There's a big problem here though. When they've hooked up with the "alpha male" assholes, they have kids with them. When they finally dump them in their 30s or so, and then want to be with the "nice guys", 1) many of the nice guys have already married other women, possibly not very attractive ones, because they "settled", 2) some of the nice guys have become angry and bitter after years of rejection, and aren't so nice any more, 3) many nice guys don't really want to take over as the father of some asshole's kids, and it's worse when there's shared custody and the asshole guy is constantly in the picture, and finally 4) now that the woman's in her 30s or 40s, she either can't or doesn't want to have any more kids.
So the nice guy is apparently expected to take over as father when the kids are entering their rebellious teenage years, devote all his time and money to raising some asshole's kids, and not have any of his own.
Maybe this is why some societies still have arranged marriages.
Not exactly. I think the phenomenon is that many women want "exciting" guys, not "finer" guys. There's plenty of nice, well-mannered guys out there, but they're not sexually exciting to many women, so the women chase after them. Of course, we know these guys by another name: "assholes". Inevitably, these relationships don't work out that well, so if the woman manages to extricate herself from the relationship with an asshole before getting stuck with him (because of a kid), and repeats this a few times before giving up and deciding "all men are assholes" (when in reality, she's self-selecting the assholes and ignoring the others), she decides if she has to marry an asshole, she'll at least marry a rich asshole, or any rich man she can land (asshole or not).
This is probably even easier these days because of 1) easy and effective contraception, keeping women from getting stuck in a relationship with kids so quickly, and 2) the ease and lack of social stigma of divorce compared to the past.
I think this is very common. The way it works is this: woman *say* they really want a nice guy. But they're lying. They meet nice guys, but they just "don't do it for them"; basically, the nice guys aren't very exciting. So they just want to be "friends". But they meet assholes who are exciting (frequently because they need to be "fixed", a lot of women subconciously want a man they have to fix), and hook up with them. After a while, when their attempts at fixing the asshole and making him nice (but somehow still exciting) prove to be fruitless, they give up and dump him, especially if they haven't had a kid with him yet. After a few cycles of this, they get tired of it and if they're attractive enough, they find a rich guy (frequently also an asshole, but at least this one has money instead of sitting on the couch all day playing Xbox) and marry him so that, even if they can't have real happiness in a relationship, they can have a warm body around and be set financially.
The women who aren't quite attractive enough to land the rich guy, or get saddled with kids by the unemployed asshole boyfriend, end up becoming bitter. Meanwhile, their nice-guy friend who wasn't exciting enough for her has stopped wasting his time being friends with her, and has married a not terribly attractive woman who, while not so great in the looks department, appreciates him and treats him well.
I've actually read many times than men will frequently not bother trying to date highly attractive women, instead going for the "second tier", because they assume the most-attractive ones will be too high-maintenance and have excessively high expectations of a relationship.
People have been using bidets in other countries for ages, and they don't have any hygeine problems. Low-pressure water works just fine for cleaning that area, you don't need to use sandpaper to wipe it.
It sounds like grafting is something like cutting off your arm, and then surgically attaching someone else's arm, connecting the blood vessels etc., except that, unlike humans, plants apparently don't have the problem of foreign tissue rejection so these Frankenstein-like operations actually work on them.
This would only work if enough people started ordering groceries this way to spur UPS/Fedex to start putting these in their trucks, and also setting up a method in their distribution centers to keep things cold there too; it's a chicken-and-egg problem as I see it. Finally, I don't think I'd trust UPS/Fedex to do this right anyway; they're already famous for dropping packages from 15-foot heights onto concrete, kicking things around more when they're marked "Fragile", etc. What are you going to do when your ice cream arrives melted because UPS/Fedex screwed up (intentionally even, like they do with "Fragile" packages)? Ask for a refund? The shipper will say it was cold when they shipped it, and you'll have to file a claim with UPS/Fedex, and then UPS/Fedex will deny the claim, saying "insufficient packaging" like they do any time you try to file a claim for damage now.
Are you insane? North America is running out of water, especially over here in the southwest. People need more room than just the footprint of their house; they need a huge amount of farmland per person to grow their food. Freshwater is a limited resource possibly and shortages of it are possibly even more looming than for oil.
