It didn't have to be in that orbit the whole time life was evolving, just the time it took the culture to adapt to it and maybe some evolutionary adaptation of their psychology.

The archaeological evidence of the cyclic fall of civilization only went back a few tens of thousands of years.

Asimov's story only assumes that the suns' and planets' orbits are in that configuration for a few tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of years, not that they are stable for what astronomers would call the long term.

If you think freedom is just about insults, you have completely taken it for granted. Which is probably why you haven't noticed now that's gone.

...that this hasn't come up sooner.

I guess the NSA has given up on trying to be subtle.

When it's already started 'foreshadowing' is not the right word any more.

Unless, of course, you don't.

Drug use exists in other countries.

The use of drugs is not exactly confined in its impact to the immediate use, which is the theory behind why it was a crime in the first place. But the other bad effects can be made illegal separately. A lot of them already are, in the form of some variation of practising pharmacy without a licence. And if a huge pharmaceutical company creates a drug that has virtually no value other than to create addictions (and deducts all the research and marketing expenses on its taxes), then someone should be going to jail.

You can still say drugs are bad, which they are in many cases, but 'bad' does not necessarily mean something the criminal justice system should address. On top of which, a lot of the time it comes down to tastes in substance abuse. Alcohol is bad for all the same reasons, and compared to some drugs is worse.

Well, of course maths, programming, and natural languages are different, but all of them involve a symbolic language that models something and expresses that model. Kun seems to be focusing just on the differing degrees of precision these symbolic languages employ.

People tend to think of natural language as only a medium of communication, but it is also the way the human mind models whatever it perceives or imagines, and despite the fact we do that mostly instinctively, it is by far the hardest thing about language.

Programming is not math, it is language - a programming language is a language which defines, describes, and expresses an algorithm. Useful programs are frequently express something mathematical, but that is a function of the application, not programming itself.

Maths is just a whole lot of symbolic language. Learning maths is language learning, but it is also learning to describe things with precision and clarity and algorithmically. Some natural language learning is like that (e.g. advanced Latin grammar) and some is not (e.g. introductory conversational courses).

I suggest beta testing on politicians.

Does 'zap' mean stopping them? Maybe they're actually trying to help Rachel.

Evolution will favour adaptation. In some cases, there may only be one straighforward path to an adaptive solution, but there will sometimes be surprises.

Type 2 diabetes is 90% (or so) self-inflicted. Do you deny a remedy to the 10% innocent victims because of the weakness of character of the 90%?

I have to applaud Rogers for doing the right thing.

This may even be a first for them, seeing as they are one of the most evil corporations ever created.

It sounds like highly subjective inferences are unreliable and indistinguishable from background randomness.

Which has nothing to do with the placebo effect.