Most of the trip to the Moon is uphill, so not falling, rather a ballistic trajectory. Think of throwing a rock 10 metres up. Spends a second going up, stops, and falls down for a second. We don't call that first second falling. Coasting is maybe the best word.

Well no more than usual. The problem is that he couldn't even stick to a simple message. About half the speech was about how the war is ending and they're bringing peace and the other half the speech was about killing every single person in Iran.

I found out that the reason Joe Biden looked so rough is because he stutters and when you saw him doing those long pauses that was him having to pause to get his stutter under control before he spoke. In his old age it came back after he had gotten it under control for a long time.

So all that crap about sleepy Joe was literally just a man with a mild speech impediment struggling with it. Of course none of that was reported by the news media...

Meanwhile Trump was talking about a bill he wanted to pass and mid sentence started to talk about a imaginary person named Bill. This is a real thing that happened. Never mind the bizarre post he just made about Jasmine Crockett being related to Davy Crockett.

Well, are you? Come on who's tired of winning?

Trump lowered military recruitment standards which is the first step towards a draft.

So this was always about AI slop. The problem these companies are facing is that AI slop is infesting the internet. It's starting to infect their data sets. It's becoming difficult to tell programmatically who's a real person and who is a slop bot.

This is an existential threat for both the AI companies who need real humans to train from and the social media companies who need clean data sets to sell to law enforcement and advertisers and corporations and governments.

If that data isn't clean none of these people have a product because you're the product and if you're mixed in 80/20 with highly sophisticated bots that date is going to become real worthless real fast.

So this not only improves their ability to track you but it lets them know you're a real person who's data can go into the set.

They had lots of other markets they could move into.

SpaceX doesn't have any other markets to move into. Musk is trying to push AI but he's getting his ass kicked and he's already lost all his good engineers.

You're basically comparing a company that got in on the ground floor and was able to use massive amounts of anti-competitive tactics to buy up their competitors and expand rapidly to a company that has maxed out its markets and doesn't have anything new to spread into except one sector where they have already lost.

It's a scam. It exists to loot 401ks.

TL;DW; this is a scam. Stock is artificially low supply to boost value and space x doesn't have enough launch customers to justify the valuation. There's not enough potential satellite Internet customers to make up the difference.

They will dump this into your 401k and deregulation lets them do it.

From being the same. If you don't believe that it's because you're not paying the least bit of attention. And about 40% of the country is perfectly okay with that. Ordinarily that wouldn't be enough but with a lot of propaganda and a bit of voter suppression it's easy to pull off. Which is exactly how Russia turned away from democracy and fell into autocracy. Germany did the same thing back in the mid 1930s. I think the only reason they didn't do it again is because they had a lot of money coming in to stop it from happening.

The basic problem is that in any given society about 1/3 of the population wants fascism. They want a big strong man to run things and they aren't very bright so they pick a very stupid man.

Then you have another seven or 10% that are just fucking stupid. Like balls to the walls stupid.

From there all you need is winner take all politics, a bunch of extra propaganda, a bit of voter suppression and a collapsing economy and you can and will vote your way into fascism.

We have the collapsing economy. Hiring is at the level of the covid crash right now.

And we have the idiots and the fascists.

The only real question is will the left and the centrists somehow learn and do something about the voter suppression because they sure as shit can't stop the propaganda at this point.

And what's really scary is we have nuclear weapons now. I'm not entirely sure they can actually hit their targets but I'm pretty confident they can make it out of the silos and that's all they need to do to render the planet uninhabitable. These aren't your great granddaddy's nukes these are much much more powerful. Plus we're already working on building more because of course we are.

Unless you are a really really bright kid you use the technology you're given because otherwise when you need help doing something specific the teacher hasn't got a clue how to help you usually.

This is why we all used the TI-82 instead of the cheaper casio. The TI calculator was something like a hundred bucks while the Casio had three times as many features and cost $50. But if you had a problem with the Casio you had to figure it out on your own where is the teacher would tell you exactly what you needed to do on the ti. Sometimes you even had to write a little of your own code.

