When Credit Suisse (RIP) was founded in order to build the trains and tunnels, Switzerland was already becoming established. And in Swiss fashion, they built a network that’s worth paying for. (It helped that the neighbors also appreciated being able to transit goods through Switzerland, of course.) Today, I spend more on my rail pass than I ever would when I lived in the US, because the utility is so much higher. I can go everywhere, and do it quickly, quietly, and efficiently. Every regular train leaves at the same time past the hour on the same track every time. I can plan a route including which track I’ll arrive and depart from months in advance, or just look at the clock and know how many minutes to my next local train right now. (And all the trains here are hydroelectric powered so it’s guilt-free travel.)

The Swiss mentality is to think about perceived value and build around that, and the trains are no exception. They continue to be built out and upgraded, and I encourage most tourists to forego the car rental and just take the train.

Sort of. A true pinhole camera creates an image that is already 100% focused. The bigger the hole (“aperture”), the wider range of angles the light is coming in at, and the blurrier it gets without additional focus. (It’s not “noise,” it’s the wrong signal.) Think of holding up a piece of paper, take a little square on it, and imagine where the light comes from that hits that square. If there is no pinhole at all, and it’s just open to the environment, the light that hits that square is coming from all directions and you just see white. If you block out all but a medium sized hole, the light can only come from the direction of the hole, but there are still several possibilities for its source which get mixed together in a blur. Once you shrink down to an infinitely tiny hole, the light hitting any spot on the paper can only come exactly from the direction of one point on the other side of the hole. Repeat for every other point on the paper, and it’s in focus and you get a picture.

The problem is that an infinitely small hole lets in no light. And the wider the hole, the more possible angles that light can come in at, and the blurrier it gets. That’s where lenses or refractive mirrors come in, but OP didn’t ask about that…

You definitely do react to allergy shots. The first shots gave me giant welts on the underside of my arm. But you take antihistamine with it, and the reaction doesn’t turn into an over-reaction. It’s a very specific dosing regimen (injected into a specific spot) to ensure that the immune system can see it, but not overreact. That’s the level at which the immune system starts to slowly see it as normal and non-threatening.

There is usually a 30 day grace period in the contract. It’s still possible he’s not current, but within the grace period, so the insurance company doesn’t want to pay until/unless he does.

Some of that is due to the quarterly reporting requirements of many large (often public) companies. Once you go over a quarterly-- and especially a yearly-- boundary, that lack of spend gets "locked in" as profit. At that point it's subject to corporate taxes, and potentially even a portion returned to the stockholders or however else the corporate governance has agreed to disposition profits.

Amazon famously operated at a zero profit for a decade, re-investing all profits and owing no taxes on no income. If some manager had claimed to need a few million then didn't spend it (but prevented it from being invested elsewhere in the company), they'd probably be fired, not celebrated for "saving" money.

If you're tracking your spend throughout the year, and not spending the expected amount in one area, there are also potentially other ways to spend that money to get a better return than it sitting in someone's "unspent" account as cash. And if a manager is going to argue they still need it, they'd darn well better need it.

If the selling site itself was/is fraudulent and you transferred money to them, then didn’t receive the promised services, that is also a valid reason to dispute the charge. Without more information it’s hard to advise you, and I’m not a lawyer or a financial crimes expert myself anyway. Was just trying to point out that “being scammed” takes many forms and the credit/bank companies handle them differently. I’d continue to appeal then CFPB it if you couldn’t get resolution.

You can file a police report at any time.

The key is whether during the course of the scam information was taken which allowed them to do the transfer without you (in which case it was a fraudulent transfer), or whether they convinced YOU to do the transfer through lies or deceit (in which case it was a valid transfer, based on fraudulent information). These are very different cases from a bank fraud point of view.

I remember reading that they had found galaxies which had collided and the bigger one stripped the smaller galaxy of its dark matter. That these small post-collision galaxies were spinning more like what would be expected with standard physics. Did that not pan out, and if it did, how would a galaxy stripping another of “information” even work?

(Please treat the top-rated comment's background story with appropriate skepticism before repeating it to anyone.)

Not quite as old, but that reminds me of my favorite bridge name -- the Outerbridge Crossing (built in 1928). Many think it was so named because it's the outermost bridge leading into the city. Nope. It's named for Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge, the first and most aptly named chairman of the Port Authority of NY.

My understanding is that the effect is particularly pronounced on the maternal line— a mothers eggs begin to form in the grandmother’s womb, so direct effects can last 2 generations. But the study I saw talked about “health” and various biological markers, not height… although the two could be linked.

To put this in perspective, from what I’ve read a single SpaceX Starship is projected to be about 100m^2 pressurized interior space, so they’ll be launching almost an entire Chinese space station each launch.

Common misconception. The life expectancy was so low because lack of vaccines and antibiotics meant most people didn’t survive childhood. Once you were 30 you had a pretty good shot of hitting 60 even before modern medicine.

Also because on the ground you need more switches to route around everything, while in space you can theoretically do it in fewer satellite-to-satellite hops.

You replace a cable that breaks. That’s a 1-1 replacement. A different/same connector at the end doesn’t save anything.

Less waste?? You’re about to force a large segment of the population to throw away a huge quantity of plastic and metal for no good reason. This will cause tons of waste, not prevent waste.