telling us the name, address and phone number of the human responding to the mail

I'm pretty sure Google is not allowed to give anyone's private information without proper court warrant, and I'm very sure that an email saying "I'm a Judge, honest!" is not a proper warrant.

Not replying to this email will result in a doubling of your fine.

Courts of law don't have the power to arbitrarily double the punishment because they happen to be feeling ornery. They can add contempt of court charges to the case, but it's highly questionable whether ignoring an e-mail - which can be from anyone - counts as contempt, especially when said e-mail seems to involve illegal action and blackmail.

What happens in low Earth Orbit and above is none of their business

Nice satellite you have there. Would be a shame if a laser beam hit it. Good thing I'm selling "insurance".

Those are all wonderful reasons for voluntary government certification: anybody who wants to can go to the government and get some government seal of approval; I as a rider can then make a voluntary choice whether that certification is useful information or whether I want to throw caution to the wind and ride with uncertified drivers.

But I, as Joe Driver, can't choose whether I want to share the road with a taxi driver who pulls 16-hour workdays out of greed or desperation. Unless, of course, some entity with sufficient power forces the taxi to take breaks.

And of course you're also ignoring the well-known fact that human beings are extremely bad at estimating risks. So no, you as a rider can't make an informed choice about whether getting a certified taxi is worth the hassle, especially since unlicensed taxi companies have every incentive to bombard you with misinformation, while bean-counters utilizing cold math can. So it's a choice between letting a preventable tragedy play out forever, or stopping it but possibly hurting someone's cherished delusions of grandieur.

What moral authority does the state have to stop consenting adults from forming their own contracts and doing business with each other?

Well, for starters, it's expected to enforce these contracts. Every legally binding contract has the state as a third party.

The treaty was stupid and anyone who signed it should be shot for gross incompetence. Simple fact is their are resources and unless we are one world communist country every damn thing in space will have a price tag attached.

No, every damn thing in space doesn't have a price tag attached, because they aren't actually owned by anyone. Or should I be able to simply declare the Moon my property and seek to extract rent from anyone who builds a base on it, possibly decades in the future?

The treaty exists to keep people and nations from getting into fights over claims on places they can't even reach.

Besides I'm German, and if I nad the capacity to mine gold on an asteroid I certainly woukd not 'land' it in a nation but in international waters.

I guess that's one way to make pirates leave cargo ships alone...

Why aren't the developers risking anything by putting their time in and at least demonstrating some ability to deliver?

Developers need to eat, that means they need day jobs to work on an unfunded game. That in turn means time spent developing it comes from their free time, which is already a precious commodity required for personal maintenance. So make that an hour a day at most for a sustainable rate.

Now, how many hours of development do you think even a simple game requires, even if we assume you're a renaissance man who can program, draw, compose, write, design levels, design characters, etc?

Conservationists tend to be rational, environmentalists are for the most part off their rocker.

People, for the most part, are perfectly rational but have been socialized to value power over any other goal. And prestige is a form of power. So any issue tends to turn into a power struggle where facts are cast aside in favour of "winning".

It doesn't help that "enviromentalism" - or any other group - has a subculture with its own value systems, which don't necessarily have anything to do with the nominal goal. Thus someone who identifies themselves as an enviromentalist inherits a set of default positions, such as antipathy towards nuclear power, and can't change them without expenditure of willpower, since that risks expulsion from the group.

So it's not that people are off their rocker, it's that human mind is bad at properly prioritizing things in its current environment. We've simply grown too powerful too fast for evolution to keep up.

I prefer to think of myself as sitting in cheapskate lala-land.

Everyone has their favorite fantasies. The problem is, some people become addicted to theirs and start to actually believe them.

Yes, the thread was about Tesla using renewables for it's new factory.

But Tesla is not going to be using renewables for its new factory. It's going to be using a grid connection, because renewables aren't reliable enough to run a factory with. What it's going to do with renewables is vary its load wildly as wind comes and goes to lower and possibly completely cancel its electric bill. Good for Tesla, bad for the power company and other customers, and utterly useless for the environment, since almost all power plants can't ramp up and down in minutes or even hours, so they have to keep burning coal in order to keep those plants ready.

