The energy needed for phase change for supercritical CO2 is substantially lower than steam.

There’s more wiggle room. My understanding is that similar to heat pumps, they can build systems with different optimal temperatures, and even daisy chain them together. They’ll never make a perpetual motion machine, but they can waste less energy.

It’s funny (in a sad and sardonic sense) - I pay attention to the energy industry and the outcry over data centers has got me watching these generators closely. If they deliver on their promises, they could represent a great way to deliver on mirror-based solar reactors in areas with limited water resources. (And to recapture and use waste heat from the servers of data centers.)

Society is on the precipice of investing a lot into increasing energy generation for data centers that have to be near the same sorts of resources that people need - fresh water, environs conductive to generating power, stable (enough) climates. But this technology is arriving/set to reach adoption just in time for this boom-bust cycle. All those data centers in populated areas already have a timer ticking for when the shell corps have their rugs pulled.

Meh, I’ve seen better arteries.

A friend once received an email riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors from her boss that critiqued her (appropriate) use of exclamation points. Specifically, that appearing cheerful was not professional.

Some people just like to be miserable.

You don’t see them?

I installed clips onto the bottom of my sectional sofa that prevent it from separating. Which is good, because it’s been separating a lot since I installed wheels onto it.

The wheels were to make it easier to move because stuff kept falling behind it, but they worked too well. They even just slid around while locked. With all the sections clipped together it doesn’t seem to budge. The clips are the alligator style ones that you push the couch together to cinch, or lift the couch section to release.

Are you saying wheat domesticated early man?

Science vs religion, baby.

I got the ingredients for, cooked, and then froze about a weeks worth of breakfast burritos.

A long time ago my wife was bratting me and demanded to know why I got to make up the rules. (À la ‘who said that was the rule?’ and ‘Well, I don’t see it written down!’)
There’s a post-it with a hastily scrawled “I am the law.” on it that I use up as ‘proof’ of my claims to domestic power.

Mind you, that’s all for play. We don’t fuck with anything that could violate consent.

My local fancy grocer has bins of loose spices, including salts of various colors and descriptions. A few years ago I was curious and did a bit of a deep dive on their supplier, to be disappointed when I learned that all their special salts were artificially colored. Their salts, reflecting geographic names, were named so because the company named the colors after the location – not because the salts came from those locations.

I know of an organization attached to a prestigious university that solely exists because at the end of some billionaire’s life, he decided he wanted to chuck some cash into a foundation to try to burnish his image.

But he was so morally corrupt that his version of helping others was to mandate that the foundation focus on “helping” people in developing countries find business opportunities.
Read: they assess how people and environments can be exploited for capitalism while focusing on telling stories about how that exploitation improved the quality of life for people there.
Most of the professors who work with the foundation are very wealthy from their non-academic pursuits.

Not only do I have an increased range of motion, but I (very recently learned) that an old injury is causing spinal stenosis – my spinal canal is narrowing due to bone overgrowth on my vertebrae. (Car accident. I was rear ended.)

About 20 years ago a chiropractor popped my neck by twisting it, and it so freaked him out that he leapt back from the table and did the heebie jeebie dance.
He told me to never let a chiropractor pop my neck by twisting it ever again.
Reasonably certain I could kill myself showing off doing yoga, like in that Dead Like Me episode.

I’ve seen speculation it was a mechanical failure of the arrester system.

How a sailor shortage is crippling ship maintenance at sea – Navy Times

Perhaps plain ol’ mismanagement of resources.

I mean, everyone is already fucked, and that’s what keeps everyone else in check.

Russia has made great efforts to hack municipal systems all over the world, and may actually have some control over Microsoft systems, owing to that credential hack last year that Microsoft still hasn’t confirmed is contained. (Recent Russian hacking campaigns are using malicious signed MSI files, so my bet is no…)

China has all that communication equipment everywhere, with rumors swirling that it’s intentionally compromised. There’s also Tuya, a massive IOT company that produces its own products and also white label products. And there’s all the EV power inverters that can be hacked and used as a botnet to destroy electrical grids. Not that they need to, because apparently they can shut down the U.S. power grid remotely. And who knows what they’ve managed to do with the U.S.’s backdoor access into telecom systems.

The U.S. has its own devices, hacking, and infiltration efforts, although as a U.S. citizen, my awareness of them is decreased due to U.S. media.

But my core point is that there’s basically a digital Cold War happening. And the U.S. is all but surrendering, making successful surveillance, hacking, and sabotage campaigns more likely.
If a situation goes hot at the same time that large parts of U.S. see poisonings or health issues en masse due to tampering with water supply chemical or filtration systems or even the possible destruction of drinking water systems, the explosion of natural gas lines as C&C systems over pressurize domestic lines, followed by a prolonged grid-wide electrical outage, the U.S. will have basically no ability to do anything but focus on domestic issues.

It’s sort of ridiculous how dumb they are. I think you’re right, that they’ve staged a bunch of ships off shore like it’s WWII to be “scary” vs offering up surprise death from above by an enemy the Houthis cannot attack or anticipate, all brought to them by a partnership of their neighbor countries.

The latter is scary in many ways, whereas the former is result of people who confuse TV with reality.

He seemed to know of the shipments being halted after he ordered them to be halted.

I also see this as a move that increases U.S. isolationism. It will trigger reciprocal tariffs, and those will both bolster non-U.S. media production, but harm the U.S. film industry.

One of the U.S.’s greatest exports is its culture. Perhaps not great in a moral or any other objective measure, but the media the U.S. creates is one of its greatest sources of influence (read: soft power) in the world.

Isolating media and giving other nations room to grow is, well, fair play to them, but an unforced error. Another step in the direction of failed statehood.

As many as it takes.