The very very few things I care to watch any more (and those almost entirely SBS and ABC) I can watch online. The other channels put together would be lucky to show anything I care about a few times a year. If they won’t stream it online I just don’t bother. If they won’t put on any stuff I care to watch, that’s their problem. My TV isn’t even plugged into an aerial any more, it’s only there to maybe use with the old games machines or maybe watch an old DVD

33 arty, wow. Still hitting logistics hard too, by the look.

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goes down with distance by an exponential factor
(1/x^3)

Umm… those two things are not equivalent. b^(-x) would be exponential, x^(-k) is inverse-power for whatever k

git branch testing.stephanie.slept.with.my.friend.brad

or bloody universal healthcare

I guess it depends on where you live. It’s not true of the whole world.

It’s not the word “lighter” that’s the issue, it’s the word “less”. If I say something weighs 80% less, … you know how much that is. 100% less, it weighs even less – nothing at all. 500% less (i.e. 5 times less), suddenly it weighs more?

“one fifth the mass” is not the same thing as “five times lighter”

Consider something that weighs half as much. It’s 50% lighter … 0.5 times lighter. Something that weighs 0.2 times as much has 20% of the weight, and is 80% lighter. If it weighed 1% as much, it would be 99% lighter (0.99 times lighter). If it was 100% lighter … it would weigh nothing. Five times lighter would be -4 times the original mass.

We already have accurate and precise ways to describe less mass (albeit leaving aside for the moment the distinction between mass and weight). It’s no harder to say “one fifth” than “five times”, but only one is correctly describing what is going on.

https://xkcd.com/927/

That’s a bit like asking “twitter or reddit”; different tools, different purposes. A single person may prefer one or the other, or use both in approximately equal measure.

global warming is definitely something it makes sense to worry about and which there’s still some chance to mitigate the worst effects of.

The sun expanding - or even the much earlier effects before that happens, as the sun gets hotter - will happen on such long time scales that there simply won’t be any humans at all; most species only last about a million years or so, vastly less time than we’re talking about.

We might well make the planet nigh uninhabitable in considerably less than one-millionth of the sun-being-a-major-problem time. It’s like worrying about the bridge maybe rusting dangerously a few decades from now, while not paying attention to the truck that has just veered onto your side of the road and will surely hit you in the next few seconds. You need to take evasive maneuvers, not worry about the bridge.

basically will just die a boring death after swallowing all the planets in the solar system

Not all the planets, no. Mercury and Venus, sure. The earth’s orbit will move somewhat further out when the sun expands, and probably won’t be swallowed but it will at least be well baked.