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Comment Re:Real reason (Score 1) 54

The population has been dropping three straight years, I don't know where you found that AI site.

As for the economy, the article and even the summary says clearly:

emissions were unchanged from a year earlier in the third quarter of 2025, thanks in part to declining emissions in the travel, cement and steel industries.

Comment Re:Poor design, not impossible (Score 3, Insightful) 48

Traditional Saudi Arabian architecture is based around keeping things cool. Like the high walls in this building complex keep everything in the shade, and retain the coolness from the night as much as possible (because hot air rises, the cool air stays in the building). At the same time, it still allows natural light which overall makes a very comfortable effect.

Having a line allows you to enforce hierarchy. The people at one side will never want to go to the other side, that's where the lower class people are.

Comment What a shock. (Score 1) 48

Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

Comment Re:Mac Mini servers are the worst idea ever (Score 1) 77

1) You do know the M series chips offer the best performance per watt right now compared to Intel and AMD. 2) Saving costs means little if your hardware accomplishes zero goals. Grab develops iOS apps on these machines; what "real data platform" do you recommend to replace Macs?

Comment Re:What? how long can that possibly take? (Score 1) 158

Again my point is Windows does not always boot in seconds unlike what you asserted. I have worked in a few companies where they are probably still using the weakest CPUs off 5400 rpm HDDs. Booting anything on those machines will be slow. I am can imagine a company like a Bank of America being one of them.

Comment Re:I reject the premise (Score 2) 88

Barring pretty exciting advances in biotech(along with either the psychology or...less wholesome methods...of keeping people on-task when they learn that their 4-century lifespan will be dedicated to a period of drifting through nothing and a life sentence studying the surfaces of Kuiper belt objects inside a tiny habitube or something) you are going to hit a line where (human) exploration is not going to be readily separable from human colonization; just because shipping times become prohibitive: Anywhere on earth you can just pack some extra canned goods and a few spare parts and be there and back in under a decade even with age of sail era tech; even faster now unless the obstacle is political objections by people who already live there, in which case it's 'espionage' more than 'exploration'. Hasn't really been a notable case of 'exploration inextricably linked to colonization' since humans crossed the Bering straight into the Americas, with some weaker alternatives from the colonial period where it almost certainly wouldn't have been as cost-effective; but would have been theoretically feasible.

Near-earth objects are mostly in the same board. Shipping cost are higher, so presumably lunar mining overseers will receive less frequent breaks than offshore drill rig workers; but the moon is only 3-ish days away. As you move further away the numbers get less favorable; though they still remain within the realm of "there were people circumnavigating the earth in that time, even before we knew how scurvy worked" or at least "modest chunk of your expected working life"; and it may well be relevant that a lot of the more distant objects are either gas giants that you would only ever observe rather than land on, or very small solid bodies that you could potentially just have a robot slap an ion drive on and bring back for your perusal.

Ultimately, it seems like it boils down to an irrational emotional position. Some people, don't know why, just look at a situation and are all "the most fulfilling outcome possible would be making this the next generation's problem!" Leads to enough bad calls earthside; I assume there will be some particularly grim outcomes in more hostile environments.

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