Seriously. I mean... $500, or *maybe* $600 for the Pro; that'd be fine. More than that, and I may as well just get back up to speed on PC gaming gear and build another PC of Theseus. Then... congrats Sony, that's better than a decade of buying NO consoles.

Then again, maybe it's just time for the gaming pendulum to swing hard back towards real computers anyway. It's been stuck on firmly on the console side for quite a while, and certian genres have definitely suffered for it.

> Trump's tariff war

Don't forget trump's ACTUAL war. I've had six figures scooped out of my retirement accounts and burned to ash since he decided to do at least ONE traditionally republican thing and launch us into yet another middle-eastern quagmire. The rest of the country is seeing the gas prices they used to attack California for. And it seems that the media is just now finally waking up to the fact that there's a shit ton of OTHER things that we make out of petroleum that are about to start to skyrocket.

We've come full circle to the tech community deciding what's proper for our neighbors. ChatGPT is free to decide not to include adult stuff, and celebrity/CSAM should totally be illegal, but "The proper use of AI is as a tool, not as a friend, lover or therapist, and especially not as an addiction" is how we get the government regulating how adults use the tools at their disposal.

Aside from CSAM and defamatory stuff we don't have the right to decide what's proper for someone else.

Eventually peer to peer training (Petals using Hivemind, etc.) will lead the way.

At least they didn't do a Tumblr and have the feature put in, then wait for millions to be using it... and then yank the rug out from under them.

We saw how that ended.

Fortunately there are alternatives.

Well, this WAS the Apple of: "1984 won't be like 1984" and earlier refusals to bend over and backdoor the iPhone so that the FBI could snoop at will.

So, for the fact that they've dona a 180 to whore themselves out to MAGA and become big brother and do the bidding of dear leader and his henchmen... yes, they absolutely should be scorned and condemned.

No. Actually he wasn't political from day one on the Late Show. At first he shed his Colbert Report persona and tried to do the typical "make nice with everyone" late night host a la Carson, Leno, and Letterman. Thing is, times were changing, audiences were expecting and demanding sharper wit, speaking truth to power, and takedowns of the high and mighty. And ratings started to slide. So Colbert adapted, brought elements of the Report back, but more overt and open than the playing th coy in-character persona from the old days. And ratings recovered. That worked swimmingly until COVID and malevolent mega media manipulation blew ups the entire television landscape and installed their minion to purge CBS of anyone who's not a true believer.

In his personal life, he's catholic and raising his kids as such, conservatively but not to be bigots. He's also a HUGE nerd and MASSIVE Tolkien and LOTR fan. He'll do fine as a writer on a LOTR movie. He havs the chops for it, and he "gets" the material. I knew the MAGAts were delusional from the outset for thinking they could silence him and that he'd bounce back. Though I must admit it's kind of a bummer he'll be holed up in a writers' room instead of back on air immediately on another platform.

Well then, I guess it's a good thing that the sort of big brother wannabe thugs who would demand your passwords under the guise of law would absolutely respect actual correctness and are not in any way the sort who would just toss you in the gulag for your stunt or just beat you with a pipe until you talk in the first place.

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

It's worth noting that Nikola wasn't his first scam, either.

YOO-HOO

He's also a sleasebag who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by three women (and in general being a sex pest to many more). When a former friend (Jonny Robb) threatened to out him over it (it had been gnawing at him for a long time, and he was friends with some of the girls), Milton entrapped him (deliberately switching the topic to money, baiting him into asking for money to stay quiet, knowing that he was poor), then when he got Robb to ask for money, reported him into the police for extortion. Robb - his old friend - committed suicide after being released on bail. Milton rained largesse on local politicians, including the Attorney General's campaign. Milton was never investigated by the AG's office for sexual assault, while they arrested Robb immediately just on Milton's word.

I've talked with people online who knew Jonny Robb, and the universal answer was that he was the kindest person you'd ever meet. He had a hard life, struggled through overcoming depression and addiction, and had a lot of sympathy for others who were struggling as a result. I saw a podcast once where he was a guest, and I remember one of the topics was about a recent event where he was at a fast food restaurant, and there was a homeless lady, clearly mentally ill / schizophrenic, who was in general freaking out the guests and the staff, who didn't know what to do with her, and were probably minutes from calling the police. Robb orders for both himself and for her and sits down and eats with her, chats with her. She's having a great time, having not gotten attention like this in ages, starts joking that he's her boyfriend, etc. After they eat, he walks her out, much to the relief of the guests and staff, heads to a store and buys her a new sleeping bag and stuff. And she looks both simultaneously happy with her nice new stuff, but also terrified, and he suddenly realizes, oh shit, other homeless people are just going to steal this off her. And during the interview, he looked almost like he was going to cry when he said that.

Anyway, he's dead now.

I literally have a BA in horticulture. Regolith is NOT a good choice for hydroponics. Period. Stop trying to pretend it is one. Also, regolith has nothing to do with "shales", and it's not clay minerals either.

The closest thing to industrial hydroponics with it is using it to make rock wool (if the elemental composition is correct) - but you can also use, you know, rocks for that. Rock wool (basalt fibre) is basically air blown / centrifugally-flung lava (artificial Pele's hair) that has been spun. Rock wool actually *is* a common and effective cultivation medium for hydroponic (with the caveat that its reusability is limited, and on Earth we usually don't bother). The problem is that rock wool isn't just basalt. It's basalt + limestone/slag + binders (sprayed into the air to collect and bind the fibres) + other chemical treatments. You may be able to substitute anorthosite or similar for the limestone, but the binders aren't available, so you'd have to come up with new techniques to collect the fibres and make a "knitted" or "sintered" rock wool. As for other chemicals, the full composition of horticultural rock wool usually isn't disclosed (each manufacturer has their own optimal formula to be an ideal substrate), but you generally have to treat the fibres in various ways (as an example, for insulation, which has very different demands, they treat the rock wool with mineral oil)

The statement about bassalt fiber is not meant to be taken in a horticultural context.

"Tell me you've never been in a commercial-scale greenhouse without telling me you've never been in a commercial-scale greenhouse"

Those greenhouse tomatoes that you buy at a store out of season? They're probably grown like this. A TL/DR for you: you start out with rock wool (basalt fibre) plug trays to start your seedlings. You then put one seedling plug each into larger rectangular blocks of rock wool that have holes in the centre for them. When they're ready, you put them into a bagged slab of rock wool (usually a couple per bag), and that's what you produce from. You only maintain a small number of vines from each, regularly pruning off all internode suckers, as you have a fixed space between plants and a fixed amount of root volume so can't have them be expanding outwards (the fixed amount of root volume also means that you have to prune lower leaves to maintain balance). Your vines keep getting longer (and need to to produce more flower/fruit clusters), so when they get to the top of your wire, you incrementally slide them over until they're growing more and more horizontally. When you can no longer slide them over any more or they simply get too long, you remove the plants, toss the rock wool slabs, and start over.

And lastly, if your plan to deal with perchlorates from water is *literally splitting the water with electrolysis*, then you better stop celebrating the existence of this poison on Mars (one poison among many, it should be added - arsenic is higher than on Earth, chromium is commonly hexavalent, etc).

I've never read it. Does he have three robot daughters?