> [...] applications from artificial cells that deliver targeted cancer therapies to flexible liquid robots that can change their shape to adapt to their surroundings.

Or, y'know, become terminators...

@TrentHawkins Terminators can terminate cancer....right?

@Frank in the most efficient way depending on order

The queen might be asked to enter the Brexit negotiations, should the next Prime Minister choose to ignore a vote rejecting no-deal brexit

@Nzall oh i want to see Boris grovel to the Queen

She'll set loose the attack corgis!

@Kevin i want to see that more

just doing Mr Burns's "Release the Hounds" and then all those corgis

> Axios: Scoop: John Delaney's staffers have asked him to drop out

This guy has been running since 2017 and never polled past 1%

Trump spreading fake news about Ilhan Omar marrying her own brother in an immigration fraud scheme

@Nzall PRO-JEC-TION.

> Pres Trump says he is trying to help rapper A$AP Rocky after the rapper was arrested in Sweden. He said his black friends called him to help, and others should support his attempts to help. "We are one," he said. Trump then said FLOTUS brought issue to his attention

I saw the Diamond and Silk tweet and was like "Ah, surely, we have reached the dumbest tweet", but this quote comes pretty close

John McAfee has decided to compete too?

> Iran's Revolutionary Guard says it has seized British oil tanker in Strait of Hormuz

More details reut.rs/2Sp21qt

They seized a second ship

(which they're supposedly claiming they let go, unclear on what's true yet)

It's next to impossible to pay the rent working full time for minimum wage, new report calculates

with thanks @GnomeSlice for facebook sharing this

Completely fucked

@Wipqozn what part of income spent of rent are they assuming here?

> In its analysis, the CCPA calculated the income that a minimum-wage worker would earn over a standard 40-hour workweek, and then cross-referenced it against rental data from the CMHC. The report also assumes the rule of thumb that a person should spend no more than 30 per cent of income on housing to avoid having other financial issues.

Emphasis mine

And also messed up

I DID IT

the 30% is kind of hard to hit today in major cities

@Ash That's exactly the point, though. 30% is what a lot of economists and financial advisers suggests.

If the average person can't do that, then that's a problem that needs fixing, by raising wages. or lower cost of living. or both.

Anyone here in favor of a UBI?

*Universal Basic Income?

@Nik3141 Yes

How much?

Annual let's say

Ontario was piloting it, and it was doing very well, then Doug Ford got elected and so it got axed in his efforts to ruin the lives of poor people.

So based on percentage for renting in their location?

@Ash Yeah there's more than enough wealth to go ahead. The rich just need to actually pay their fair share.

@Nik3141 Cost of living as a whole, but basically.

@Wipqozn the only way I see is to provide a lot more housing in areas with high cost. The costs are simply rising too fast to match it from the income side

So as a percentage of the net cost of living in an area? Or covering the net cost of living in an area?

@Nik3141 Also this is a perfect example of how basic income was helping people in Ontario

@Wipqozn And the frickin government needs to stop spending multiple hundreds of billions of dollars per year on sending troops to other countries and making sure all the planes and boats have the latest and greatest guns and bombs and bullets and more on making people's lives better here.

the tl;dr is this alone should be enough for Doug Ford to spend the rest of his life tied up in the town square for children to throw food at

err I mean shouldn't be in office

Of course it isn't, but it would be a huge step forwards.

@Nik3141 I mean, sure, but still, play this: direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos

basically the 1% have so much wealth it's completely ridiculous to the point of being unethical.

I live in the US btw so maybe there is less spending on the military in Canada, but here it is ridiculously egregious.

Some donate lots of it. Bill Gates has been donating large portions of his income, but plenty of other rich just don't and try to avoid paying taxes as much as possible.

@Nik3141 canada spends 1.2% of our GDP on them military: cbc.ca/news/business/…

Our military is drastically different than yours though, which I learned after some discussions with @GodEmperorDune around border patrol.

I think the US is closer to 3-4% of GDP for military spending

Essentially our military also operates within the country as well, operating in a lot of "peace and rescue" stuff. i.e. search and rescue, helping with natural disasters, et cetear.

Which I guess your military doesn't do at all, and isn't even really allowed inside the borders? Not sure on all the differences.

but I guess you have different part sof your government doing what our military handles.

@Wipqozn time to move to sherbrooke

@MadScientist I think this is a great idea, and there's many cites that have been piloting free housing programs. There's a very northern US cities doing very well with it, I think.

Yeah we got National Guards, police, and rescue stuff is another division entirely

but again, the main problem is that wages just don't raise fast enough. At least for the average worker.

@Wipqozn yeah we have laws against it, though they've been suspended in the past, and skirted with trump sending military to the border for fence repairs

@MadScientist So based on the domain name I'm not sure how trustworthy this is but it looks right compared to many other graphs and sources I've seen in the past.

@Nik3141 the extra spaces messed it up

@TimStone defintiely going to find some whales to attempt to earn that murder pardon

Thanks @Wipqozn

@Nik3141 Also I think that's just a proposed budget, not the actual budget. I mean that's still fucked, but I think @MadScientist was talking about the actual in effect budget.

