>What would you spend all the money on if you knew we'd all be gone in 50 years?

I think this is one of those really character revealing questions if you can get an honest answer from someone. Most of us will be dead in 50 years no matter what, but you're probably not living like that's all that matters. Even while you're alive, you should probably give a shit about your fellow human beings and the quality of their lives.

If you're response is, "what the hell, let's burn it all down" then you're probably not a great person to know. I'd like to keep things going at least as nice as they are until I'm gone, and I think it's not the worst idea to try and help others have a decent life too.

On the other hand, if your response is, "Well, we probably shouldn't invest in anything that takes more that 50 years to return value", that I can get behind.

Pretty much anything past the frost line starts requiring prohibitive amounts of solar panel to get decent power, and Voyager is much, much further than that.

If you could send a refueling mission, it would be for sentimental reasons only. Any vessel you send that could catch up to Voyager would be much better utilized simply carrying a new and improved instrumentation and communications package.

If you give up your nuclear weapons, the next greedy sociopath to lead a neighboring nuclear power is going to kill you.

If you have nuclear weapons and are self-sufficient in critical areas, and you don't go around making enemies every time you open your mouth, you're fine.

Pakistan and India haven't nuked each other, because the people in control of the weapons want to live. If only one of them had nukes, the other would be gone by now.

The "animals" as you describe them, had the chance in 1948 to accept the two-state solution offered by the British Mandate.

They refused it, quite explicitly because their leadership believed they (with the assistance of adjacent Arab states) had the ability genocide the Jewish populations of the region. Subsequently they, or their paymasters in Tehran, haven't hidden even slightly that their goal isn't coexistence, it's extermination.

They said, in effect, "No thank you, we don't want to share this land, we would rather kill them all".
And they're still not kidding; since 1994 the total international contributions to the Palestinians has been >$40bn. Did they build power plants? Water desalination? Ports? Infrastructure? Nope. They used it for terrorist-hiding tunnels, weapons, and rockets.

I agree, the reaction IS worse than the unprovoked attack. This is how punishment and conditioning works. https://intersol.ca/news/organ... Even in 'enlightened' systems, if someone shoplifts a $100 shirt, we don't simply take $100 from them as a 'commensurate' punishment. We put them in jail.*

*ok I realize the concept of jailing shoplifters in 2026 is hilariously outdated; we don't do this any more unless they're white or asian or hispanic, and even then it's rarely done. I submit the societal consequences as further proof of the point.

Aside from them being convincing, I'm interested in hearing what fact asserted there is wrong.

Amusingly, those guys you DISMISS are agreeing with you, you sanctimonious cunt. The article from way back in 1958 explains how the AMOC very specifically is overturned, and the colossal climate consequences.

If only we held the same strict standard to the people casually ransacking retail stores in urban areas.

Nevertheless, the US still has the highest percentage of successful missions to Mars, compared to organizations and countries with all-metric programs.

Funny, that.

... But I would willingly suffer brain rot instead of being locked in with "...more than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn ... For two hours of reading, drawing and conversation."

As it turns out, I and a lot of other people are willing to pay a fee to avoid seeing ads, so the shows do actually get funded anyway.

I hate ads with a passion, and miss the old days of the internet where people would get mad at you for advertising.

This isn't a Val Kilmer performance, it's an AI performance wearing Val Kilmer's skin and using his voice. There's a difference, even if it's just in the viewer's head.

A little cameo in a series to show the writers haven't forgotten the past work of an actor is nice to see. A hour of screen time is ghoulish exploitation of his legacy by the family.

Why would you dedicate any storage to permanent GPS logs in a car? The way to monetize that data is to actually have it, which means periodically sending it back to the company's servers.

Car manufacturers will often make choices to save fractions of a cent per car, so why would you have them put any more storage capacity in them than the bare minimum?

Or, it's something that's happened cyclically for eons.

These guys in 1958 are vastly more convincing than modern climatologists
https://harpers.org/archive/19...

Paleoclimate shows clear pulses of warming about every 120k-140k years followed by cooling 30+ times in the last 5 million years. The last... About that many years ago.
Per the wiki on the subject: "... It has been observed that ice ages deepen by progressive steps, but the recovery to interglacial conditions occurs in one big step..."
Wait long enough, and being present when it happens is inevitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The idea that we are doomed as a species is laughably pessimistic.

I think you have your administrations confused.

Sept 2023: Biden administration hands $6bn to Iran. And authorized them to access up to another $10bn frozen assets.

Oct 7 2023, in what was a coincidence(?) Hamas - a directly-funded and -trained proxy for Iran, launches an unprovoked murderous attack on Israel.

People on slashdot routinely say religion is for the gullible and stupid.
Now suddenly the Pope is "sacred"?

You guys are such bald faced hypocrites it's astonishing.

There was a shitty faux treaty that did nothing, it that the one you were talking about?