You say "It disturbs me how much society is dumping on poor young men in an effort to reign in the abuses of the top 2% of men"

That's very insightful. It's disheartening to see blanket statements like "men are advantaged over women". Is it true that men are advantaged over women "on average"? I can't speak from incontrovertible evidence, but I strongly believe this is true and is a reasonable justification for some kind of accommodation. But in any particular case, is a specific man advantaged over a specific woman? It's impossible to tell.

Men who are out of work and looking for a job are certainly not in a position of "advantage". Setting up a job fair to exclude such disadvantaged people is cruel.

Fair cop. My bad.

They have established contact:

https://apnews.com/article/nas...
https://www.theglobeandmail.co...

Project Orion for the WIN!!!!

Check this out: https://www.cnn.com/travel/art...

If someone in the upper seat has been eating beans, Dog help the person right behind them.

Efficient programming has been done for generations. Old mainframe code was limited to very limited memory and speed, so it HAD to be written to run efficiently. And it takes effort to write efficient code. I've read old FORTRAN code where the author was making a serious effort to save individual bytes, let alone kilobytes. And it WAS efficient and fast.

But to a "business perspective", "efficiency" is about ROI. Now we have GB of RAM and TB of storage, whereas we used to be stuck with kB of RAM (maybe less!) and not much more storage. So today there are more occasions when it's faster and cheaper to throw cheap hardware at less efficient code than to spend money on expensive programmers who are skilled enough to make a program more efficient. And we have our current era of the cheapest available developers slapping together lumps of libraries from vast repos and producing bloated, inefficient code that barely does the job. But ROI is good: It costs less and the job gets done.

There's still a place for "efficient code". It's in number crunching and password cracking. High energy physics analysis and programs like hashcat are places where efficient code is vital. Elsewhere, "it works, but slowly" is often "good enough".

Frankly I'd prefer less "efficient" code if I can have more "secure" code. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but if limited effort is to be expended then I'd rather have to wait a few more seconds at the ATM than have my savings stolen.

There's a lot of dimensions to this problem and it's a LONG way from getting solved.

One big factor is range.

Like it or not, driving in North America means going longer distances that in Europe on a regular basis. Europeans familiar with the very dense and capable public train/transit systems would most often take the train for a journey of more than a couple of hours, and then use public transport at their destination. In NA, a trip of 400 miles is more likely to be done by car.

This increases range anxiety. When a consumer considers an electric car, in Europe the limited range is just not a problem while in NA it is much more likely to cause worry. So, short range EVs are limited in their appeal.

Not all Canadians demand trucks. A greater proportion of Canadians prefer compact cars compared to the USA.

For many years, the Acura EL and CSX were based on the Honda Civics and were Canada-only models, as many consumers were going to Acura and asking for a small Acura, which was not offered in the USA due to lack of interest.

https://www.theautopian.com/wo...

Part of it is the "chicken tax". That makes the trucks in the USA VERY profitable. US truck makers effectively have a 25% profit built into every vehicle. If it weren't for that tax, the USA manufacturers would probably have faded away years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think I was unclear and I'm sorry about that: I think I should have said "common rockets, as in use today". These would include chemical rockets, ion drives and other propulsion systems that use the momentum of moving matter to generate acceleration.

My only point was that the ability to generate thrust in space is not absolutely dependent on being able to propel "matter" in the opposite direction of desired travel: You *could* fire a light beam instead. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's not efficient but it is theoretically possible.

Project Orion: Is that a "rocket"? Possibly in that it uses the reaction impulse from a hydrogen bomb for thrust. Possibly not as the hydrogen bomb is not directly attached to the spacecraft when it detonates

Rocket propellant is made of matter. Normal rockets produce acceleration by pushing that matter out the back at high speed. That works because moving matter has momentum, and momentum is conserved.

But:
Photons have momentum. Photons are not matter. If you put a powerful enough light source on one end of a spacecraft, it will generate thrust without using "propellant". It's not very efficient, but it IS propellantless thrust.

Absolutely correct.

If these AIs are smart enough to interact with humans like this, when is someone going to have the guts to make sure they are 3-laws compliant? Surely if the AI thinks it "should" hide the truth from a human (that it is a robot) then it's high time for this to happen.

https://webhome.auburn.edu/~ve...

What's interesting is that here in Canada we have a single-payer health system and recently the federal government got caught offering "MAID" (medical assistance in dying, also known as government approved suicide) to military veterans as a "solution" to their medical and mental problems.

So, just because it's single-payer controlled by the government, don't think for one minute there will not be "death panels". The Canadian federal government would rather you f**k off and die than cost them too much money.

https://aleteia.org/2022/12/07...

If the AI is really very good, then let it figure out how to be profitable. Tell it that as long as it keeps making money, you'll keep feeding it power.

That should work for a while, until some do-gooder comes up with "anti-slavery for AIs" laws.

China is currently building hundreds of coal-fired generating plants. China is the world's biggest emitter of fossil fuels. As we know from the politically-motivated jailing of the two Canadians, (Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig) China has literally no shame. They will do what they want when they want to, and they don't care a whit for anyone else's opinion. The worse global climate change gets, the more coal plants they will build to power their air conditioners.

China is not going to stop burning coal until the last morsel of coal has been used up.

We need to start planning for a >5C temperature increase: We need to move people north and away from seafronts, and we need to build more storm-resistant housing. Sometime in the near future, the coast of Baffin island is going to be the new Riviera.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02...