It's to connect mainland Italy to Sicily. They've been trying to build it since Pliny the Elder suggested it.
It's not even that wide of a crossing, bit over 2 miles with a maximum depth of 235 feet (Verrazzano-Narrows in NYC is wider). It wouldn't be setting any firsts were it not for their deliberate decision in the 2006 design phase to go for a record setting center span so the towers don't have to be built in the water.
I don't think you're really familiar with the Persona franchise's fanbase.
Imagine you're playing minesweeper and you click the first cell and it comes back "8", and then you click another cell and it also comes back "8".
That is Atlus's experience with the Persona fanbase. There is nothing they can say in any direction that will not piss off someone. Every installment they manage to put themselves on a hill where every possible move is downwards so their only recourse is to build the hill even higher next time around.
We can assume that a hypothetical Persona 9 will be the end of all computer gaming because it will be everything for everybody and any change will alienate half the fucking world.
No, they do not.
The typical residential "smart" meter is the GE I-210, which is a kWh hour only device.
To get vAr measurement you have to step up to the GE kV2c, which is several times more expensive per unit. When you are talking about footprints of millions of customers, a choice between one product or another product which costs several times more, it doesn't matter what capacities the product offers, management will pick the cheaper choice 100% of the time.
I know as I type this, that the significance of it will be lost on most of you, but there is actually a physics argument in favor of California's pricing model.
It's a well known problem in electrical engineering that the simple, residential electric meters have limitations. They do not have the expensive circuitry necessary to perform the phase difference calculations to determine true reactive power consumption. Rather, they use assumptions to do a simpler calculation to determine apparent power.
Now, there's something you have to understand about the electrical grid:
AC power is divided into two complex components: real power and reactive power. An ideal resistor consumes only real power, and an ideal inductor consumes only reactive power.
It is MUCH more expensive to deliver reactive power than it is to deliver real power. Like direct current, reactive power can only be delivered a few miles, meaning in most metros it has to be produced in-situ using capacitor banks at transformer stations. Which are expensive, maintenance intensive, and prone to exploding. A generating plant may cost half a billion dollars to build and millions to operate, but utility scale capacitors have to be deployed and replaced in huge numbers. Never underestimate multiplication.
Since the grid was devised, the largest change in residential energy consumption patterns has been air conditioning. A/C units consume obscene amounts of reactive power to drive their compressors and fans.
Now, this consumption is measured by residential electrical metering units because it shows up in apparent power. The hucksters selling capacitors claiming they'll make your power meter stop are just that; the meters measure apparent power, the capacitor won't make them stop counting. All adding capacitors at your house does is make the power company's life easier and make your house a fire hazard.
BUT, the meters don't have the capacity to BILL customers differently based on their power factor (that is, the balance of resistive vs inductive load).
And since highly inductive loads are more expensive to meet than resistive loads, this is something the power companies sort of want to do.
But they can't, because the metering technology to do it is expensive. It makes sense to use it for massive industrial customers. It's not practical to do it for residential customers.
So the current electrical billing system in California (that is, the old system) was already bad, because the wealthiest people have the highest load factors (something which the meters couldn't accurately bill).
India is a mess in general. It has some upsides and some downsides.
Their culture doesn't pull punches about being fat, being a single parent, etc, so that's a plus. But yeah, you also get incomprehensible outcomes like this, because they're still a classist, monogamous, legal-paternalistic society.
On balance, I wouldn't choose to live there, but I'm sure there are millions of Hindu who wouldn't choose to live here either.
And Punjab... well, they're basically Klingons. What sort of Sikh gets killed by his wife? One who didn't listen to the gurus, that's who.
Novelty theory is an idea conceived and promoted by Terence McKenna, a psychedelic explorer and visionary, who claimed that the universe is not a random and chaotic place, but rather a structured and creative process that generates increasing levels of complexity and novelty over time.
Only a fucking boomer could come up with such tripe.
As I've said in the past, the problem with the schools comes down to recognizing that the American secondary education system as it is currently structured is frozen in a compromised state that only made sense between the 1940's and 1950's.
To explain this, I need to give you some terminology.
