I am an environmentalist. Leftie as all hell, thank you very much.

With respect to DDT, I cited that deliberately, despite the fact that malaria does indeed take a huge human toll which could (in principle) be mitigated by widespread used of DDT. The problem is the tradeoff: Wholesale collapse of ecosystems is too high a price to pay for even millions of human lives, because the long-term result will be even more lives lost, and more suffering inflicted. The bacteria are going to win, eventually. Burning down our own house to prevent that is both futile and self-destructive.

For all of the laudable successes of the Environmental Movement in the late 20th Century (e.g. bans on DDT and chlorofluorocarbons, regulations to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions, habitat preservation), the anti-nuclear movement has to count as one of its great failures. These old plants are dangerous, and becoming increasingly so. Knee-jerk opposition to the construction of new nuclear facilities has made all of us less safe by encouraging obsolete plants (like Fukushima) to be patched together for another few decades because there is no alternative to meet power demand. Knee-jerk opposition to any waste respository has resulted in the highly dangerous on-site storage of spent fuel.

Environmental opposition to nuclear power has made nuclear power vastly more dangerous than it needs to be, which appears to be a deliberate strategy: if you are convinced beyond any reasoning that something is too dangerous to be used at all, then it becomes paradoxically sensible to work to make it as dangerous as possible so that other people will agree with your preconceived notions about the hazards. I'm not sure if this effect has a name yet. Proof by suicide?

This has to be the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard of. If I tell the Post Office to hold my mail while I'm on vacation, I expect to get all of that mail delivered upon my return. Not thrown away.

An email is an electronic form of mail. It is asynchronous. You send it to somebody when you do not expect an immediate reply, but instead expect the recipient to read it as time permits, but within a reasonable time, and respond as appropriate. An OoO is an optional courtesy letting the sender know that a reply will be delayed more than a typical amount of time. (I pretty much never use them, instead just go through my outstanding email and respond when I am available.)

Something is seriously upside-down about the world when otherwise sane business people find it totally normal to never answer their phone (which is a synchronous form of communication) and communicate by trading voicemails, but at the same time expect instantaneous response to emails.

The problem is that local emergency infrastructure is incapable of handling the technology. Every call 911 from a cell phone, for example, in New York? You get sent to a centralized, state-wide call center, and the first thing they ask is: "What town are you in?" Then they manually route you to an emergency center nearby. They have no infrastructure to use the location info from your phone, despite the fact that it has been mandated in the cell phones themselves for many years. People have died because of this, but there is no funding to upgrade the system.

You can make the phones as high-tech as you wish, if you don't back it up with government funding for the corresponding infrastructure, it's completely useless.

I have a better idea: how about I ignore the whole sordid, over-hyped clusterfuck and go do something useful with my time? The Emfdrive company will go under like a submarine in short order, and we won't have to worry about them anyway.

Yes you can: it's obviously wrong. Read the paper from the inventors on how the engine is supposed to work. It's a series of novice-level mistakes about physical principles and mechanisms. The entire idea is completely fucking batshit from the very beginning. The very fact that somebody actually got funding to build one of these absurd snake-oil devices indicates very little except that something is very, very wrong with the funding process. NASA is infamous for this kind of loony bullshit, and they really need to stop. It makes them look like morons.

Weird Al is your friend.

...because of a critical topic...

HTH.

The noun referenced by the verb covers is plural, so the verb should be cover:

HTH.

These are two independent clauses and should be separated by a semicolon, a colon, or a period, for example:

or:

or:

HTH.

No, is isn't.

It's under-grads, not under-grad's. HTH.

It's à la carte, from the French. HTH.

You do understand the idea of a liberal arts education, right? There's a very good argument to look at coding as a trade, but that's not what universities are for. If you want to be educated like a plumber, go to a trade school.

This.