Unfortunately, they still have to launch from Earth which is seething with them.
Wasn't that why Juno didn't use RTG? (that and the shortage of Pu238)

One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Turns out their guitar cases had laptops in them too, and they can code twice as good as you!

>And then of course, there's the whole matter of your car often being
>on the road or parked somewhere else when other people in the
>house might need it to be parked in your garage.

But this is about California, where the obvious solution is to raise revenue by requiring advance purchase of a permit to remove the car from your garage!

>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.

That would generally be "space opera".

There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.

Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.

Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .

hawk

ANY dairy product made for sale to the public requires licensing, and yearly inspection of the production facilities for safety compliance. Which makes sense, given the number of foodborne illnesses and poisoning concerns that can come from improper processing and sanitation when dairy is involved. This isn't "excessive licensing requirements" in any way, shape or form, no matter how much dishonest lying-ass conservatives try to misframe it.

The yearly license cost is absurdly low, too. Licensure if you're making yogurt and selling it to the public, year round, is a miniscule $106.

Milk products plant licenses and permits are issued by CDFA for various types of businesses that handle or manufacture milk and milk products. As required by Food and Agricultural Code (FAC) section 35011, a person shall not engage in the business of dealing in, receiving, manufacturing, freezing, or processing milk, or any product of milk unless a license or permit has been obtained from CDFA for each separate milk products plant or place of business. All milk products plants must be inspected and approved by CDFA prior to a license or permit being issued.

A milk products plant license is required for the processing and packaging of products including but not limited to fluid milk, yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, butter and dried milk. Such plants must score a minimum of 80 percent on the official scorecard for milk products plants (FAC 33701) and comply with the requirements for new construction, repairs and sanitation of milk products plants (FAC 33731 - 33782). A separate room dedicated to the manufacturing and packaging of milk products is required, as well as other rooms dedicated to specific operational activities at the facility. The facility may manufacture any quantity of product packaged for sale on or off the premises.

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/ahfss/Milk_and_Dairy_Food_Safety/Milk_Product_Licenses.html

note that the pendulum has swung back.

Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.

While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.

hawk, esq.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

Ofc I don't mean LITERALLY nobody. There are niches of readers here and there.

But my kids are all in their 20s and 30s, and they have many friends who say things like "you know, I haven't read a single actual book since college".

To me it's incomprehensible, and I sort of take it as evidence of the collapse but...is it really all that different than say, the 1950s? 1930s? Sure, intellectuals of all eras read but I don't believe the % of intellectuals by nature has particularly swung one way or another since then.

I'm curious what they're going to use up power dragonfly?

  Sure the atmo density should make flying easier* but that distance and air density combine to make solar basically impossible.

*I'm not sure that's as "given" as they make it sound. Low air pressure on Mars meant that even hurricane-speed winds aren't that forceful. At 1.5bar, I'd assume the force of even a gentle breeze will be significant.

Ingenuity leveraged daily solar charging to avoid having to lug hefty batteries around; certainly that won't be an option for dragonfly.

I've heard there are more slaves now than at any time in history. Of course that might not be true if normalized to a percentage of the work force; but the mere fact that it even still exists is of course awful. We've sanitized slavery by re-naming it as "convict labor" or in this case pushing it overseas and wrapping it in layers to disclaim responsibility.