Sometimes. Not always of course but often enough.

Check this out man. I personally think Crimea should have stayed part of Russia but that decision was made during the Soviet era by your leaders. No big deal, leaders make mistakes (US leaders sure make plenty of them) but then when the Soviet Union broke up Russia didn't demand the return of Crimea to where it really belonged. Then when Ukraine agreed to give up their nukes Russia agreed to honor their borders. So tell me, why can't Russia stop being a lying piece of shit straddling the continents of Europe and Asia and actually keep their word? As for the oil that's a huge misconception on your part. Saudi Arabia is cranking out the production to undermine your economy and they're doing it at the behest of the United States because that's how that stuff works. They did it in the early 80's under Reagan and completely shuttered the US domestic oil industry once before. I know because I lived through it. Reagan took away your only major export then challenged your country to a military buildup race and broke your economy in the process. It was a pretty good plan if you think about it. We can afford it. We can sacrifice our oil industry (which really is no big deal because it's not like the oil is going anywhere) and let cheap fuel power the rest of our economy into prosperity. You on the other hand depend on fuel prices because your economy is shit in every other way imaginable so when we take that away you feel the pinch. Yes, Crimea is yours forever. At least your heating oil will be cheap this year. Can't say the same about much of anything else.

Ahh yes, you mean "birth defects".

I look forward to having better options to treat these people than simply carving them up and reassembling them into what they feel like they should be. That seems like figuring out how to let an anorexic live a productive life on a 300 calorie a day diet. It would be better to find a way to genuinely solve their problem instead of making a poor substitute for a member of the opposite sex out of them and putting them on hormones for life. At some point we'll be able to actually fix issue in their brains and this entire issue will hopefully fade into history. Come on progress!

Hmmm, interesting. We change our phones out probably around every two years. Sometimes we go a little longer. I think my wife had her last Samsung for almost 4 years and I skipped all the iterations of the iPhone 5 but more often than not I just tend to skip a generation (Had a 3, skipped the 3GS, got a 4 near the middle of its cycle and skipped the 4S and all the 5's. My 4 really was fine even when I traded it in to AT&T. Only reason I upgraded really was that they gave me a $300 credit for an aging phone. That almost paid for the iPhone 6 that replaced it.

Honest question here. I'm an iPhone user (on my third one starting with a 3, then a 4, and now a 6). I've never had any reason to replace the battery in my iPhone. Is mine an atypical experience? I ask because my wife is an Android user (gives me constant shit about the price of my phone vs. the price of her phone) and even though she has always bought phones with removable batteries she has never had to change one either. Now years and years ago I had to replace a battery on a Sony Ericsson T-610 but that was "The beforetimes, in the long long Ago". Seriously, do people run into this issue a lot? Maybe I've just been lucky?

My mom's 2003 VW Passat needed a new battery so I went over to her house to replace it. Found a replacement battery for like $50 or so and then when I got to her house I pulled out my smartphone and looked up instruction for replacing the battery on a 2003..... "Step 1: Remove the windshield wipers". WTF? The battery is up by the firewall and there's a plate under the wipers that has to come off for you to remove it. Called Firestone. They carry the battery and will install it for around $20 more than I would have spent for the batter alone. Doing it myself is just not worth the trouble.

This exactly. There simply wasn't a very deep field of movies this year that I wanted to see. Certainly not many that I wanted to see more than once. Looking at the top ten highest grossing films of the year I note that I paid to see 9 out of those 10 movies in the theater (I missed Interstellar, couldn't get the wife interested in seeing it and thus never got around to it) BUT I don't see a single one I paid to see more than once. Also I only genuinely liked 4 of them a great deal. The other 5 on the list I ranged from "It was OK" to "Fuck Peter Jackson. Fuck him in his stupid ass". Next year is going to be off the charts with blockbusters but this year the big tent-pole movies just didn't really pan out like they expected.

These kinds of shortages have a way of sorting themselves out. If the price of a commodity goes up, then people start exploring new sources of the commodity, new modes of production, alternatives to the commodity, and ways to be more efficient with the commodity. This is exactly what happened with oil prices back when people started panicking about "peak oil". New resources and modes of production (deep water oil, tar sands, shale oil) were developed and alternative sources of energy (solar, wind, natural gas, etc.) were pursued, and more efficient cars were developed. The result is that oil prices have fallen dramatically in recent years from around $100 a barrel to around $60 a barrel and the U.S. is set to become a net oil exporter. The same dynamic is likely to play out with copper- as soon as we start seeing shortages of copper, increased prices will increasingly drive people to find more of it, replace it with other materials, and be more efficient in its use.

I remember seeing starving Ethiopian kids on TV when I was a kid, and it left me deeply shaken up. But over the years, I realized that you saw all kinds of things on TV- GI Joe and Transformers and the Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon and exploding coyotes, and the little Ethiopian kid with the distended belly sort of entered that realm. One more image on TV and you can just change the channel.

And then travelling in Africa I saw a starving kid, face to face. Me looking at him, and him looking back. And I realized, that's not fake. That's not TV. I can't just change the channel and make him go away. And he can't just change the channel and make all this stuff go away. This is his reality, and it fucking sucks, and this is the reality of millions and millions of people.

One of the tropes in science fiction is the Bubble City. The residents of the Bubble City live in their cozy, clean, climate controlled little domed city and have wealth and peace and long happy lives. And meanwhile, outside live the savages, with their poor, dirty, and violent little lives, and the people in the Bubble City don't think much about them or worry about them. What I saw for the first time is that this isn't science fiction. This describes the world we live in. The developed world is a bubble, but until you step foot outside, you don't even know it.

