There are sprays and things farmers, ranchers, suburban and rural homeowners are responsible enough to use OUTSIDE ONLY to prevent termites where there is not a exterminator for 100 miles. What they do not do, is mark the the product primary for termites, but the carpenter bee, ant killers and wasp killers take care of the occasional deck post that became the new home for termite flyers before the lighting it on fire method. Those of us who live near freight railroads need to boost the yearly termite and bug protection from the firm mid june and mid august. The active chemicals are identical. If you attempting to stop them after they have been there for a year two, grab a demo saw and sledge hammer, you got some work to do. We do not hand the good stuff to urban people, rather we camouflage the places with the stuff that works as tractor, farm, ranch and horse supplies.

This is how government goes in the age of automation. It should shirk or we are India or an African state or something, where a government job is required for every golden child of every connected family. Open source weather, you ever been to the place where the farmers and ranchers collect mid morning to chew on what is happening. You will know the short term, mid term, until harvest, and yearly and decade long trend in the first 20 minutes. Go to a stock auction dinner gala and drinks, and you will learn the stories of the extremes you long ago forgot. The government forecasts are nice percentage of weather forecasting, but the market is full of private providers, with real money on the table. Your paying an entire group already via your food and utility bill.

You do know there are private weather forecasters who need data for the commodity trading markets in the world. Not everyone with a degree needs a government job, and if a private industry is allowed to flourish, it will deliver better and cheaper than a govt org. If it is going to rain Tuesday, or be abnormally hot is the noise within the model that someone looking at corn production seriously is going to give away as a lost leader. That weather forcasting is now averaging two dozen models and not paying attention to the extremes or the agreement means the amount of staff is reduced. As for sever storms, if you have not noticed their is private group out there chasing and looking for the next live stream daily. For weather at sea, or along the nations highways, private companies do all that already.

The application price for a patent renewal every 10 needs to be higher and scaled to software, chemical formula, drug formula, process and hardware. Dustbin technology lines needs to be free to be reborn in the hacker space free of the threat of the project being gutted by a paten claim by the dead patent collector businesses. If someone does not make or license a product for 10 years, their fee to protect the technology should be in the 10s of millions USD/Euros. Cut the number of active protections to 10k and inactive protections to 20k and the small caps will explode with new products using old discoveries.

We ran this with thought experiment, with economists to physicists in the room back in the 1990s. With a MR. Fusion technology, Something 100 times to 1M times bigger than the international space station on 50 year crise at .05C to is very technically feasible at $10/kg (2025 dollars) to LEO. The enemy of the mission is boredom, generations becoming to dumb to repair and, just plain water loss that allows crops fail in a way the seed bank is useless. The real problem is the communications from earth the next mission blowing past them at .3C about 2/3s of the way into the mission. The first launched interstellar travelers will probably land in a world with a greeting party of fellow earthlings from the 5th or 6th follow-up missions, that was a 10,000 x bigger and had a gravity ring with a dude ranch and cattle. Scifi counters these risks with deep sleeping people, but what super brilliant 20 year old is voluntarily going to sign a life away, their kids and their grandkids up for what could be a stuck in minivan sized living quarters for the next 100 years.

Just send 1M robotic space probes to 5k targets at .1C and tell the AI to look for the trash piles and dumpster fires before even bothering sending back a signal burst. My expectation is all civilizations float to a common mean of not my problem for this generation.

Lets say we get a signal warning us about the Borg the same way as presented in Contact. Assume full technical specs for whatever to save your race from being assimilated, with the added benefit of a compact risk free fusion powerplant and replicators to solve world hunger, and with clear warning that the Borgs estimated aria vial date of 2350. 20 decades to prepare effectively. At this point there would be supporters of the BORG looking for attention from the cameras on every high end school campus across the nation. The Luddites would be heard from. The anti science listen to the lawyer quasi science people would be out in force, as we cannot just be given a gift, someone has to profit from it.

