Plant varieties are essentially inbred, so to get strong but still predictable plants, you need to cross two varieties that have some genetic distance.

The plants resulting from a cross are called F1. F1 seeds are comparatively expensive because of the effort required to make them. (Still, they are very cheap compared to other expenses.)

If the storebought peppers are F1 then their seeds are F2 and will be a random combination of parent traits instead of the perfectly predictable F1.

Another reason to buy seed is that you can grow much more interesting peppers. For instance beautiful purple striped Blot peppers or tasty Jimmy Nardellos.

We still have a lot of roofs that could have solar on them. Scaling up nuclear will deplete fuel mines faster because the isotopes that are legal due to arms treaties are pretty limited.

I’m not claiming that electric transmission is more efficient always because it isn’t. But as you say it is close.

In a scenario where a train drives at a constant speed forever, attaching the engine to the wheels directly is a clear winner.

However, with varying torque requirements, an ICE can’t always operate at maximum efficiency. They are especially bad at starting from a standstill. You can get a good overview of the concept from this wiki article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_band

We are comparing attaching a diesel engine via a gearbox to attaching it via generator and electric speed controller.

Electrically driven wheels can deliver just the right amount of power at over 95% efficiency. Direct ICE suffers because it cannot always run the engine in ideal conditions, reducing its efficiency.

We do this in locomotives but not in cars because cars need to be lightweight. Actually, nuclear is clearly the best vehicle propulsion, almost infinite range and high power. It is only used in ships due to its weight.

The tire thing is completely made up. Yes, they sell their premium tires but they are not necessary and do not contain electronics. https://www.tesla.com/support/tires

You are arguing a side rather than looking at facts.

You are correct that it is best to have a lightweight car if you have to have one. But an electric one does take over in environmental cost relative quickly and is cheaper in countries that don’t subsidize fossil fuels and tax emissions. In addition the air quality in cities improves.

Everything automatically updates if you use Linux…

Also, it is relatively easy to understand conflicts happening near you. People take very strong stances on faraway conflicts even though it is hard to know what is actually going on, especially in issues that there is a lot of propaganda or polarized opinions about. You’d have to do a few days’ research to have a chance to understand some complex faraway problem.

Agreed except for R. That language’s documentation and semantics are painful. Not Malbolge but reminds me of PHP and BASICs with weird limitations.

Not really hidden, though. Often Linux distros even have gcc preinstalled.

Will it stay around? Yes, because it allows writing performant software as our CPUs and compilers are made for it and performance does matter very often.

On the other hand, Rust is being used even in the Linux kernel now. It lets you do the same things as C, so the only thing holding it back right now are the lack of some more exotic C extensions like guaranteed tail calls / computed goto.

For an actually hidden language, try Mercury. It is not famous or widely used and its tooling is not quick to get started with. However, it will definitely broaden your horizons much more than C, which is similar to all the mainstream languages.

It is the best on the market but unfortunately they just use Google underneath plus their own blog index. And at least to me it seems it isn’t going in a better direction.

The US sounds extremely expensive. In the EU 1500$ a month will pay for a very nice apartment close to work.

It can’t create a radically new art style or new information. It would be great if we could harness it as a search engine instead of an oracle.

Indeed. You pay them for their work, not for what they do with their life.

it is better than the competition but it will never be like Google before 2019 because they’ll never build their own index.

The car/bus comparison is useful, the others aren’t because they travel at different speeds.

Probably walking can still move more people than cars. If walking is 5 kph and driving is 50, people need to take 10x less space to break even. They probably do, as cars need to keep distance.

I think it is funny to make this an ethics discussion when there is plenty of evidence that bacon and sausage cause digestive tract cancers. Meat is also pretty expensive unless heavily subsidized.

I think the main focus should be on educating people that a healthy diet contains a very small amount of meat even though the meat industry has managed to make people think it should be in every meal.

While researching another issue, I found some evidence that a vegan diet can be better than the average meat diet. This could be because the meat in pet food is of poor quality and is more likely to be spoiled than plants.

You could of course grow mice or purchase expensive meats but once it is well-rearched, a vegan diet may be a more economical way to provide a good nutrient profile.

There is but most people prefer to pretend they understand rather than seek a scientific understanding.

I interpreted your first comment as meaning that you are supposed to hate the book because of its topic as many people seem to think whenever it is brought up.

Rowling has said a lot more questionable things, though. And even written books about her insane opinions. Calling Lolita a love story makes sense, as that is the protagonist’s point of view, even though the story is also many other things.

Crime novels about murders are a very popular type of book. Do you think that people read them because they’d enjoy watching murder in real life?

Also, the writing seriously is that good. I’d have completed the book if it was about watching paint dry.