Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
Lots of rock climbs at a place called 'Goblin Combe' are named after Tolkien people and places
This I did not know, but the rule about Goblin Combe is: don't tell people about it, or it'll be swarming with people ruining it, like anywhere nice in Bristol.
the associated faff needed for a motorbike
Whilst getting a category A licence might be deemed a "faff," if the power output is below 11KW, you can do so with just a CBT and a provisional license (like pretty much every takeaway delivery rider on a moped). I'm of the opinion that many push-bike riders would do well to have done a CBT course, just so that they have basic road awareness and control of their vehicle, given the number who seem to like to change road position without even looking, let alone signalling their intentions.
The only other "faffy" bit here is the wearing of a helmet. Drop a watermelon from six feet onto a hard surface, and you'll understand why this isn't a faff, it's essential; one of these has saved me from brain damage or death on more than one occasion. Again, I'm of the opinion that those on push-bikes should be made to wear helmets (even if not motorcycle ones, some impact protection is better than none).
Okay, well there's insurance, tax and registration as well, but those cost a lot less on a bike than they do on a car.
Russia hasn't been communist for about 99 years, since Uncle Joe got in, or possibly 106 years, if you consider that the Bolsheviks weren't exactly borotherly towards other political entities.
This is why our Left-Pondian cousins are so rabidly anti-socialist, because they think that the USSR calling itself socialist was the same as the USSR being socialist.
This, plus socialism and communism are not the same thing; a commune doesn't necessarily have to be run as a socialist endeavour, and socialist societal structures do not necessarily have to be organised into communes. That aside, the USSR rapidly dropped the communism aspect around the time of the end of the first world war, and only really made a pretense of socialism by the time all Russia's satellite states were being made to send their resources home to Moscow.
I had some memory from Corsair a few years back (it was a 16GB set of four 4GB sticks of, IIRC DDR3, so a little while ago). After a few years of continued use of the RAM, overclocked within spec (it was advertised as overclockable), my PC started developing intermittent faults. Booting to a memtest CD showed one to be faulty. Corsair, when I contacted them, were happy to honour the lifetime original-owner guarantee, and replaced the RAM, although they wanted me to send the whole set back for replacement, not just the faulty module, which led to me buying some faster 8Gb sticks (also Corsair), using them in place, and selling the replacement when it came, effectively giving me a cut-price upgrade.
Their kit seems rock solid, and their customer service is second-to-none.
Sorry, that's not a complaint, but I just felt they deserved my endorsement.
Yes.
In case you hadn't noticed, El Reg is, and always has been, irreverent. Scientists are referred to as "boffins", Trump is "Florida Man" (tying in with other pre-Trumpian Florida Man memes), Apple is "the fruity company", and so on.
The light-hearted writing style is part of the charm, especially when some of the material is otherwise very dry.
The reason why this indictment is important, is that it is a state-level one in Georgia, not a federal one. My understanding is that the president does not have the power to pardon convictions of this type, and that the governor of Georgia does not either (and would not in the case of Trump, even if he had the powers to do so, as he is a political opponent).
This is the analysis I have read, anyway. It might not be correct, and as always, IANAL, and I also don't have either the time or will to delve that deeply into US politics, which seems primarily to be a demonstration of how to subvert and corrupt representative democracy through the judicious application of large amounts of money. Not that our own politics int he UK isn't also this, but in a slightly different way.
The ones committing the violence in the name of politics is the far left. This has been the way throughout history
Well, to disprove that argument takes only a single counter-example doesn't it?
Here's a few:
Hitler
Mussolini
"The Proud Boys"
Oswald Mosley
The city state of Sparta
I could go on, but I think it might exhaust your brain cell.
I would agree that the DUP are extremists, with some pretty fundamentalist religious ideology that has no place in the political sphere, and hard-right political stance, but I'd question whether this applies to Sinn Féin; they may have originated as what was essentially the political arm of the IRA (because the British government would not deal directly with the IRA), but as far as I can see, they have morphed into what is essentially a moderate centre-left pro-reunification party.
Whilst the reunification standpoint might arguably be said to favour the Irish Catholic part of the population, it might shock you to learn that most people in the Republic are not deeply religious, and many do not identify with any religious beliefs at all, let alone Catholicism, so as a result, there is little evidence of religious fundamentalism in Sinn Féin's politics.