So the actual effect of all this is that people will end up paying more for their electricity, and the risk of a catastrophic grid failure increases, since there's now a huge and randomly varying load on it.

I came to my understanding faced with an incurable terminal illness. We were planning for the funeral until I decided to try to do my own research and try nutritional treatments. It was a truly stunning and miraculous transformation. The disease is still there, and death will come, but it's many years off now, not just a few months, the oxygen tanks are gone because they aren't needed any more, and life has real QUALITY now, even though there are a few things I still can't do.

Good for you. So... care to give us your disease and specifics of treatment for any fellow sufferers who might benefit from them?

Gluten isnt bad for you, unless you have a specific allergy or condition.

Possibly. However, "vague bad feeling" is a classic sign of constant low-level infection response. So it's entirely possible that gluten isn't really good for anyone despite only a few people being so sensitive to it that they get clearly visible symptoms.

And you've never done anything that endangered others? (If you say "never" I'm going to call you a liar)

Plenty, including drunk driving. So if I hit your kids tomorrow, is that just too bad for them and you, because obviously your employee deserves a second chance, and me failing mine is just accaptable price for that?

Because, I assure you, I'm drunk this very second, will probably never stop, and can only hope I judged my (abused) liver's abilites right, when it comes to making sure I'll be sober for when I have to drive. But of course even then I'll be sleep-deprived and in withdrawal. So go ahead and defend your employee; just remember you'll also be defending me.

And he has served time in prison for that.

And that won't make any future victims any less dead.

Don't be so eager to dole out "justice" for people you've never met.

I'm not. In fact, I don't give a tiniest bit of a shit for "justice" when that's just a nicer word for "revenge", which in turn is a nicer word for "sadism". I do, however, care about stopping people from getting killed. And that means keeping drunk drivers away from cars.

He had to have an interlock on his car even when granted a provisional license for 2 years.

Of all the things you've listed, this is the only one that actually matters, since it's the only one that stops him from driving drunk again. And frankly, at this point, it would probably be best if we simply admitted the facts and demanded that an "interlock" be installed on all cars.

They'll play the normality privilege card on you, and anything you say will just be taken as proof they're right, and you're wrong since they're right for merely existing according to their dogma. Works like your average proudly chauvinistically myopic females using the creep card on males that don't play their games by their rules literally all the fucking time. You learn to avoid them, which will just get you generally blacklisted as that creep always alone over there, anyway.

How strange. I only seem to run into average dudes who sometimes say stupid things, sometimes insightful things, and normal girls who interact with me like they and me were both real people with real feelings. It's almost like there was something wrong with you to make everyone treat you like you were a complete shithead.

Just like some groups have predisposition to certain diseases, maybe some groups have a genetic limitation to the likelyhood of above average intelligence.

Fixed that for you. Don't feel bad, you're not responsible for your genotype :).

Please note: I am saying some groups. I am not saying my group would be smarter. People tend to project that idea.

That said, I hope not. But not looking into it is a massive disservice to humanity.

People project the idea because every single time this has come up that's exactly what it has eventually reduced to. It's what it'll always reduce to, because what other purpose could bringing up this idea possibly serve? What are you going to do with it, besides feeding racists demagogues?

As for "disservice to humanity", the problem nowadays isn't that people aren't smart, it's that they use their intelligence in service of baser instincts. Thus, for example, we have climate "sceptics" who are smart people using their intelligence to make up excuses to disregard evidence of something they don't want to believe. Then we have the "war hawks" coming up with compelling reasons to invade one country after another. Finally, there's a horde of economists pushing for various contradictory ideological goals, all dressed up in very believable theories purpose-built to get the desired conclusions.

The problem isn't that Joe Average is not smart, the problem is Joe is using his smarts to come up with excuses rather than solutions.