'twas a smidgen wilder than usual, frankly.

How you doin’?

There are multiple reasons. Raw materials or chemicals feature lower profit margins than end-stage weapons. They also leave massive environmental footprints, particularly of nitric and sulphuric acid, which are key to making everything from nitrocellulose to RDX.

Andreyi… You’ve lost another su-25arine?!

Was there a recent assault by Russia? Those vehicle and drone numbers are twice as big as usual, no?

The thing is, the situation is not that they’ll run out of tanks one certain day and then stop fielding them completely. What’ll happen (what’s already been happening actually) is that seeing the end of their stocks approaching they’ll taper out their use. That’s been happening for a year now: we’re seeing lower and lower tank losses in each of these reports because they’re simply not using them so much anymore. Because they don’t have as many and don’t want to risk what’s left.

When their old stocks are completely used up (for all practical purposes) we’ll only see new-build armor, in correspondingly low volume. They’re never going to not have tanks at all.

Because it comes from “paths of desire”, I think. Sort of like “beauty mark” is not “beautifying mark”: because it comes from “mark of beauty”.

the modified missiles are now equipped with radar-decoy systems and use quasi-ballistic flight paths that make them more difficult to track and intercept using Patriot systems.

His theory was the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity.

Unfortunately:

the quasi steady-state hypothesis is challenged by observation as it does not fit into WMAP data.

I don’t think they’ve ever been a real thing. Very creative world building though. I interpret it as part of an environment of excess so ridiculously hedonistic that even sadness drugs would make sense in order to gorge on emotions their jaded minds can’t produce naturally anymore.

And the juicier tl;dr bits (note that XKCD only dares consider an electron moon, not a whole sun):

The amount of energy in our electron Moon, it turns out, is about equal to the total mass and energy of the entire visible universe.

[…], the energy from all those electrons pushing on each other is so large that the gravitational pull wins, and our singularity would form a normal black hole. At least, “normal” in some sense; it would be a black hole as massive as the observable universe.

Would this black hole cause the universe to collapse? Hard to say.

The spring on its own:

That’s the longest time I’ve ever heard someone take to build up a comeback. Be on your guard!

This doesn’t make sense to me. The ultimate value of shares is in the dividends they represent, no? If there are no dividends ever, what are they sharing in? Is it just a postponement until future dividends? A share in control of activities?

I get that there’ll be speculation that will keep values increasing, and selling can net a profit, but what does the last share-holder get?

Why are you guys getting so personally triggered by a one-word comment? They said it’s performative. Yes, the liberals do it too. Is this a sports game? Are we keeping scores? Is your team winning?

I don’t think the world applauds that at all. The US used to be the good guys. Very flawed but still “good” as things go. Now they’re just dangerous and thrashing wildly…

Feeding money to Russia was madness and had to be stopped as a priority. Nothing ridiculous about it.

Please sir, can we have some Moore?

a chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection.

They demonstrated that 40 milligrams of a two-gram bean gum tablet was adequate to reduce viral loads by more than 95%, a reduction similar to what they saw in their SARS-CoV-2 study.

I had a similar thing with a pen, the very same year I think… I had a mildly special pen which one day I lost. Went looking for it and found it sitting on a (slightly older) classmate’s desk, so i grabbed it and said “hey, that’s mine”. He tried to pretend that no, it was his, and he sounded very convincing about it, and even got the teacher involved. They both looked at me with infuriatingly condescending expressions as I explained how it was mine.

The teacher suggested “just let him have it” to the classmate, who conceded.

I went back to my desk fuming and scratched my initials into it before returning to show them, "look, see, it was mine! The classmate immediately pointed out “you scratched those in just now” and I think I mumbled something incoherent before going back to my desk, to the teacher’s mortification with the whole situation.

It had already begun dawning on me at this point that the classmate was right… That wasn’t my pen. It was his and just looked like mine. But it was too late at this point and I didn’t know how to handle it other than to keep quiet and try to forget about it.