They don’t care if you get sick from crappy, dangerous food that you must buy because that is all you have access to. They will make billions more than they would if they continued to be regulated.

Unrestricted use of certain chemicals in agriculture, removal of restrictions on dumping waste into watersheds, unenforcement of pesky regulations in food prep. It’s not just one industry pushing for this.

They don’t want to eat tainted meat, they want to sell it to you.

Last week, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney seemed to praise the loss at his keynote speech in South Carolina, relating it back to Republican lawmakers’ promises to “drain the swamp” in D.C. To the GOP’s credit, this relocation definitely seems to be draining something.

Or brave enough to remove the guns themselves.

“I’m a little sad about the lenses I have going obsolete.” On the contrary! Those old lenses with aberration are just what the hipsters want to nostalgically photograph their printing presses, big wheel bicycles, ancient espresso makers and other arcane ephemera! They’re surely to skyrocket in value and be sold in…

Agreed. It’s going to take just a couple of years. The lens designers are already putting aspherical elements in line, it’s just a matter of applying this formula, building some test lenses, and, well, testing. The ‘couple of years’ is mostly the lead time between designing a lens, and getting copies coming off the…

*Vampire* Capitalist. 

They’re goblins

This is the new way to say ‘ghoul’

How do we do that in 100 years? 

This is all empty talk.

...Also for abundant and unlimited resources, an impossibly huge amount of living space, the sheer joy of exploration and discovery, and entertainment.

Great piece George, as usual. The other thing you don’t mention about the viability of Mars colonies is that there is no economic incentive to go there. While of course economic incentives don’t motivate everything we do, the complete lack of economic incentives of living on Mars makes the prospect of long term…

I think you could also have looked more at the microbiology of sequestration. We wouldn’t be going to Mars alone - we would also be taking along our gut, oral, and skin flora, and whatever viruses happened to be present in the astronauts. That flora is necessary to our survival. We tend to kind of take the regulation…

One thing I didn’t mention in this piece is how, after Mars, the list of other viable places to set up colonies falls off sharply. Realistically, we only have the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to consider, which present their own challenges, including the tremendous amount of radiation pouring out from the gas giants.

Came here to say this. it’s so funny to me that people have somehow convinced themselves that the Earth will be around and habitable long enough for us to develop the technology required to set up a colony (a colony, not a base) on Mars. Sure, maybe it’s possible, but I simply don’t see how you could look at climate…

“why should we expect troves of people to want to live in a place that’s considerably more unpleasant? It seems a poor alternative to living on Earth”

I think humans will out-breed our ability to feed ourselves long before colonies outside our biosphere become independently viable.

Technically, Turkey is a secular state, according to their constitution. It’s current president is the one who has enacted a more hardline religious policy in recent years. Much like the US!