However, whatever the hearer thought of in five seconds, the sufferer probably also already thought of, and spent days/months/years attempting to make it work and it just didn't, and now the listening session gets diverted into kind of an argument where the suffered has to justify they have already put in sufficient effort to the fix the listener is pushing that it's not worth continuing on that road.