A while here too.

I remember earth gov went ever more extremist in a right wing direction. Babylon 5 ended up declaring independence, and later led a coalition to liberate the people of earth.

To anyone who’s seen it, the spoiler definitely counts as a mild /s

The series Expeditionary Force" by Craig Alanson actually plays on this.

Spoiler to protect those who might want to read the series.

While there are a lot of parenting books, it’s only in the last few years that it has been properly studied, scientifically. My generation of parents is one of the first to be able to truly make use of the advancements.

Basically, it wasn’t that handbooks didn’t exist (when the episode was made), but that they contradicted each other.

Trying to ban them would be extraordinarily difficult. A potential solution would be to push to reclassify them as trucks, under trucking regulations (I’m unsure how this is done in the US). Once you need a tachograph and a requirement to keep driving records, it would cut back on sales. It also still allows “legitimate” usage. This would weaken the argument against the change.

Basically anything where you can’t see a 5 year old within 0.5m of your bumper should be under “truck” rules, not “car” rules.

You just reminded me of the bit where they discover that fucking with causality is BAD.

I do love how the side effects (leaking improbability) were critical to the story making any plausible sense.

Throw in bistro-mathematics as an alternative star drive.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

Making a lot of us angry. Unfortunately we are not as good as the french at complaining about it.

We also have the issue of this party being the better of the 2 viable options.

There’s talk of a new party forming, to the left of modern labour. Unfortunately, in a FPTP system, that can split the vote and make things worse, if done poorly.

It’s more the power that can be applied. Most people capable of getting a pedal bike up to those speeds also know how to read the road for safety. Even then, bikes can basically disintegrate in a (initially) minor accident.

A powered bike is capable of destroying itself if misused.

It’s often one way or the other. “Get away from me!”, or “more babies!” Pregnancy hormones do a complete number on the mother. That’s before having a parasite attached to you near 24/7, demanding your attention, day or night!

Interestingly, her pheromones can do a similar job on any males around her (both human and dog). That was an interesting surprise.

That’s a trick many/most breeds of dog can pull off. It’s amazing how well a wet nose, and a slobbery smile shoved in your face can break a bad cycle.

There’s a reason they are used as emotional support animals so often. They can guard us from ourselves almost as well as this dog did the sheep from coyotes.

Proviso of this is that, globally, politicians grow a spine, along with a sense of morality, and long term planning. It would also require them to deal with the money hoarding issues with the hyper rich.

• The first step is a massive push for renewables. They should be representing 200-500% of grid demand regularly. If nuclear can get up to speed and be part of this, great, but we can’t wait on it.

• That excess power should be soaked up by large scale, portable, energy storage. Green hydrogen is the current best option, but synthetic fossil fuels could also take up the slack. Depending on the area, desalination could also be combined into this.

• We seriously decarbonise the transport networks. For vans and smaller, electric vehicles win. BYD have demonstrated that low cost electric cars are viable. For larger vehicles, where electric becomes inefficient, hydrogen is viable. This is where a lot of the excess hydrogen will be going.

• Carbon credits with teeth. Rather than relying on a planned economy mindset, we can make capitalism work for us. We need a global fixed carbon emission limit. This limit should trend towards net zero on a preset timetable. Credits are bid on, akin to stock market trades. Companies must have credits by the end of the year/period. The fine for not having credits should be a multiple of the closing credits price (10x?). The fine for falsification should be multiples of that, erring towards corporate execution levels.

This will force easy savings out of the market quickly. It will then force compulsory emitters to factor in Carbon costs.

• Combined with the carbon credits will be negative credits. If a group takes a ton of CO² out of the air, long term, they gain a new credit. They can sell this to emitters. This will provide the CO² emissions industry requires, while meeting net zero.

An example of this might be large scale bio capture on the open ocean. Grow seaweed etc on pontoons, and turn it into a solid. This can then be locked up (old coal mines?) taking carbon out permanently.

• Geo engineering. There are multiple methods of reducing incident sunlight on the earth. Everything from powders in the upper atmosphere, to mylar solar shades at the Lagrange point. They will be short term fixes, but will buy us time.

None of these require massive reductions in quality of life. They do require changes in how we do things. It’s also worth noting that I’ve not covered the numerous problems to be solved e.g. power grid upgrades to account for renewables. None of these should be insurmountable however, just engineering, or political/policing challenges.

An no, I’ve no fucking idea how to get politicians to grow a spine and do what’s required for our long term comfort/survival. Fixing the planet? That’s just a (really big) engineering problem. Fixing human nature? …Fuck knows.

It depends how deep they are. I run into a depressing number that have just been caught up in the misinformation storm. Getting them to stop and think often helps recalibrate their thinking.

It doesn’t help much on those that are deep enough their ego is heavily involved.

As a late diagnosed aspie, I fully get that. I also know that vaccines save a lot of lives, including fellow autistics.

The phrasing is also fun to derail the brains of people complaining about vaccines. It can bypass their mental defences and makes them think for a moment. It doesn’t work on the hard core, but the casual idiots are easier to deprogram.

Vaccines do increase autism numbers.

Most childhood vaccines are administered before symptoms of autism generally appear. A lot of children owed their lives to vaccines, and so got to develop autism, rather than dying.

It’s worth noting that their job has zero room for errors. They are expected to be basically invisible, outside of the ceremonial parts. They are also (I believe) authorised for live fire, at their own discretion.

They walk a political tightrope, and the last major fuck up I heard about was decades back now.

I believe the king’s guard only recruits from enlisted veterans. They also have to have been deployed to an active warzone. In those terms, it’s both quite relaxed and an important position. The pomp and ceremony that visitors see is only a small part of their job.

It’s likely more down to social cohesion. Smaller villages all know each other (or at least passingly aware). They also don’t have a huge pool of workers to draw upon.

If all your staff agree it’s an issue, then finding replacement staff won’t be trivial. Also, a large chunk of your customer base likely agrees. Finally, a small pub is unlikely to be run by a big shot CEO. They will have a lot more empathy than the average middle manager.

That’s why most poker players use static probabilities. It gets even worse when there uncertainty involved. E.g. your 40% sure a player had an AK before folding. Along with an 80% they didn’t have a spade.

The Human mind is incredibly good at doing calculations like this. Unfortunately it has to be learnt, and is in the form of “feels” rather than actionable probabilities.