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.

...until the punishment is terrifying.
Simple as that.

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Most HR personnel are women, and some might assert this is the problem, they are the vanguard of the overwhelming feminization of workplaces.

https://www.compactmag.com/art...

"...Everything you think of as âoewokenessâ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. ..."

She presented it a little more compactly (not a great public speaker, ngl) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?

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.

It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

My, we are an aggressively stupid dipshit today.

The only thing that meaningfully matters to a cargo ship is size.
Vessels are already slow sailing to artificially constrain bandwidth and prop up rates, and have been since COVID.

Nobody on earth is trying to build FASTER cargo ships, and haven't for 50 years. Jesus Christ. If only slashdot had a "doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about" filter.