“What’s big brown and sticky?”

“A big stick”

“What’s brown, and hurts if it falls on you from a tree?”

“A piano”

I was more referring to how they deal with the cream. They fully skim it out, then mix it back in to get the various types of milk. That processing is why you don’t need to shake supermarket milk to mix the cream back in before use. The oil droplets are FAR smaller, and it changes the mouth feel of the milt at the very least.

I’ve no proof, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t bother mixing the best parts of the cream back in. At least not in the ratios that came out originally.

They also mess with the milk in additional ways. I didn’t realise how bad it had gotten until I started getting milk delivered from a local dairy. It’s still pasteurised, but closer to natural. I dread to think how bad it must be for you yanks.

I can easily see someone trying “raw” milk and discovering it tastes amazing by comparison. The conclusion that raw is better is wrong, but understandable. The middle ground is where the sweet spot is, safe, but as natural tasting as it can reasonably be.

It gets extra fun if part tries to break away and elect a new spokesperson.

I saw a talk from someone working in the field a few years back. The “fusion is only 10 years away” had a small proviso “if fully funded”. The actual funding was barely enough to keep the lights on.

That has now changed. It’s gotten close enough that private investment has decided it’s worth investing in. I believe the only really big problem left is the wall material. The neutron flux transmutes the elements making it up. This makes it difficult to maintain a hard vacuum, since the wall can start leaking and/or outgassing, forcing a shutdown to replace them. On a minor plus side, if you dope the walls with mercury, it transmutes to gold, in commercially viable amounts!

Fusion has several advantages over fission. The biggest is the impossibility of a meltdown. The very difficulty in balancing the reactor means that it shuts down fast and mostly clean. This would let them be placed far closer to population centers. They could provide a base load supply, in the way nuclear could/should have.

It’s not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.

If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that’s fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that’s fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won’t get the run away effect that happens currently.

A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.

It’s also worth noting that I’m also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.

Just an FYI, that goes all the way down the power chain. We tend to have less (instinctive) empathy for people below us. It’s not we actively want to do them harm, but that we just don’t think about them at all.

E.g. when did you last take proactive action to help the exploited workers harvesting chocolate? You likely never even thought about them.

The problem is that people like musk look down on us the same way. We get smashed by their indifference.

The best long term solution is a tax system aimed at “regression to the mean”. I.e. exceptional people can get rich. However rich, “average” people will regress back towards average income and savings. Conversely, an averagely capable poor person should easily climb back up to average income levels.

Basically change the graph from a hump to a bathtub shape.

Silicon’s conditions would make it difficult. It has far less inorganic precursor molecules to work from. It might work under cryogenic conditions, but that has a bunch of other problems.

The titanium one is new to me, and potentially interesting. My concern would be an abiogenic pathway. It might be able to form interesting molecules for life, but if they don’t appear naturally, then getting life started gets massively more difficult.

There’s also a hell of a lot of options with carbon based life. Earth life is VERY locked into a few variants with our base biochemistry. E.g. there’s no reason for particular RNA sequences to match particular Protein peptides. Yet it’s basically a universal thing. Even chirality is fixed, for no particular reason other than mixing causes issues.

I could potentially see a dual based life system working, effectively a more advanced version of how some creatures use metals to make shells etc, or how horns and hair grow. It could also provide a viable (though extremely convoluted) bootstrap process for titanium life, or something more exotic. Forcing life to change its core functionality however is apparently quite difficult, since no life on earth seems to have done so and survived to be detected. Rocky, in Project Hail Mary, would fall into this group (a carbon life core basically piloting a stone and metal mech).

What combinations are you thinking of?

Life on earth is based around Carbon chains. Carbon’s 4 bonds allows for a low of complex structures that would be hard/impossible for less bonds.

The only other viable option I know of is silicon. Unfortunately its chain equivalent has an extra reaction pathway with water. It would degrade rapidly if exposed to water, which is very common at the energies it would work at.

I’d be curious to look up any other viable options.

The uncanny valley is FAR stronger with moving things Vs inanimate ones. It’s likely modified from a revulsion of dead things, but seems to be distinct now.

