There's an optimal pricing for most services. Take cable TV - lower the price and a few more people will buy in. But, not enough to make up for the lost revenue from lower prices. Raise the prices and you'll get more money, but not enough to make up for the people leaving your service. Your pricing can deviate around that "sweet spot", but not by a huge amount.

That's why companies instead try to make their services shittier, by inserting ads and reducing quality and so forth. People are more willing to put up with that. But if you legislate that they can no longer provide shitty service, it doesn't necessarily mean the prices will increase accordingly. Even if ISPs start lowering their data caps, people will likely perceive that as "paying more for less".

I can't help but see this as anything but a win for the consumer.

would of easily had enough time in the billions of years that have passed to colonize every single planet a thousand times over in the entire galaxy

I take the more pessimistic view: it means that interstellar travel is so difficult that no species has ever managed it.

We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity

True, but we can create machines that can more or less do what insects can do. Look at self-driving cars: they can make simple maps of their environments, recognize multiple pre-programmed objects (signs, other cars, pedestrians), and navigate around easy obstacles. If we were able to control a beetle with a couple hundred kilograms of computer hardware and sensors, we could probably come up with something roughly similar to what the beetle already does.

Delayed gratification is not about increasing the amount of work you do, it's about being able to plan ahead. I saved up my dollars from a summer job working on my Dad's farm, and bought a computer for $1400 at the end of it. My brother spent his money as soon as he got it, but when I got a computer he wanted one too. So he got some kind of 'lease to own' deal, which he was still paying back years later, long after that thing was an obsolete piece of shit. Ended up costing him almost three grand.

Who ended up working more? This is not a trick question.

The only thing delaying gratification achieves is that you get less years and less opportunity to be happy.

The opposite is true. The ability to save money, to be financially responsible, and to study for an education all reduce the amount of work you need to do over your lifetime. And it will tend to be more enjoyable, satisfying work.

Torrents... I see what you did there.

It all depends on how long you've been playing. (And how long you've been reading spoilers) For those who play for conducts, the most common conducts are:

Never changed shape.

Never polymorphed an item.

Never wished for an artifact item.

Never wished for a regular item.

Genocideless.

So you see lots of five-conduct ascensions, since these five are relatively easy to achieve. Easier than say, weaponless. Or pacifist.

(Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!)

Heh. I'm guessing this is about arch-liches. They're dangerous, but manageable if you have magic resistance. You just stand on the upstairs and beat them to ...death. You can get magic resistance without wishing by: 1) sacrificing and trying to get Magicbane. 2) Playing a role whose quest item provides magic resistance. 3) Killing a gray dragon and making a suit of armor out of its scales. You can repeatedly loot the throne in the Castle while confused to attempt to summon a dragon, but their scales drop rate is lower than normal.

It tells me that IQ scores are related to other things besides genetics. Of course children who are educated, raised in a stimulating environment, and have years of practice at critical thinking are going to do better at these tests.

"For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed."

Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.

"What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."

No, it doesn't. You cannot draw conclusions from your results without significant data, because as you just said, your results could be due to random chance. I see this all the time in papers submitted for peer review. They'll say something like, "our technique showed benefit over the other techniques, even though the difference was not significant", and try to claim this as a win.

I've often wondered what fate awaits humanity. Will our technology gradually regress as the supply of rare earth minerals dwindles? There's a finite amount of economically recoverable reserves, and no recycling program is perfect. As the centuries roll by I imagine the minerals being gradually spread out in deposits that aren't economical to harvest - say as a thin film of rust at the bottom of the ocean, or in tiny pieces in long forgotten garbage heaps.

Or is it possible that we could continue having access to rare earths more-or-less forever?