I would say that this underscores the need to abolish the death penalty for these kinds of cases. I used to be opposed to the death penalty, but not anymore. For cases where the death toll is more than 100 people, even in white collar or government official duty cases, where a profit motive can be shown, I believe in capital punishment. It would be applied where it’s beyond unreasonable doubt, meaning the evidence is overwhelming, and it should be fast tracked. As an example, specifically mishandling the covid response under your duties executed as a public servant to profit off it where the toll is more than 100 people should be eligible for immediate execution. It’s not about deterrence, it’s simple threat removal. And the 100 limit is mostly to stop the cases of trying to litigate every little thing, this is reserved for the large cases. It would also get the money out of politics very quickly, by choice or by chair.

Have you heard of the push to get algal and fungal colonies to watch influencers and video creators across many platforms? It’s always pushed as lichen subscribe.

When a billionaire doesn’t set the parking brake and wheel properly and their vehicle goes out of control, no matter the extent of damages it’s not worth paying attention to because they passively earn money far faster than the carnage accrues damages. It’s simply the cost of owning a car thousands of times to even a million times cheaper than for the rest of us. There is no such thing as jail for negligence because everyone is thirsting after the money and is afraid of being cut off.

This is correct. It does not lie, it does not hack, it does not cheat. It simply optimizes variables under its control to achieve its goals. Implying it does those things implies intelligence and an understanding of the physical implications of morality and how it reduces quality of existence for everyone else. It 100% lacks reasoning of that nature, and it’s dubious to call the orchestrating layer a thinking layer when thinking is implied in the human or even animal sense.

Automatics aren’t more fuel efficient, they are quite a bit less to less fuel efficient at a component level, dual clutch automatics come the closest at around 1% less efficient. Most people who drive a stick is really interested at keeping the shifts in the proper RPM range to get optimal mileage which is how automatics make up for their loss of efficiency. However if you simply want fuel efficiency, it’s simple to learn when to get the best mileage.

Manual transmissions have lower component cost and lower complexity and if you take out the humans who screw up using them, are more reliable and last longer than automatics. The reason manual transmissions cost more is they aren’t being made in quantity, if you make 200x more of something even if it’s more complex and expensive to make it’s actually not in many cases because of economies of scale. If the two were reversed the gap would be far larger with manuals quite a bit cheaper which was the case when it really was 200-1 back in the day.

Not everyone wants to spend tens of thousands of dollars to steer on the freeway so you can post to social media, or park for you, the majority of people want cheaper cars. Made in bulk, they are far cheaper and would help to achieve this though that cuts into profits so it’s not what’s forced on us all.

Haha. This happened to me in the US except I dropped my car off at the valet for an event and when I came back hours later it was right there in the front waiting for me, exactly where I had left it. Not one of the people on staff knew how to drive one so it never even went to the lot.

Some people don’t realize that when you lock wills with an animal for dominance and domestication it’s possible to lose. Incidentally, those that don’t realize this have a much higher chance of losing for some strange reason...

With 50k satellites it can become an effective space weapon. Assume about 250ish miles orbital altitude. also assume the satellites you target with this weapon are at about the same altitude. That makes for roughly 140 miles average between satellites in the cluster and target, but much of the time there will be multiple satellites closer than this. Even low amounts of light coming from unexpected angles can blind sensors like surveillance cameras, but at shorter distances if the mirror has appropriate focal length and multiple mirrors can be used, it can dramatically increase the heat experienced by the satellite but far more importantly it can push the heat from unexpected directions. Satellites often employ heat shielding to stop the direct heat from the sun from baking the satellite and also have heat pumps to push it out the dark side. By heating that avoids the heat shield, or better yet, raises the radiator to a high temperature, the satellite bakes and self destructs. The focused energy does itself not need to come close to baking the satellite on its own. The use case is very compelling for destroying enemy satellites while getting funding and permission by pretending to solve a civilian purpose.

Two problems with that are,
1) this only locks in the rate of the system, and building, or far worse renting, the system to meet 100% of needs into the future is basically unaffordable on a cost basis and specifically because you could take the 5-6 figures and invest it in markets or such creates a vast lost opportunity gap. Even breaking even long term is very bad for this reason. And.. I’m close to 45 latitude, and in a climate that sees quite a few overcast days. This greatly reduces the efficacy and thus increases the cost for installed kWh you actually receive and can use. This compounds the problem in #1. This is why I’m all for starting a trade war on solar panels and getting China to glut the market with crazy excess capacity to the point homeless are sleeping under perfectly good discarded solar panels because cardboard is too expensive. We don’t even manufacture them to 3% of our needs and the cost of the government subsidizing domestic production is only a tiny fraction of the wealth we would extract from china, not to mention the saving the planet as a byproduct. But until panels cost what cardboard does, and until storage costs drop (lithium isn’t even the most cost effective given chemistry maturity, something like sodium ion would be vastly superior for home grid), it does not make financial sense at all.

Of course, with just a touch of polish they are so shiny and gleam. With the consumer push for physical media, wouldn’t you want games made with element 13?

It’s not. Literally through the 60s all the way to the 90s improper construction methods caused widespread destruction and unaffordability in Florida and its suffering to this day with no one wanting to insure those homes. In my state stucco homes in the 80-90s were built with a sealed style of construction that worked well in dryer/warmer areas but caused billions in damages to the point around here a stucco home is considered garbage and has a bad name to this day. It’s not that homes can’t be built with stucco even here, it’s that when you build without understanding the environment then practices that work quite well can fail systematically and catastrophically.

A problem (or rather a lack of a problem) in my state are fixed rate utilities. kWh are the same price during peak usage as middle of the night and the rate is quite low compared to much of the US so batteries don’t make sense from a power savings perspective. About the only thing it provides is uninterrupted power during outages but the problem there is infrastructure around here is well regulated and down times are exceedingly rare and when they do happen statistically last only a few minutes. In two decades we have only lost power twice that lasted over 24 hours.

Getting insurance dramatically changes depending on home construction. If you have a ground level 60s style house where they took regular building practices and simply put it on a beach or within a hundred or so miles of the ocean then you get total destruction and unaffordablity. However, if you put it high on stilts that are 18’ above high tide on the coasts to avoid surges (height depends on location), use hurricane proof windows, siding, roofing, and internal bracing, etc. The cost may go over double per square foot but it will survive hurricanes largely without substantial damage the majority of the time. You can actually see aftermath videos where ground level old construction homes are completely absent and modern construction stilted homes are unscathed and they used to be neighbors after a major hurricane.

Astronomers renamed it to avoid those jokes forever

I have been following climate science from the 80s and the most consistent thing has been what we’re dealing with actually is worse than what’s been the “consensus” so far. Not to say an administration hostile to inconvenient facts and logical reasoning isn’t a problem, but science in general across all fields tends to resist change in ideas. Going against the established precedent is difficult (and this isn’t always bad), but it does take a long time and when it impacts how people live their lives this change always seems to greatly lag behind where logical reasoning from facts places us. It’s part of the human condition.