I do like the airship “what if” angle — blades are long and (relatively) light, so on paper it seems tailor-made for buoyant lift. I've already posted about it, elswhere in this thread.

The catch is handling. A 95m blade slung under an airship turns into a weather vane the size of a football field. Crosswinds, gusts, even wash from the stabilizers during takeoff/landing would make it a nightmare to keep stable. Then once you’re down, you’ve got the classic LTA problem: mooring a giant balloon in real-world wind -- and there is going to be a lot of that, especially if the destination is a wind farm. :) Honestly, wind is why airships never really solved heavy cargo despite the payload advantage.

So yeah — cool idea, and I like thinking about it too. But in practice the “free lift” just buys you a new set of headaches. Big ones. :)

Yeah, I had the same thought — the trick is that a 95–100m blade is less “dead weight” and more “giant sail.” Even if you scale a helo to sling 35 tonnes, you’re still fighting rotor wash, gusts, and control oscillations the whole way. Not saying it’s impossible — a “Skycrane on steroids” is a cool mental picture — just that the physics gremlins don’t go away, they just move around.

I’m genuinely impressed with the fixed-wing design they’re proposing to haul 95-meter blades. That’s not “strap it to the roof rack and hope for the best” engineering — it’s a clean-sheet aircraft designed to wrap itself around a renewable energy problem. Respect.

But my inner contrarian couldn’t resist: what if we dusted off lighter-than-air?

On paper, it almost makes sense. Those blades aren’t dense hunks of steel — they’re long, fragile aerofoils weighing maybe 35–40 tons apiece. That’s a volume problem, not a mass problem. Buoyant lift was born for that kind of cargo. Picture a modern cargo airship, two blades slung under its belly like chopsticks, floating from port to installation site.

Of course, reality is a cruel engineer:

Wind sensitivity: Giant balloon + giant blades = crosswind hell. Even with AI vectored thrusters, gusty weather would turn every flight into a white-knuckle simulator run.

Ground handling: Mooring a 200-meter airship with unwieldy cargo is not exactly “pull up to the gate.” It’s a dance involving tethers, winches, and crews large enough to look like a Graf Zeppelin re-enactment society.

Economics: Slow cruise speeds and weather holds are poison to project schedules. Every extra day those blades aren’t spinning is money lost.

Still, there’s something about it that scratches the “I like a challenge” itch. LTA wouldn’t be faster, cheaper, or easier than the fixed-wing plan — but it might be a different kind of elegant. Less brute force, more "float it gently like a leaf across the sky."

I’m not pitching this as a better solution. The fixed-wing aircraft is the real thing, and it’s an excellent solution to the problem of dragging a 100 meter long telephone pole around the country on highway infrastructure never meant to accommodate this cargo's geometry. But part of me likes the idea that LTA is still out there in the margins, waiting for some lunatic engineer to say: “Yeah, let’s try it.” As my friend Hunter used to say, when the going gets tough, the tough get weird. :)

No, you are not. The “I’m totally pro-X, but” preface is a tell. It’s rhetorical Kevlar for what follows, not an argument. My guess is you are a fossil-fuel shill, not a serious commenter. If you’re “all about wind,” you should know the logistics wall we’re hitting with 90–100m blades and why new transport concepts exist in the first place.

False premise, twice. First, nobody’s proposing to chainsaw national forests so an outsized cargo bird can cosplay a 747. These aircraft concepts are designed to use short, semi-prepared strips sited on already-open terrain (prairie, pasture, fallow fields, deserts) near the project—then reclaimed. Second, air delivery shrinks—not expands—the footprint compared to today’s miles of widened switchbacks, blasted hairpins, and tree-clearing for oversize trucking turn radii. One graded strip near the site plus a short last-mile haul beats carving a serpentine road corridor across counties to drag a 95m telephone pole around corners.

What’s “half-thought” is assuming the bottleneck is runway grass, not physics and geometry. The whole point is that ground transport is choking on bridge limits, curve radii, and slope constraints long before you even get to aerodynamics. Building a vehicle around the load (the blade) is literally the opposite of half-baked—that’s standard heavy-lift engineering.

Pick a lane. Either access is “surprisingly little impact,” in which case a temporary strip near the pads is a rounding error—or access isn’t little, because anyone who has escorted oversize loads knows those “back roads” become widened curves, shaved cutbanks, and permanent turnouts to swing a 95m blade without planting it in the trees. Air delivery reduces the number of places you have to permanently deform the landscape.

