1) They don't need to turn the core on Earth. 2) Core's don't get straight from slightly enriched uranium to plutonium to highly radioactive in a few seconds. They take time for radioactivity to build up as there are more fission products.

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

But still, the question remains why not have it rubber stamped from the very beginning? Why do you need that apparent stop gap?

This is not true. Because whatever your personal motivations, the mathematical result of you not voting is that you are voting for whatever majority comes out in the end. And because only a minority voted against Donald Trump, a majority either voted directly for him or was ready to accept his election win.

In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes. As for the idea that there's a lot of data centers being built in the Southwest, more are being built or planned to be built in California or on the East Coast. Northern Virgina is the fastest growing region for data centers. See map here https://usdatamap.com/ (This isn't a perfect map. The situation is in flux. And admittedly, this map doesn't show size of them. My impression is that at least some of the ones being built in Arizona are very large so the map here isn't showing everything.)

Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, one has historical water rights to contend with. In many jurisdictions for major water resources, historical users get priority over new users, so farmers and others would get priority before data centers if it came down to that. (Yes, this does mean that in parts of California, golf courses get priority over some other uses.)

This is not remotely why AI systems are being used. ChatGPT is being used daily by hundreds of millions of people https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users. Right now, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world by some independent metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites. These systems are not being used just because some rich people want to not have to pay people or bother with civility. The regular, common people are using them. Understanding where this is going, the impacts it will have, both positive and negative, requires understanding the actual usage, not what one imagines it to be.

The water use for AI seems to be greatly exaggerated. Estimating water use complicated. Different data centers use different amounts of water. Also, systems need more water use for cooling when the weather is hot, so centers may use more water in summer. A data center will use more water when the center is at close to maximum usage, so data centers will use less water if they are handling queries when few users are using the system. Complicating things even further, some people are counting not just data cooling water but also counting the indirect water use from the needed electricity production (fossil fuel and nuclear plants use a fair bit of water for their steam turbines). There's a good article here discussing the difficulties in making water estimates https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 However, all things considered. they estimate that all things considered it takes about 39 milliliters of water per a typical query. Now, for comparison, a high efficiency shower uses about 1.5 gallons of water a minute, which is about 95 ml of water a second. So making a query to an LLM AI system costs less than a second of water. If this estimate is off even by a factor of 3, this is equivalent to taking 1 second longer on a shower. The water use is just not hat high. The total water use is also not very high. If for example you use estimates for how much water is used by golf courses in the US https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf, the largest estimates of AI use put the water use as about a tenth of the water use by golf courses, and golf course water estimates put it at most about 1% of total US water use. So even if one is concerned, just getting rid of some of the gigantic water hungry golf courses in California and Arizona (seriously who the heck puts a golf course in Arizona) would largely offset this. Now, it is true that as data centers grow, more water will likely get used. But as we switch to more wind and solar power, the indirect water use will go down, and data center builders are working hard on reducing water use since it is such a hotbutton issue.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.

These issues are all very minor. Submarines are cramped and people can remain incommunicado for months. Messages to Earth is essentially just means one will be relying on email equivalent. And vacuum packed food can keep for years. Drinking water that is reclaimed from pee isn't fun, but isn't a big deal.

Mechanical problems are a big issue. That's why for example even today submarines carry some replacement parts, and why big surface ships historically had machine shops. Some things will need to be carried. But others may need to be ready to be made on site. That's why there's now a 3D printer on the ISS, to get used to doing exactly this. The gravity issue isn't a large one: on a 90 to 120 day mission to Mars, the level of bodily deteriorating isn't that big. We don't have a lot of data for the exact "how bad is it" but I'd strongly suspect that 3 days in microgravity and then 2 years on the Moon is going to be much worse than 90 days in microgravity and then 2 years on Mars.

A 90 or 120 day trip just isn't that big an issue. People have spent far longer on the ISS and managed fine.

People don't go insane and murder each other nearly as much as they do in movies. Again, look at submarines. The degree to which there are psychological issues is drastically exaggerated.

One of the lessons from the ISS and Mir is how incredibly difficult and expensive in-orbit construction is. Now, we've learned from it but its still a big issue. If you want to send 12 people then the most pessimistic estimates give you around 250 tons of stuff for a 2 year mission. That's only slightly higher than the Starship design, which is capable of being built on Earth, and masses about 5000 tons. Serious on Earth-designs for rockets have been bigger than that. For example Sea Dragon was going to mass 18,000 tons. And you can also do things to reduce the difficulty by launching multiple rockets, say one with the humans and the stuff they need for the first few months, and then another just full of cargo.

AI systems are useful to many people. Most users aren't getting it as an investment engine itself. They are using them to do things like assist with programming, look over drafts of documents, do specific searches and other things. Don't mistake valuable to you personally as the sole form of relevant value.

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

A Mars settlement has the long-term ability of self-sustaining. And that same benefit means that it is much easier than the Moon to make it while not fully self-sustaining, involve a lot less maintenance and resource. One can likely more easily grow food, obtain water, and do many other things. The higher gravity also means that the health issues for humans in a low gravity environment are likely going to be lower.

Ok.. This is a reasonable list in part. The gravity well point is a pretty reasonable one; if one does want to build large structures in space, then having the much lower lunar gravity to start with is reasonable, and mining there doesn't come with the same environmental damage it does on Earth. The telescope point also makes sense, especially for radio telescopes which would be in the lunar shadow. I'm not at all convinced by your last point; it has a pre-existing fixed orbit which severely limits when observations and communications can occur, and that would require much larger systems for Earth observation since the moon is far away, and would add really not good latency for communications due to the moon being about a light second away from the Earth. But your point about resource extraction/processing and telescopes is enough to make a strong case that there's a reasonable goal set here. So, yeah, my statement there was wrong.

Seems like a suboptimal use from a military standpoint. Sure, it works in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but in practice, the travel time from the moon to Earth means it will be a minimum even with very high acceleration of about 6 hours to hit a target on Earth. Much more effective to have satellite based weapons in closer orbits.

Trip time is a valid concern and ability to get home quickly in an emergency is also valid. Another issue with distance is the ability to send emergency supplies is very limited. Radiation issues are not really that bad though (and that seems like more of a problem). The radiation level is high https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11814067/ https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20240009831/downloads/NAS%20BPS%20Simonsen%20v4%20strives.pdf but manageable. A 6 month (comparably long) trip to Mars adds around 300 mSv which is slightly over half a year of time on the ISS. For comparison, if one looks at some of the most intensely naturally radioactive places in the world that people live, like Ramsar, Iran, one gets around 150-250 mSv.

If there's no goal of making an eventually long-term self-sustaining colony, it isn't clear what goals there are here that are a reasonable use of resources on this scale.

From the center of the mass.

Not really relevant. That's a canonical example of a bubble. It is incidentally, an exaggerated bubble in many respects. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-006-9074-4 and https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51311368 (although I find some of the arguments in the second of those not completely persuasive.) But the real key is this isn't relevant: tulips weren't a tech. The point is that tech bubbles can be very different than other bubbles because the underlying good can still turn out (and often does turn out) to have real value and continue to expand. Tulips are like gold or other nice shiny things, (or bitcoin which is like gold or tulips but doesn't even have the advantage of having something to look at) not really the same sort of bubble.

That is exactly what it meant. Regulation (from Latin rex = king) means: per the King's law. Or as Wiktionary has it: Borrowed from Latin regulatus, perfect passive participle of regul (“to direct, rule, regulate”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), from regula (“rule”), from reg (“to keep straight, direct, govern, rule”).