Headline from 1845.

Who are you and what have you done with rsilvergun?

Broaden your scope: Both the America revolution and the US civil war were consequences of prosperity. Subsisting people spend little time pondering pamphlets or worrying about ratios of atmospheric trace gasses. The Left and its simple minded and reactionary hair-shirt solutions to all problems are certainly their own worst enemy. That's a key point as well: the enemies they imagine, including all the churches and all the fictional Nazis that live in side their heads are nothing by comparison.

Of course you believe this. You have no concept of actual warfare. Your whole worldview is what you've been fed by comfortable, secure establishment media that hasn't dealt with an actual military threat in about 80 years.

No son, job loss and "disinformation" are not worse than kinetic warfare. You're a poster boy for the consequences of excessive peace.

This is the language of someone that's never been more than a few hours away from a source of food.

Taiwan is a island of people that don't want to be enslaved by a totalitarian hell state, and China will not hesitate to nab Taiwan at the very first instant they think they can pull it off. All your 8-D chess thinking is just you filling your head with shit. Stop doing that to yourself.

The only reason Taiwan hasn't been blockaded and starved into submission is that China lacks the 2-3 additional aircraft carriers and naval air wings they'll need to ensure the success of that mission. That's it. No other reason. And you're likely to live long enough to witness the truth of that.

When that day comes, do yourself a huge favor: recall this discussion and take it to heart. If you do, the good news for you is that perhaps you'll be able to salvage some of your remaining years free of the cognitive damage you've indulged.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

I doubt that. This isn't the nifty fifties and we don't moral panic over blowjobs anymore. Clinton was poking girls with cigars in the Whitehouse and the Bezos beams dick pics around to women. Jenson could handwave this, and she can't "Me Too" him because she's a spy that did it for her government.

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

There is no alternative now, and there won't be an alternative for years.

Globalstar is far too low bandwidth for Ukraine's needs. Amazon doesn't have the ambition or nerve to risk building anything that approaches Starlink in the kind of time frame that is relevant to the Ukraine conflict, and they don't have the vertically integrated launch platform with the airline-like capacity and reliability of SpaceX to make such ambitions affordable, and they don't have the ambition or nerve to build that either.

Love him or hate him, for better or worse, Musk has the ambition and nerve to do these things. That fact is everything: the essential, exclusive ingredient. And Bezos et al. don't have it. You may wish they did, and regret they do not, but don't kid yourself.

The valuation is what mystifies me. Maybe, before Starlink, a constellation of 25 communication satellites was worth a few billion. Maybe $10 billion with IP, lucrative contracts and whatever spectrum they hold. After Starlink?

No. Just no.

Globalstar equity holders have played this one well.

It's supposed to be a benefit: better competitors that aren't governed by shiny-object leadership are supposed to take advantage and punish such clowns. That's the real cost of centralization, IP law and regulatory balkanization: the clowns rely on these to insulate themselves from the wolves that would otherwise end them.

Makes me think of the "bad faith" trope we see with some frequency from certain folks.

Recently some blowhard Reddit mod(s) went ham on AI in open source, and essentially outlawed discussion of any open source projects that are not purely organic from their little Reddit sandbox. When it was pointed out that this is pretty unworkable since significant open source projects, including Linux, Mesa and others are allowing AI generated code, they backed up. And that's all fine I suppose, except they characterized the response to their stupidity as deliberate "bad faith" misunderstanding of their original announcement. It wasn't that at all; it was exactly what you should expect when get all chesty with the world and can't handle the blowback, but they've adopted the cop-out of calling these self-inflicted episodes as some sort of "bad faith."

I see this often enough now that anytime I see someone claiming "bad faith" I assume I'm dealing with another nasty little shit-bird trying to cry-bully their way.

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.

IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.

(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)

Yep. Back in the early days of Slashdot, when helium usage would come up, I'd grumble about how wasteful the medical industry was with helium.

It still uses a lot, but it's nowhere near as wasteful as it was before.

Yes, like the Nile Delta, water flowed in from wet regions further away to the desert and near-desert lowlands, and humans began using it for agriculture. Around the Tulare Basin, there's dozens of inches per year in the mountains due to orographic uplift, but only half a dozen in the lowlands. The problem is that farmers first consumed the water from the mountain-fed local rivers and are now consuming water shipped in from as far away as the Oregon border and drawing down groundwater much faster than it's being replenished. At the same time, the mountain rivers are becoming less reliable as climate change leads to snowpack melting earlier. As it stands today, it is not sustainable. More water is being used than is long-term available.

Indeed, I have no clue what you think you were trying to prove with this link:

The conversion of this water system to a lake-and-slough wetland to agriculture began in the mid-1800s when European settlers began to build canals and diversion structures to irrigate their crops. This early irrigation infrastructure upstream from Tulare Lake slowly cut off the lake from its source waters, shrinking the lake's footprint. By 1899 - less than 50 years after irrigation was initiated - Tulare Lake went dry for the first time in history.

They were overdrawing the rivers *even before the 20th century*.