It wouldn't be cost-effective in China either were it not for state support.

There is no doubt that global free trade in commodities, in the absence of any government support, would be the most economically efficient thing to have. But China -- probably correctly -- identifies dependency on foreign supply chains for critical materials as a *security* issue. So they have indirect and direct subsidies, as well as state owned enterprises that operate on thin or even negative profit margins.

Since China does this kind of support on a scale nobody else does, China produces more rare earths than any other country, even though it is not particularly well endowed with deposits. This solves China's security problem with the reliability of the supply, but creates a security problem for other countries.

China thinks like Japan did before WW2, like empire building European countries did in the 1800s. Control over resources is a national security weapon, both for defense and offense.

The behavioral model you have isn't supported by data. When you raise the standard of living and food security of population, the fertility rate goes down. When you have nothing, children are economic assets whose labor can support the family. It's not a great option, but some people live in conditions where there are no good options.

I don't know what what means?

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

One example is AlphaFold an AI program which predicts folded protein structures "with near experimental accuracy" from amino acid base sequences. This ability is going to have a huge impact on many practical problems like pharmaceutical development, agricultural science, and engineering custom proteins. For example, since the human genome has been long since sequenced, the program means we now, with a fairly high degree of certainty, know what all the protein coding sequences make.

I'd say that's a pretty significant result.

If you work in technology long enough, you see this over and over. Every time something new comes along, it's actual usefulness gets buried in the breathless media response by a mountain of bullshit. But that doesn't mean the uses aren't real.

I had no concern with Joe Biden being Catholic, but I *would* think something was fishy with the *Electoral College* if six of the last nine presidents were Catholic given that fewer than one in five Americans are Catholic.

I'm not saying Catholics (or Jews) shouldn't serve on the Supreme Court, although maybe it would be good idea to have some justices who weren't Catholic or Jewish. Maybe an atheist, or polytheist.

One of the casualties of the Internet has been newspaper science desks. In the post Sputnik era, major city newspapers built teams of reporters with science and technology backgrounds to cover breaking science stories. To make use of that manpower in between big stories, they'd do a weekly science supplement, which was one of my favorite parts to read. These bureaus even had people on staff who could cover breaking news in *mathematics*.

That's all gone now, and you can see the impact of that in the scientifically ignorant summary you are objecting to. Twenty years ago, no major city newspaper would ever print anything that stupid. Today just the New York Times and Washington Post still have a newspaper science desk, and those are much reduced. Smaller newspapers barely cover local government anymore, they tend to just reprint opinion, purchased content, and press releases by politicians and corporations, and dueling reading letters on hot button issues. Actual shoe leather find out the facts journalism is in steep decline. In other words cheap content is more profitable, and science reporting is the least profitable content of all. The most widely consumed remaining sources of science information are non-profit -- the public broadcasting outlets.

I'm not implying anything. I'm saying the Pope's opinion is particularly significant to more than half the Supreme Court. They won't necessarily take those words as marching orders; I doubt that they would even agree that all the other Catholics on the court are good Catholics. But it means those words are automatically more weighty than if, say the Dalai Lama or the Lubavitcher Rebbe said them.

If we're not Catholic ourselves, I mean.

I'll tell you why: 2/3 of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic.

First of all, spoils of war doesn't work the way you think it does under international law, according to multiple treaties to which Russia is a signatory. Spoils of war are limited to military equipment like tanks or ships. You can't invade your neighbor and declare anything you can grab as yours because they're spoils. Private property, civilian infrastructure, cultural objects and human beings are explicitly excluded.

So when Russia seized the power plant, what it got -- again according to treaties it signs and holds other countries to -- is a mess of responsibilities. It is obligated to protect and maintain the plant. It is obligated to protect the civilian population in the areas under its control, both by maintaining the plant in a safe condition, and by providing normal infrastructure services to those civilians; it does *not* however, need to ship power to the rest of Ukraine.

So Russia could, under its treaty obligations, sever the grid in the area around the plant from the rest of Ukraine, and connect it to Russia. The plant would then provide normal services to the civilian population in the occupied area, and also provide power to Russia at least until the final status of the province and power plant are agreed to by the belligerents.

What Russia can't do is use the plant, in essence, as a giant dirty bomb to blackmail Ukraine. That is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. But so was destroying the Kakhovka Dam back in 2023. That's a cautionary tail, because it tells you something important: the Russian military leadership aren't just war criminals, they're idiots. The consensus was the intent of the dam destruction was to hamper Ukrainian movements. But it also hampered Russian movements. What's more it cut off the main water supply to Crimea, which Russia considers Russian territory. This caused massive economic damage to the man industry in Crimea: agriculture. Not counting environmental costs, and the billions of dollars required to build new wells and desalination plants, this act by Russian generals is costing Crimea, a "Russian territory", tens of billions of dollars a year economically.

So the takeaway is this: the fate of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is in the hands of idiot criminals.

> Bitcoinâ(TM)s supply is finite its issuance is algorithmic and transparent and no one can âoepull numbers out of thin airâ to inflate its price or supply. ...so long as the social structure and community norms that undergird it remain in place. The ETH split over DAO is instructive here.

It's stupid; but at least more honest than trying to dress 'grok' up as the master control computer.

In the MS case; it wouldn't be too surprising if that order is also the one that urgency dictates. Neither is totally unavailable on-prem only; or entirely without more-chatty-than-one-would-like behavior; but if your concern is about your dependence and Redmond's potential direct control their groupware stuff is moving faster than their OSes(at least if you have enterprise licenses and someone to handle keeping them quiet) in the direction of pure SaaS.

You'll get some nagging about how Azure Arc is definitely the cool kid's future of glorious hybrid manageability; but your ability to run Windows as though it were 15 years ago is definitely greater than your ability to run Office that way.

I suspect that this won't be the last case we see; as MS has shown comparatively little interest in backing down on the future being azure SaaS, and there's no real equivalent to some steep but temporary discounts for dealing with people who have fundamental privacy and operational control issues; while it's not terribly challenging to find a special discount that makes sticking with the status quo look cheaper than trying to do a migration.

Before the Dot Com era, startups that succeeded transitioned from growth stocks in to blue chips. They settle down, focus on becoming more efficient at executing what is now proven business mode.

But modern tech stocks are expected to act like growth stocks *forever*. When they grow to their natural potential, they begin to turn to dubious practices to generate the next tranche of growth. They undermine their services in order to squeeze a bit more revenue out of them. Or they let their successful business stagnate while the rock star founder beguiles stockholders with visions of transforming into a block chain or AI company.

Back in the early 2000s, when Amazon first transitioned from being a book store to an everything store, and they just introduced Prime membership, you used the site and thought "this thing is great." Nobody thinks that anymore; it's slower, more opaque and less reliable, cluttered with knockoffs, sponsored results, and astroturf reviews. Fake sales events with phony markdowns? Who is surprised?