Harvard not being the benchmark is a fair criticism, so let's pick an average public university in a blue state for comparison, say University of Maryland.

According to their 2024 operating budget, they plan to spend $755 million to put professors in the classroom, compared to $772 million to pay professors for other things ($636 million for researchers, $134 million for public service).

Their strategic plan's mission, vision, and values call for them to prioritize things like:
--Promoting multidisciplinary collaboration and experiential learning (I count this toward education)
--Engaged and impactful research and curricular innovations (Count say half of this)
--Addressing "grand challenges" across local and global scales. (I don't count this)
--Supporting civic engagement and lasting partnerships between students and the broader campus community (hmm? maybe 10%)
--Developing strategic research partnerships (no)
--Strengthening social justice through relationship building and community partnerships (no)


In other words, only a handful of the things their own strategic planning prioritizes are related to educating students. The rest are research or political goals.

I think budget reports from universities differ from you are saying, including universities in blue states like Harvard and MIT.

Universities never charge just what is required to cover the cost of providing the education. This is because they are only partly educational institutions, they are also organizations that conduct research, philanthropy, political lobbying, and public outreach. MIT conducts billions of dollars of research each year. According to their 2023 financials, about $1.9 billion of that research was sponsored, while the combined cost of providing education and conducting unsponsored research was less than $1.5 billion (unsponsored meaning it wasn't funded, it came from sources like student tuition). They maintained more than $30 billion in investments and more than $5 billion in real estate and facilities. On top of that they spent another $1.1 billion on administration and overhead. They didn't break out education expenses from unsponsored research, but the numbers mean providing education had to have been far less than a third of their costs.

Among other expenditures, Harvard is funding a huge sustainability initiative, building new programs on climate change and sustainability, buying electric buses and infrastructure, etc.

What we really need to do to cut costs is refocus universities on the job of education.

The servers seem to be doing that just by operating. The real question would be how to transfer the heat efficiently from the circuits to the water when you're starting with salt water, without shorting or corroding the circuits.

I'm no fan of crypto mining (or blockchain in general), but your argument sounds like it should apply equally to justify emergency reviews of any attempt to shut down older/fossil fuel power plants in the interests of protecting the climate. The exact same logic applies: it might kill people when the grid destabilizes in extreme weather. So if that's the standard for emergency action on power stability, let's make it the standard and apply it in both cases.

My first thought was "what the heck does this have to do with Alphaville? I thought they were a band from back when I was a teenager."

I think it means India's satellite should either be named the Cygnus or the Palamino but I can't figure out which.

What I would like to see is a BEV backed by a propane fuel cell for superior range. The technology already exists and seems practical. Something like:

https://wattfuelcell.com/porta...

General requirements, I tend to buy mid-sized SUV equivalent capable of comfortably carrying passengers, luggage, and a load of astronomy gear cross country, driving ~800-1000 miles/day by switching drivers back and forth. Then go off road (hence the SUV suspension and 4WD), unload equipment into a remote dark site, and not worry about finding adequate power or charging supplies along the way.

At the moment there's no BEV that really qualifies, I have a plug-in hybrid but that's as far as I'm willing to go until there are some fuel-cell backed options.

The endangered species list also would be more of a reliable metric over time if there was a standard for evaluating whether a newly identified species has a viable population to begin with before it could then become listed as endangered if its population falls. In the last few decades there seems to have been a drive toward finding the one rare insect or frog nobody knew existed and listing it as endangered. It risks masking the trend line we need to be concerned about with noisy data.

To put it another way, I'm not sure that attempting to artificially ensure that every emerging species reaches a sustainable viable population is as valid an ecological goal as preserving species that once were viable and have become endangered due to human activity. A cleaner trend line focused on the latter cases would probably be more convincing to people.

Good grief they had limited imaginations. Almost none of their questions had any practical use, and all of them assumed humankind is powerless to do anything but simply adapt to the environment.

A more useful list of questions might include things like:
How can we redirect or limit the eruptive power of supervolcanos to mitigate their destructive impact?
How can we generate, store, and distribute hundreds of Terawatts of energy quickly, cheaply, and cleanly at a cost of less than $0.01 per kilowatt hour?
How can we quickly and cheaply desalinize and distribute large volumes of seawater to meet freshwater needs without too much negative impact?
How can we achieve practical faster than light communications and transportation?
How can we create medicines that will cure cancer and other major diseases?

Should have just been M102, which can’t be unambiguously identified.

(1) DST changes are not trivial for air traffic control. Making sure airports, aircraft, timing and positioning systems, etc. are all synched to a common time standard and switch correctly even if required in-flight is a significant safety issue.

(2) This is simply wrong, there's a great deal of research pointing to the health/sleep problems that changing the clock back and forth causes, not to mention good documentation of the increased occurrences of things like automobile accidents after the changes.

(3) This is more of an issue, but it doesn't change (1) and (2). Instead of permanent DST perhaps we should try permanent standard time.

(4) Tilt change is happening already, no need to legislate: https://www.space.com/earth-ti...

Remember that Elon already launched a Tesla into space on a rocket. The same process would work for a cybertruck.

Nor would it subsidize either public transit or renewables, so I think that proposition loses on balance.

It's more of a sign that we need to start planning for a future where we're looking to an energy system and power grid that can provide terawatts and petawatts cheaply and efficiently rather than megawatts and gigawatts. Minor improvements in energy conservation are nice and all, but they'll never overcome the upward trend of energy usage we really need to consider and prepare for. Real jumps in advancement that can ultimately address humanity's longest term problems (asteroid defense, mitigating supervolcanos, planetary colonization, etc.) will come only with energy intensive tech like AI and supercolliders.

The best way to describe Elon Musk is that he's like Howard Hughes reincarnate, there are some really crazy parallels between the two:

Wealthy industrialist with a focus split between advanced tech, aerospace (aircraft for Hughes, Space-X for Musk), and media (film for Hughes, social media for Musk). Flamboyant personality, history of dating lots of famous women, some questionable decisionmaking both in business and personal lives, some potential stability or maybe even mental health issues (at least pretty well documented for Hughes). The real world Buckaroo Banzai/Tony Stark archetype, but a little less stable.