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.

Seems like Zvezda should just be scrapped. Launch the ICM that NASA built in case Zvezda wasn't ready; presumably it is still sitting in a NASA warehouse somewhere. Then jettison Zvezda and connect the other Russian modules wherever you can fit them.

Sheesh. Wasn't the total failure of Stargate Universe enough to demonstrate why this is a terrible idea?

That's one of the things that made Stargate work. Even the characters that weren't the most highly educated were still by and large intelligent, or at least capable of logical thinking.

There are a few of episodes where characters were genuinely stupid — not just uneducated, but failing to listen to logic outright. Those episodes were sometimes a bit cringe, but they were also rare. And none of those episodes were written that way just to add artificial drama to make people feel things (ugh), but rather invariably ended up in a teachable moment demonstrating the folly of willful ignorance and not using your head.

You mean like the first episode of season 1?

It's bizarre that the various streaming services don't just pick up the director's cut of Children of the Gods and make that the default first episode, and serve up the original one as a separate "show" so that they don't have to have the "nudity" caption on every episode all the way through season 10.

SG-1 poked fun at the concept of a younger, edgier version in season 10... and then three years later, the studio actually did it. I believe the word is "harbinger".

Anthropic urges everybody else to pause so they can get their code bloat under control.

Engineers who suddenly produce 8x more code are almost certainly not doing it by writing clean, efficient code. That would mean that somehow it takes less than an eighth as long to explain to the AI what you want to do AND review that code. And for non-trivial code, adequate code review alone can take 5 to 10% of the time it would take to write the code from scratch. So that would have to mean that engineers are not spending any time telling AI what to do. That or AI is reducing the amount of time they waste in meetings. (That was a joke! Ha ha! Fat chance!)

And that doesn't even factor in the amount of time spent figuring out whether it's the right way to approach the problem in general, which often exceeds the amount of time spent on the code. So even if you could reduce the time spent working on the code to absolutely zero, including review time, it should not be physically possible to exceed a 2x increase in code generated.

And there aren't 32+ hours in the day, so we can also exclude the possibility that they are working 4x as long.

So from this, we can safely assume that either their code quality is an abomination or their architecture is, and possibly both. If that's not true, then it's nothing short of a miracle.

The grid does care. You're charging for two or three hours, and then not using that power for 21 or 22 hours. That means generating capacity has to be brought online to cover that load. And when everybody does this all at once when they get home from work, it creates a significant increase in generating capacity at a time when solar is unavailable, etc., and because that load is brief, you don't get to use clean base load power, and end up spinning up peaker plants (likely natural gas).

I'm kind of surprised by that. Unless I'm misremembering, Tesla's high-current charger used multiple modules in parallel for efficiency reasons — I think two modules for the standard charger and three for the high-power charger. Their superchargers do the same thing for the same reason. I kind of assumed everybody did it that way.

No, $3k is the off-the-shelf retail cost for a basic 22 kW HVDC charger. Cheap Chinese hardware for 22 kW HVDC from Alibaba starts at only about $1,000.

Also, I think you're massively overestimating the labor costs here. Swapping one 3-phase charger with another in place means turning off a breaker, removing several wire nuts, unbolting the old one from the wall, figuring out how to fasten the new one to the wall, and putting the wire nuts back on. It involves nearly zero actual wiring work. It should cost only slightly more than replacing a bad receptacle ($80 to $200). If installation is over $500, I'd be absolutely shocked.

So for a basic version, probably more like $1,500 installed. Getting one with better firmware that can do load balancing would cost more, but not an order of magnitude more.

Let me be more precise in my wording. Did Congress explicitly authorize spending to pay for the dismantling of monitoring stations? What bill provided that authorization for this initiative that was just announced two days ago, with the House not even in session this week?

Government money is not the President's personal piggy bank. He doesn't have any right to arbitrarily redirect funding from one agency purpose to another, because each of those purposes is a line item in the federal budget, and redirecting funds without congressional approval is potentially misappropriation of public funds, which is a felony.

The first season of the BSG reboot was tedious, and reached the point of me saying that I don't care about these people, because the utter stupidity and short-sightedness of some major characters was just too much to handle. It got better after that. *And* it felt like it was just a long string of figuring out ways to survive the situation.

