Interestingly I was talking at the weekend to a guy who used to work for a soda company here. He said the glass bottles used to be made and filled locally where he worked because they were heavy and difficult to transport, but switching to plastic allowed the company to centralize production in a city hundreds of miles away and ship them here instead. And, obviously, sack him and most of the other local workers.

But the MBAs got a boost to their stock options.

We're no longer allowed to bury plastic because it requires digging holes and digging holes causes Climate Change or something.

This is why we now ship the plastic to the third world so they can throw it into the ocean instead.

I think it will be difficult for the music industry to push 'this song was created by an AI in which 0.1% of the training data was a song we own' because that would pretty much destroy the AI industry which is based on being able to use other people's content without paying for it and the Tech billionaires are richer than the music billionaires. You're right though that the tech companies like Youtube might agree to block AI music 'because of unresolved legal questions' or some such nonsense.

Imagine the economic chaos if I could just tell my computer what kind of music I want to listen to and it could generate that music for me.

Think of the starving Music Executives!

Because The Mushc Industry must be able to continue rent-seeking and collecting most of the revenue that actual musicians create.

I know a guy who was a moderately successful musician in the 90s with a few songs near the top of the charts back then. He loves AI because he no longer needs a band and can create entire songs by himself.

That terrifies The Music Industry. Because its income is based on gatekeeping and rent-seeking.

And Apollo 13 cost NASA billions of dollars and came close to killing the crew because they screwed up the oxygen tank tests.

If SpaceX didn't test the tanks before filling them that's probably retarded. But the Apollo 13 oxygen tanks were fine until someone damaged them with improper testing. It's not inconceivable that someone damaged these tanks after testing and either didn't realize or decided the damage wasn't serious enough to matter.

17 Apollo missions but only 13 Saturn Vs flew (including Skylab).

One of the earliest Saturn V launches (maybe it was the first?) lost several engines but was considered a success because it still made it to some kind of usable orbit. Apollo 13 came within about second of disintegrating during launch, but fortunately an engine shut down and reduced the hazardous vibrations that were going to tear it apart. Skylab's engines overheated because the interstage didn't separate, but that was due to a piece of Skylab falling off and breaking stuff on the way down. I don't remember whether any of the other POGO problems before Apollo 13 came close to destroying the rocket, but they'd almost reached the end of the Apollo program before they fixed those problems.

NASA also blew up a lot of Saturn V engines in testing, to the point where some people didn't think they'd ever make it work.

So, yeah, NASA blew a lot of stuff up to get the Saturn V to work and it only claims a 100% success rate because of luck and ignoring things that didn't really work right.

Running some calculations at the PVWatts site, Colorado looks like a pretty good place for solar power. An 8kW system is allegedly only producing about a third less in winter than summer.

We're quite a bit further north and get a quarter to a third as much power in winter as summer. Assuming the panels aren't covered in snow.

You do realize that 12.5kWh of batteries will only power our moderately-sized house for 8-10 hours?

I'd like to run my next house off solar but based on my experiments over the last couple of years we'd need at least 60kWh of batteries to cover the cloudy days in winter and even then we'd need to limit non-essential power usage until the sun came back because some days we get negligible power from our existing panels for more than two days at a time.

That would only be about $20k worth of batteries these days if I bought regular server-rack packs but then I'd need to convince our insurers that they're not going to catch on fire and burn the house down. It's probably twice that much to buy fully-approved batteries here.

So $120k is probably about right for a system which can power the house and keep that power on in the depths of winter. And keep our insurers happy.

There is a school of thought which holds that past a certain scale, effective moderation becomes impossible. I've done moderation work and it took tons of judgement.

Somewhat. I watched some old episodes from the 70s recently and they were pushing feminism back then but it was never the focus of the show.

But I didn't stop watching this 'new, improved, better!' version because of the Woke. I did get annoyed by the way the Doctor was regularly getting bossed around by annoying English women but it was mostly just that after a few great episodes early on the stories just started to suck.

I only watched about half of Matt thingy's shows and then just one of Capaldi's was enough for me to go find something better to do with my time. So I missed most of the complete collapse of the show into what I'm told by people who suffered through it is now basically Woke Hell In Space.

Another problem was the conversion of the show into a scifi soap opera. As exemplified by this very story here, because I have no idea who most of these characters are and probably couldn't jump back into the show now if I wanted. I was also never a big fan of Billy Piper so I'm not enthused about seeing her come back yet again; I was glad to see her go the first time.

I know what that would do to my morale.

The story "Q. U. R." had an inventor simplify robots which were going insane from having humanoid features they had no use for. 1943.

You can just upload a book to Amazon and they'll handle the print-on-demand side. They charge a big fee, but a scammer publishing lots of books probably doesn't care if they only get a couple of dollars per book sold. They make it up on volume of books to sell rather than big sales from each book.

There's a strong bio-philosophical argument that you can't have consciousness without a body.