t has to be space because even if you had no NIMBY bullshit to deal with at all

Yeah I think it's 100% entirely appropriate to NOT have massive amounts of unpleasant noise pollution in people's back yards. But it's "bullshit" for peons to not be gobbling up whatever scraps mega corporations throw to them regardless of the costs to themselves.

I'm not talking about "idleness" though.

It is idleness in a sense: nothing you have to do. You can bum around, go skiing etc or art galleries whatever but you don't need to do anything. You have no structure and no obligations. The world's your oyster, but that's not so easy it turns out.

Choosing to "do" more of whatever already made you a billionaire seems crazy.

Maybe, but I think I'm the type to keep farming until the money runs out. Metaphorically. I don't actually farm.

It's like the story about the farmer who won the lottery.

When asked what he'd do he replied "keep farming 'til the money runs out".

I'm not rich enough to never work again, but I've taken long gaps between jobs. Idleness is hard it turns out and I start getting antsy.

Anyone who believes the phrase "No one ever died wishing they spent more time in the office" has never met an academic.

If you want taxes that high, you don't build AI satellites in space

Heat dissipation is going to be more of a problem than taxes when it comes to AI data centres in space.

you don't complete Starship

Only Apollo?

you don't build moon bases

What moon bases?

and we don't get humanity to Mars, apart from some rovers, flags and footprints.

What humans on mars?

We managed to build roads, railroads, bridges, canals, and an entire industrial revolution without an income tax.

A lot of those railroads were built by stealing land from a bunch of people and giving it away to fund the railroads. Oh and a little light genocide on the side. That "resource" is long tapped out, unless you want to bring back large scale government expropriation and genocide again?

If you really understand history, it's clear that most of the 20th century was about squeezing the cultural, economic, and political energy out of the United States for the benefit of the people running big political machines.

Even if this is true (it's not but let's put a pin in that), Musk is a pretty integral part of that political machine now. You seem to think he's apart from it but he isn't. Massive political donor. Employed by the government to destroy departments investigating his companies. Massive recipient of loans etc raised by the taxes you so despise. Massive beneficiary of the work NASA did when taxes were at their hightest etc.

I was referring to vehicle carrying capacity not storage capacity.

I thought that was blindingly obvious given the context.

Bullshit as in fake?

Right you're an arsehole, I get it.

Fortunately in the UK we have average speed checks over long distances so arseholes find a hole in their bank account and maybe points on their driving license too.

OK, that's more interesting than my guess. Thanks for the clarification.

Yeah no problem. I like it because it's not attempting to be too clever providing a full general purpose solution for a very difficult and varied problem. The existing low level APIs are a good fir for what you need to do anyway, and it just lets you get a lot more flexibility out of them.

While this is theoretically a reasonable answer (best for AI drivers driving autonomously at 100MPH with humans asleep in the backseat), itâ(TM)s not a realistic one today with mostly impatient fallible meatsacks behind the wheel driving at the speed of greed, enhanced by prescription meds.

It does actually work. Any law not enforced ceases to become a law, so yeah it needs enforcement. It's like, no one speeds on the 84/285 through northern NM, because. well you're going to get a ticket from a reservation cop. You can try challenging it in a reservation court with a reservation judge in the arse end of absolutely nowhere, at a spectacularly inconvenient time of their choosing but what do you think the result will be? So despite nice wide, empty, multilane roads, no one speeds.

Likewise on motorways back here in the UK with variable speed limits, they are enforced. By and large, people stick to them, it isn't worth the ticket.

Plus also, when the reduced speed limit signs come on the road is usually clogged anyway (they're more the speed you wish you were going), so there's nowhere to speed to: any route ahead is thoroughly blocked.

Highway, implies both high capacity and high speed.

I mean kinda. High capacity, sure, but many big roads are notorious for traffic jams.

If I wanted to average 25MPH on my commute because less space, Iâ(TM)d probably drive some back road every morning, taking in the scenery and maybe some fresher air along the way. Zero point in getting on a highway that isnâ(TM)t any more efficient.

