Recent content by Sparker

I sometimes watched sports when I had cable. None of it impressed me enough that I would pay for streaming now. If I'm biking past a high school or amateur game I might stop to watch.

People who still watch cable may have growing influence per capita, but what they influence has a shrinking budget.

Football is a factory sport, with large numbers of people working in precisely coordinated motion. It became enormously popular with the workers of a manufacturing economy. Baseball is a farming sport, where farmers could quietly watch and relax for a few hours on their days off from farming...

I wasn't aware Iran is that much of a problem. I like Persian rugs, so I hope the rug industry survives. But part of the MAGA agenda is we make our own rugs.

Ideology and smug overconfidence can combine and lead to restarting old fights.

Some sports fans prefer a specific type or style of play, not just cheer for the home team. If they like speed and skill, and a game is just big bodies slamming together, then they could be bored silly. I don't know enough about hockey to know who plays with skill or brute force, but there are...

The new reserves have been known for a while. They were left untapped because they're lower grades and harder to reach, the tar sands, shale, etc. Lower grade means they cost more energy and money to extract and refine into something we can burn. We will eventually reach a point that the...

The current population size of 8 billion plus is temporarily possible with fossil fuels. The world won't have much of a fossil fuel industry past this century. M. King Hubbert knew that in the 1950s. Peak oil was in approximately 2008. USA peak oil was in the early 1970s. Peak coal hasn't...

If a Mars trip was possible, it would have been done decades ago when America spent massively on the space race and relevant fields of science education. Americans then were scientifically educated enough to know it can't be done, so they stopped caring so much about space travel. Now, people of...

Rising fuel prices will eventually destroy Amazon. With slave wages it still can't beat local store prices. Bozos may regret helping ICE when he can't hire dirt cheap laborers.

And maybe a pic if you can reach your phone.

Tyson is one of the high priests of the Science religion, maybe the highest. When people said "trust the science," they were making religious statements. There are people who practice actual science, not the religion, but they still need funding, and that goes through very religious routes in...

We have so many robberies and murders because we have so many people who think that is the only way they can survive. The long term solutions of rebuilding our economy with well paying jobs, and removing the incentives for single parenting so fathers can be dads again, will take decades. Long...

14 ineligibles were found in one county. Michigan has 83 counties. The 2024 Senate election was 48.64% to 48.3%. Democrat Elissa Slotkin won by 19,006 votes out of 5.6 million. That same year, Trump won the state 49.73% to 48.31%. So the elections may have been fair enough that year. There is...

We don't need a naval base at Guantanamo Bay now. Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, and a bunch of friendly Caribbean nations can have drone bases. Keeping a base in Cuba looks like an expensive vanity project.