Collectively agreeing to raising prices is anti-competitive collusion and illegal.

Collectively raising prices is anti-competitive coordination and legal.

Pandemic and supply shocks is a perfect excuse to do the latter.

Good luck to whoever is trying to solve this.

The patent story reveals a lot.

Government:

• creates and enforces a patent system

Also government:

• does essential research and doesn't patent their own discoveries

Donate to propublica.org - they produce a lot of great journalism.

Well, the far right faction of Republicans did already side with Dems to oust the speaker.

I had a Smaturday last week.

apnews link:

https://apnews.com/article/angola-youths-louisiana-prison-d6dbb08e0d494a1d1808012f208e946f

If they are gonna burn religious books, why not include more of them? Burn bibles, qurans, vedas, tanakhs, etc. Make the event more inclusive :)

Engineering: It's not stupid if it works.

"I should speak less and listen more"

That's incorrect. Any base system has the same property. For base 12, we would just have two extra digits, and we would be counting powers of 12 instead of powers of 10. Let's say those extra digits are X for ten and Y for 11. We would write numbers like so (starting with zero and incrementing by one): 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, Y, 10, 11, 12, ..., 18, 19, 1X, 1Y, 20, 21, ..., 29, 2X, 2Y, 30, ...

For example, in base 10, a number 265 means we have 10² twice and 10¹ six times and 10⁰ five times (100 + 100 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1).

Same number in base 12 has 12² once and 12¹ ten times and 12⁰ once (144 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 1).

A "round" four-digit number in base ten is written as 1000 (written in base twelve as 6Y4). If we subtract one, we get a three-digit string of nines (highest single digit): 1000 - 1 = 999 (written in base twelve as 6Y3).

A "round" four-digit number in base twelve is written as 1000 (written in base ten as 1728). If we subtract one, we get a three-digit string of Ys (highest single digit): 1000 - 1 = YYY (written in base ten as 1727).

I hope this shows you how there's symmetry between the bases and there is nothing special about base 10 other than we're familiar with it. If we were familiar with base 12, the "round" numbers for us would be (writing in base 10 here): 12, 144, 1728, ... which we would be writing as 10, 100, 1000, ...

Big if true

What an appropriate homage - linking to one of markdown's originator's Wikipedia page using markdown.

"In 2002 Aaron Swartz created atx and referred to it as "the true structured text format". Gruber created the Markdown language in 2004, with Swartz acting as beta tester ... Markdown: Swartz was a major contributor to John Gruber's Markdown,[249][250] a lightweight markup language for generating HTML, and author of its html2text translator. The syntax for Markdown was influenced by Swartz's earlier atx language (2002)" from wikipedia

Gasoline cars produce, on average, about ten times more lifetime pollution compared to manufacturing pollution. So even if electric car manufacturing pollutes a bit more, it more than makes up for it over its lifetime of driving.

Your other claim that batteries can't be recycled is false. And that recycling pollutes more. More than 90% of battery materials by mass can and do get recycled - and the expectation is to reach 98+%. Recycling process is expected to produce less pollution and be cheaper than mining the equivalent amounts of material.