Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.

That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.

This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.

An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.

Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.

There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.

Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

The premise is that all energy use increases entropy over time, and eventually a planetary civilization will use so much energy that the planet itself will get cooked. As a thermodynamic inevitability.

But if it’s a super advanced civilization with advanced technology, Why can’t the civilization cool the planet by dumping waste heat into stuff that they then launch into space?

And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

They’ve got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola’s fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder’s indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They’ve had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors’ cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn’t actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They’ve gone after India’s Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn’t led to anything actually uncovered. India’s security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani’s founder is close to India’s Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn’t enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn’t really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don’t have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

The ifunny watermark really tips this over the edge, comedically.

Enshittification of services is real, but the linked greentext complains about something cultural: that internet humor isn’t as funny as it was in 2011.

Which I’d say is a matter of taste, and probably wrong. There are still new greentexts being written that make me laugh. Plenty of tweets/toots/other microblog posts still make me laugh out loud. There are video memes that are pretty funny, and that format wasn’t really feasible until Vine in 2012, and more recently has been made more accessible through simpler editing apps for splicing videos.

For mainstream culture, there’s still great standup comedy out there, good TV comedies, podcasts, etc.

Yes, I love the old stuff. But I like the new stuff, too.

Hobosexual

I didn’t know until this thread that this character is from Overwatch or that there is apparently a lot of porn of her. I only knew it as a random meme format.

It’s definitely Viet Cong.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Yeah she travels to LA to figure out some stuff that happened in the past, and another cop (played by Rob McElhenny, most famous for playing Mac on It’s Always Sunny) is super helpful and showing her around and eventually loses his patience and just asks point blank whether they’re going to have sex. Confirming that he was just being nice in the hopes of being able to bang.

Why are you sticking with a specific spectrum? You made it hard to read in service of a requirement that doesn’t make any sense.

If the most effective policies are price-based, then that’s a good sign for all the investment of the last few years paying off when green solutions are cheaper than the dirtier solutions.

EVs are starting to be cheaper than similar trim levels and features, especially when accounting for total cost of ownership. Now that EVs are hitting the used market in volume, it’ll just accelerate adoption, and we might start to see EVs run away with a permanent cost advantage.

Same with electric generation picking up a higher percentage in solar and wind, lots of developments in storage and demand shifting, especially price-based incentives there.

At that point, if consumers and corporations are as cost sensitive as this study suggests, we’ll be seeing lots of improvement over the next decade or two.

No such thing as an NDA that allows a spouse to work in the same room, and allows the spouse to actually be on video while blurred, but draws the line at not being able to unblur the video.