I recently read that the sales price is $105M but the lifetime maintenance cost is budgeted at $300M.

yeah, that's why SCOTUS was not given Judicial Review powers in the Constitution and just declared fifteen years later that it had that ultimate power "because we have to".

The Legislature is supposed to manage this nonsense. It has been in a coma since 1995.

Given its small size it might be better to land a small mining module on the rock and then carve it up in situ to expand that module into a small space station.

We need to do this with the Taurus cluster to prevent another Tunguska event, but better to start small and practice closer. It's so much more profitable to not lift mass from Earth than it is to send it down.

Taurus has enough asteroids to build Space Station Alpha. Might be a nice vacation spot.

What if it's 299,792.458 km?

Do we send the SYN-ACK?

Agreed but I think that the average adult is far less capable that you think. If you want a good scare look at the average level of education that people achieve, it is much lower than you think. This makes them more susceptible to charismatic individuals offering plausible (to them) sounding solutions. It's worth remembering that Hitler was democratically elected because people thought he could solve the serious problems that Germany was facing at the time.

Dish antennas can be used for both transmitting and receiving. The reciprocity theorem says they work equally well in either direction.

Nobody uses dye-sensitized solar cells. They were an interesting idea for a technology, but the improvements in silicon cell performance along with reductions in cost just made their mediocre performance obsolete.

Also, nobody uses plastic coatings for solar cells. Plastics simply deteriorate too fast. Everybody uses glass.

"...Workers still at the company claim they are increasingly concerned that they are being set up to replace themselves. According to internal documents viewed by WIRED, GlobalLogic seems to be using these human raters to train the Google AI system that could automatically rate the responses, with the aim of replacing them with AI."

So, the idea is that eventually the AI decides whether its responses to a prompt is accurate or not. Net result is that the AI responses go off into Lalaland without checking against anything real. Eventually, when the AI's training gets to the point where it is trained primarily from other AI generated text, the AI text will have no tether to the real world at all.

Might be interesting to see what comes out once it's no longer constrained by logic or reality...

Per Wikipedia, the estimated quantity of tritium in a warhead is 4 grams, with decay of this producing about 0.20 grams of 3He per warhead per year ([ref]. The US has 5277 nuclear warheads, Russia a similar number, with 12,331 warheads total in the world. ([ref]. Multiplying, that's 2.4 kilograms of 3He per year. Density of Helium 3 is 0.134 grams per liter at standard temperature and pressure, so I get 18.4 liters per year produced from decay of tritium in all of the nuclear warheads in the world, about 40% of it in the U.S.

Wouldn't hurt to check my math, but unless I slipped a decimal, thousands of liters per year is an overestimate.

It's surprising that the suicided whistleblower didn't leave an insurance file.

Or did he?

> Isn't capitalism great?

Capitalism doesn't let you buy laws, that's Corporatism, a subset of Fascism, which is in turn a subset of Socialism.

A proper Capitalist systems speaks to economics, not poltiics.

Reconstruction US, Post-Mao China, Post-Soviet Russia all embraced capitalist economics to lift the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty.

Societies which did the opposite mostly killed their middle class ans then half the population starved to death.

This one is rather significant.

I wonder which private repos were made public. This could be the main prize. Industrial espionage ops?

Having lived through the Dot-Bomb it's basically the same.

You're not going to get a valuation bubble without a hype bubble. And nobody is buying companies for that much who have zero infrastructure. And the stock price is what they use to buy the infrastructure.

These are inextricably linked, not separate phenomena.

This is what Austrian Economists call the 'malinvestment' part of the business cycle. It's caused by artificially cheap money (not set by a market) and will unavoidably be cleared.

Our Orwell is so strong the eggheads artificially setting the price of money call themselves "The Open Market Committee". Because an open market in lending rates is de facto prohibited.

Blaming the people is a very dangerous, and frankly extremely undemocratic approach to take. If you look around the western democracies I think the problem is that voters are getting increasingly fed up with politicians who are not addressing the increasing problems that they are facing: salaries rising slower than inflation, house prices going through the roof, immigration out of control etc. Mainstream politicians on both the left and the right seem either incapable or unwilling to address these problems.

This has opened the door for more extremist politicians on either the right or left who promise to fix things by whatever means necessary and people are increasingly voting for them because it looks like they are the only ones who may be capable of actually addressing their problems. It's not that people are broken, it's that when you are drowning in problems you'll reach out to whomever is offering to help, regardless of who they may be.

So it was worse than falling asleep at the wheel - they bent the knee to him. That is what has largely amazed me seeing this play out as a non-American. For all the bluster about how free and democratic the US is, the courts, politicians, press and companies all seem to have just largely capitulated and accepted Trump's rule by proclamation and speech-suppression by firing/intimidation tactics.