Most diseases don’t show strongly enough to trigger it, most of the time. Historically, the exception has been leprosy. I’m honestly curious if it’s evolved to keep us clear of leppers specifically or not.

There are 2 parts at work. The focus reflex and the blink reflex. The window between them is the dangerous part. If the pulse is fast enough ( a few ms) then the eye can’t focus, and it’s fairly safe (unless you were already focused on the emitter). If the pulse is low enough power then the blink reflex kicks in and protects your eye.

Hitting a mosquito is a hard task, tracking one is even harder. It’s better to use an ultra short pulse, with a bit more power. You can also shift the frequency. If it’s an infrared laser then the eye won’t lock onto it, and will struggle to focus it dangerously.

This idea was tried previously. If done right, it doesn’t take much energy to damage a mosquito’s wings.

Secondly, a laser is only a real issue for vision if the eye focuses on it. With a continuous beam, it would be instinctive, making it dangerous. If the pulse is short enough however, the eye won’t have time to focus and so the power will be safely spread out, even inside the eyeball.

I’d also be fascinated if we figured out a way to do it

I personally suspect it’s not common in the animal kingdom. It’s quite likely a defense against leprosy, a disease that is most dangerous in larger society type communities, without outside predators (to pick off the sick).

That theory might be wrong however. Its distribution would tell us a lot about what it defends against.

I’m pro suicide. However, a lot of times suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

There should definitely be at least a couple of doctors in the loop for an assisted suicide. There also needs to be a lot more in the way of support for people in that hole. Both the emotional support, and more practical guidance (it’s hard to break out of the cycle when your life is objectively shit and all you can get is “there there, it will get better”).

It’s quite difficult to retroactively adjust the traffic speed, without causing knock on issues.

A road might have been designed to cope with 50, but hidden junctions, or pedestrians might knock it down to a 30. Making it feel like a 30 is quite different.

I’d personally prefer other, more polite methods. In the UK, the signs showing your current speed in either green (good) or red (too fast) are remarkably effective. I accept that speed cameras are needed when the other methods fail.

Proviso, the cameras should be blatantly obvious, with no ambiguity over the limit. It should only catch people both deliberately speeding, and not paying enough attention to spot the risks of speeding.

I’d argue they didn’t, they just changed.

There are 2 groups worth noting. Government and private.

Government assassination is still a thing. Israel has used it aggressively over the last few decades. There are also signs that china has too. That’s just off the top of my head. It’s also worth noting that drone strikes etc can fill the same roll as an assassin.

Private has definitely changed. I suspect the high profile assassinations have stopped. Low level ones just had to get a lot better at not looking like assassinations. The ever classic boating accident being a good example.

The change is mostly from improvements in policing. You can no longer just move to another city to escape the law.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of society has changed. It used to be that a country pivoted on its leader. Now, it’s a lot more reliant on formal structures. Taking out a leader doesn’t have the same, devastating effect it used to. Iran being a good example.

Lasers are both coherent (all the photons line up) and monochromatic (all the photons have basically the same energy). This makes them very easy to focus to a small point and/or make directional.

Diode lasers are effectively LEDs, tuned to these properties.

Lasers let you get a lot of power down a VERY small hole. They also allow you to send multiple colours down the same fibre, multiplying its bandwidth.

Agreed on that. Though in the scale of the UK there aren’t that many cases. The ones there are however, are (deliberately) high profile. It has a chilling effect on the population, without needing to use it much.

They also hamstring the bobbies via the budget assignments. I know a lot of forces would love to get rid of some of the more overtly racist/sexist/other-ist officers. Their budget limits wages however, which limits the selection of replacements. They end up having to try and weed out the ringleaders (to fire or retire) and split the followers up.

The long and the short, most of the police are working class and do the job to try and make our country better. Some are even trying to counter the bullshit rolling down from on high.

So are a lot of scientists.

The UK force has its problems, but it functions fairly well. It also has a lot of people in it who honestly want to do a good job.

The problem is the rules and mandates coming down from the government. (And the political upper management level of the police)