Arguments about reunification aside (as I think we can all agree, we're not going to settle that one on an internet message board), it comes down to the DUP being a right-wing pro-England status-quo party (and I say pro-England, not pro-UK, as I doubt they give half a shit about Wales or Scotland), and Sinn Féin being the default opposition to this, of a moderate progressive centre-left party with some pro-republican tendencies. I know which of these I’d characterise as extremists, and it's not both of them.
edit - I'd also point out that power-sharing only seems to have worked for as long as the DUP had the majority, and as soon as they lost it, they threw their toys out of the pram and refused to form an assembly in Stormont, thus actively preventing power-sharing. In my mind, that should disqualify them from taking part at all, and the remaining parties should be allowed to form the assembly without them.
Of course, this is still open to corruption, if you don't have strict limits on election spending, as most real democracies do. In the US, it's pretty much down to who can get the most donations towards their election campaign, which pretty much by definition corrupts the candidates, because those donors are going to want something for their money, even if it is as "innocent" as a candidate who agrees with them. What you end up with is a plutocracy, because whoever has the most money to throw at the campaign has an unfair advantage.
I'd go so far as to say that all campaigning should come from a relatively small budget, and that budget should be funded from a grant of public money where the candidate does not have the funds to cover it. Candidates who fail to reach a voting threshold don't get their deposit refunded, which goes some way to reduce the number of purely frivolous candidates.
You might then say, "with so many candidates on the ballot paper, how do I know which one to vote for". The answer to that is, of course, if you don't know what the candidates stand for, after you have read the list of candidates and their positions, why are you voting at all?
I have experience of using HL7 to communicate between different IT systems. Highly specific messages that don't match the use case, so you end up misusing the fields in them to hold information that is subtly different to the message design spec. The other 95% of the fields are left blank, and you have to count the delimiters when reading them to work out whether you have got your data in the right field.
Eugh. Give me some use-case-specific JSON instead.
The impossibility of doing this properly becomes apparent when you consider that every single general practitioner has their own way of working and organising materials. There is no standardised working practice for a GP's practice, let alone record-keeping or IT standards.
- Searching for any term in the file, e.g. "hip". Easy in a digitized file, not so easy in a paper file.
Actually, not as simple as it sounds. The way we search digitally isn't the same as the way we search physically.
For example, if searching through a paper medical record for things to do with hips, that would probably involve looking for things that clearly relate to the orthopaedic inpatient department of the local hospital, specific hand-written notes, and so on, and scanning them for things that mention hips or related terms ("pelvic", perhaps?). Your brain is doing a lot of different things seamlessly when you do a search like that.
On the other hand, searching for occurrences of "hip" in a load of digital medical files will miss things which haven't been OCR'd or categorised correctly, and will probably pick up 300 instances of "medicine shipped" that you have to wade through.
Someone has to be trained to use the second mode of searching, because the first (the system they have been using since birth) is not applicable.
Managers actually have relatively few tasks to perform:
- Assign work, when it cannot be done automatically (actually happens relatively infrequently in most businesses, because correct processes assign work, if you're doing things such as DevOps properly)
- Manage sickness and absence (which basically comes down to rudimentary checks that employee's aren't trying to game the system)
- Being available to offer advice and guidance or offer a second opinion on something if it's not obvious (this requires technical knowledge that many middle managers don;t seem to actually possess)
- Performance reviews (again, largely pointless, as it should be covered by the previous two points; "personal goal setting" is one of my bugbears in a job where the incoming work dictates your activity, setting goals is at best meaningless, and at worst, actively a waste of time and source of stress)
- Pay reviews (often set as a fixed n% by C-levels anyway)
I've heard it said that a manager should ideally be managing around 8 people directly; many more and they have too much work to do; many fewer, and they are not working effectively themselves.
On the face of it, many are superfluous, especially the ones who thing that management is a one-way stream of "I tell you what to do and you obey", rather than a bidirectional process where they make an employee's work life more efficient by helping them as well as instructing them on their next task. The management culture, especially in the US and UK is one that tends towards either micromanagement where the worker has no room for any initiative, or one that is so hands-off that they are unavailable for help when it is needed. Both of these can lead to "busy-work" from management, which reduces the efficiency of the organisation overall.
I'm willing to bet that in places like Google, there are not anywhere near as many as eight people actually working per middle-manager, and I'm willing to bet that there are superfluous levels of management between the immediate middle-managers and C-level execs; don't even get me started on the necessity of those in most organisations.
There's a balance to be struck here, because, unlike myself, not everyone is happy to work from home full time, or indeed for any time at all. One of my colleagues has a 2 y-o and a 4 y-o at home, and thus works from the office as it's the only place he can actually get space and quiet to concentrate.
