gelfin

Totalitarian states do things like that, particularly in wartime. A radio can receive broadcasts from the enemy, and broadcasts of propaganda and disinformation into enemy territory are common. Enemy agents can receive coded messages by radio, and the hell of it from an intelligence standpoint is the broadcast goes to anyone who has the gear to receive it. So confiscate all the radios, make them contraband, and you don't even have to prove somebody is a spy. Just owning the receiver is a crime.

It's the same idiotic logic by which our modern, enlightened leaders often call for cryptography to be outlawed for ordinary citizens or trivially decryptable by the government: Bad people might use privacy against us, so nobody can have privacy, not even honest people.

When I was a kid they still held little parades and put people out in the median in hoods to wave at traffic. I remember my mother snapping at me not to wave back and not understanding why (until she sort of explained later they weren't good people).

Most towns in the South ultimately dealt with that by putting up nominal parade fees and such. Not only are Klansmen not normally the most flush with cash in your town, but it requires somebody going into city hall and signing his own name on a piece of paper saying he wants to hold a Klan event.

In general the new generation of professionals love to work around people.

Please, please try to understand: no. Most people working in this environment loathe it, particularly people in roles requiring high focus. Open workspaces are exactly what you'd intuitively expect: noisy, overcrowded, distracting productivity killers. The people who keep spouting this "people love working around people!" nonsense are the executives who, first, are just trying to save a buck on square footage, and second, like the high-pressure environment of the resulting managerial panopticon. And, of course it is also repeated by people like you who sell it to them.

People placed in this environment do not feel free to criticize it openly, because part of the environment and the way it is forced upon people over their universal upfront rejection clearly communicates to them exactly how unimportant they and their needs are to the organization. Behind closed doors they don't toe the party line so closely. They feel degraded, infantilized and pressured all at the same time. The message the ever-shrinking workspace conveys is: "You are expected to do more with less. You are not trusted. You must be observed constantly. We do not care what you think about this. This is not negotiable."

Putting people into human cattle pens to work is never going to be anything but dehumanizing, no matter what funky color you paint that accent wall. The only hope for salvation from next year's workspace for "people who love being around people" (that is, just stacking 'em in like cordwood or dead fish) is the prospect of universal telecommuting, which pits the "save a buck" urge against the "we don't trust our employees" urge. Unfortunately so far the panopticon mentality is winning out.

Reminds me of a Fry & Laurie sketch with a fake obituary of Hugh Laurie: “Hugh Laurie was raised in a working-class home his parents had specially constructed on the grounds of their Gloucestershire estate.”

Since you didn't get a direct answer, it seems as if you can ballpark this based on information we have. One of the articles described the possibility of looking up and seeing another planet, appearing twice as large in the sky as the moon. Now, this might be pop-sci fantasy crap, and "earth-like" could cover a lot of territory, but for argument let's say both that it's accurate and that other planet IS the Earth. The Moon is (very) roughly a quarter of Earth's diameter, so for the Earth to appear twice as big in the sky, it needs to be twice as far away. Now, because gravity falls off with the inverse of the square of the distance, a body two units away ("unit" in this case being the moon's orbit) would exert a quarter of the gravitational force of the same body one unit away. The gravitational pull of the Moon is 1/6 that of Earth, so the gravitational force of an Earth twice as far away as the Moon would be about 1.5x the force exerted by the Moon on Earth.

There are many, many assumptions here, including the assumption that I'm not making any super embarrassing mistakes in my chain of reasoning, but at least in principle, yes, it seems the gravitational effects of neighboring planets in such a (potentially) tight system could be significantly greater than that of the Moon on the Earth.