Seriously? Just imagine if drive-by slashdot trolls understood mechanical engineering. A 95-meter blade carries gigawatts of cyclic bending and torsion through continuous carbon and glass fibers. Cut those fibers for a bolted joint and you’ve destroyed the very thing that gives the blade its strength, forcing all that stress through a splice or sleeve — the weakest possible link. Even if you bury the joint inside a fairing or coating, the tips are moving at more than 300 kph -- any discontinuity in stiffness or surface finish risks tripping the boundary layer and shredding efficiency. Turbine blades also flex millions of times a year for decades, and a even a hidden joint would still create micro-slips and stress risers — a fatigue factory, not a long-life structure. Add to that the fact that blades are tuned so their natural resonances stay out of operational ranges; drop in a splice and you shift mass and stiffness where it matters most, leading to tower resonance, gearbox grenades, and very expensive noise. And even if you somehow engineered the perfect internal splice, you’d still need to prove to insurers and certifiers that it can survive twenty years of salt spray, UV, lightning, and cyclic loading — a test program that would cost more than building the custom transport aircraft in the first place.

This is why engineers designed the aircraft around the blades — not the other way around. Structural integrity and aerodynamic continuity are non-negotiable. “Just bolt it together” isn’t an idea; it’s cosplay engineering for people who think physics bows to their snark.

Nope. Your entire post is just wumao boiler plate BS -- pretend the technical risk doesn’t exist, wave your hands about why it “can’t” happen, and hope the thread gets derailed.

The real threat, the one you are trying to minimize, is surreptitious radios enabling side channels to exfiltrate data like location, usage, and control signals they sniffed. Radios enable latent remote control vectors, even if “sleeping” until a trigger. Radios don’t need a SIM card to transmit. SDRs, mesh radios, unlicensed ISM-band emitters, even LTE-M/NB-IoT modules can beacon or handshake without a carrier-issued SIM. A hidden transceiver embedded in an inverter or BMS doesn’t have to “get called” — it can initiate traffic, join a mesh, or beacon metadata until it finds a bridge -- like the one embedded in that shiny new dash cam some idiot got on Alibaba that he drives around town with, just waiting to be pinged by a Chinese mesh router embedded in a solar powered highway sign. The US and other nations have already flagged unexplained comms components in imported Chinese grid gear. U.S. DOE and DOT advisories aren’t about “pagers”; they’re about spectrum anomalies tied to critical infrastructure.

This “Presidential Memorandum” on pharma ads is political theater, not policy. It has no teeth, no new authority, and no binding effect on drug companies — it just tells FDA and HHS to “do what you’re already allowed to do.” The point isn’t regulation, it’s distraction. Trump’s approval is tanking, Epstein Files headlines won’t go away, tariffs are backfiring, and his domestic policy of deploying troops to cities run by members of the opposition party is an unmitigated PR disaster. Cue a shiny new “tough on Big Pharma” memo to change the subject. And let’s be real: in 2025, advertising is largely opt-in. Beyond the vanishingly small number of Americans who still watch linear TV, who even notices these drug spots anymore? The memo solves nothing, but maybe it buys Trump a couple of news cycles.

This smells like a slashvertisement, but if you ignore that and get beyond the marketing fluff and Apple lock-in, there might be something to live language translation. There are big caveats: translation accuracy still stumbles on nuance and idiom, even tiny latency can break conversational flow, and $249+ hardware limits accessibility. And if your conversation partner isn’t on the same ecosystem, the magic trick collapses.

But despite all that, I think this feature matters. If email was the killer app that launched the information revolution — breaking barriers of time and distance — then live translation has the potential to be the killer app of the AI revolution, breaking the language barrier. The shift isn’t in raw capability (Google Translate and DeepL already exist), it’s in immediacy and intimacy: earbuds that let two people talk naturally, eye-to-eye, without the pause-type-wait cycle. If that becomes smooth, cheap, and universal, it changes travel, business, education, healthcare, and emergency response alike. And yes — obligatory Trek/Hitchhiker's Guide reference — it’s as close to a real Universal Translator or Babelfish as I’ve ever seen. :)

It still would need guardrails, though. Accuracy vs. context is still an unsolved problem with AI in general and LLMs in particular. Machine translation is much better than it used to be, but idioms, humor, and cultural nuance still trip it up. A mistranslation in casual chat is harmless; in a courtroom or ER, it’s dangerous.

History suggests it won’t land all at once. Every killer app goes through a phase of overhype, then disappointment, then quiet ubiquity. Think videoconferencing (promised in the ’60s, normalized in the US only after Trump's ludicrous mishandling of COVID-19.) Live translation may follow that curve: first as a glossy Apple demo, then gradually becoming ordinary infrastructure. It depends on whether Apple (and others) can make it cheap, accurate, low-latency, and universal enough to actually dissolve the walls between languages, and not just demo well on stage.

More trollish BS. You make sweeping claims, provide zero technical detail, and push as much FUD as you can.

