Nope.
Trump denied there was any danger from the beginning, no significant or hazardous infection in America, and insisted it would miraculously disappear by April. Last week he suggested ending stay at home orders next weekend! Batshit crazy and criminally ignorant at best, intentional attempted mass homicide at worst.

Trump didn't stop flights from China, airlines did. Trump restricted travel for non citizens (except family of citizens) coming from China Jan 31, well after most flights were cancelled, and only when faced with the uniform recommendation of the career public health officials at HHS.

What preparations? They seemed to start those last week, not in February, and certainly not before. Most temporary hospitals are still in the planning stage, not built or stocked, and completely unstaffed. Stockpiles were not full or being filled. It seems they weren't even making plans, just denials.

The racist part was Trump and his subordinates calling it the Chinese flu and Kung Flu.

The loudest and latest one saying it was like any flu and not a problem was Trump, here's a clip of that from less than one month ago, try again.

https://youtu.be/xcDq1jUAuI4

Trump should not have dismantled the systems in place that made us more prepared, nor should he have underfunded and defunded the health programs and organizations so vital right now, nor should he have ignored the impacts other countries were suffering and, instead of preparing, downplayed the unfolding crisis while dragging his feet on any responses, or refused WHO tests that worked in S Korea in favor of nonexistent American tests that at first didn't work at all, couldn't be mass produced so are STILL in short supply, and now seem to give false negatives 1/3 of the time because the manufacturer donated $1.5 million, but he did.

China lied and minimized (sounds familiar) until mid January, yes, but Trump dismantled the CDC Pandemic Preparedness program that was designed to protect us from exactly that likelihood...that is their M. O.. Remember, the whistle blower went public in mid December, but Trump and co. ignored it, accepting China's obvious lies. The CDCPPP could not only have verified his claims, but could have sounded the alarm earlier. (Think Brad Pitt in WWZ)

Trump calls the Chinese liars and thieves, then bases his policies on what they tell him with no method or effort to confirm it, then denies any responsibility?! Trump STILL called it the flu less than 1 month ago. Who is he blaming for hiding the truth from him until then?

We also dont have the facilities in place to mass produce steam engines or build pyramids in the traditional way. Or computers - roll your own coils for memory, anyone?

Interesting, not disturbing.

Wow. Little to no evidence of smoked marijuana having any connection to lung or other cancers.

I must admit I'm surprised. To me it seems like burning something and inhaling the smoke is "obviously" a bad idea with regards to health.

Since the link between tobacco cigarettes and cancer is well established and agreed on by doctors, it makes one wonder what the difference is. Is it entirely the additives that cigarette manufacturers put into cigarettes? If so, why the hell wouldn't there be massive pressure to mass produce additive-free cigarettes at least as an option for smokers?

Also, I guess one (potential) downside of legalization is that the same sort of corporations that knowingly put cancer-causing shit into cigarettes might expand into marijuana territory, potentially trying to put crap into your pot that dispensaries and dealers never have.

Still, overall this is clearly good news for pot fans out there, and will put further pressure on the double standard between legal-but-far-more-dangerous alcohol and tobacco as compared to illegal-but-relatively-innocuous pot. Congratulations! Light one up in celebration (as if you needed a reason).

I love these things but never knew what they were called.

Nice to know you can still get mass produced tubes for about $10 each.

Suffering is the point here, not eating meat. Cheap, mass-produced meat is subsidised by the suffering of animals.

Please try to buy the good stuff.

Actually blade thickness has a lot to do with cutting power. Having a nice sharp edge at a good angle helps with the bite of the blade - and a host of medieval and ancient swords had that - but blade thickness impacts how deeply a cut can go, the thicker the blade the harder the hit will have to be.

It's why your kitchen knives are measured in milometers. Beyond that thickness of a blade has a large impact on its weight (katanas are a shorter blade but heavier than most longer swords), how long the hilt needs to be (and katana hilts were significantly longer than the remakes of today) and more.

One might think the thickness is there for durability and certainly the blades were durable, it's why there are still some of the originals around today, but the real reason is Japanese steel wasn't very good and full of impurities while at the same time the Europeans were mass producing steel of a significant higher quality. I hear the Japanese folding process vaunted as the height of sword-making but the real reason they folded the steel wasn't because it was a superior process - it wasn't, pattern-welding was and it was used in Europe as far back as a millennium earlier - but because it helped spread those impurities throughout the steel. That extra thickness helped keep the impurities from ruining the blade as well.

The katana... it's beautiful, fun to wield, unique looking, has a treasured past but it just.. isn't.. a very... good.. sword.

