TheVat

Agree. The alt-azimuth mount makes it useless at higher mag or photos, as you noted, but it's a great "light bucket" (what we called it, back in my astronomy club days, for its large aperture) for low mag viewing. As @Genady mentioned there are also binoculars, for a wide field, ultimate portability. And their chromatic aberration isn't a problem unless they are very cheap. If you want to do real astronomy, be sure and get an equatorial mount. That has a clock drive which follows the stars in their apparent motion. For planets, you would do well with the Dobson or a Maksutov or some other Cassegrain, because planets benefit from the larger aperture. For deep-space objects, it's hard to beat the classic Newtonian - good price, too.

C'est la vie, C'est la guerre, C'est la pomme de terre! "what makes something absurd"

Made me think of Kiki Rockwell, with her witch/folk stuff. And weirdly, though the vibe is somewhat different, Wet Leg. Here's a rather whimsical track from these Isle of Wightians... Great voices, great sense of humor. See also All Day Long on the Chaise Longue, or Ur Mum.

I think the previous sentence to the one you quoted made clear I wasn't comparing casino gambling to other forms of wagering. I was, somewhat whimsically, saying that drugs do deliver on at least some of their promise of making you feel better (hideous as the cost can be). Sorry if my tone, or comparison, was unclear.

Maybe not a wildcard, but researchers into the big drop in average sperm counts debate if it could also be a factor at some point. Sorta depends on what extrapolations from that downward curve could be made. And how your mentioned reproductive technology wildcard is played. There is an apparent redundancy built into a system of millions of little swimmers. (as well as that delightful redundancy in the standard method of sharing them)

Well, ok then. If you were making a point about semantics I wish you had just said so, goddamit. 😀 I just figure a good faith discussion of how to reduce population is predicated on the assumption it is via lower birth rates achieved through various carrots and sticks. One stick that wouldn't be as coercive would be just to eliminate tax credits if you have more than, say, three children. That just says, we're not stopping you but bear in mind you are putting a disproportionate burden on various social infrastructures and resources. So you need to help pay for that. As others point out, doing this globally is not possible at the moment, as various ideologies and creeds of growth prevail, especially the mostly unexamined phobia that economic shrinkage is a fate worse than death.

Holy feck, did you just troll me? Dude, no one who advocates a set population for the planet is advocating people dying. This is about family planning and a demographic shift to smaller families being a viable choice and one that is rewarded. i.e. fewer new people being born. I'll thank you also to skip the forced sterilization strawman, too.

Say that we do get to a more stable, egalitarian, nonsexist, eco-aware and carbon-neutral planetary civilization. Call it the Thunbergian Era.* In terms of quality of life and elbow room, what would people here see as a good population size? Maybe most would say it's impossible to determine. Sierra Club style nature nuts might offer a lower figure where lots of Earth is a wild preserve and Yosemite is never crowded. People with rare niche hobbies might want more, to increase odds of finding fellowship. Some people would just shrug and say things like I want the beach less crowded on Sundays so it's easier to fly kites. My guess is a lot of preferences relate to how popularion is distributed rather than numerical totals. We could have three billion people, a figure that seems to me a nice middle path, but that could be very differently distributed. A decentralized population with autonomous houses could sprawl across the countryside, or a very urbanized population could concentrate in dense clusters of soaring towers surrounded by immense green spaces. Or other options between those polarities. That distribution is somewhat tied to wealth of nations and complicated social trends. * you can call it something else, Mack. 🙂

Two persistent misunderstandings block a clear view of the problem, one that advocacy for population decrease is some Right-Wing wolf in sheep's clothing, and is only aimed at brown people. I've tried to dispel that one. The other is that all land is equal and that people can live on any dry surface. Well, maybe very affluent people, who can hire a team of engineers and have a million dollars on hand. The rest of us need to keep a distance from seashores, flood plains, dust storms, swamps, unstable slopes, dry lands which lack a sustainable aquifer, fire-prone woodlands, etc. It's surprising how little of Earth s land area is really suited for human habitation. A good point, the elimination of extended family homes is one of the hallmarks of the over-consuming USA. Dad was 500 miles away, so I had to buy an extension ladder instead of us just sharing one with him. We also largely eliminated the boarding house, a handy setup for single people that pooled resources nicely and provided a homecooked meal.

Saying it's relevant is not to say reducing population is THE solution, only that it may be part of a suite of solutions that protect arable land, wetlands, beaches, parks, wilderness preserves, watersheds, airsheds, oceans, etc which are vital to having a nurturing planet. Working against this common sense suite of solutions are toxic ideologies and religious beliefs, which sometimes foster a notion that my group is special and chosen and we should have large families and lots of room to push out the less-special people. And, allied with that, is the anthropocentric view that we can also push out other species who just don't matter as much. One reason I avoid trying to define a global carrying capacity is that quality of life is not easily rendered in numbers and constant over all bioregions. Phoenix is already overpopulated at a couple million, and is already massively dependent on resources imported from other areas, and struggling grimly to find enough water. The Mekong delta OTOH could probably handle more people, with its society having a more low-carbon lifestyle and immense biological richness and fecundity all around. That said, I haven't heard of too many places where ordinary people (not local business and tourism boosters) are crying dear god we just need more people! I live in a relatively sparsely populated place, and yet even here there has been a decline in many metrics of livability. My city is already prone to spells of poor air quality due to the bowl effect of hills, and the metro is a mere 120,000 people. It is dirtier, less walkable, the creek for which the town is named is threatened by runoff, traffic is ugly, people are less friendly, housing prices are insane and there is the unmistakable impression that if we could just stop growing for one freaking minute and catch our collective breath then we might be able to catch up on some of these problems. It is just not normal and healthy for human civilization to go from 3 billion people to 8 billion in less than my lifetime. Yes. I too have pointed this out in other threads. Western nations spread their rapacious level of consumption, both by stripmining resources of developing countries, and by selling a Western lifestyle to them. And places where population increase is rapid do then experience a double-barrelled blast of social and ecological problems. And there is the sad paradox of bringing in vaccines and reducing child mortality and better crop yields....all supposed to improve life...and then you have a disruptive rapid surge in population that later struggles to sustain itself when drought years come. This happened in the USA too, when too many people came in and grew crops on land really only suited for grazing sheep or cattle. The result was an eco disaster called the Dust Bowl. Millions of Californians are descended from the torrent of refugees it created.

