Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?

Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.

Restaurant chain Hooters goes bust and files for bankruptcy protection

In theory. In practice, an employee could skip all steps and pretend you concluded the test.

Yes, they could break the rules.

Similarly, a pharmacy expects that you went through a long process with a doctor diagnosing and ordering the medicine.

While following the rules, they could just accept whatever you wrote onto the paper.

See the difference? In one case the security model is reasonable so that it takes an employee cheating / breaking the rules for a bad result. In the other case the security model sucks so an undesirable outcome is possible even if all the security checks are followed.

Also, sometimes “terrorists” give up their armed struggle. That’s something that should be encouraged. If you go with the idea of “once a terrorist, always a terrorist” then there’s no incentive for so-called “terrorists” to ever change their ways.

And, from a more practical matter, he’s in charge of Syria now. If the international community wants Syrians to be free, happy and healthy they have to try to work with him. If they cut off all aid to Syria and refuse to work with him, then the only people who will work with him are all the various bad actors of the region. They shouldn’t necessarily fully trust him, but they should give him an opportunity to show he has the best interests of the Syrian people at heart.

Sure, but if I want to get a driver’s license, I can’t just walk up to the DMV with a document on the right letterhead and get a license. There’s actually a whole process involving a test.

The fact that a pharmacy requires a prescription on a certain kind of pad from a doctor means that that’s supposed to be a security measure. It’s supposed to stop someone from getting a prescription that they just scribbled on a random piece of paper they found. But, in terms of security, it’s just about the weakest form of security I can imagine.

It’s basically the equivalent of this:

Yeah, saying “it’s the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me” is like saying “I don’t contribute to climate change because I don’t cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It’s the restaurant that’s destroying the environment!”

The top speed of Columbus’ ships was about 8 knots, and the average speed was about 4 knots, or 7.5 km/h to 15 km/h. Typical jogging speed is about 6 km/h to 10 km/h. So, they were a bit faster than typical running speed. But, those were the cargo ships.

Ships designed for speed were much faster. In 1852 the fastest ship was the Sovereign of the Seas which topped out at 41 km/h.

Probably for a long time the fastest transportation would have been a horse. Or, if you want a “vehicle” or some kind, a chariot. But, for at least a century a fast sailboat was probably the fastest thing around.

I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours

Challenge accepted.

Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.

The bigger issue is that there isn’t much point to having humans in space.

After the Wright Brothers flight, aviation took off because aviation is genuinely useful. First it was mostly for delivering mail, but that was an incredible change. Instead of a letter taking weeks to get somewhere it would take days. Places that used to be completely isolated from communication now had an easy way to keep in touch. Then with passengers aviation you had something that changes the world in a positive and measurable way.

Humans in space is extremely expensive and there really isn’t much worthwhile to do up there. Sure, you can do some science experiments about how zero gravity affects something, and learning things is useful, but there’s no obvious immediate payoff. If going into space made your bones stronger and not weaker, space travel would have developed massively because there would be a reason for millions of people to go to space for the health benefits. Or, if ballistic travel made sense economically, there might be rockets that cut the travel time from New York to Melbourne down to a couple of hours. But, having to get all that mass above the atmosphere means that it’s far too costly to make economic sense.

People talk about mining asteroids or the moon, but there really isn’t much that’s valuable up there. The moon is mostly made of cheese [wait, my sources need updating] lunar regolith, which is composed of elements that are just as common on earth: silicon, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, iron, etc. But, on earth you don’t have to deal with the difficulty of processing it on another celestial body, nor do you have to deal with the spiky, unweathered nature of regolith that means it destroys space suits and machines.

The only reason the US landed on the moon with humans in the first place is that it was in a dick measuring contest with the USSR. Now that the cold war is over, nobody’s willing to pay for something that useless.

Everything I hate is cultural marxism.

It used to be fairly normal, the pharmasists knew the various doctors in the area, and they also know what is a reasonable prescription.

That just seems like a system that is broken by design. If the pharmacists know what a reasonable prescription is, then why bother with the prescription pad at all? Just have the patient ask the pharmacist for whatever it was the doctor recommended.

I suppose what probably happened was that initially the prescription pad was just any random scrap of paper and the doctor wrote down the prescription so that the patient didn’t have to remember the exact details. But, then drugs started getting more powerful, and people started abusing them, so what used to simply be a note to help the patient remember became a secured way to authorize the pharmacy to dispense something.

If the system had needed security right from the start, it probably would have been a system where the doctor sent a prescription directly to the pharmacy via a courier, a phone call, a telegram, or something.

Sure, but those are cases where someone with the job and authority to stop someone from breaking the rules and is choosing not to. Prescription pads are just these wildly insecure things where once the pad is stolen (which is relatively easy to do), it seems like the system is designed to just blindly trust them. I know that has changed a bit in the modern world, but even that it was once like that seems weird.