The amount of construction in that corridor from Windsor to Toronto has increased significantly in the last year or so. The Ontario government changed the rules so that municipalities can't outright block construction of higher density housing (semi-detached) or else the province will step in and over-rule them. This was a major barrier that was keeping house prices high, because in municipalities like mine, they would only allow construction of fully detached very expensive family homes. The only other alternative was condos in Toronto, but those weren't being built for people to live in, but for international investors to purchase and leave empty. It's messed up, I know. Now for the first time in years, house prices in London (Ontario) are flat or going down. And as a buyer you can get away with putting a condition on your offer now. It's finally become a buyer's market. We purchased a detached home in '06 (so 20 years ago) and we've seen our house value triple (at least) in that time. It's ridiculous. And that high price doesn't do us any good unless we were to downsize, which makes no sense for us right now. I absolutely want house prices to drop by at least 30% so people who want to start families can afford them again.

Sorry to throw some cold water on all the emotional comments in this story, but just remember that the North American trade agreement (USMCA/CUSMA) is up for renewal this year, and it's standard practice before any negotiation for both sides to try to position themselves on more stable footing. When you want to negotiate, you need to go into it with a list of things you can negotiate away in order to get what you want. Every (smart) negotiating team from every country does this. Canada has been making small but significant agreements with other countries both as a hedge against the US going its own way, and also so that it has something to offer the US in exchange for a continued USMCA agreement. "Sure, we'll buy the F-35's and put more barriers in place for Chinese EVs if you agree to re-approve CUSMA for 4 years." And if the US decides to walk away, then Canada still has some other trading options it can fall back on. It's just a pragmatic thing to do.

I read that delta-V map wrong... it's even harder.

Starlink is at a low enough orbit that they decay back into the atmosphere really fast. There are some objects in higher orbits, or spent payload deployment adapters in higher elliptical orbits that don't decay very fast. Oh, and you absolutely cannot launch anything into the sun. I mean, you theoretically can, but it's unbelievably expensive. It takes a huge amount of delta-V. It's much easier to get to the outer planets than to get to the sun. You can get to Jupiter with 33 km/s of delta-V, but it would take 440 km/s of delta-V to get to the sun. And delta-V isn't linear. The rocket equation is logarithmic.

I'm assuming they would need Starship working first, and that's going to drop the cost per kg to orbit by a factor of about 10. But I agree there's lots of other challenges.

There was some recent research showing that we are actually much closer to Kessler Syndrome than was originally thought. Basically, if we were to lose control of the existing constellations (and therefore the ability to dodge debris) then the next significant collision would happen in a matter of days, and then the cascading collisions would produce more and more debris. Some of the orbits would stay unusable for years. I don't think you want to launch satellites with these large solar panel arrays into the midst of that.

I've been frustrated by AI constantly making shit up and stating things as fact when it's clearly wrong. But then I realized if you read around the internet that it's full of posts that are just factually untrue. Like I'm not talking about opinion stuff... I mean people posting absolutely untrue "facts" even on technical forums where a very cursory google search with turn up multiple independent sources that show they're completely wrong.

So, it turns out that if you can make a program that's only correct 90% of the time, you've already created a program that's correct more often than the average employee, so it's probably useful. This is completely backwards to how I think about computers, but I can't deny it. Humans are just a lot less useful than I thought, particularly if you need them to make correct decisions.

I mean, that's Google's purpose, right? Pay as least as possible for everything, including people and talent?

That's literally what all businesses are doing through all departments every day. The entire goal of businesses is to produce the most value for as little resources as possible.

I don't know how clueless you have to be to make the statement above, but it shows how pitiful our education system really is.

Yes, we've used the same system here in Canada since... well at least since the 90's and probably earlier.

I'm glad that worked out for you, but it's not like humans have a great safety record avoiding child pedestrians. You're talking about a pretty rare case where you can tell when something is about to happen due to clues, but let's face it, most accidents are going to happen because it's hard to see, or there was no warning, or the driver was distracted by a cell phone. If you just added auto-braking to all passenger cars, what do you think would happen to those pedestrian collision statistics?

This is pretty much the ideal situation where a self-driving car can perform better than a human driver. The car was probably following the posted speed limit precisely. It's likely been designed to cope with this specific situation because it's relatively common. And it can detect and react to the pedestrian faster than a human reaction time.

I'd rather just take the protein in pill form, or an MRNA-based injection that causes my own cells to produce the protein.

That reminds me of the short story Manna. Or at least part 1 of the story. Part 2 (set in Australia) is supposed to be a utopia, but it's creepy.

"Most asteroid collisions would result in large craters and little else; even the largest asteroid known, Ceres, wouldn’t budge the Moon." - source

Per NASA, "the asteroid is about the size of a 15-story building." I don't think we need to worry about it significantly altering the orbit of the moon when it hits.