but...Gödel says all intelligence incorporates flaws.

In response to your question 'Did nobody do the math at FCC?", the summary says that FCC specifically pointed out that their authority was only over the RF communications of the satellite. They had no authority to analyze or critique reflected light or to calculate whether it's a useful investment. FCC is the communications commission.

Second, obviously the final product, if it were to be implemented, would not be a single 60 foot mirror. Pointing out that a single small mirror produces an amount of power that's not economically useful is irrelevant, since producing an amount of power that's economically useful is not the point of the test. Deployment, tracking and pointing control of a flexible structure-- these are non-trivial, and would benefit from a test in orbit.

Got it. You mean "I heard it on the internet somewhere, not sure where."

Yes, that's what I am coming to understand.

In my experience, when a person asks for a citation to some purported fact somebody posted and the guy posting it responds "Google it", this almost always means "I don't have a citation", which usually translates "I heard it on the internet somewhere, not sure where."

Oddly, I was prepared to believe you right up to the moment you posted this.

Then all the average humans are out of work. And there probably isn't enough need for above-average intelligence humans to keep all that many working.

The economy, as we currently run it, ceases to function when unemployment exceeds 50%.

It was 57 years from Eliza to ChatGPT.

Logically the opposite: as soon as cash is gone, taxes are going to decrease because economic activity can't avoid paying taxes by escaping into the grey zone so easily, and hence the people formerly dodging taxes will start paying their share.

Except it doesn't. Only a tiny fraction of the cops doing such stalking get caught.

I hate the headline, which is crediting Relativity Space to Eric Schmidt.

Eric Schmidt did not found the company, nor did he contribute to the technology, He was just the billionaire who stepped in with funding. Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone should be credited with founding the company and developing the technology.

But we Americans treat billionaires as superhuman rock stars; we don't care who does the actual innovation, we just let the billionaires take credit (and, yes, that applies to Elon Musk as well. From the press, you'd think he's the only person who invented anything or built anything or does anything at Tesla or SpaceX.)

Ah, now you're nit-picking wording to pretend that you don't know what the word socialism means.

Bye

It is a problem. You make up a meaning that has a definition that's bizarrely twisted to make your opinions written into the definition. As I said:

Looks like a correct number; why do you think it's a lie?

https://fortune.com/2026/05/11...

Except this isn't a delay from April to June. This is a delay of well over a year, and maybe nearly two years.

That's a bad problem: people like you make up their own definitions of the words, then make glib assertions based on the assumption that everybody else means the same thing, and as a result people talk right past each other.

Not just you. A lot of people--mostly Gen-X and younger-- these days think the word 'socialism' means "the government doing things that benefit the people instead of corporations". That's not what it means.

Yes, that's another bad problem: people like you making their own definitions of words so that their opinions are correct by definition.

I would say that "doing some robbery, taking the ill gotten gains, and using those gains to bribe voters with inducements and largely debt-based goodies to get the incumbents reelected" is the definition of crony capitalism.

I have no fantasy of a worker utopia. I think that socialism had fatal flaws and doesn't work. But if we fail to use words that are understood with the same meaning, we can't even discuss the flaws. (Unrestricted capitalism also has flaws, which turn out to be well known to any actual economists (and is why real economic systems have restrictions). Believing that there are two and only two choices, and no other possible choices, is another bad problem.)

I'd like it if more people would push for approval voting. Basically, approval voting means simple deleting the part where you can vote for only one candidate, and let you vote for all the candidates you like ("approve of") and not for all the ones you don't like ("don't approve").

Seems like a trivial change, but it would be completely simple to implement, with no changes whatsoever to the way we count ballots (only turning off the software check, "throw this ballot out if more than one candidate is marked). And it works much much better in more-than-two candidate elections. It selects the candidate that the most people like.

Notably, it easily allows negative voting: a vote saying "anybody but X." So, if the candate are Abe Average, Wyatt Whatever, Bobbi Bland, and Adolph Hitler, you can vote for everybody up against Hitler, rather than picking one.

https://ballotpedia.org/Approv...