TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal… except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error – type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm – the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it’s businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that’s great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.

Somewhere a philosophy undergrad just sat bolt upright and shouted, “A TROLLEY PROBLEM! I must go, the world needs me!”

This seems an… overly-vitriolic response.

Also you’re wrong. :P

Look at it this way: in the context of the data being shown here, the relevant reference points are 0% and (arguably) 100%, or at least a point somewhere equidistant from the top of the line as the ~30% low point of the line is to zero. Casually glancing at the chart, a viewer who doesn’t take time to look at the scale and the labeled points would take away:

A large majority of college-age men used to binge drink, and now almost none do!

Instead of what the data is actually showing, which is

Half of college-age men used to binge drink and now only three in ten do, while about a third of college-age women have consistently binged.

I don’t think the chart designers are being intentionally misleading, but cutting out half of the 0%-100% range means that the graphics are telling a different story than the labels are, and outside the context of a scientific paper not everybody is going to take the time to scrutinize the labels. Omitting the high and low ends of the range also exaggerates the difference between the two lines, since the graph coincidentally cuts off just below the relatively flat line for female binge drinking right after the line for male binge drinking crosses it on the right.

Besides which, for the purposes of the story showing at least the range from 0%-60% wouldn’t obscure the overall trend – there’s not a lot of noise in the data, and barring the odd spike in female binge-drinking between '14-'15 – that critically, doesn’t appear to be the subject the of article this comes from – there aren’t any smaller-scale trends or oddities in the data that demand scrutiny. Squashing the Y-axis a bit to tell a truer story about the absolute values of the data wouldn’t obscure the message of the graph in any meaningful way.

It’s only showing the range from 60% to 30%, which makes the 20% drop in male binge drinking rates look more like an ~80% drop to near-zero unless you pay close attention to the scale.

Alas, I was so looking forward to hearing them parrot the talking points of acclaimed Leninist… (checks notes) … JD Vance.

Conservatism is about preserving a historical social order, rather than existing conditions generally. Acknowledging an environmental change and altering the structure of the economy to prevent it threatens the social order that allows oil companies, chemical companies, and auto manufacturers to be some of the wealthiest and politically powerful entities in the world.

Further, in the short term, ignoring climate change preserves the status quo for the wealthy and powerful. In the long term, though, it only really becomes an existential threat to those who are not positioned to profit from it – look at Nestle attempting to take control of water supplies for an early example of what this might look like. Cataclysm is a life-and-death issue for the masses. For the powerful, it’s an opportunity.

The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?

Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.

NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

Another perovskite hype piece. You’ll know that they’ve got something that’s commercially viable once they’re making these sorts of efficiency claims and not omitting information about cell degradation.

Given that the first perovskites studied had lifespans that could be measured in minutes, this is great progress, but the fundamental problem is that as a class of materials they just don’t want to exist outside of an inert atmosphere. Without significant progress in stability and encapsulation materials, they’re more of a research curiosity than a viable real-world PV tech.

With regard to this specific issue, you don’t even have to go looking for cases of young women being discouraged from reporting rape and sexual assault allegations against promising young athletes, because “think how you could hurt his future prospects” – examples are so plentiful that you can’t help but find them if you spend any time reviewing sports news. It’s really only been in the last decade or so that anybody has seriously pushed back against the idea that Johnny Sportsball’s ability to score points for the local team is more important than the safety and bodily autonomy of women.

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD’s lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that’s still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

The Power Wagon name goes all the way back to a WW2 military transport manufactured by Dodge (i.e., a powered wagon in army parlance).

It’s dumb, but there ya go.

Can’t take credit – it was originally coined by Gertrude Stein – but it’s a very apt turn of phrase to describe the placelessness of American suburbia.

I live in an old, once-redlined streetcar suburb, and my folks are about a half hour away in a new, nearly-exurban tract home development. They love to see their grandson and are happy to babysit him when my wife and I want a date night, but we’ve just about stopped taking them up on that offer because every restaurant in a reasonable distance from their neighborhood is some mediocre, mid-market national chain that’s utterly devoid of charm, serving plates that have been ruthlessly value-engineered to minimize the need for specialized equipment or skilled talent in the kitchen. The area is quiet, I guess, and I’m sure the land was cheap, but there’s no there there.

On the one hand, I agree with you that the expected lifespan of current OLED tech doesn’t align with my expectation of monitor life… But on the other hand, I tend to use my monitors until the backlight gives out or some layer or other in the panel stackup shits the bed, and I haven’t yet had an LCD make it past the decade mark.

In my opinion OLED is just fine for phone displays and TVs, which aren’t expected to be lit 24/7 and don’t have lots of fixed UI elements. Between my WFH job and hobby use, though, my PC screens are on about 10 hours a day on average, with the screen displaying one of a handful of programs with fixed, high contrast user interfaces. That’s gonna put an OLED panel through the wringer in quite a bit less time than I have become used to using my LCDs, and that’s not acceptable to me.

Battletech has flamers, which are basically like if you took one of those WWII flamethrower tanks and powered it with nuclear fusion instead of napalm. The lack of a WarShip-class flamer for space combat seems like an oversight, though…