Signal is implementing secure backups in a way (zero knowledge) that mitigates known attack vectors: no key escrow, no server-side metadata leakage, no linkability to payments, ciphertext padding to resist analysis, and backups that honor disappearing messages. The tradeoffs are intentional: you must safeguard your recovery key, and “secure backups” don’t protect against device-level compromise. But that’s the right line to draw — if they softened it, it would break their privacy model.

I can think of something stupider: dismissing a zero-knowledge system without understanding how it works. Signal isn’t “handing over data.” Backups are encrypted on the device with a locally generated recovery key that never leaves the user’s hands. What’s stored is opaque ciphertext, unlinkable to accounts or payments. No one — not Signal, not the host provider — has the means to read it. This is zero knowledge. If a third party wants your data, like law enforcement, or the IRS, they are going to have to come through *you* to get it. This is a win, period.

That is *not* the "entire point" of Signal. You are so far off-base, it is not even funny. The "point" of Signal is private, secure communication under user control. Let me repeat that for you: user control. Backups are opt-in. If you want ephemerality, don’t enable them. But if you want resilience after device loss, you can — without compromising the core privacy model. Equating “optional backup” with “betrayal of purpose” is just your lame strawman.

Do you even know what zero knowledge means? Signal doesn’t know which account it belongs to. They don’t know what conversations or media are inside. They don’t know the key material that would ever let them peek.The recovery key never leaves the device. Without it, the encrypted blob is cryptographic noise. Zero-knowledge design means there’s nothing to “hand over.” Again, let me repeat: If some third party wants access to your data, they are going to have to come through you to get it.

This statement is fundamentally incorrect. This is textbook false equivalence: user-controlled keys are the entire point of end-to-end encryption, not a contradiction of it. Saying “if you hold the key, what’s the point?” is like saying “if you own the front-door key, what’s the point of a lock?”

That ignores the difference between DIY crypto and an audited, interoperable system built into Signal. Rolling your own scheme is a recipe for data loss and insecure mistakes. Signal’s approach provides verifiable open-source code, zero-knowledge server architecture, and seamless daily rotation -- no CS degree required.

Now we get to you the heart of your FUD: implying that Signal backups are less safe than “tons of other services.” In reality, most consumer backup services either escrow keys or scan content. Signal’s design deliberately severs the link between ciphertext and identity, adds ciphertext padding, and offers no escrow, for a couple of bucks a month. That is a winning combination.

If you want to worry about chirality, worry about the way headlines get twisted out of shape — because the real inversion here isn’t left-handed vs. right-handed molecules, it’s sober science flipped into clickbait doom. USA Today splashes that mirror life could wipe out humanity, but the technical report says we can’t even make a living cell yet, mirror or otherwise, and early attempts would likely be fragile and lab-bound. They warn that a mirror bacterium could replicate unchecked in humans, and the report agrees immune evasion is plausible — but it also points out that such cells might not even be able to metabolize our “wrong-handed” food in the first place. The article imagines an unstoppable invasive species with no predators, while the report notes that although natural controls wouldn’t touch them, they’d also be starving in a world built on the opposite chirality. Even the rhetoric about “a threat beyond anything that has ever existed” is sharpened for drama; the report’s actual phrasing is more cautious, calling mirror life unprecedented — which justifies precaution, not inevitability. And that breathless decade-long countdown to synthetic doomsday? The report is vaguer and far more sober: building a mirror bacterium would take decades of effort, major breakthroughs, and massive resources before we’d even need to start worrying about a left-handed biological Skynet wiping us out. In the end, the report’s bottom line is simple: risks are unquantifiable, harms could be irreversible, and the safest path is to not pursue mirror bacteria at all. USA Today just wrapped that in apocalypse packaging to grab clicks.

No, we are not "already doing this." Period, end of statement. Calling one candy-aisle molecule “already doing this” is a category error, not information. A sugar molecule in an Erlenmeyer flask doesn’t self-replicate, metabolize, or evolve. We are light-years from building a whole cell out of left-handed DNA, RNA, and proteins. Did you even read the report, or are you just indulging in some TL;DR drive-by slashdot snark? To put not too fine a point on your mistaken assertion -- the very reason L-glucose passes through us untouched is the same reason a mirror bacterium would likely starve in a right-handed biosphere. Leave the biology to the scientists, and the click-bait distortions to the mainstream press, okay?