Primary Education - Is defined as what Americans would call grades 1-8. A person who completes primary education should be capable of reading in their native language and performing arithmetic and trigonometric math.
Secondary Education - In most of the world secondary education is bifurcated into two separate systems. Vocational education, and college preparatory education. These are different outcome objectives, with very different needs. To be effective, vocational education needs to be producing the workers the job market needs.
College prep education focuses on two major things: advanced math, and learning the lingua franca (today english, previously french, historically latin). Americans being english speakers, this means that college prep in the US is mostly about math, and sure as hell shouldn't take 4 years.
In the aftermath of WW2, the US was riding high. Economic prosperity was everywhere, and it was possible for most school districts in the country to combine vocational and preparatory education in the same schools.
I want to emphasize: This is not normal. Aside from Canada (which is basically just America in this regard), no other first world nation does this. College prep and vocational secondary education are different programs, and pretty much every European and Asian country forces people to decide, at a younger age, what path they want to try for.
But for a brief while after the war, the US was able to pretend that its high schools could offer vocational education. Then the baby boom hit and this illusion went to shit. In the face of surging enrollment numbers, schools had to drop hiring in favor of emergency facilities expansions, which would stress budgets for decades. Across the country, voc-ed took the worst hits, staying basically frozen in a 1950's state of affairs until the late 80's when Apple Computer came along.
To pick up the slack, community colleges emerged and quickly grew in the '70s and '80s, providing the actual voc ed programs that the high schools neglected.
What should have happened at this point is that the community colleges should have become alternative options for secondary education. That is, you could attend a CC as if it was a vocational high school.
Obviously, this didn't happen. And so the the US secondary school system rotted into its current state where everyone is given a college prep education that takes entirely too long.
It's discussions like this where we have to bring back the old ideas of the id and the ego, or lizard-brain as it seems to be called now.
Everything you're talking about is happening at the ego level. That's irrelevant. The ego level is an unreliable narrator that will perform whatever gymnastics are necessary to restore what Clarey calls "perfect mental state".
When we talk about wants, we're really talking about the id level.
Now A, that's just being quippy without being constructive.
I think his train is "stuck" somewhere and I'm trying to unjam it.
My hope is that he says he's a believer, because if he is, there's essentially two paths to resolve his thinking. If he wants to be Christian, he needs to learn forgiveness. But if he can't forgive, then the path forward is to accept the next revelation, and it could be said that god is punishing him for not listening to the Prophet.
Okay, I need a clear answer to one question:
Do you, or do you not, believe in god?
Because if you do I can conceptualize that the world as you see it is a catch 22, it's all god's fault, and you are compelled to play by god's rules because the only thing YOU'RE judged for is your own actions.
But, if you do believe in god, and you believe everything you've said over the years, then I'm very curious why you haven't accepted Muhammed as the messenger of God's final revelation.
Here's the thing TI...
Everything you say, undermines your credibility and agency. Your framing is so extreme, that your actions are incongruent with your words.
There are logical conclusions to your thinking, all of which are quite grimdark and quite violent, but they are conclusions.
But you don't go there. So I'm left with only one of two conclusions:
A. You don't actually believe the things you say, you're just a troll trying to provoke others into reaching the mental conclusions you want them to, for your own amusement, or...
B. You know where your thinking leads, but you're just a coward.
Entity-Component-System
"Composition over inheritance (or composite reuse principle) in object-oriented programming (OOP) is the principle that classes should achieve polymorphic behavior and code reuse by their composition (by containing instances of other classes that implement the desired functionality) rather than inheritance from a base or parent class."
Jesus flying spaghettimonster.
This is Magic: The Gathering as a software design philosophy.
In the United States our problem is different.
It was a mistake for the US to leave Britain. Our style of government needs a politically impotent sovereign to keep the government conscious of its station.
If the US hadn't revolted, Parliament would be held in New York City now.
Yeah this is is why the joke ends with hell being managed by the Italians.
Two thousand years to build a bridge to Sicily. One really determined guy with a shovel and a wheelbarrel could have built a gravel causeway across the strait by hand in that time.