I suppose I may have found it more obvious than you that this image was taken in the United States, which possesses a plethora of places that look like this. I did try to look up RPS guardrails to get a bearing on the context you were coming from, but didn't come up with relevant results, probably because the search engine is biased for English/American results to English/American queries. You mind me asking where RPS is from?

The FHWA guidance on guardrails (https://highways.dot.gov/safety/rwd/reduce-crash-severity/guardrail-101) is very clear that the guardrails are there for drivers and in fact makes exactly zero mentions of pedestrian safety. Many states have specific guidance that guardrails should be placed behind sidewalks. Here is an example from NCDOT: "The preferred treatment is to place the face of the guardrail 12 feet from the face of the curb. The 12 feet width provides ample sight distance for any intersecting streets or driveways near the guardrail installation. This placement method will also accommodate for sidewalk installation. The guardrail will be placed behind the sidewalk" (https://connect.ncdot.gov/projects/Roadway/Roadway%20Design%20Manual/03.%20Guardrail,%20Barriers%20and%20Attenuators.pdf). "Them" is the institutionalized practice of traffic engineering that treats safety of those outside of a vehicle as an afterthought and not a primary purpose of road design elements in the US (and to varying extents, other countries)

There's only one Dem to vote for in this race, and it ain't Cuomo

Not really, he wasn't. The myth of Nazi/fascist competence comes from a combination of propaganda and "right time, right place" in terms of when they took the reins of the German economy. A kind of funny example that isn't Nazis, but their contemporary fascists, Mussolini's Italian regime damaged the on-time performance of trains in Italy, but the regime kept saying the trains were running on time to the point where it's become a whole saying about excusing fascism because of its competence/results ("at least the trains run on time").

Instructions unclear, hid roadkill bear in Central Park

There are people who retire on 1/1000th of that. This man made almost a lifetime's worth of money in the same amount of time it takes most people to get a single good night's sleep. Truly unfathomable wealth hoarding behavior

Ah yes, the west. The monolithic political entity that definitely involves nobody who is critical of Donald Trump's ravings. Trump and his sycophants have no place to criticize thanks to his words and actions. Anybody who gets behind his proposed annexations has no place to criticize. But there's a lot of daylight between those groups and the entirety of "the west", both within and without the US. If Brazil or South Africa want to criticize Trump's annexation threats, their involvement in BRICS wouldn't invalidate that criticism so long as they are also willing to criticize the threatening words and actions of Jinping and Putin. The world is not (yet) composed of 1984-esque political monoliths, and there is no need to voluntarily give up that heterogeneity in order to silence criticism of aggressive and threatening geopolitics

Am one of those "assholes". Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn't need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I'm so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!

Radiation does not by definition make things it impacts radioactive, and most of the lingering effects that we associate with radiation have to do with radioactive particles that are left behind by the atmosphere. Since there is no particulate matter traveling between the sun and Mars (photons not withstanding), the surface of Mars would not be expected to acquire radioactive properties from an acute solar radiation event like this one. However, an entity on the surface of Mars would be exposed to radiation from the Sun, much more so than an entity on/near earth and it's magnetosphere (Mars' thin atmosphere and distance from the sun probably helps reduce that disparity relative to something in say low earth orbit, but I don't think it fully equalizes or shifts the scales). I am not an astrophysicist, so there's at least a 20% chance I got part of that wrong.

Pi is an infinite series of non-repeating digits, and yet you will never find the letter A in pi because there is a 0% chance of the letter A being a digit in a decimal system. By the same logic, infinite possibilities do not guarantee that every conceivable state occurs, if that conceivable state has a 0% probability. As finite beings, it is very difficult for us to accurately distinguish between a 0% probability and a infinitesimal probability, so we end up circling back to "we don't know"

Based on the Wikipedia article on biological immortality referencing species that live for a couple hundred years and the Wikipedia page on armillaria ostoyae mentioning living specimens that are multiple millenia old (and thousands of acres large!), I'm guessing that may be what the prof is referring to?

Actions or action? I was infuriated by the railroad strike response, and I'll never view that as anything but a miserable decision, but Biden was also the first president to join picket lines with the UAW strike and, for what it's worth, leaders of the railroad unions did give him some credit for helping negotiate for the sick day benefits they were able to earn in the months following. He's no Mother Jones by a longshot, but grading the balance of his actions on the curve of US politicians, he's a C+ at worst