The US government is not going to replace the foreign markets he's busy trashing.
2,260 karma · joined November 13, 2021
And while SpaceX currently has a monopoly on the affordable launch market, my understanding is that's about to go away. I wouldn't like to be SpaceX seeking new government contracts under the next Democratic administration.
More seriously, this seems like an elaborate troll of space settlement enthusiasts. It's far simpler and less demanding than long-term settlement in space...and you still look at it and go "WTF would anyone want to do that? Wouldn't it just be easier to send robots down"?
Clearly, I’ll need to give o1 a try at some point to see if it does better.
A hobby of mine is editing Wikipedia articles about Australian motorsport (yes, I have an odd hobby, sue me).
The vehicles in the premier domestic auto racing category in Australia, the Supercars Championship, are unique to the category. Like NASCAR, they're built on a dedicated space frame chassis with body panels that look like either a Mustang or a Camaro draped over the top.
I'd seen occasional claims on forums that when the organising body was deciding on the design of the current generation of cars, they considered using the "Group GT3" rules that are used for a bunch of racing series around the world (including the German DTM championship, the GT World Challenge events raced across Europe, Asia, and Australia, and the IMSA GTD and GTD Pro categories). If true, it might be an interesting side note to the article about the Supercars Championship.
So I asked Copilot (the paid model) to find articles in motor sport media about this (there are a number of professional online publications that cover the series extensively). It confidently claimed that yes, indeed, there was some interest in using GT3 cars in the Supercars championship, and pointed me to three articles making this case.
The first was an article featuring quotes from the promoter of the DTM series saying what a good idea it was to have a common car across different national series. So the first article was relevant, but didn't actually show that anyone involved in the administration of the Supercars Championship was interested in the idea.
The second and third references were articles about drivers and teams whose core business is the Supercars championship also running cars in the local GT3 championship (while not explicitly mentioned in the article, they do this for a large wad of cash from the rich hobbyists who co-drive and fund most GT3 racing). Copilot's interpretation of the articles was just flat-out wrong.
Yes, this was a sample size of one historical query, but its response was very poor.
If you build up to climbing Everest more gradually you find this out in places and at altitudes where you can be saved.
That said, Everest is an extremely dangerous place even for experienced mountaineers, though it's not the most dangerous . The second highest peak, K2, is so dangerous that roughly one person dies for every eight or so who reach the summit.
It seems that roughly 1% of people who attempt the summit die in the process; there are hundreds of bodies simply left on the mountain as it's too risky to retrieve them.
There's every chance that this approach will lead to more fatalities as it will increase the proportion of inexperienced, unskilled climbers attempting the summit, with less opportunity for those unsuited for very high altitudes to pull out before dying.
Did you do the actual coding in Acrobat or is there a less painful way to write embedded JS in a PDF?
Congratulations, you just saved 200 billion dollars of expenditure.
The difference between expenditure and revenue in 2023 was 1.7 trillion.
Let me be clear - if money is being spent poorly, that is bad and it should be spent more effectively, or not spent at all. I'm just trying to demonstrate that "waste", at least waste as it is traditionally understood, is almost irrelevant in any attempt to balance the federal budget.
And even taking their numbers as gospel, it’s 1.1% of the federal budget - and it’s not like you can claw back that 1.1% either, because the enforcement mechanisms required to expel and keep illegal immigrants out of the USA would cost very substantial amounts.
Eighty million dollars isn’t even sufficient to count as a rounding error in that context.
The one big opportunity to do that is defence and it is the one that Republicans, particularly, treat as a sacred cow.
Social Security is already extremely efficient in that the cost of moving money around is minimal.
Medicare and Medicaid are also more efficient than the private sector.
Is government perfect? Hell no. But in the really big picture the big and rising areas of civilian expenditure are not where the inefficiencies lie.
Write Wikipedia articles. Volunteer at a charity. Go and do a PhD in whatever field takes your fancy. Take up auto racing. Learn an instrument. Have children.
The writer is in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to do whatever he damn well pleases, at an age where he is still physically able to do whatever he damn well pleases.
I find it very difficult to sympathise.
Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
By American standards, Medicaid and Medicare are pretty efficient. So any cuts are going to mean that either doctors get paid less or fewer health services are provided. Yes, politically, Republicans can get away with cutting Medicaid, but it’s the much smaller piece of the pie compared to Medicare. Good luck with either one of the options above with Medicare.
As for defence, procurement is a giant money tree for defence contractors, but a large part of the reason why it remains a giant money tree for contractors is that they build plants in every single congressional district there is, so trying to apply some sanity to the defence procurement process is politically untenable. Beyond that, are you going to be the one to tell the Marines they don’t need their own aircraft carriers?
Of course, tanking the American economy by removing a significant chunk of its labor force (undocumented immigrants) and increasing costs (by putting tariffs on things) is just going to make the problem harder by crunching revenue.
The right of politics has forever claimed that they can painlessly cut taxes, and it’s always nonsense.
I haven’t read the whole thing so I can’t really judge whether this specific benchmark is useful, but if it is, every time a new model comes out they can run the benchmark and breathlessly report its improved performance.
And this is the whole point - DST gives those whose work schedules aren't flexible an hour of extra usable daylight at the time of year when it is available and pleasant to be outside.
If I'd looked the example when South Australia's interconnector with the rest of the NEM went out, they had periods with the instantaneous penetration of rooftop solar was over 90%. AEMO, the body that manages the Australian electricity grid, are aiming to be able to support a 100% instantaneous renewable mix on the NEM within the next year or two.
As for Australia's overall electricity mix, that is rapidly changing (and the numbers get a bit distorted by the amount of self-consumption of rooftop solar). We're at 40% renewables overall now, and while it may not hit the government's 82% target by 2030 we will almost certainly reach 70% or so by 2030 and I'd think 90% by 2035 is very doable. The last 10% is harder, but there are enough options (gas with CCS, green hydrogen, biofuels, long-term energy storage of other kinds) that I reckon we can get there. We are in the fortunate position of not having solar completely go away for months in the winter.
As for nuclear, it's never, ever going to happen in Australia (despite the claims of the conservative side of Australian politics). Even if Australia could build nuclear power as efficiently as South Korea - an extremely big ask, given we have the same challenges at building large infrastructure as the rest of the English-speaking world - it still doesn't make economic sense.
As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar (and another ~10% was utility-scale solar).
Rooftop solar works just fine if utilities don’t actively try and obstruct its use.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/16/tackling-soft-costs-a...
Either way, pretty cool, but I don't see it replacing TVs any time soon.
As best I understand, it’s not clear yet whether quantum computing will ever have any practical applications.
Furthermore, there has already been a great deal of work identifying potential applications for a quantum computer, so I’d say we’ve got a fair idea of what you could do with one if it ever exists.
It's also explicitly prohibited under the GPLv3 unless there's no way that the manufacturer can update that firmware.
Covid (pre-vaccine) posed an extremely low risk to children, little risk to young adults, a bit of a risk to the middle-aged, and a lot of risk to the elderly.
The 1918 flu pandemic, by contrast, killed people across the age range, disproportionately including young adults.
Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.