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Comment It's just another grift (Score 4, Interesting) 78

There is a government contract to go with this and it'll go to somebody well connected, probably Elon Musk. That was what Doge was all about. They caught a bunch of things and turned them into a juicy government contracts. The 250 million Elon spent on electing Trump was money well spent.

Everything is a grift now. Capitalism is collapsing and the only thing left is crooks trying to get the last bit of what you have out of you before the collapse.

We really need a third way. I get that nobody in this country is going to get behind socialism. Not after almost 100 years of propaganda.

But it's pretty obvious capitalism is collapsing too.

So we can't have capitalism and we can't have socialism so what's it going to be?

And we better figure out something fast because the clock's ticking and right now the third option is a total economic collapse. They're already talking about using AI to deny people Medicare and let the AI companies keep the savings. So even if you are retired you better start thinking about it

Comment Re:Food (Score 1) 92

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at fully closed loop self-regulation. That doesn't work, and is not what is under discussion. The discussion is of using systems to maintain environments.

Production of oxygen is not remotely difficult. Not by plants, but again, industrial systems. Systems to make O2 from CO2 and/or water are TRL10. They exist, you can just buy them off the shelf. Same with reusable CO2 scrubbers (it's a very simple chemical process: cool = absorb CO2, hot = release CO2; they just cycle between cold and hot and whether they're connected to the input or output)..

You seem to have the idea that the proposal is just to have plants and humans life in harmony with no technology. If that were the actual proposal, I would agree with you. But that's not the actual proposal.

Comment Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score 1) 92

Yeah. Because if Mars' gravity is insufficient, and you'd have to live in rotating habitats anyways, then what are you even doing there, instead of being located e.g. on an asteroid where it's much easier to make a rotating habitat, where your surface is much more resource-rich, and where delivery and return of goods is much easier?

Venus, by contrast, I think few people doubt that its gravity would be sufficient for human life. Mars, it's *probably* enough, but it's not well studied. Moon seems like a coin toss at this point.

Comment Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score 1) 92

It's not entirely clear, but it's quite possible, arguably probable, that at least part of Venus's highlands involve fragments of ancient crust (the highlands also have milder conditions for exploration). Venus was Earthlike before Earth was, with vast warm oceans. There's also some arguments for life in the atmosphere based on gases that have been found, although I don't buy them (in the same way that I don't buy the same arguments for current surface life on Mars).

Submission + - Texas makes clean power breakthrough as solar output overtakes coal (reuters.com)

AmiMoJo writes: For the first time, Texas' main power system looks set to generate more power from solar farms than coal plants during a calendar year in 2025, marking a key new energy transition milestone for the largest power network in the U.S.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) generated 2.64 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power from solar assets, compared with 2.44 million MWh of power from coal plants for the January-to-November period, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Comment Here we go again! (Score 0, Troll) 23

NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, though, zeroed out funding for MAVEN, which cost $22.6 million to operate in 2024. MAVEN was one of several missions "operating well past the end of prime mission" the proposal would terminate, despite MAVEN's role as a communications relay.

Even more winning! It's wearing me out!!

Comment Before Musk (Score 0) 59

Twitter did a much better job with the bots. It did have a tough time because you can't algorithmically police right wing extremism without having it go after American Republican politicians. So right we extremism had to be manually policed. In other words racism and Nazis and whatnot. Musk solution to that problem was to just let the racists and the Nazis take over.

Now ordinarily that would be the company would rapidly go out of business because of lost users. But musk has been pumping money into it, largely with the help of the Saudi royal family. Essentially turning it into a propaganda arm of American billionaires and the Saudi elites. At least if you are consuming content on the platform besides a handful very specific people posting to it.

The real problem is that computers are just too good at figuring out relationships. That's why you can't kick Nazis off your platform using algorithms. A computer will very quickly figure out that the dog whistles the Republicans or whatever your local equivalent is are saying are dog whistles referring to racist or Nazi stuff and it'll go after those dog whistles because the computer knows that when a republican talks about welfare Queens it's no different than a Nazi talking about rounding up black people and gays. The computer knows the dog whistle and you can't program an effective algorithm that doesn't figure it out right quick.

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