Sorry, best I can do is the sci fi dystopian option where we grow entire cows in vats, but we make it humane by just growing them without brains.

Yeah, this is one of those areas that capitalism really screws us over.

The natural and most obvious use for these lab-grown and imitation meats are for filler meats. Think a ground beef replacement. Something that would be added to a casserole, a burrito, or any other dish where meat is present, but not the primary focus of a dish.

But it costs money to develop lab-grown meats. And to pay that investment back, for-profit companies have to target the luxury market first. It’s like how Tesla started with building an expensive sports car. Then they used the profits from that to build a cheaper next generation car, and so on. That’s what the lab grown meat companies have had to do. The ideal market for products like these would be things like chicken nuggets or the meat inside hot pockets. But those are also the cheapest form of meat sold, and they need to target the upper end of the market to have any hope of profitability.

If it makes you feel better, cows themselves are opportunistic carnivores.

I had two holes down there, but at some point I decided to get another one installed. Unfortunately it was absolutely not a DIY installation. :/

I wonder if crypto coins could serve a similar role here. Except instead of mining, just create the tokens and start the currency by giving every resident an equal share.

Write them a physical letter complaining about their website and mail it to them via international mail. That should get the point across nicely.

I’m going to right now start the conspiracy theory that the actual US president, Donald Trump, has not worn pants or underwear in decades. He’s somehow just hypnotized us all into not noticing.

Wait, what the hell did Denmark do to New Zealand?

If it was working for everyone, there would never be a widespread movement that got Mercator largely phased out of education.

If we were to talk about education injustices we could argue about how the USA stole the name of the continent for theirs and how most of the world went along with that, and you people don’t seem to like that talk…

I propose that Brazil go for the option of maximum chaos. Brazil should formally change its official name to Os Estados Unidos da América. Ain’t no rule that says two nations can’t have the same name. By default, every diplomat on Earth would just start casually referring to each country as the North United States and the South United States. Brazil could effectively rename the United States on a global diplomatic level.

Pfft. Antarctica is but a few islands in an ice-sheet trench coat. If the ice sheets melted, it would remain uninhabited except for some stalwart rancher folk.

I don’t think there’s any standard that requires it anywhere. So I’m not sure exactly what this is about.

Don’t give the right any ideas. They’ll be on about “geometric purity” or other such nonsense. Or anything but Mercator will just be “woke.”

I hate this kind of artificial limitations but in this case I’m totally fine.

This is an environmental disaster. We’re building cars with equipment that will never be used. It costs more materials, time, and energy to manufacture a 300 HP engine than a 200 HP engine. VW might make all models with a 300 HP engine and then require a subscription to increase the power from 200 to 300 HP. Yet, what if you don’t want to use that extra power? You’re still stuck with the weight of the heavier engine! You’re hauling around a uselessly heavy engine, and you’ll be doing so from the moment you buy the car until the end of its life. Even if you don’t want to pay for the subscription-only equipment, you’re still paying for the higher gas costs to haul all this redundant crap around with you. And the environment takes an unnecessary hit for us to manufacture equipment that will never be used. This is an environmental disaster.

Is it actually an Irish company, or just one of those Irish companies in the same way Apple is an Irish company?

I would prefer a mixed system. All wealth over 1000x the median household income taxed at 100%. So no one should have a fortune larger than that, a number that would be approximately $80 million today. But if you secretly gather a fortune much larger than that? If you somehow secretly amass a fortune 10,000x the median household income? At that point I would apply severe criminal penalties, like a mandatory minimum 20 year sentence. I don’t want to throw the book at someone just because they accidentally let their fortune grow a bit beyond the limit. But if you’re a whole order of magnitude above it? Then that’s when severe criminal penalties should apply. At some point your wealth becomes so large that you personally become a threat to national security. Amassing a fortune in the billions should be treated like a private citizen trying to build their own nuclear bomb. No one should have that much power, and we should treat both the same.

I like the 1000x threshold because that is approximately the maximum possible fortune one can amass in one’s lifetime off of ordinary salary work and extreme frugality.

1000x the median income would be about $80 million. Consider the highest-earning non-executive salaried employees - people who spend years in school in very challenging fields. People like neurosurgeons. Imagine if there was a couple composed of two neurosurgeons, and they earn very good salaries. They’re also so frugal that they spend basically nothing. You have a pair of neurosurgeons literally sleeping on the sidewalk out front of the hospital. They live like that, and they invest and save every penny they can. The highest salaried incomes combined with pathological frugality.

Even if they did all of that. Even if two highly educated workers lived off nothing and saved everything, even then those people would still struggle to earn, over their whole life, a fortune that exceeded 1000x the median household income.

Such a system allows for a capitalism that actually does live up to the marketing. You’re allowed to earn a fortune as large as your own labor and skills will allow. However, the only way to obtain a fortune larger than this is to get into the business of labor arbitrage - hiring other people and harnessing the surplus of their labor. I want people to be able to earn as much money from the sweat of their own brow as they can. But I don’t want people to be able to hoard strategically dangerous fortunes by exploiting the labor of others. And 1000x the median household income is a nice even number that’s easy to explain to people and that achieves this goal.

Having wealth over 1000 times the median family income.

In some cases, arson is morally perfectly justifiable.

Seems likely. The most rigid materially known, (or at least theorized) is nuclear pasta.. Nuclear pasta only forms inside neutron stars, stellar objects that are the last stage of matter before matter gives up entirely and collapses into a black hole.

It would work, but only in the impossible world where you have a perfectly rigid unbreakable stick. But such an object cannot exist in this universe.

Pick up a solid rigid object near you. Anything will do, a coffee cup, a comb, a water bottle, anything. Pick it up from the top and lift it vertically. Observe it.

It seems as though the whole object moves instantaneously, does it not? It seems that the bottom of the object starts moving at the exact same instant as the top. But it is actually not the case. Every material has a certain elasticity to it. Everything deforms slightly under the tiniest of forces. Even a solid titanium rod deforms a little bit from the weight of a feather placed upon it. And this lack of perfect rigidity means that there is a very, very slight delay from when you start lifting the top of the object to when the bottom of it starts moving.

For small objects that you can manipulate with your hands, this delay is imperceptible to your senses. But if you observed an object being lifted with very precise scientific equipment, you could actually measure this delay. Motion can only transfer through objects at a finite speed. Specifically, it can only move at the speed of sound through the material. Your perfectly rigid object would have an infinite speed of sound within it. So yes, it would instantly transfer that motion. But with any real material, the delay wouldn’t just be noticeable, but comically large.

Imagine this stick were made of steel. The speed of sound in steel is about 5120 m/s. The distance to the Moon is about 400,000 km. Converting and dividing shows that it would actually take about 22 hours for a pulse like that to travel through a steel pole that long. (Ignoring how the steel pole would be supported.)

So in fact, you are both right and wrong. You are correct for the object you describe. A perfectly rigid object would be usable as a tool of FTL communication. But such an object simply cannot exist in this universe.