And what do you think those financially-troubled masses will do when they lose access to credit card debt? Suddenly become financially responsible? Or hit the payday loan place charging 400% interest?

What do you think the odds are that the trillion-dollar, highly-competitive banking industry hasn't studied this to the nth degree, and doesn't know exactly what the effect of increasing or decreasing the interest rate by a tenth of a percent would be on their market share, customer population, payment flows, bankruptcies, etc.?

I agree. We should have amended the Constitution.

Nonsense.

The police issue citations, but they're enforced by courts. Oh, people often choose just to pay them rather than going to court, but the ticket is actually a summons.

Are you a dumb fuck or is it slashdot?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a....

In the short term it would most certainly hit profits, not merely because of lower revenues from interest, but because credit card is unsecured, bad debts taking a bigger bite out of profits. The ultimate result would be that it would become much harder to get a credit card. In the end consumers would effectively have their short-term lending capacity reduced.

It does when it gets shaded by astronomical bodies, like the Earth.

Still, this could make ground-based grid-scale PV arrays massively more effective, boosting their output by increasing their input during the day, and if the satellites are in very high orbits, extending the duration of the "day" by delivering power to farms that are in dawn/dusk from satellites that are in full sun but still have line of sight to them. For that matter, you could really increase PV output if you used a constellation of satellites to beam power around the planet (probably with microwaves) to the night side, to keep the solar farms generating 24x7.

Absolutely. Lots of challenges, but it's not obviously impossible.

I wonder if that would have any agricultural applications. If nothing else you could probably extend the growing season a bit, shortening the winter by providing enough warming to prevent frost. Especially if you can beam day-side power around to the night side.

but it could also be an awesome weapon.

I guess if you had hundreds of full-size space power plants and decided to beam all the power to the same place at once, then maybe? But for a given one, think "the sun", not "a laser cutter". The beam is very wide and diffuse.

Yes, I'm sure its spread out but I still wouldn't want to be standing under it.

Why not? It's less damaging than standing out in the sun. Why are you afraid of IR?

so at least the beam could be seen and people avoid it?

You seem to be thinking that this is like some sort of point laser with incredible intensity. It's not. It's an extremely wide beam of "normal" levels of light intensity.

I was expecting it to be inefficient, but after looking into the, the efficiencies are a lot higher than I expected them to be, esp. given that they have a choice about what solar farm to beam to, so can avoid adverse weather. Looks like they could probably get like 50% laser efficiency, 40% system, with a ~500m spot. And 1064-1070nm is 90% clear in good weather.

Solar power in space gets ~40% more W/m2 than on the surface, has zero blocking by clouds, no night, passive solar tracking, no land cost, only one-off permitting costs, low mount costs (minimal structural loading), no weather damage, no dust, and they can beam to wherever they can sell the power for the highest price. Historically it was right-out because of high launch costs, but launch costs are plunging, and could get very low indeed. Also, space solar tech has advanced dramatically in terms of W/kg in the past few decades, and is likely to advance a lot more if this is pursued at scale.

Of course you have radiation, no maintenance, micrometeoroids, launch packing/stress/deployment, beaming, thermal management, and a whole host of other things - one can absolutely not say it'll be cost effective. But at this point, I don't think we can assert any more that it won't be cost effective, either. It's probably about the right time to start working towards giving it a shot.

There's also some fun things you can do with this, like on-demand spot-warming of specific areas and the like. Not visible lighting, mind you, since this is IR (the Soviets once did a small-scale experiment with mirrors to light a town with something like 1% of the sun's light from space)

Vibe coding has nothing to do with who the user is and everything to do with how it's used.

AI-Assisted Coding: You look at every line of every diff suggested by the AI
Vibe Coding: You accept all lines suggested by the AI without looking at them.

You can have been a programmer for 60 years and still vibe code.

That's not "further reading", and it's not "news", it's what he said two months ago, while this is what he's doing today.

Vibe coding is such a weird experience. Claude 4 Opus combined with modern Cursor or Claude Code agents is so powerful these days. You can actually handle sizable projects now without the model losing its way. I've been vibe coding a rather complex Shopify store (Shopify is easy if you plan to do things the way they thought of but a nightmare if you want to do anything outside their workflow), and it's a trip having Claude use all sort of tools and services that I've never even heard of before, and something perfectly functional comes out.

That makes sense, and there kind of is such a policy, it's called "stare decisis", and it means that courts honor the rulings of their predecessors. Unfortunately, it's a guiding principle, not a hard and fast rule, and the current SCOTUS has shown themselves willing to abandon it whenever convenient.

That said, this structure that we've used since The New Deal is pretty plainly unconstitutional according to the plain text of the Constitution. More here.

It's interesting -- in an abstract, analytical way, ignoring the very real mess this may all make -- that this attempt to strip regulatory powers from agencies works against Trump's attempt to gather direct control of all of those agencies. If both efforts are successful, then Trump will have gained for himself and future presidents direct, unrestricted control of all of the power of all of the executive agencies, at the same time much of that power has been taken away from them. More here.