Advocating full time home-working for everyone is just as wrong as advocating full-time office working, or indeed any inflexible n-days-a-week-in-the-office policy. Everyone's personal circumstances are different, and if an employer wants to treat their employees as identical work-producing units, then I have some news for them: People are non-fungible, and managing them as if they are is a fool's errand.
I'm pretty sure that both of those contrived examples are further back than anyone sensible is suggesting.
I'm actually lucky enough to live within 15 minutes walk of both my nominal* place of employment, and also a lot of very good shops. Granted, living in a city also has its own problems, such as high rent, traffic congestion, and pissed up arseholes shouting in the streets at night, but those are other problems.
*I say nominal, as I've worked in there exactly once since early 2020, ad despite not having a commute to speak of, working from home is still more convenient in terms of time, effort, and reduced distractions from being in an open-plan space.
The Romans (and Greeks) were actually pretty innovative with architecture and construction. Multi-storey buildings with tiled roofs (many of which are still intact underneath many metres of volcanic ash as Herculaneum), sewerage systems, aqueducts sometimes hundreds of miles long, underfloor heating, water storage cisterns lined with hydraulic cement, lots of things with arches (viaducts, etc.).
Many of their innovations are still in use today (terracotta roof tiles, and hollow bricks, for example, and, as you point out, concrete!) - just because we have grown accustomed to materials and technologies that are thousands of years old, doesn't mean they are no longer useful, and it also doesn't mean they weren't innovative. People work with the materials and techniques they have available.
Well, in Rome, if you look hard enough, you can find Romans amongst all the tourists and touts aggressively pushing selfie sticks in your face. You'll probably have to go to the suburbs a bit, or look behind the counter in a bar or restaurant.
As for Greece, well, I'm reliably informed by a relative that lives there, that the foreign tourist numbers, especially from the UK, are really down this year, and that most of the tourists in Peloponnesus this year are Greeks, mostly from around Athens.
Well, if the Martian atmosphere started off in chemical equilibrium, and life developed and modified it, in a similar way that Earth's was posited to have, then it would have started off with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, and this would have been consumed and converted by photosynthesis into oxygen.
This is what is supposedly happened with the Earth. The evidence for organisms beginning to produce oxygen on a global scale is quite strong; there is geological evidence in the form of the production of "old red sandstone" where the oxygen was soaked up by oceans and oxidised iron II compounds (which are typically yellow/green) to iron III ones (which are orange/red), and then there is a mass extinction event of microorganisms for which oxygen was toxic once the oceans had been oxidised and atmospheric oxygen began to build up, followed by geological evidence for a global ice age when the global cooling caused by a reduction in carbon dioxide caused the oceans to begin to freeze at the poles, thus becoming more reflective and causing a runaway cooling effect (look up "snowball Earth" for details of the evidence for this, such as magnetic field preservation in equatorial rocks showing widespread ice at the equator).
So, in short, photosynthetic life causes global cooling, not global warming.
Early life would most likely have been photosynthetic, as it would have to get its energy from somewhere, and the alternatives are "chemosynthetic" life, which relies on a chemical gradient (such as those around volcanoes or hot springs) to produce energy, or "thermosynthetic" life which relies on temperature gradients (again, around volcanoes, or hydrothermal vents). Both of those would be very limited in their scope to expand, so any organism developing photosynthesis from thermosynthesis or chemosynthesis would have an evolutionary advantage in that it can spread more freely.
I'm not surprised. Those 5Sis were beasts. IIRC, a place I used to work had one with a duplexing unit and a stack of feed trays that would take a whole box (five reams) of A4 paper, as well as one that would take a ream of A3. A box of paper weighs around 12 kg give-or-take; I don't think it added a significant percentage to the weight of the printer to fill all the feed trays.
I was wondering what Musk would do about the legal fees of people suing him for unfair dismissal over their tweets. Like the guy who corrected something dumb that Musky said and got fired for his trouble. (I can't remember the exact details, but I'm sure it was reported here).
Would the elongated one pay to sue himself? I can see an easy way to exhaust all his funds into the pockets of lawyers. A bit like a real-world implementation of an infinite recursion bug.
I'd like to see Musk pour money into a pit trying to argue that a defamatory tweet isn't libellous. As far as I can work out, the legal arguments here would either be based on tweets not counting as published material, and therefore not subject to libel laws, or that the content of the tweet wasn't defamatory. Of course, depending on where in America you live, as I understand it, some employers can just fire people if they feel like it, without any real employee protections.
