magduf

I completely disagree about the Moon being more difficult. We can get to the Moon in 3 days flat. We cannot do that with Mars; to go there, humans have to spend months in space being exposed to hard radiation. With the Moon, that isn't a problem because 3 days cosmic radiation exposure isn't a big deal, as proven by our many landings on the Moon in the 60s-70s.

On top of that, the Moon has proven mineral resources which can be mined and refined on-site a lot easier than trying to do the same on Mars.

Mars is just too far away. If you're going to neglect distance, then we should just skip Mars and go straight to Alpha Centauri or some other star with a bunch of exoplanets.

I don't work at a FAANG company, but we do have some pretty nice hardware. I have 27" Dell monitors that I think cost about $800 each when new. (They're probably less now, they're a few years out-of-date by now.)

Admittedly, I'm not a coffee drinker, but rather a tea drinker, but I've seen French presses and I thought the idea was that they aren't very expensive, but they're a lot more laborious than a machine, both in preparation and in cleaning.

It's kinda like my fancy tea infuser cup: I have a nice glass mug with a laser-cut stainless-steel infuser for loose tea. It was $30 at a fancy store (could probably get it cheaper on Amazon), but it's a one-time purchase. With high-end loose tea, it makes great tea, but the problem is cleaning: cleaning out the infuser (by hand) is a lot more work than just dumping a tea bag in the trash and putting a regular mug in the dishwasher. But the results certainly are a lot better than a $0.20 tea bag.

Depends on the monitors and dishwasher. A $250 dishwasher is a pretty crappy one; the nice ones are $500-1000. $150 will get you a perfectly decent 1080p 23" monitor, however at work I have three 27" monitors that probably cost about $800 each.

It just depends on if you want nice stuff or really basic stuff. The nice stuff costs a lot more than the prices you quoted, just like a nice midrange car like a Camry costs a lot more than a basic, bottom-of-the-line car (Yaris?).

Considering the audience of this site, I would assume most here would buy higher-end stuff, and not the cheapest things available.

Honestly, the bit about cooking and doing the dishes sounded even more ridiculous than the coffee thing. What kind of adult can't do even the most basic cooking, or never has to do dishes? How many people actually get all their food at the company cafeteria like this person claims to?

For certain things, yes. For other things, no. For instance, I find "all hands" meetings at work to be a complete waste of time, except maybe for the possibility of socializing or getting a free lunch. I could learn everything I need to know from these meetings in a few minutes just by reading an email, instead of wasting an hour of my time listening to bosses drone on and on about stuff or show photos of their families and dogs.

Basically, I think the key is latency. If you need to communicate two-way to work out issues, then you want low latency (because each response of yours depends on the other party's last response), so speech is quickest. (There's also texting, but that sucks because the data entry method is so slow; I don't know why so many people prefer it to talking, even for conducting intimate relationships.) However, if the communication is one-way (like your company disseminating some general information for all employees), then at least for me, reading is much, much faster than listening to someone talk.

You think 3 days is "too far for any meaningful emergency response"? I mean, yeah, if someone needs to be in an ICU within an hour, that's too long, but if they develop a new coronavirus on the Moon, 3 days to get people back to Earth is not bad.

By your logic, it seems like we should just give up on building any bases in this solar system altogether, and just start building a ship to go to Alpha Centauri.

Getting back from Venus is as easy as launching from Earth: i.e., completely doable with present-day technology. The only issue is getting it there to begin with, but that's not really hard, though we'd probably need to launch several rockets here on Earth, and assemble stuff in space, to get all the mass needed for a single launch on Venus. Landing stuff on this hypothetical Venus would be much easier than on Mars, since this Venus has an atmosphere, and Mars only has an "atmosphere" (one that's 1/200 the pressure of Earth's, not really much of one), so we'd be able to use aerobraking, parachutes, etc. In fact, landing stuff on today's Venus is pretty easy, and the Soviets were doing this ages ago; the only problem is that landers didn't last long because of the heat and corrosive atmosphere.

Sorry to be pedantic, but no, those people were called "Martians". (His term, "homo ares", is referring to Ares, the god also known as Mars.)