How far from your local grocery store is ice cream made that they sell? For that matter, how long do you camp out at the local grocery store waiting for it to arrive so you can speed it home and eat it all before it melts?
Irrelevant. They ship it in refrigerated trucks. In case you haven't noticed, your neighborhood UPS or Fedex delivery truck is not refrigerated.
Are you really that stupid? I'm sorry, I have to ask because if you don't understand this simple concept you should get help.
It's easy: you put it in todo.txt, bugs.txt, or similar.
It all really depends on the nature of your project. If it's more than 1 or maybe 2 developers, it probably should have a bug tracker; there's plenty of free ones available, after all, such as BugZilla, so it's not like it'll cost anything more than time, and it's really not that hard to set them up on a Linux box with Apache and MySQL. But if your project is small and you're the only developer, a bug tracker is really overkill, unless you want random users to be able to file bugs online without you having to handle those emails personally. But that's probably a very rare project, where it's big enough that the public can file bugs, but there's only one developer; anything that big usually has more people working on it.
For my own personal projects, I'd never bother with a bug tracker. A todo.txt file is much simpler and easier, and since I'm the only person, the overhead of a bug tracking system just isn't worth it, plus I'm the only one finding bugs so I don't need an automated way for others to file them.
For banking, for instance, tellers haven't gone away, and there's no charge to see them. If your bank does charge you, you need to find another bank; there's tons of smaller banks and credit unions that haven't instituted the ridiculous fees the big banks have.
As for cashiers, we only need so many minimum-wage jobs. In many places, before the economy turned to total shit, it was really hard to fill those jobs because there just weren't many people who wanted to work for so little.
For grocery stores, if you think shopping online is going to replace the local supermarket, you're insane and need psychiatric intervention. How are you going to buy ice cream online? Unless they do some really fast delivery, it'll be melted. How are you going to buy produce online? Just hope they pick something that isn't squashed? What do you do when they give you apples with giant bruises on them? Send them back? Finally, I don't know about you, but buying things online can be a bit of a chore, between slow websites and poorly-written websites. If I know exactly what I'm looking for, buying online is great. It's especially good when you're buying a manufactured product that's exactly the same, no matter where you buy it (the LG flat-screen TV model ABCDE is exactly the same whether I buy it from Amazon or Best Buy). This doesn't work with food; it varies a lot, especially produce. Seeing a stock photo on a website is no substitute for seeing it first-hand, knocking on it (for melons), etc. It's not uncommon to walk into a supermarket intending to buy some fruit, and while they have them in stock, they're all crap (usually picked too early and shipped from far away). How are you going to see that online? You're not. And what if you want to browse an aisle full of some type of food? I can browse much faster by walking and looking at shelves than by messing around with some website.
Grocery shopping online isn't a new concept. Netgrocer tried it ten years or more ago, and it never took off, unlike Amazon and Newegg.
Online shopping definitely has its advantages, and works extremely well for certain goods. Electronics are a prime example here; you get the exact same thing as at the local store, and you get better information online, since the local pimply-faced teenager doesn't know anything about what he's selling. Groceries are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Finally, one thing people will never do online is go to restaurants. There's plenty of low-wage jobs there for all the cashiers that lost their jobs.
That would only work if there were a bunch of people there with lots of money, sorta like how desalination plants are very popular in Saudi Arabia. Mexico isn't rich like SA, so trying to sell stuff there (particularly the northern areas, which are the places that don't have enough water) doesn't work that well.
It made perfect sense to me, though it was still stupid. What I understood from that line was that they wanted to come up with a new unit to actually replace the ampere, at least for small-scale currents, perhaps sort of like the Angstrom is used instead of nanometers in some fields. Of course, this is entirely different from redefining the ampere, which from the way you write it I take to mean they want a new way to reproduce it, much like they changed the definition of the meter many years ago from "the length of this exotic metal alloy rod" to "the distance of x number of wavelengths of some radioactive emission". I haven't read TFA (it's slashdotted).
