gydfi

I've never seen it done with a seven-figure income though.

I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences.

Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.

Not sure why the US needs to make a big deal out of it with biometric scans instead of the tried-and-true option of a little man in a box stamping your passport.

See also the Russian bases in the Australian Antarctic territory. Australia asserts sovereignty over a third of Antarctica, Russia ignores it and sets up bases anyway. Australia has neither the ability nor the desire to fight Russia, so we studiously ignore it.

I imagine that would be a pretty easy record to break, if you're doing a translunar flight anyway then getting a bit higher doesn't take much more energy (source: played a lot of Kerbal).

On the other hand the passengers might prefer a close-up view of the Moon to a record.

Or to put it another way, they're standard in practically every country apart from the US. Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?

I'd say those people are the real threat to democracy.

The divergence in poll results seems to suggest we should put even less credence on polls here than usual.

In what sense is it off-topic?

Not so much. In Australia we have single member districts but not really gerrymandering because our districts are set by an independent non-political body using an algorithm and some common sense. Look at an electoral map of Australia and you'll see that our electorates are reasonably sensible shapes, they haven't been set up to favour one party over another.

No, we're not rewriting the whole code base on a production system just because you think Scala is neat. The existing code is fundamentally fine, let's focus on this problem today.

"Sure, I could boil some water. Or I could just sprinkle seasoning on the top and eat it now..."

"I mean, there'd be temperature fluctuations of tens of degrees every day! It would be dark half the time! How could life survive in such an unstable environment?"

A cell, a treadmill, some books and movies, and Skype privileged with your family on the outside. That's all you need. It's constraining enough to still be a punishment that you want to avoid, but it doesn't send you crazy like traditional solitary (which is more like sensory deprivation). You don't make contacts with other criminals, you don't risk getting shanked, and you sit out your sentence in an annoying yet humane state of boredom, like a waiting room.

I've always wondered what goes through the head of someone when they think "Hey! I think I'll try heroin for the first time! That seems like a good decision!"

So I repeat my question: how are things working out in the Philippines? Are the harsh policies being pursued doing a good job of decreasing the drug problem? If they are, perhaps we can think about adopting aspects of those solutions while leaving out some of the more problematic aspects such as extrajudicial executions.

It seems to me, however, that the overwhelming priority of our heroin policy should be ensuring that people who aren't already taking heroin don't start. Those who have already got hooked are pretty much doomed already, they should be a lower priority than those who can easily be saved. It seems to me that many people advocate a "softly softly" approach to drug users that fucks over the first group to help the second, and thus ensures that our drug problems continue instead of being wiped out.