Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

Is NASA doing anything useful?

Aren't they just trying to repeat what SpaceX has already done?

I vote to call them the Sardaukar.

The natural cascades of man-made global warming have only kicked into overdrive in recent years. Basic common sense tells us that the rate is only going to increase in the foreseeable future. Meaning that regular heat itself will be the main problem. And way earlier than 2050.

Point in case: It's nearing the end of September and temperature and humidity was flat-out tropical this weekend in western Germany. The water table here has been nothing but dropping for the last decade or so with zero replenishment happening and it ain't looking like that's gonna change. Rains have mostly reduced to short warm drizzles or the occasional 3-hour long flash-flood with a years worth of water coming down in an hour in selected counties. And flowing away within 24 hours. The first farmers in Germany are starting to move towards dryland agriculture (in effing Germany!), the complete vanishing of alpine glaciers is due in 5 years or so, perhaps even earlier and the famous German forrest with their Beeches, Oaks, Sykamores and such are officially a thing of the past because the water-cycle can't support them anymore.

Tourists have been steering clear of the mediterranean in recent years because the water was too warm. Not the air (although that too), the effing _water_ was too warm.

So I'd say in 2050 smoke from forrest-fires is likely to be one of our lesser problems.

Dish antennas can be used for both transmitting and receiving. The reciprocity theorem says they work equally well in either direction.

Nobody uses dye-sensitized solar cells. They were an interesting idea for a technology, but the improvements in silicon cell performance along with reductions in cost just made their mediocre performance obsolete.

Also, nobody uses plastic coatings for solar cells. Plastics simply deteriorate too fast. Everybody uses glass.

Grammar and punctuation are not your enemies.

That depends on how much I'm paid.

For enough money, I can tolerate almost anything.

The truth is an absolute defense against libel in America.

It is a weaker defense in the UK.

Another difference is that in America, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff to show the statement is false. In the UK, the BOP is on the defendant to show the statement is true.

The budget of the US Space Farce (spelling deliberate) exceeded NASA's only 3 years after it was created.

2024 Pentagon budget - $841 billion
All NASA budgets since foundation, combined - $640 billion

This is why we can't have nice things.

The Pentagon number doesn't include the (unconstitutional) Black Budget, the alphabet soup of intel agencies (some of which have space budgets larger than NASA), or the plethora of mercenaries hired by the State Department.

The arbitrator imposed the non-disparagement clause.

Sarah agreed to the arbitration process (she couldn't afford to do otherwise), but didn't specifically agree to the ND clause.

They erected a half dozen statues to him just last year, one just a couple of blocks from a mass grave of people his followers murdered. Zelinsky visited a cemetery of Ukrainian Waffen SS, a group which carried out multiple atrocities, as part of the WWII anniversary. They're not even subtle about it.