@Wipqozn the percentages are going to be roughly the same

@Wipqozn I think rent is a special case, in large cities they're just rising faster than any possible wage increase. Unless you find a way to get people to not want/have to live in large cities, the only way I see is to increase the supply in large cities somehow

Yeah I mean when you look at that chart it's legitimately shocking...like it actually takes a few moments to sink in that most of the US's budget is spent on the military

however, this is only "discretionary" spending and leaves out the mandatory spending which mostly goes to healthcare, social security, and debt service

the US has been at war for 96% of its history

@MadScientist Yes large cities do suffer from overpopulation issues

urban density or whatever you want to call it

@Nik3141 that's wrong, you're probably looking at a specific subset of the budget. There's some weird split with different types of spending in the US budget that is terribly misleading

yeah defense is only the biggest slice of discretionary spending, which is like 1/3rd of the overall spending

above pic is from congressional budget office via wikipedia

more wikipedia reading on the US federal budget

Ah I see

Well that makes me feel slightly less worried

the amount the US is spending on the military is still insane

But $623b is still a fricking ton

yeah

I mean honestly imagine how much we could do in terms of science, infrastructure, social programs, education...

Because that is per year

the thing about all of this stuff is that it's not like the money goes into a box labelled "miltary" and is set on fire, it is paid out to people and companies. Cutting those budgets is invariably going to hurt those people and companies, so they are going to do whatever in their power they can to make sure it doesn't actually get cut

(this applies to all federal spending, not just military)

Yeah and of course Northrop and Boeing and Defense Dept government employees want to keep the money flowing so they can keep their jobs, but some jobs are just (in my humble opinion) worth less than others. Designing intelligent missiles, or laser drone defense capabilities, or faster torpedoes, is, in my opinion, worth less than researching how to split CO2 into C and O2 using ultraviolet lasers or creating a good, intuitive curriculum for teaching mathematics or physics or chemistry...

or engineering a bacteria that exclusively eats plastic and breaks it down into sustainable parts. These jobs just seem objectively better for society as a whole. Even doing R&D on some kind of "remote taser" (assuming it's possible) to make police use of firearms less frequent would be worthwhile. Just not designing missiles, and guns, and bombs.

@Nik3141 The CO2 thing is quite impossible, there's no way around the laws of thermodynamics

No someone did that: I saw it in an article on phys.org recently...I'll try to find the link

well, of course you can do that. But you spend more energy than you gained by burning the carbon in the first place

Oh I get it now C + O2 -> CO2 + Energy...well, maybe not that, but the point was research in carbon sequestering in general is better

@MadScientist the point isn't to generate energy, it's to spend energy generated by non-carboniferous means (e.g. solar, nuclear) to fix CO₂ out of the atmosphere

Since the problem isn't directly "total energy expenditure", it's the amount of CO₂ being dumped into the atmosphere for which energy use is only a rough proxy (because so much of it comes from fossil fuels)

@ToxicFrog as long as a single coal power plant exists, replacing them is far more efficient than tying anything fancy with carbon sequestration.

Of course we want to get rid of every fossile fuel dependent system on the planet, so we don't all die really soon, but we also want to be CO2 negative so we don't die in a few decades

@MadScientist I completely agree

But also, what Nik3141 said

Research into carbon sequestration is not sufficient, but is necessary

If we get to a point where we have far more renewable energy than we can use, we have solved the problem. Of course we should use some excess for carbon sequestration then, but the big problem is getting there in the first place

bruh this is a big moment...I managed to say something intelligent on the interwebs

@GodEmperorDune I wonder how the chart would look any different per capita instead of gross.

The US would probably look even more out-sized since China has waaaaay more people but smaller military spending.

Alright so I just played that game and it is ridiculous...

I managed to spend all my money on every social cause I could and still wasn't able to spend it all...I eventually just had to pay bail for my charge of "destabilizing capitalism"

@Nik3141 almost as if that's the lesson of the game :D

Okay, plugged those in with population data from Wikipedia and got this:

Ignore the percentages, Google's charting function is weird.

Essentially, it's per capita military spending (US$ billions per million people).

I wondered if I should use per billion people so the magnitudes match up but figured that really didn't matter as it's more about the relationships between countries.

Interesting note, despite being the fourth-largest gross spender, India is actually spends the lowest per capita on their military budget.

Now I want to plot against GDP to see how relative wealth plays a factor.

Oh, the military spending data is for 2018. That might change things.

This is why this is the best chatroom on the internet

Also interesting is how much Japan spends (both gross and per capita) despite not technically having a military.

By law, Japan doesn't have an army but a defense force and a lot of their defense is subsidized by the US.

Okay, replaced my population data with 2018 numbers and it hasn't affected relative rankings.

> More than a month after YISD Superintendent Xavier De La Torre head-butted Socorro ISD Superintendent José Espinoza while in San Antonio at a training, YISD board members deny any knowledge of the incident

Oh hey, a chart where the US isn't on top.

Also @Yuuki I regret to inform you you now have a law named after Chick-Fil-A

@TimStone :|

It's okay they gave the governor lunch or whatever

@TimStone on a roll with wild and unnecessary bills, i see

I suppose it makes a weird sort of sense that Israel and Saudi Arabia spend the most on their military versus their respective GDPs.

Also, Japan's odd gross and per capita spending amounts make some more sense now given the size of their economy.

🤔

Would that A) reduce the homeless population by half, B) reduce the homeless population to zero, or C) double the homeless population?

Alternately, D) result in some employment changes in the UK Conservatives ad agencies?

@Yuuki sounds messy