That's more of a matter of budget than technology. We don't have to send the return-fuel on a single big ship, we can send multiple that dock up in orbit over Mars.

No handful of local universities can cover all needed topics. Being able to shop the world for products and skills gives an economy more options and better options.

Protectionism and isolationism is economically stupid, almost every economic model shows this. There are ways to improve supplies of critical components without trying to make everything local.

Whether such "protects culture" is another matter. I personally believe such is tribalistic ego in action, but I've hesitantly come to conclude that one must respect xenophobics to a degree, humans are highly imperfect.

There an interesting, little-known new tool called "Google" that can help you with such questions.

Heaven forbid, you might have to show them your Slashdot account!

These days, the market is more trusting of the statement that better tools and processes require fewer employees to serve the same customers if you call that AI. If you get more of your customers to succeed in using your website or app to do what they need without having a human do anything for them individually, you don't need as many employees doing it. But the market doesn't want to hear that you can cut jobs because your website doesn't suck as much any more, so you say AI and they think you've done something futuristic when you've actually done something practical, and you're vague enough about it that the SEC can't say that you claimed to be doing something you're not.

Musk's real "innovation" in the category is paying shitposters for engagement, thereby outsourcing the gaslighting. He's literally paying people in developing countries to pretend to be US Americans ranting about keeping out people from developing countries.

Americans can't even go on our own frothing racist diatribes anymore, we just pay someone else to do it.

launch you to Mars one way without a helmet if you fuck with his IP

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

It would just be funny, and that's apparently good enough reason in Musk's view.

His Nazi bar will always be Xitter to me.

I think this may be a signal that streaming services have achieved satisfaction-parity with cable.

Both deliver mostly similar service, both endlessly churn content, raise prices and spam viewers with more ads endlessly.

There was a window when streaming was actually a better experience than piracy. But they've fixed that problem, and bittorrent is once again the least aggravating way to get your couch potato fix. It isn't about the money, it is about steadily making the service worse than it was when the subscriber agreed to pay for it.

Surely an author would want to actually allow a user to read the book they purchased on whatever device they want? It's convenient to be able to download it as a PDF, and might make it an easier sale if the user doesn't have to own a kindle or install the janky Kindle app.

But I suppose there's still the lingering fear of losing potential sales because a reader can just copy and share that PDF with his friends. It might keep some authors awake at night. The DRM does present a (not insurmountable) barrier to copying and sharing.

I'm not sure I buy the conclusion that this will potentially increase DRM use, though... if you're already selling a book without DRM, it would already be trivial for a reader to convert it from an AZW to PDF or Epub, this just saves that extra step.

On the one hand, Meta made openllama right? So maybe these guys will do some similar things. On the other hand, maybe the world is safer if they focus on ads and we can just trade up on potential hellscapes.

And a leader who decorates the Capitol with gold Wing-Dings.

Helping out dyslexic glaucomic crosseyed midgets who are using CRT monitors due to poverty sets off all their DEI alarms. They'll send out ICE out of sheer panic.

More like Wing Dings, the dude rambles incoherently.