Phi for All

I'm assuming by "processed" you mean "something that had to be made" like a stone knife, as opposed to "most primitive tools" like using a stick to get ants out of a log? I can agree to this. You're basically saying it's more innovative to strip the extra branches off a tree limb to make a stick than it is to simply pick up a stick. Is that right? Why do you place the use of fire for cooking meat in the Stone Age? Surely primitive humans encountered lightning strikes first among the trees. It was partly cooking our food that allowed us to lose the big gut that processed raw meat and kept us from walking upright and running on the plains. I see a bigger problem than safety in your assumptions. You have us running on the plains before we could possibly be quick enough. But that doesn't automatically make it the most important type of tool we've ever come up with. Except it could have been a rock. Can you copy/paste your details here? I can agree that it is one, but not that it's either the first or the most basic. I could be persuaded that this is so, but more evidence is needed.

Sorry, but I don't like the implications that evolution isn't happening without innovation. I don't agree that weapons are the best human tools. I think the path to bipedalism is much more evidenced than you're claiming, and I don't like your conclusions. There are some lizards that run on their back legs, and one might think they're evolving to bipedalism, but actually it's just the momentum of their running and their counterbalancing tail that lifts their front feet off the ground. I think you need to reevaluate your premises.

It's not a fallacy, and you can argue that as long as it's legal, it's not hypocrisy either. If the politician was specifically arguing against SUVs but bought one for themselves, I would call that hypocrisy. OTOH, sometimes a person has family/work that demands a bigger vehicle, in which case it's actually less of a carbon footprint to have one big one instead of multiple smaller ones. You might not be getting the full story here. This IS fallacious. As iNow mentions, the premise is false, and the conclusion also doesn't take into account the remedies that were introduced to combat the predicted catastrophe. It's not like we did NOTHING, after all. This is also fallacious. It capitalizes on the Vagueness of "numerous", and also Begs the Question that their disagreement is valid and fully understood. When someone assumes their prayers, uttered just before a sudden recovery, are the reason for the recovery, it's called a post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) informal fallacy. Many folks believe supernatural assistance is at work, rather than the efforts of trained medical professionals, but you know who never does? Amputees. No supernatural being in modern history has regrown a limb for a human who lost one, and none of the literature reveals why.

I read somewhere once that, besides the obvious heritable traits, the overall shape of the nose is dictated by ancestral environment, factoring in things like temp/humidity, dust/pollen counts, and local vegetation.

Another part of scientific reasoning is removing as much bias as possible. Progressive taxation is NOT simply "taxing the rich". I would consider someone a very poor rich person if they couldn't avoid a 90% tax on earnings over $5M/year. Instead, progressive taxes not only ensure the wealthy pay a proportional share, they also stimulate businesses to invest rather than sitting on the huge sums of cash they've been amassing for so long. That kind of money does little for the economy, and encourages buyouts and consolidations. Progressive taxation can help us avoid antitrust issues and companies that are too big to fail.

If it still has its icy crust, it will reflect light and be more visible, especially as it gets closer to the sun and leaves both an ion tail and a dust tail. We should have quite a bit of warning. Certainly, but the larger it is, the more warning we'll have. There are a LOT of folks and equipment watching the skies for such objects. The rest of your questions can't be answered super accurately. The asteroid that seems responsible for wiping out most of the dinosaurs couldn't have hit a worse spot on Earth for triggering an extinction event. Just a few miles further north or south and the Chicxulub strike wouldn't have caused so much soot in the atmosphere. It's not just the size or speed that determines how devastating a big asteroid strike would be. I'm more worried that small objects will end up hitting a satellite head-on. Every time a pieces break off a satellite, they create debris that threatens everything that moves in those orbits. The US DoD tracks over 19,000 objects bigger than 10 centimeters circling the planet. We need to keep this area clean of the small stuff if we're going to have the best chance of seeing the big stuff from far enough away to do something about them.

Are you using an ocular prosthetic? Can you use different weights to see which relieves the stress on your neck muscles? If so, you could devise an experiment where you test to see where your pain levels are after using progressively lighter weights. Wikipedia puts the mass of the eye alone at only 7.5 grams with a volume of 6 cubic centimeters. Can the muscles and lid account for the other 29.5 grams? Perhaps it's too much?

At some kind of rally (most often Monster Truck, MAGA, or Klan).

Your brother may be the movie star, but you still look enough like him to be called Starkly handsome.

When I want the good stuff, I go for a double Gloucester with chives and onion from England, or some triple creme brie from France. America has some excellent cheddars (the sharper the better), as well as some great jacks and colbys, and we do some wonderful things with goats, but as your article says, stay away from anything called American cheese. It's usually heavily processed orange plastic squares individually wrapped in plastic. I've never been sure if American cheese is sliced from a bigger brick before putting it in plastic, or if it's just squirted directly into the cellophane and allowed to set up.