Apparently sound economics is right-wing bullshit. Of course, none of the leftist statist will answer the question why the robots couldn't do the dangerous jobs instead of the people, nor why the healthcare tanning beds couldn't, or wouldn't, be mass-produced for wider consumption like most technological advancements. No, they'd much rather shit on everything and tell you what an idiot you are because you hate the poor and the roads and firemen. Simplistic fuckers.

The scientific community *knows* that climate change is real. The scientific community is made up of individual researchers at universities all over the world, anyone who practices good science and adheres to the scientific method is in no doubt about what the research points to. You can't buy the global scientific community, there are too many of "us" (i guess) that are all absolutely anal about good scientific practice. You could buy one or two, you could buy a small group, but the only thing that changes the opinion of the global scientific community is hard scientific reasoning.

I can't speak for where you live, but if you were to walk into my university's physics department tomorrow and ask any lecturer or professor about climate change, they'd tell you that, and the same goes for just about any university in the UK, holland and france i imagine, if not more like germany and so on. Anyone who has spent any amount of time comparing graphs and looking for statistical anomalies will tell you that there is a god damn big and unwieldy peak sticking up on the temperature/time graph right about where we started mass producing greenhouse gases, and the only new influence into the equation was us, because the old peaks are flat compared to this one. This is happening on a HUMAN timescale, not on a geological one.

We're seeing ocean floor methane bubbling up to the surface that we haven't seen before due to the heating of the ocean, and only this week the scientist who studied it tweeted flat out that if even a fraction of that methane is released into the atmosphere... "we're fucked."

It's pretty damn serious, but i'm not telling you that you need to pay huge taxes or fees to green companies or anything, and no scientist ever will. The agendas that politicians take up in the name of science should not stop you from accepting the science, and there are simple, good common sense things you can do to make a small difference that would cumulate to something big if we all did them. The only reason governments haven't been investing more into green energy is because they are relentlessly lobbied by the hugely wealthy and powerful and corrupt energy firms.

What is more likely?

Ha!

I am facebook friends with some ardent and passionate vegans. One of them posted that photo without commentary.

My first thought was -- honey. You should listen to my 90 year old father talk about living on a farm in Oklahoma. That old saying of eating everything but the squeal? They weren't exaggerating.

Modern times mass produces and sorts what a handful of people did to one pig.

I really like this little robot. It's quite elegant in the ways it moves. I hope he mass-produces them for experimenters. I'd like to try my hand at making a bowling-bass firmware.

This is all true. Also, diamond rings are the single tackiest, ugliest, "hey look at how much money I spent on this" piece of jewellery ever.

Nothing says "I love you for the unique person you are" than a piece of mass produced jewellery!

What blows me away is we have gone from goods being expensive, 1-off, completely custom items, to inexpensive, mass-produced, one-size-fits-all items, to inexpensive, 1-off, completely custom items.

A 1930s hand crafted wind up watch -> a Timex quartz watch -> a self-designed, 3D printed, wind-up watch that looks identical to the 1930s handcrafted one.

The only reason people become grumpy old folk is because experience gives them the insight to discern quality from tripe, and because the older you get in our culture the further away you become from the honest, cultural evolutionary changes.
All we hear at our age is the shit that's pushed out on the radio (if you even still bother with that). That media has been shit since before we were born. If you had the time and ground-level access to the culture younger people are brought up with today, you'd find just as many wonderful, legitimate sources of art, culture and change as when we were discovering it in our youths.
Teach people to assess things honestly if they're put in front of them by someone else. Is Youtube telling you what the hottest 100 videos are? The manipulation is pretty obvious, even if the wolf is wearing a different sheep this time around.
Look to the origins of whatever is the current greatest thing to find the true art, and as soon as a genre or medium finds popular appeal to the point that it's exponentially mass-produced and formulaic, move on to discover the next thing. You'll never grow old that way. Don't get angry! Get wise! (and more importantly, raise future generations to have that wisdom as well.)

Mass-produce these and start selling them to adult children, yesterday!

The types of mass produced production shown in this movie are the only reason that we can sustain an opulent lifestyle where it is rare that people starve and exercise is needed to fight over-nutrition.

Producing food "organically" takes much more time and money to create the same amount of final product. It also creates more waste.

Monoculture crops and warehoused livestock are ways to more efficiently create the resources that people crave thereby optimizing profit for those who create and sell the final product. The downside of these production techniques is that they are very sensitive to disruption by disease or pests.

If we didn't have mass produced farming, food would be more expensive and more people would be starving.