For what it's worth, I've never popped my dog on the nose, and he never poops inside, so you should reconsider your need for punishment. Reward-based training has been shown to work better.

Anyway...

The punishment in prison is supposed to be boredom, lack of luxury, and in a very real sense, a loss of useful lifespan. The punishment is not supposed to be sexual assault, or indeed any kind of assault. Someone beating a prisoner is at least as criminal as any other beating; and it's arguably worse, since the prison officers have a duty of care that they're clearly failing.

There is a persistent streak of vindictiveness in the general population who think that prisoners automatically deserve everything they get; that abuse is a feature, not a bug. There's also a persistent streak of violence which seems to think that corporal punishment is the only punishment that really works. Finally, there's a persistent streak of suspicion that "once a criminal, always a criminal". For all three, you can come up with examples where this is more-or-less accurate, but for the vast majority of convicts, it's just a fantasy inspired by a historical legacy of "tough-on-crime" politics and entertainment.

I've never been accused let alone convicted of any crime greater than a parking ticket. But there but for the grace of god go I - most criminals are victims of circumstance or mental health in various ways, and it behoves us to treat them with dignity and to try to give them the best possible chance to move on once they've satisfied their sentence.

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And of course that's all neglecting the very real fact many people rotting in prison have done, frankly, far less damage to the world than many of our political and business leaders. And those leaders are usually doing those things when they have the choice not to - it's calculated, corrupt, self-serving greed, rather than circumstances or mental-health or crimes of passion. And yet they have the money and/or influence to avoid punishment altogether. There's a convicted criminal in the White House, after all, and even if you believe that the conviction was a partisan witch-hunt, you'd have to admit that someone who says "they just let you grab 'em by the pussy" is not someone possessed of even average levels of moral fibre; he's easily guilty of breaking every single one of the ten commandments. Yet he's living a great (though weird - I wouldn't want it) life, and John Smith, who punched someone in a fit of rage, will be breaking rocks for years.
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(fwiw I'm atheist, but the Christian ethics frameworks are a useful minimal baseline)

Sure, but that was then and this is now. High explosives and drones and rapid-fire guns and global public transport and rogue nation support (eg: North Korea supplying weapons and training) makes it much easier for any 'stragglers' to still cause significant damage/fear across the globe.

And in the case of Iran, they've been perfecting their defence/resilience for decades; their civilians could (and may yet) starve to death, and the remaining militants would still be launching the occasional rocket into Hormuz; enough to deter shipping, at least. Indeed the civilians would join the militants (so they don't starve to death) and ideologically agree with the militants (because starving to death is unfair).

Besides, the group you refer to was, in some sense, befriended - The Marshall Plan was a recognition that the only way to stop the Axis from being resentful and eventually triggering WW3 was to treat them perhaps more fairly than they "deserved". The equivalent in Iran would be to remove sanctions and deliver aide, and I don't see the US doing that any time soon, not even if the situation calmed down militarily.

Yes and no - the best way to eliminate your enemies is to make friends with them. The best way to make more enemies is to incompletely destroy them.

It's not realistically possible for Israel to completely destroy Hezbollah and Hamas, let alone Iran. God knows they've tried. They can cripple them, perhaps, but it's temporary, and warfare is only getting more and more asymmetric, so the few remaining enemies can do serious damage.

Obviously it's hard to make friends with people who are ideologically opposed to your existence. But unlike destroying them, I don't think it's impossible.

No, you only think you "know" that, but your thoughts are in conflict with observable reality.

If you don't trust big science, you can do an experiment at home to show that an increase in CO2 will trap more heat (from the sun, or any other source).

At this point, you should report your results, and publicly admit that "an increase in atmospheric CO2, absent other factors, will lead to increased trapping of heat".

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is also increasing. This is difficult to measure at home, though affordable sensors do exist. But it's widely measured across the world, and is a predictable consequence of carbon-containing material that we are burning.

Now the burden of proof is on you, my non-hoaxy small scientist: prove that there is some process underway that will fully counteract the heating effect of the above two datapoints. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of processes that will partly counteract it (cloud vapor, oceanic CO2 absorption, oceanic heat absorption, ice caps melting) but the current (big science) consensus is that none of those processes are sufficient, even in aggregate.

If you can prove that we're making a big fuss out of nothing, you'll make the rest of the world incredibly relieved. You'd probably be paid handomely by the fossil fuel industry, too. What are you waiting for?

I visited Vietnam a couple of weeks ago and they have a home-grown (probably heavily government-subsidised) Vinfast company, which specialises in EVs. I'd say at least 50% of the cars in the cities there are VFast EVs now (though there are still ten scooters for every car, and not many of those are EV). They're perfectly adequate cars; equivalent to BYD or similar.

Despite being something of an EV enthusiast, I'd never even heard of them before.

They're starting to try to export them (they even manufacture them in North Carolina now); it's something to keep an eye out for. Vietnam's a rapidly developing economy, basically following in the footsteps of China, so it's a good time for them to ramp up their auto industry.

Visa screening processes (and indeed most screening processes for anything anywhere) are flawed fromt the get-go.

Most (99%+) people are completely harmless and won't cause any problems.

Most broad demographics (eg: Palestinian, Christian, Australian, Gen-X...) will also have 99% completely harmless people.

