goku12

I frequently see videos from around the world or hear directly from the teachers I know, that the children currently in schools are averse to and perform badly in reading and writing skills and even basic reasoning skills. It's extremely alarming - in some places, 8th graders are performing at 2nd grade levels! Their attention span is also reported to be very short.

To be honest, I'm a bit skeptical and am waiting for study results on this. The reports are that unbelievable. Of course, this isn't uniform among that population. But the incidence is a bit too frequent for my comfort. I don't remember any other generation complaining so much about the children like the current one. If I were asked to guess the culprits, I would pick social media and AI slop. But again, I'm waiting for a rigorous scientific confirmation.

But if it's true, I am scared to think about the emotional and neurological mess these kids are going to find themselves in.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to include protocols and protocol suites among centralized services. One simple test for this is the question: "How many Xs are there?". For examples, how many email servers, FTP servers or terminal servers are there? Compare that with "How many Facebooks or GitHubs are there?".

Email protocol suite is designed to be federated. FTP is just a file system access protocol. But you could combine it with an inter-server filesystem synchronization protocol/service to make it a distributed federated service. And as for terminal servers,.. well, I don't think centralization makes much sense there. How can you achieve any of these with centralized services?

It really boils down to if the individual cares about freedoms. Some hackers don't care about them, and some normies do. Both of them use centralized and restrictive services. But the former does it by choice, while the latter does it because they don't know any better. But those normies do take an action when they have enough information. How many ordinary people have participated in boycotts and cancelation of subscriptions against corporations in protest of exploitation or for digital detoxification?

It's partially our own failure to be loud enough and get them the information they need.

The Kubernetes Book, by Nigel Poulton. A very detailed and well explained book that is updated every year and you get them all for a one-time purchase.

Build Your Own Lisp, by Daniel Holden. This is an often cited classic with a lot of precious concepts explained in detail. It can be read for free online. But this is an opportunity to reward them for it. (Yes, I do own a purchased copy).

Ansible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling. Already mentioned by the sibling commenter.

There a lot more on my wishlist. All of them are competitively priced at 10 to 15$ each.

Exactly! People seem to believe that this is a problem caused by a handful of individuals at the maximum. If nothing else, dangerous precedents have already been set. The bigger picture is much complicated and scarier!

If this is what you make of the current atmosphere, I'd say that you're severely underestimating it. In fact, the entire US seems to be in denial and sleep walking into a disaster. Everything that has happened so far was predictable at least six months in advance. But people seem to miss it because of the 'that won't happen to us' attitude. I'm not going post alarming warnings anymore. Just study history in detail. Everything happening today is eerily similar to several dark chapters in history - except with the added precision lethality of modern information warfare.

One more thing. Trump isn't your biggest problem. He's just a very visible symptom of a much deeper festering issue. The people who surround him actually far exceed his penchant for preplanned retribution. They follow the same playbook that many foreign leaders employ with him to get their wishes - satisfy his craving for validation.

I buy ebooks straight from publishers like Nostarch and Leanpub. (In fact, I have an older edition of this book). There are a few books that are sold directly by the authors too. All of them DRM-free.

I actively avoid publishers and sellers who don't respect me as a consumer/reader. People need to start demanding better deals, or else we'll end up with monopolies that won't think twice about deleting books in your custody that you purchased from them.

Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.

I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.

Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.

You can watch this video for a detailed history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyI38Vp1PGw

I don't know anything about Sam Altman, and so I cannot endorse the views presented in the video. However, this channel is usually very informative with detailed research and analysis and is usually spot on with their predictions.

One aspect I find curious about this video is that the description matches a lot of the famous SV billionaires. Not all of them, but all the usual suspects. They're all either privileged by birth, or has unusual luck of being at the right place at the right time. They may or may not have some talent, but they never acknowledge their privilege and luck. They all have made some disastrous decisions in the past, but failed upwards due to their privilege. They never mention any of those.

And some among them (this is not necessarily about Altman) exhibit a very curious behavior that's like a movement or cult among them. Once they become rich and famous, they start believing that they're special compared to all the plebs out there. They oppose the social and educational programs that empowered them in the first place. Whenever they talk about 'freedom', they're talking about their freedom to do whatever they want, even to the detriment of the others. They believe that they're divinely gifted with business acumen and therefore should be the decision makers and controllers of large populations and resources (they don't like democracy). They even have clubs and literature based on this idea.

