CarbonIceDragon

It's not even a disaster, like, the port workers wouldn't strike so long as to actually threaten the country, they live in it. It's only a disaster if you're trying to avoid paying them more

I am genuinely surprised Europe has so few, given how much I've seen Eurofurence mentioned on my social timelines whenever that one approaches. I suppose that's the only European one I really hear about, but still, the impression I got was that there were a fair few people in Europe that would go to one.

Seems like it might carry the slight risk of someone cheating to intentionally become a frog for the lols?

The last bit about the big bang isn't really how it works to my understanding. The big bang is compared to an explosion, but its actually more like a balloon inflating, if you imagine the surface of the balloon as analogous to space. The galaxies don't all move away from some original center to the universe, new bits of space get "added" in between every bit of space, so that every object gets farther away from every other object. If you go backwards in time far enough, every point sees itself as being the center. At least, that's how I've seen it explained.

The issue with ICBM interception as I understand it is that it's one of those cases where the economics heavily favor the attacker. An intercept missile requires a rocket just as capable the one launching the target, if not more so. But, you can't afford letting even a few nukes get through, even one is devasting, so given that the chance of a successful intercept isn't 100 percent (my understanding is that it's well below 100% currently, for likely real world conditions), you need several intercept missiles for every missile your enemy has. Any countermeasures that make taking the enemy missile out harder, like deploying decoys or such, increases the needed resources on your end far more than it increases the resources used by them.

It might be viable against countries like North Korea where the difference in resources is vast enough, but against any serious opponent like Russia or China, it's not likely to work out.

Israel is absolutely stopping them from forming their own state in the west bank and Gaza, indeed, the fact that Israeli settlements keep getting built on the west bank makes it actively harder over time for such a state to be created. The agreement of much of the world doesnt help much when the land in question is under occupation.

Yes, I don't think Israel should be destroyed, for the record, there's been enough time since it's founding that people have been born and grown up there without having a say in it's founding after all. But the Palestinians need to be full citizens of some state or another, a proper state with international recognition, sovereignty and the capacity to defend itself against Israel in the future to the extent that is reasonably possible. In theory that could be an Isreal that didn't discriminate against them, but as far as current tensions stand, that seems very unlikely to be stable without one group or the other seeking to disenfranchise the other or worse, so they should have their own state, or states potentially depending on how one decides to handle the issue of the west bank and gaza not being geographically connected.

Which hardly matters when people are taking the homes of people living there currently and killing them. What difference does it make if some of someone's ancestors centuries ago lived in that general part of the world?

You could justify European colonialism in Africa under similar logic, on the grounds that since humans evolved there before spreading out to the rest of the world, all Europeans have ancestors that lived on that continent at some point in the past and would merely be "reclaiming" it.

It's one some people who both identify as aromantic and asexual use. I've seen some people who prefer it to using the flags for both of those things separately because they preferred to think of their orientation as a singular thing rather than breaking it down into sexual and romantic attraction, though not everyone that uses it rather than both the ace and aro flags it does so for that reason.

to be fair, though politicians are usually rich, we dont want a system wherein they have to be rich, or where compromising information on a high level politician gets to a hostile power just because while said politician was running they were a cheapskate about who they hired for security

Probably not, because contrary to what video games would indicate, water does not prevent all fall damage.

It is fundamentally less efficient to run electrolysis on water to produce hydrogen, and then reverse the process again in a fuel cell to produce electricity to turn a motor, vs taking the electricity used for that electrolysis and storing it in a battery that is then taken back out to turn a motor. Granted, modern lithium battery chemistry isn't the cleanest thing to extract and use, but it's also not the only possible battery chemistry, just the one currently most used for vehicle batteries. It also doesn't allow for certain benefits to BEV like home charging (I mean technically one could run a hydrogen line to one's house, but that doesn't seem likely). The only scenario I can think of for hydrogen cars taking off is if the needed infrastructure was built out for something else and so was readily available. I could maybe see that if hydrogen ends up getting used as the solution for decarbonized aviation fuel, but my understanding was that it (along with basically every other proposed tech for that admittedly) had some pretty serious cost drawbacks and so there's no garuntee of it getting built out for even that application.