The Belters lived in the Asteroid Belt, and were opposed to both the Terrans and the Martians. The Belters were the most different biologically because the gravity is so low, whereas the Martians got to enjoy the relatively high 1/3 g gravity of Mars.

Maybe we should work on terraforming it: use various processes to change the atmosphere and stop the runaway greenhouse affect, shed the excess heat into space, and build an earth-normal atmosphere.

However, it does seem like building rotating space stations (like O'Neil cylinders) is much more feasible.

>Despite that I don't think it's a good idea to recommend or disrecommend any specific drug; it is very much a biochemical roll of the dice as to whether a med will work on a given individual and the odds aren't even particularly good.

Since many drugs seem to affect different people differently, it seems we really need to work on understanding how drugs affect people differently based on their genetics. This is similar to, for instance, how some people think cilantro tastes like soap, because of a gene mutation. I think there isn't nearly enough attention being paid to this, and it's making the field of psychiatry look like various drugs are no better than placebo, when it's much more likely that some drugs work great for some people, but terribly or not at all for others, so right now it's a crap-shoot when instead we should be figuring out what will actually work for certain people based on their genetics instead of shooting in the dark.

>Please don't recommend Phenibut. It's not an antidepressant. It's highly addictive and has severe rebound and withdrawal symptoms. Drugs that make you temporarily feel good should not be confused with antidepressant drugs.

This kinda sounds like drugs like clonazepam or lorazepam. They're also very addictive, and are not antidepressants at all, however they are anti-anxiety drugs and they work very quickly. And anxiety and depression seem to go hand-in-hand for many sufferers, so they do seem to really help some people, at least initially.

I think a big problem is the medical establishment really doesn't have a good handle on what depression really is (biologically) or how to treat it.

It seems to me that the real problem is that these issues have root causes which really need to be addressed, and that's why telling the chronically obese people "just stop eating" doesn't work, because it isn't addressing the root cause.

The problem, however, is that addressing the root cause is extremely difficult, or even impossible (for those trying to give advice), so people don't know what else to say. For the person in poverty, for instance, the root causes are numerous and systemic in that society, and pretty much impossible for anyone to fix anytime soon. So what else do you do or say?

I don't think this applies here; from the story, it sounds like both Pornhub and the victims are in the US, and Pornhub is bound by US law on these matters (which is decidedly unfriendly to CP).

>Furthermore, these platforms can claim that they didn't upload it, a user did, so they shouldn't be held responsible.

Not true. They're required to take down stuff when notified it's illegal, and CP is very illegal. So taking 2 weeks to remove something this blatantly illegal sure looks a lot like criminal negligence.

For comparison, how does YouTube handle this kind of thing? I'm pretty sure CP videos would never stay on YT for more than a day at the very most. And Pornhub can't claim to not have the generous resources Google has; Pornhub is a gigantic website.

I wouldn't be too surprised to see some zealous federal prosecutor nail them for this stuff, especially with a GOP presidential administration.

I believe so, yes.

My ex-wife used Stevia a lot and loved it. It tastes bitter and disgusting to me. Growing up, my mom always used Sweet-n-Low (saccharine sweetener) and tried to get me to use it. It always tasted bitter and disgusting to me.

I'm not a fan of grapefruit either (very bitter, no sweetness). Cilantro I'm okay with though; it doesn't taste like soap to me, but to some people it does.

I'm fairly sure they can't do that after the trial has started.

Basically, yeah, if you admit to the attorneys at the beginning (during "jury selection") that you'd do this, then yes, they'd use this to make sure you don't get on the jury, because you're obviously biased.

But if you lie or keep your mouth shut and get on the jury, and then during deliberations you bring this up only among other jury members that you don't believe anything the CIA says, I don't see how they can boot you from the jury at that point. Most likely, it would result in a mistrial due to hung jury.

>I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.

I think Nazi Germany should have been enough proof that humans are perfectly happy to do anything to support their side. Planting CP to target political prisoners is nothing compared to what the Nazis and various other regimes have done. What makes you think the humans in this place are any different?

Stevia tastes bitter and nasty. It's not even sweet.

