Well, this isn't quite a new low in first posts. After all, Golden Girls, Gaping nether parts and blatant misspellings are just rampant in our attempt to be the first to reply to these important and challenging topics.

But the drug's name, verapamil, is the 13th word in TFS. How long does that take to read?

Slow down Cowboy! We're here all day!

Paperboy?

Bonus?

Are these English words?

Nobody summoned you this time. It was just snoring.

Patience is a virtue.

Which isn't true at all. Islam has gone through many twists and turns and in fact, there are a number of competing 'versions' of Islam duking it out at present. Can't look it up at the moment, but there is an article in The Atlantic online that speaks to that. Plenty of other references as well.

Personally, I think they're all insane, but I;m obviously a minority.

The cost to isolate a tailings pile for, say, 1000 years is significant. Probably on the order of 10% of total costs (concrete dams rather than earthen, decent overburden covering) - so pennies, but a lot of them. Still and all reasonable but likely only in a country with a strong rule of law and strong environmental enforcement. China gets a pass on both - at least for the moment.

IIRC, doubling rare earth costs would increase the average electronic device by a couple of dollars - small, but not insignificant especially given the margins on these things. And if some country is holding down costs for whatever reason, they will win the short term economic race.

Murphy's Law?

In the US we have these things which do pretty much that. I'm sure similar vessels exist in other areas. And these are tiny little things compared with what the oil industry uses to move rigs around and maintain them.

Remember the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon mess? It was over 50 feet tall and was placed on the bottom of the ocean at a depth of 1600 meters. The technology is there, it's a matter of whether it is economically feasible to utilize it.

On the Internet, no one knows that you're a goldfish.

The problem isn't the engineering per se. It's getting the costs of the necessary engineering down to a level that makes this economically viable. They probably won't succeed (most similar installations have yet to) but they probably will learn something. And perhaps they will manage it - it certainly doesn't involve any higher grade technology than your average deep sea drilling rig or LNG floating production system.

For fairly low values of 'solved'. Boats and especially submarines (which is what these things are to some degree) are cranky and expensive of maintenance. Few people realize this, but the term 'boat' is really an acronym (Bring On Another Thousand).

Posted, amusingly enough, from my sailboat, on which I am fighting yet another chapter in the endless war between salt water and any man made material.

Bah, you can fix any marine electrical problem with enough WD-40.

Look, if the President isn't getting any, how much hope do you think there is for the rest of us?

Because

TL;DR- planes aren't subways

Now that's a pretty dystopian world. Worse than Blade Runner.