I agree it would only be a surprise first strike. But if any container ship was potentially hiding a few of these, think of the chaos it would cause in supply chains.

And how is that any different than a nuclear arsenal? It's an attack weapon that's most highly useful in first strike situations. But your enemy probably has a bunch too and they're hard to find and wipe out in a first strike. So the only way to win is not to play.

This is an interestingly less expensive deterrent for middle powers to buy (or develop themselves) who don't want to invest in a nuclear program to keep the larger countries at bay. I actually see this as a positive because it offers an alternative to nuclear proliferation. With current technology, a barrage of missiles like this can't be intercepted cost effectively, and you can hide them relatively easily. It has a chance to maintain a peaceful status quo, and perhaps avoid the looming WW3.

To give you a more practical example of the range, pretty much all of the continental US would be within 800 miles of the northern and southern US land borders. Not that Canada or Mexico would actually follow a program to develop these, as the US, Canada, and Mexico are still quite close allies, but my points is that the cost would easily be within the capabilities of those countries, and the range is pretty huge. Even container ships parked off the western and eastern coasts could reach well over 2/3 of the US landmass.

I have no idea what gateway was meant to be for.

I suppose you could argue that it was kind of like how the original Apollo worked. The capsule that brings you back to Earth for re-entry stays in lunar orbit and you just descend in the lander and go back up to lunar orbit. Plus you can maintain a much larger living environment at the gateway station. But it certainly made the whole thing seem like a Rube Goldberg affair. Assuming Starship gets the bugs worked out, then you should be able to do the whole mission with a single re-usable ship, assuming you launch it to low Earth orbit empty of fuel and then send up multiple other Starship flights to refuel it before it goes to the Moon.

Remember, it takes a long time for projects to make their way through the entertainment machine. The stuff that's coming out now was greenlit years ago. I don't think they're going around handing the keys to the kingdom over to a group of directors and writers whose main credentials is that they're "young and diverse." That was proven not to work, and they will now be mandating an adult in the room.

So Heppner is an idiot. Typing that shit into Claude is rather dumb.

Why would someone doing official government business using ChatGPT like a diary to document what they were doing? I don't understand. Aren't the context windows limited? Would it even "remember" everything you've told it? That just seems like an odd use for an LLM, and obviously OpenAI uses all that information for whatever they want.

Dude, I know a family where all 3 of their kids identify as LGTBQ+, and so do both of their cousins. Yes, it should be about 1 in 10 because we know historically that's the number, but if that were true then having all 3 of your kids identify would be a 1 in a 1000 chance. There was a survey that went around the schoolboard recently which said about a third of the kids from grade 7 through 12 identified as some kind of gender non-conforming. I support rights for everyone, and tolerance of everyone, but you can't ignore the social contagion effect. It's real. This whole generation is going to become young adults and will sit around laughing about how goofy they all were in high school comparing notes on their gender identity all day every day, and then it'll be considered cringe, and the next generation will be on to something else. It's already happening. That's kind of the reason so many young people are taking a conservative turn, which is weird for their age range. But that'll end too. And after all of that, the real 1 in 10 will still be there living their lives. As far as your complaints about the cost of living, I 100% agree. The only good news I have is that your kid graduated into a small demographic cohort, and that bodes well for their life-long employment prospects (as it did my generation born in the 70's). There will be lots of demand for services as the baby boomers continue retiring and start spending their money. All that capital in their 401k's and older family homes will slowly get converted into cash and spread out. And the stuff they're selling (stocks and homes) will be going on the market.

Isn't most of the S&P500 just speculative fiction anyway?

Alternative facts, eh? You can live in your post-modernist hell-hole where you can insist anything you want is true, but I'm quite happy living in the good old modern era, where people are expected to use logic and reason. If you want to explain what about those statistics are wrong, and what evidence you have that they're wrong, that would be reasonable. The fact that you simply don't like that information isn't a valid argument.

most jobs are getting either automated or offshored

This doesn't make any sense. There are more jobs in the US now than at any time in history and the unemployment rate is near historical all-time lows. But go ahead and live on vibes instead of data, and see how that works out for you.

The conservatives just figure it's people they don't want in America anyway, and the liberals are convinced we're still headed for a Malthusian resource shortage soon, so they want the population to decrease anyway, so nobody actually cares (except the economists and the geo-politics people, but who listens to them?)

Wow, that was... absolutely terrible.