We may need to tinker with individual laws -- but the bigger picture is as in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

The results from whatever the laws will likely remain problematical as long as we have a political mythology built around scarcity while we also have super-powerful computers which could be used for universal surveillance or all sorts of other problematical -- or beneficial -- things.

We need collectively to change the spirit behind the culture towards one recognizing and emphasizing abundance in all we do and legislate.

Related from: https://egreenway.com/taoism/t...
"When the Tao is forgotten, there is righteousness.
When righteousness is forgotten, there is morality.
When morality is forgotten, there is the law.
The law is the husk of faith,
and trust is the beginning of chaos."

So, we need to emphasize the "tao" (way, spirit) of abundance -- as otherwise instead of using technology to create egalitarian abundance for all, we may just digitize an inegalitarian status quo or worse.

I'd think so given it appears to have a monochrome low resolution LCD screen and controls that while I'm sure are functional, are far from "gaming grade".

The most interesting part will be what radios it has. The CC1101 in the original Flipper Zero is a great chip. I started using it long ago for work and soon realized it is extremely flexible.

Even there though, I think all the commercial RISC-V SoC suppliers use binary blobs and undocumented peripherals.

Unless they have competition, they will go for wireless "broadband" instead of upgrading to fibre. It's shitty but it's cheap, and they don't care if the service is any good when you have no other choice.

Ironically it was exercise that screwed up some of my joints, due to undiagnosed health issues. It's hard to know what is best to do.

Stressing about it is probably worse than the damage a lot of this stuff is doing. Plus I need coffee, life isn't worth living without it. I'm not joking.

It's true that if it works as intended, Starship would be a fantastic tool. But aside from having doubts about that, it doesn't preclude others from getting them on a similar timescale, just a different way.

Blue Origin demonstrates that. Panned for being "behind" SpaceX, but when they fly stuff it tends to work and suddenly they caught up. The Chinese are the same, and they aren't the only other people working in this area. That said, the rate at which some of the private Chinese outfits have been advancing is really impressive. Okay, they had second mover advantage, but they had that with EVs and batteries and renewables too, and are now way ahead...

I was thinking the same thing. Or maybe near the pole, to look for water. They already have comms satellites in place to communicate with the far side.

I'd say they are likely to try something that is clearly different to what Apollo did, and what Artemis is doing.

Aiming for too big to fail, because his AI stuff is failing and he needs to be sure that you will be forced to bail him out when it does.

If they think it's worth it, on the balance, yeah. I'm not telling people where to put their money; or how to weigh the risk of Musk skimming the till on the actually-profitable rocketry in order to cover losses building mechahitler or trying to make orbital datacenters work.

I was mostly responding to the "I ask because I'd imagine the first thing the collective shareholders will ask for is that the crappy bits of Musk Inc. get divested as quickly as possible." part of the above poster's post. This is 100% an IPO where, to the degree legally possible and potentially beyond, and more so than even typical tech IPO voting structures, anyone who thinks that they are getting even a whisper of oversight, even at institutional investor scale, is kidding themselves.

It's up to you whether or not you think that a security representing whatever basket of endeavors Musk feels like conducting will be worth it; or if the risk that he'll bleed the winners to prop up his more dubious bets is too high; my note is purely that this IPO is genuinely rather novel in the degree to which it's designed to put the current CEO in effectively total control. Even compared to something like the mostly-unremovable Zuckerberg voting/nonvoting shares arrangement this has additional curbs on shareholder resolutions and litigation options.

Anyone who is hoping to avoid Musk's dumber ideas should probably just stay the hell away. Even by the standards of the classic "oh, there's actual-votes stock and peon stock; guess which kind we sold during the IPO" stuff; spacex is pushing things. The boy-king of mars holds 85% of the voting power; shareholders are required to waive the right to jury trial or class action and submit to arbitration only, only class B shareholders(mostly Musk) can remove the chairman of the board, CEO, or CTO; and similar enthusiastic use of Texas' provisions for 'controlled companies' that really don't want to take any pesky outside input.

Putting your money on that is pretty much entirely just making a bet on whether you think the dictator for life will make line go up or not; not even pretending to be analogous to an ownership stake.

If it weren't a technical issue; would it actually be a moral issue?

I suspect that there are lots of ways, including some surprises, of getting the problem wrong to some degree and introducing nasty developmental issues; so I could see an IRB having very plausible objections to the "eh, we'll keep pumping out flipper babies until we trial and error our way to what an embryo requires to develop a brain stem properly!" R but, if for sake of argument, you had a system that actually worked wouldn't that basically just be surrogacy without the seedy undercurrent of economic conscription?

Unfortunately, Musk and friends took that into account. They demanded, and received rule changes to get rammed into indexes as fast as possible. They'll certainly be happy to take direct purchases from any of the weirdos paying for blue checks on twitter; but the strategy is clearly intended to not require the bagholders to bite directly; instead hitting anyone with index exposure as rapidly and automatically as possible.

The Chinese government is doing basically what the US government did back in the 1960s. Set a goal, make it happen, fund it properly. Gives private companies the confidence to invest in space, even if they aren't directly involved with government projects.

Except they also do it for stuff like electric vehicles and battery technology, renewable energy, railways, semiconductor manufacturing, steel production, and anything else they feel is strategically important to their economy.

Their goal is "before 2030", so 2029 at the latest, and they are on track for that. They either have or are at the prototype stage with everything they need. Their mission is not over ambitious either, it's a medium size lander and proven technologies. Blue Origin is also going with a reasonably conservative lander, but Starship is a much greater risk.

That's an interesting idea. What do they gain from doing a flight around the moon? They get to test the spacecraft in that mission profile, but they have already landed things on the moon so stuff like the comms and navigation is already sorted out. They have a space station so have experience with long duration missions, and the moon is only medium duration.

Artemis didn't test separation and docking in lunar orbit, but Apollo 10 did. The Chinese can already do the docking reliably for their space station.

These days it would make sense to do a fully automated landing and return to lunar orbit first. Apollo 11 was the first landing of the LM because they couldn't do it automated at the time. But if you are in a hurry to get there, going for a crewed landing is certainly an option now.

In any case, they need to fly some more hardware first, even if only in Earth orbit.

There's also been some developments in AI that means that the demand may level off a bit. Google said yesterday that they can now train AI with servers distributed over the globe. If one region has cheap renewable electricity right now, they can move more of it there. So the need to build more capacity and more storage is reduced as well.

There are some similar developments coming from Chinese companies too, particularly around making AI more efficient.

Hopefully by the end of the year we will be seeing reduced prices, and maybe a flood of used storage from failed AI startups.