Anyway, coming up with a new unit seems stupid to me. The whole reason SI units use prefixes like mega, giga, milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, etc. is so that you don't need new units for different scales, you just use the appropriate prefix. If this thing is in the picoamps, what's the problem? Aren't picoamps good enough? If that's too big, we still have femtoamps which are 1000 times smaller. But if that's not what the article says, then it's really a moot point.
As for the editors, I wonder that all the time. Between the horrible article summaries and the frequent slashdupes, they don't really seem to do much besides click "ok", and really don't deserve the title "editor". Of course, if you look at modern mainstream "journalism" these days, it's not much different. Spelling and grammar errors and terrible writing are commonplace these days in professional publications.
There's a few reasons I can think of to grow things in the desert: 1) Lots of sunlight. 2) Lack of big storms which destroy crops. 3) Lots of open land that isn't being claimed for other uses.
Of course, a growing population is going to reduce the amount of arable land all over the US, so that's part of the problem. However, we have been growing things here in Arizona for over 1000 years now (the Anasazi were doing it, with canals, long before Europeans got here), so it's not like it's entirely new. Farming has been a big industry in the Arizona desert in modern times as well, and in fact a lot of farmland around Phoenix has been converted to residential land with the real estate boom.
It's not just racist Americans, it's racist humans. Most human societies don't really like it when extremely different groups of people move in in large numbers and then start pushing their own cultural practices as the norm. Just look at the Native Americans; they didn't really like it when large numbers of European settlers showed up in their lands, did they? And for good reason too; just look at how they were treated when the Europeans became the majority. This happens every time some group moves in on another group's territory. The old group gets pushed out and marginalized. The best case of this is that the immigration rate is slowed, and/or only a certain number of people from any particular place are allowed in (to prevent balkanization), and the groups blend together in a non-violent way, but these days people scream "racism!" when this is tried. What's weird is that I never see those people screaming about Canada's "racist" immigration policies.
Finally, your point about labor is incorrent. Business owners like cheap labor, and middle-class people like cheaper produce, however the lower classes hate it, because it increases unemployment for them. Try being poor and finding a job in an area with lots of Spanish-speaking immigrants, such as here in Phoenix. It's very hard, unless you speak Spanish, because all the low-end jobs are staffed by Spanish speakers so they discriminate against English speakers. Asking the working poor, who live paycheck-to-paycheck, to take time off and go enroll in community college to learn a new language would be asinine.
Because of the effects of extremely heavy (80,000 lbs) vehicles traveling at high speeds, highways seem to usually be built with a concrete foundation, and a thin asphalt layer on top. The concrete allows it to handle the weight without damage (and it's not just the static weight, but the effect of it traveling at high speed puts extra strain on it; I'm sure a civil engineer could elaborate on this much better), and the asphalt gives the benefits that asphalt gives. Every so often, the asphalt can be resurfaced, for a lot less money that it'd cost to repair an asphalt-only road. However, the up-front cost is higher because of the concrete foundation.
Don't forget, interstate highways are also supposed to be capable of allowing military vehicles (tanks, etc.) to travel on them.
I disagree about the volcano bit. No one's tried it, but I'll bet the pressure under a volcano could be relieved by drilling and allowing magma to escape in a slower, more controlled manner than allowing it to build up and erupt.
The Roman Empire collapsed, but that probably had little to nothing to do with climate change, just social and political problems. Those same factors will probably be the undoing of the USA within a couple of decades the way we're going now.
Many historians even argue that the Romans were on a downward spiral as soon as they switched from a Republic to an Empire (with an emperor), though it still took hundreds of years for the whole thing to finally fall apart.
The fact is, no one's managed to figure out how to make a really stable governmental and social system yet which performs well for the majority of its population. All the ones which we have today are relatively short-lived; the Western European nations are doing pretty well, but they've only existed in their current forms for less than 70 years.
People like you keep saying this, but you never answer the question, "where?". It's not like there's tons of perfectly livable land that doesn't already have other people living there, people who don't really want to share with a ton of newcomers.
