I don't know about the Japanese having a only a potential enemy in the Soviets. My understanding is they already threw down with the Soviets in 1939 and got stomped at Khalkhin Gol. I would say it was less that the Japanese generals weren't as dumb - more they had had a very recent educational experience on the subject.

So let's have a look at The Greens representation. For my state, which is very much fire affected: city councils: 58/1273, state government (NSW) 3/93 and 3/42, federal government 1/150 and 9/76.

Now several questions: how have the greens been able to wield such incredible political power with such amazingly low representation? Have you actually read their policy on hazard reduction?

I recommend you read the entire paper you quoted from. It's a good read. You may want to read the entire section your quote is from. It's also 15 years old. You might find some things like the window in which hazard reduction burns can be safely carried out have changed since then.

but would a non-reflective coating on the satellites be an option? We get stories here on a semi-regular basis about a new material that absorbs 9x.x% of light. Maybe this could be a practical application? Obviously you can't coat solar panels but keep them pointed away from earth.

I don't know enough about the field to know if this would be in any way practical.

So who do you propose regulates space? I foresee some minor jurisdictional issues.

I'll not even go into the fallacy of relying on data from only one year. If you actually read the article you posted on pool drownings it only covers a three month period, not a full year. The article about accidental deaths of children references "at least" 73 cases, is only referring to accidental deaths, and doesn't cite any statistics. If you actually read the article the point of it seems to be more about whether or not the gun owner should be held responsible over the accidental death of a child. The firearms to drowning deaths ratio for under 18s in the United States runs about 2270-1000 on ten year averages. Those are CDC figures to 2016. I doubt they've moved a lot off trend since then.

So to sum up I think your figures are wrong and/or quoted out of context. Not a great start. Even if your figures were correct I'm not sure what conclusion you're trying to draw. Just because more people die in car accidents than plane crashes doesn't mean that airline safety isn't important. A more relevant comparison would be how the figures compare to similar countries. If others are doing better than you then you ask why. I suspect you'd be about average or slightly better in a comparison about drowning. Firearms deaths... I think we all know that answer - and that you're not going to do anything about it any time soon

If this particulate matter is still in my lungs in millennia then I'll willingly accept your point that they weren't as bad as everybody claimed.

What you're describing is good practice and excellent mitigation but it's not a panacea. I had a friend who worked at a company who did exactly what you described. They had a ransomware attack and duly reinstalled and restored using their planned, tested backup strategy, all the while making snide remarks about what it would be like for organisations that didn't have competent IT people like themselves. All was well until the logic bomb in their data went off a week later. Still no problem, the restored from their older air-gapped backup.., and discovered that the logic bomb had remained quietly in their system until it was on all the backups and there was more than one of them. By this point down time and data loss is starting to add up. I think they paid in the end.

Now better OS/software design, good access controls, logs, policies, etc can certainly help but all you're really doing is minimising your risk - not eliminating it. And if the attacker is someone who at some stage had trusted access like a former (or current) IT person, contractor, high level manager, etc then all bets are off.

Here's the problem though. All the mistakes you make along the way are out there in the population indefinitely. It might even take a couple of generations for a flaw or introduced weakness to become apparent and by that time it could affect a lot of people. And if one day a couple are left with a child with severe problems because someone was tinkering with one of their grandmother's genes 'for science' and inadvertently introduced something incompatible with a large chunk of the natural gene pool then let me give you give you a clue: It's not going to be the science or the original researcher who is going to be taking care of that kid.

We may one day reach a point where we have the understanding to do this safely but I don't think this is the point in history to be screwing around with our own genetics too much

Your problem is that you want all the freedoms but none of the responsibility.

It's all very well claiming that everyone should have the right to choose whether they wear a seat belt but what about the poor bastard who has to remove your mangled remains from twenty square metres of road with a shovel and mop? What about their rights? When you've seen a person ejected from a vehicle that's an image that can mess you up for a long time. PTSD runs at about 1 in 6 for paramedics because of all the crap they see. Maybe we should give emergency services personnel the right to sue the estates of seat beltless wonders and leave their dependents with nothing. Of course, I suspect most of them wouldn't because they're decent, compassionate people.

How about time to grow up and think of someone other than yourself?

...and your government is putting the best part of a trillion dollars on the credit card every year. You're paying nearly $400 billion in interest which is expected to double over the next decade. When (and how) does that start to be paid down? The current projection doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room if you have to deal with another economic shock. I wouldn't be to chirpy about the economy just now.

Zero downside - really? I thought this was a tech site. Do we now have miracle jammers which stop at property boundaries now? I drive past a jail with a jammer fairly regularly and it will kill phone calls from a kilometre away. Beyond that there's an area where calls will get through but the signal is definitely degraded. It's a big problem when you have a minor accident and an older driver who is having bad chest pains. I had to flag someone down and ask them to drive up the road a little bit to call for an ambulance and then I had no idea whether they had bothered to make the call. I hate to think what it would be like with a severe accident where minutes counted.

Unless the jail is in the middle of nowhere jammers are a bad idea. You don't get to screw with people who aren't incarcerated because you can't handle your contraband problem. If they're smuggling phones in that's not all they can smuggle in.

I don't know how it is where you are but in Australia a psychiatrist has to have done a medical degree, internship, residency and then another five years or thereabouts of training while practicing as a doctor. A psychologist from memory needs a four year degree and a two year internship before they can be registered. Are things significantly different where you are?

Interesting thing is that they say very similar things about the US.

When you say potentially a bit long for a tank of gas you are thinking 380 km not 380 miles right? Four hours would be travelling within the speed limit if you don't stop.

There is a difference between saying that x and y statements are inaccurate (and here is evidence that they are inaccurate) or relevant information z has been left out which gives an unbalanced impression and saying [media organisation] is an enemy of the people/country/whatever.

The former is valid criticism which gives the media organisation the chance to defend their assertions and editorial choices or correct the record and generally doesn't put anything beyond reputations at risk. The latter is straight out of the playbook of personality cults and tinpot despots. Rather than being an attempt to bring the facts to the fore, it is a vulgar use of raw power to attempt to crush perceived opponents. As it is leveraged power rather than facts in dispute it is very difficult to defend against and does put people in real danger - as we have seen very real examples of. Notable users of this tactic to to destroy opposition include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Nazis Rather than encouraging a robust public debate it holds a gun to the head of any free speech that does not conform to the views of power.

Trial by facts and evidence should what the media has to deal with. Anything beyond that is straying into very dicey territory.