I think resources can be inequitably distributed, and some groups are big on overconsumption, but that doesn't mean that we aren't overpopulating too. Population and quality of life are connected, even if pointing this out can be misused for political purposes.

What's especially worrisome is that as pop increases, other trends mean arable land is decreasing and habitable land also decreasing. And, to make a trifecta of awful, fisheries are being depleted, and with more seafood becoming too contaminated to eat. Some of the crowded southern border of the US is related to eco-degradation in Central America, with regions that are no longer sustaining those populations. This onslaught of desperate refugees from the tropics is being repeated all around the world. I would not mind if Pope Francis, an unusually progressive pontiff, were to speak up on the matter. Rhythm method is not going to cut it.

Not sure if null hypothesis applies to a metaphysical conjecture. There is no statistical test that would affirm or reject. We can't compare data sets for a universe that has a god and another universe that lacks a god. In any case, I see no epistemological position that can not be agnostic and be valid. There is simply no means by which a human mind can obtain and crunch sufficient data to certify the existence or nonexistence of a deity. The only mind that could make a valid claim that there is a god would be the mind of that god, since it would have the prerequisite features to discern traits like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Personally I do not believe, so I would be atheist in the broad and nonprejudicial sense, IOW no burning bushes have spoken to me or filled me with some divine inspiration. I make no conjecture, though I am sometimes intrigued by panpsychism as an alternative to theism.

Let me dispel those fears for you. You're not.

Aline has been a member for five years.

My bladder exploded. As I had always feared it would.

This sounds not quite correct. Space has no temperature, it's a vacuum, only objects in space have temps. And any shade would be (as a practical matter) an object that is thin and radiates IR from its backside, so it is not clear that only a tiny bit of heat penetrates. Also, objects cool more slowly in space, because there is no conduction or convection, only radiation. So that shade will be slowly radiating heat a lot of the time. I don't know enough about IR reflecting surfaces - are there materials that would affordably create your near-perfect shade? Otherwise you may need some fancy system circulating coolant theough the shade.

Walter Sobchak: Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos. /the dude abides

So what's yours? You were moved to post, so I assume you have one. That, and paperwork. Had one relative whose stuff I had to deal with. It was mostly junk you couldn't even put in a garage sale, so it was simpler to donate it or dump it. (and I suspect some of the donating was really dumping in disguise) Thrift stores refused some of it because upholstery was saturated with cigarette odor. Recyclers wouldn't take it, either, because furniture has to be disassembled into its various components. With all due respect to the departed, I wish smokers would smoke next to an open window, range hood, or find some way to vent. Crazy Chester, in the song The Weight , was a real guy in the town my wife grew up in. My in-laws knew him. Bandmate Levon Helm was from that area.

I remember Vallee. Seems like one problem was his hypothesis wasn't much of a hypothesis. The alleged beings appeared to be three-dimensional and possess craft that would require time to construct and have bodies that would require time to evolve, so it's hard to see them coming from "beyond space-time." Not clear what is meant by multidimensional visitation. I just got up and went to the bathroom. The bathroom was multidimensional and I visited it. Not terribly anomalous. Conditions like us imagining things? If something is like a fairy or angel, then it's also like a unicorn.

Jenna Ellis looks disturbingly happy for a mugshot. Kind of a Manson Girl vibe. Trevian Kutti looks like she is auditioning for a horror movie scene where she picks up an axe or chainsaw. Trump looks like someone frightened who is trying to look tough.

Odd how the power of the Cult seems to overcome what would normally be an aversion to cowardice. Especially among the blue collar portion of TFG's base. Trumpers I encounter would not usually be the sort to be okay with someone backing away from the debate arena (and instead retreating to the safe space of a Tucker Carlson interview during the Milwaukee debate). I can remember a time when prairie republicans out here would have found that repugnant. But now they lap up his weak sauce of debates don't matter, big waste of time, and I'm so far ahead.

Ken, as usual, steps in and posts much of what I wanted to say, except better. I will just add how annoying it is that American business has such dislike for worker profit sharing (with a few exceptions), the sort of Marx Lite that gives workers a stake in their company and correlates with improved quality and productivity and worker loyalty. The whole Red Menace thing is tiresome.

Seems like it. Putin grew up in street gangs in the postwar ruins of Leningrad, so that way of thinking about power is natural to him. I think we're both experiencing citation fatigue, neither wants to dive deep for previously posted poll data, so for now I'm just saying we see the trend differently. Slainte.