If you had serious objections to my "assumptions" you would have called them out instead of handwaving them away with a kiddy-grade ad hom. Just to be clear: Different energy carrier, same physics. RO’s specific energy is ~3–5 kWh per m^3 because you must push 55–80 bar against seawater’s osmotic pressure—that’s true whether a steam turbine turns the pump or a high-efficiency motor does. Direct steam drive only dodges a few percent in generator/motor losses; it doesn’t erase the 3–5 kWh/m^3 for modern SWRO. Thermal routes (MSF/MED) do use reactor steam—but they need tens of kWh from the thermal side per m^3 plus a couple kWh from the electrical side, which is why RO displaced them. And in cogeneration, “using steam” reduces electric output by back-pressure/extraction—an opportunity cost you seem to be ignoring. Better get your own assumptions in order before you attack mine. The carrier can change the bill rate; it doesn’t change the billable physics.

That is an epic misunderstanding of basic ecology when it comes to our species. Malthus is spinning in his grave right now. That’s not how it works for humans. Yes, nature enforces carrying capacity for animal populations. But *humans* build Hoover Dam, the Central Arizona Project, and whole desal plants so that “demand” doesn’t crash back to “supply.” Arizona has supported millions of people for decades with imported Colorado River water, far beyond local rainfall. Saudi Arabia uses fossil aquifers and desal to keep its cities alive. Cape Town nearly hit “Day Zero” in 2018 — demand didn’t magically fall, the government rationed and engineered their way out.

Humans bust carrying capacity all the time, but since we are clever little apes, we fix it, work around it, or build against it for the future. The UN’s point isn’t that demand magically drops — it’s that we need to be clever and do something now, *before* it becomes a crisis.

Let’s run the numbers. Nuclear doesn’t change the thermodynamics of desal, it just changes what you pay per kWh.

SWRO membranes need ~3–5 kWh/m for seawater. That’s baked in by osmotic pressure; no reactor makes that disappear. Pretreatment/post-treatment adds ~0.5–1 kWh/m. Call it 4–6 kWh/m^3 all-in. A large modern reactor (EPR, AP1000) delivers ~1 GW electric at a levelized cost of ~$60–100/MWh. That’s 6–10 cents per kWh. At 5 kWh/m^3, one cubic meter of desalinated water needs ~30–50 cents just for electricity. Add CAPEX for membranes, pumps, pretreatment, brine handling, and distribution, we're closer to $1–2 per m^3

Now, let's look at offshore aquifer pumping. I did some back-of-the-envelop noodling elsewhere in this thread, you can check it out if you want to see my thought process, but I came up with: Lift + friction + light treatment: ~2.7–3.5 kWh/m^3. At the same nuclear electricity price, that’s ~16–35 cents/m^3 in energy costs.

Even with offshore pipe CAPEX, we're not obviously worse than nuclear + RO. Yes, you can hang thermal desal (MSF/MED) on the side of a reactor to use low-grade steam, but those processes guzzle 10–15 kWh/m equivalent. They’re economical only if the heat is truly “free.” Otherwise, RO still beats them.

So, in a bucket -- saying just build nukes and desalinate is like saying just burn rocket fuel to drive to the grocery store. You can, but the physics still hands you a 4–6 kWh/m^3 bill. Nuclear helps with carbon, which is truly nice, but it doesn’t erase the water-energy math. Offshore aquifers are in the same league energetically and potentially cheaper if you solve the off-shore infrastructure issues, which admittedly are non-trivial, but not impossible.

Sure thing. Here’s the back-of-the-envelope version, as augmented by my dog-eared copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics from my high school AP physics class back during the Carter administration. :) The math actually puts it in the same ballpark as desal; the tradeoff is offshore economics, not physics.

Lift energy for 1 cubic meter of H2O for 1 m is .0027 kWh with perfect efficiency; scale by head and divide by pump efficiency, and then factor in pipe friction for a 50 km haul and we get roughly 2.3 kWh per cubic meter. This is an upper bound; it assumes we are pulling against the weight of the seawater column above the sediment containing the aquifer. The article was light on specific location details, so I'm assuming standard bathymetry 50 km off-shore of Cape Cod, which means the sea floor was anywhere from 100m to 200m, making the total head about 600m. A better case is with a submersible pump; the net static lift you pay is basically the vertical distance from the pump intake to your onshore discharge point (plus friction), minus any artesian pressure head in the aquifer.

So what about current desal processes? Modern seawater reverse osmosis plants is around 3.5 to 5 kWh. And what about nukes? Process energy is the same. Whether you power RO with a fossil grid, renewables, or a reactor, the membranes still need ~3–5 kWh/m. Nuclear doesn’t magically reduce the thermodynamics of pushing water through membranes or boiling it off in MSF plants. Cogeneration helps economics, not physics. Nuclear plants often run with excess low-grade heat, so you can couple distillation/desal units to the turbine exhaust. That can make sense for thermal desalination (MSF/MED), but it’s more about plant utilization than energy breakthroughs.

In a bucket then, the math says it is absolutely doable from the basic physics; and it could be economically viable, if we can make the off-shore infrastructure trade-offs work. Your skepticism is...misplaced.