Plenty of high end cars depreciate at incredible rates. You can buy a Mercedes S63 and it loses like $12k a year in value.

Conversely people are thinking gasoline isn't ever coming back down in price. I always figured it would be more patriotic to NOT send more money to hostile middle eastern countries.

And probably bitching the entire time when they see a tank of gas costs over $150.

Your intrepretation leaves a lot to be desired. The main issue is you do not understand my argument at all.

I am not objecting to the stuff sold, I object to their harvesting procedures. In other words, this is not matter of their agenda. This is instead a matter of harm done in creating the stuff they sell.

In the chemical industry there are rules and regulations about disposing of pollution. In Animal Husbandry there are rules and regulations about humane slaughter and how you deal with sick animals. In the laundry industry there are laws about the disposal of the toxic chemicals used to clean clothing.

Here they are collecting private information and we are objecting to the methods they use to collect that information. This is VERY different from objecting to their agenda. I do not care if they lie about everything.

Instead, I object to the massive harm caused not by what they say, but how they collect their product. I insist that we find a way to prevent them doing that harm not to the people that pay for their services, but instead to the people they consider to be their animal herd.

This is not about free speech - they can say anything they want to.

What they cannot do is harm the people (adult or children) that are NOT their customers but instead their product. You cannot treat people as a crop. Not even if they are foolish enough to agree to it. Not if they are adults, not if they are children, not if they are senior citizens.

The people that signup to Facebook, Instagram, etc are NOT customers and are NOT media consumers. They are the steak that is chopped up and served to the advertisers.

As such, we have the right to demand that the steak be treated well before they are served.

Right now, their are no regulations about how the companies treat their product. We need to create those regulations, not regulations about what these social media agenda may be.

There are a lot of AI driven scientific advancements. But they are not described as AI driven or have been downplayed.

The current increase in AI was caused in part because of the success that DeepMind had in protein folding. Before Google bought them out, DeepMind did real scientific work. It was so very very good at it, the DeepMind people got a Nobel Prize for their work.

https://www.nature.com/article...

Congratulations, you have successfully defined PLUTOCRACTIC ECONOMICS and mistaken it for Capitalism.

Capitalism is NOT about making money. It is a clearly defined economic system designed by Adam Smith. Read The Wealth of Nations. The Free Market is a key part of capitalism. Without it you get the horror show that you have described and no sane person that was not incredibly wealthy would accept it. You have been tricked by anti-capitalist propaganda.

I am specifically trying to correct the ignorant view that you professed.

Capitalism works and works better than communism. It only does so because of the free market that prevents the abuses that you think are part of capitalism. They are not.

If capitalism worked the way you think it did, there would be no non-profit organizations. There would be no charity. There would be no Medicare, Medicaid.

There would also be mercenary armies rather than a National military. There would be security guards instead of police. There would be private federal prisons rather than federal prisons (Note, in the US there are private state prisons, but no private federal ones).

Capitalism is often maligned by people that hate it - usually while they claim to be capitalists.

The fact they had to make those rules is proof they USED to do it, and ALSO means the culture that created those rules still exist. Hoesik was/is a SYMPTOM of the problem, not the problem by itself.

Your description of the women is also true of 90% of western cultures. Women in the US, Europe, Australia are also forced to choose. But these other countries do NOT have anywhere near as bad a problem with population. As such it is incredibly foolish to believe it is the real cause.

You listed contributory factors not the most significant cause.

My definition of an AI is one that initiates rather than responds. There is a huge difference between being asked to do X and then going on to do a whole bunch of steps to achieve X and deciding to do X without any input designed to trigger X.

The issue is their monetization strategy - total information based advertising. It requires maximum 'engangement' and maximum coverage.

If you outlaw that system, then they will stop being so very very evil.

Set it up so they can charge a monthly fee and are forbidden from engaging in any advertising more targeted than by location or saving any information except related to their monthly payments. They could still put up ads, just not let people purchase ads for pregnant women under the age of 20.

This will force them to treat their users as customers rather than the product. Suddenly their behavior would change from pushing conspiracies to pushing and helping pedophiles to instead being respectable social media companies (which do not exist today).

The current corporations will either die or totally change.

