Not necessarily. My wife and I broke up (separated) but we didn’t divorce.

The first is, but they aren’t in chronological order. Three of them are from the 1800s (earliest is 1840).

If you scroll lower down, there’s a table with the amounts from the different samples from different fires.

I think it’s telling that the amounts in the Palisades fire are by far the highest. That fire had a huge number of structures burned, so the samples of suppressant scraped off of leaves and things is going to be mixed with smoke and ash particles from those burning structures. It doesn’t make sense that the amount of heavy metals would vary wildly from one batch of suppressant to another, but it makes perfect sense that the amount in a field sample would vary depending on what’s burning in the area.

Much easier to buy them at Costco h they come in a bottle, so no blister packs.

Science showed things like climate change, which was hurting the bottom line of giant corporations who donate huge amounts of money to Republicans, so Republicans convinced their base that science is against God, and that it’s all part of the evil woke liberals thing. So now anything that comes from science, including vaccines, is tainted.

Me too! I’ve voted consistently liberal, including for every minimum wage hike on the ballot. Also, I’m on the very trailing edge of the boomer generation, and much of the era you’re talking about was before my time. I did reasonably well because I was a computer science grad when that was an earlier thing, but still, I had it easier than my kids (who we’ve tried to help a much a we can).

I just retired after 40 years at over company, plus some college jobs. I’m 62, and social security was one of the things in my plan that made me decide I could retire My company was laying people off; I was secure, but my leaving allowed one more person to keep their job.

Now Trump is tanking my 401k and Elon is taking about cutting SS. I’ve never been more stressed about money.

No, a NASA and DOD contractor. Worked on some neat stuff over the years, including the electrical power system for the space station. I ended up managing the software engineering group, and really liked that - very smart people.

Probably so

Funny, that word was used in a book I was reading over the weekend and I looked it up.

Old guy checking in. I was a computer science major, graduating in 1985. My goal at the time was to go into computer animation (note that Toy story, the first full length computer animated movie, wasn’t released until ten years later). But there was a big computer animated project that was canceled or tabled just before my last semester, so the market was flooded with out of work animators and I decided I’d better do something different. I was getting married, and I needed a job.

I had good grades, but I didn’t think there was much that made my resume stand out from my classmates, each of whom was making 100+ copies of theirs and applying to every software job they could find. So instead, I asked everyone I knew if they knew anyone who worked at a place that hired software people, and asked if they could get me a name of a hiring manager. I got seven or eight of those, and I sent each of them a letter with my resume, mentioning who pointed me their direction. Out of that I got three interviews and two job offers. My first job ended up being writing control software for the space shuttle main engines, and I stayed at the company almost 40 years. I just retired in January.

You didn’t need to stand up a whole instance to create a community.

As I understand it, it’s the effect of a number of policy decisions intended in the surface to stabilize the economy. They stopped approving minimum wage hikes, they accepted a higher rate of unemployment due to factory automation, etc. Also, the difference between worker and executive compensation has grown tremendously.

I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, but the story I had always heard was that chocolate became very scarce during the war, as milk was rationed, but Hershey’s figured out how to make decent tasting chocolate from spoiled milk, which was easier to get since no one wanted it. The war went on long enough that Americans eventually expected chocolate to taste like that, so after it ended they reformulated to keep the signature taste while using fresh milk.

That’s why the right aligned with evangelicals all those years ago. Prior to that, Republicans were actually for abortion rights as a personal freedoms thing. But then they started with the family values stuff, casting Democrats as literally against God. “You need to vote for us because we’ll protect marriage, keep you safe from the sin of homosexuality, and most importantly will protect the babies from being murdered.” Once in office, they could pass all of the tax cuts for the wealthy and reduce corporate oversight, which was the actual goal.

Didn’t they just elect a fairly liberal president?

I had mixed emotions when I read Time Ships last year. Here’s what I wrote in my notes:

Authorized sequel to “The Time Machine," by H.G. Wells. It’s strange, in a way, because I of course read Wells’ work in the modern era, though it was written in 1914. Part of the charm was reading his notions of time and his commentary on class divides from this time a hundred years later, when the author has no knowledge of what happened in the intervening century. Baxter’s sequel is written from this modern era, but from the perspective of the same protagonist. Many of the advances in the sciences are captured, but it feels oddly artificial to have them observed by our early 1900s hero. Still, it’s a very ambitious book, with a very broad scope, and much more commentary on the nature of man. Well worth reading.

Wells’ original is for sure worth reading. The prose is similar, of course.

I’ve thought for many years that the first true cybernetics will be artificial eyes. If they can get self contained optic systems that fit into the eyeball space, it should be trivial to allow them to see a much wider spectrum, plus macro and telephoto. That would be cool. A computer interface for them would be awesome, but I’d have trust issues with that as well.