Trying to identify trouble-makers only works if you have non-demographic information about the person you're identifying... but most (90%) people won't have a public-enough life for that information to be available.

Only ~73% source of people in the world have uses the internet, and of those, ~90% never contribute more than the occasional comment. So analysing social media use won't help much.

For crime, estimates vary but in first-world countries roughly ~5-30% of people have some kind of criminal record, so maybe that helps; but most of those crimes would be the sort of trivial stuff that really shouldn't prevent a visa (eg: traffic offences).

So screening will only pick up the really obvious stuff (bad criminal records, news-worthy offences, certain types of celebrities). It won't pick up the quiet sociopath or the devious white-collar grifter or the desperately-in-debt-to-criminal-gangs.

And the expense and the delays and the false positives are just incredible. I don't think we get good value-for-money for it, or good value-for-delay, or good value-for-inconvenience.

No, in fact it's sort of the opposite - the social media companies have to prevent kids from logging in, but they don't have to prevent them accessing it. So, if anything, there will be more no-login access to sites because the SM companies still want kids' eyeballs (and just because they're not logged in doesn't mean they're anonymous; Facebook will still know from tracking cookies, etc).

I basically disagree with the legislation; it's ineffective and poorly targetted. Kids can bypass the blocks in many sorts of ways, and the loss of anonymous accounts is actually really bad; I've had a spare throwaway Facebook account with a fake identity for ~10 years, and it could well be caught by this. Also, how can a kid learn to be safe online if they're not allowed to use half of the web? And how can parents use parental controls to restrict a kid to safe parts of Youtube if the kid can't be logged in to it? And of course 4chan isn't banned.

That said, it's a social discouragement: "I can't let you use Snapchat, it's illegal" is a good excuse for a parent to prevent Snapchat usage if they catch the kid using it, while "but all my friends use it" becomes a less effective comeback because all of their friends' parents have the same excuse. It's not going to stop a determined kid of an inattentive parent, but it is a social pressure that might help to reverse some of the crippling SM addictions that way too many kids (and adults, tbf) are hit by.

It's not an uncommon approach, but the 17 mins (33%) varies. My physics prof went for 50%, one particularly picky maths prof I knew went with 80%; you really had to know the material for his exams.

And not only that, but road surfaces are designed with expected traffic patterns in mind - stronger surfaces for highways, weaker/cheaper for side streets.

You can choose your level of detail for these sorts of calculations but you'll always make some assumptions.

Our university uses https://github.com/dropbox/zxc... , which does that as well as some simple algorithmic transformations (eg: pa$$w0rd). We don't say, "it can't be stupid" but we do say "that password is considered insecure".

That said, MFA almost makes passwords obsolete; the threat landscape for guessing a password online is far wider than the landscape for having access to the student's unlocked phone.

And yes, we support Passkey these days too.

A bit of Googling (which you could have done, were you so inclined) suggests Barcelona and Majorca.

And before you say "they're not deserts yet", he did say "forming apace", not "currently here" so don't strawman him (but hey, maybe I'm strawmanning you). For evidence of "forming apace" you can look at the data in the study linked from the above article - already measured decreased overall rainfall, and increased droughts on top of that (ie: all the rain is concentrated in one time period, aka floods).

Of course, he also mentioned a string of other climate issues, none of which you argued against, so you must agree with him on those. So I sure hope you're as alarmed by this as I am. ...I get sick of the "show me the evidence" crowd. There's plenty of evidence and no matter how much I show them they don't care, because they're not actually ready to listen.

If you think you are ready to listen, but you still don't believe climate change is a threat to humanity's future, consider this question: what realistic evidence would convince you? If you don't think such evidence could realistically exist... then you're not ready to listen.

Climate change doesn't look like "Day after Tomorrow". It's not going to be 10 degrees hotter today than yesterday. The effects are large-scale, long-term, and subtle, and will slowly destroy human civilisation. The more we do now to slow it down, the better it will be for everyone in the future.

Right, but it may well be just as easy to find a place to rent that's $1800 (maybe further from the supermarket/restaurants) and keep the Doordash.

You can make any small value into a big value by accumulating it over a year, but it's still a relatively small value compared to your other accumulating costs.

We're financially secure (own our house outright) and we get doordash simply because we don't have the time or energy or interest to clean or wash up. We do feel a little guilty about it (the business model does seem pretty unethical), but our guilt is not because we could be spending the money more wisely.

They'll remember after the first couple of times.

Mobility scooters are much heavier. They're also less manouverable and have slightly restricted sight lines compared to your typical walking person. The 4mph reduces your chance of running over babies crawling in front of you.

I have a friend who suffered sever spinal injuries in her 20s because a mountain biker crashed into her when she was walking down a hill. The rider had lost control (they didn't mean to be going that fast) but he got away with minor grazes, and she's the one who can barely walk.

Even without electric assistance, the mass and speed of an out-of-control bicycle + rider is not to be underestimated.

It's short-sighted. How expensive are people's lives going to be when the earth is 3 degrees warmer? That's not "turn up your air-conditioners", that's "massive natural disasters every year" and "farm yields drastically decline" and "some countries become unlivable" and "fish stocks collapse" and "water wars".

If you want to forget about the ethics of making many species extinct, we can just play the economics game instead - but it still doesn't look good.