Exactly. We're already seeing this problem with Mexico and the USA. A lot of the illegal immigrants from Mexico are coming up to the US because there's not enough water going south in the Colorado river (LA is using it all up), making much of northern Mexico unusable for farming as arid areas like that depend on irrigation. So, with no economic opportunities, they're moving to the nearest place where opportunities exist, which is the USA immediately to their north. Problem is, many Americans (except for business owners looking to take advantage of dirt-cheap labor) don't want them here for various reasons.
When large groups of people want to migrate elsewhere, this is an inevitable problem in modern times where there's zero unclaimed livable land left. The people who already live on that land usually don't want a lot of newcomers, and if they do, they have very strict conditions and rules, such as Canada where you either need to deposit $300K into a Canadian bank account or you need to have some skill they want; dirt-poor, uneducated, unskilled people aren't welcome there.
Actually, it seems that frequently, some "recent exciting discovery" is frequently code for "this is total bullshit that we're making up so we can get some venture capitalists to give us a lot of money so we can embezzle it".
Not only both these problems, but these days, with the far greater population, we also have established national borders. 2000+ years ago, it wasn't that hard for people to just pack up and move to another land; after all, much of the Tigris-Euphrates civilization is underwater now, under the Persian Gulf, so the people there moved elsewhere as sea levels rose, and there was lots of uninhabited land back then. But these days, if a few hundred million people want to move from southern coastal areas to places farther inland in in the north, that means crossing national borders in many cases, and that usually leads to wars and other big social problems, since the people who already claim that land for their nation don't usually want a bunch of newcomers taking over.
Huh? Our Congresscritters are all directly elected by the people. Over 100 years ago, only the Congressmen were elected, and the Senators were appointed by State Legislatures (which are, in turn, elected directly), but that was changed with the 17 Amendment to the Constitution. Now, the only ones not directly elected are the Supreme Court justices (appointed by President after approval by Congress) and the President (elected by "Electoral College" which is determined by popular election state-by-state, though in practice the results of the popular election are almost always the same as what the EC does).
Slashdot Mirror
There's a big problem here though. When they've hooked up with the "alpha male" assholes, they have kids with them. When they finally dump them in their 30s or so, and then want to be with the "nice guys", 1) many of the nice guys have already married other women, possibly not very attractive ones, because they "settled", 2) some of the nice guys have become angry and bitter after years of rejection, and aren't so nice any more, 3) many nice guys don't really want to take over as the father of some asshole's kids, and it's worse when there's shared custody and the asshole guy is constantly in the picture, and finally 4) now that the woman's in her 30s or 40s, she either can't or doesn't want to have any more kids.
So the nice guy is apparently expected to take over as father when the kids are entering their rebellious teenage years, devote all his time and money to raising some asshole's kids, and not have any of his own.
Maybe this is why some societies still have arranged marriages.
Not exactly. I think the phenomenon is that many women want "exciting" guys, not "finer" guys. There's plenty of nice, well-mannered guys out there, but they're not sexually exciting to many women, so the women chase after them. Of course, we know these guys by another name: "assholes". Inevitably, these relationships don't work out that well, so if the woman manages to extricate herself from the relationship with an asshole before getting stuck with him (because of a kid), and repeats this a few times before giving up and deciding "all men are assholes" (when in reality, she's self-selecting the assholes and ignoring the others), she decides if she has to marry an asshole, she'll at least marry a rich asshole, or any rich man she can land (asshole or not).
This is probably even easier these days because of 1) easy and effective contraception, keeping women from getting stuck in a relationship with kids so quickly, and 2) the ease and lack of social stigma of divorce compared to the past.
I think this is very common. The way it works is this: woman *say* they really want a nice guy. But they're lying. They meet nice guys, but they just "don't do it for them"; basically, the nice guys aren't very exciting. So they just want to be "friends". But they meet assholes who are exciting (frequently because they need to be "fixed", a lot of women subconciously want a man they have to fix), and hook up with them. After a while, when their attempts at fixing the asshole and making him nice (but somehow still exciting) prove to be fruitless, they give up and dump him, especially if they haven't had a kid with him yet. After a few cycles of this, they get tired of it and if they're attractive enough, they find a rich guy (frequently also an asshole, but at least this one has money instead of sitting on the couch all day playing Xbox) and marry him so that, even if they can't have real happiness in a relationship, they can have a warm body around and be set financially.
