No chlorine?

If you think it’s normal that a hotel breakfast buffet (in a very expensive hotel at that) doesn’t serve good bread, I think it underscores my point.

I base that assessment on my experiences visiting the USA, and what I heard from colleagues who lived there.

When I visited (Aspen, CO) the tap water tasted like dirty pool water. I guess it can be better in other areas. The bread was terrible as well, easily the worst I had in any hotel breakfast in any country I’ve visited. From what I understand, Whole Foods has some decent options, but is expensive. You can make your own bread of course, but that’s a more time-consuming option.

Not really financially constrained, but I also don’t spend a lot on groceries as I just don’t like wastefulness. Some tips:

• No alcohol.
• No tobacco.
• No branded products.
• No soda. I drink mostly tap water, though considering you’re American that might not be a viable option.
• I eat quite a lot of bread, though again it might be difficult for you to get edible bread.
• Frozen vegetables are good, decently healthy and easy to buy in bulk.
• Rice and dried pasta are cheap and easy to combine with the above.
• Modest amounts of animal protein, if any. Cheap alternatives include tofu and peanuts.
• Since you’re alone, you can cook for two or three days and save some time and money. One option is to cook for two servings but alternate, so that you eat the second serving 2 days after. That way you don’t have to eat the same thing twice in a row.

Not only “could” it be done, it already exists - though probably not to the degree we could say such societies are “egalitarian” (except in a relative sense).

The biggest reason is the electoral system, featuring first-past-the-post districts.

Omelette du fromage is actually wrong, it does mean “cheese omelet” but it’s not how you say it. You say “omelette au fromage.” (Funny: the Wikipedia article has a chapter containing an analysis of the various viewpoints on what to drink alongside a cheese omelet.)

Germany isn’t really getting anything out of it, it’s essentially a form of military aid to the US.

There is a common misconception among conspiracy/imbecile circles (and hence also the administration) in the US that these US military bases are a crucial part of the local economy, and that dismantling them is a way to “punish” allies that display a lack of servility.

Okay well let’s just stipulate that the object is travelling close to enough to the speed of light for there to be time dilation of some sort.

There is always time dilation between any two frames of references moving at nonzero speed with respect to each other. It’s generally negligible for everyday velocities, but it’s still there. You can find the degree of time dilation (and length contraction for that matter) in special relativity (i.e. ignoring gravity) by computing the gamma/Lorentz factor. For example, for 90% of the speed of light, the Lorentz factor is about 2.29.

Or maybe the object is stationary but near a black hole or something so there is time dilation from the gravity

In that case, it depends on how strong the gravitational effect is. The mathematics is a bit more complicated though. I would recommend to stick to special relativity if you’re learning about relativity as an interested layman.

This hypothetical is of the type “immovable object versus unstoppable force.” The question becomes: which of the axioms of relativity do you want to discard? Yet, once you do, you are leaving the realm of physics and entering the realm of sci-fi, in which anything may be possible.

If you want to maintain any link to our current understanding of physics, there are no hypotheticals, no ifs or buts. It’s simply not possible to have a set of laws of physics consistent with relativity as we understand it, wherein massive objects can travel at the speed of light in vacuum.

Physicist here. Many common misconceptions in the comments.

1. No, someone traveling at light speed won’t arrive “instantly” or anything of the sort. It’s simply not possible for massive objects to travel at the speed of light in any valid (inertial) frame of reference. Any system that does travel at the speed of light (e.g. a photon) does not have a frame of reference in which it is at rest - instead, it moves at the speed of light in all frames of reference.

If the other person travels at some speed (just) below the speed of light, the signal they send will be Doppler shifted/time dilated according to their relative velocity.

2. No, quantum entanglement cannot and never has been used to communicate faster than light. See: no-communication theorem.

It was the style at the time.

Yes, for various reasons it would be beneficial to have a global government responsible for global issues. However, until such time as we have one, local currencies are going to be the best bet.

First of all, hyperinflation hasn’t been an issue in any modern economy for decades. We understand more about monetary policy than we did in the 1930s.

Secondly, economic crises did happen prior to Bretton Woods. In fact, they tended to be more common, and more severe.

Finally, it is not obvious at all that “universal currencys (sic) not run by local governments” could do better, especially given our experience with cryptocurrencies, all of which are extremely volatile and not suitable as a currency for that and various other reasons.

We need better alternatives

Why? Modern fiat currencies do exactly what a currency needs to do.

The kid’s name? Albert Einstein.

Single-transferable vote with multi-member districts is not really a proportional system. Due to the necessarily small number of seats per district, it favours the larger parties, though not by as much as first-past-the-post or STV with single-member districts.

If you consider the political dynamics of systems with open-list PR, closed-list PR and MMR, the difference actually isn’t all that significant. The average person doesn’t have the time to investigate the merits of each candidate, so in these systems most people vote according to party preference, perhaps also considering the charisma of its leader. Of these systems, MMR is probably the least effective, since it requires an electoral threshold (5% is chosen in both Germany and New Zealand) to keep the system workable. This electoral threshold again favours the larger parties, and skews the system away from proportionality.

The top of the global quality-of-life rankings is dominated by countries using open and semi-closed PR.

Just don’t have one and save some money. My wife and I never miss having a wedding photo album. We also didn’t have a wedding, which helped mitigate the need for a photographer.

Frankly, this is something that already should be, and to a large degree is, manually checked by editors and referees.

While this is a problem that should be taken seriously, it’s also something that mainly affects trash-tier journals. You won’t find many hallucinated citations in Nature or Science (I doubt there has been a single one), and authors have strong incentives to prevent it from happening as they risk their reputation (and with it future grants).

Make citations hyperlinked and publicly accessible.

It’s already the standard in many journals that citations should include a hyperlinked DOI.

And if the research is mega paywalled, well… perhaps we should do something about that, too.

That’s also increasingly the standard, for example all of my publications (and I left science years ago) can be accessed in preprint format without a paywall.