Rich countries tend to have better functioning waste collection and disposal services.

These days it is a lot better, but it wasn’t always that way.

Or even “experience using …”

Plus, launching that sort of payload is going to be insanely costly.

And causes its own additional air pollution as part of the launch.

A lot of ocean trash comes by river from poor countries.

Also by river from wealthy countries, and has done so for centuries.

The scope of the task of removing it is far bigger than OP can imagine.

That is exactly the reason.

Those caps also prevent the small percentage of people who would abuse the system from having as much of a negative impact on other users.

Back when the company I used to work for offered an unlimited voice calling deal (we’re talking 25 years ago on the old analog cell system) there were a few people who decided it would be a good idea to use their phone as a baby monitor, which tied up a voice channel for days at a time. There being only a dozen or less voice channels on most towers at the time made that kind of thing a signifigant cause of congestion.

Has been for as long as I can remember.

Of course, but you’ve still got to hunt through a dozen instances to find the most active ones.

That’s part of the issue. There’s a hundred instances that each have their own version of most of the subs, and none of them can see each other without users having to find and follow each of them, or at least look at them to find the most active 2 or 3.

Part of the difference I see on Lemmy is that there can be multiples of the same topic area being discussed on different instances with no connection between them and no straightforward method of determining which instance will have the more active discussion.

However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.

That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.

Well it’s an explicitly defensive system.

Yes, that’s what it is named. Government and military projects don’t always have the most transparent naming conventions, though.

Do we know that it isn’t capable of acting in an offensive capacity as well, should those in control of it choose?

The US has decided it wants those missiles intercepted,

Assuming the weapons system and personnel in question are used exclusively for missile intercept, then this deployment can be seen as an attempt to reduce further escalation of the ongoing conflict.

I care for up to 10-15 minutes per topic.

If it turns into an hour long presentation, my level of caring drops off significantly.

The Horn and Hardart automat was an interesting bit of early 20th century Americana.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Horn_%26_Hardart_automat.JPG

Well yeah, they’ve been doing this for decades.

And not only in Canada. Pretty much anywhere there are Chinese students or expats.

the US is really fucking hoping Putin dies of old age or is voted out domestically

Or is killed by disgruntled Russians.

And the author is getting paid.

It is at best a step towards a cure.

That should not be dismissed.

Every step puts us closer to an actual permanent cure.

if there is a warrant issued for his arrest, his secret service detail would need to arrest him.

Also if he tried to flee the country, I would expect.

On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.

On the other other hand, there are tons of commonly available industry standard batteries that a manufacturer could choose to use, if they wanted to.