Sure, if you just fixed people, that would work better than any conceivable technical solution.

But you can't fix people, so there's no point in complaining that *some* people are *sometimes* stupid, careless, or irresponsible..That will never change. Sometimes, even, that careless person might be *you* on a bad day. We all rate ourselves based on our performance on our good days; which is why we all think we're better-than-average drivers, but really our risk to ourselves and others is dominated by the days we didn't get enough sleep, are stressed out, distracted, and running late. Those are the days when the things we habitually do right go out the window.

If you frame the root of the problem as being "people aren't good enough to operate the world we've built", then you're stuck putting band-aids on the problem. That's not unreasonable as it sounds, think of how things would be if you didn't *have* band-aids. People would be getting limbs amputated because otherwise insignificant cuts got infected.

So it's perhaps better to frame the problem this way: the world we've built is not suitable for people to operate in with acceptable safety. The root of the problem is design, so that should be highest priority. But even so, we'll still need to address the failures that better road design can't fix. Even the most safely run factory still needs a first aid kit, and that first aid kit is going to be stocked with band-aids.

And in five years, I fully expect them to start doing it again blatantly.

Possible counterpoint: Frozen food transport.

While true, that's not the complete picture. You can survive in pretty spartan conditions for a short time, but for a longer trip, you need:

• More radiation shielding/exterior hull mass
• Exercise equipment
• Food preparation equipment
• Food storage equipment (refrigeration)
• Bathing and changing and sleeping facilities
• Large tanks of fresh water (assuming reprocessing with only limited replenishment)

And so on. That's all mass that you're not having to accelerate into orbit over and over.

Additionally, it may be possible to provide some of the consumables from the Mars side, where gravity is lower, and thus less energy will be required to escape the planet's gravity well. These things might include:

• Food
• Water
• Uranium
• Calcium oxide and/or sodium/potassium/lithium hydroxide for CO2 scrubbing

And so on. All of these mean that it could actually save a decent amount of energy compared with launching full ships from Earth to Mars, despite accelerating the people and the launch craft with the same amount of delta-V.

But it matters to the research and operation teams whether their downtime is two months or nine months. Such a reduction could alter the economics of a robotic exploration program, which would surely be a prelude to a manned mission. So the robotic program could both provide input into planning of the manned mission while proving the propulsion technology is reliable enough to be man-rated.

Current concepts for a manned Mars missions would last 22 months, 21 of which would be spent in transit and one on Mars. If the round trip transit time were reduced to 4 months, you could spend 18 months on the surface in a mission of the same length. In such as scenario with robotic missions you could avoid staging supplies that only *might* be needed knowing you could send them if the need arose *during* the mission. You could respond to unexpected circumstances, or return samples to Earth for analysis that could alter the priorities of the mission.

So it could make sense to build unmanned vehicles with such a technology -- as part of a manned *program*.

Nothing wrong with it that a reverse ad wouldn't fix.

Fade in, interior, recycling center.

[center]WORKER[/center]
So what are we doing with these iPads, again?

[center]FOREMAN[/center]
We're crushing them and turning them into musical instruments for schoolchildren.

[center]WORKER[/center]
But don't they contain heavy metals that are poisonous?

[center]FOREMAN (shrugging)[/center]
I-uh-nuh.

[align=right]CUT TO:[/align]

Close-up on the machine as it crushes a few hundred iPad and iPhone devices.

[align=right]SLOW DISSOLVE TO:[/align]

Interior, school band room.

A sickly child pulls a trumpet (or trombone) away from his lips, revealing a green ring where the mouthpiece was, then coughs.

[center]BAND KID[/center]
Thanks, Apple!

The usual approach is to buy business interruption insurance or similar.

Health insurance costs are obscene, but mandated or not, that money is still essentially going to the workers, i.e. it isn't a tax, per se.

False. Businesses are taxed on their net income, not their gross, and money spent on employees is an expense, so that money comes out of the gross revenue, not the net. Therefore, taxes don't reduce the amount of money that you have available to pay employees — only the profit that you make after doing so.

I mean, if you want to be pedantic, the money spent on employees is taxed slightly, in that the businesses must pay the employer half of the Medicare and Social Security payroll tax, but even that is still at least arguably paying the employees, albeit not until after they retire.

It's unclear, but they are using their extreme market power in one market to gain power in another market, which is definitely pushing against the bounds of being an antitrust concern.

I'm not sure it is a clear step in the right direction. Yes, the fact that they're shifting at least some portion of the price increase onto people who actually use the Prime Video service could be considered an improvement, but as long as you can't get shipping without getting the "free but not free" tier (if it were really free, you wouldn't need a Prime membership at all), it's still a huge problem.

And I'm not certain that they actually pushed all of the Prime Video cost increase onto actual Prime Video users, either. From 2022 to 2023, their sales revenue increased by 11.8%, and I *think* the number of packages shipped increased by 13%, while money spent on shipping increased by only 7.2%. So if those numbers are correct and include all Amazon shipments rather than just the ones they did themselves, then it likely means that their average cost of shipping decreased, both in terms of cost per package and in terms of cost per dollar of revenue. However, I'm not confident in those numbers, so take them with a grain of salt.

Higher prices for Prime in the face of reduced shipping costs would imply that part of the basic Prime cost is going into either higher profit margins or into bailing out the Prime Video division's overspending (or both).

Peer reviewers are volunteers who don't get paid, at least that's not the norm in science. Arguably they should be given the importance of the task. If you've ever seen peer review comments, some of them are obviously phoned in. Occaisionally institutions will offer honoraria for reviewing proposals -- typically $200 or so. This is not a lot of money considering how much work it is.

Here's how I look at it: generative AI is dsigned to create plausible-looking output in response to a prompt. That's how the lawyer who submitted a ChagGPT-generated brief got caught. The references the AI generated for the brief looked plausible enough to pass a cursory inspection, even by an expert, but if you looked them up they didn't exist.

This wasn't a failure of the AI; the AI did exactly what it was designed to do. It was the fault of people who relied on it to do something it wasn't designed to do. Surely someday soon a *lot* of the work of peer review will be automated by AI before a paper actually gets reviewed by a human, to avoid wasting reviewer time with obvious shortcomings.