If you parked the Venus zeppelin on Mars it wouldn't offer the inhabitants enough protection from the cold or radiation. But that's a minor issue next to the fact that it would explode due to the lower atmospheric pressure.
This article is so full of cherry-picked bullshit that I would expect a 3rd-year undergrad wrote it to be edgy. I can't get to everything, so here's the lowdown on the cost of education.
Colleges didn't "oversell" education. If the well-wishers of the world had their way, we would ALL be college educated because educated people tend to make better decisions and be less horrible to each other. The value of education is extreme. PARENTS oversell specific careers to their and in consequence mandate their children attend the most prestigious university they can get into. They also have no clue how to tell one university from the next and thus lean on prestige.
The COST of higher education (Ex. post-secondary, college, uni, etc.) is highly variable based on who is providing the education. Let's take a look at a couple examples:
The University of California (UCLA, Berkeley, San Diego, Santa Barbara, etc.) has 9 undergraduate campuses and is a powerhouse of research. Their campuses are RESEARCH institutions whose charge is to be the research arm for California while also creating more PhD RESEARCHERS in addition to lawyers and medical doctors. Those researcher-faculty are also required to teach classes. Please understand that I wrote that description for a reason. Research is the primary focus and education is secondary. Thus, if you are a student that needs to be spoon-fed everything, then the UC is probably going to be a bad fit.
It costs around $15,600/year for UC tuition plus a variable amount of campus fees ($1,200 - $2,200) depending on which campus you attend.
The California Statue University has 23 campuses and is a powerhouse of education. Their campuses are EDUCATIONAL institutions whose charge is to be the educational arm for California while creating industry experts (Master's Degrees) and limited doctorates (Education, etc.). Those instructor-faculty have the option to do research as well within the realm of their instructional duties. Instruction is the primary focus and research is secondary. Thus, if you're a student that is desperate to get into a lab and work on cutting edge (albeit sometimes monotonous) research, the CSU is probably going to be a bad fit.
It costs around $6,450/year for CSU tuition plus a variable amount of campus fees depending on which campus you attend.
Side Note: The #1 reason it's more "PRESTIGIOUS" to attend a UC campus than a CSU campus is because they have Nobel Prize winners and big cool experimental toys. People see that and assume, "Wow... they must be amazing educators," but it doesn't always translate. Often, you're being taught by "lecturers" (temporary instructors who JUST focus on instruction) and THOSE instructors tend to be, on average, better than research faculty. (End Side Note)
That's all very, very affordable, right? No one gets into $100K of student debt solely on the basis of paying tuition at UC Berkeley. So what are we missing? EVERYTHING ELSE.
Housing: Rentals and homes for sale near UC and CSU campuses are under extreme demand due to both student and employees wanting to live near the campus. People buy single-family homes near major campuses and rent them out to students at massive mark-ups because... it's a strong investment and home values near major university campuses bounce back FAST after any downturn.
So how much are we talking about? Near a small campus (Chico State), it's safe to budget $500-$1000/month for a room rental. Near a major UC campus, it's safe to budget $1,000-$1,500/month for a room rental. (Note: Back in the day, almost no one rented their own room. It was always 2-3 people per room. The pandemic changed that and students view the dorm experience as a "one and done" and all but demand their own room and the cost of that preference is high.)
That's just rent. When you add in bills (electricity, water, sewer, waste, broadband internet, phone), transportation (car, gas, parking), textbooks, food, and other living expenses like clothes, the total COST OF ATTENDANCE gets you over $45,000/year to attend a University of California campus. It's not the tuition... it's the EVERYTHING ELSE and that's 100% predictable because we've been watch the cost of EVERYTHING ELSE climb mercilessly upward for the last 20 years.
Don't believe me? Look at the breakdown yourself:
UCLA - https://financialaid.ucla.edu/...
Berkeley - https://financialaid.berkeley....
And you can see the history of tuition prices here: https://www.ucop.edu/operating...
Lastly, the tuition you pay during your first year at a UC campus is what you pay throughout your undergraduate experience. Tuition increases only affect the incoming class.
I guess you missed this part:
The firm’s findings still contrast strongly with those put forward by three Australia-based academics, who estimated in 2019 that based on transactional data from 2009 to 2017, one-quarter of all 106 million Bitcoin users engaged in crime, and that by 2018, illicit finance accounted for around $76 billion a year, or roughly half, of all transactions in bitcoins.