While the trend on the wholesale electric is only downward.
I read that, and almost spat out my tea, even though I finished it ten minutes ago.
I don't know which supplier you're with, but my electricity price, whilst it has dropped a little recently, is still way above what it was a couple of years ago. I can't remember a time when electricity prices ever had a downward trend, let alone the standing charge, which basically seems to be a daily fee for the privilege of not living in the 19th century.
You've also missed "push people back into offices when they can work productively from home" - because those investments in city-centre office space, and privatised public transport (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one) need to keep paying out dividends for your rich party donor.
Despite the fact that one very real, immediate, and pretty simple measure that can be taken to reduce not only greenhouse gas emissions from transport, but also help fix air pollution issues in cities, and give everyone back a bit of free time that would otherwise be spent on commuting, thus allowing them to get more exercise, and have a healthier work/life balance, thus costing the NHS less in treating heart disease, obesity, various stress-related illnesses and so on, would be to allow those who can, and wish to, to work from home.
Thankfully, some employers, such as my own, can see the benefits from this approach. The likes of Alan Sugar (business property landlord extraordinaire) and Jacobus Rees-Moggus hold opposing opinions, but I'd not even want to use those opinions to fertilise fields.
If someone wants to pay people to do very little, that is their prerogative. On the other hand, maybe they are being paid fairly to do a job that brings in revenue, and it is those who are working many times harder for little extra remuneration who are not being paid fairly? Maybe certain jobs are undervalued?
If your labour is being purchased for x, and your employer is making 5x from that, yet your neighbour is also being paid x, whilst their employer makes 1.5x from it, then you aren't being exploited by your neighbour, you are being exploited by your employer. You might, rightly, not be happy about it, and recognise that your labour is being undervalued, or that of your neighbour is being overvalued, but it's not your neighbours fault; that is known as "sour grapes".
Ironically, "sour grapes" arguments are often those ones reeled out when people observe that some people in society are earning many times (sometimes hundreds or thousands of times) the salary of their workers whilst doing less actual work themselves. Perhaps the alternative view might be that capitalism has allowed too much power to flow to those with capital, and a bit of regulation is required to bring things back into line, to ensure that wealth is properly taxed in line with income, so that it actually is possible to earn more money by working harder, rather than just hastening your own trip to the cemetery.
Those who cry out "Marxism" at this sort of suggestion only display their ignorance of the meaning of the words they shout, not that it will stop them shouting it as loud as they can. A little outward-looking at the social systems in place in countries that aren't terminally in thrall to "the market" will demonstrate how balance is found in neither extreme, but trying to work with compromise and sensible social policy seems to be real anathema to those profiting from greed.
There are reasons why this country is in the top few for a number of those things, and I do actually agree with you that there can be a lot of biased reporting in the Grauniad (which is why I pick it as a source of news, not the source of news). Most of those reasons are historical. For example, Britain built its wealth (and empire) on being a trading nation, and, given our geography and location in the world, we really should be playing to our strengths. Erecting barriers to trade with our nearest neighbours, whilst crowing about trade with the other side of the world seems a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face, though. As for our health service; well, yes indeed, the NHS is very good, and a very cost-effective and egalitarian system. Worth remembering that it is, at its heart, a highly socialist endeavour and dwell on that. It has survived (so far) despite private capital, and politicians in the pay of private capital, from both main parties (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, I'm looking at you), trying to carve bits off it for profit. Don't think we've forgotten "PPP"
The important thing, of course, is not how well the UK is doing by various metrics, but how those metrics are changing. I'd be deeply surprised to learn, for example, that our trade is better now than it was in 2016. I know for a fact that many great scientific research departments at universities have been hit hugely by no longer being able to draw on funding and people from mainland Europe. Scientific research, of course, is one of those areas where international collaboration is not just useful, but vital, if you want to stay ahead of the field.
None of this means, of course, that I am "doing the country down" by pointing these things out. Believe it or not, I actually want the people of this country to he happy, healthy and wealthy. I'd love to be able to point to things we do here and be proud of them. Sadly, it seems that it is our own government is inward-looking and self-destructive, and are essentially "asset-stripping" us all for their own enrichment. I'd like to see some ambition and pride from them, rather than empty phraseology, stamping "Great British" onto of anything that isn't nailed down, and the merry-go-round of empty promises and lies. Sadly, I don't think Keir Starmer will be much better when he gets in next year.
