Joe Average on a fish-watching trip in the Bahamas? No, you can go to about 30 meters using regular air or nitrogen-oxygen mixtures.

Some technical diving enthusiast planning a 50-stage 20-hour dive to 175 meters, just because the hole is there? Well, you absolutely need some other gas in there, and helium is currently the popular choice.

From an outside perspective the US does not have a political left. The policies proposed by the Democrats are roughly in line with the mainstream right-wing parties in the rest of the world. A mainstream left-wing party would look an awful lot like someone like Bernie Sanders - and we all know the Democrats would rather platform a wet paper towel and lose than see him gain any kind of power!

I could probably go on for another ten pages. Europe definitely has its flaws, but let's not pretend like the US is a paradise where everything is perfect and nothing ever went wrong.

Or are you worried about your kids getting an unfair advantage over unrestricted ones?

Post-quantum signatures will require rotating your keys, but that's less urgent.

I don't know enough about oil & gas to tell you what is happening there, but not every market truly operates as a free market.

For example, nuclear power plants almost always have a contract with the government for a specific electricity price: if the market pays more the profits will go to the government, if the market pays less the government subsidizes production. Something similar happened with early wind power.

Using nuclear means electricity prices will be set by the price of nuclear - which is even higher than the price of gas.

Besides, it is economically impossible to operate it as backstop as almost all of its costs are in paying back the construction loan: run it 10% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 10x, run it 1% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 100x. With that kind of budget there are suddenly a lot of alternatives to nuclear as generation-of-last-resort.

Elite schools are full of dumb people. Being good at math doesn't automatically give you emotional intelligence.

> that is smart enough to make a social media app

What, like it's hard? I could've sworn making a Twitter clone was in plenty of "Programming for Dummies" books during the 2010s - and they didn't even have access to LLMs!

I have to disagree. Even small subsections of, say, routing are already NP-hard. In my experience autorouters are universally awful: they fall apart as soon as you feed them anything which isn't completely trivial. The problem is just too complicated to solve with a bunch of heuristics and clever approximations.

If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War.

If you want to stay with WWII metaphors: if you contributed to putting Hitler in power and benefited from Hitler's favors, you were complicit to the Holocaust.

For example, the general rule-of-thumb is to place one 100nF decoupling capacitor per power pin. But in practice there isn't always space for that. Do you suboptimally route your critical high-speed traces to place one? Do you add additional board layers for it? Do you switch to a smaller (and more expensive to manufacture) capacitor package size? Do you more it further away from the chip - making it significantly less effective? Do you make two power pins share a single capacitor? Do you switch to a different IC package or even a completely different chip with an easier pinout?

What is the impact of your choice on manufacturing requirements, manufacturing cost, part cost, part availability, testability, repairability, EMC/FCC/whatever certification?

Every option could literally be free, cost tens of millions, or anything in-between. Parts documentation is already woefully incomplete as it is, trying to automate routing it by requiring people to provide data describing basically the entire world just isn't realistic.

Just a few years ago this was the standard business model for startups: attract VC money, offer plans at a loss, capture a huge market, boil the frog with incremental price increases to become profitable.

Companies like Uber wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful if they had been forced to make a profit from day one.

As someone who played sports in college, for >99% of people it really was just about having fun: you're hanging out with your friends, getting some exercise, and doing something enjoyable. I exercised side-by-side with people who went on to represent my country on the international stage and their dedication was definitely the exception.

No silly scholarships involved here, though: I live in the EU, so education is reasonably affordable to everyone without it, and the colleges don't feel the need to pretend to be professional sports teams.