Presumably that's why they envision having 50,000 of them. One alone won't do much, dozens or even hundreds of them all reflecting at the same spot...

Depends, is the amount of solar it generates at night going to offset more heating than it causes?

I'm having a bit of trouble working up any sympathy, as the saying goes.

This is a small prototype, not a full-scale mirror.

Also, ignoring that, pretending light brighter than the full moon is useless is... silly? For generating power, sure, but for illumination, it absolutely is not.

In fact China has brought in a lot of fairly strict environmental policies in the last few decades, which often have quite dramatic effects on local industry. For example, no factories within half a kilometre of most rivers, and no discharging untreated waste into them.

Then there is the massive and frankly staggering rate at which they have adopted renewables. Hit their Paris targets 5 years early, and those were considered too ambitious to be realistic at the time.

"But China" was never a good argument, but these days it's laughable.

TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

All the EU has to do is hold its nerve until he relents.

Mamdani hasn't been in long but has already

- Froze rent for 2 million New Yorkers
- Cut subway fares in half for low-income riders
- Fully funded NYC parks
- Added $680M for public schools
- Launched free child care for 2-year-olds

All things that we were assured were impossible, would crash the economy, would bankrupt the state etc. Oh, and he balanced the budget.

Politicians absolutely can help the people they are supposed to work for. Socialism absolutely does work. It's just that it works for you, not billionaires, so they are very keen to convince that they you can't possible have it and it's all just a fantasy.

They drive themselves most of the time, and on the odd occasion when they are unsure or the passenger calls for assistance, a human can intervene. They don't drive the car directly, they just tell it if it can proceed, which route to take, that kind of thing.

It helps deal with the corner cases that are hard to engineer general solutions for.

The main difference between that and driver aid systems is that the car doesn't need immediate intervention to be safe. It will stop and call for help. Driver aids need the driver to be paying constant attention, which is why the Tesla ones result in so many injuries and fatalities.

It's mostly better. While the barge has to be a bit more complex because it has to have the lattice of ropes (it's not a net), it means that the booster doesn't have to have landing struts. That's a significant weight saving, which means less propellant needed too.

It likely also means that the system is less dependent on good weather, and better able to recover from small issues that would tip self supporting boosters over. IIRC the Blue Origin system actually welds itself to the deck when it lands to help with that, which obviously makes the legs disposable.

The only real downside is that it does require that barge to land, so to land on the moon you would need to first land a landing station. That won't be an issue for the first manned trips, and longer term it may have advantages because the vehicle's engine can be shut off at higher altitude and kick up less regolith.

Exciting times and another technique added to the list of options. We will see which becomes the preferred one, but competition in this area is going to be good for getting costs down.

It has created massive personal inflation for some people.

The EU decided that to protect local middlemen they would introduce a 3 Euro charge per item type on packages being imported. It seems to have been targeted at sites like AliExpress and Temu. I'm sure they will sooner or later set up local distribution warehouses inside the EU - in fact they already have some, so that popular items and heavily discounted ones can be delivered more quickly and cheaply. I suppose that creates some jobs, but it must be very annoying for people buying less popular stuff who are forced to pay the 3 Euro or buy from a middleman.

The FSB is certainly getting a good ROI on their investment in Trump.

Games are around $70 today, which adjusted for inflation is about $32 in 1996. If you look at ads from back then, games were typically $50 on the original Playstation.

What's happened is many of the basics of life have been squeezed. Housing, education, utilities. Meanwhile wages have stagnated, in real terms.

It's more about getting health data into a common format so that it's not stuck in lots of individual providers. Your dentist, your health tracker, the place that did your x-ray, your smart bathroom scales, they can all contribute data to your health records. You can keep those records on the platform of your choice, including your own self hosted one.

And before the paranoid comments start, they did this with Matter for smart home stuff too, and it is genuinely open and local only capable.

How about Grok? xAI is being sued because it lets you make child abuse material, which sounds pretty unrestricted.