In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

It came across as intense satire/sarcasm to me, but then I maybe failed to consider that there may be some here who actually are that stupid. *shrug*

This has to be a troll. Nobody on Slashdot is actually this stupid.

I often wonder how all these people who believed that COVID vaccines were a plot to sterilize or murder humanity have justified to themselves the continued-unchanged existence of babies-in-specific and humans-in-general, respectively.

Does it make you watch the whole ad before it lets you take the vehicle out of park?

We don't even have a permanent colony on Antarctica, just scientific expeditions manned part-time.

To be a multi-planet species, we would need at least one permanent colony on a second planet (Mars, presumably).

Mars is a LOT harder than Antarctica.

I would say the non-litterer is preferable to the person who even litters on the moon.

It's the same reasons that CEOs who wreck multiple companies one after the other seem top find a golden parachute and a new job waiting for them.

Just wait until they get that massive ticket for littering...

Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.

Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time. And it's not like you have vastly larger average lava flows than we do. The largest lava flow on Earth in the Holocene (modern era) is in Iceland (the THjórsárhraun - 900km2, 25km3, 70km underground travel followed by 130-140km on the surface). For comparison, Hawaii's largest holocene flow is the Ailaau Flow at 430km2, 4-5km3, and 40km.

If we want to limit to more recent flows (since Ailaau was fairly recent, in case you think Iceland stopped having big eruptions), Iceland's biggest *after* Alia'au was Laki (1783–1784 AD), at 600km2, 15km3, and 80km. It lasted for 8 months to 2 years, depending on whether you count the concurrent Grímsvötn eruption as part of it. So much gas was released from that huge volume of lava that despite us being nearly arctic (polar volcanoes have much lower near-term climate impacts than equatorial volcanoes), it caused a winter so severe that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and ice was seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

We simply get bigger effusive eruptions than you, full stop. Not all eruptions, of course, both of us have a huge variance in eruption scales and dynamics. But trying to claim ours are somehow "easier" is just not in line with the facts. Also, Hawaiian eruptions tend to occur on terrain that slopes significantly more consistently toward the sea, aka where you want to divert lava toward; on flatter or less-consistently-angled terrain, lava "piles up" more and makes it easier to overtop berms.

There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks

I'm not talking about "coffee shacks", I'm talking about whole communities and beloved places. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2018 Lower Puna eruption. Of course the homes near the vents in Leilani Estates were doomed, but there is absolutely NO reason why you should have lost anywhere close to as much as you did so far from the vents. Losing Kapoho Bay for example was simply cultural fatalism. I watched a person crying on the news saying she didn't understand why Pele chose to take such a beautiful place. It's not Pele who took it, it's your insane resistance against doing anything to protect yourselves. That was one of the easiest possible flows to divert. Most of the lava fronts moved at a crawl, you had warning long in advance of the eruption and a very slow eruptive rampup (didn't really take off until June), and you had a steep slope to the south into unpopulated areas you could have easily diverted it down. Losing all that was a choice.

"Oh, we can't!" is just an excuse for your fatalism that gives you an excuse to not put forth the effort to actually do it. It's not the 1940s anymore, we're not chucking surplus WWII bombs at lava tubes anymore. Lava diversion is a science and is routinely effectively done. There are limits, but you were nowhere near said limits for sites far from the vents. There are costs, but they are nowhere near the costs that you paid by refusing to act.

Yes it's very interesting how quickly we have learned that the Constitution is simply a piece a paper with no inherent power, except as people honor it. Once that honor is gone, the constitution is gone. Congress and the courts also have no real power, except that which is granted voluntarily. Courts can rule until they are blue in the face but when a president just says, "so what" everything is lost. We all got extremely complacent, thinking that all people, especially presidents, ultimately uphold the constitution as we do individually. Despite generations of talking about freedom, it's astounding how quickly so many just don't care about it actually, and are happy to have a king.

I agree with John V. Last: It's worth fighting for, even if I'm not hopeful about winning. At least you can tell you kids you stood up for the constitution and freedom, even though you lost. The next 10 years will be very interesting.

Well, to make a not so subtle point, there WAS an armed revolt, but it was in defense of all this, not in opposition.

It's none of those things. It's just seething vitriol. Republican voters, who are predominantly poor, sick, and uneducated, have been told for years that they're poor and uneducated because of the only people on this earth who don't want them to be poor, sick, and uneducated. The GOP can't succeed without a huge tribe of victim voters who can only be trained in base instinctive behaviors like hate and violence.

Manufacturing didn't move to China because the Chinese were cheating and undercutting American companies. Rather it was a deliberate decision on the part of American companies to kill local manufacturing and eliminate jobs (employees are simply costs to reduce), in order to maximize short-term quarterly gains. No amount of tariff and government banning will fix that.

I take native Hawaiian religious objections seriously. These are people who take a fatalistic "Pele will take what she wants, it's pointless to try to stop her" attitude toward lava flows running over their houses that seems utterly insane here in Iceland. We'll buy up every available water pump on the international market and walk on active-flowing lava fields to save a harbour for a couple thousand people. We'll keep running tourist sites right next to a volcano that erupts every couple months by building multi-story-high berms around it with giant bulldozers and cooling anything that tries to overtop to make the berms even higher. And it totally works . But Hawaiians will sit back and watch incredibly slow-flowing flows with easy diversion paths take out everything they hold dear. At best they'll point to some primitive failed attempts in like the 1940s as a reason to not try, but then when pressed, it often comes back to: "Pele will take what she wants to take."

Another example: geothermal drilling on the Big Island. Massive protests. Massive resistance, way beyond the token NIMBY resistance here. Meanwhile Hawaii continues to generate most of its electricity from oil, at great cost. Hawaii is the only other place (outside of Iceland) to have accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. In Hawaii they treated it as a major incident and immediately shut down the well. When we did it? Our reaction was, "WOW, we can produce REALLY hot steam from THIS well!", made it into a production well, and started planning to drill more.

I guess one major difference here is that in the early Icelandic cosmology, volcanoes weren't the product of a high-ranking creator goddess, but rather, Surtr, who was practically a demon and was fated to destroy the world. It's good to resist Surtr!