The year 1995 just called: "what's a manual transmission?"
Followed by - The year 2050 just called: "what's a transmission?"

Really, if you need to start your car, nothing beats that big old hand-crank over the front-bumper!

Lol; a BMW key will set you back at least $80, for any BMW less than 20 years old.

# "The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity"
-- C.A.R. Hoare

In the early part of the last century, automation reduced the labor amount for producing food drastically. This reduced it's market value. Probably far below its real value. (when you consider that that value is actually a composite of the food itself, and the water used to produce it, and the soil, and how we burned through the water and soil at a much higher rate than it can be replaced).

So if you want to blame something, don't blame "urban hipster douchebags". Blame the invisible hand for not being able to use basic science to look 100 years into the future and see how growing the population to 7 billion people, while burning through resources at an unsustainable rate, is going to make the concept of money look like a complete fraud, within the next generation.

You're accusing Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush of being pussies? (ie. Civilized).

3 times the electricity cost is actually pretty cheap compared to one's water-bill, or what one spends on gasoline, on average, and what we'll all be spending on electricity for running AC 24/7 everywhere when global warming really starts to kick in. (not to mention all the hundreds of millions of people who will have to relocate, and the hundreds of millions who will starve to death when we can't grow or distribute food anymore)

How much is a livable planet worth, anyway?

Well, here's your clandestine workaround then.

Go take a hike, and start killing any and all plants and animals you see by any means necessary. Accomplishes the same thing, and works around those pesky civilized rules.

MIT doesn't need to justify Humanities degrees.

The business world must. Maybe such degrees are okay for people who are already independently wealthy? But right now, our broken job market doesn't think they're worth much.

The ULA boosters are Lockheed's Atlas V (with the Russian RD-180 engine), and the Boeing Delta IV (which, I believe uses the Rocketdyne RS-68).

However, Boeing has pulled the Delta IV from the market, so there will be a limited number of these launched in the future.

I think that Boeing's decision was one of the reasons that prompted the launch-services merger. The RS-68 was expensive to develop, (and expensive to fly; part of that was the choice to use hydrogen+LOX, instead of kerosene+LOX like the RD-180) - and they weren't making enough profit on the launches, and were ready to bail from the market entirely; while Lockheed's decision to use the RD-180 saved them money - it made them the only player in the medium/heavy launch market.

One thing about the Delta IV; is that it had capabilities that Atlas does not have, like in-air restarts, better reliability, more accurate payload delivery. Don't get me wrong, I think that both vehicles have their merits. The market will suffer with the loss of the Delta IV; and hopefully SpaceX can help, but SpaceX's goal is going to be cheaper launches, and it remains to be seen whether Falcon can deliver any of those features. (the other question about Falcon, is whether they can deliver the Heavy Lift capability which is a HUGE gap right now. Both Atlas and Delta have flown in "heavy" configurations - both of which are essentially "hacks" - but no worse than Ares was going to be).

They're not selling drugs.

They're selling FREEDOM!!!

Darwin doesn't take care of it. Nature does.
And that approach basically says we should throw up our hands at this whole civilization thing, and let nature take it's course in every human endeavor.

The whole point of insurance is to share risk. So yes, if insurers are allowed to discriminate, then there is really no point to insurance, other than as being a middleman for the end-user's savings plan.

If one could offshore a wind-farm, it seems trivial by comparison to offshore the receiving antenna.

A method for working this out, in the 1970's, included a moon-base, and a mass-driver to launch raw materials into earth orbit for processing and construction. This was deemed to be profitable (by the precursors of what later become the Planetary Society, used to be the L5 Society) - based on projected energy costs (in 1973, during the energy crisis), and also based on a cheap, reusable spacelaunch system which would reduce launch costs to something like $10/kg. The Space Shuttle was supposed to BE that launch system, and we all know how that turned out. (nowhere near $10/kg).

So if you use today's numbers, and rule-out a moon-mining colony; yeah, it's kind of a ridiculous proposition.

However, a lot could happen to our energy costs in the not-too-distant future. Though I don't think that that will lead to orbital solar power stations.

I think that the really amazing bit was that they were able to land over the ocean, in stormy seas. I wonder what the wind-speed was at that time?

several fish were severely burned. probably.