There’s a large park in my area that has a lot of deer. There used to be no hunting of any kind allowed in the park. You pretty much can’t drive through any area of the park without seeing a few dozen deer.

The result was, predictably, since we have no real predators left in this area, that the deer population exploded. The deer ate a lot of vegetation, there were a lot of car accidents involving deer, and it even got to the point that a lot of the deer just were not even very healthy because there was too much competition for food and numbers of other animals also took a dive.

Maybe 10 or 20 years ago they implemented some deer culling programs to thin the deer population, and so within my lifetime I’ve seen biodiversity explode in the park, I’m seeing lots of different plants and animals that I don’t remember seeing as a kid, the deer are healthier, car accidents are down, basically all of the issues have improved dramatically.

And probably the craziest thing to me is that around 100 years ago or so, give or take a couple decades, deer in my state were in really sad shape from overhunting and deforestation. There was even one hunter who believed that he may have shot the last deer in the state (he probably didn’t, but the fact that he believed that was the case speaks volumes about how few deer were left)

The state of course put a lot of programs into place to rebuild the deer population, hunting licenses, tags, seasons, limits, and other restrictions and various other conservation programs, and the deer pretty quickly rebounded, so well in fact that the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the other direction and we now have too many deer in parts of the state (personally I think it’s a bit odd if I see less than about 6 deer on any given day, and mostly all I do is drive 20 minutes to and from work, and walk around my neighborhood)

And circling back to dogs, until very recently because of those restrictions put into place, you could not use dogs in any capacity to hunt deer in this state. A lot of the damage done to the deer population a century ago was by commercial hunters who would often use dogs to help drive large numbers of deer. A couple years ago they did finally change the law to allow dogs to assist in tracking wounded deer.

I also strongly support reintroducing predators, however in my area, it probably won’t be feasible without some major un-development, deer may only need a home range of about a mile or so, so they can carve out a decent life in isolated pockets of woods and fields scattered around suburbia, many larger predators like wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. on the other hand may need a range of tens or sometimes even hundreds of miles, so it would be hard to get them established here (although our coyote population has been growing and adapting well, so they may be able to start filling some of that role)

I feel like there’s some room for nuance here. I don’t like using dogs to hunt down live uninjured game in general, flushing, chasing, treeing, etc. that just seems like unnecessary stress for the animals which should be avoided.

But I have no issue using tracking dogs to follow a blood trail and find a wounded animal after it has been shot, which could mean the animal can be humanely dispatched more quickly, or to retrieve dead game, like with waterfowl hunting since ducks and such are often shot over the water making them difficult to retrieve.

There can be some narrow exceptions for people who are actually subsistence hunters and rely on hunting for a significant amount of their food needs

There’s also cases like feral swine that are often hunted with dogs, they’re invasive and can be very damaging to the environment, can be aggressive towards humans and can present a health hazard for domestic pigs in nearby farms, so it’s often important to keep their numbers in check, so it might sense to allow dogs for that purpose if it makes the hunters more effective.

It’s north Korea, even if it wasn’t a spy satellite, everyone would assume it is anyway, so no sense beating around the bush.

And everyone would probably figure it out pretty quickly anyway based on where the orbit is, any signals they’re able to intercept from it, etc.

And really, it’s north Korea, they don’t have a whole lot of needs or interests in satellites besides spying and military purposes. They don’t really need communications satellites, their country isn’t all that big and no one else really wants to talk to them and they certainly don’t really want their citizens talking to anyone else either.

Which pretty much leaves observation satellites for things like meteorology, and monitoring crop yields and such, and since those kinds of purposes would probably have a camera onboard, they’d probably try to use it as as a spy satellite in addition to/instead of that primary purpose anyway.

Really though, their primary purpose for NK in to test missile technology somewhat on the down-low.

Just to kind of give you a sense on my personal thought on the handles, I have 3 razors, an old one that’s either a Gillette or a Merkur (I honestly can’t remember which one) that I scrounged from my dad’s junk drawer, one I picked up from a grocery store or target or something that I believe is a van Der Hagen, and one my wife got from somewhere on Etsy, so I feel like that’s a pretty decent cross section of what’s out there.

All 3 shave just fine. They all shave a tiny bit differenly, but that really kind of comes down to personal preference and that technique/learning curve I mentioned. I wouldn’t really say any of them are significantly better or worse than the others.

The Etsy one is my usual razor, probably feels the nicest in my hand, the handle is a little longer which I like, but the real reason it’s my main razor is because it looks the nicest hanging on my razor stand and because my wife got it for me. I’m not crazy about how you change the blade because you basically unscrew the whole top and I don’t love needing to fiddle around with it that close to the blade.