That's an odd headline! It makes it sound like Sandisk is doing something sleazy. Believe me, I'm completely against corporate sleaziness. But this is Sandisk and the other manufacturers just following the demand-supply trends in the market. Sure, it causes RAM famine for everyone from us individuals to Apple. But what is the incentive for those manufacturers to serve this market when they can sell their entire stock exclusively at much higher profit margins? How would they even justify such a move to their shareholders?

This is the manufacturers being unable to absorb the sudden demand hike. Normally, their production capacity should be increased until supply meets demand. But then, how long will the demand last? What will happen when the AI bubble bursts? What exactly is going on on that front?

> Like last time, so far he’s bad mostly for his own country.

How well is that going?

> The Medrano abduction and kirking Iran’s leadership may end up positive actions from a humanitarian view.

Meduro may no longer be in Venezuela, but his entire regime is left intact in place with a puppet leader under the remote control of the so-called 'acting president of Venezuela'. So the local dictator of an authoritarian regime is replaced by a foreign one - a very racist one at that. How is this positive on 'humanitarian grounds'?

In Iran too, Trump's callous rhetoric has riled up the Iranian regime to crack down heavily on the protestors in the name of treason. In the future too, his behavior will only bring more suffering to ordinary Iranians.

Why is it that when it comes to authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, so many people pivot to judgments based on nation and race, instead of being politically consistent?

This is a very valid criticism that can't simply be dismissed by an inappropriate application of the whataboutism argument. I agree that the current Iranian regime is ruthless and has to go. But history has shown that almost all US intervention results in a much worse outcome for the people they 'liberate' (a good example was the polpot regime of Cambodia). And this is due to the fact that any humanitarian crisis is just a pretext for the US to invade, and it hides their true motivations of colonial commercial exploitation of the war torn land. Even the current Iranian regime is a direct result of the US sabotaging a democratic system that existed there for exploiting their oil reserves. What makes you think another intervention is going to end any better?

The US government doesn't care at all about the thousands who were murdered in Iran. Gaza is the best example of that. I was worried that the Trumpian rhetoric about the protestors would put them in more jeopardy by painting them as US backed saboteurs to the regime. And that's exactly what happened. If he cared about them, he would have kept quiet for their safety. But what he actually wants is an excuse to invade, and any rhetoric helps that cause. The US intervention is already causing serious issues. However way I look at it, I see this only making a bad situation much worse.

There is this belief that the US is a benevolent superpower who is forced by the brutality of foreign regimes to intervene on humanitarian grounds. But history says otherwise. I always get a strong push back whenever I suggest this, from those who refuse to judge the situation impartially. See what happened in Venezuela, for example. The only difference now is that the current US regime doesn't care about hiding their true intentions.

And finally, the current US regime complaining about the brutality of a foreign regime is supremely ironic. The Khomeini regime may be much more brutal, but it's only because they got so much time to evolve into one. The Trump regime is however, on a speed run to a full dictatorship. Does anybody have any idea what's happening with the nearly 70K people that ICE rounded up so far? Everyone seem to think that they're in some detention facility for their 'crimes'. And that scares me a lot, because that's what the German civilians thought about the Jews too, until the allied forces overran the concentration camps. Attacking a foreign autocracy to deflect attention from the one at home is just pure moral bankruptcy.

> People are just way to optimistic instead of realistic.

Apathetic is a more appropriate description. This is as optimistic as hoping to not contract lung cancer without ever bothering to quit smoking.

You're correct. I'm just going to add a bit more technical context here. The process of keeping a steady orbit is called 'station keeping'. Similarly, the process of maintaining the correct orientation/alignment is called 'attitude control' (attitude is the technical term for orientation).

Attitude control can be achieved to a finite limit using momentum wheels or reaction wheels. But at some point, it will reach its maximum speed and its control capability saturates. You will need to 'desaturate' the wheels and restore its control capability. One method is to produce a counter torque using special reaction control thrusters (RCT) called 'attitude control thrusters'. That needs propellants. Smaller satellites don't have that luxury. So they exploit Earth's magnetic field by using a 'magnetic torquer' to produce the counter torque against it. That needs only power, not propellants.