Basically you have to use what the teachers get handed to them by the school board or you have to kind of already know all the material in the class. I did know one or two math obsessed kids who have the casios but they were really just coasting through the classes because they were mandatory because they already knew everything in it.

I don't think distractions are the problem per se. It's more that having a physical object that you can rapidly swap through pages on combined with the ability to take handwritten notes and the effort of it makes information stick a lot more. It's a quirk of human cognition.

Screens are still infinitely better as reference material because of the ability to do rapid searches. They aren't as good when you are trying to learn. Human beings need a lot of physical motion in order to create the mental pathways that go with learning.

Honestly we've known this for a long time. It's why educational software isn't as big as it was back when most of the people reading this were kids. As much fun as Odell lake and Oregon trail can be they Don't really teach you anything except maybe how to work a computer. Which to be fair is a skill.

Just make sure you are one major release behind Microsoft at all times.

Windows 95? Garbage. 98 especially SE? Just fine. Windows millennium was hot trash and XP especially service pack 2 just fine. Vista garbage, 7 just fine. 8 was a dumpster fire. 10 was okay. And now 11 is right back where we started.

Although honestly I don't know if we will ever get a working Windows 12. Microsoft has very very little competition anymore. Basically just Apple and there's a laundry list of reasons why that's a problem in the Enterprise. And gaming on a Mac is worse than gaming on Linux. Spending $2,000 to play cyberpunk at 45 FPS isn't my cup of tea... Even if the frame pacing is good

I've said it before I will say it again if we ever do get a viable alternative to Windows it will be only in Europe and only because North America has gone completely fascist and Europe can't use Microsoft software anymore.

That's about the only upshot to the collapse of America I can think of. The downside is it will probably end in global thermonuclear war.

This almost exactly matches the observed behavior from [my comment](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23954882&cid=66072694)... which is an anecdote already dating back to 2009.

I worked as a programmer at a medical billing company back in 2009, and let me tell you it was eye opening. We had radiologists working remotely (in 2009!) with mutliscreen setups that would show an original image on the left of one screen, a computer-enhanced version on the other side of the screen, with a computer generated opinion pre-generated at the bottom of the image (again: 2009 already had this). The other screen, usually rotated 90 degrees, would show minimal required relevant patient history/demographic on the top and offer a place to enter the radiologists opinion below, along with a button to copy over the computer-generated opinion.

Let's game out their options.

Let's say the agree with the computer, and they're right. No extra reward, they're just doing their job.
Let's say they agree with the computer, and they're wrong. Well, that must have been a hard case. Oh well.
Let's say they disagree with the computer, and they're right. Again, just doing their job./
But now if they disagree with the computer, and they're wrong, that is a world of malpractice lawsuit about to drop on their heads.

That is, every incentive this person has is to just always agree with the computer. There is no great bonus for doing better, and potentially huge consequences when they disagree. (And, by the way, this is now the training data for more recent AI options).

And it's this context we had at least one doctor billing $300,000.

Per month.

So, in this case at least, yes please bring on the AI. Because it's already doing it, and I'm sure the AI won't have to cost as much.

The problem with that is the judges have been too scared to find anyone in criminal contempt and order them locked up. Trump controls the doj and with it the Marshalls that would round those people up and the judges are worried that the marshals won't do the arrests and they'll have a constitutional crisis on their hands. So they're trying to hold out until the midterm elections.

All we can do is hope American voters come to their senses and that the Democrats and the left do something about the rampant voter suppression at the county level...

The problem is we need to hang on until the midterm elections and Trump is so insane and senile I don't know if we can anymore.

Trump's stupid illegal war is on track to start causing food shortages. This is Putin getting out ahead of that. No matter how much you oppress people if they're starving to death they will act against you. You can cut them down with machine guns but you run the risk of the rest of the world using that as an excuse to turn against you. At a certain point no matter how much dirt Putin has on Trump he won't be able to keep letting him bypass sanctions then.