This was probably true for a bit after 9/11, but I can’t say I personally know anyone who currently feels safer flying on planes because of the TSA. Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to in person regarding this knows the TSA is a joke.

Realistically it’s now a government jobs program that is basically immune from ever being terminated because many politician benefits from having this program operate in their district/state/etc providing jobs that they do not want to lose.

You seem to be under the impression that they care about your safety. Rookie mistake. They care about the security of the airplane, not you.

Chemists would look in envy at the mathematician’s cyclohexane / benzene ring pancakes.

Just fyi the term for molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic regions is amphipathic not bipolar.

I’m intrigued, do you have a link?

I’m a researcher in the biological sciences at an institute which receives lots of government funding, and was at a university before my current position. We are not being paid to develop drugs. We are being paid to develop new knowledge that hopefully can be useful (in the broad sense of the term). Practically no one I’ve ever met during my time in academia is developing drugs, and the small few that were doing so were only researching a single, small part of a very long, complex process.

The R&D you are paying for is for us to typically find out that “Protein X interacts with Protein Y and causes Effect Z. When we delete Protein X then Effect Z goes away”. We might also find out that “Molecule Q can block the activity of Protein X, but has a host of issues that make it ineffective when given to Petri dish cells and mice.” This can give you a lead towards making a drug, but what we do is basically discover a possible starting point, nothing more. If someone wants to make a drug from this, they typically will start a company and get venture capital and angel investor money, as university labs are usually poorly equipped financially and talent wise to actually develop a drug (to speak nothing of pushing it through clinical trials). Transforming Molecule Q into a bona fide drug candidate is going to require a massive amount of work that most lay individuals are completely unaware of.

I’m really curious where this concept that the government is spending tons of money on drug R&D at publicly funded universities is coming from. It sounds great as a talking point, but from my perspective within the system it’s not quite how things work.

It has to be the former. I would be shocked if bats even outnumbered humans and rodents combined.

Sucrose has a solubility of about 200 g/100 mL water. I’m in American so I’ve never seen Australian food labels, but would they really label a sugar-saturated drink as having 200% sugar? I guess technically you can do that, but it seems a bit weird. In my experience % is usually reserved for liquid in liquid solutions, like alcoholic beverages.

I feel like this is a situation where going full Karen would be an acceptable response.

As a fellow tall person I have accepted the fact that I will almost certainly have back issues in my 50s/60s as an inevitability. The world is very much designed for the “average height” person.

I’ll second what has been said. Depending on what kinds of games you play will guide your CPU purchase. If you play CPU heavy games (simulators, grand strategy, Escape from Tarkov, etc.) the X3D variants would be a good choice. For previous gen that would be the 5800X3D. My brother has this one so I can tell you firsthand that it is a beast of a processor. However, this would lock you into DDR4 ram which means your next upgrade is guaranteed to need a new mobo, processor, and ram. The upside is that it’s fairly inexpensive compared to current products, so it’s good if you’re on a budget. If you don’t play those game the normal 5800X should be good.

If you’re looking for more current DDR5 build that you might be able to reuse parts for on your next upgrade, the 7800 and 7800X3D are what you want to be looking at (the 7800X gives you marginal improvement for way more power usage if I recall correctly, so not worth imo). I upgraded from an i7 7700k to a 7800X3D earlier this year and noticed fairly sizable improvements in performance for the games I play.

Either way, I don’t think you can go wrong with any of these options.

Fortunately Microsoft Office isn’t fully subscription yet, but with how much they’re pushing Office365 it’s not too surprising that people don’t seem to realize this. You can still buy a permanent license from MS directly (with some digging around to get to the correct page) or from 3rd party websites. Only downside is it locks you into the current version of Office, but for the average user (me) that’s not too much of a big deal - I can’t recall them releasing any major must have features over the past 10 years.