I think that these stereotypes about alien lizards are getting out of hand. All we ever hear about is the baby-eating, and never the fine and nuanced cuisine that goes into it.

Quite the opposite; I was thinking of the contented Western middle class* - the scholarly class if you will - that's so settled into its world of aspirational brands, entertainment media and convenience that it has forgotten that its forefathers used to be politically and socially active.

Shit, people dependent upon the "welfare state" can't even change jobs without checking whether it clashes with the terms and conditions of their funding.

*I believe the American expression would be more like "upper middle class"

To be blunt, politicians. Everyone who agreed with the establishment and supported the ongoing maintenance of a solar storm readiness plan would get to be the bozo whose big scheme sat there wasting money, and only once in a while would any of them get to play hero.

Twenty years without turning a meaningful profit isn't a clever part of a long-term strategy, it's an entire ongoing business model. Even if Amazon wanted to turn the switch and start making money hand over fist somehow, it would take them decades to transform the kind of business they're in.

Amazon, as it exists now, will never be a wise investment.

I'm not sure that's true any more. One of the biggest businesses they were trying to compete, entertainment media, with has gone digital and despite their best efforts they're only remotely competitive in the books area. If their goal was to kill off retail stores and then dominate physical media delivery, it looks like they missed the boat by five years.

I'm sure they've thought of that eventuality. Probably something involving an engineer-sized hamster wheel strapped to the axle and a cat-o-nine-tails.

Nothing calms people down like cutting off all their entertainment, food, and sanitation. ;) If I was going to take over a country I'd offer them all cheap energy, bountiful food, and as much entertainment as they could consume.

Some would say that this has already happened.

A solar storm isn't like a local EMP happening everywhere at once. It has a much lower intensity. It affects things like power grids is because they're spread over an enormous area, so the induced currents add up, but it won't even tickle systems that are disconnected from that grid.

Can I take a moment to talk about how mind-crushingly vast the Oort cloud is? It doesn't begin until something on the order of 100 times the orbit of the furthest known dwarf planets, and then it goes out about a quarter of the way to the nearest neighbouring star. It's so far away that, being composed of inert space junk, we have no direct observational evidence of its existence. I mean, space is big, big to the point where thinking hard about Jupiter makes my temples ache, but the Oort cloud is something else entirely. And that's just an object on a planetary system scale!

Most people buy supercars for the aesthetic allusions to cutting-edge technology, not because they genuinely benefit from the disk brakes, carbon fibre, or exposed engine parts that accomplish that allusion. I mean, they even put that stuff in vehicle ranges that genuinely have no need for it, because it's part of the "performance" style. I dare say that if golf ball dimpling (probably strategically deployed on particular parts of the chassis) starts appearing in, say, F1 racing - where efficiency is a differentiator - then it'll become a popular part of the supercar look.

1) Thanks for counterbalancing my laziness
2) That's an amazing visualisation

Logical, but probably not the case; surveys matching career stage and field put the male-female wage gap on the order of 10%, which is in line with these results. (I forget the exact amount; it's likely to be a little more.)

The STEM label mushes together computing fields and engineering, which have high pay and demand for jobs, with the sciences, which to be completely honest with you don't pay that great and have about a twenty to one candidate to job ratio. What would the result be like if we split them, I wonder?

I'm not saying that Kinect did this already, but I'm going to heavily imply it with the first clause of this sentence.