The women who aren't quite attractive enough to land the rich guy, or get saddled with kids by the unemployed asshole boyfriend, end up becoming bitter. Meanwhile, their nice-guy friend who wasn't exciting enough for her has stopped wasting his time being friends with her, and has married a not terribly attractive woman who, while not so great in the looks department, appreciates him and treats him well.
I've actually read many times than men will frequently not bother trying to date highly attractive women, instead going for the "second tier", because they assume the most-attractive ones will be too high-maintenance and have excessively high expectations of a relationship.
Yes, I think that's what he meant with that statement. Problem is, spoiled brats usually don't seem to become loving, appreciative kids.
People have been using bidets in other countries for ages, and they don't have any hygeine problems. Low-pressure water works just fine for cleaning that area, you don't need to use sandpaper to wipe it.
It sounds like grafting is something like cutting off your arm, and then surgically attaching someone else's arm, connecting the blood vessels etc., except that, unlike humans, plants apparently don't have the problem of foreign tissue rejection so these Frankenstein-like operations actually work on them.
This would only work if enough people started ordering groceries this way to spur UPS/Fedex to start putting these in their trucks, and also setting up a method in their distribution centers to keep things cold there too; it's a chicken-and-egg problem as I see it. Finally, I don't think I'd trust UPS/Fedex to do this right anyway; they're already famous for dropping packages from 15-foot heights onto concrete, kicking things around more when they're marked "Fragile", etc. What are you going to do when your ice cream arrives melted because UPS/Fedex screwed up (intentionally even, like they do with "Fragile" packages)? Ask for a refund? The shipper will say it was cold when they shipped it, and you'll have to file a claim with UPS/Fedex, and then UPS/Fedex will deny the claim, saying "insufficient packaging" like they do any time you try to file a claim for damage now.
Are you insane? North America is running out of water, especially over here in the southwest. People need more room than just the footprint of their house; they need a huge amount of farmland per person to grow their food. Freshwater is a limited resource possibly and shortages of it are possibly even more looming than for oil.
How far from your local grocery store is ice cream made that they sell?
For that matter, how long do you camp out at the local grocery store waiting for it to arrive so you can speed it home and eat it all before it melts?
Irrelevant. They ship it in refrigerated trucks. In case you haven't noticed, your neighborhood UPS or Fedex delivery truck is not refrigerated.
Are you really that stupid? I'm sorry, I have to ask because if you don't understand this simple concept you should get help.
It's easy: you put it in todo.txt, bugs.txt, or similar.
It all really depends on the nature of your project. If it's more than 1 or maybe 2 developers, it probably should have a bug tracker; there's plenty of free ones available, after all, such as BugZilla, so it's not like it'll cost anything more than time, and it's really not that hard to set them up on a Linux box with Apache and MySQL. But if your project is small and you're the only developer, a bug tracker is really overkill, unless you want random users to be able to file bugs online without you having to handle those emails personally. But that's probably a very rare project, where it's big enough that the public can file bugs, but there's only one developer; anything that big usually has more people working on it.
For my own personal projects, I'd never bother with a bug tracker. A todo.txt file is much simpler and easier, and since I'm the only person, the overhead of a bug tracking system just isn't worth it, plus I'm the only one finding bugs so I don't need an automated way for others to file them.
Your post has some serious problems.
For banking, for instance, tellers haven't gone away, and there's no charge to see them. If your bank does charge you, you need to find another bank; there's tons of smaller banks and credit unions that haven't instituted the ridiculous fees the big banks have.
As for cashiers, we only need so many minimum-wage jobs. In many places, before the economy turned to total shit, it was really hard to fill those jobs because there just weren't many people who wanted to work for so little.
