There are some examples of good writing out there (Andor is the most recent example I can think of). But the last few years has been particularly bad. From what I've heard, there was a short-sighted push to not just hire a whole bunch of diverse young writers, but to *get rid of* the old grey haired ones. The logical consequence is that you lose the necessary mentorship to support those young writers, and teach them the craft. Exhibit A is Disney's big flop: "Wish". This was supposed to be a big 100th anniversary movie for Disney, but the animation and writing was so atrocious that people in the industry couldn't believe Disney's famed animation department would release such an amateur movie. Insiders told the same story: management pushed out all the knowledgeable experienced people and replaced them with fresh new blood.

That tax money was at least spent on useful services, such as launching satellites or moving people to and from the ISS, and which costs *much* less than the same services performed under the NASA space shuttle program. You're laughing at them because they sold you services for cheaper? Doesn't make sense to me. I think you're laughing at them because you don't like their weird CEO. Why not just criticize the CEO, and let the engineers do their thing?

Scott Manley's video points out that there's a downcomer from the header tanks that goes right down that side of the ship, and it could be an overpressure event in that downcomer line.

It's not the message. But if you want to put a message in your movie, it needs to be *shown* instead of *told*. Show me something that gets me thinking about it, and let me come to my own conclusion. Of course that's much harder to write than just telling the audience what you want them to think. That's why we need good writers.

I barely remember Charlie's Angels. Wonder Woman was really good, but not the sequel.

I found myself trying to untangle the web of privacy issues around Copilot, and it was just a mess. More than half the time you end up on the privacy policy of a "different copilot". I might want to know what it's doing with my code if I use various license levels of Copilot in Visual Studio, but most of what I can find is about Copilot in Office 365, etc. And on the pages themselves they don't even differentiate different Copilot products! It's quite frustrating, and I wonder if they did that on purpose.

Even a good movie with decent writing can still have pandering that, if not ruining the movie, at least breaks you out of the immersion. The best example I can think of is Avengers Endgame, where, in the middle of the big finale, all the female heroes had to get together for a girl-power moment. I saw that movie in the theatre, and discussing it afterwards even the women in our group said they rolled their eyes at that. It was just so difficult to maintain your "suspension of disbelief" when they do stuff like that.

You are right, which is ironically why we don't want to see blatant pandering in our movies, and is related to why Hollywood is failing.

It worked for Bin Laden... for a few years anyway.

The thing is, we already have advanced refactoring tools. If I want to change a function signature and update it everywhere, that's a solved problem, as least in Visual Studio. It's right 100% of the time and I don't need to check its work in excruciating detail. Why would I ask an LLM to do it?

I think Novo Nordisk investors should be rightly angry with the management who let it lapse. But whatever.

You are correct. When asked about falling birthrates, almost everyone says the problem is financial. But that argument has a big hole through the middle of it: people had far more kids when people were a lot poorer in both absolute or relative terms. What people really need to raise kids is space. If you want to crash the birth rate, pack people together in apartments and high density housing. Apartments are fine for the first few years after you're out of school and building up some savings while working on your career, but then people need space to start a family. All these billionaires complaining about birthrates need to understand that efficient housing is the antithesis of 2.1 children per woman. Efficient housing should be inexpensive, so you can save enough for a down payment on a real house.

Musk would start up a company around this to produce more of his children since he can't find women willing to help him with that anymore.

You would be shocked how easy it would be for him to find women willing to have his babies, even now. Women have high standards, but "lots of money" beats most of them.

I think that a slow decline in population over many generations would be a reasonable goal. I worry more about a sudden decline, especially after such a large group is heading into retirement across the west. We're going to go through a period where there's a lot of elderly people who need care, and that's going to suck up resources, which leaves less resources for everyone else, and that naturally leads to a drop in standard of living. There's a huge difference between slow or even flat growth, vs. a declining economy. Human psychology reacts very violently to any perceived decline. That's why leaders are always obsessed with constant growth... it keeps people content. Decline causes violence and fighting over increasingly scarce resources.

There's a big difference between the Blue Origin flights that just pop you up above the Karman line to technically be in space and experience a ballistic trajectory for a few minutes of weightlessness, vs. going on a trip to the ISS, which is in orbit. The delta-v required to reach orbit is an order of magnitude more. This is definitely real astronaut stuff, especially if he has a job to do once he reaches the ISS.