I'm not too offended by this answer. We all reach for it before we seriously think about the debugger. But debugging should be treated as a specialist skill that's almost as complex as programming, and just as empowering. There are two ways I can think of right away, in which the mastery of debuggers can enrich us.

The first is that it gives you an unparalleled insight into the real stuff behind the scenes. You'll never stop learning new things about the machine with a debugger. But at the minimum, it will make you a much better programmer. With the newly found context, those convoluted pesky programming guidelines will finally start to make sense.

The second is that print is an option only for a program you have the source code for. A debugger gives you observability and even control over practically any program, even one already in flight or one that's on a different machine altogether. Granted, it's hard to debug a binary program. But in most cases on Linux or BSD, that's only because the source code and the debugging symbols are too large to ship with the software. Most distros and BSDs actually make them available on demand using the debuginfod software. It's a powerful tool in the hands of anyone who wishes to tinker with it. But even without it, Linux gamers are known to ship coredumps to the developers when games crash. Debugging is the doorway to an entirely different world.

Thank you for your kind words! Glad you liked it! It's during instances like this that I wish I really wrote things down and preserved them.

> So you’re correct that, for vaccine proponents, framing this issue properly is key. If you frame it in terms of mandates and dismiss optionality out of hand, it’s a lay-up for right-wing Tik Tok to come back with “they’re more left wing than Sweden.”

I think it's a bit more complex than that. How do you frame an issue properly when a small group of people are out to discredit you based on everything from 'deep state' to 'bible' and even the 'aliens'? And while these people are swayed more by emotions than cold hard data (which is not entirely unusual), you also get to hear some of them say 'I do my own research' to an experienced doctor who's trying calmly and respectfully to change their mind.

Let me contrast that with my place. My place isn't as developed as the US or Sweden. But people were keen to oblige when a lock down was declared for covid, despite personal losses, because the rich people didn't get richer on the backs of their misery. The covid vaccines we had here weren't as effective as the mRNA vaccines of the west, and also had the rare blood clotting problem (VITT) that killed a few people. Despite that, people were thronging the health centers when the vaccine came out and the critical mass was soon reached to lift the lock down. People knew the dangers and were making educated tradeoffs. They were online talking about the droplet transmission mode, R0, myocarditis, etc. Doctors didn't have to plead like in the US. We don't have childhood vaccine mandates because parents make it a point to ask the pediatrician about it and the associated risks and do it diligently. We grew up learning the horrors of smallpox, polio, Hansen's disease, tuberculosis, etc. Nobody is keen to take them on again.

The real problem in the US isn't right wing or left wing politics. It's the anti-intellectual culture. Honestly, I haven't seen as much skepticism against the sciences anywhere else. Sure, people sometimes say stupid stuff in underdeveloped places. But rarely does anybody reject science outright like in the US. And very often, the US government is squarely responsible for it. How many times has the government taken the sides of the big industries and hung the people out to dry? (Big oil, big tobacco, telecom, big pharma, big agriculture, chemical producers, etc.) Wasn't there a case where a racial minority of a city was intentionally infected with syphilis and denied treatment for a sick experiment? This is how people turn anti-government, anti-establishment and even anarchist. And then the people find it difficult to believe anything the government stands for - including the genuine pro-public science institutions like the CDC or even NASA - to a level that some even have difficulty believing that the Earth is spherical (roughly). Heck! I was once asked by an American tourist if I believe that the US sent men to the moon, when I was a project engineer for a mid-heavy lift launcher!

You can see this effect even outside the US. The US used a vaccination drive in Abottabad, Pakistan to collect information about Osama Bin Laden. I'm not here to support the terrorist. But that action led to the people there distrusting and rejecting vaccines, leading to a Polio outbreak. Effing Polio that was nearly eradicated after decades of grueling global effort! Even people who has been to the US say that the government is a bit eccentric and overbearing with their science policies. The problems in the US is more cultural and pervasive than you think. It's self-defeating to think that it's a fringe phenomenon or that it's partisan. A simple reframing of the issue isn't going to solve that.

