At this point it's not a question of if we are screwing whales, it's how and how much. Between noise from shipping and sonar, fishing, whaling, general pollution, micro plastics, and climate change, we aren't doing them any favours.

They would rather not sell you a car. More profitable to sell you a loan to buy a car, or even better just lease it to you for a monthly fee, then take it back and sell it to someone else, maybe in a different market.

List prices are mostly to deter people buying those cars, but at least in the UK if you look around you can usually get them with a very hefty discount. Mine was about 30% off.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

It would be the human who submitted the AI code who is on the hook.

All those things could be true about human generated code too.

The US was doing weapons tests in space before China even got past the KÃrmÃn line. That's some Israeli level arbitrary cut-off dating there.

Exactly. Treat it like any other submission. If it is well written, clear, works as intended, passes all the tests, then it's good. Who or what wrote it isn't really relevant.

Right. And to be clear, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Maybe those scientists should have been punished for their part in the atrocities, but making something actually useful from those weapons was a good thing.

They wear out and need to be replaced. Demand was low, AI increased demand, but the manufacturers see it as a bubble and aren't going to massively ramp out output to meet it.

This reminds me of when Germany built new coal plants and there was much hand wringing. In fact they closed more than they opened, and the new ones were designed to fit better into a heavily renewable grid.

Another good reason to invest in solar. The more energy you generate yourself, the less you are beholden to whatever they want to charge you for it.

It's just how they organize it. You wouldn't say NASA is a military organization because its funding is authorized by congress that also authorizes military spending, or because the president is also the Commander in Chief.

Some countries maintain the fig leaf of separate military and civilian space programmes, but that's all it is. For example the Space Shuttle was designed around military payload needs, and regularly used to deploy military satellites.

For decades all the US astronauts were ex military test pilots too, and of course a lot of military rockets/missiles were used in the early days. Most of the rocket tech was derived from Nazi weapons.

They have been letting women fly from the get-go too.

It's a little surprising that this doesn't happen more in the US, where some people seem to like being rugged and independent.

It is very viable to go off-grid, or at least have enough backup energy storage and generation to survive days of no grid power.

You don't even need to deal with regulations, there are products that allow you to have it all isolated to your own home, or simply plug critical appliances into a box of batteries and solar panels when needed.

Trump wants to be the king you pay tribute to in order to do business.

Renewables being cheaper has moved a lot of stuff over already. The reality is that a lot of the cost of burning fossil fuels is outsourced or hidden, and efforts to make the people burning it pay are also proving to be effective.