[Laughs]

There was a huge amount of corruption and fraud in the previous election. (And in most of the elections. The Crimean "president" got just a few percent of the vote but was appointed by a corrupt Crimean parliament.) That's what started the protests. Same thing happened the last time the Russians rigged an election in the Ukraine. (When they weren't poisoning anti-Russian candidates, and straight up murdering critical journalists.)

It wasn't a coup. The Ukrainian military stayed mostly out of it. It was a popular uprising.

The Russian-puppet President in Crimea "asked" for Russian "assistance", not "the people of Crimea". And the referendum held after the invasion is hardly a measure of actual popular opinion. Putin gets 95+% in his elections. That's how Russian "democracy" works.

Helium-3 fusion is more difficult than deuterium fusion, so we'll likely have deuterium fusion first. One of the waste products of deuterium fusion is He3; and you can increase production artificially by adding lithium linings to deuterium fusion reactors. OTOH, the amount of He3 in the lunar soil is infinitesimal. It will always be vastly cheaper to produce it artificially on Earth. Hell, it's probably cheaper to produce it artificially in deuterium reactors on the moon, than it would be to mining it from lunar regolith.

Moreso, once we have any kind of fusion, the whole economics of space development could change. For example, we have no idea if the same fusion technology would allow cheap fusion rockets, etc. So trying to justify a development today by predicting a development in 20 or 50 years, is foolish.

Helium-3 mining is a stupid reason to go to the moon, it just makes space-advocates look like idiots.

Ethnically, it wasn't Russian until the 1940's when Stalin deported (and murdered) a shitload of locals and trucked in Russian-speaking replacements.

Before that, it was no more Russian than India was "English".

Putin apologists are weird. Russia signed an explicitly unambigious agreement to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and existing borders. Putin violated that agreement. It's not complicated.

Landing on the moon and taking off again adds 4km/s delta-v to the energy cost of going to Mars.

Plus launching from lunar orbit into Mars transfer orbit is less efficient than launching from LEO directly into MTO, due to Oberth inefficiencies.

The net effect is that there's no benefit from using the moon as an intermediate step, unless the cost of manufacturing fuel on the moon is vastly less than the cost of launching it from Earth into LEO. However, the equipment cost for mining, purifying, and electrolysing polar ice into hydrogen/oxygen, then liquefying the cryo-gases into fuel tanks and launching those tanks back into Lunar orbit (using yet more lunar fuel) is likely to be ridiculously high.

Russia signed a specific agreement with Ukraine (and with Georgia and other FSRs) in order to get them to give their (formerly Soviet) nuclear arsenal back to Russia, that Russia would "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine", "refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine", etc etc.

Putin violated that agreement. Every former Soviet republic knows that Russia won't honour any agreements, and that they all boned themselves by giving those nukes back.

Care to offer a definition of "planet" that would include Pluto but rule out Eris/Sedna/Makemake/Haumea/Ceres/etc?

American astronomer Michael Brown discovered Eris, Sedna, Makemake, and Haumea.

Nobody has. He's still listed as the discoverer of Pluto. Just as Piazzi is still listed as the discoverer of Ceres, even though it too lost its early status as a "planet".

The Romans didn't know how to make cement. They knew how to make concrete by using a specific volcanic sand from a particular area, mixed with lime.

They didn't know why it worked, nor how to identify other sources, nor how to make it from less pure sources. They were cooks who knew how to use flour, but didn't know how to make flour once their initial supply ran out. Cut off the trade in magic sand and the concrete made from other sources was weak, worthless for building.

Plenty of communities across post-Roman western Europe knew how to make cement mortar. It just wasn't anywhere near as a strong as Roman concrete because no-one else had the right magic sand either, nor knew why less-magic sand worked, or didn't work, hence the right way to cook it to make it more-magic. So it tended to be restricted to things like mosaics, not entire buildings.

Food yes. But it will be years before we use up the housing and clothing we already have.

Housing and clothing are issues in a disaster that physically destroys housing/property in excess of casualties, leaving people alive but homeless. Floods, quakes, etc. Regional disasters, not global civilisation killers.

They don't need to. By merely switching to silent mode when they detect (somehow) that they are in a car, they are still usable to passengers to make outbound calls/text, play games, or check their incoming. [This means they can also still be used by drivers, but I don't believe the intent is to stop drivers from initiating calls/texts. Just to stop incoming calls/texts/alerts/updates/etc which people have trained themselves, Pavlovian style, to always respond to.]

Screens and radios are apparently much less distracting than phones. Driver's can choose when it's safe to glance. (Presumably TV's would be more distracting. And modern car-radios with dozens of tiny little black-on-black buttons are probably worse than your granddad's chromed push-button car-radio, but the audio itself is not that bad.)

As for GPS, there was research by... BMW?... some years back that showed that voice-guidance (spoken turn-by-turn nav) drastically increased crash rates. Probably for the same reason that phones are so distracting, the device shouts for attention regardless of what the driver is doing. Yet in most (all?) units, voice-guidance still can't be turned off at all. (Nor is it banned in any country.)

Judge just says, "First to permanently fix it for us wins the case."

Dude, no-one is a "developer" straight out of high school. Kids who learn basic web-hosted programming skills in high school are still going to do a college-level course before even the most entry-level coding job.

How exactly is that disagreeing with the parent post, or with Bloomberg?

Laws have comments. Things like introductions, framing statements, etc. In fact there's an art to reading laws in order to separate the "code" from the "comments", in order to get to the stuff you need to know. And then the specific laws have whole libraries of case-law, regulations, and other dependencies which you need to know in order to apply the "code" to a specific situation.

Technical people make terrible politicians. Some can become good technocrats, in a non-democracy, but generally not good politicians.

Oblig

OTOH, people who studied programming/CS are likely have intelligence in the top few percent. That makes it easier for them to pick up any new, similarly technical subject, even after they are outside the high brain plasticity age bracket. Which makes them a poor model for the general population.

"Coal miners", or equivalent, generally aren't in the top few percent, or even top ten percent. So once they are outside the age of rapid learning, retraining is going to be extremely difficult.

I put "coal miners" in quotes, because today mining is a high pay, high skill job. [At least it is in this country.]

Indeed. And one of the ways of doing that is not destroying their parents' livelihoods faster than society can adapt. Children of the long term unemployed (or underemployed) have a much lower chance of reaching an education level (and hence work) commensurate with their true capability. That reduces social mobility, resulting in multi-generational welfare dependency.