Ugh. Ignore my previous post - got suckered in by a very poorly written title, which hit my brain opposite to it's actual meaning.

OK, move along now, nothing to see here.

I'd rather cheer for 10's of thousands of deaths per year from self driving cars if it replaces the hundreds of thousands of deaths per year we have now. Especially knowing that even if it is that bad (and I doubt it would be) it can only *improve* year over year.

Wouldn't anyone?

Ummm.. "even plants past about 500ppm don't gain from any more". No.

As usual, Google is your friend: "The level of 1000 PPM CO2 is very close to the optimum level of CO2 required, given no other limiting factor, 1200 PPM, to allow a plant to photosynthesis at the maximum rate."

Flowering plants can use 1500 PPM - I'd say probably 1800-2000 PPM is the level where plant's don't gain from any more CO2.

It is not to make things more affordable - though that may be a pleasant side effect.

It's insurance. Nothing more - subsidies and price supports for farmers is to make sure that more crops than we need are planted every year. So that farmers and dairies stay in business. So that we don't get rollercoaster abundance and scarcity from year to year, driven by market effects, that we don't get one drought or disease outbreak crippling production and leading to famine.

Think of it all as insurance for our food supply.

Don't know why I need to point this out, but WRONGFUL DEATH SUIT. Which they won. They weren't suing the doctors.

You don't think the couple in this case wouldn't want to kick the crap out of the idiot who casually destroyed their chance at having a kid? Really? Hate to break it to you, but people have died for less.

It's a wrongful death suit - and they won. That's the civil equivalent of murder. It's what they got a conviction on OJ on!

Murder is already in it.

Fun fact! This was like 95% of the dialog in the entire movie.

Isn't your entire argument basically thrown out the window due to the very fact that we are having this discussion at all? We are having it because a couple whose embryos got destroyed is seeking justice for them. They thought they were worth something - that personal harm came to them as a result of it. That extrapolates to societal harm.

THAT'S WHY WE'RE HERE.

This is intolerable! We cannot allow the Sun to fire flares at us repeatedly with no response.

We will launch at night to approach unseen, then strike at dawn! Who's with me?

I have an alternate hypothesis - Great Recession threw a lot of people out of work. Proportionately more with lower education levels. They could no longer afford as much cigarettes, booze, and/or drugs as before. So consumed less of them. And lived longer.

How's that one?

Does one need repeatability? This may give rise to a new generation of craftsmen who can pick out just the right specimen to carve / machine into satellite parts that will work as intended, avoiding the weaknesses and maximizing its strengths. Each one of a kind, each unique, each a work of art as well as being functional.

That sounds pretty cool to me.

"Satellites should be made as light as possible to minimize the fuel burned."

While this is true, I think we are entering a different era for spaceflight. Cost per Kg launched has plummeted, and looks like (for SpaceX at least) will continue going down.

Given that, mass itself may not be the most important factor anymore. Now there are more tradeoffs available - whereas before a project's budget might only cover a fraction of a launch (and so need to squeeze into as small and light a package as possible just to afford launching) - now they might be able to afford a dedicated launch. With that, you now have a max mass and a max volume / shape to fit within.

That lends a lot more flexibility for creative solutions. Including wood apparently. Interesting times we have!

Ooh! Ooh! I have a bizarre personality. Where do I sign up?

We do the alternating Fridays off schedule. We call it 9/80 - still 80 hours work, but every other Friday off for the whole staff.

Pretty clever actually how it's done - labor laws specify a 40 hour work week, but they don't define what a 'week' is exactly (just a 7 day period). So, the clever part is you declare the week starts and ends in the middle of the workshift on Fridays. So the Friday hours get split between two weeks. Needs a little a tweaking though - 9 hour days on Mon-Thurs (36 plus half a Friday = 40). But we don't really notice it.

Work well.

The attitude is something I find weird. Monopolies, in and of themselves, are not bad. They are only bad if they are exploited to harm their customers. Assuming that any type of monopoly must be killed off is not only pretty unproductive, but seems ignorant on the face of it.

There are many regions of the country where there is now only one surviving hospital. So they are a monopoly - do we need the FTC to come in and close them? Just because they have no competition? That would be ridiculous.