They never said anything about keeping their messages away from Google. It's about having some agency.

One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with.

Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well.

That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account.

And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.

Thanks! I figured that you had a reasonable understanding in this subject. But I still couldn't help just laying it out. I have some background too - as a professional.

Let me see if I can. Before we go to space, let's try something on the ground. Imagine pitching a ball horizontally. What do you expect if you pitch it too slow? The ball will curve more towards the ground and meet it early, won't it? (In other words, it doesn't go very far and doesn't stay airborne for long). Going from ground to space, this action remains the same. You need to 'lower an orbit'? Reduce its forward velocity. It will curve more towards the planet and reach closer to the ground.

However, there is a bit more detail involved here. Why doesn't the satellite just fall to the Earth? (Please excuse me and disregard this part if you know this already. I'm trying to maintain conceptual continuity.) So, when something is flying horizontally (no aerodynamic forces), we know that its trajectory will curve towards the Earth due to the pull of gravity. If the ground (on Earth) curves as fast as, or even faster than the trajectory's curve, the object will never get an opportunity to even reach the ground. This is 'orbiting'.

Now assume that the satellite is initially in a circular orbit. The gravitational force acting on the satellite at any point in the orbit is perpendicular to the satellite's velocity vector and tangential to the orbit. The satellite will maintain a constant speed at this point, since its velocity and the force are always perpendicular [1]. So, what happens when we reduce the satellite's forward velocity? Just as we've seen with the ball, the satellite's trajectory (orbit) starts to curve more towards Earth. Now a subtle, but important change occurs. The velocity and the gravitational pull are no longer perpendicular! They start to align! And when that happens, the speed MUST increase. So, the satellite is now losing altitude and speeding up simultaneously [2]. At some point, the satellite will pick up enough speed again to 'straighten its curve' and avoid falling to the ground. In effect, the satellite had to compensate for the lost velocity in order to remain in orbit, and it did so by exchanging some of its altitude (gravitational potential energy) for velocity (kinetic energy) [3].

So our satellite 'fell' from where we slowed it down, until it had enough velocity again to maintain orbit. At that point, the gravity and the velocity are parallel again, since it will keep falling otherwise [4]. But since it 'fell from a higher altitude', it's speed is now too high for it to remain at that altitude. The orbital curvature is a bit 'too straight' now and it starts to curve away from Earth. So now we're in the exact opposite situation of what was explained in the last paragraph. The satellite is now climbing back up again! As it happens, the satellite actually climbs back up to the point where we slowed it down! And when at that point, its velocity is exactly the same as what it was, after we had slowed it down! [5] So the satellite did the inverse of what it did earlier - it exchanged kinetic energy to get back its altitude (potential energy). The satellite is now living in cycles juggling kinetic energy and potential energy back and forth. The final effect is that the point in orbit that's diametrically opposite to where you slowed it down, is now at a lower altitude. And thus you've effectively 'reduced the orbit'!

One more detail to pin down. How do we slow down a satellite in the first place? Easy! Push the satellite in the opposite direction of its velocity [6]. This is called 'retrograde thrusting' or 'retro burn'. But that's about as easy as it gets. Remember that unlike on Earth, you don't have a surface (a wall or the ground) to lean against. Imagine pushing something heavy on an ice rink. The good news is that you can still push things on an ice rink. The only catch is that the push force will set both the item and you in motion in opposite directions [7]. And that's exactly what we do in space. We throw out mass from the satellite in the form of super-fast gaseous of plasma exhaust. The key is to throw out the mass with as much momentum as possible. But the mass is limited by how much you can carry - it's a depleting resource. So you're basically left figuring out how to throw it out with ever increasing speeds. And that's how we slow down the satellite in space - fire your thrusters!

And finally to lower an orbit entirely, instead of just one point on it, you have to do multiple firings. There are bunch of these 'orbital maneuvers'. The most common one is the Hohmann Transfer [8]. If you could understand what's given above, most orbital maneuvers including Hohmann Transfer will feel very intuitive to you.

[1] Speed is the magnitude of velocity and it remains steady in a circular orbit. However, the perpendicular force will keep bending the velocity vector, thus constantly changing its direction.

