In the southern United States, we have biscuits made with bacon grease and sausage rolls, which are just rolls with ground sausage baked into them.

Again, you keep avoiding replying directly to my points. Can you explain to me what’s wrong or absurd about my post?

so I won’t engage with the topic

I’ve been engaging with you. I’m trying to understand what exactly you want to happen. You keep mentioning how dangerous asteroids are and then casting my responses as “lol ez” or “world bad mkay” I just don’t understand what you want here. Are we not allowed to talk about asteroid habs at all because there is a hypothetical danger to them? I don’t know how to prevent people from crashing an asteroid into the Earth. But I still think the idea of asteroid habs is interesting and, because I’m not actually moving an asteroid myself, I don’t think that’s dangerous.

pointed out that it doesn’t actually address any of the problems with space settlements.

It does address some of the problems. We already have a lot of the capability. Like I’ve said, moving an asteroid has already been demonstrated. Capping the dig sites makes it reasonable to maintain an atmosphere inside the hollow body of the asteroid and the body of the asteroid protects inhabitants from radiation. We can build soil using basic principles we’ve used for millennia here on Earth and raise crops so the hab could possibly be self sustaining. This addresses most of the scientific issues the article presents.

You keep ignoring a lot of what I’m saying so it feels like you’re not actually arguing with me and this is a personal bugaboo for you. I never said “space will be the wild west”. There are already laws in place that work and prevent a lot of bad things. What I was trying to get across is that laws don’t actually stop people from doing bad things. Putin invaded Ukraine, Israel is bombing civilians, etc, even though those are against international laws. The laws are a deterrent but can’t actually stop someone. And the international community has shown they will not forcibly stop countries from breaking these laws. What would stop people from doing something like this is the same as what currently stops countries from using nukes.

There’s a huge difference between dart and redirecting an asteroid to a specific near earth orbit. These are not comparable existential threats.

They redirected an asteroid into an orbit farther from Earth. That’s not a huge difference from bringing its orbit closer to Earth.

My push back is because we are just randos on the internet having a fun conversation about hypothetical far futures, not an organization with space launch capabilities, and you started yelling at us for being irresponsible with existential threats. No matter how this argument here end, nothing will change in the status of space law and the ability to ram asteroids into Earth. So we wanted to spend our time theorizing about the fun questions and there’s no international law requiring us to submit a thesis on how we would prevent a global apocalypse before we play armchair scientist/explorer.

I’m not handwaving them away. We were having a fun conversation about theoretical concepts and you jumped in with “what about madmen who wanna destroy the world”. I have no political power on the global stage so that question is so far outside my scope that it’s absurd.

You’re also handwaving away the fact that there’s nothing we can do. It doesn’t matter how settled space law gets. If somebody with the capability wants to do that, they will unless someone else forcibly stops them. Laws won’t matter at that point (see all the humanitarian crises going on right now despite being against some law and how most of the world isn’t actively stopping them)

And, yes, NASA tested asteroid redirection on an inconsequential asteroid. But that was a choice and now we know they have the capability. We’re not adding a threat, it’s already there.

Lastly, if you read my other comments in this thread and crossposted threads, you’ll see me reiterating that the point of this article is that there are a ton of unanswered questions about space colonization and I don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetimes. There’s plenty of time for you to figure out how to write a law to stop physics/math or outlaw rocketry or whatever. So excuse me if I continue to imagine cool sci-fi futures.

Putin already has nukes. They are a much more immediate existential threat and we have a framework in place to deal with it. I also don’t know what you’re proposing. If any entity has the capability to move an asteroid, how do you propose we stop them? NASA has already moved an asteroid and they didn’t ask for anybody’s permission.

Any government with launch capability, I guess. I get what you’re saying but this is already how it works. NASA recently modified the orbit of an asteroid and I’m sure they’re already studying how to do more. Any govt with launch capability probably already has access to nukes, though, so I don’t think this is an existential threat.

Nobody is doing it right now. Its a scifi concept, but the parent is saying that is an alternative to trying to colonize planetary bodies.

Exactly. In the podcast episode I linked, the authors explain how they’re sci-fi nerds and fans of space exploration. They started out writing a book about how cool it would be, but started asking these questions and realized we don’t have the answers yet. That’s not pessimism, it’s practicality

I definitely think this is the cooler way to go. You could even put engines on them so that they could migrate around (slowly; I’m envisioning engines that modify their orbits, not allow for free motion). We could have space stations orbiting Mars and the Moon coordinating drones below for research and asteroid habs that can visit these stations for transfers.

But as the article/book points out, there are still a ton of questions we need to answer before that is possible.

But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me.

The question was do video games improve your life. I would argue you are the only person who can answer that question. This isn't really a scientific question because its purely subjective. You'd need to narrow it down and define some criteria before you could try implementing a study for it.

If video games really were an unqualified good

I don't think any sensible person would try to argue that. Nothing is an unqualified good. Watching 150 hours of tv would be just as bad as spending that time playing video games (video games would probably be better because at least you're getting more brain stimulation). You can form unhealthy habits with anything. Video games are like any other hobby; you have to balance them with other hobbies/responsibilities. It's good to know exactly what effects certain things like video games can have on your mind and body, but I don't think its that useful to compare time spent with one hobby/responsibility to time spent with some other hobby/responsibility. And it always seems like only certain things are compared like that. People rarely ask if watching tv is good for their health, even if they do it more than you or I play video games. Why would playing guitar be better than playing a video game? What makes video games the lowest value hobby? (sorry this got kinda ranty. This sparked a lot of things in me i guess)

I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

100% This article was a waste of time. I'm not disagreeing on that. Your comment gave me more to think about than that article.

I agree that this is ridiculous. But I think the issue is that the “middle men” are the retail stores that are used to doing retail things like lowering the price of older goods. Digital storefronts don’t have anybody going over “inventory” and checking if it needs to be marked down. And corporations being corporations, they don’t care about this oversight. Why spend time/money on lowering the amount of money they’ll make?

Thanks for pointing out Ladybird. It’s a pretty exciting project. But the author isn’t early in “announcing” anything. This isn’t a press release. He posted on his own blog about a pet project. That’s what the web is supposed to be. Not everything has to be for a big purpose or compete with everything else.

A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.

It’s a pet project; it doesn’t need to be “viable”.

I think this attitude is part of the reason why we have so few browsers. Every time someone tries to start their own browser, even just for fun, a lot of the response is just bitching about how big and complex browsers are and how the effort to start a new one is wasted. It makes it so that people interested in writing their own browser (for fun or profit) are less likely to share about it and probably less likely to pursue it seriously

I don’t know anything about the market, but I was really in to Overwatch for a while. It went downhill when they basically abandoned the first game and then came out with a second to flip the business model to battle pass bs.

I’d be down for something new to fill its spot and this looks like it could be it

WTF. That would explain a lot. Now I’m wondering how much of the main story did I skip.

But that also makes that fight seem even more disappointing, to me, since i managed to easily beat it early.

I’m glad you enjoyed it, but I had the opposite experience with the final boss. I had around six hearts on the second row and the Hylian armor fully upgraded. I found the fight slow and unchallenging.

I also didn’t even realize it was going to be the final boss. The mission was titled something like “Research …” but we didn’t actually learn anything about that.

I did think the cutscenes were good and the music during the rights and cutscenes was really good.