Depends. Google fucking loves diverting me onto minor back roads for a theoretical 2 minute gain. I wish it would stop they're usually more of a pain to drive than sticking to major roads. But anyway the massive rise in rat-running due to satnav has caused a lot of councils to block off rat running routes, to keep heavy through traffic away from residential areas with inadequately sized roads.

The actual fix for congested roadways is firing the incompetent middle-earth management who canâ(TM)t find a duty beyond cube farmer overlord, and make WFH actually work.

Also viable alternatives to driving. My commute is a dead predictable 25 minutes if I go by bike and a slightly less predictable 30-35 minutes by bus. I'm not going to go back to WFH. I don't like doing it and it's not a fit for my job anyway. I've got no room for a Colchester 2000 at home for starters.

You're not wrong: in the UK we've had this tech for ages. We also have a fair number of speed cameras and they're adaptive on the roads with adaptive speed limits. Naturally this encouraged exceptionally dickish behaviour like flooring it then slamming on the breaks for speed cameras but we've had average speed checks now for a while.

I don't drive much at the moment (I have no car, so trips tend to be long ones on motorways e.g. for work or a holiday), but as a result I see snapshots rather than being embedded in slowly moving trends. One thing I've noticed is that overall on motorways drivers have chilled out a lot compared to how they used to be. The number of people zooming along way over 70 is way down , and often even on quite empty roads people will often be doing 65 not 70. This even holds on roads without the heavy enforcement, so I think it's the case that people have got used to not speeding on motorways so the average behaviour is lower speeds.

In towns though with less rigorous enforcement, people speed more.

But thereÃ(TM)s no difference in how Russia saw a threat in Ukraine expanding NATO

This is utter Putinist bullshit.

Nato "expanded" east because most of the countries which had been invaded by Russia and subject to varying degrees of oppression and even genocide joined a defense pact so Russia could not do the same again. A few didn't and Russia invaded them, proving beyond doubt that NATO was an effective defence pact.

A full highway is a full highway, there's little in the way of magic or capacity to remedy that.

Well, not entirely. A highway has more capacity at moderate speeds than at high ones, because you need less space between vehicles.

I have opposed US involvement in Ukraine from the beginning. I don't think we should have supplied them with weapons or cash. It is a conflict that does not involve us

American thinks America's word is garbage and should mean nothing.

, America First!

Oh right that figures.

China produces around 40 million drones annually.

And really they're hardly trying, just responding to market forces etc. Ukraine's churning out over 2 million from a much smaller industrial base, population and economy.

This is the future, and it will revolutionize warfare. Pure volume of drones can defeat anything we currently have to defend against them. You just send a swarm of drones, or a drone one after another after another spaced 10 seconds apart, until whatever they are targeting has been destroyed. 10k drones targeting the US's ports on both coasts... destroy the bulk of imports and exports. 10k drones targeting tractors and other agricultural equipment in the US's breadbasket - famine. Really, it's hard to understate what these could potentially do.

Tiny drones lack range, though. The US has the advantage of geographic isolation. The only kind of drones with that sort of range are cruise missiles as they used to be known, which admittedly China could make a massive shitload of, though not as many as small FPVs. But basically the only way to hit the breadbasket would be from inside the US anyway.

These drones are not selecting targets. Their mission is "kill all humans in this defined area"

That is selecting targets though?

Basically they bobble around a (predefined?) area for the limit of their endurance, until they spot a target. Probably Yolo v8 running on camera images, fine tuned on some data with a few classes selected as "targets", i.e. people and vehicles or in practice all elements of the people and vehicle classes. Then, basically head towards it, presumably using a realtime tracker to keep it in view, maybe with occasional updates from the DNN just to make sure.

I mean that's how I'd build it anyway.

Either way though the target selection is autonomous. Sure it might be everything matching some set of classes, but it's not going after trees or cows.