My only disagreement is that I think it would not be equal, not that there would not be devastation.

Trump’s ridiculous tariffs are doing the beginning of the legwork for them.

Ah, yes. They’re all sycophants now.

Okay, let’s be clear: there were MANY resignations, but resignations are not always effective

But while america has been investing in making itself dependent on foreign resources, China has been investing in making other countries dependent on theirs. I think that, if it were about the math of overall risk, China has less risk from the us. There are wartime measures that can boost an economy, but they require that economy to actually have the resources necessary to function.

Except that, if China went full cold war with the US, all they’d have to do is stop selling to the US and the entire US economy would collapse. Not to mention that economic sanctions against the US would cripple the country completely, because Trump would just immediately default on the country’s debt (as he loves to do) and, oh yeah, the entire NYSE would crater to 0 in about 5 minutes flat.

Ooh, did you read Grágás? It’s a shockingly entertaining read for a legal code. The section on Wergild is great, and you can learn a lot about the attitudes the Icelanders held toward different behaviours. Also, it strongly implies that there were at least a few people in Iceland who were training polar bears (which they must have either imported from Greenland, or found stranded on passing ice floes), and those trainers must have lobbied pretty hard, because it was specifically illegal to import trained brown bears from Norway.

There are a lot of gems in there. Simultaneously insightful and very metal.

It’s because the tool is named Nepenthes, after the pitcher plants, into which victims fall, cannot escape, and thrash around until they die and are digested.

This is not oniony in the least

It comes from Portuguese, it seems, meaning “big head” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cachalot

I am dubious of your intermediate and final claims. For something to be necessary, it means that one cannot go without it. Is procreation a biological imperative, with strong positive reinforcement from the individual’s biological feedbacks? Sure. But is it necessary? Strictly, no.

I don’t think you can make the claim that someone saying it is not necessary is inherently biased. To claim that procreation is not strictly necessary is a neutral, objectively true position. The bias in the perspective of “child-free” is the implied framing of the lack of procreation as a personal or moral good. Procreation is, again, unnecessary, and is (in many ways literally) a burden. Whether one frames that unnecessary burden as positive or negative is at issue here.

I don’t appreciate the claim that people must be biased in order to observe simple facts, denuded of emotion.

Great, how convenient that the latter option is based on mass, just as the OP requested. The researchers should clarify the number based on total mass.

Found the coprolite.

Seriously. This is obviously the “Turd Reich”.

Let’s consider what it would take to have unbreakable (effectively infinite) surface tension:

Either existing intermolecular forces would need to be dialed to infinity, or a new intermolecular force must come into action. In either case, it would make it energetically favourable for gaseous water to immediately condense into liquid whenever a gaseous molecule interacted with another water molecule. It would be an ice-ix scenario. All water would fall out of the atmosphere within hours, everything which uses lungs would find them filling with fluid. No water could be poured or create any droplet smaller than itself or otherwise separate from other water. However, that’s not even the weirdest bit.

If this new or altered intermolecular force functionally increased the attractive forces between molecules of water, and only water, to infinity, all water would immediately collapse such that the individual atoms would undergo fusion, breaking the bonds of the molecules in a conflagration of nuclear fire.

But let’s assume that it reaches just before the point at which the atomic bonds break. The water will likely take on the properties of a glass, becoming effectively solid, everywhere, just like ice-ix.

So let’s be more generous and assume that the intermolecular forces are increased to be only strong enough to make it effectively impossible to break surface tension. We’d see a significantly higher viscosity, but what else?

Well, the intermolecular forces will probably still SIGNIFICANTLY decrease the solubility of pretty much everything, everywhere, all at once (but especially covalent gases, which do not dissociate).

This means that, in every living thing, at the same time, bubbles of oxygen and nitrogen will be coming out in the blood/hemolymph/cell membranes, not only making respiration functionally impossible (or at the very least far less efficient), but also embolizing every living thing with the precipitated gases. Everything alive dies, immediately.

If those two gases aren’t enough, it will probably also significantly change the dissociation constants of pretty much every ionic compound, making them far less likely to dissociate in water, effectively causing large portions of the salt in the sea and other dissolved solids to precipitate in a cloud of powdered solids that would make the banded iron formations of the great oxygenation event look like a child’s sandbox.

Depending on the interrelation of water’s own dissociation and the intermolecular forces, which I can’t recall at the moment, all acids and bases may suddenly neutralise in a similar event.

No matter what, I don’t think anyone would be worrying about swimmers not being able to break the surface of the water.