I think that this is probably a bit overly optimistic. The difference between the U.S. and some failed state isn't merely a difference in the level of wealth. It's a whole series of things- an effective security apparatus, infrastructure, a court system, trustworthy, responsive, and effective government administration, education and literacy, a free press, a fair market system with companies and finance, a national identity, tolerance of different people and ideas, and a culture that buys into and believes in these things as realistic and important goals. The wealth and prosperity of the United States are built on a culture, ideals, markets and governments that go back hundreds of years, to the Colonies, to England, to Renaissance Italy, to Rome, to Jesus, to the Greeks.

Wealth isn't just the condition of not being poor, it's about creating a productive and fair society. Like they say, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him the rest of his life. The issue is that being a good fisherman is *hard*. It takes a work ethic and discipline, piloting, engineering, and navigational skills, management skills, and learning how to actually catch fish. It takes years.

Poverty has a lot of causes. If you cut your potential labor force in half by keeping women unemployed, if government officials steal from the people with bribes, if there's a lack of education so you can't hire skilled workers, if business can't operate because of a corrupt judiciary, if you can't move goods to market because there are no roads, if you're sick with malaria and can't work, if the army is weak and violence flourishes, if you can't get a small business loan... these are problems that make going to the moon look pretty straightforward. I'm not saying we shouldn't try. As Kennedy said about the moon, we're not going there because it's easy, but because it's hard. But we need to be realistic about how hard it's going to be.

Yes, Elon Musk's rockets will be funded by all those privately funded space stations, privately funded spy satellites, and privately funded missions to Mars.

The cost of the International Space Station was $150 billion, and a crewed Mars mission- sending a crew to Mars, landing them, bringing them back- is an order of magnitude more complicated. I'm guessing it would cost on the order of 500 billion or a trillion dollars. The issue is, that money has to come from somewhere. That's a trillion dollars that's can't be spent on other things. Economic development, medical treatments, flood and famine relief, scientific and medical research, etc. So we have a choice. We can spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars on the possibility that the human race will face some crisis in the far future. Or we can spend that money on solving the very real problems that people are facing today, right now, as we discuss this. Unemployment, poverty, starvation, disease, lack of education, lack of opportunities for women. I'm not saying that we cannot do anything else until we solve all those problems. But for all the talk about The Good of the Species and Preserving the Species, space nutters seem remarkably unconcerned by the idea that there are people right here on Earth who could use some help, and last time I checked the species was composed of these people. And if you space nutters are really so goddamn concerned about saving the species, maybe you'd be more interested in helping them out. If half the planet wasn't uneducated and living in poverty, maybe we'd have a lot more economic and intellectual resources at building that Space Ark or Warp Gate or Hyperdrive or whatever it will take to get into space. I'm skeptical about the possibility of setting up space colonies, but if it does happen, I think Bill Gates' work on malaria in Africa will probably end up doing a lot more to help get us there than Elon Musk's rockets.

The "we've got to get off of this rock!!!" argument is nonsensical when you consider that the Earth is currently the most habitable place within several light-years and it's been that way for at least the past 3.5 *billion* years. Just over the past 550 million years we've seen severe ice ages, runaway greenhouse warming, an asteroid impact, several massive volcanic eruptions... these events were severe enough to devastate the biosphere and wipe out most of the species on the planet, but in each case some of them survived (otherwise we wouldn't be here). It's been able to sustain complex life for at least half a billion years. Even after the Chicxulub asteroid impact, it's still got a breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, normal gravity, liquid water, etc., none of which are the case on Mars (all you'd need to survive would be stocks of food, warm clothes, and fuel to last out the impact winter). And even before 550 million years ago, when there's too little oxygen for complex life, it's still a better option than Mars (you'd need supplemental oxygen like on Everest but otherwise it'd be habitable). You would have to do a lot to the Earth to make it less habitable than space or Mars; even with a full-out nuclear war, you've got the Strangelove option.

Looking backwards, Earth has been habitable for a very long time, it's likely to remain so for tens of millions of years more- far longer than our species can be expected to last. Looking forwards, there's no realistic scenario in which space colonies make sense:

Let's assume that we do develop the technology to live on hostile environments such as Mars, asteroids, etc. Wouldn't this exact same technology also allow us to cope with whatever hostile environmental conditions might develop on Earth?

Let's assume that we develop the ability to terraform Mars to make it habitable. Wouldn't this exact same technology allow us to terraform Earth to correct whatever hostile conditions might emerge here?

Let's assume that nuclear war or other environmental issues threaten us as a species. Wouldn't it be a lot easier and more realistic to prevent these things from happening in the first place than build some fleet of Space Arks to escape them once they've already happened?

Let's assume again we're so suicidal that we're in danger of wiping ourselves out due to nuclear war or environmental damage. Doesn't this undermine the whole All Your Eggs in One Basket argument? I mean, the idea is that some freak event might wipe out one of your baskets, but not ALL of them. But that assumes these are independent events. If people on Earth are stupid and suicidal enough to wipe themselves out, that's not a problem with the Earth, it's a problem with the *species*. EVERY human population will have those same suicidal tendencies. It's false redundancy because all your backup systems share the exact same fatal flaw.

The man has a point. We're just not good at that stuff, peace and "nation building" (whatever that's supposed to be)