Of course, there are things our government could be doing to actually help the country. The most obvious one to me seems to be investing in renewable energy (and this does include nuclear), and in the technologies this involves, rather than handing out licences to suck up the last dregs of North Sea oil. In 20 years time, we could be at the forefront of the technologies behind solar, wind, and tidal energy, but at the moment the subsidies and tax breaks go to massive multinational fossil-fuel companies. The cynic might point out that our PM's family profits directly from consultancy from those firms, but that would, of course, be tantamount to accusing a Tory of corruption, which is, of course, impossible. If we were genuinely forward-looking, this would, of course, have been done 20 years ago.
Okay, I'll bite on your right-wing culture war talking points...
- Strikes: people are striking not just because, in real terms, they are being paid less for the same amount of work as they used to be, but also because their working conditions and job security are being eroded in the name of making ever greater profits for business owners/government private capital outsourcers.
- Quiet quitting: It's also known as "working to rule". If you have a contract of employment for 40 hours a week, why would you work more than that, for no pay or recognition? Goodwill goes both ways, and if the employer shows none, it should not be incumbent on the employee to provide free labour. Putting in extra hours does you no good; all it does is raise expectations of your capacity to do work, and then a C-level executive will come in, think that your job is easier or less important than it actually is, and make you redundant for the purposes of increasing short-term shareholder profits. I have seen this happen. I have never seen anyone put in extra hours and get rewarded for it. A toxic work-ethic does nobody any good, because burn-out leads not only to personal collapse, but a reduced quality of work.
- Lazygirl jobs: what the fuck does this even mean? Is this some sort of sexist playground slur? I'd rather have a sensible discussion with an adult please.
- Shirk-from-home: If you can't be trusted to work from home properly, then this is your problem, not mine. I've found that the attitude of thinking that someone working from home must be shirking tells a lot more about the person saying it, because that is what they would do. Meanwhile, responsible adults, who are paid to get the work done, and not for presenteeism, tend to work mroe effectively when not placed in a disruptive open-plan office environment. For example, our business' productivity went up during the pandemic when everyone was forced to work from home, because it employees responsible adults and treats them decently. The opposite of this, a work environment where employees are closely supervised and treated like children, breeds only the response of "if you are going to treat me like a child, I will act like one". So, whilst you might think "shirk-from-home" is witty and cleaver, the reality is more likely to be people shirking in an office by making busywork to appease useless middle-managers.
- Preferring to live on benefits: Clearly you have never had to claim any benefits if you think living on them is preferable to literally anything else at all. Whilst there may be a few people who "prefer the misery," most people in that situation would give their eye teeth for the opportunity to genuinely work their way out of poverty. The reality is, of course, that unless they really luck out and get a well paid job off-the-bat, working will result in a cruel cut to benefits, and exposure to higher costs in the form of tax liabilities, driving them further into poverty. This isn't just bad for them, it's bad for the economy as a whole, because anyone who actually knows anything about economics will tell you that the current system, where tax cuts are given to the rich, results in money being taken out of circulation, whereas cutting taxes for the poor, and genuinely helping them into work that pays an actual living wage (not the governments rebranded minimum wage which is not enough to live on in most places), puts money into circulation, as every pound is spent on living costs and thus circulates in the economy. At the end of the day, you have a choice between an economy where wealth is shared and circulates, and society functions, or one where it all floats to the pockets of a few, gets hoarded, the economy is starved of liquidity, and society crumbles. Which do you reckon we're living in? Maybe stop reading the very biased UK newspapers, and take a look outside, and also at other countries (and not just what those billionaire-owned papers tell you those countries are like).
All of these things are the direct result of government policy, so, yes, all the government's fault.
Yeah, who's the actual scrounger? The person struggling to survive on £40 a week whilst jumping through administrative hoops, desperate to find a way out of poverty, or the person getting a contract from a mate in government o provide billions of pounds worth of useless PPE that the tax-payer has to pay to dispose of? With all profits going to a tax haven such as (picks random example), the Isle of Man, of course.
And that's our closest neighbouring star.
Technically, Proxima Centauri is the closest star (Alpha Centauri is a 3-star system and Proxima Centauri is Alpha Centauri C). If you are talking about Alpha Centauri as a star, and not the system, then it would refer to either Alpha Centauri A or to A and B together (as they appear as one star in the night sky due to their proximity).