The junk drawer razor is my traveling razor because its handle is kind of short and it fits better in my toiletry bag. It probably has my favorite blade changing method, there’s a little knob at the base of the handle you turn to unscrew the head and the top half of the head comes off. You can also halfway undo it which leave the blade a little loose without the whole thing coming apart which I find makes it easier to rinse hair out. If I had to pick one that shaves the best it’s probably this one, but it’s also the one I’ve had the longest so I’ve had more practice with it and I’m pretty sure that’s like 90% of the difference. It’s probably my best quality razor, even though it’s probably a few decades older than me everything about it still feels rock solid, but it also had probably a half century worth of tarnish, scratches, etc. that I’m too lazy to really clean up, so it’s also probably my ugliest.

The van der Hagan razor has sort of a butterfly opening thing for the blade. I feel like on a nicer razor that would be kind of nice, but with the fit/finish/tolerances it was made to, it feels a little cheap to me, like it wants to break (although it’s been years and it hasn’t broken on me yet, so my fears may be unwarranted) it has a slightly longer handle which I like, but it’s also skinnier, which I dont like. It probably gives me the worst shave, but it’s also my least used and again I feel like practice and technique probably play a bigger part in that than there being any significant shortcomings in the design. This one lives in my guest bathroom for when I shower and shave in there if my wife is hogging the master bath.

And when I say one shaves better than the other, the difference is pretty miniscule once you get used to the razor. When I first got it, I thought the Etsy razor shaved terribly, now that it’s been my main razor for years I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and the junk drawer razor. And since it doesn’t get used as much anymore, I feel like I get worse shaves from the junk drawer razor than I did when it was my main razor. I also noticed my shaves get better with the VdH razor when I tried to use it more, but honestly I never put much time into getting used to it because I always felt like the handle was too skinny. But that’s personal preference, I like thick-handled heavy tools in general, some people like thinner handles and lighter weight.

Probably the biggest thing is to try out a few different brands of blades to find what works for you, that’s probably going to be the biggest variable. There at least used to be some variety packs you could order on Amazon and such

Personally I like feather blades, they do have a reputation for being ridiculously sharp even by razor standards, which can make them a little unforgiving, there’s a good chance you’re doing to slice yourself up a little when you’re first using them, but find what works for you. About the only thing I purposely avoid is store brand blades, they’re pretty much all garbage, try to track down pretty much any name brand.

Other than that, pick a handle that seems sturdy, and comfortable in your hand. Honestly I think most options out there, even a lot of the cheapest ones are just fine, there’s really not that much to them. Be prepared for a bit of a learning curve as you figure out the technique.

Some people get way into it, and will give you a whole lot of recommendations about soaps, creams, lotions, etc. and by all means experiment with them, but don’t feel like you absolutely need to get too into it. Personally I lather up with whatever soap I have on hand and splash on some old spice afterwards and like my results just fine (disclaimer - my skin isn’t picky, I could probably just about wash my face with acetone and dry shave with a piece of broken glass, some people have more sensitive skin, so find what works with you)

I rarely drink coffee on my days off, when I work I bring a 20oz mug of drip coffee with me. At my old job, I’d probably polish of a pot or two to myself most days, mostly because walking back to the break room and brewing a pot when it was empty was a good way to avoid actually working that no one ever batted an eye at.

Smallpox eradication comes to mind, same with the ongoing efforts to eradicate Polio (we very well may see it by the end of the decade)

A humans life is not worth more than anything else on the planet, no more, no less

So it’s an equal trade, a pig life for an equally valued human life. One of them is going to die regardless.

And from certain points of view, since that pig would not have been born if it weren’t for this, that is one more life created in this process. It may have been a short life, it may not have been the highest quality, but if we’re valuing all lives equally and believe that life is a good thing, the fact that that pig existed at all, regardless of the circumstances of its birth, life, and death, is something to be happy about.

I mean, we’re talking from the position of a race where a whole lot of us have evolved to have a serious case of the stupids and in a frightening number of cases we’ve put some of the biggest stupids in charge of running the show.

Looking at ourselves, it’s not too hard to imagine a race of religious zealots who view other intelligent life an an abomination to be destroyed but are fine leaving lesser life forms alone.