For grocery stores, if you think shopping online is going to replace the local supermarket, you're insane and need psychiatric intervention. How are you going to buy ice cream online? Unless they do some really fast delivery, it'll be melted. How are you going to buy produce online? Just hope they pick something that isn't squashed? What do you do when they give you apples with giant bruises on them? Send them back? Finally, I don't know about you, but buying things online can be a bit of a chore, between slow websites and poorly-written websites. If I know exactly what I'm looking for, buying online is great. It's especially good when you're buying a manufactured product that's exactly the same, no matter where you buy it (the LG flat-screen TV model ABCDE is exactly the same whether I buy it from Amazon or Best Buy). This doesn't work with food; it varies a lot, especially produce. Seeing a stock photo on a website is no substitute for seeing it first-hand, knocking on it (for melons), etc. It's not uncommon to walk into a supermarket intending to buy some fruit, and while they have them in stock, they're all crap (usually picked too early and shipped from far away). How are you going to see that online? You're not. And what if you want to browse an aisle full of some type of food? I can browse much faster by walking and looking at shelves than by messing around with some website.
Grocery shopping online isn't a new concept. Netgrocer tried it ten years or more ago, and it never took off, unlike Amazon and Newegg.
Online shopping definitely has its advantages, and works extremely well for certain goods. Electronics are a prime example here; you get the exact same thing as at the local store, and you get better information online, since the local pimply-faced teenager doesn't know anything about what he's selling. Groceries are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Finally, one thing people will never do online is go to restaurants. There's plenty of low-wage jobs there for all the cashiers that lost their jobs.
That would only work if there were a bunch of people there with lots of money, sorta like how desalination plants are very popular in Saudi Arabia. Mexico isn't rich like SA, so trying to sell stuff there (particularly the northern areas, which are the places that don't have enough water) doesn't work that well.
Yep, sounds exactly like when they redefined the meter to some number of wavelengths of some light emission.
Anyway, it sure would be nice if Slashdot had some real editors that didn't blindly accept such horribly-written article summaries.
It made perfect sense to me, though it was still stupid. What I understood from that line was that they wanted to come up with a new unit to actually replace the ampere, at least for small-scale currents, perhaps sort of like the Angstrom is used instead of nanometers in some fields. Of course, this is entirely different from redefining the ampere, which from the way you write it I take to mean they want a new way to reproduce it, much like they changed the definition of the meter many years ago from "the length of this exotic metal alloy rod" to "the distance of x number of wavelengths of some radioactive emission". I haven't read TFA (it's slashdotted).
Anyway, coming up with a new unit seems stupid to me. The whole reason SI units use prefixes like mega, giga, milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, etc. is so that you don't need new units for different scales, you just use the appropriate prefix. If this thing is in the picoamps, what's the problem? Aren't picoamps good enough? If that's too big, we still have femtoamps which are 1000 times smaller. But if that's not what the article says, then it's really a moot point.
As for the editors, I wonder that all the time. Between the horrible article summaries and the frequent slashdupes, they don't really seem to do much besides click "ok", and really don't deserve the title "editor". Of course, if you look at modern mainstream "journalism" these days, it's not much different. Spelling and grammar errors and terrible writing are commonplace these days in professional publications.
There's a few reasons I can think of to grow things in the desert:
1) Lots of sunlight.
2) Lack of big storms which destroy crops.
3) Lots of open land that isn't being claimed for other uses.
Of course, a growing population is going to reduce the amount of arable land all over the US, so that's part of the problem. However, we have been growing things here in Arizona for over 1000 years now (the Anasazi were doing it, with canals, long before Europeans got here), so it's not like it's entirely new. Farming has been a big industry in the Arizona desert in modern times as well, and in fact a lot of farmland around Phoenix has been converted to residential land with the real estate boom.
It's not just racist Americans, it's racist humans. Most human societies don't really like it when extremely different groups of people move in in large numbers and then start pushing their own cultural practices as the norm. Just look at the Native Americans; they didn't really like it when large numbers of European settlers showed up in their lands, did they? And for good reason too; just look at how they were treated when the Europeans became the majority. This happens every time some group moves in on another group's territory. The old group gets pushed out and marginalized. The best case of this is that the immigration rate is slowed, and/or only a certain number of people from any particular place are allowed in (to prevent balkanization), and the groups blend together in a non-violent way, but these days people scream "racism!" when this is tried. What's weird is that I never see those people screaming about Canada's "racist" immigration policies.
