The issue isn’t forwards, it is down.

You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.

To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.

Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.

Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.

You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.

2000 Bezos or about 4x the GDP of the planet.

People just need to invest and stop blaming others for being broke SMH.

Invest one penny at 3% per year, who can’t afford one penny? You’ll have $68 billion in just one thousand years. Poverty is a choice.

It depends on the type of fusion.

The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor’s containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.

Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons – much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.

There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.

But if you could see them, they could see you …

The issue is how the constitution lays out the choosing of a president. Pence had to certify the results, if he had refused to do so for long enough, then that session of Congress may have ended without choosing a president.

At that point, the Constitution prescribes there is a contingent election in the House, where every state delegation to Congress gets 1 vote. There are more red states than blue states -> Trump wins.

Intentionally did not talk about Vance, I was merely responding to the idea that using past prices adjusted for inflation compared to current prices isn’t that straightforward.

Thanks for the lecture, appreciate the tone.

I see the point you are trying to make, but inflation doesn’t quite when that way.

Comparing the prices of the same commodities at two different points in time is literally how inflation is calculated, the increase from $1.50 to $4 is real.

Now, what the inflation-adjusted dollars are telling you is that if eggs had only increased in price commensurate with general inflation, they would have gone from $1.50 to $2. The extra $2 increase is above what a consumer would expect given the general increase in the prices of everything else. If someone (magically) had a salary that increases with inflation, they would find eggs today to be a larger fraction of their spending if they kept the same level of consumption.

Eggs are more expensive both in absolute and relative to other products. The reasons for this are complex, but due in no small part to people continuing to buy large quantities of eggs even when they were heinously expensive in the early days of the pandemic. The market absorbed that information and came to the conclusion that eggs were previously undervalued.

The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.

Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.

Bro delete this I just shi myself omw to work

You haven’t really described what you are imagining.

Proper “AI”. No more coding, you just tell the machine what to do and it will do it. I don’t think in the physical world but computers and every profession that is not physical will be much rarer. Either pivot to AI Management or be the arms that the AI “guides” through a task.

Telling a computer specifically what to do and how to do it without making mistakes is coding. Programming is a level above that, in designing the architecture of how to approach the business problem.

What the other commentator is saying, is that simple being able to tell some model ‘build an app that does XYZ’ requires AGI because that set of instructions is not complete - the machine requires outside knowledge and the ability to make judgement calls in order to complete it.

If that isn’t what you meant, it is at least what you said. The breakdown in communication here, between humans, should also serve as another reminder how difficult it is to convey an idea to another entity and how that problem will remain difficult for a very long time.

An inherent flaw in transformer architecture (what all LLMs use under the hood) is the quadratic memory cost to context. The model needs 4 times as much memory to remember its last 1000 output tokens as it needed to remember the last 500. When coding anything complex, the amount of code one has to consider quickly grows beyond these limits. At least, if you want it to work.

This is a fundamental flaw with transformer - based LLMs, an inherent limit on the complexity of task they can ‘understand’. It isn’t feasible to just keep throwing memory at the problem, a fundamental change in the underlying model structure is required. This is a subject of intense research, but nothing has emerged yet.

Transformers themselves were old hat and well studied long before these models broke into the mainstream with DallE and ChatGPT.

There is always a tension between security, privacy, and convenience. With how the Internet works, there isn’t really a way - with current technology - of reliably catching content like that without violating everyone’s privacy.

Of course, there is also a lack of trust here (and there should be given the leaks about mass surveillance) that the ‘stop child porn powers’ would only be used for that and not simply used for whatever the powers that be wish to do with them.

The world bank isn’t involved so much in printing money - that’s central banks like the US Federal Reserve or European Central Bank.

They do love to force developing nations to adopt US-style capitalism by withholding loans for needed development projects. They also focus far too much on increasing GDP at all costs and do not give really any weight to increasing living standards or reducing inequality. Basically, think loans to institute Reaganomics and you won’t be too far off.

The loans pay for large capital projects (power plants, large-scale irrigation, etc) that are built by the state and then mandated to he handed over to private entities that then charge rents and extract wealth. Not every loan and program is bad, but there’s plenty to give pause when they are involved in a project.

Beyond making them look horrible, they were marching towards a court ruling against the forced arbitration clause.

Once there is a precedent for the clause being unenforceable, the clause ceases to be a deterrent to legal action - every claim would be litigated at the very least to settle the question of whether arbitration is required in a specific case.