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Comment Re:kewl story bro, but these drugs aren't for them (Score 2) 121

Those techniques won't work on overeating because you need to eat to live, you can't just stop cold turkey like with smoking.

Overweight people have it constantly hammered into them that they're endangering their lives, it's not a messaging issue.

And if it's so bad, why is having the meds such a problem? Their side effects are minimal and they work better than diet and exercise and lifestyle change. Most of the arguments seem to be based on some weird puritanism, where only the "worthy" should be able to weigh less.

Comment Re:kewl story bro, but these drugs aren't for them (Score 1) 121

"We spent a ridiculous amount of effort to stop smoking in this country but have done almost nothing in regards to obesity"

I disagree strongly. We have spent as a society uncounted billions on addressing obesity, including on government programs. The problem is it's just a harder problem than smoking.

At the end of the day, just about everybody knows obesity is bad and that you have to exercise and eat healthier. Lack of knowledge isn't the problem.

Comment Re:kewl story bro, but these drugs aren't for them (Score 3, Insightful) 121

"You have to admit that the majority of people are not like diligent you but are more like those bakery patrons"

So then the drugs sound like the best option? The only other argument is basically that of a sociopath -- people should be punished because they don't have the willpower you think they do.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 1) 70

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 3, Insightful) 70

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 4, Informative) 70

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

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