"now"?

You mean all those corporate tax cuts which were handed to them which was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us?

Trickle down economics carefully explained

From TFS:

this raises some unsettling questions about our ability to trust government officials and why they might be tempted to fall back on such blatant hyperbole.

Really? REALLY? If this just NOW raises those "unsettling questions", your head has been in the sand for the last, hell, I don't know, 80 years? 100? More?

Who wrote this, some wide-eyed first-grader?

I mean, really, holy crap. Sometimes I forget the Gaussian doesn't quite flatten all the way to the left...

So, like I said. Blow up the moon, and it'll blow up a lot of stuff on earth.

I didn't say it would blow up the earth.

I didn't specify how big an explosion, other than "blow up the moon", quoting the GP, which is going to be in the darned large side just to begin with.

As for your gravity fall back idea, when the moon is fragmented, the chunks near the surface are furthest from the others, which are all further from each other, so total gravitational pull is much less, plus, any leading elements are probably moving with maximum velocity -- nothing was in their way to bang into -- and so doubly likely to escape the gravity of the remaining cloud of fragments -- the larger that cloud is, the less pull on the outer edges of the cloud will be, because the mass that CAUSED that pull/warp is moving away in all directions. It's not the same math as trying to get "a rock" off "the moon" by any means. While in the meantime, the earth's pull, sufficient to keep the whole thing as a whole in orbit at its current orbital velocity, has not diminished, and so any fragments that are coming towards the earth afterwards, hence being pulled harder, are quite likely to be pulled out of the original orbit into impact trajectories.

And just ONE fragment of the moon about the size of Long Island landing here, m. physics person, would pretty much put a period to everything you know in fairly short order. Or, on other words, what I said in the first place. Blow up stuff on earth

And that's my dose of anti-strawman for the day. :)

you still have a fairly low user ID so I wouldn't expect you to be at a point where you've seen the full impact of your decisions. It's natural that you would still consider the establishment's judgements with such disdain

That's hilarious. I've built and hosted websites on the net for a good deal longer than slashdot has been in existence, and was doing engineering and programming for decades before that. My user ID only reflects when slashdot got my attention. But hey, you go right ahead with drawing ridiculous conclusions from totally insufficient data. Given such a propensity, it's natural that you would consider other people's judgements in such a superficial manner. Also, I'm old. :)

Blowing up the moon would be a highly efficient way to blow up stuff on earth. Assuming only random distribution of the resulting fragments.

I. for one, welcome our... no, wait... imagine a beowolf cluster of... um... in Soviet lava tubes, er, the tubes... the intertubes... no, no... these tubes are like a car, see, in that they... they... ok, then, Netcraft confirms that these tubes... well, but BSD is definitely... Aw, futz. I'm memeless, you insensitive clods!

And I thank you for proving my point. Classic misuse of the mod system. Moron.

The drone operators must touch their toes five times an hour, say 10 hail Marys, make a widdershins circle with the controller every time they change the drone's direction, and apply for a variance for each different package the drone carries. More regulations to follow.

Near as I can tell, every official "ratings" operation I've ever encountered has been, to paraphrase OWK, a hive of scum and villainy. Almost never do the ratings make sense, they pay absolutely no mind to the actual state of knowledge / interest / sophistication of young people, they routinely ok violence and they pull their virtual lace panties up over their own heads if sex rears its terrifying, world-destroying head... seriously, on the list of people I'd like to bitch slap until my hand hurts, ratings boards are right near the top.

Seriously. Ratings boards. Ugh.

Very interesting information. I'll look into it -- I try to keep up on that sort of thing (obviously, it affected that particular point, so that'd be why... :)

Thanks!

You, suh, are fated to redefine "safe" :)

An example to disprove the statement: Chemical weapons tuned for humans are a universally bad technology.

Given that the tech is possible, though, finding antidotes for them, however, is not. And making sure they work means you have to create the weapon tech as well.

So it can be about the tech; but generally speaking, it isn't.

Not sure that development of an anti-matter weapon could be justified in the context of anywhere near the planet use, either. Or black hole generation. These kinds of things are too unsubtle to play with unless you've got a really significant buffer zone. And no living relatives.

I'm not a conservative. I'm also not easily fooled. And I don't see it that way. I see it as you have been blinded by the party you adhere to -- because I assure you, neither party is worth jack shit at the present moment.

I'm not saying they are the same in platform -- they clearly aren't -- I'm saying they're equally corrupt and not working for the benefit of their constituents, their platforms serve only as the vaguest possible guides for their actual actions, almost no elected member of either party even remotely understands or complies with the constitution they swore an oath to, and that goes double or triple or perhaps 10x for SCOTUS, who, unfortunately, we cannot vote out.

But, as part of that 37-or-so%, by all means, you keep on voting in the dem/rep situation you have so much faith in. If compulsory voting comes about, it'll be interesting to see if your vote matters any longer. I truly hope it doesn't, but that, of course, is just me.

I used to be for mandatory voting until I realized that stupid people would vote anyway

The very reason we have the democratic and republican parties is that the voting public is already comprised largely of the stupid. Given the realities of the Gaussian, most of what's that's left should be smarter people.

I would like to see a requirement that in order to get certain benefits, one MUST have voted in the prior election AND filed the prior year's tax forms.

Uh-uh. Many of the poor don't file taxes, and it's perfectly legit. Your idea would lock them out of any active political role in determining their own destinies. You can't lock people out of voting. Period.

I'd also like to see congressmen who vote for something that's bad for the country, solely to screw the other party, be stripped of their citizenship and deported.

I'd substitute "unconstitutional" for "bad for the country", and remove "solely to screw the other party", and make them stay here so their fellow citizens could sneer at them on a regular basis, but yeah. If you enter public service, and you don't serve the public, I figure that's maximum bad behavior with absolutely huge harm. Worse than anything else on the books. Seriously. Murderer kills what, a few people? Bad law hurts people by the tens or hundreds of thousands or even (drug laws, for example) millions, tens of millions.

I'm honestly quite surprised that one of the more severely injured victims of bad law -- and there's plenty of it, and of them -- hasn't already taken their mistreatment directly to the source(s) as a matter of some well-deserved kickback. Still, only a matter of time, I'm thinking. All it takes is one person with not much more to lose and a good reason. Good reason being trivially available in prolific amounts, the rest is just a matter of social Russian roulette for congress and SCOTUS.