Apart from anything else, what happens if it turns out they're innocent? At least if someone is in prison, there's release and reparations from wrongful prosecution, conviction and imprisonment. If you kill someone and then find out later you got the wrong guy, not much you can do.

Beyond that there's a rather ancient legal principle that the punishment should fit the crime. While I want every child rapist severely punished, the fact is the child is still alive, and thus the principle is broken. If we can execute child rapists, are there are other non-lethal crimes that we should consider executing people for? How about rape of adults? How about defrauding old age pensioners? How about theft over a million dollars? How about theft of any kind?

You may say that's reductionist, but once you breach the principle, even for a notorious type of crime, you open the door for redefinition all the way down the line. And we've had legal systems where non-lethal acts, heck even non-violent acts were punishable by death. The Mosaic Code requires men who practice homosexual intercourse are to be killed, adulterers are to be killed, blasphemers, witches, rude children, death death death.

So while I can't say why you got permabanned on Reddit (or was it just a sub), which usually takes one helluva over the top post, your basic idea is incredibly problematic, and shifts punishment back across a legal principle that Cicero had established over a century before the birth of Christ. It means that a new principle (or an old one) involves the notoriety of a crime as the metric for punishment, and not the consequence. Consequence is at least to some degree objectively measurable; dump toxic goo into a stream, we can take a stab at what the damage over the short, medium and long term will be. Rape a child, and we can make some pretty good educated guesses as to what the short, medium and long term consequences for the child and their family will be. Execute people because you clutched your pearls exra-hard, and there is no line other than how upset you get by it.

Maybe a few million. The Great Leap Forward, a decade earlier, killed tens of millions. The conclusion we can draw from this is that Mao really didn't give a damn about human life. The Great Leap Forward had been about showing the Chinese populace and the world how incredibly great Mao's version of Marxism was, and ending up in mass famine. So discredited was Mao by this that people Deng Xiaoping managed to sideline him and bring some sanity back to the government. Mao didn't like being sidelined by his underlings, so sparked the Cultural Revolution to destabilize Chinese society and wrest power from Deng and Co., which he did, and Deng and the other reformers were sent off to be "re-educated". In the end Deng won; after Mao's death and the attempted coup by the Gang of Four, Deng was "rehabilitated" and handed power, and it is Deng Xiaoping who actually turned China around.

Sadly the lessons of that period seem to have been forgotten.

I found the book fairly dull and stylistically confused. Some of that perhaps comes from translation, but the awkward plot and stylistic issues almost certainly are built into the story itself. I finished it only be sheer effort alone, because of its reputation, but honestly I found its reputation to be ill-deserved. It just isn't a very good book. I can't imagine subjecting myself to watching a miniseries version of it.

Driving down the wrong side of the street may get you to work faster, but also leads to fatal head on collisions. But other than that, it can work!

That's a punch straight to my McRibs.

If there's no explicit or implicit threat, then not really. I mean, I suppose a President or their representative could say "Industry X, clean up your act, or I'll use my executive powers and/or petition Congress to pass new laws to force you to clean up your act." The latter is more strident, certainly is a threat, but not one that implies any unconstitutional threat (unless, of course, specific remedies are not available via Executive Powers or Congress refuses to play ball). In the case of the bully pulpit, it's the equivalent of a parent of an adult child telling them stop eating so much junk food, in the latter it's the adult parent saying "You won't be allowed to eat from our fridge and I'll ask the Johnsons not to let you scarf back their food either."

Well, that's kind of where concepts like conspiracy come into play. Clearly wagging your finger at Facebook and X and telling them to stop spreading naughty stuff doesn't even represent much of an implicit threat. Strongly implying to your supporters that they can prevent Congress from certifying the electoral votes seems a fundamentally different activity.

