Well at least he was self-aware enough not to actually try anything.

The really bonkers part of this is that much of the economic planning in the west is allegedly Keynesian, but that would involve this kind of counter-cyclial approach where you build and spend more during a recession, then slow building and start saving during growth periods. But of course we've ended up doing neither of these with predictably poor results

No, Russia asked, and NATO said "sure, here are the requirements before you can join" and Russia weren't happy that the entrance requirements applied to them so it went nowhere.

I mean the change in control center may have been fine, and they weren't happy about the skipping of the T-2 hour poll.

It worked well until someone decided to do a test that induced a failure condition with all the safeties switched off.

How much Heinlein have you read? Stranger in a Strange Land was very controversial. Heinlein is much more complex than a one dimensional reading of Starship Troopers would suggest. It's one of the reasons that his writing is so enduring. Much of his writing is exploring the potential impacts of politics or technology on people and veers wildly from Libertarian (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), authoritarian-democratic (Starship Troopers), to communalist (Stranger in a Strange Land) and explored transhumanism, isolation, post-apocalyptic, techonological collapse settings, and did it both in long-form novel and YA. If he was writing today, conservative commentators would not like him at all.

It's the usual trap that the civil union and the religious union are both called marriage so they get conflated. In Europe and the US/Canada it is possible to be in a civil union called "marriage" and not be in a religious union called "marriage". From the civil perspective, it's irrelevant if you are married in a religious ceremony, "marriage" is a civil contract. The involvement of the State is as the ultimate arbiter of contracts, which is the most basic form of government. In Ireland, for instance, religious ministers are also registered civil witnesses, so can witness the contract legally. But the paperwork still has to be submitted to the state.

If the language was more precise separating the two I think that the conversation about things would be easier.

Less the phone itself, and more that a lot of the content is (as designed) quite compulsive, and that the phone notifies you when there's new content, which is all the time.

To make your smartphone life easier, just turn off all the notifications. And if you find yourself compulsively checking an app (TikTok, imgur, Instagram, whatever), remove it for a while to break the habit.

If the actor, on stage in a theatre, could see the laptop then it was guaranteed to be disturbing others.

The problem is that treating drugs as criminal exacerbates the underlying social issues, plus adds an incentive for criminals to get involved and greatly increases their revenues which in turns increases their power and influence. So you end up with a negative feedback loop.

If you legalize you can mitigate some of the problems and by taxing the sources (the drugs) you can also defray the costs of dealing with the social consequences, and reduce some of the negative health side-effects by ensuring quality of supply. You also impact the spread because by removing incentives for criminals to expand demand (the first hit is free kind of stuff, or active pushing) you have an opportunity to manage demand better.

Bascially people will always use drugs and prohibition does not work. As with alcohol the side effects of prohibition are significantly worse than the problems caused by legal supply, and you can defray the costs of dealing with those problems with tax income from the supply.

Good Inspectors are why all the buildings in Turkey fell over during an earthquake, and why the buildings in Japan.... don't

Puns are supposed to be funny?

I might be a software archaeologist, though.

At executive levels I've head it being referred to a being "given the garden seat"

The Irish times (may be paywalled, I'm a subscriber). Some choice excerpts