We can’t really pretend to understand the thoughts or motivations of aliens, after all, they are completely alien to us.

then the alien overlords are already aware of us

Unless they have been actively and vigorously scouting for us with FTL travel, our earliest radio transmissions, even if we assume they’re somehow still recognizable and not totally lost in the background noise of space, have only made it about 126 light years or so from earth (and honestly our very earliest ones probably wouldn’t be recognizable from very far at all, Marconi’s radio was of course pretty crude, it was our first time playing with radios, so we can probably chop a good 20+ light-years off of that easily if we’re being realistic)

Now that encompasses some 60,000 or so stars, which is a tiny speck of the observable universe, and depending on how you fill out the Drake equation that could be a whole lot of aliens out there listening, or literally no one. And only about half of them, assuming no FTL travel or communication, would have had a chance to get a response to us by now (if they even wanted to) since their response would have to travel at or below C.

If they’re in the Milky Way or nearby intergalactic space and have bothered to point instruments at us that are far beyond the capabilities we have on earth now today within the last 300,000 years, they may know that homo sapiens exist, but they’d need to be within 3000 light years to know that we entered the bronze age, and within about 200 to know that we’ve even started playing with electricity (and counting on them looking specifically at us is a real long-shot)

Parts of the Andromeda galaxy, at best, is maybe aware that Australopithecus evolved. Any further out and no one has any clue that anything really resembling humans at all is here.

Now that sort of isolation does give us a bit of security in case there is a xenocidal race that would like to wipe us out somewhere in the universe, unless we’re very unlucky we probably have a long time before we have to worry about them even knowing we’re here, and at least that long again until they can do anything about it (unless they do have FTL travel) so probably not something we actually need to be concerned about, again unless we get really unlucky the sun dying in a couple billion years is probably a more pressing concern.

Yeah, exhausting resources on the moon is a valid concern, it could be an invaluable, even necessarily asset to furth space exploration, but should probably be viewed as a stepping stone to something more sustainable, possibly asteroid mining, capturing comets etc.

I certainly glossed over that in my comment because it was already getting longer than I liked and I kind of wanted to focus on just the cost of getting things into space, but it is something that needs to be managed carefully or we lose an important foothold we might need to take the next steps.

I’m certainly no rocket scientist or astrophysicist so exact details are a bit over my head, and to be clear I’m talking about long term goals that are decades if not centuries out, but I’d kind of imagine that the ideal situation would be something like using the moon to get enough fuel to go mine a few comets and then use the ice from those comets to support future missions instead of getting it all from the moon.

To further break down what others are saying about the cost to send water to space, it cost thousands of dollars per kilogram to put something into orbit. Every extra bit of mass you want to send up needs extra fuel. The numbers are a bit all over the place depending on which rocket you use and other factors, but as a rough rule of thumb after googling around a bit, you can kind of figure on it taking about 100kg of fuel to shoot 1kg of payload into space, which means at the low end that 1kg costs around $5,000 to launch. That’s how much it costs to fight gravity and air resistance to get into space.

I’m gonna bounce around between units a bit because I’m American and I think in our crazy units by default. Generally speaking, an adult needs about a gallon of water a day. That’s a bit less than 4 liters, a liter of water weighs about 1kg. So just to get 1 crew members water supply for one day, you’re looking at about $20,000. Multiply that by however many crew members you have and how many days of water you need, and it adds up fast. And that’s before you account for the water you may need for other uses, experiments, equipment, etc. Once it’s up there, space vessels are mostly a closed system, you can recycle the water you have up there to some degree, but there will be some losses, it takes some time and energy to reclaim that water, and you don’t want to be skating by with exactly as much water as you theoretically need, you want to have some in reserve in case it’s needed.

The ISS has a crew of 7 people. Even if we assume our water recycling is efficient enough that the water you used yesterday can all be reprocessed today and be ready to be used again tomorrow without any loss (which I’m sure isn’t the case) you’d still probably want at least 3 days of water per person, so you have at least 1 day of reserve water just in case it’s needed (in reality I’m sure they probably need several days worth of water, if not a week or a month’s worth) so 3 gallons x 7 crew members x $5000 = $105,000 at a theoretical minimum just to send up the ISS crew’s water supply, and again the actual cost is probably several times that much.

And even if water magically had no weight, it still takes up space. For pretty much all practical purposes water is incompressible, you can’t really make a kg of water take up any less space no matter what you do to it. That’s space that could potentially be used to send something else up but can’t because you need to send up the water.

The moon, however, has about 1/6 of the earth’s gravity, and no real atmosphere worth mentioning so no air resistance to fight against, so you need a lot less fuel to get something into space from the moon. So if you have a moon base that’s capable of extracting water on the moon, it could be a hell of a lot cheaper to send that water to wherever else you might need it in space than if you launched it from earth.

Not to mention any other resources we could potentially get on the moon, Mars, asteroids, etc.