SG-1 and Atlantis did not fall into either trap. Almost without exception, the characters were smart, and the ones who behaved in stupid and/or power-hungry ways were inevitably shamed, and eventually learned from it or (in the case of enemies) died.

SG-1 had the most diverse pile of unrelated episodes in Season 1, and after their introduction in the first three episodes, they barely even touched the Goa'uld again for most of that season (key part of episode 14, plus minor bit parts in episodes 8, 16, 20, and finally becoming front and center again in 22). There was not really even an arc in that season.

Atlantis was similar. Most of the season was exploring their new part of the universe.

The out-of-control bit in Universe just turned every episode into a repeat of the same one: Go to a planet, something goes wrong, "Oh, no, they're not going to get back," somehow they figure out a way to get back. They didn't get control until somewhere around episode 30 (halfway through season 2), which was when the show started to not suck, but by that point, they had lost more than 53% of their initial audience.

I'm not generalizing at all. There are real grid stability reasons why you don't want someone drawing that much power to charge their car fully in four hours. If your use case requires fast charging, you need to have grid batteries to spread your impact out over time, or else you are causing significant problems. A few people doing that isn't a big deal, but if everybody did it, it would be apocalyptic. That's why the target for automakers should be fully charging the car overnight, or 10+ hours.

Additionally:

• You're dragging around the extra weight of additional/larger charger hardware, which wastes energy.
• Everyone who doesn't have the three-phase connection and high-amperage breaker setup will be using the charging hardware at a fraction of its rated capacity, which is likely to be less efficient.
• Compared with a dedicated HVDC charger, you're drawing power at a higher amperage and lower voltage for a longer distance, which wastes even more energy.
• It probably involves an entire additional charging board, which means one more set of components that can fail and require service.
• Most of the the locations where you would charge likely do not support such fast AC charging speeds, so chances are you'll mostly benefit from it at home anyway.

And while the folks who take advantage of that extra charging speed might save a little money in the manufacturing cost compared with installing an external HVDC charger, it still adds up to far less than the amount of money wasted on bigger hardware by everyone who got that hardware but doesn't need it.

It's not even close to being a reasonable engineering tradeoff, IMO. You're far better off focusing on making HVDC chargers cheap. And for the amount of effort required to keep the unnecessarily complex hardware going long-term (manufacturing replacement parts, stocking them, etc.), the manufacturer would probably be better off just buying HVDC chargers wholesale and giving them to customers who complain. A HVDC charger with 22kW output costs only about $3k.

Trump is the one who tore up the deal that put inspectors into Iran to ensure that they didn't get nukes. If Iran gets nukes, it is because Trump gave them nukes on a silver platter in a misguided effort to "own the libs" who put that agreement in place.

And the things he has done regarding oil — disrupting Venezuela, creating a situation where Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz, massively inflating the cost of oil, eliminating world sanctions on buying oil from Iran, etc. — are also effectively giving massive aid to a state sponsor of terrorism.

It's hard not to see the direct consequences of many of his actions as commander in chief as anything less than supporting terrorism. The only question is whether it was done intentionally or merely because of utter incompetence.

What I don't understand is this: Did Congress authorize this spending? No? Where's the budget for this coming from, and why has no one already filed a permanent restraining order to prevent the illegal misappropriation of federal funds?

I ask because to do this, they have to steal — yes, steal — money away from something Congress DID authorize. And this isn't a tiny amount of money we're talking about here. There are probably some other major efforts that Congress authorized that won't happen because our idiot-in-chief is stealing the funds to do something else.

Customers who care should just sue. This is pretty strictly a civil issue, and the government isn't going to bother to intervene. It's up to the customers to force them to reverse that.

That said, 22 kW AC charging is absurd. It requires 32A of three-phase power or 90A of a single phase 240V, which means a three-phase 40A circuit or a single-phase 120A circuit. That's larger than the total capacity of my entire breaker box at my house. In a sane universe, the demand charges alone would be enough to discourage anyone from charging at more than about a third of that rate, because unless you just happen to be producing solar power locally at the time, it's horrible on the electric grid.

Even Tesla never went much above about 17 kW for home charging, and they stopped doing that years ago because there was approximately zero demand or real-world use of higher charge rates.

So while technically speaking, they are absolutely doing something wrong, they're still right that the number of people who legitimately care is likely to be within the margin of error of being zero.