Don't forget that before this whole mess, the Ukrainian president was going to the EU hat in hand asking for 15 Billion Euros to pay off debts paid to Russia and to fix its infrastructure. Speaking of which, their infrastructure is in complete shambles. When Russia first took Crimea a couple days later the Russian minister of fiance was bitching about how much is was going to cost to fix Crimea (something like 15 Billion over 3 years).

So by all means, if Russia wants to take over Ukraine an incur the expense of actually fixing Ukraine... excellent, I suspect very quickly the whole thing will be a pyrrhic victory.

Also, while they're expending their military forces trying to keep the Ukrainians from engaging in an insurgency against them, we're going to keep putting the screws to them on the global market, causing their currency to go into an inflationary spiral.

As of right now, the Europeans have been hesitant about criticizing Russia too heavy because of fears about their gas supply. However, I can't imagine the Europeans will say nothing if Russia rolls in the tanks. Possibly we'll start shipping NG to the Europeans to further undercut the Russians? Who knows.

However, now that Russia has banned food imports from the EU and the US. How long before the standard of living starts spiraling downwards? I don't imagine that Putin would starve his own people, but who knows?

All Red Dwarf proves -- again -- is that the English have really low standards when it comes to comedy. Ok, you did produce Python, admittedly some of the best comedy ever, but it appears that was a fluke. You're responsible for Dr. Who, and I'll never, ever forgive you for that.

You *do* realize that the equatorial zone is generally tropical, wet as heck, and quite a bit warmer than everywhere else, yes? And that plants thrive on CO2?

Doesn't follow that making it warmer will make it drier. That doesn't seem to be how it works. Drier happens when water sources go away. There's no reasonable postulate for that which would apply to most equatorial regions.

Nah, it's almost certain to be big cats. Perfect apex predators. They can deal with heat, cold, wind; they can kill anything, climb like crazy, swim, they're fast as hell, stronger than just about anything, they instinctively use available terrain features for cover and shelter, they come equipped with deadly weapons, and they're very smart and wily. Common mutations already include thumbs and other extra digits, and they have a short enough breeding and maturation cycle that populations can recover in a very short time span, given only that mankind isn't around to defeat them using already developed technology.

Is it sane, given foreknowledge of your own demise and the power to avert it, to charge full-steam-ahead toward that demise

It's not my demise; it is the demise of others, sometime in the future. I fully expect to live out the rest of my life comfortably. I rather suspect that's the same set of conditions you face when you describe these worst case scenarios to others. Some of us are sensitive to the woes of future persons, some of us are not. But it's always at least one step removed from today's reality.

In the USA, just look at the number of people who would let the financially low performing suffer the slings and arrows of disease and injury without any particular concern or guilt; you can measure that directly by the resistance to the ACA, which remains substantial, even though it's working out pretty well if you actually take the time to look at the numbers. When people don't concern themselves with the other people in town, who are there and suffering right now, isn't it a bit optimistic to expect them to concern themselves with some abstract, unknown set of people who will exist after most of them have died anyway?

You're better off looking to technology to solve this than compassionate outlooks among the citizenry.

I'm going to go back to watching the news now, where I can learn more about us shooting up Afghanistan for no particular reason other than to prop up our MI complex, as we've kind of worn out Iraq now. You know, because we care. We'd be in Africa "helping" them too, you know, if we needed more income. I'm sure their day will come, though. Both Africa and South America are deep future market resources for our weapons manufacturers. Caring. It's what we do!

I'd expect massive droughts in the equatorial zones

Why? Equatorial zones have a great deal of ocean water, which certainly isn't going to change. That water will evaporate faster, the atmosphere will contain more humidity, and therefore there will be more precipitation, if the average temperature is up a few degrees C. How does that constitute the precursors for anticipating equatorial droughts?

I can see marginal areas (US midwest, for instance) baking off the little bit of moisture they have and not reaching any threshold of precipitation, followed by dustbowls and so on, but at the equator? Why would droughts happen there?

Proposed by those the people of OHIO voted for.

Which may be sufficient to see them ousted next time around, Ohio not being a particularly ignorant state as our states go. Here in the US, politicians think that they have to be religious to be elected (and they may still be right about that) but generally speaking, they aren't controlled by this when in office (look to corporations and the money stream for that.)

In the interim, it's worth keeping in mind the degree of scientific and technological progress that's come out of the USA.

We're not all superstitious wankers, though I can see why it might seem that way sometimes.

So I switched to MacOS. If it's not going to be transparent and I have to spend time digging around and doing system-level stuff in the non-Unix way, why not do it on a system that's at least got great UX and lots of officially supported hardware and applications?

I saw what you did there...

Anker products.

As you note, the problem with batteries is there's just so much undifferentiable import crap. Lots of it has fancy packaging.

Anker is no doubt trafficking in generics as well, but they do have their own design department (even goods like their Qi chargers that are made out of glass and metal have logos embedded in them and don't look like everyone else's generics) and when I posted a lukewarm review on Amazon ("Seems to work, nothing impressive, but good that it works.") about a phone battery, a rep with native English contacted me immediately and asked if there was anything they could do or offer to improve my experience from lukewarm to stellar.

So that at least is indicative of a company that cares. Note that I don't work for Anker, but since that experience (the phone battery was my first purchase of their products) I've purchased a number of subsequent products and none of them performed more poorly than the original OEM equipment, so that's at least something in this world of mostly fake batteries.

Yep, most likely that'll be exactly how it goes.

However, right now, it's kind of fabulous. :)

Now of course gas stations don't always have fully occupied pumps and that's the point, so that almost whenever you arrive, there's a free pump available.

Well, there's likely a pump available. It isn't generally going to be free. Tesla charging stations, however, at least for the time being...

If you thought it was a quick process to build a Supercharger station, you were clearly wrong.

If you thought I thought it was a quick process to build a Supercharger station, you were just as wrong. If you thought I cared about how long it tool them to build such as station, you were wrong about that, too. And if you thought I liked java over c, you were still wrong. I could go on -- likely longer than even I, in the name oif pushing a point until it is completely blunt, am willing to do so, but I will refrain in the interest of keeping the peace.

Anyway, as it turns out, TFS serves as a veritable smorgasbord of potential if-then-huhs that can only be explained by somewhat bemused turtles all the way down.

At this time, I'd like to take a moment to thank my dear friend Yurtle.

I like Minneapolis as a city... except for the winter. Around the end of Nov. it becomes a really brutal place to live.

2 phones, 2 kindles, 2 hand held game consoles, 2 tablets, 2 laptops, 1 netbook, 1 full size console and 1 TV.
Damn.