Hardly the only two countries. In the US it's only masked by immigrants. Fertility is even coming down in most parts of the third world.
It's mainly attributable to women's improved education, career prospects, and access to contraception, plus declining infant mortality. Every single one of these factors is a good thing, but the combination of them will lead to a global demographic crunch over the next century.
Big oil didn't stop solar panels from becoming a working technology. Sometimes a technology is just hard, there's no need for a conspiracy.
NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input
Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn't hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.
Unless he's willing to do something about it, I don't think making this kind of statement is politically helpful. The snack makers will just ignore him, and then he ends up looking impotent and irrelevant, feeding the Republican narrative against his presidency.
Same thing with his administration publicly wringing its hands about the death toll in Gaza. Meanwhile the US continues funding Netanyahu's war machine, which publicly thumbs its nose at the president. It projects weakness.
In this context, the "energy that they put in" only counts the heating of the plasma. It does not include the energy needed to run the rest of the reactor, like the magnets that trap the plasma. If you count those other energy needs, about an order of magnitude improvement is still required. Possibly more, if we have to extract the energy (an incredibly hard problem that's barely been scratched so far).
So yeah, it's nice to see the progress, but the road ahead is still a very long one.
Needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually capturing the heat for electricity, and getting more electricity out of it than required to run the reactor itself, remain massive open questions that this generation of research reactors does not even begin to tackle.
blames American venture capitalists
Me personally, I think the Chinese had something to do with it.
Thanks for the heads-up, just disabled Google Play Protect.
Singapore is probably the ideal test case for Google to start normalizing walling off their garden, thanks to how passive locals are, and the ability to point to scams as the justification (a real problem, though not something that justifies this power grab IMO).
I wonder how Chinese Android smartphones will be handled, especially since some large fraction of the old folks who are susceptible to scams might use those. It would be ironic if Chinese phones, falling outside direct Google control, turn into standard bearers for open software ecosystems because of this.
Pilotless drones
Guess this is dating me, but everytime I see this I flash back to the classic rant...
Mr. Howe! Is there any other kind of drone? You, you tell me right now. Is there any other kind of drone, drone, other than a pilotless drone? Isn’t that what a drone is, an unmanned aircraft? Don't you check these things? Don't you supervise the subeditors who write these headlines? Don't you do your job?!?
These latest strikes in Syria and Iraq are playing incredibly badly across the world, outside of the US. Especially in the global South. Those countries have gone through two years of being scolded by the West over not taking sides against Russia for violating Ukrainian sovereignty. This just confirms the already popular view that those arguments were nothing but hypocrisy.
I would have thought that space debris is deadly no matter if it's made of wood or metal. If something comes at you at a few kilometers a second, it doesn't really matter what material it is.