Finally, your point about labor is incorrent. Business owners like cheap labor, and middle-class people like cheaper produce, however the lower classes hate it, because it increases unemployment for them. Try being poor and finding a job in an area with lots of Spanish-speaking immigrants, such as here in Phoenix. It's very hard, unless you speak Spanish, because all the low-end jobs are staffed by Spanish speakers so they discriminate against English speakers. Asking the working poor, who live paycheck-to-paycheck, to take time off and go enroll in community college to learn a new language would be asinine.
Because of the effects of extremely heavy (80,000 lbs) vehicles traveling at high speeds, highways seem to usually be built with a concrete foundation, and a thin asphalt layer on top. The concrete allows it to handle the weight without damage (and it's not just the static weight, but the effect of it traveling at high speed puts extra strain on it; I'm sure a civil engineer could elaborate on this much better), and the asphalt gives the benefits that asphalt gives. Every so often, the asphalt can be resurfaced, for a lot less money that it'd cost to repair an asphalt-only road. However, the up-front cost is higher because of the concrete foundation.
Don't forget, interstate highways are also supposed to be capable of allowing military vehicles (tanks, etc.) to travel on them.
I disagree about the volcano bit. No one's tried it, but I'll bet the pressure under a volcano could be relieved by drilling and allowing magma to escape in a slower, more controlled manner than allowing it to build up and erupt.
The Roman Empire collapsed, but that probably had little to nothing to do with climate change, just social and political problems. Those same factors will probably be the undoing of the USA within a couple of decades the way we're going now.
Many historians even argue that the Romans were on a downward spiral as soon as they switched from a Republic to an Empire (with an emperor), though it still took hundreds of years for the whole thing to finally fall apart.
The fact is, no one's managed to figure out how to make a really stable governmental and social system yet which performs well for the majority of its population. All the ones which we have today are relatively short-lived; the Western European nations are doing pretty well, but they've only existed in their current forms for less than 70 years.
This is a pretty stupid argument, unless you happen to not be human. I'm fairly sure that 100% of the readership here is human, except maybe for you.
People like you keep saying this, but you never answer the question, "where?". It's not like there's tons of perfectly livable land that doesn't already have other people living there, people who don't really want to share with a ton of newcomers.
Exactly. We're already seeing this problem with Mexico and the USA. A lot of the illegal immigrants from Mexico are coming up to the US because there's not enough water going south in the Colorado river (LA is using it all up), making much of northern Mexico unusable for farming as arid areas like that depend on irrigation. So, with no economic opportunities, they're moving to the nearest place where opportunities exist, which is the USA immediately to their north. Problem is, many Americans (except for business owners looking to take advantage of dirt-cheap labor) don't want them here for various reasons.
When large groups of people want to migrate elsewhere, this is an inevitable problem in modern times where there's zero unclaimed livable land left. The people who already live on that land usually don't want a lot of newcomers, and if they do, they have very strict conditions and rules, such as Canada where you either need to deposit $300K into a Canadian bank account or you need to have some skill they want; dirt-poor, uneducated, unskilled people aren't welcome there.
Actually, it seems that frequently, some "recent exciting discovery" is frequently code for "this is total bullshit that we're making up so we can get some venture capitalists to give us a lot of money so we can embezzle it".
Not only both these problems, but these days, with the far greater population, we also have established national borders. 2000+ years ago, it wasn't that hard for people to just pack up and move to another land; after all, much of the Tigris-Euphrates civilization is underwater now, under the Persian Gulf, so the people there moved elsewhere as sea levels rose, and there was lots of uninhabited land back then. But these days, if a few hundred million people want to move from southern coastal areas to places farther inland in in the north, that means crossing national borders in many cases, and that usually leads to wars and other big social problems, since the people who already claim that land for their nation don't usually want a bunch of newcomers taking over.
Huh? Our Congresscritters are all directly elected by the people. Over 100 years ago, only the Congressmen were elected, and the Senators were appointed by State Legislatures (which are, in turn, elected directly), but that was changed with the 17 Amendment to the Constitution. Now, the only ones not directly elected are the Supreme Court justices (appointed by President after approval by Congress) and the President (elected by "Electoral College" which is determined by popular election state-by-state, though in practice the results of the popular election are almost always the same as what the EC does).