>So you're saying that getting less votes in an election makes one better at getting the most votes? Fascinating the logic, or rather lack thereof, of Trump supporters.

Wow, this is an incredibly stupid post. I'm not a Trump supporter; that should have been obvious from my posts. And you think that getting more votes equals winning an election, in a place where the electoral system makes this not the case? And then you fire back at me with this idiotic post? You're beyond help. It's no wonder Trump won with people like you on the other side.

>Let's call this the coronavirus

Because it's not "the coronavirus" any more than the Spanish Flu is "the flu". The Spanish Flu was one pandemic that happened with one strain of the flu; it's not the same flu that we get every year. Similarly, COVID-19 or whatever we end up calling it in the future is not "the coronavirus", because that term applies to MANY different viruses, including MERS and SARS.

This seems like a very good example of how poor enforcement is. Child porn is very, very illegal, and gets "regular people" throw in prison for the rest of their lives just for having downloaded it and having it on their machines. Yet a big site like this can have it posted, and reposted, over and over, and that's perfectly OK.

Why is there no federal prosecution of not only the site for abetting, but also tracking down these ex-bfs or whoever it is uploading the videos? Usually, producing and knowingly distributing CP results in a very, very long prison sentence in the US.

Obviously, you are completely unwilling to accept the fact that Trump won the election, and somehow you're creating utterly insane logic to continue the fantasy in your head.

Are you seriously bringing that up again? He won the election. The number of votes is irrelevant. Maybe that's why he won: he actually understands this simple fact about how the Constitution works, and people like you either don't, or simply refuse to.

>Insofar as he can be said to understand anything

Well, while he doesn't seem to have much understanding of economics or how to run a government properly, let's give credit where credit is due: he certainly seemed to understand how to get people to vote for him a lot better than his political competitors did.

>The rest of the world has their own responsibility to some extent but the US usually takes point on these kind of things.

The US has 330M people. The rest of the world has over 7B. The rest of the world needs to get over this idea that the US is the leader on everything; the election of Trump should have been the canary in the coalmine that the US just can't be trusted for global leadership any more, and continuing to do so is dangerous and foolhardy. As you said, it's been "a few years" since the pandemic response team was fired; so why would any country have trusted the US since then for pandemic response ability or competence?

This is what happens when you elect utter incompetents to run the federal government, and they cut off funding for public-benefit agencies. The American people are getting exactly what they voted for. Expect things to get much worse.

>Please don’t shame me.

You're the one picking on me for just handing out some advice to someone.

>I think the fact that you are not angry about this situation

Where did I ever say I was OK with the state of affairs here? You're projecting your own biases and assumptions onto me.

All I did was give some advice to someone who is a victim of a crappy situation. You lashed out at me for not coming up with some magical solution to fix all the ails of the American healthcare system, or instead just whining about how bad the system is, instead of offering constructive advice for his particular situation.

Suppose you need inhalers, and you're living here in America with our crappy healthcare system, and suddenly your inhalers cost $300 instead of $30. But you make $100k+ at a tech company, like so many people here. Someone suggests taking a vacation to Canada or Europe or whatever and stocking up. What are you going to do, so "no!! All the poorer people here can't afford that, so I'm going to pay full price for these inhalers even though I'm going to Canada next week!" Or are you going to take advantage of your ability to travel and save some money on inhalers? Personally, I don't see how it's morally justifiable to not stock up on inhalers on your trip to Canada, and instead enrich the domestic companies that are screwing you over.

I never claimed this was a sustainable strategy for most Americans. Where did you ever get that idea?

Someone on this site probably has a good income in the software sector, and can afford a plane ticket out of the country to stock up on inhalers abroad.

Maybe you should try not getting outraged about every comment that doesn't propose somehow creating utopia.

Wiretapping is only illegal if you don't give permission for it. By having a device that's always recording audio, you're implicitly giving permission for what you describe.

2 wrongs don't make a right. And sure, FB uses "dark patterns", but that's a lot more subtle than registering obvious phishing domains. There's simply no defense for that at all; it's obviously aiding and abetting criminal activity.