Cryptocurrencies have transformed drug trafficking by enabling crime syndicates to cut out street dealers and sell directly to customers around the world through darknet markets, as well as peddle higher-quality narcotics, said Sean Foley, a finance professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and one of the report’s authors.
“Chainalysis is trying to tell us about the total consumption of cocaine in Australia by telling us about how much cocaine has been seized,” Foley said. “It’s very difficult for me to meaningfully comment on the methodology because they don’t really tell you what they do.”
That's because most blockchain activity is wash trades, so everything else is small in comparison. Here's something to get you started:
Reminder to all readers: Monero and zcash exist, off-chain transactions (including cash-for-wallet deals) exist.
The difference is that Visa transactions are overwhelmingly for non-criminal purposes, while cryptocurrency transaction are (excluding wash trades) overwhelmingly for criminal purposes.
I'll just leave these here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...
https://www.rand.org/pubs/comm...
https://www.dw.com/en/north-ko...
There are two cryptocurrencies that functionally specialize in helping criminals launder money and evade sanctions, Monero and zcash. They are inherently untraceable and can work as a one-stop money laundromat once you can get currency in and out of them, and the subset of cryptobros who are trying to take cryptocurrency mainstream don't want you to know this. A little money laundering flaring up with some random stablecoin is background noise in the criminal finance world of cryptocurrency.
Catch up to the Chinese on battery tech? They don't have any special battery tech. There's nothing special about Chinese EVs components, they're basically the same stuff everyone else is making their EVs out of.
Biofuels aren't worse than fossil fuels but they surprisingly aren't much better. You can make renewable e-fuels with just renewable power and recaptured CO2, but they take an obscene amount of energy and then the ICE turns most of what all that energy produced into waste heat.
Hydrogen is a fossil fuel industry distraction, it offers the best selection of the worst downsides: An expensive and currently mostly fossil-sourced fuel you need to get at a station like gas/diesel, relatively long refuel times and short range in a vehicle with a higher up-front cost and weight like an EV, and a fuel that is only available at a small handful of stations, needs to be stored at immense pressures, escapes through solids and embrittles steel on the way out, and burns with an invisible flame like only hydrogen can offer.
We won't be able to get rid of liquid hydrocarbon fuels completely any time soon but we can make their uses a small enough fraction of what they are today that they're no longer a major source of fossil CO2 emissions and these oddball "fucking around in the margins" solutions can fulfill a decent fraction of the demand.
My last three landscape sliders were the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4 and F(x)tec Pro1, so they survived longer than that, and all three were in the size range of normal phones.
It's best to assume that banking apps won't work with anything but a non-rooted commercial Android install with its full suite of Google trash. Either that, or the most meticulously rooted systems that can fool all forms of root checking. Banks only want their apps running on walled-garden systems.
The solution for me has been to use banking websites rather than banking apps. This also eliminates the potential issues of banking apps having access to more than what can be seen through the browser, and it will hopefully show the bank that there is still demand for web access.
This. It seems that the US has forgotten the '80s automotive malaise era. Trump has tried to start a fresh one before and it looks like this time he's succeeding.
Don't worry, we're all Homo Economicus by default. Perfectly informed, perfectly rational, perfectly selfish. Otherwise the whole system would be a broken farce! So each buyer will independently source their own perfect climate risk data, obviously.
The Animatrix was pretty solid for its intent as a series of vignettes telling stories of human civilization throughout multiple iterations of the Matrix. Most relevant is
"The Second Renaissance Parts I and II" (viewable on YouTube).
In that pair of vignettes, you follow humanity's introduction of *actual* AI, it's abuse of that sentience, its refusal to acknowledge independence, the resulting war, and the blotting out of the sun to starve the machines of their primary energy source. That, then, required the machines to seek out a perpetually renewable energy source which (the electrical impulses of human physiology).
Sci-Fi. It's a warning, not a guidebook.
Interesting that the "EMI hardening" is a software/firmware error correction feature and not a physical shielding around the hardware like on military planes.
"If John Madden steps outside on February 2, looks down, and doesn't see his feet, we'll have 6 more weeks of Pro football." -- Chuck Newcombe
