With temperature, light and humidity controlled across 12 growing 'rooms,' pollination of plants has also been engineered to be more efficient than bees.

I need more details on this "more efficient than bees" claim. I grow a couple of hydroponic strawberry plants for fun, and every strawberry is a result of my swirling a toothbrush around a flower. I am having a hard time imagining scaling that up without bees.

Physical trauma makes sense for large animals. If you have 50 lab rats that you need to euthanize, a gassing setup can make more sense than individually whacking them.

Co2 reaction is highly, highly concentration-dependent. Rodent euthanasia ideally starts around 20% which makes them cranky and sleepy, they go to sleep, then concentration is upped to around 80% and they die very quickly. Yes, they feel bad when they go to sleep, but it is a mild bad and it's all over quickly. Rodent euthanasia horror stories are about getting the concentration wrong, not the co2 itself.

Nitrogen - as long as the flow is strong enough to remove exhaled co2 - won't make anyone cranky, but it takes longer, and the longer it takes the higher the risk of something going wrong with the setup. So, tradeoffs.

Many sinks do not have overflow drains.

The driver's license thing is misleading - he had an Arizona license, so "didn't have a Washington license", but was still legal to drive.

The department is legally not able to issue any discipline until the investigation concludes, and they are not able to conclude the investigation while the appeals process on the fine plays out. Due process is slow. Hopefully in the end he gets everything coming to him.

I believe the claim is not that she is trans, but that she is a chimera: her mom got pregnant with boy/girl fraternal twins, and instead of developing separately, they merged into one embryo. The other boxing organization that disqualified her claimed that some of her cells have a Y chromosome.

Her anatomy is all woman, and has been her whole life. Whether the test that showed she is a chimera/mosaic embryo was accurate, and if so whether those few cells with a Y chromosome have any effect on her athleticism, is unknown.

I believe the claim is not that she is trans, but that she is a chimera: her mom got pregnant with boy/girl fraternal twins, and instead of developing separately, they merged into one embryo. The other boxing organization that disqualified her claimed that some of her cells have a Y chromosome.

The New York times did a video analysis that pretty convincingly showed it was a bullet. Why Trump is hiding evidence is just bizarre, like the idea of having to support anything he claims - even true things! - is offensive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/us/politics/trump-shooter-bullet-trajectory-ear.html

In some takes on the trolley problem (do nothing, five people are run over by a trolley an die, flip a track change switch and two people are run over by a trolley and die) flipping the switch is the morally worse option because then those two people's deaths are your fault, whereas the five people who die because you did nothing are someone else's fault. I don't agree with that take, but it's taken seriously in philosophy circles.

I don't get how in the Levant, where both Hamas and the Israelis have significant factions that want to genocide the other people, a situation where Hamas does the genociding (because an Israel without attack capability de facto also loses defense capability) is somehow more moral than a situation where Israel does it.

The problem is the very pro-death penalty camp wants the dying process - not the being dead part after - to be the punishment. The pro-humane camp is generally anti-death-penalty enough they don't get a seat at the method-decision table.

Alabama tried that and managed to screw it up. You have to remove the carbon dioxide in the exhales to prevent the feeling of suffocation, and they didn't provide enough nitrogen flow to do that. Took like twenty minutes of clearly desperate gasping and convulsions for the guy to pass.

I heard it was shrapnel and not a bullet that got Trump's ear.

There will always be some level of unemployment (a percentage of people who want job a won't have found one), but if automation made the unemployment rate permanently go up, all the people who used to hand knit socks who lost jobs to powered looms, all the people who used to drive plows with oxen who lost jobs to combines, all the blacksmiths who lost jobs to powered forges, and equivalent percentage of the population for subsequent generations forever would remain unemployed. And yet, somehow, subsequent generations have managed to mostly find jobs.

Jobs are not a finite resource. If there is a pool of people who want to work, someone will find stuff to pay them to do.

I seriously would love for my entire current set of job responsibilities to be automated. There are a couple of value-adding full-time jobs' worth of work I could be doing for my employer that are just being left on the table right now.

I think it's likely really surprising to learn/experience that feces of a breastfed baby (and to a lesser extent formula fed babies) don't smell like shit. It's natural to want to share a surprising learning. Might also be good to be forewarned the milky smell ends once normal food is introduced.

Unfortunately, the alternate option was not "let them stay hostage a while longer". It was "let the hostages die". And maybe that would have been the more ethical call. But let's not delude ourselves that they could have been kept alive any other way.

The males don't bite, but the females need that sweet protein from blood to grow the next generation. Exterminating all the females (the biting ones) would end the whole population.

Does Arizona not have an online free system? Illinois has a very hand-holding guided set of questions and has for years, it's always been our federal taxes that make my head hurt to fill out via the IRS's FreeFillableForms site.

Her son died of cancer as a young adult. I have wondered if the abdominal xray while she was pregnant contributed to that.