This is a small prototype, not a full-scale mirror.

Also, ignoring that, pretending light brighter than the full moon is useless is... silly? For generating power, sure, but for illumination, it absolutely is not.

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

In fact China has brought in a lot of fairly strict environmental policies in the last few decades, which often have quite dramatic effects on local industry. For example, no factories within half a kilometre of most rivers, and no discharging untreated waste into them.

Then there is the massive and frankly staggering rate at which they have adopted renewables. Hit their Paris targets 5 years early, and those were considered too ambitious to be realistic at the time.

"But China" was never a good argument, but these days it's laughable.

TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

All the EU has to do is hold its nerve until he relents.

Mamdani hasn't been in long but has already

- Froze rent for 2 million New Yorkers
- Cut subway fares in half for low-income riders
- Fully funded NYC parks
- Added $680M for public schools
- Launched free child care for 2-year-olds

All things that we were assured were impossible, would crash the economy, would bankrupt the state etc. Oh, and he balanced the budget.

Politicians absolutely can help the people they are supposed to work for. Socialism absolutely does work. It's just that it works for you, not billionaires, so they are very keen to convince that they you can't possible have it and it's all just a fantasy.

They drive themselves most of the time, and on the odd occasion when they are unsure or the passenger calls for assistance, a human can intervene. They don't drive the car directly, they just tell it if it can proceed, which route to take, that kind of thing.

It helps deal with the corner cases that are hard to engineer general solutions for.

The main difference between that and driver aid systems is that the car doesn't need immediate intervention to be safe. It will stop and call for help. Driver aids need the driver to be paying constant attention, which is why the Tesla ones result in so many injuries and fatalities.

It's mostly better. While the barge has to be a bit more complex because it has to have the lattice of ropes (it's not a net), it means that the booster doesn't have to have landing struts. That's a significant weight saving, which means less propellant needed too.

It likely also means that the system is less dependent on good weather, and better able to recover from small issues that would tip self supporting boosters over. IIRC the Blue Origin system actually welds itself to the deck when it lands to help with that, which obviously makes the legs disposable.

The only real downside is that it does require that barge to land, so to land on the moon you would need to first land a landing station. That won't be an issue for the first manned trips, and longer term it may have advantages because the vehicle's engine can be shut off at higher altitude and kick up less regolith.

Exciting times and another technique added to the list of options. We will see which becomes the preferred one, but competition in this area is going to be good for getting costs down.

Is that better or worse? I was under the impression that most people find the catching of a rocket booster like SpaceX does with those little arms to be more awesome than just landing the booster.

I also thought that outside of having to land on Mars it is the preferred approach because it is more efficient.

Finally: Caught it in a net conjures up the wrong image. If you look at the video the 'net' is much more like the mechazilla arms and not some fishing net they plop the booster into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

It has created massive personal inflation for some people.

Can we add "surprise and delight" to that list of firing reasons?

The EU decided that to protect local middlemen they would introduce a 3 Euro charge per item type on packages being imported. It seems to have been targeted at sites like AliExpress and Temu. I'm sure they will sooner or later set up local distribution warehouses inside the EU - in fact they already have some, so that popular items and heavily discounted ones can be delivered more quickly and cheaply. I suppose that creates some jobs, but it must be very annoying for people buying less popular stuff who are forced to pay the 3 Euro or buy from a middleman.

Games are around $70 today, which adjusted for inflation is about $32 in 1996. If you look at ads from back then, games were typically $50 on the original Playstation.

What's happened is many of the basics of life have been squeezed. Housing, education, utilities. Meanwhile wages have stagnated, in real terms.

It's more about getting health data into a common format so that it's not stuck in lots of individual providers. Your dentist, your health tracker, the place that did your x-ray, your smart bathroom scales, they can all contribute data to your health records. You can keep those records on the platform of your choice, including your own self hosted one.

And before the paranoid comments start, they did this with Matter for smart home stuff too, and it is genuinely open and local only capable.