[2] This is the from-the-first-principles explanation of conservation of angular momentum. This is how the ballerina spins faster by pulling in her arms.

[3] If this sounds like a 'negative feedback' phenomenon to you, that's because it is. Feedback is a mathematical construct. Nobody ever said that a feedback mechanism must be implemented separately. Some systems have them inherently built-in.

[4] This is the lowest point of the orbit - the periapsis.

[5] Yes. There is quite a bit of hand waving here. I didn't explain why the satellite went back to its original position with the exact same speed. But that's what actually happens. It might take a lot more 'mathematical sense' to explain just using words. One thing I know is that this has something to do with the fact that the gravitational field is one of those 'conservative fields'. If you take a trip inside a conservative field, and return to the location where you started, you will be left with the exact same (kinetic) energy as you started with. You may exchange your energy during the trip, but you always regain it back when you get back to the starting point, no matter what path you took. As far as I understand, the 'conservative' part refers to the part that the energy is conserved and stored, and never lost. Unfortunately, the force field that we're most familiar with - frictional force - isn't conservative at all. If you're going on a trip, be ready to spend some energy!

[6] One matter that confuses a lot of people is why the satellite's position changed at the opposite side of the orbit, instead of the point where we applied the force. The answer is in the Newton's second law. Force changes momentum, not position - at least not directly. The direct effect of application of retro thrust is that the velocity reduces at that point. The change of position on the other side of the orbit is only a consequence of that velocity change.

[7] Yes, the Newton's vengeance law.

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit

[9] Every so often, someone comes along and argues that gravity is not a real force and all these explanations are wrong. If you want to deal with this in terms of relativity and space time curvature, be my guest. But for all practical purposes, the old faithful Newtonian physics works just fine, even as a special case of relativity.

[10] This should probably have been a blog post. Please don't shout at me if it annoys you. This is one of my favorite subjects and I just got carried away. I used to teach and train many students and junior professionals in these topics.

Blowing up something in the same orbit as the targets isn't an effective strategy. The explosion disperses the fragments into different orbits that intersect the original orbit only at one or two points. And even if some of those fragments find their targets, the collision velocity will be low (relatively slow).

It will be like getting hit with with shrapnels from a grenade. Depending on how they collide, the target may survive. If you think that grenade shrapnels are fast, you need to understand the 'hypervelocity impact' that happens when objects in different orbits collide, or when an interceptor hits a satellite. Hypervelocity impacts are impacts where the impactor moves faster than the speed of sound in the solid target. What that means in practice is that the debris/interceptor may have hit one end of the satellite and vaporized already, while the other end of the satellite doesn't yet feel the shock and vibration from that impact. That end doesn't yet know about the carnage that's about to hit it in a few milliseconds.

The 'expendable mass' is almost never a solid or liquid. It's the gaseous combustion exhaust or plasma exhaust from the satellite's thrusters. The advantage of gases is that they just expand and disperse fast enough to be too wispy to cause anything on impact.

However, there are a few systems that do use solid masses for obtaining a reaction force. A remarkable example is called a 'Yo-yo despinner' [1]. It was used in missions like Phoenix (Mars mission) and Dawn (Asteroid belt proto-planet mission). And yes, it does create space debris. But those space debris are probably somewhere in orbit around the sun. Nothing that those guys are going to be too worried about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo_de-spin

Just to elaborate the correct reply given by the others, the perigee of all fragments will be less than or equal to the altitude at impact point. If that's low enough, they will all eventually decay and deorbit. Even the fragments in elongated high-eccentricity orbits will have their orbits circularized by lowering apogee (the perigee is never going to rise) due to air drag. It will eventually spiral into the atmosphere. Here is the best visualization for this phenomenon - the Gabbard plot.

[1] Gabbard Plot Discussion (NASA Orbital Debris Program Office): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150009502/downloads/20...

[2] Satellite Breakup Analysis (Australian Space Academy): https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/collision.htm

You're right that all the fragments will pass roughly through the impact point in orbit. But it's not always the periapsis.

