“those who make monopolistic fortunes off the sick while also dictating refusal of care to the sick” is hardly arbitrary, though, is it. It’s quite a high bar to clear, that. It’s rational too, since they do many orders of magnitude more harm than e.g. a death row inmate, whom society is content to destroy.

Ohhhh, sorry! A patsy (watch the spelling!) is someone who takes the fall for, or is otherwise manipulated by someone else.

“Dr. Blakeley is not a patsy for the previous government, according to that report”, would be my guess?

Well there is no way to settle that bet, otherwise I would absolutely take it.

What? You think every single teenager universally disobeys their parents? I know for a fact this isn’t true. There exist responsible teenagers. Brides, even if a teenager is disobedient, the placement of boundaries changes their behaviour.

Peer pressure is real. Kids get social media accounts way too early because it’s difficult to justify holding off when all of their classmates have them. It causes actual social issues for kids when they are the only one without something. They get bullied etc, so parents are effectively forced to accede. Making it illegal gives parents a reason to say no, which might slow down the uptake.

Liberal tears are already known to be the most expensive commodity in the known universe, cf. Brexit.

I’m a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It’s not this one and I don’t and will never work for Elon Musk).
The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn’t exist, and there’s a whole lot of new technology required. Remotely docking is akin to self-driving in complexity; don’t forget to factor in the signal delay if you’re in a lunar or translunar orbit. If you make this a crewed activity only, then the problem becomes one of pneumatics. A pressure system that can reliably contain and transfer pressure up to the levels of spacecraft fuel (around 300 psi for liquid, 3000 for gas) repeatedly, in both directions is very, very heavy. The valves are heavy, the tanks are heavy, the control systems are heavy. Too heavy to be considered viable for spaceflight. Even less so for a mission whose payload is “as much transfer fuel as we can possibly get up there”. A huge amount of innovation has to take place before this can become real. As of 2022, when I last worked on this, none of the technology was even being researched, that is to say it was not even at TRL 3. Typically these things take on the order of a decade or so to get to TRL 9, if they are successful and quick.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying I’ll be fascinated to see which solutions they come up with, and that I’m sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.

All songs should be taken literally, which is why I eat love and prayers, and have a restraining order against me for trying to drag Hozier into a church at knifepoint.

Fair enough.

Haha! To prove that it wasn’t me, I just downvoted you. You are now on -1.

Sorry dude, you assumed too much there. I’m in Europe, and don’t go around down voting people in the middle of the night.

Anyway, your point. It’s irrelevant, since we were talking about NASA vs. the space rangers or whatever they’re called. Not This Guy vs. me.

No, it’s space administration. And they are the ones who actually know a thing about how spaceflight works, unlike this guy, evidently.

NASA.

Repetition.

You’re absolutely right there. We’re hard wired to think this way and it’s a constant battle.

Knowing these helps with self-talk. You trip over a curb and start scolding yourself. Then you can say to yourself “this is just spotlight bias”, and move on with your day, avoiding the impact of negative emotions. Or, you might be more open to a change in restaurant plans because you know of the false consensus effect. There’s subtle but real power in just naming things!

I think you meant they are labelling the protest as pro - Palestine, rather than anti - genocide. But it looks like you are annoyed that anyone would say things that are pro - Palestine.

Golf With Your Friends literally brings my family together

I don’t actually think economic migrants are a drain on our economy. Are you paid what you are worth? Nobody is, because then the company would be losing money on you. If the boss pays the expat 40 quid an hour, then he’s making 60 quid an hour off them, otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable. The boss is the winner, all the way up to the top of the company. Even if these expats are all working cash in hand and avoiding taxes (I don’t think that’s true: the vast majority of expats are decent and hardworking according to the government figures) they are stimulating the economy by doing the jobs nobody else wants to do, and making their companies/bosses rich in the process.

I’m going to have to disagree on the conditions in other countries as well. France, for example, has a much more socialist approach to refugees. It takes more refugees than we do, and it shelters and supports them better. The main reason people choose to pass through France, which offers a better life for refugees than the UK, is because either they speak English (often because they are coming from a country we colonised) or they have family or friends who are settled here already. I mean, put yourself in their shoes for a second. What would be more important to you if you were fleeing your country, or even if you were just sick of it and wanted a new life somewhere. Would you go somewhere you didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak the language to be totally alone and lost, even if there was an extra 100 quid a month in it for you? Or would you go to the country where you have an existing support network and the ability to communicate and negotiate without the need for a translator. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not borne out by any of the studies we’ve seen.

Totally agree on the legal routes. It needs to be sorted NOW though, because while there are no legal routes, people are dying in the channel and there’s nothing we can do that will stop that.

It’s a joke. You see, the standard of living in the UK is tanking along with the economy, and levels of racism and bigotry are spiking. This means that the quality of life for an expat settling here is not all that great, especially if they are outwardly foreign. So the UK is its own deterrent. And yet people are still emigrating to the UK.