The (current, at any rate) lack of geographic identification probably hurts emotional engagement a bit. The more successful team sports have a nearly magical ability to grab the audience in some primitive part of their little hominid brain that used to handle inter-tribal combat and allow them to experience, by proxy, the emotional indulgence of victory or defeat against the away tribe. It's really pretty weird. Especially weird is how easily the affect of the game bleeds over into other things, like the traditional rioting and setting cars on fire, or the stock market...

Until they come up with a way of inspiring the same large-scale insanity in their audience, 'e-sports' are going to have a difficult time competing.

Whoa there. This was no mere bad judgement call. Having him thrown off the plane was over-the-top malicious, totally beyond what I ever expect from anyone who is "having a bad day." I sincerely believe such a person really shouldn't be in any sort of position where they might have that amount of power over other people.

Put a hundred random people in the same sort of bad-day position, and I don't expect one of them to behave like this one did. This one is truly exceptional, and does not merely "have bad days." This is the kind of person whose news stories are usually headlined something like "gunman kills five then self."

I might be willing to excuse them, if say, their psychiatrist were to explain how this was anomalous for their character and that their medication was defective, or something like that. OTOH that can be handled in their lawsuit against the medication manufacturer, and then this psycho will never need a job where they exercise power over other people again.

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where that statement doesn't imply sarcasm...

Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.

Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.

Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.

I happen to be the executive who works at Southwest and made the decision, upon seeing the tweet, to call the gate and have him kicked off. Please allow me to explain my decision.

I work in the PR department, and managing publicity is my job. When I saw the tweet, I realized it was bad publicity. I don't like my company getting bad publicity, and I seek to avoid it, or replace it with good publicity.

So I threw our tweeting customer off, thereby solving the bad publicity problem! See? Now do you get it?

...

(Why is everyone looking at me like I'm a idiot?)

How can you be so crass as to bring filthy, filthy, empiricism to a discussion about government?

Only people who lack faith in the a priori truths of Objectivism would be so base as to drag some nonsense about "what is actually happening" into the discussion. It's simply a fact that absolutely anything a government does is just a cover for expropriating the wealth creators and building a cadre of elitist bureaucrats to centrally mismanage things.

I think that Newsmax, 'linkbait for reactionary old people', is behind much of that. They are ostensibly a political thing; but their advertising leans heavily into (sometimes rather dubious) tabloid medical reporting when there isn't a good red-meat issue to run banner ads about.

Only when we aren't trying to figure out why the planes keep asphyxiating them; but in theory, yes...

This seems like a sensible approach, I just hope that it isn't accompanied by a raft of broad and dubious patents that purport to cover pretty much any 'printing something to fit someone' application. That would both serve as ammunition against a broad range of printing applications and be unjustified given the things that have already been 3d printed for medical applications(usually on a small scale). If they have something more specific, covering programmatically generating customized deformable shapes for best fit, or some elegant manufacturing twist, that may well be all good; but it would be unfortunate to see something overbroad.

On the plus side, they might actually survive that. If memory serves aircraft helmets (while probably not as concerned with ballistics as infantry ones) are supposed to at least not endanger the pilot, and ideally to protect him, during fairly violent maneuvers like ejection.

That said, I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to find out.

I would suggest that you give more thought to 'races' where outnumbering the opponent and firing anti-aircraft weapons at them from the ground is acceptable...

Even if we suspect that a nasty shooting war with a modern adversary is in the cards, it's a bit of a problem that our current next generation super plane costs so much that we'll necessarily have them in quite limited numbers and be unwilling and (in a conflict of any nontrivial size or duration) unable to expose them to serious risks.

This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard. Obviously the cost of pilots means that the US isn't going to be doing many aerial human wave attacks (short of a WWII-style mobilization); but we certainly aren't going to be fielding larger air forces, or ones better able to resupply after losses, because our fancy aircraft cost north of $100 million a pop.

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. But this immediate rush to blame/defend lets rumors fly around while the truth takes its time.

But where will the US get its supply of mutant kangaroos?

..the sale is criminalized in The Netherlands.

My point is that the court's recent decision suggests the above is an outdated, quaint law which no longer reflects the society that The People wish to have, nor which reflects the new way of thinking about reponsibility and the relationship between demand and the victimizing acts which serve that demand.

Thus, I'm sure the Dutch people will soon be revising their kiddie porn laws. Huh? Whaddya mean, "no?" Why not? ;-)

Indeed, it carries MUCH more precision than just "Ebola", which can mean any of the following:

"Ebola River" is a tributary to the Congo River.

"Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever" was the name of a disease first discovered in people living in the remote Ebola River watershed.

"Ebola Virus" (abbrev. "EBOV") is the infectious agent that causes "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever"

"Ebolavirus" is the taxonomic genus to which the "Ebola virus" belongs.

"Ebola Virus Disease (abbrev. "EVD") is now the more common name for Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. We can call it that because we have definitively identified the infectious agent that causes the disease (EBOV). Changing the name pre-emptively differentiates EVD from other hemorrhagic diseases that might arise from the same area.

Laymen simply say "Ebola" and let their audience sort out what they mean -- if indeed they mean anything precisely. I once had this conversation with an elderly relative.

Relative: 90% of bats have rabies.

Me: That's hard to believe.

Relative: It's true! I read it in the paper.

So I went to the paper and found out that she had it hopelessly garbled. TEN percent of bats SUBMITTED FOR TESTING had positive SCREENING tests.