So true. I gave up reading Slashdot daily back in 2014 because it went from a tech site full of boffins to a conservative safe-place where ignoring science and complaining about "shrill lefties who used to believe in global cooling" would regularly get modded to 5. I know we're mostly greybeards now and older people skew conservative, but I never thought science nerds would stop believing in science on the basis of petty politics.

Libertarianism is orthogonal to the traditional left-right dichotomy, you can find libertarians anywhere on that axis. It's more useful to see the political compass as two dimensional, with libertarian vs authoritarian on a north-south axis and left-right as the east-west axis.

Sounds pretty similar to the weapons system on Magrathea in H2G2.

Or more likely social media companies like Facebook just move operations offshore and continue operating as before; enjoying the lower tax benefits and being financially shielded from breaches of new regulation. Pretty sure that is what the online casinos did.

That's not the primary reason health experts are worried we won't have lasting immunity. Some viruses lay dormant in our immune system and then come back again when we are immuno-depressed (e.g. chicken pox -> shingles). Some viruses mutate quickly enough that our immune system doesn't recognise the new strain (e.g. influenza). And some, like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold, can reinfect us within a year of having it, as our immune system doesn't permanently retain the memory of the antibodies needed to fight it. Since this virus is new, we simply don't know enough about long term immunity to make an accurate assessment. What we can predict is that it could be any of the above scenarios, of which "no long term immunity" is a possible option, especially since that is the situation for other known coronaviruses.

Why do you allow your president to have shares in any company while in office?

If it was cytokines causing fatalities, then you would expect to see people with stronger immune system responses being hit the hardest (such as young, fit and healthy people), as usually happens with pathogens which trigger a cytokine storm. In fact so far it is the reverse, it is people with the weakest immune system who are hit the hardest, such as the elderly.

Yeah I wonder why they didn't choose iOS...?

Makes perfect sense really. Trump has to appear to be doing something on an issue he already ignored for too long. So he gets to act tough on countries where he has no business interests, while allowing travel to other countries where he has golf courses. https://www.businessinsider.co...

I put 5kW of panels on my AUD $800k home for about $8k five or so years ago. So you could say that the panels were 1% of my housing costs. The same 5kW panels probably cost around half that now, and would probably be about 5-10% more efficient due to natural degradation. So I seriously can't see that "houses here in Oz are already attracting a premium when they have solar PV". At best you might say they could theoretically add 1%, but constant price decreases and degradation make that the absolute maximum unless the purchaser was clueless.

The only way I can see that solar PV could add anything more than a couple of thousand to a house price is if the original owner locked in a very high feed-in-tariff from before the state govt cut them substantially (around 2011 in most states IIRC).

Australia isn't a great example to use for regulation driving efficiency, it has a dirty grid due to cheap local supplies of coal, and yet higher prices per kW than the US and Canada.

Your valuation method is a little naive. Most businesses can't survive without loans, even fewer would have been started without one. If spending more borrowed money from VC's than you make in profit means your company is worth $0, then you presumably assume Amazon was worthless for the first 14 years of its existence?

You'll understand when you have children. Even if you don't want to take dozens of photos, your spouse might, and your extended family will want you to share photos. Many times your kids will be indoors, in bad lighting. They will be moving, making a long exposure blurry. You won't have time to set up a decent DSLR and manually focus. You'll want something in your pocket to take a photo at exactly that instant. You'll want to look back at those photos in years to come. You will come to care about image quality.

Doesn't this strategy assume every-increasing prices for large shopping mall retail space? And doesn't the current trajectory of prices predict that the move to online retailers will reduce the demand for warehouse-style retail? From the 80's onwards, there was a constant battle for suburban malls to grow in size to be the biggest in order to get the foot traffic. It feels like that trend has been reversing for the last 5 years, and by 2030 I imagine most malls will be deserted and replaced by Amazon and similar online retailers.

Translation: I refuse to make any sacrifices to mitigate climate change until my preferred method of action is implemented.

Wrong. Nuclear is ridiculously expensive and doesn't belong in that list, especially when you neglected solar. Nuclear is dead in the water based on cost alone, let alone the unsolved spent fuel problem or the 10 year build times. Renewable energy has 3 times the decarbonisation potential of nuclear for every dollar spent.