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.

Basically, violence in the Middle East started on a significant scale with the collapse of the ecosystem. Natural climate shifts in the area reduced food available and regions that were inhabitable. This resulted in massive population migrations (the Sea People, the Babylonians, etc). As natural resources were depleted and became highly centralised, violence became worse. The collapse of the tin market resulted in Dark Ages for many cultures in the region, where societies imploded catastrophically.

As wealth increased, corruption increased. We know all about a copper merchant in Babylonian times, but it was unusual enough that he wrote a long and rambling letter in cuneiform about it. These sorts of complaints weren't common but increased. Corruption requires chaos, and chaos generates conflict. So this relationship should not be surprising. It's not that corruption causes violence, but corruption and violence have the same cause and are tightly coupled.

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.

OTA just seems like such an inconvenient waste of time and resources now. It doesn't help that you need a licence for it in the UK, but even if it was free, it seems like it is easier to just pirate the small amount of stuff that is worth watching. And these days that is approaching zero, and what there is can be streamed anyway.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

The main reason that Israel supported Hamas is because the more moderate Palestinian politicians wanted a two state solution.

I think it's more horses for courses, and can also vary considerably between what different demographics, both contemporary and historical, think of as "perfection". Hollywood is largely driven by white western males, so they naturally favour your "20% silicone", although that does seem to be undergoing a gradual change of late, but that's not the case for world cinema as a whole; you'll find far fewer wannabe Barbie Dolls in African cinema, for instance.

From a people portraiture perspective, especially candids, there is also a night and day difference between what a photographer would most typically want to shoot in a studio vs. on the street. The former is very much about some ideal of perfection, with hours spent on makeup and clothing the model(s) and setting up the lighting rigs, before the camera even gets turned on, whereas in the streets and fields, you are totally going to home in the people with the most interesting features, and those often tend to be very much the definition of imperfection. You are actively looking for the aged faces with more lines than a metro map, more piercings/tats than Vogue would likely ever consider acceptable, and anything else that really tells a story about the kind of life the viewer of the resultant image might imagine them to live. For the right images, there is absolutely value that can be measured in both clicks and dollars there too.

Also, why limit it to women implanting silicone to comply with some visual aspirational idea of perfection being forced on them by men (mostly), media, and entirely unrealistically proportioned dolls? Have you seen the lengths some men are going to as part of the "looksmaxxxing" fad? There's going to be a Darwin Award winner there real soon now, I'm sure.

The problem is that he is an artist and needs to keep making money to get opportunities like this, so when critics pan his work and audiences react negatively, he feels the need to defend his decisions.

It sounds like he ripped off those people who take a podcast, add AI slop images, and upload a video to YouTube.

The problem is Israel. Israel is everything the US claims to oppose Iran for.

- Nuclear armed, with the ability to deliver those warheads to Europe and beyond.

- The world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism.

- An existential threat to every other nation in the region, constantly attacking and invading them.

- Openly genocidal, has the means to actually do it, and is doing it.

- Abuses its own people.

If Israel wasn't based by the US and European nations, if we didn't tolerate Israel violating international law every single day for decades, Iran wouldn't be the problem that it is.