Timing *chains* are not universal, but they do help. Timing belts are quite common. Headgaskets still go and are still a massive labor cost. Within the last couple of years I've had to pay for timing belt change, a new radiator, new hoses due to leaks, a new evap canister, a new alternator. This is on a 2015. I'm told I'm "lucky" the turbo hasn't keeled over on me as this model is notorious for turbo issues. My colleague has had to pay for *two* headgaskets on a 2017 in the last few years. These aren't "solved" problems because it's pretty fundamental physics. Some things are more solved, e.g. I would have had to pay money probably for power steering problems, but the switch to electric power steering pumps greatly helps.

Because it's preventative maintenance and if you have one, you are expected to change it every 100,000 miles. Since we have interference engines, you don't want to push your luck since a failed timing belt will ruin the engine.

SMRs that utilize 1950's designs and require intense operational oversight and maintenance could never be economical. SMRs that use better, safer designs that can safely operate with no active operational oversight and little or no maintenance, which can function without intervention and without refueling for 20-30 years, then be inexpensively disposed-of and replaced, and which can be manufactured in large quantities to bring the unit cost down, promise to be very economical.

Will the new designs actually achieve all of those goals? On paper it looks good. Whether that theory will translate into practice is something that can only be discovered by trying.

The risks are a lot smaller than you think they are, because of new reactor design. Nearly all of the nuclear reactors in the world are still using a design that's 70 years old, that requires active cooling and doesn't fail safely. We have much better designs now, at least on paper, designs that simply can't melt down, whose failure mode is to simply stop. But no one builds these new designs on industrial scale because they're unproven, and there hasn't been much funding for doing all of the engineering and research needed to develop them into fully-functioning designs that can be.

I'm skeptical that small reactors are really the best way to actually deploy nuclear power on a large scale, because of security concerns, but starting small is the best way to validate and refine new designs. And modularity is clearly a good strategy for making deployments of varying sizes cost-effective. If you can develop a cost-effective module that can be manufactured in large numbers, you can build large plants by clustering them.

The new designs shouldn't actually need much operational oversight -- if something goes operationally wrong, they just stop functioning -- but they'll still have highly radioactive cores which, if extracted, could be pretty terrible weapons. Not to make nuclear bombs, but to greatly enhance the damage done by conventional explosives, by adding radiation hazards that linger for years. So, security will remain an important consideration, and the SMRs should only be deployed where security can be assured, which will in practice mean that most are deployed in large clusters.

This all assumes that the safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the new designs proves out, of course. The only way to find out whether that will be the case is to try.

First, both Zvezda and ICM have propulsion. That was the entire purpose of those modules. So I *think* that such a mission could at least ostensibly involve the old Russian module giving the rest of the Russian segment a small push with its thrusters, followed by a push back the other way to stop the motion away from ISS, followed by undocking, followed by Zvezda doing a deorbit burn to pull it downwards and away from ISS, followed by ICM doing the same basic set of maneuvers in reverse.

Second, even if that is determined to be too stressful on the interconnections between modules, the ISS has Canadarm2 permanently attached, which is what was used for most of ISS construction. As far as I know, the shuttle's arm (Canadarm) just moved each piece or module out of the Shuttle's bay and handed it off to the ISS arm, which put them in place. Note that Zvezda wasn't brought up by the shuttle, and nothing would necessarily require a self-propelled module like ICM to be launched in a shuttle, either. Even when fully fueled, it is well within the weight capacity for a Falcon 9 in its reusable configuration. It's slightly lighter than an fueled crew Dragon capsule. They would probably need to give it some sort of protective shell or something, but it seems like it should be a pretty straightforward lift.

It's probably worth noting that apparently ICM was never fully completed, and it could take as much as 2.5 years to finish it, but it is still in storage at last check. And apparently others have proposed a similar solution for keeping ISS operational without Zvezda, so this isn't an entirely crazy idea. :-)

For a moment, I read that as "supercriticality" and was more than a bit concerned. :-D

But seriously, that's great — both that it successfully reached that point and that it did so on the first try.

This was freakin' genius. Not only did they hide a secret communication system inside a military radio system, but there is more. The US graciously 'gave' permission for civilian use of the previously military only technology, allowing it to be spread throughout the world.

This way their agents could openly use the 'civilian' equipment to receive encrypted military information.

There is some genius American out there that for decades has been unable to brag. Maybe they can give him a medal now.