In the past, when I rightly pointed out that the self-driving car promises were just smoke and mirrors, I was called stupid, a Luddite, and ignorant. But the simple facts remain the same: this technology is unworkable in theory and impossible in practice. Just build fucking electric trains.

Pretty sure this is violating, at a minimum, FCC regulations. That makes it a federal crime. The only thing dumber than filming yourself committing crimes is thoroughly documenting every step of the crime and publishing it online and then giving interviews about your crime.

Why are all these articles so surprised by the basic functioning of supply & demand? A third of Millennials have a college degree. Half of Gen Z that's of age to graduate college have a degree. To contrast, ~10% of Boomers have a degree. If lots of people have a degree, a degree isn't worth much. If that degree is increasing in cost faster than inflation while being diluted by the pool of those who posses one increasing, then it's not really worth it.

The reason this was deployed to the Faroe islands is that they are remote and energy is already expensive there. Power from this thing costs ~$1/kWh. For reference, California has the most expensive electricity in America at ~$0.29/kWh. Even the rosy future prediction price is more than twice that!

"A group of suckers that was taken for billions of dollars prove there yet remains greater fools to sell on to."

Fixed your headline.

This is a scam and vaporware. No one should put money into this. For reasons that should be very obvious to anyone who passed High School level science, the proposed mechanism can't work. This is a premise of a bad sci-fi movie, not real technology.

This is technically true only in the sense that ChatGPT is just a bullshit engine chatbot. It's more likely to deliver a result that doesn't work in reality than anything dangerous. It's only AI in the sense that anything is AI as "AI" is just either sci-fi technobabble or a marketing term (so a different kind of technobabble) depending on the context it's used in. It's not a real thing. Not least because the concept of "intelligence" in general is a social construct and thus can only exist in the context of a group of human minds; and the concept of "artificial" is equally... well... artificial. It's a stochastic parrot that's just a more complex (and I mean that in more than one meaning of the word) Eliza. There's no intelligence, understanding, or even more than the most ephemeral and tangential affiliation with physical reality in the bot. Any seeming intelligence in ChatGPT is merely the echo of the minds of the creators and a reflection of one's own social facilities. It's an elaborate form of pareidolia. If you fall for it, as many techbros seem to have, then you've simply failed an elaborate version of the mirror test.

This is just GrapheneOS wearing a mask. Why get this instead of just getting a Graphene phone?

Those kiosks make you do for free what someone used to be paid for in order to fire a worker. It is a moral imperative to use those kiosks to steal whenever possible.

That's simple. Crypto valuations are almost entirely bullshit and based on pump & dump manipulations. While the notional value of the crypto was $7m, the actual liquidity you could extract was only $20k at best. All crypto is a scam.

Sodium laser guidestars and adaptive optics took care of that problem a quarter century ago. The problem is that the company proposing this is a scam that's just out to fleece gullible investors.

This is a scam. It's not a real thing and will not result in an operational device. The key to understanding this fact is remembering that exactly one group have ever used lasers to induce inertial confinement fusion and it's not these guys. This is yet another press-release-as-story "written" by an over-worked and under-informed freelancer that was actually written by the PR team for a company that is, and I can't stress this enough, a scam to part VC suckers from their money.

This is your reminder that there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics. The Nobel Prize has five categories: medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, and peace. The "Nobel Prize" in economics was invented in the 1970s by Austrian economists to provide prestige for the roundly disproven supply-side economics. It has no relation to the Nobel estate or the Nobel Prize.

In 2020 the U.S. Naval Research Lab launched a module on an orbital test vehicle, to test solar hardware in space conditions.

That was testing solar panel tech that's used to power satellites, not stuff on the ground.

This year Caltech electrical engineering professor led a team that successfully launched a 30-centimeter prototype equipped with transmitters — and successfully beamed detectable energy down to earth.

This is otherwise known as a radio transmitter and a rectifying antenna. You can buy them at Radioshack. Well, no you can't. But you could buy them at Radioshack back when Radioshack sold actual radio electronics equipment.

In June the U.K. government announced over $5 million in funding to universities and tech companies "to drive forward innovation" in the space-based solar sector.

That's a Tory grift to funnel money to supporters. Also known as a kickback.

The U.S. Air Force Research Lab plans to launch a small demonstrator in 2025.

From the article: "The goal of SOLARIS is to prepare the ground for a possible decision in 2025 on a full development programme by establishing the technical, political and programmatic viability of Space-Based Solar Power for terrestrial clean energy needs."

It's a proposal to begin a fact finding committee to organize an investigation into the possibility of a research program. Which is bureaucratic-speak for, "This is how we waste money for twelve years then say nothing came of it."

Europe's its Solaris program aims to prove "the technical and political viability of space-based solar, in preparation for a possible decision in 2025 to launch a full development program."

Same as above.

One Chinese spacecraft designer and manufacturer hopes to send a solar satellite into low orbit in 2028 and high orbit by 2030, according to a 2022 South China Morning News report.

This is just a scam. It might actually just be propaganda; it might just be a scam without a scam.

You know the ground exists, right? You can just build the solar panels on the ground. What little you gain by putting things in space doesn't offset the cost. Are thermal batteries and liquid air batteries (basically anti-thermal batteries) expensive at grid scale? Yes. Are they more expensive than lifting all that mass of solar panels into space? Hell-fucking no. Every plan on the subject ever put forth always ignores the much cheaper and easier alternative because the architect of the plan just wants his (and it's always a him) Buck Rogers spaceship future. The problem is, if we don't build out massive solar farms ten years ago, we're seriously fucked.