And as others have mentioned, we could potentially split that water into hydrogen and oxygen to use as rocket fuel (and breathing oxygen.) Looking longer-term, if we manage to end up with a self-sustaining moon base that’s able to grow their own food, and meet their other needs from the moon’s resources with excess to spare, the moon could essentially become the first pitstop on the way to other planets. We send our astronauts up with just enough supplies to make it to the moon, then they load up with more fuel, oxygen, food, water, etc. and head off to their destination from there, saving us the cost of launching all of those supplies into space. Kind of like if you were to start off on a road trip with a quarter tank of gas because you know just across the state line the gas is a lot cheaper so you’ll fill up there and save a few bucks. We’re probably a long way off from that, but sometimes you have to plan well ahead.

Your comment was true, but not exactly relevant since we were talking about airtag-like devices that don’t have connectivity besides Bluetooth, saying that a device like them exists that has GPS built-in is kind of moot since they don’t have any additional ways to send that location info.

The thing you linked would fall under the walkie-talkie-like device I described.

Depending on where you are and where you hike, you may have a very different idea of what a large forest looks like than some people. Unless you’ve really traveled to go camping and hiking, or just happen to live in a very heavily forested area, what you think of as a large forest patch and what others think of may be in entirely different leagues. And just being in the woods is only part of the issue, geography has a bigger effect than all of the trees.

I’m from the Philly area, we have a pretty big wooded park, something like 2000 acres, that is entirely within the city. It’s also in a valley, so when you’re in the park there’s usually steep hills or even cliffs all around you. Cell service gets spotty in a lot of the park, even though there is probably no place in the park where you’re more than about a mile or so from major roads and cell towers and all the other stuff you expect to find in a major city, the signal just can’t get through all the dirt and rock surrounding you.

It gets even worse when you get up into the mountains, driving along a winding mountain road you can see your signal going bonkers bouncing between full bars and no bars based on what mountain is in the way of a tower at any given moment. And towers and everything else are just more spread out in general, one area I go pretty regularly to you’re often driving a good half hour or so between anything you’d really recognize as being a town, without much but woods and mountains in-between.

By contrast, I’ve also done some hiking in the NJ pine barrens, some of the sections I’ve been to absolutely dwarf that park in Philly I mentioned, and are generally more remote, but they’re mostly pretty flat, trees aren’t great for cell signals but they’re a hell of a lot better than mountains, so I can usually get pretty deep into the woods before my signal starts failing me.

I’ve also been to Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, which dwarfs pretty much any other forest I’ve personally ever been to, just an absolutely massive tract of natural area, and relatively flat at that, but it’s just so big and remote that there is really no cell service to speak of.

GPS is one-way though, your device isn’t sending anything up to the satellites, it’s just looking for where they are.

You still need a way to get a signal from the collar to your phone or computer or whatever device you’re using to track it. Things like airtags and tiles use Bluetooth to talk to nearby phones that relay it onto the Internet. If no one is close enough with a phone they’re basically useless, and if the cell service is spotty, the location can’t be updated until the phone has a signal, and depending on the area, that could be a while which means your dog could be miles from where they were when a phone last picked up the signal from their collar.

If the collar itself is hooked up to the cell network, then you don’t have to rely on someone being nearby with a phone to pick up the location, but it is still reliant on having cell service, which may not be a given if you’re out hiking in the mountains for example.

Other than that, you would have to use other satellite services, or rely on having a direct radio connection to the collar, sort of like a walkie talkie except carrying the GPS data instead of voice.

I don’t know the ins and outs of how they work, and I’m sure there’s some catch and they overall skeeve me out a bit, but I have seen a few companies that offer very limited free service, something like 25 mb/month. I don’t know how much data a gps tracker would use but that might be doable

I’m sure those companies do everything in their power to get you to pay more than nothing, automatically change your plan if you go over, deceptive emails, etc. so definitely something to be careful about. I also wouldn’t have a whole lot of confidence in those companies sticking around for very long.

And while not free, there are some pretty affordable prepaid plans and such that may be competitive or slightly cheaper than what a regular subscription might cost.

Depending on where you live, it may be possible to forego the call plan entirely, in a dense urban area with lots of open public WiFi networks, you may be able to work it entirely off of WiFi.

If you wanted to get real weird with it and jump through the loopholes to get licensed, there might also be some options using ham radio stuff like APRS, though that’s probably going to leave your dogs location exposed to any ham who happens to be playing with their radios in your area.

Now I’m not saying that any of that is necessarily a good idea or worth the hassle of setting any of that up, I’m just spitballing some ideas for what someone could potentially do if they did want to homebrew such a thing.