1. The normal or anti-normal delta-v imparted by the explosion/fragmentation (i.e, the velocity imparted perpendicular the plane of initial orbit) will cause the orbital plane of the fragment to change. The new orbit will intersect the old orbit at the impact point. Meanwhile, the eccentricity (the stretch of the orbit), semi-major axis (the size of the orbit) and displacement of periapsis from the impact point (the orientation of the orbit) remains the same as the initial orbit.

2. The prograde and retrograde delta-v (velocity imparted tangential to the orbit) will cause the diametrically opposite side of the orbit to rise or fall respectively. Here too, the new orbit intersects the old orbit at the point of impact. But since the impact point isn't guaranteed to be the periapsis or apoapsis, the above mentioned diametrically-opposing point also cannot be guaranteed to be an apsis.

3. The radial and anti-radial delta-v (this is in the third perpendicular axis) will cause the orbit of the fragment to either dip or rise radially at the point of impact. Again the impact point remains the same for the new orbit. So the new orbit will intersect the old orbit either from the top or the bottom. The new orbit will look like the old orbit with one side lowered and the other side raised about the impact point.

So none of three components of delta-v shifts the orbit from the impact point. You can extrapolate this to all the fragments and you'll see that they will all pass through the impact point. The highest chance of recontact exists there. However the perturbation forces do disperse the crossing point (the original impact point) to a larger volume over time.

Edit: Reading the discussion again, I get what you were trying to say. And I agree. The lowest possible altitude of the fragments in orbit (i.e the periapsis) is the same that of the impact point. So if the impact point is low enough to cause drag, the orbit will decay for sure. There is nothing that demonstrates this better than a Gabbard plot [1][2] - the best tool for understanding satellite fragmentation.

[1] Gabbard Plot Discussion (NASA Orbital Debris Program Office): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150009502/downloads/20...

[2] Satellite Breakup Analysis (Australian Space Academy): https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/collision.htm

That depends on how you define risk. If it means the probability of a collision, then you'd be correct. But if a collision does happen, the consequences will be worse than being in the same orbit. Based on an oversimplified model, debris in orbit is likely to have low relative velocities with respect to an intact satellite in the same orbit, since a large deltav would change the orbit. (It's not as simple as this, but it's good enough in practice.)

This is actually what asat weapons take advantage of. They usually don't even reach orbital velocity, just like ballistic missiles (of course, there are exceptions like the golden dome monstrosity). The kill vehicle just maneuvers itself into the path of the satellite and lets the satellite plough into it at hypervelocity.

That's the Kessler Syndrome. But it's better if it happens in a lower orbit, irrespective of what assets are present there. Space will be free for exploration again in a few years since all the debris there would eventually decay and deorbit.

The article mentions a few months at 480 km. I'm a little skeptical about this figure though, because the last tracked piece from an NRO satellite that was shot down at ~250 km by SM-3 missile in operation burnt frost, lasted 20 months in space before reentry. SpaceX is probably using a statistical cutoff percentage of fragments to calculate the time. But all the pieces are dangerous uncontrolled hypervelocity projectiles. Spain lost a military communications satellite a few days ago from a collision with a tiny undetermined space debris.

How illegitimate do you have to be, if your power is so threatened by protests that you're willing to put a teen to death? Any regime that oppress criticism deserves the noose.

Sure! They all have overinflated egos that're propped up by PR shenanigans and doesn't match their demonstrated achievements. But their opinions are more likely their aspirations rather than oversimplifications.

What follows is my gut feeling from observing their public interactions. So take it with as much salt as you like. At this point I'm confused as to whether they're motivated by wealth (greed) or by the suffering they inflict while amassing it (misanthropy). If you carefully observe the interviews of the broligarchs and some others in power, you'll notice that they're genuinely happy and excited to discuss plans and activities that cause widespread misery, pain or even death. I can give you numerous examples of such instances, but this will probably seem eerily familiar to you too. Even this story is one such example.

It's as if multiple people bullied or abused them in their childhood and now they're out to prove their superiority and importance and show humanity its place. It's like a super villain revenge fantasy. I know that at least a few individuals among them does have such a dark history. But this behavioral pattern in pervasive among them.

It's an attempt to appear as a nonconformist that a genius visionary has to be (from their perspective). SBF did the exact same thing.

Says a lot about how they view fellow human beings, doesn't it? Disposable money printers.