This is a great build and report. Even though you don't have great photo gear, you should try capturing a picture of steam in the light (as DIY Perks did).
As a layperson I go into this thinking that it sounds like "scientists make matter from light" but after reading it seems more like "scientists make fancy electric field with a laser".
I guess "solid" has a technical definition that allows for this sort of interesting interpretation.
The problem is that the usual definition of "solid" requires a classical understanding of what it means for "a thing to be in a place". With quantum mechanics, places get blurred, so you can have things remain in a rigid structure and flow, simultaneously.
So you read it correctly: scientists made a fancy electric field with a laser.
If vision-restoring eye transplants are the novel ___domain of futuristic moonshot research, how did Jerry Orbach’s eye donation give the “gift of sight for two New Yorkers” twenty years ago?
EDIT: Ah I follow now: he donated his corneas, which is a more routine procedure than an aspirational, vision-restoring full eye transplant
This raises many questions for me, having only a superficial understanding of the Soviet Union. A restaurant seems inherently entrepreneurial. Were they created by individual initiative or committee? Who did they serve? How did they weather shortages? Etc..
>Polish cafeteria which during the Communist era provided government-subsidized traditional Polish cuisine at low cost. The name comes from cheese cutlets, which were often sold when meat was rare.
As one born in the USSR and economist, I can give some brief description.
The economy was like 20-40 ministries, formed like Korean chaebols -- with many in-house services to compensate for their poor public counterparts. Like kindergartens. Or own housing -- to get an apartment (for rent) from the municipal authorities, you'd be in a long queue with some people more equal than others, and corruption, and normally you'd get one by retirement. So enterprises built it for their workers, in some exchange with the construction enterprises (idk which ministry they'd belong, probably dispersed among many entities).
You probably can imagine a huge Google -- where departments can't trade on a free market with each other -- but with a lot looser control and more corruption, which created some black market.
For example, I suppose, restaurants must have belonged to the retail ministry. Under the minister himself, there was the republican department with its manager, the regional, and the municipal one, and only down there was a "Restaurant #5 <<Sunflower>>" (#5 in the retail department of city X), and its director. This made him like CEO, but in reality it was like small group manager in a big hierarchy.
Just as in any big capitalist corporation, such a manager is risk averse, because failures lead to being fired, but sudden big profits go in the corporation pockets, not manager's.
But if you add some corruption, you could be an entrepreneur in a way: make good services (expensive) => be popular among the elites => have some high-profile friends to protect in case of turf wars (e.g. city's Communist party 1st secretary (president) is your friend => city's retail department can't fire you) => exchange some services/goods/commodities beyond the counter (as it was said "from the back door of the shop"). (Black market prices were high, so you could easily sell something elsewhere and put the nominal amount of cash in the box.)
Regarding the shortages issue, they existed for the buyers at the front door of public retail. Retail & restaurants managers exchanged the stuff (they were supposed to sell to the public) between them to fill the gaps.
Private companies existed, although there were less. IFAIR restaurants as you may know were less common. Usually in hotels, next to train stations, in gov buildings, tourist shelters and so on. Often run by gov-owned networks. You required a nice place to drink vodka while discussing how to screw others, right? If you had dollars you could buy some western goods in state owned stores.
There were some bistros-like places, where menu was simplified and there were no waiters. We call them Milk Bars, you know, pierogi and soup. It's actually sad there is a shortage of such cheap places nowadays.
Larger work places often had their own cafeterias with basic food for employees. Schools often as well. You didn't really go to a restaurant just to eat. There had to be a reason.
They handled shortages by connections, cheating and poor quality.
Can't really tell who used restaurants as I was too young, but recall official events like wedding parties were a thing. Party members, politicians, priests and crooks had to drink somewhere as well. I recall it was customary to do business using vodka as well, more than modern sales dinners - get shitfaces and yell at each other before shaking hands. It was a thing also after communism, but less so. If you had a deal to make, it was almost expected to discuss that with way too much vodka. Normalization of alcoholism is a stench that we still try to wash off.
I don't miss those times, I still can smell those cheap cigarettes that everyone smoked EVERYWHERE. No-one cared if children were there. Not having money was less of a problem, empty stores were. If you didn't knew a lot of people, you had nothing. You had disgusting green bathroom with tiles like a hospital, for 30 years. Yet you were happy, at least they delivered tiles that one time and your friend told you quickly.
I'm not great in that field at all, but in Poland private companies existed. At first (after 1945) they hoped to survive until regime will be gone "in a few years". Then the regime tried to kill those one by one. Private owner was an oppressed enemy, fined, bullyragged, threatened.
Small businesses existed the whole time, but it was not an easy life.
Something the article doesn't discuss is that many children born with Down Syndrome have heart defects, such AV canal[1] or Tetralogy of Fallot[2]. The prognosis without surgical intervention is poor. We were told our son with DS and ToF would likely have not made it to 6 without his surgery.
Bike Index is very well known at least in OR/WA (I'm in PDX) and has been around a long time. I appreciate you're supportive of another effort but you don't need to push one effort down to lift another up.
I don't see where I said anything disparaging bikeindex, it certainly can't hurt to register a bike or search on both sites. My comment was a one person sample size anecdote of what I've commonly seen used on the west coast.
interestingly both sites want to claim to be the single authoritative source of data, and place to register and search for stolen bikes, but the "market" for such online services is really split between the two... or maybe there's a 3rd online bike registry I'm totally unaware of as well?
in reality I think the data is split between the two sites. My bike is registered on 529, this has provided motivation to me to also submit the same photos/data to bikeindex for a belt and suspenders type approach.
I was surprised by the table showing 177,000 listings for one and 700,000 listings in the other.
Ideally they could both share data and mirror each other for both registrations and stolen bike listings, for the most effective use by people who may be unaware of the other entity.
