When space weather activity increases and more frequent and larger storms and substorms occur, the aurora extends equatorward. During large events, the aurora can be observed as far south as the US, Europe, and Asia. During very large events, the aurora can be observed even farther from the poles.
That's a very weird and not very precise way to word this. Of course I would expect auroras to be regularly visible in the far northern parts of the USA and Europe:
If the magnetic field completely disappeared tomorrow the top layers of the atmosphere would start to be ionized and stripped away. There'd also be a slow change in the composition of the atmosphere due to neutron bombardment.
The process would only take a mere million years or so!
In the meantime the Earths atmosphere alone also blocks cosmic radiation to the extent that there's no immediate harm to life.
"Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly."
The South Atlantic Anomaly is interesting. In past years satellites are being made to shutdown while passing the regions to avoid damage from the lack of protection from harmful particles.
Not the original commenter but I am in the industry, and its true, many satellites shut down during this region over the South Atlantic.
For that reason, it is not a popular orbit unless there is a larger driver behind the selection. For example the ISS goes right through it in order to be above Russia for a reasonable portion of its orbit. I believe Astronauts have reported increases in optical flashes during this part of the orbit as more energetic particles pass through their eyes.
This article approaches a few correct points on some very obvious ideas while saying a lot of other things that I find crazy.
My personal experiences with the government have been either frustrating, inefficient, meaningless, or detrimental. At some point, you inevitably start questioning why such a large government exists and why we need it.
The authors is listing words with very specific negative emotional subtext. It barely makes sense in the context of the sentence.
"The first thing to understand about governments is that governments and corporations are exactly the same. Both are just groups of people trying to create value in some market."
The first thing to understand is generalities can be the death of any reasonable perspective.
The authors use of language betrays the mistake of personifying the government as a cohesive and singular entity.
The truth is that most governments exist as an ecosystem for many different parts to cooperate for various reasons. A very large amount of the people within that ecosystem are genuinely passionate about being able to work for the public good and do a fantastic job of it. A large amount of people within the same ecosystem do not care and take advantage of their civil service role as a means of personal/commercial benefit. Now what about the people in between these archetypes?
The actual "thing" is too varied and complex for almost any generality to be usefully applied.
The point of generalities is to be able to reason about things too complicated to fully describe. Whether or not you think a specific generalization, framing, or model is a good or useful one is completely up for debate. Denouncing the idea of generalities doesn't give any room to reason about anything complicated.
Saying something is too complicated and varied to reason about is an indictment against all of science. Reality is fractally complicated yet we still manage. Physics is an approximation of reality. Chemisty is an approximation of physics. Biology is an approximation of chemistry. No model is perfect.
In my opinion, understanding government as a monopoly in the business of violence provides a useful framework.
1. It's generalizable. Monopolizing violence over its citizens is the common factor between every government. From North Korea to China to the US to Norway, all governments maintain the absolute and unrivaled power to exert violence over their citizens. I cannot personally find any counterexample.
2. We can apply existing research. Modeling governments as businesses in a specific industry enables to use research about how markets and businesses work. This whole post is essentially an argument to change macroeconomic modeling. Instead of treating the government as some separate special entity, we can simply existing macroeconomics models by treating the government as yet another business.
Despite this article over-hyping what's happening the author summarizes things well.
"So why is Microsoft bleeding overall market share while Ubuntu is gaining so rapidly? One reason, as WindowsLatest points out, could be the COVID-19 pandemic and a significant decrease in company-owned PCs being used at the office.
And perhaps people are exploring alternatives at home."
A lot of people have more free time lately to mess around with new technologies lately across the board so while I'm happy to see that, it doesn't necessarily mean much.
Bringing up Windows 10 here is almost just for show.
Complex obstacles require a complex approach towards solutions so it makes sense to have multiple communities working together.
And sure, horrors occur but we don't get to know what horrors are avoided.