Yeah, motorist clubs. AAA did a lot of advocacy for expanding driving back in the day, apparently they still lobby for & against certain taxes.

Showing adult content to minors is also probably not an insignificant part of their business (certaintly a major part if the classification of social media as adult becomes more widespread), and having age be an os-user property might give children more opportunity to subvert the verification. And if enough applications end up behind the maturity wall, they can count on children to badger their parents into setting their account to adult, and the industry will absolve itself of all responsibility once more.

This does sound absurd at first, but how much gravity is really needed for collection? Is there any value in just a few hundredths of earth gravity?

The article mentions that on Mars, with 0.38x Earth gravity, there will still be challenges, so I expect you need a significant fraction of 1g for the problems to go away.

It's not an absurd question. The threshold value is the one that breaks surface tension and effectively pulls waste away from the body. It will be more than a few hundredths g but less than 1g.

Unfortunately we have basically no data on the effects of partial gravity, in this context or any other. We can try flying partial-gravity parabolas in aircraft and simulate a Martian toilet the same way they tested the design for Skylab; I don't think this experiment has been done.

Municipalities, at least in some states, can be sued for refusing development that meets existing regulation and zoning

If it's allowed by regulation and zoning, they generally don't have a say in the first place. These stories are never about building another box-shaped building in an industrial zone. We're talking about rezoning, variances, or otherwise preferential treatment.

This is more of my personal axe to grind, but it's important to view this as a result of monetized content and highly algorithmic feeds. It is my understanding that these platforms don't even really remove this language, just demote it, but that the culture on these networks is entwined with people who post for money, so anything that reduces exposure or payout is shunned. This is true for TikTok, Instagram, YouTube (shorts).

That said I wouldn't even assume "s3xual" is a result of this. It smells of older censorship to me, all the new stuff is video-first, so phonetic substitutes are more characteristic.

> hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.

Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".

They're officers and researchers strapped into their seats for 10 days, what could they be doing that doesn't involve email

Traditionally, officers would probably be working on their powerpoint slide decks.

I wonder if they've checked for any rogue sharepoint instances yet...

Play minesweeper or solitaire...

Research with the data they’ve collected so far?

This hurts my brain so very much, the idea that email is necessary in outer space — I just threw up in my mouth a little.

wow imagine that, astronauts having to communicate with the outer world??? that's insane....

Parking minimums are implemented during building permitting. Natural lakes don't have building permits, and the parking is often constructed by the state.

The purchases are purposely similar to previous examples of gameplay in design and language.

> Germany after they lost WW2; they still speak German

This is a trick of definition. There were a few places that spoke German before the war and don't now, but they aren't part of Germany today.