The biggest concern with that setup is how inefficient it is to reach the Pacific Northwest region, LA is a serious bottleneck on top of being a common endpoint in and of itself. A line that goes straight to either Seattle or Portland from the Northeast simplifies things a lot.

The most efficient would be 3 major east/west lines, Boston to Seattle, DC to San Francisco, and Atlanta to LA, connected by a series of north/south lines to form a grid. On the east coast, just extend the Acela down to Atlanta.

Competitors tend to do that. Originally Firefox used traditional version numbering up until 3.0, but then when Chrome came out with their numbering scheme of incrementing the main version number with every minor update, Firefox followed suit. It’s the same reason Microsoft called the Xbox successor the Xbox 360, if the average consumer would see the Xbox 2 next to the PS3, they’d at least subconsciously think the PS3 was more advanced.

Because it doesn’t have any understanding of the rules of chess or even an internal model of the game state, it just has the text of chess games in its training data and can reproduce the notation, but nothing to prevent it from making illegal moves, trying to move or capture pieces that don’t exist, incorrectly declaring check/checkmate, or any number of nonsensical things.

That’s a bit of a false dilemma though. The two options aren’t “it’s a magical elixir with absolutely no downsides” and “people deserve to be locked in a cage and have their life ruined for possessing it”. Plenty of legal things can cause harm. 35% of people are lactose intolerant, do we ban dairy?

My conspiracy theory is it was chosen to deliberately harm the optics of environmentalists. Something with minimal useful impact and maximum inconvenience would turn people against the whole idea of environmentally friendly alternatives.

The lethality is 52%. If it rips through the population, we’re looking at total collapse well before the vaccine is available.

Because people who don’t understand what words mean label every possible post-capitalist system as communism even though they’re as different from each other as they are from capitalism.

Every suppressed vote is as fraudulent as any fake vote.

A sack of garbage can be human shaped. Look at Elon Musk for example.

The ID verification is the purpose. Keeping minors off is a smokescreen, tracking every citizen on social media is the real reason for this law.

Silent? I fucking wish you idiots were silent.

It’s all a weird act. Kids swear around other kids, adults swear around other adults, but oh no, you can’t let kids hear those dangerous swear words that they already know and use every day.

He deliberately brandished a weapon to incite bystanders to try to defend themselves so he could kill them and call it self defense.

Anything with a nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times. The complete works of Shakespeare consist of 5,132,954 characters, 78 distinct ones. 1/(78^5132954 ) is an incomprehensibly tiny number, millions of zeroes after the decimal, but it is not zero. So the probability of it happening after infinitely many trials is 1. lim(1-(1-P)^n ) as n approaches infinity is 1 for any nonzero P.

An outcome that you’d never see would be a character that isn’t on the keyboard.

Dolphins are pretty much the only other animal to display straight-up malice.

“Guess what! I’ve named a boil on my ass after you. It, too, bothers me every time I sit down.”

-Gheed, Diablo 2.

Also, if you compare the age of the universe right now to how long it will be until heat death, we are absurdly early. We’re in the first 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the universe’s lifespan.

Climate change was known and covered up by oil companies since the 1930s.

To quote the Onion themselves:

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.