! Moderator Note Our rules state members must be able to participate without going offsite. Please, can you copy/paste an abstract or overview of your idea here? Thanks for understanding.

1. Cultural preferences 2. Inherited traits 3. Confirmation bias 4. Environmental pressures 5. Dishonest friends and relatives 6. Mirror distortions 7. Misunderstood definition 8. Low standards 9. Random chance 10. Altered state of observer

... which is usually legislation giving their big companies top hazard pay to fix the neglected mess. They love holding out on low-cost bridge maintenance in favor of high-cost emergency repairs, don't they? And as you mention, that's not left or right, liberal or conservative. How can it be conservative to spend money you didn't have to? It's just greedy extreme capitalism, and I think critical thinkers can see that more clearly than others. Extreme capitalists messing with consumers is one thing, but when they come after public funds, it's worse, imo. That's money that shouldn't be concerned with profits and enriching private interests. I suppose my political leaning is towards reasoned actions.

A third option is that he didn't understand any of the opinions offered, and kept fishing for something that made sense to him. This president often finds himself out of his depth and willfully uninformed.

So silly that I suspect it's all just a stall by wealthy interests who don't want their taxes paying to help support the masses in such a broad way. They've been delaying the common sense choices for quite a while now with their "too costly" and their "doesn't work", as well as their racism, and their bootstraps, and their snowflakes, and their 2nd Amendment, and their Welfare Queen, and their immigration fears, and all the other tactics they use to keep tax revenues focused on their private investment opportunities. The Cons pulling the strings over here live in private versions of museums with swimming pools on parks with roads and airstrips, and they resent paying taxes for public versions of the same things because they rarely need them. Working folks just don't deserve more than the pay the wealthy give us to work for them. We're such ungrateful bastards to demand good health on top of all the rest they allow us to have.

It's not just lower costs, but I agree that will be the most obvious benefit. With everyone signed up, it's also a better national health database for medical research, a powerful political message that citizens matter beyond their vote, and frankly it's the bare minimum a citizen should expect from a society that requires them to give up so much freedom in order to live in such density. It's a step towards better education for everyone, learning how to take better care of ourselves physically and mentally. And universal healthcare is quite simply the smartest way to spend the money we have available to us for our health. I also predict there will be many innovative ways medicine will advance without the spectre of private insurance hanging over us. Remove the profit angle from the risk pool, and healthcare funding can take a more natural course. As it stands now, part of my medical insurance premiums goes to a guy who's paid to deny my claims any way he can. It's a warped, hamstrung system.

Deepen which debt? Medicare for All would quickly become the standard for paying healthcare professionals, simply because it could be offered at significant savings to everybody concerned. Doctors groups and hospitals would no longer have to jump through so many hoops to get approval and payment. It's actually MORE IMPORTANT to fix the risk pool before trying to bring down the other costs of keeping folks healthy. It would give us enormous clout to negotiate as the .gov (first step - take back the right to negotiate drug prices that Bush II the Businessman gave away).

I'd like to lay my towel down on the marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, and study the Shoe Event Horizon phenomenon.

They must spend a fortune on custom-made hand puppets for this type of briefing.

The health system runs pretty well, given that they're focused more on profit than service, like any other privately-run enterprise. What needs to change is the risk pool associated with it. It's extremely stupid to have private health insurance, for the reasons iNow mentioned, and also because you need a value before insurance makes sense. It's easy to figure out how much life insurance I'd need to cover my family if I died tomorrow, and I can insure a car for it's replacement value, but nobody knows how much good health is going to cost them. We need a national risk pool like Medicare for All so we can gain the most benefit from economy of scale.

We don't get enough Vitamin D when we can't get outside often (as with colder weather), and that can lead to complications. Also, it's sort of a design flaw that when your nose is stuffy from a cold, you breathe through your mouth, which bypasses your nasal filtering system and allows more viruses and bacteria in.

How does that work?

OK, please consider your point made. Also please, please consider NOT continuing to belabor it. The OP doesn't really give you the opening to yank the train onto this particular track. It seems obvious this is a straight-up "How many people could the planet sustain" kind of question. You should start another thread about other life persisting after human mistakes.

I don't think we need to overthink this thread to the point of meaninglessness. Can't we assume the OP was talking about human populations when they said "we don't really live in sea or submarines"?

Too many variables. We could probably sustain 9-10B people doing what we're doing now, but we could sustain many more if we changed the ways we used our resources. And as you mention, there are habitats we haven't needed to explore that would become viable if we were trying to maximize our population. New technologies are also hard to factor in, but growing our own proteins (like cultured meats) would have a significant impact.