What are you talking about?

Wow, what a sight to behold. It was pretty hard to stay quiet while watching that streak of light come down with everybody cheering. Probably the first "USA! USA!" chant I've ever heard that was both entirely well-deserved and not even a little bit sarcastic. An historic occasion indeed. :-)

Congratulations SpaceX, this is like that 4th launch where everyone suddenly went from doubt to astonishment.

Amen.
(Useless post to undo accidental bad mod.)

Fascinating!

In the longer term though, when it becomes normal to live right next to your workplace for everyone, you would be much more tied to not losing your job. Imagine how much commuting would suck!

That's what you already get in the EU: there is a column for nutritional content per unit mass (100mg, for solids) or volume (100ml, for liquids) as well as a column for content per product. At a glance you can compare different substances using the first column, or read your total energy input if you eat it from the second.

Given how much certain processed food ingredients seem to affect our 'digestive behavior', however, I feel that looking at just the basic nutritional content is only half the story at best.

You bring up an interesting point: while we do expend some effort doing psychological research to assess the honesty of people (and it's well-accepted that humans have an innate desire for correct information - even if this can be subverted), those same people might make radically different choices when put into inpersonal positions (such as CEO or marketing employee). Their actions are then taken as an extension of the organisation, rather than an expression of personal convictions. Thus it feels more like the company's present situation (and expectations of superiors) is the thing dictating the choices they make, rather than them; this makes any assessment of the person's honesty in normal social circumstances all but irrelevant.

Interestingly, this illusion seems to disappear when people break rules. THEN we see them as acting out of their own interest.

LOL. You couldn't be further from the truth. They have a "free market", sure, I'll give you that, but it's a free market in the American sense. Quality of services and products do not matter beyond some bare minimum, as friendships, kickbacks, manipulative marketing practices and sheer piles of money have orders of magnitude more influence than anything else. They have such a free market that you can't even buy proper food in many places, because nutritional content is a rather expensive thing and it's been optimized out where possible. That is perfectly in line with a functioning free market, by the way, and I'm not exaggerating here. The milk you buy in stores is almost entirely made of milk powder (you can increase milk content by paying more, but you can't just *get milk* like you can anywhere just accross the border), and that's just normal. 2-to-3-ton SUVs are the *majority* of traffic (!) in the capital and if you see a Hummer driving down THE SIDEWALK people are just getting out of the way because they are more afraid of the asshole driving it than they are of getting run over. Money just elevates you out of the population without any sort of need for control. You open your mouth against any random asshole, that happens to have a lot of it (and they are all over the place), and you get rammed off the road and beaten to a pulp or simply shot by members of the armed forces. Is that your definition of freedom and democracy?

This country needed the EU a lot more than the EU needed it; it is run by barbarians, and is still a place where might makes right. The parallels to the USA are hard to ignore but the Ukrainians simply never even experienced what freedom is. In the USA, at least in the past, some people did get that chance, and can now remember what it was like.

(Disclaimer: I just got back from there. The above applies to the - comparatively Western - capital. Everywhere else the divides are hundreds of times worse, and that's before you even consider the conflict.)

No it's not. That's just as blind to the facts as the "oh god NUCULAR WEAPONS" crowd is. Nobody (as far as I can tell) is saying you're going to die (or even be affected) where you live, who knows how far away from Japan. Nobody is saying this single event will cause the end of civilisation. It won't, because the vast majority of the radiation released was injected into a different food chain that we barely know anything about - the ocean. If you really think the pollution released into the air is the biggest problem here, you're ignoring nearly the entire effect of the catastrophe.

Remember, we're talking about reactor fuel meltdown, not a nuclear explosion. Just like Chernobyl, the explosions that did happen were relatively harmless hydrogen gas explosions that would have been incapable of damaging anything outside of the industrial compound. Once containment is breached, however, you are talking about large amounts of radioactive material submersed in a moving liquid/gas environment. The damage is no longer local and is cumulative, and increases with every minute spent dispersing unstable isotopes into the gas/liquid. You don't have to approach a lethal direct dose - anywhere - for it to spread through the entire food chain and alter life at the most basic level (cell and DNA reproduction itself).

This is a problem that you can't debug, or fix, or predict (irradiation effects only become predictable _well_ above random mutation level, where direct effects start happening, but if you get to that point in the environment your only option now is to leave the planet) once atmospheric dilution has begun, and it will start affecting us *long* before we notice any increase in cancer rates, deformed babies or miscarriages (look up the orphanages in Minsk, btw!). Before that starts happening, we will have extinguished or corrupted most of the species that are a lot less radiation-tolerant than we are. Like insects, which plants depend on for reproduction. Which, in turn, nearly everything else depends on.

Now realize that we are ACTUALLY discussing a triple reactor meltdown that *actually happened* right next to one of the largest material-carrying currents that exist in our atmosphere; containment was breached allowing liquid to flow right in and out of the 3 reactors; that contamination has been happening continuously for the past *THREE YEARS*.

I, too am frustrated by sensationalism and fearmongering surrounding nuclear power generation, but I swear since Fukushima happened and the initial scare faded, the "it's completely safe because you need a lot of radiation to kill someone" crowd has been doing more damage than the fear crowd ever did.

Hungary here, I'm getting 120/15 Mbps for less than $30 a month in Budapest. I originally had 240/60 Mbps ($35) but it was not really worth it since most servers (and peers) can rarely deliver more than 90-110 Mbps at a time, even though it actually tested 248 on a [compteting ISP's] speed test.

That sentence, combined with the lack of sarcasm or indignation in its presentation, would paint a pretty dystopic picture of any kind of fictional society a paranoid author would want to write about.

I wish this society remained fictional, and I wish I didn't have to live on the same planet.

So now that you've done the math, why don't you just walk? :)
That's not that much. Plus you get a better experience than just sitting on a bus.