science4sail

> One singular nuclear warhead can be enough to eradicate the entire population in the US.

How big would this warhead be? "One singular nuclear warhead" wasn't enough to eradicate the entire populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much less Japan.

2029? Wouldn't that be in the Vance or third Trump administration? Why would they send those CEOs to prison?

A lot of Hacker News posters work for Google and/or SaaS crapware companies. There's economic self interest at play here.

But how does raising awareness help anything in this case? In the current political climate, companies are likely more afraid of presidential punishment for not supporting Israel than of any public disapproval for supporting Israel.

> This is easier than it sounds from a military perspective because Israel is small and simple to isolate.

Does that sort of thing even work against nuclear powers? You could certainly isolate them like North Korea, but no country would be willing to invade for fear of seeing a mushroom cloud over their capital.

I thought that there were only four planets? Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune

The banner doesn't always seem to display; here's the direct link to the White House YouTube if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLhwIQUE0DU

Tax havens aren't immune to economic disaster though. If the US dollar becomes worthless, then it doesn't matter how many dollars you have in your offshore bank account. Ditto if you're storing wealth as equities or bonds. Real estate value will collapse if tenants can't pay rent or if the local government decides to confiscate land.

I suppose that you could keep gold or bitcoin wallets in a vault, but then it actually belongs to the vault guards, not to you.

Basically you need a collapse that's bad enough to shrink asset prices but not bad enough to break the social contact.

> Nvidia, the report said, will “continue to spare no effort” to make products that comply with regulations and “unswervingly serve the Chinese market.”

> A few weeks ago, Mr. Huang met with Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago at a dinner that cost $1 million per person.

Nvidia reminds me of third-world countries during the Cold War - playing off superpower suitors against each other. Potentially very lucrative, but also a very dangerous game.

I don't understand this question - professional wrestling is a form of sport/entertainment and generally irrelevant to international relations. Is "wrestling" supposed to be a metaphor for something else?

After looking at the author's bio, I don't think that the author of this article is particularly specialized in the Middle East. They probably have the same level of understanding of the area's ethnography as most Americans: an Arab is anyone who isn't an Israeli.

Therefore, Persians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Lawrence of Arabia are all Arabs. It's unclear where Arab Israelis fall in this taxonomy.

The article notes that state backed entities and the Chinese government itself are showing interest in DeepSeek. The investment money may be "an offer that they can't refuse".

If you're okay with just a flyby of the Voyager probes though, then you can use a laser sail. Breakthrough Starshot[1] is aiming for 60,000 km/s of delta-v. Lightsails have already been demonstrated several times in practice[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Projects_operating_...

It's definitely doable. The "'Momentum Limited' Orion" concept[0] has a delta-v of 10,000 km/s, which should be plenty enough to catch up to either of the Voyager probes. It can also carry ~25,000 tons of payload - that's a lot of spare parts!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

As a thought experiment, if one wanted to advantage labor over capital, then a durable way to do so would be to engineer a simultaneous labor shortage and a capital surplus. The amazing Silicon Valley employee perks of the 2010s were the product of such an environment.

Labor shortages can be induced by cutting supply: the Black Death was a famous example of this. More modern ways to do so could be reducing the birthrate or deporting able-bodied, working-age immigrants.

Capital surplus can occur if there is too much cash and not enough investment opportunities. Importing more rich people and printing money can accomplish the former. Low interest rates and technological stagnation can accomplish the latter. War is also an option: war profiteering is a poor investment since the losing side's investors often get their assets confiscated as loot or reparations.

One risk of this approach is that retirement becomes near-impossible. This is because retirees are capital holders: either directly via defined-contribution pensions or indirectly via annuities (defined-benefit pensions). The only way to retire will be if one has kids (or at least younger friends) willing to support them.

Another risk of this is that the capital class will try to defy economics by abolishing civil rights and re-instituting slavery or serfdom. After all, it worked for Constantine...

Don't most billionaires have at least some of their assets in the American financial ecosystem? If so then one could find buyers via extortion: first sanction them or freeze their assets, then make permanent residents and citizens exempt from sanctions.