Presidents lecture and cajole all the time. The notion of the "bully pulpit" pretty much goes back to the beginning of the United States. That's not to say that all statements made by a President or member of the Administration is merely finger wagging. But telling people to eat less sugar or telling social media to stop assisting in the spread of misinformation are both more examples of a President using their moral authority (such as the office of the Presidency or individual Presidents may have moral authority). If Mark Zuckerburg or Elon Musk feel coerced by a US Administration lecturing them, perhaps it isn't SCOTUS they should be consulting, but the mirrors one presumes they have in their houses.

I'd argue overhyping is inherent in any kind of marketing and sales. I mean you never see a Ford commercial that says "Yeah, our F150 has four wheels, pretty much performs within the same parameters as our Dodge and Toyota counterparts, mileage isn't really any better, and our heated seats have about the same likelihood of malfunctioning and burning you alive as your neighbor's brand new Ram."

Everything in capitalism is one degree of fairy tale or another. It's how you beat out competition that are selling essentially the same product as you are. Am I the only person that watched the "It's Toasted" sequence from Mad Men? I don't actually think I'm going to have an orgasm if I chew minty gum, but the implication is kind of there.

Has a President or members of the Administration using the bully pulpit ever been seen as anti-constitutional? Surely an Administration has the right to lecture, cajole and whine. If Federal agents are showing up and forcing Mark Zuckerberg to type "I will not repost Nazi slogans" two hundred times, well sure, at that point lines have been crossed. But finger wagging, even vigorous finger wagging?

Here's the real problem with all of this. It isn't economically viable simply because the externalities aren't factored in at the point of initial manufacturing. We have built an economic system that is heavily reliant on basically mortgaging the present and demanding the future pay for it; a sort of vast buy now, pay later (and by later we mean decades). If manufacturing plastics, glass and everything else had the long-term costs factored in up front, I suspect recycling in all cases would look more attractive.

Presuming you could do it at all (and that's a pretty big assumption) it isn't going to be blown away in a few years. It would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years for the atmosphere to decay. It certainly would endure long enough for a colonization effort, but that presumes you can pull it off, and again, that's a massive "if". You would need some really huge rockets to intercept and redirect comets and other material to start bulking up the atmosphere.

In a future where we have fusion or some other form of energy, aka Star Trek, I suppose why not. A few decades or centuries of robot spacecraft smunching stuff into Mars wouldn't cost much more than not doing it at all.

What I've heard as a rough estimate is that if somehow someone was able to give Mars a dense atmosphere (thicken it with water vapor, nitrogen and a whole more CO2 to create a greenhouse effect) it would probably endure for a million years, but without replenishment, eventually the solar wind will indeed just blow it away. As to create a sufficient magnetic field, well, I don't see how it's actually possible to create that large a magnetic field without a helluva lot of energy. I don't know if there is an engineering solution without magical far future technology to shield Mars' atmosphere from the solar wind. I've read of some guys suggesting we bombard the planet with comets and other debris to kick start the various cycles (carbon, nitrogen, water) as well as create a whole lot of heat to start melting the large amounts of water, but for that we're talking if not super far future planetary engineering, then at least we're talking about really big rocket engines (probably nuclear) shoving all kinds of gunk at Mars from every corner of the solar system.

Who knows, maybe in a few centuries the technology will exist to pull it off. Mars certainly seems the most likely body in the solar system to terraform. It is, by some estimates, still in the Goldilocks zone, so providing there's a sufficiently dense atmosphere with enough CO2 to actually capture more solar radiation, it might work. But it really would take a whole other level of technology to protect that atmosphere from steadily being eroded, and stop everyone from getting horrible cancers along the way.

That should have been done 20 years ago. Back in the 70s-90s, it made sense. Cable companies were given monopolies to incentivize them stringing cable all over the place so they could recoup their expenses. They have made back their money. Now, they're just milking the people.

LK

Fuck you! I use tar for all my version management. Now get off my lawn!

Yes, well, Democrats didn't use the magic formula "To Protect Our Children!" as in "We Need Everyone To Have Large Capacity Semi-automatics TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!" or "We Need To Keep Vomiting Vast Quantities of GHG's Into The Atmosphere And Allow Poisoning Of Water Sheds TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!"