>"But I would say that insurance should pay if the scan turns up anything requiring medical attention - early detection saves money."

I would say it is very unlikely any insurance will retroactively pay for a non-medically-indicated (non-physician-ordered and with justification) scan. Even if it picks up something that is a valid concern. However, they should cover further investigation/treatment of something discovered. Including further scans to clarify and follow-up scans.

It would be insane to not get a copy of any imaging. You can't rely on some health system storing your stuff for more than X years and it will get silently deleted. And if you need an old image for a baseline comparison, you will be out of luck. Plus, if you wait until later, you might forget to get it, or not remember where you had it taken, or the company might have gone belly-up or sold and systems changed.

>"I've always wondered if there might be a benefit to a full body scan along these lines not for its own sake, but for what it could tell me later in life when something actually is wrong. Does having a "before" image help to weed out things"

I came to point out this exact case. There is probably a good reason to have a body scan sometime in mid-life as a "baseline" so you have something to compare back to. I believe this will probably become routine at some point. Maybe at age 45 or something. But for now, a full-body MRI it is very slow and expensive. A CT scan would be much faster and cheaper, but not as good.

Of course, when comparing back, it might still not be ideal because the resolution might have been too low, or would have needed some special contrast, or different exposure, or needed to be a PET, or something else.

Similarly, don't pay for a single full body scan to clutch your pearls over.

Pay for several, taken several years apart. Then at least you can tell if the weird spot is still there, has always been there, or winked out of existence.

TLDR: learn how detection theory can work for you!

“If I like to respond to every post I disagree with”

You kind of answer your own question in the first clause.

What you’re describing isn’t “free expression.” It’s an asocial urge to jump into every disagreement, everywhere, all the time, and “respond as I see fit” with no real limit except your mood. Scale that up to dozens or hundreds of threads and from the moderator’s perspective it doesn’t look like participation, it looks like one guy trying to turn the entire site into his personal argument factory. Your attempt to fig leaf your asocial behavior with free speech arguments is a non-starter. Free speech != compulsory audience. You absolutely have the right to say what you think. But -- and this is why your free-expression argument fails -- the First Amendment doesn’t entitle you to a permanent microphone in an online forum, any more than it entitles you to barge into your neighbor’s living room because you overheard a comment through an open window and you feel compelled to argue with all their dinner guests “as you see fit.” You've articulated your own problem, very clearly, and it's why mods drop the ban hammer on you with what must be annoying regularity. From inside your own skull it feels like “I’m just speaking my mind.” From everyone else’s POV it’s “this idiot again, dragging the same fight into yet another thread.”

Mods don’t see your inner motives. What they see is your asocial behavior pattern: one user generating outsized friction across the site. When the pattern doesn’t change after nudges and warnings, the ban hammer comes out. That’s not them “preventing free expression.” That’s them protecting everyone else’s ability to participate without wading through your permanent counter-take on everything. Consequences aren’t persecution; you frame this as “mods prevent me from responding as I see fit,” as if that’s some outrageous injustice, but it's just mods doing their job, which is to tell you, in no uncertain terms, that “You can’t keep doing this here, in this way.” They aren't telling you you can never speak again, they are letting you know that you can’t keep using their bandwidth and their community as the arena for your asocial compulsion to reply to everything. You chose to treat “I want to respond to every post I disagree with” as a personal right that trumps everyone else’s time, attention, and enjoyment. This kind of asocial behavior is a red flag to any moderator. Mods chose to treat it as what it looks like: someone using “free speech” as a shield for asocial behavior. Their job is not to absorb your compulsions because you’ll threaten suicide if they don’t. Their job is to keep the place livable for everyone.

If your mental health is really that fragile, the answer isn’t for mods to let you keep arguing with every user on their forum. The answer is: step away, get help offline, and maybe treat “I feel driven to reply to everything” as a symptom of a personality defect, not a principle to defend. Rage-baiting is not a socially acceptable outlet for your compulsion. In the larger rage-bait discussion: platforms already act like Skinner boxes. They reward compulsive engagement — especially the kind that locks people into endless, angry back-and-forths. The more you give in to “I must respond to every post that annoys me,” the more you’re letting that machinery train you.

So in a bucket, why do mods ban you? Because from their POV, you aren't some tragic free-speech martyr. You're just a user with asocial traits that you should have left behind when you left kindergarten -- a lack of impulse control and a need for attention -- that is degrading the experience for everyone else. You’re not being punished for having opinions. You’re being punished for acting like a child.

Okay, challenge accepted. If you build machines that relentlessly reward our dumbest, angriest impulses, you’re going to get more of them. That’s not a mirror; that’s a factory. You’re treating rage bait as if the internet were a geological survey: we dig, and whatever stupidity we find was just lying there all along. That’s way too generous to the system. What we actually built is more like a Skinner box. If you pay people in attention and dopamine hits specifically for knee-jerk, bad-faith hot takes, you’re not just “exposing” a latent tendency – you are actively training it. We’ve built feedback loops where shallow outrage gets shown more, thoughtful nuance gets buried, and the humans inside the loop update their behavior accordingly. That’s not revealing stupidity; it’s literally manufacturing it as a side-effect of the revenue model. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have hijacked reading and replaced it with a variable-ratio dopamine dispenser — basically a slot machine jacked into your limbic system. These platforms make revenue by giving their users an infinite scroll engineered to stimulate the brain’s reward system with novelty, outrage, or cleavage — sometimes all three at once. The content that survives in that environment isn’t what makes us smarter; it’s whatever keeps us twitch-scrolling.

And what happens when you wash it?

I understand it completely. Because I understand it completely, I will eat my own gun before I have anything to do with people who strap bombs to their own children and tell them that paradise awaits.

>"India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance"

What? This is the same India that just tried to force non-removable government spyware on everyone's phones. Then claimed it wasn't spyware, could be removed, that it couldn't spy on anyone using it, and then claimed it was always going to be voluntary to use?

It is obvious that they are pushing the populous to see what they can get away with.

I thought the garage was where people put their guest bedroom. :-)

The real question is "Will they re-release the roadrunner cartoons?".

Do you really think fiction is a reasonable source of facts?

Not entirely correct. It is the only *active* pad with that infrastructure. There are decommissioned pads that have been used for manned missions in the past. What state they are currently in is an unknown, but it has been speculated that equipment could be salvaged from them to repair the damaged pad.

Remember that models used from a decade or more ago always make simplifying assumptions, and that those tend to be unquestioned until data shows that they must be. Even now climate models can't handle all the variables known to be needed. Turbulence is *extremely* difficult to handle. And there probably is some "butterfly effect". The way that's normally handled it to run an ensemble of models with slightly different conditions, but they may all make some of the same simplifying assumptions.

Well, panspermia is possible, but not extremely likely. OTOH, if life started on Mars, it could well have spread to Earth on impact debris. The further away, the less likely. But remember that yeast have survived in space conditions for months, perhaps years...and that wasn't in extreme cold (though it was in inactive form).

OTOH, years is different from centuries. And for interstellar trips in a comet, centuries wouldn't be enough.