Slippery slope fallacy, zzzzz. Plenty of stable nations are socialist-leaning.

It's good for your system and forces you to move every 90 minutes or so. Just not before long meetings.

Canada and Northern Europe are doing just fine. Better mental heath than USA by far.

> This isn't even a bubble.

I'm suggesting the "AI everywhere" is a bubble, space-server-farms is only an extension of it.

> you might prefer Cuba, North Korea or (as of recently) Russia.

Argument-by-extreme-example. They are not even democracies. I'm not suggestion ending democratic rule.

I hope you get the Funny, but on your sig I currently favor Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. R is where their noses are for the orange-nosing cowardice, whereas D is for believing in various stripes of flying elephants, with or without feathers. (There's an old book by Woody Allen from back when he was funny...)

I agree with you, but I had to include the obligatory joke. The word has lost all meaning these days. Children? Graft? Socialism? Federal? Naked? Trust? Slashdot? No meaning anywhere. But let's think of the socialist children!

I've had two of each and I would say that the Oppos have outperformed the Samsungs while costing less. I know someone else who had several Samsungs but then switched to a Pixel of some sort. I could go down the list of problems with Samsung, but there are also problems with Oppo, so I would say it's mostly a matter of degree of satisfaction in this imperfect world. I've owned a bunch of other brands of smartphones over the years with various levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Two Taiwan brands come to mind as near the top for dissatisfaction. There are still improvements, but I feel like most of the big improvements were a long time ago...

In terms of brand-linked satisfaction, I think I would actually have given the prize to Huawei before they were disqualified... I bought about ten Huawei devices of various sorts over the years, but I'm down to one last survivor and do not anticipate searching for or buying another Huawei in the future. In point of fact, I bought this last Huawei in a kind of fire sale and in hopes of higher compatibility with old data.

Boycotts are \the trick that does not work in this case, though you may not even have the option to boycott any more. Maybe Zuck will have to create shadow profiles for the residual humans who decline to play his game on his turf. How else can he fill in the holes in "the members' profiles" when they refer to people who aren't there in person. As if "in person" still has a meaning?

On the boycott topic, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. The products (books) and services were mostly okay, but I saw what was being done with my personal data and it stank to high heaven and I wanted no part of it. So I stopped using all things Bezos but kept an eye on the development of the new corporate cancer. Can't see that my boycott has hurt Amazon any.

(Maybe I just have to wait longer? My first corporate boycott target was Exxon. Never managed to bankrupt them as I planned so deviously, but it sure feels like Exxon has fallen far from it's glory days. Is an ugly acquisition in Exxon's future? Oh I hope it's Chinese or Brazilian!)

Back to Zuckerland and a sort of disclaimer: My identity on Facebook was assassinated a few years ago. I had already looked at WhatsApp and Instagram and decided not to use them, but I had cured my Facebook problem with a timer. Actually two of them. The first one went off at four minutes and then I had one minute to get off of Facebook before the second one buzzed. That was my daily allotment for the last few years before my Facebook identity was murdered for reasons that Facebook declined to tell me about. I declined to "prove" myself to Facebook's satisfaction, even if that was possible without knowing my hideous crime, but I did exercise the option to download Facebook's dossier on me and I spent a while searching for any reason, but never even found a candidate. I have a theory it was politically motivated, but only Zuck knows. If Zuck has his way "only Zuck knows" may become the law of the land for the entire universe. "Domination!"

Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity -- both of which remain active on Mars -- without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it. "We've had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars,...

But the older that Perseverance and Curiosity get the more engineering baby-sitting they will need. Repurposing the test rover risks shortening their life. Judging the need based on the first half of Mars missions is insufficient. Past 50 people need a doctor much more often. Rovers are similar.

Francis Crick calculated how long it would take for life to evolve from scratch, and concluded it would take longer than the earth has existed. In response, he developed the hypothesis of panspermia

Any such calculation is likely to be off either direction by a factor of about 10 such that the age of the Earth and age of the universe is not different enough to distinguish. And we don't know all the pathways to biogenesis such that estimating the early stages is a fuzzy art.

Panspermia is certainly a realistic possibility, as some microbes have incredible survival abilities.

Note that my early description didn't mention that the chemicals the intermediate-step proto-cells would consume and produce may be partial or full fuel for the subsequent stage(s), perhaps after being altered by the environment a bit. Having to rely on the environment to "adjust" the food supply may be why separate sub-microbes are necessary.

More evidence we need to tax the rich, they have way too much money and are chasing really stupid shit. After you have 20 yachts then #21 doesn't have the same ego kick, so you look for pie-in-sky investments.

Rumor is there's also a bubble in bubble insurance*. Does that mean it will double-pop?

* Or at least bubble hedges

It's not the highest scope in the world, but its forte is mass surveys, not resolution, so it doesn't have to try to compete with Hubble. If it finds something interesting, then another resolution-oriented scope can zoom in.

It's great for finding moving and flashing things, as it allows automated comparisons over time of most the sky. This scope might even find Planet X, although let's not call it Planet X because Elon tainted X things. Call it Planet NoElon.

People seem to think that the first living organism to evolve has to be as complex as the simplest cells we know, but more likely it was much simpler. We just don't have any living examples because such protocells probably can't compete with modern ones. The first life-forms can be slow, inefficient, inaccurate at reproducing, etc. because they had zero competition. Somebody joked "union workers evolved first!"

One interesting theory is that the first living thing(s) were actually a set of complimentary proto-cells where reproduction happened in cycled stages say: A to B to C back to A, because self-replicating is hard to get right in a single step. Each stage may have fed off different chemicals. Eventually they evolved into a single unit.