Probably whoever gave them the sofas

I always liked the extended version:

They might not have made it impossible, but most of this book banning crap has been political point scoring rather than actual attempts to change the literary record for its own sake. Now they’d have to loudly proclaim their book bans without admitting what they’re doing, which sounds a lot harder to pull off.

Anything that underlines the offensive nature of censorship like this is a good thing in my opinion.

I’d guess the requirement that experienced librarians make the decisions is just another way to exclude politicians and random mums with opinions from the process, I imagine most who go through a library sciences degree have already got a healthy respect for libraries which limits their willingness to play these stupid games.

I don’t disagree with your views on Boeing, but this incident is quite likely not related to Boeings problems, (other than their hard-earned public perception problem). Plane engines shouldn’t catch fire, but they do, whether that is rare bad luck or somebody screwed up is yet to be decided, but it sounds like this is not a newly minted plane, Boeing probably hasn’t touched it in years.

Not that Boeing hasn’t earned their public perception problem, but accidents happened before Boeing lost their mojo, and will continue to happen even if Boeing regain it. This incident may well turn out to have lessons once the investigation is done, and some might be directed at Boeing, but that’s not where I’d put my money this time around, it sounds unlikely that they caused this particular incident.

I’ve always thought it’d be useful to pursue just as a backstop: you set a carbon tax to whatever the cost of sucking the co2 back out is, and then you have net zero.

I guess it’d have to be introduced slowly to 1. Give them time to develop lower costs before bankrupting literally everyone and 2. Reduce the shock of painfully high carbon tax, and give everyone time to jump for cheaper alternatives. But it feels like the closest to a proper solution that I can imagine.

Hay-fever and melanomas: no, the beauty is not for you

I’m curious how you’d phrase it, there is a law in Ukraine and it is widely reported to apply to “men aged 18 to 60”. What phrasing would more accurately depict the current situation without having the problems you list? If you meant instead that the law itself is problematic, then I can understand that, it’s received some criticism for that side of things.

Yeah, the switch has an entire core locked off and everything is downclocked to improve battery life and control temperatures. No doubt this emulation gives everything more clock cycles (and perhaps an extra core?). Probably very short on battery and possibly very hot too.

Whilst I agree that universal consuming nanobots are a bit far fetched, I’m not sure I’m sold on the replication problem.

Life has replication errors on purpose because we’re dependent on it for mid to long term survival.

It’s easy to write program code with arbitrarily high error protection. You could make a program that will produce 1 unhandled error for every 100000 consumed universes, and it wouldn’t be particularly hard, you just need enough spare space.

Mutation and cancer are potential problems for technology, but they’re decidedly solvable problems.

Life only makes it hard because life is chaotic and complex, there’s not an error correcting code ratio we can bump from 5 to 20 and call it a day.

Is there a difference between the 2? If cancer is the main side effect of this level of radiation exposure, then being more resistant to cancer is also being more adapted to radiation.

Tldr: in this “revolution” we get to play the part of the horses from the Industrial Revolution.

The last revolution made more and better jobs for horses at the start. Then it made less and zero jobs for horses. This one could be the same for humans.

Ok, apart from human rights, workers rights, rebalancing funds to poorer regions, free trade, free movement, a voice at the table, straight bananas, peace in Europe, and endless examples of consumer rights, what has the EU done for us?!

Militaries are typically tasked with protecting more than themselves. If someone invaded Britain then the military wouldn’t have to wait until the invaders had shot a soldier to start defending the country.

A better question is whether they are attacking US and UK citizens/ equipment.

I assure you we’re not, and we seem to disagree pretty fundamentally, possibly you’re confused by the fact I replied to my own comment, but I assure you that was just because I was a bit drunk and couldn’t find the edit button

Just to add, I think the reason bankruptcy needs to exist is to ensure there is no burden on the government enforcing inefficient debt collection. It’s not about fairness or second chances, those are just happy side effects. But if someone’s business model relies on government enforced punishment to function it’s a wasteful model from the governments perspective. Allowing people to go bankrupt means nobody will benefit from this model of debt collection, and thus saves the courts and government to focus on more beneficial contract law involving large amounts of wealth, rather than millions of pittances that cost the government more than they earn the loan sharks.

Trying to control the lives of millions of people because they were too stupid with their finances is a very inefficient solution to the problem (also unpalatable). I think the far simpler option is to simply stop protecting anyone giving bad debt. The government has less work to do, people learn to be smart in what debt they offer, because if they start offering people the moon for punishing but distant costs, they’ll get nothing.

Your solution relies on every human being smart. Mine doesn’t care how smart people are, it ensures the problem is self correcting. Much neater, much less societal harm. Who actually cares about “punishing stupid debtors” when you can instead just not have any stupid debtors.

Don’t loan what they can’t afford to repay. Easy. Not everyone was stupid enough to offer debt up to people’s eyeballs, and many weren’t “fortunate” enough to even try.

Stupid games cause stupid prizes, for everyone involved. Bankruptcy exists for a reason and it was foolish to ever allow any debt to bypass it. Humans always have and always will act in their immediate best interests with a hopeful view of the future, and the best way to accommodate normal behaviour is to balance discouraging it (by encouraging the specialists in debt to refuse bad debt by punishing them with unrepaid loans) and ensuring the people caught in the system can still be functional in society since that is better for them, society, and everyone except the idiots who loaned them money they were never paying back.

Or maybe etymology is strongly discouraged amongst wizards, because spells work on the belief of the caster and any etymological knowledge could ruin a perfectly good spell. Every now and again a good spell-caster’s career is ruined because they sat near the wrong nerd at a bar and now can’t forget that in the original Morrispanian the word all their fire spells start with meant “tepid”.

Makes sense to do the power hungry and experimental research into carbon reduction next to a cheap and carbon free energy source though

Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.