Pointing out that the risk is shared by both parties does not, in fact, lower the risk nor the stakes. People will shun a high-risk-high-stakes investment, regardless of whether those risks are fair.

The "traditional marriage," where one member (typically the woman) gives up her career in order to be a stay-at-home spouse, is largely a thing of the past. Most families simply can't afford that arrangement anymore. In this economic landscape, it is almost selfish to want to be a stay-at-home-spouse. The financial burden that such a person imposes is significant, and is multiplied by the even greater financial burden imposed when the divorce happens.

If wealthy men want to seek out traditional women to offer livelong providence (even after divorce), more power to them. It's their money, after all. In a world with a 50% divorce rate, it seems a significant waste to me, but really that's just an issue of values.

The bottom line, though, is that marriage rates won't go up in the current climate. No amount of blaming-and-shaming will have any impact. Maybe that's ok. But people who would like to see the marriage rates rise are going to have to do better than say "you need to learn better." Such a tactic utterly fails to address the reasons motivating the current trends.

Skyfox and Wings of Fury would like to have a word. /s

Questions that readers might want to know about:

1. What has been the hardest part of the codebase / toolchain to update? Anything specific to Linux/BSD?
2. Are there any APIs / features that you wish were in Linux/BSD that would make working on Sopwith easier?
3. What has been the most enjoyable part of the code to work on?
4. Are there any upcoming features that you can talk about that you are most excited about?
5. What do you think part of the "charm" of Sopwith is? Nostalgia? Simplicity? Something else?
6. Is there an HD Texture Pack, Widescreen option, mod, or other high resolution graphic's options for modern screens given that Sopwith was designed for CGA's 320x200 screen. (Similar to how Diablo II v1.13+ had a Widescreen mod.)
7. Any plans for a better HUD. i.e. Show airspeed, etc.
8. Any plans for mod support?
9. With the enshittification of AAA games via over priced MTX what are your thoughts on retro gaming and the future of gaming?

When the tech is this awesome, the answer is always "of COURSE we should!!!"

You know, like this.

Same goes with CRISPR. The moment we CAN use it to create mosquitoes and ticks that don't suck blood, yellowjackets that don't sting you for no reason at all, Humans with three eyes for full trinocular depth perception, humans with gills for breathing underwater, humans with gorilla strength, and human-spider hybrids, we absolutely should. In fact, I don't understand why we don't have government funding on these projects already.

Hmm, somehow I've missed Vernor Vinge. Thanks for the heads up.

I totally forgot about The Expanse. Loved Netflix's adaption so I'm REALLY looking forward to reading this.

I read the entire Dune books in high school and found them to be extremely boring -- long, dry winded.

I typically pass on Cyberpunk as I'm not generally a fan of dystopian worlds -- I read SF to be inspired not depressed! However, maybe it is time to give Neal Stephenson and William Gibson a chance ...

For the rest of the authors, yup, looks like I have some new reading material. Thanks for the list of authors! A lot of these names I recognize just have never gotten around to them for some reason.

BattleTech and Warhammer have never really caught my eye -- aside from the odd game here and there (BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, MW4). While I can admire Mechs from a fun "blow shit up" POV I find the technology of giant mechs to be utterly stupid. With technology things generally get much, much, smaller. A giant mech is like someone doesn't understand future tech and how it works. I have seen Warhammer pop up from time to time so maybe I'll consider checking out Horus Heresy, Night Lords: Omnibus, etc.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

Ukraine is not free

Give me a list of Ukrainian prime ministers since 2000, and compare it to a list of Russian presidents since 2000 . Thanks in advance.

Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe

This is not even remotely true. Ukraine's Rule of Law Index in 2022 was 0,50; contrast with NATO members Turkey at 0,42 and Hungary at 0,52. And its scores were dragged down by the consequences of the war in Donbas.

with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty)

Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent before the current invasion was 3,2%, and that was *with* the ongoing Donbas conflict . By contrast, the US, at peace, spends 3,45% of its GDP on the military. For some European contrasts:

Azerbaijan: 4,5%
Armenia: 4,3%
Russia: 4%
Greece: 3,7%

Before the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent on the military was 1,6%.

ED: Just saw your second paragraph. But the things you speculate on are not exactly common on Titan, if they even exist on the surface at all (it's an icy crust ,not a rocky one). And either way, it'd be much easier with compounds other than methane.

And no, there doesn't seem to be meaningful amounts of nitrates in the atmosphere at least. You can see a list here. Nitrogen compounds are cyanide and nitrile compounds.

Metabolized with what oxidizer?

It's just the opposite - methane on Titan is like nitrogen on Earth; it's things like acetylene and free hydrogen that are the potential energy sources, and to a lesser extent the more common (but less reactive) higher mass alkanes, etc.

The main problem is that LAWKI isn't even remotely compatible with existing in the cryogenic environment of Titan. There are a lot of interesting alternative chemistries, but they require basically redesigning life from scratch. We're simply not up to this task with our current technology.

Sadly it's being launched to near the equator, not the poles :( The geophysicists won out over the geochemists...

Freedom is great and neglectable, until you very suddenly don't have it.

History has not ended. The world order that makes life nice and comfy for you is not a given into the future.

It's funny how we so strongly disagree further down in the comments, but I 100% agree with you here.

0,38g being largely fine for health is... I mean, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on it probably being true, but it's anything but guaranteed. There was a private project to test this, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite, but it ran out of funding; I'm not aware of any similar experiments that have been conducted. There've been a variety of attempts to simulate various gravity on Earth, such as having people lie on tilted beds or hanging them from cranes at an angle or whatnot, but they all have obvious weaknesses.

There's not just the question of adults who visit from Earth, but also children who grow up on 0,38g, and what impact that would have to their physiology.

Venus is hot, but it's not *that* hot... ;)

NASA is getting there

It most definitely is not. Are you being deliberately obtuse?

one can do for more than a few minutes before shit implodes and burns

You clearly didn't read anything I wrote, so why should I even bother responding? (A) Literally nobody was talking about settling the surface, and (B) It's been repeatedly pointed out that basically indefinite lifespans can be achieved for surface vehicles, as backed up by peer-reviewed research from NASA. And "christoban on Slashdot disagrees with peer-reviewed research from NASA" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

B) building floating cities, which would probably take another century of engineering and investment before we could do so reliably.

We were flying balloons on Venus almost 40 years before we flew a helicopter on Mars. We directly sampled Venus's atmosphere 4 years before we sampled Mars. We successfully landed and transmitted data either 1 or 6 years (depending on your definition) from the surface of Venus vs. Mars.

Your incredulity about levels of difficulty doesn't translate to actual levels of difficulty.

That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.

I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.