To the people paying the bills, professional or just barely works this quarter does not matter. The goal is to receive payment, everything else is a cost center in the way of getting payment.

Household commercial rates do support the grid more than commercial rates, but commercial enterprises pay up front for substations and additional capacity, while households finance it over infinity ran by not so saucerful corporate creatures who landed a utility job. Rural customers do pay more to connect to the grid, and tend to be low cost until the storm blows through. As the residential customer goes away with rooftop solar and cheap storage, its the poor renters in multifamily that are going to be paying 6%+ of their incomes just to keep the lights on, that 50% of that cost is a failed green effort by the ALGORE those urban lefty leaders will forget. 40 years plus of nuclear industry support, I can jump and down and say, TOLD you SO, baseline power expansion is the only true long lasting expansion of the grid. Everything else is a gift to the vendors to your local utility company.

This is yet another cheap Content Distribution Network for NASA, that also shows the way for any other publicly funded stream. YOUTUBE, NETFLIX has made investments to get storage and real time multicasting (in broadcast TV terms) into you internet providers headend, where you are paying the freight for packets to your unicast home endpoint. If the department of education survives, perhaps this is something they can partner with, and have rich(media) public school curriculum available for snow days nation and state wide. There is no reason all lectures have to be delivered locally is what has been discovered over the past 5 years, lets attempt to use it.

And it could be economic peak tax strategy from Google - Take a 200 billion dollar loss today, get the green cred, and never pay taxes again with the deferred loss.

Since I was in middle school the lack of investment in commercial Fusion has always been the complaint why we do not get beyond 40 years away.

Here is the investment, so burn 10 billion on Fusion boondoggle, and recognize the problem spend 190 Billion on 3 to 10 fission power plants with the old school known product vendors with the same rated capacity and zero technology risk. Same amount of power, lower risk, and send the waste to Yucca. Throw another 10 billion at a solar project, and 20 billion at storage and shut up the greens. Pretend solar is the lead, while baseline fission is the cheaper than storage solution but the costs "just got away from us".

More like saying locomotive manufactures know about a simular velocity transportation method, so lets dump 80% of public funding into Baldwin Locomotive Works and ask for something that moves people and does not need tracks.

Boeing and the 3 or 4 Turbine Manufactures can marginally make a product that looks and performs like every other one for the last 50 years that does not regularly kill the kids going to Disney. That takes a remarkable amount of specialized invenstment that may have a tiny relationship to spaceflight, but in reality Boeing is the company that invoices for a collection of subcontractors that form a plane from parts from across the globe.

SpaceX is building a supply chain for rockets in the same way Boeing is a supply chain for flying rail cars. It is going to take 50 years before it no longer a bespoke parts creation effort, into a invoicing method of a collection of reliable parts.

Economy car vs a 1960s skyscraper in a race across the nation. Perhaps a asteroid could hit Gotham, and send the skyscraper fragments across the face of the planet, and sort of redefine race, but it is very unlikely anyone would call that a win.

You make the earth a bit warmer, create clouds, and a good portion of the band your asking about never reaches the surface into the @thesurface budget, it also does not go to space until the clouds dissipate. Clouds cool during the day, Retain heat under a deck during the Night. But eventually, you get a clear night and the surface radiates IR to a few kelvin of space.

The long term carbon measurement has been proxied, has the long term cloud population and transparency. My bet is more temp, higher cloud top rejection of heat to space or some methane gas release over the last million years.

The hard sciences use to be the items that took the cuts first, with the spike being a big hole in Texas and a shuttle flying about 1/5 the pace that was expected. now its the fluffy sciences who have been on a 40 year run of non repeatable results across all the departments that are not directly STEAM that are taking cuts and crying is amazing. The things that once were hard, inventorying galaxies, supernova hunting, processing the spray of 100,000,000 collisions per second, and mapping and storing DNA sequences is trivial amounts of compute and storage companied to the mass of marketing and streaming video for much less serious things.