If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative to human-sacrificing Bronze Age god-kings, I’m going to call you out as being a little bit unrealistic. Government isn’t just an idea, it’s a technology, and it relies on other technologies (communication, record-keeping, organization) to function.

The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other. Where things started getting difficult is when agriculture paved the way for population explosions.

Millions of deaths compared to what alternative? The difficulty with attributing causes in history is that we have no ability to conduct controlled experiments.

Did they test the soil and plant a control crop of corn only in nearby similar conditions?

When it comes to gardening I’ve heard countless stories of people trying some intervention and declaring “it works for me” without ever having tested the conditions or using a control. Those kinds of results can be safely ignored as unscientific.

Heck, one thing I’ve noticed with gardening is that even if you attempt to plant a bunch of crops under identical conditions (as best as you can manage) there’s so much variability that you get widely varying yields from one plant to another for completely unknown reasons.

I delivered the newspaper when I was 13. Is that such an alien idea? I used the money to buy my first computer.

There is no Biden election gamble. US presidential elections happen every 4 years whether Biden (or any other president) likes it or not.

It’s a Macron election gamble because he actually called the election himself to try to benefit himself. This might turn out to backfire.

Is there any evidence that living legumes make the nitrogen they fix available to other plants nearby? I thought they locked it up in root nodules and it only becomes bioavailable if you chop and drop the legumes so that the nodules break down and release nitrogen into the surrounding soil. Otherwise the legumes are just going to use the nitrogen for their own growth.

Yes, it’s actually huge. Especially for maintaining a weapon as complicated as an Abrams tank. If it can be repaired close to the front lines then that has the potential to cut days off the turnaround time compared to towing it over to Poland.

Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

*Uninstall Windows, problem solved.

FTFY

That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, since it’s by definition beyond the ability of science to answer. It suffers from the infinite regress problem which many people invoke God to solve (the uncaused cause) but that’s not very satisfying, is it?

It makes me so depressed thinking about how many thousands of Ukrainian lives could’ve been saved by just giving Ukraine full and enthusiastic support immediately instead of dragging it out this long.

Well hopefully they’re not putting melamine in the milk powder!

That’s just ridiculous to me. Why? I have had fries plenty of times which were way better than McDonald fries and all they were made of was potatoes, oil, and salt. The perfect French fry doesn’t need anything other than that. It’s all about choosing the right potato variety and then it all comes down to cooking technique.

The fact that McDonald puts anything else in their fries just makes me shake my head.

I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.