scratchee

Seems like an awful waste of police resources, if nothing else.

Londoners looking at this article in utter confusion

Our society runs on our stomachs

It sort of still works if you imagine they’re talking about the descendants of the dinosaurs which form the primary meat of human society (chickens)

There’s been plenty of explanations already, but here’s a perspective I think can help:

Your original intuition is entirely correct for an object that appeared next to earth but which isn’t moving relative to the sun. It would fall straight in with very little trouble. If it’s moving a little sideways then it’d need to be nudged to make sure it didn’t miss the sun.

But the Earth is moving super fast sideways, so an object coming from Earth would need to be nudged a lot to not miss the sun.

Hell, you can take the logic a step further: this isn’t necessarily anti-Israel even.

People can show support for Palestine without making any claim against Israel’s right to exist too.

I’ve certainly been there, shocked to realise my personal slice of reality was unusual. At least in this case, it’s a good problem to have.

But surely equality has been achieved in the last few months, this all feels so very January. People are so much more open minded now than in those dark days of the past. Why waste time even discussing such outdated attitudes that totally and completely disappeared in February and are certain to never return?!

It may be in a scientific paper, but this is more of an anecdote about the various issues the author encountered, rather than something intended to be actionable and clearly delineated as you’d expect in the body of a scientific article. Therefore a more literary style is appropriate for this section.

My mental model is that bullet points are for when you expect a reader to go over the points with a highlighter, prose for when you want to produce an emotional response. This feels more like the latter.

The stowaway was on the outside. Therefore could have attached after they checked. I doubt very much that it’s practical to require constant vigilance from all travellers at all times (do travellers need to hire temporary guards for their vehicles when going to the toilet in order to comply with this law?)

Also, ignoring that, it’s braindead to not make an exception when the people in question self-report and fix the issue, it’s directly undermining the goals to punish people for vigilance (even belated vigilance).

But ignoring all of that, the law (or implementation) is flawed. The stated goal of the law is to discourage negligence, but negligence needs to be measured against a fair yardstick like “could a reasonable person catch this easily”, not just “were you smarter than whoever tried to hide on your vehicle?”. Defining negligence competitively like they seem to be doing isn’t reasonable and I hope these people win and force the law to be interpreted more judiciously. Next they’ll be fining old ladies who get scammed for “negligently supporting criminals financially”.

Ironic that his polite human-scale protest wouldn’t have gotten much attention if the police hadn’t turned it into national news.