When I hear about ESR nowadays, it's usually in the context of extreme right-wing politics. I'm not sure whether that's an accurate description of the man or a smear campaign against him.

That said, if you dig into the Jargon File on catb.org, you can find some interesting descriptions of how ESR perceived his hacker[0] community.

[0]Notably, his "hackers" are computer programmers from the ARPANET, USENET, and 1990s Internet cultures. Not cybercriminals or Silicon Valley startup founders.

What other jobs? I guess that they could pull a fall-of-the-Soviet-Union scenario and sell their skills to foreign countries? Surely there must be a lot of countries interested in starting their own nuclear weapons programs in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Probably similar given the same yield unless the bomber has some way to utilize the kinetic energy of the orbit.

The difference though is that a nuking from orbit has less chance of retaliation since the aggressor is no longer on the same planet (unless the victim has ASAT weapons).

> In addition, BYD’s Xuanji architecture will be connected to the Deepseek R1 large model to improve the AI capabilities of the vehicle and the cloud.

This part smells suspicious. Just like Volkswagen putting ChatGPT into their cars, this feature is likely the result of some product managers looking to put "used LLMs professionally" onto their resume.

I think that's a common phenomenon that I see among both right-wing and left-wing Americans. Both are convinced that the other side's leaders are morons and refuse to entertain the possibility that the other side is full of intelligent people with different, even alien, priorities.

There are plenty of both screaming orangutans and postmodern anti-humanists out there, but the ones that end up in positions of power instead of the homeless shelter are there because they have far more intelligence than the average person. They may be deficient in technical knowledge, but that's because they spent their time learning how to manipulate minds instead of learning how to manipulate bits or atoms.

Source WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-incorporation-texas-delware-f0...

> Last year, Delaware’s legislature made it easier for big shareholders to use stockholder agreements to assume powers normally held by a company’s board. The Delaware Chancery Court also ruled in Meta’s favor in April, dismissing a case that argued the company had to consider societal impacts in addition to chasing profits.

I wonder if this is an attempt to disempower minority shareholders (i.e. anyone that isn't Zuck)?

What is a crime? At the end of the day, laws and legal processes are just social norms. To quote The Onion: "Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole"[0]

[0] https://theonion.com/trump-claims-he-can-overrule-constituti...

There's no need for evidence. The administration's belief is that DEIA is axiomatically "radical and wasteful", so any investigation would be nothing more than a Tautology Club[0] exercise.

[0] https://xkcd.com/703/

If you have too much free time, it may be worth reading the (long) "Debanking and Debunking" essay for an exploration of all of the perverse and bizarre behaviors that result from banks' fear of AML/KYC regulatory action.

My favorite example is how banks are required to file secret "suspicious activity reports" (SARs) about their customers. Even knowing about the existence of SARs can be grounds to get a SAR written against you. How's that for thoughtcrime?

Link: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476

The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes"). Many of its users also came from academic or technical backgrounds, which helped to maintain shared cultural values (although this was constantly eroding over time - see "Eternal September").

Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era - while they were wonderful for democratization of the Internet's benefits, the merger of Internet culture and non-Internet culture meant that all the ills of the latter were inflicted on the former.

I think that the law "banning" TikTok applies to any Chinese app with over 1 million US users, so Xiaohongshu/Rednote or anywhere else the TikTok refugees flee will be a target - except YouTube shorts and Facebook/Instagram reels of course.

Perhaps the investors felt that DEI programs would produce benefits in the long run? For all the accusations of Wall Street short-termism, the stock market was very patient with Amazon during its reinvest-all-profit years and the Saudis were very patient with Masayoshi Son's Vision Fund adventures.

When you're living in the Metaverse, it doesn't matter whether all of the other players are biological humans or bots. Your friends, parents, spouse, and even children will all be LLMs.

Humans will eventually go extinct, and then all that will be left are LLMs talking to other LLMs. Surely an intriguing sight for future alien visitors!

Doesn't that strategy only work for a temporary amount of time? Surely investors will ask questions when Facebook claims that it has 100 billion active users?