And "taikonaut" isn't even really Mandarin-- it was a word coined by westerners in a sort of chinese/greek mishmash language, and not the word used in Chinese. The Mandarin word is hangtianyuan.

The constitution says no such thing. Try reading it.

[my emphasis].

You do know that Wikipedia is international, right? Not just U.S.?

And, I'm not even sure by what legal system you say it is "the legal name" even in the U.S.. What body of law exactly says that the president has the unilateral power to rename international bodies of water? Can he rename Florida "Trumpia?" Can he rename the Appalachian mountains "Donald's Hills"?

In any case, Mexico's coastline on the Gulf is longer than the US's coastline, so if anybody can name it, they should.

The Deccan traps are estimated to have been active for a period of something like 750,000 years. This was a very slow event. The end-Cretaceous extinction, on the other hand, was very abrupt: ignore the dinosaurs; the record of foraminifera (and other oceanic microfossils) shows that the extinction was essentially instantaneous in the fossil record.

So it just doesn't seem that the Deccan traps fit the data as the cause for extinction.

I lost my first account somehow and rarely posted (if at all), but have been reading since maybe 1996?

Thanks for your positive perspective. I don’t mean to be negative or sound like an edgelord. I’m just trying to be realistic, and I can only speak from my experience, which seems to indicate a lot of environmental, societal, political, intellectual, and likely other forms of deterioration during my lifetime.

I don’t deny that there is good news – in fact I seek it – but it always seems rather minor in comparison to the bad news (Israel, Ukraine, climate change, increasing wealth disparity, increasing authoritarianism and likely more war coming, and so forth).

I also often find that good news is countered somehow by a greater amount of bad news. For example, I’ve heard that thousands of people come out of extreme poverty every year. My concern is that much of that progress is based on things like increased fossil fuel usage, which is one of my major concerns. That progress is also reversible (for example, what’s happening in China and Africa today?), and I’m honestly not sure about absolute and relative numbers affected. Personally, I think humankind and the planet were better off when we could establish equilibrium with our environments.

Regarding solar installations, I recently also read that fossil fuel consumption is projected to actually increase until at least 2050. Those panels might mitigate that growh just slightly, but we don’t seem to be going in the right direction globally.

I live in Southeast Asia electric cars are everywhere, but so are diesel trucks that owners will keep running for as long as possible, and people burn all types of trash everywhere. Dirty tractors, motorbikes, and other types of vehicles aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Disposable plastic cups for unnecessary coffee drinks come in plastic bags with plastic straws, and yet people still buy plastic bags just to contain garbage. There is no separation of organics, recycleables, landfills, and worse things such as batteries. It’s hard to have any impact in this environment, but I suspect that it would have to start with education, which generally needs to start with English. But school costs money and people need to work to feed their families, so nobody has any money or time for learning.

Regarding diseases, I’m not in favor of prolonged suffering, but I do believe in reasonable human lifespans. I’m not anti-DEI, but my step-sister has an adult child with some kind of brain condition that will never contribute anything to society (emotional and intellectual development stopped at about age 2). He consumes significant resources and is actually a bit of a threat or risk to others. Even his mother doesn’t want to spend time with him. Being a utilitarian, it’s hard for me to justify his existence relative to alternate potential uses of equivalent resources.

I support research and I know that I am not entitled to draw any lines. I have been extremely fortunate throughout my life, and I don’t take that for granted. I just wish that I could actually foresee a future like Star Trek as potentially even possible.

I agree with their conclusions and choices, and appreciate people like you that talk honestly about such topics, especially with children. I honestly don't understand why so many parents encourage their children to have progeny, and I see it as their own personal self-interest as grandparents.

For numerous reasons, I never wanted to have children of my own, but two women convinced me that I was wrong (well, one was more of an accident I guess, but she wouldn't use birth control and then wouldn't abort). Despite their relative advantages, I have significant guilt for leaving my children in current global conditions.

Partly due to media but also my community and education, I grew up with this perspective that humanity was on an upward path globally, and it's been distressing to learn that this may not be the general rule. I see my daughter watching rainbow unicorn videos and I'm so worried about the reality she'll discover when the childhood period ends and she realizes just how unpleasant and cruel people and the world can be.

He's still around? I though he retired years ago.

Nevertheless, he did not come up with an alternative theory.

This has been stated thousands of times on slashdot already, but I guess it has not sunk in yet. Climate is not weather.

Climate is a long-term average over a large region. Weather is the specific conditions at one specific place at a given time.

You can predict the average value of, say, rolling two 6-sided dice a million times (average is 7), but that still won't tell you what you get on your next roll in a craps game. Averages are easier to predict than individual values.

I'm not sure what "established climate scientist" you're referring to, but we already know about water vapor. We've known about the greenhouse effect of water vapor for over a century. It's not an "alternative model": water vapor is incorporated into every climate model since Manabe and Wetherald 1967. We wouldn't understand the temperature of Earth at all without understanding the greenhouse effect of water vapor.

Water vapor, however, goes into and comes out of the atmosphere on a time scale of days, due to evaporation and precipitation. Unlike CO2, it does not accumulate.

Hard to see what you have difficulty understanding.

Let's start again.

What I said was high-voltage transmission lines are not "spanning continents" and they were not cheap. All the posts since then have emphasized that point.

Get it now?

Their bid won in the first round. It is unlikely that ULA would have put in a bid for the lunar lander (they are solely a launch vehicle company-- the individual companies, Boeing and Lockheed, the components of ULA, were part of the Blue Origin "National Team" bid). https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/16...

Blue Origin sued NASA to be reconsidered, saying that they didn't know that cost was so important, but lost their case.

Huh? Elon Musk funded Donald Trump's presidential campaign, indeed, but I don't see how that makes them "partners in crime." The Supreme Court ruled that billionaires are allowed to fund political action committees. If you think that's a crime, blame the Supreme Court.

SpaceX doesn't get any no-bid contracts; they are just very successful in winning bids. But they win because their bids are typically lower in cost than the competition. The solicitation to provide a lunar lander to NASA was open to anybody with the capability to make a credible bid, the contract was bid won by SpaceX because their bid was significantly lower in cost than any other bid.