You are right. I wish in a city enclosed between mountains, there are only 4 or so main accesses (and some minor ones). It was always jammed, do the ecological mayor 15 or so years ago decided to make it much worse: the main entrances got traffic lights for no other purpose than to slow entering traffic, making it basically impossible at rush hour. BUT at the same time they built lots of bike paths and improved bud and tram network. Now I don't have a single colleague coming with a car.

Yes, the books are entertaining and can be read on several levels, but the prize went to the *series*, which IMHO is somewhat subpar. For instance they show the researchers as just naive morons while in the book they are the only ones with ethics and a backbone. And the introspective side of Murderbot is glossed over.

I got in a car with a friend 2 days ago. It was his wife's car and the 2 of us couldn't even figure out how to turn the radio off with the idiotic screen. And the funny part is that a few weeks previous he hosted a few students from Munich (home of BMW) in his own car and they were so surprised to see a car with buttons that they took selfies in front of them !!!

Why are you responding to yourself in a negative way ? It feels like an intermediate post is missing or you replied to the wrong post. Is /. buggy ?

Eh, take some time to read a bit better, my post was in reply to a mention of Trump, I didn't even know you were involved. This being said I can understand you being touchy in your forever war with your personal trolls, but usually you are a lot more insightful. Best of luck.

Silent ? He can't seem to shut the fuck up about anything.

Haven't you seen all the recent deep cuts to NASA science missions? And science in general. In some cases it will take over a generation to recover.

I really like that quote:

Or it could be that they both evolved from an earlier and different process which was quite inefficient and which was replaced by the 2 mechanisms of bacteria/archea so thoroughly that no genetic trace remains.

Did that include the graphic card in that laptop or not ?

Yeah, a lot of jobs are done with their body. I never understood the people who oppose sex work because "it uses the body" or similar arguments. A lot of jobs are physical and will destroy you over time. What about a mountain guide and his rotten knees, a wallbuilder and his painful back, an electrician with crawling on his knees and repeated shocks, a plumber with handling shit, etc, etc...

It wasn't "anything goes" before capitalism. In Europe it was often king-given monopolies. The first one to do something could often get a monopoly for life (and sometimes even more) to continue doing it. A lot of industries were controlled like that, and it crushed any competition or hope for technical improvements. It also applied to unions (trade unions of which only one per job existed and you were not allowed to work if you were not a member). It even applied to weird things like composing/performing musicals (for Lully in France under Louis XIV for instance).

I used to work in Antarctica. One summer on a new station in the center authorities decided to put us on the same time as the big coastal station, saying that we had sun 24/7 anyway so it wouldn't matter. The idea was to synchronize communication with the head station. Well, the sun still has daily ups and downs, so we had to get up when the sun was lowest and start work when it was the fucking coldest at -50C and we'd go to bed when it was a balmy -20C. After a few days of that we started getting up and start work later and later, until we'd start work at 2pm or so !!!
The next year we had our own timezone.

Well, it needs to be quoted quite subtly. If you try "I don't believe murder is wrong", your are in for a bad time.

Still better than the Ministry of Lies we currently have...