I could buy this. Also, the fonts are very jarring and intrusive. I rarely want to view what’s behind the spoiler tag, just give me a line for bias and a line for credibility, no need to be bold and a smaller font if anything, and hide the rest behind the spoiler tag if I’m interested. I already know where MBFC’s bias is, and I can adjust that to get an idea that when they say left, I think center or maybe left-center.

All of that seems pretty reasonable to me, but not if your goal is advertising…

“There are two states that have such shitty electricity production systems that it may take more than the lifetime of an electric car for the carbon emissions to break even. That’s how terrible electric cars are!”

🙄

Some few people with a conscience might be horrified when they learn that the policies they worked so hard to get passed caused massive loss of life for mothers and infants, but many will think the price was worth it.

Ditto. I think he could bring out the exasperation and pessimism that so much of my life warrants. And the transition to the good parts would be even funnier. “Oh, sorry honey, you’re why I keep going. I should have said that to him.”

You made me spit out my cat burger.

The algorithm is working as intended!

This ignores that, until we had an effective treatment program and mass vaccinations, it had a mortality rate of about 20 times that of the flu. After effective treatment plans, vaccines, antivirals, etc. it was brought more in line with the flu. 0.5% mortality means that you need to know 200 people who got sick to know someone who died. This also ignores all the people we saw online who would deny their family members died of COVID. Having had friends working in hospitals, COVID deaths were happening. And let’s be honest, how many people have you personally run into who died of the flu, yet that happens every year. We just shrug and move on. They were old, it was their time. And if it was your child, it was devastating, but could you even relate if your friend’s infant had died of the flu?

People historically are really bad at statistical analysis, so tiny risks over huge occurrences are dismissed, and most people will get away with it so we feel like the bad outcomes didn’t happen at all. But they do, and they did, and now a lot more people died than had to because people couldn’t stay home when they were sick, or wear a mask in public, or not cough in other people’s faces because it’s just a flu. And I honestly can’t show any respect to people who think their life is so much more important than anyone else’s that they can’t show a little respect and just try to not risk a stranger’s health because it might be a little uncomfortable.

So I’m supposed to just buy your anti-intellectualism rhetoric? Why should I trust your dumb ass over an expert in the field?

Hey, look, it’s Typhoid Mary COVID Larry, who wants all the privileges of society yet none of the responsibilities. If you don’t want to uphold the social contract, I’m okay with it. Get out.

A reasonably safe, fairly effective pipe bomb is easy to make with the some basic theory and high school chemistry knowledge. A moderately safe, highly effective pipe bomb requires only slightly more knowledge and a deeper understanding of high school chemistry. This stuff was easy enough that people were using it over half a thousand years ago to good effect. If you can’t figure it out now with a couple weeks effort and the breadth of knowledge at our disposal, that’s on you.

Massive changes have been happening in the battery field for decades, they just aren’t fast. Our rechargeable batteries are smaller, more energy-dense, longer-lasting, and cheaper than they were 40 years ago. They aren’t magical, last forever, infinite power, instant recharge batteries, though, that’s correct.

And absolutely HUGE pockets!

There’s no evidence that what feels good to you actually reduces the odds of the perpetrator committing crimes again or reduces the rate of those crimes in society in general, and good evidence that what doesn’t feel good to you does those things. So you will have to decide if you would rather feel good about how the person who did something wrong was punished or have less crime in your society.

My multivitamins are shaped like balls!

The trick is to not show discomfort after slapping your testicular tumors.

Because the way to get rid of angry, desperate people is to kill them. A better way is to get rid of the desperation, which usually gives them something to lose, which gives them less desire to engage in actions that will lose them. That’s why the War on Terror ended in a withdrawal, and not a victory. Sure, education and economic improvement isn’t very fast, but some governments seem to be more than okay spending a couple decades doing something different.

No, this won’t get rid of all of the terrorists, but how many of the wealthy, educated, married extremists with families are actually willing to risk their lives for their beliefs?

Like most questions that devolve to, “What would the world be like if people stopped doing bad things and just <insert wish here>?” pretty great. (The wish in this case is help each other with raising children.) Now if only we could get people to stop doing bad things.

The scientist Robert L. Forward discussed possible ways to handle this in his novel Rocheworld. The fiction part wasn’t about the light sail, more the general AI, life extension tech, and the aliens.

This is probably the most charitable interpretation of this scenario. Good for you.

I figured his wife put him on a diet and he was having none (or three times) of it.

If you think Pu₂₃₈ with its half-life of 90 years is scary, check out Fe₆₀ with its half-life of 2.6 million years. That must be super scary!

/s

I’m aware that everything with a higher atomic weight than iron wants to be iron.