The nice thing about Europeans finally doing this, is that they might create and use standards!

And if they do that, then not just France, but everyone can dump their proprietary meeting software.

AI is the solution to every problem.

No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

You're supposed to pound the table, not make shit up.

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

^ This is the way. The way to fix ads was to cut ads out of our lives. It worked spectacularly well, IMHO. The only catch is that when you do it, it just works for you. So you've got to advocate it to others, if you're worried about what other people might do while under the influence of ads (i.e. what if they vote?).

In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" (scifi written in the '00s but takes place approximately around now) there is a thing called "Friends of Privacy" which makes it hard to find relevant information about a person, by overwhelming the truth with a sea of spam/misinformation. If you google your ex-wife and get 200 different possible addresses (all of them credible), then you don't have her address.

I thought that was unrealistic and wouldn't really happen, of course it's starting to happen.

But it's happening (on a mid scale) with all topics, not just personal information, thanks to AI slop. We just need more AI slop targeting the stuff we want to target, not knowledge in general. But nevertheless, despite the mis-focus, it's kind of interesting to search youtube and see some of the garbage that you end up landing on. If only we could make that happen to our adversaries...

I'd rather they'd just exited the business entirely rather than just let some Chinese shop slap their name on products. "Sony" on gear use to mean something.

GW lets you include the air conditioners, making the resulting number much more impressive!

"The first fix is free." Now that you're hooked, bend it.

On the bright side, every single person should be thinking about the computer they're going to build, when the fire sale begins on slightly-used graphics cards and RAM. That computer is going to be awesome!

Lasers are much brighter than sunlight

These aren't. That's the point you're missing. The beam divergence is so great from traveling nearly 36 thousand kilometers that by the time it hits the surface it's at typical solar intensities, spread out over a large area.

The sun also puts out a painful level of visible light, which kicks in the blink reflex if the sun enters your field of vision.

What you're freaking out about is that a space solar plant:

1) Aims in the wrong place
2) Keeps aiming in the wrong place
3) But *consistently* in the *same* wrong place
4) And you're staring up in the sky
5) And at the EXACT right spot
6) For long enough to cause permanently damage to your eyes

I'm sorry, but find something better to worry about.

A thousand beams

... each with the power output of 1/1000th of the power plant.

Let's say this is a thousand square kilometer solar array in space getting 1 kW/m^2 with 20% efficiency in turning that into a beam headed for Earth and then 50% of that energy is lost before hitting the ground. So 1 square meter of the array would produce about 100 Watts per square meter on the ground (averaged out, of course). Then there are 1000 of those beams

So your scenario is a *million square kilometers of solar panels*? Yes, obviously you can fry an area with that, but it's also not a single space solarplant. Even just one of those thousand square kilometer arrays you propose is a 200 GW solar plant.

Do you have any big what you're proposing is? It's ~40% bigger than Texas.