Copyright is for written, filmed, or musical work, as well at its derivatives.

It’s a little bit more than that. There are 8 categories:

1. literary works;
2. musical works, including any accompanying words;
3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
4. pantomimes and choreographic works;
5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
7. sound recordings; and
8. architectural works.

Sculpture is a type of visual work that can be copyrighted. So are architectural works. Not that a bar of soap would likely qualify as a sculpture, but there are 3 dimensional shapes that can be copyrighted.

Shapes can be trademarked, but an oval is not trademarkable because it is a very generic shape.

If it’s not already in common use when trademarked, even simple shapes can be trademarked. Simple colors can be trademarked as well: UPS trademarked its shade of brown, Tiffany has trademarked its shade of blue. Specific design elements can be trademarked as well, like the recognizable Burberry check pattern, the iconic glass bottle shape of Coca Cola, etc.

And the Dove soap bar shape isn’t just a generic oval. It’s a precise 3 dimensional shape, with a raised center and a gradual taper to the vertical edges all around.

I couldn’t find a registered trademark, but the shape is distinctive enough that they probably would be able to trademark it if they wanted to (or even enforce an unregistered trademark in that shape, at least in the U.S.).

That’s what I’m getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn’t released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.

It’s the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it’s going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.

slowly release the chemical energy to the ground

In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That’s dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.

That’s just not how chemistry works.

Every bomb, grenade, or other munition will have some kind of explosive substance, which contains a large amount of chemical energy that is ordinarily released very quickly as kinetic energy and heat, in a big explosion. These weapons are designed to where the explosive is resilient against accidental or incidental detonation. So there are a ton of safeguards in place to prevent these things from blowing up unexpectedly.

The problem is that the energy contained within those chemical bonds is still always going to be there. And there’s not an easy way to gradually release that energy. That’s why unexploded ordnance is usually disposed of by blowing it up, in place, with an external explosion. The deterioration of the safeguards around accidental detonation makes the whole thing less safe, so the safest thing to do is to detonate it in place.

Even chemical batteries, which are designed for gradual release of the stored chemical energy, can sometimes overheat and cause a runaway reaction of a battery fire. Deterioration of the device is bad for controlling how that immense quantity of stored energy gets released.

So if you have a device that is hard to accidentally detonate, how will you make it so that the explosive degrades over time, without causing an explosion at an unexpected time?

Kinda depends on the fact, right? Plenty of factual things piss me off, but I’d argue I’m correct to be pissed off about them.

Yes, there are mid-block crosswalks in some of the walkable parts of Austin. There are also roundabouts with yield signs and crosswalks and no lights.

I love that the question doesn’t specify what “better” means, and we’re all interpreting it in our own ways. Healthier? More enjoyable?

Oh well I’m sure the cabinet secretary who oversees TSA will get right on that oh wait she loves killing dogs too

…isn’t that the whole point that OP is making?

By calling the US the richest country in the world, in a post that shows that the US isn’t doing too hot on certain other metrics, it’s a clear message that the richness of a country isn’t enough, in itself. It’s intentional use of irony.

Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

No.

Autocracy moves faster at marshaling the resources it has, but is significantly worse at accumulating resources than what economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson describes as inclusive political and economic institutions, which broadly allow members of the public to engage in political and economic activity. (Note that their work on these things won them the Economics Nobel last year.)

Distributed, decentralized power is important for maximizing the potential of a population.

Autocratic political systems are brittle. They’re also poor. They tend not to survive more than a decade or two before the strongman is deposed, one way or another, whether from internal coup or revolution, or simply external invasion of a weakened state. And a successor strongman might be weaker. All the while, the inclusive states continue to grow in their own power and influence.

So any short term gain in consolidating power into smaller groups is going to be up against time, and the fragility of the whole arrangement as the autocratic country falls behind its competition.

I think you’re relying too heavily on your anecdotal experience here. Maybe you’ve never seen a gun fired in anger, but there are about 13,000 gun homicides per year.

Plus, the nature of gatherings mean that a very small number of events can have many witnesses, especially if defined to include people who heard gunshots.

Take the most extreme example, the 2017 Vegas shooting, the single worst mass shooting event in American history. There were people killed and injured in the event. Under anyone’s definition that was a mass shooting.

There were 22,000 attendees at that music festival. How many staff, crew, contractors, vendors, performance artists and their own staffs? How many cops and first responders were there? How many were in the 3200-room hotel and casino who had to be evacuated during the response? How many people heard gunshots in the open air, or saw muzzle flashes from the hotel room? 50,000?

Same with the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Lots of people were within hearing range of the shots.

These types of events have a lot of people present. If 4 people are dying from a shooting, what’s the average number of people wounded? How many are present?

The math is somewhat counterintuitive, and can explain a lot of the high number.

That’s the joke.

In the late 80’s, there was a huge consumer push for tuna fishers to change their techniques so that they didn’t kill dolphins while catching tuna. Before then, tuna fishers used to actually track dolphins, because following the dolphins generally meant being able to find the tuna faster. Then, they’d surround the tuna with their nets, indifferent to the dozens of dolphins they were drowning as part of the process.

By the 90’s, there was legislation on how tuna cans could be labeled as “dolphin safe,” and stepped up enforcement of the existing laws that made it illegal to intentionally kill dolphins.

During the height of this debate in the popular consciousness, of course, this comic came out joking about that link between dolphin deaths and tuna canning.