At some point, Proxima Centauri will be further away, as it orbits the A-B system, but this won't happen for another 25,000 years or so, at which point A and B will alternate being the closest star (every 79 years) until Proxima comes back round again.
The article mentions fractal-like structures, so I'm thinking graphene-analogue dendrites (graphene is a very good conductor due to in-plane electron delocalisation) rather than fullerenes, and it is these which provide a large surface area. It doesn't explain, however, how you'd produce and maintain two separate sets of them separated by dielectric, which is what would make them into a capacitor and not a conductor.
The article doesn't explain how this makes a capacitor, and not just a conductor. A capacitor has two poles, and doesn't conduct between them, but this talks about "self-assembling nano-wires", which sounds a lot like a conductor.
Presumably, there's more to this than just mixing the concrete and pouring it, and it will require some sort of membranes or something to act as the dielectric, otherwise what you have is one big circuit.
As the article says, this is fine for underfloor heating if you want to pass a current through it, but this is light on the details of how it is made into an actual capacitor.
There's a reason that the electronic symbol for a capacitor is two parallel lines that don't touch...
Did you miss the bit in the article, where the problem is actually described? It isn't the slowness of RNG, it's the fact that it stalls the processor while it waits. If I wrote a bit of software that stalls the whole system while it does some processing, especially on a modern system that is multi-threaded and multi-core, I'd rightly get a kicking for it.
A bottleneck in RNG should only be a bottleneck for RNG, and not for the whole system.
It's like having your house wired so that the lights don't work unless the dishwasher is running...
My home PC has installations of both Win10 and Win11 on it, yet the Win10 installation is still nagging me to "upgrade" it to Win11. There'd be blessed little point in having two separate Win11 installations, and the only reason I have one is so that I can "test-drive" it to make sure that nothing has problems when Win10 is finally end-of-lifed.
I get to periodically enjoy two sets of massive Windows updates for my trouble. At least the Win11 installation is on a fast NVMe drive and not spinning rust, so I don't have to sit there for hours looking at the good old "100% complete" messages as it writes massive amounts of data slowly to disk.
edit - That has reminded me to boot it into Win11 for the first time in 4 months and apply the updates, while I'm working...
I'd be inclined to take such things with less salt if the eyewitness reports were ever anything more than that. "We saw it on radar" is emphatically NOT the same as "here is the recording of some anomalous radar signals we picked up," and whenever you drill further into these things, the actual physical evidence becomes ever more nebulous. Literally anyone can say, "I saw a UFO and recorded solid evidence of it, and the MiBs came and took it away," which neatly explains why all sorts of people have said this sort of things in the past, their testimony always differs, and pretty much always has a strong social context to it.
The same goes for all sorts of "paranormal" reports; in the US, people constantly seem to be experiencing "demons" all over the place, whilst reports of hauntings in the British Isles are always determined to be variants of ghosts or "little folk" (such as poltergeists, pookas, and so on). Even weird ones like Gef the Talking Mongoose don't get the immediate "it's a demon" response on the Isle of Man that they would get in Texas.
The obvious explanation here, is of course, not that demons like to terrorise Americans, but that the fundamentalist Christian belief systems that are common in the US, with a strong belief in demons is projected onto anomalous experiences when people have them; and people have anomalous experiences all the time. People do, of course, forget that our senses are deeply unreliable, the visual cortex actually invents half the information that it integrates (what? you can't see those big blind spots in your field of vision? whodathunkit?), hallucinatory experiences are much more common than people think (stress, tiredness, illness, drugs, and so on are all causes), and the brain likes to try to interpret anything anomalous as something to be paid attention to, due to evolutionary threat responses.
IIRC, the premise there was that there are planets in unstable orbits that meant that other planets were unsafe, so they were sent ahead to blow up the unstable ones, so the others could be settled.
Of course, scientifically speaking, it's nonsense; the mass in those planets would have to go somewhere, and if converted somehow to energy, would be like a supernova going off, which would be far worse for anything in the cosmic vicinity. In terms of impact, there's very little difference between being hit by one large object or a trillion smaller pieces of it, the energy involved is the same.
Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job?
I think this is more a basic failure of capitalism. There are plenty of capable people out there who are prepared to do all sorts of jobs, they just require decent payment for it, whilst "free-market" capitalism demands ever-increasing profits (infinite growth with finite resources is the biggest piece of idiocy anyone has ever come up with IMHO). If resources are limited, and growth is deemed essential, the only way to achieve it is to pay the workers less, and the natural response to this from the workers is to go elsewhere.
