larkeith

In the long term, they're pretty much the most important missions possible - even absent disasters, Earth only has so many resources, so designing and testing the technology for extraterrestrial habitation is rather essential.

Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.

> You can't opt out of competition any more than you can opt out of gravity.

Perhaps not as an individual, but I wonder about as a society - I don't know how we would get to this point, but imagine the sheer potential we as a culture could unlock by moving to a more cooperative model; consider the billions upon billions of person-hours wasted on things like stock trading, internal politicking, and marketing/advertising: all the things that provide no value to the race, but "required" to facilitate interpersonal competition.

Of course, none of that is against your primary point, which is that hard work is still, on the whole, required. It just irritates me to see competition equated to a law of nature; we're not animals, we can choose whether and how competition applies.

> "Water is blue because it mirrors the sky."

Seeing that people believe this was quite unexpected, at first - it's such an obvious phenomenon looking down into any slightly deep body of water. But on reflection, it makes sense: many (most?) people in the world might live most or all of their lives without going beyond the shorelines of a sea, ocean, or larger lake/river.

It's a good reminder to always be critical of the assumptions you make, and how much they depend on your own context.

(If you ever get the opportunity, visit Crater Lake. The drop from blue to midnight to pitch is beautiful.)

Personally, I much prefer the manual ones, where I can trivially tweak the settings without having to think about it or look away from the road. But that's in part because I usually have the windows down, so constant adjustment is needed to compensate for speed, outside temp, wind speed/direction, etc. - at this point, changing it is second nature. With a touchscreen, even if I could get used to the lack of tactile feedback, it's impossible to know if the right screen is up without looking away from the road (the same issue arises with radio settings).

This demonstrates the amazing savings of crowdsourcing appeals.

It only took 2-3 hours for Apple to assess the PR cost of banning the app and decide it's not worth the income increase.

Throw enough nukes around and Europa might start to look a pleasant alternative.

And that's in the best case. In reality, consumers don't get anywhere near a local maximum, as they are neither well-informed nor entirely rational.

Well, IIRC no BD-10 ever actually went supersonic.

Or the rest of Y2020, for that matter.

You can do some of that with uBO (see "hard" blocking mode), but my understanding is that uMatrix gives you more granular control. I need to learn more about using uMatrix to confirm, though.

`datetime.fromisoformat()`, as of 3.7 :D

Though `dateutil` is still recommended for most cases.

You can also disable JS via uBlock Origin by default, and enable it on a site-by-site basis.

IIRC you can mitigate this by lowering network.http.redirection-limit