Wishful thinking?

Yep. And I’m sure you know this, but we toppled Iran’s democracy at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) through clandestine action of the CIA.

They used another tactic that I didn’t notice until one of the commenters on the Ars article/forum pointed it out:

Promising good stuff that’s not too close (~5 years) so you’ll remember it and say, “Hey, where’s my <good thing>?!” but not so far away (~25+ years) that you’ll say “That’s way too far you need to fix this shit now.” Apparently it was used in Soviet Bloc countries a lot to keep the population from revolting, and now I’m seeing it everywhere in our society. In this case, the O&G companies said things like, “Sure! We’ll be generating all your fuel with algae in ~15 years and then we’ll never need to drill again!” and “We’re developing amazing carbon capture technology that’s a mere ~15 years away and will repair all the damage we’re not doing!”

Ars Technica might be owned by Conde Nast, but it has a really smart userbase on average, so I tolerate that fact.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s just interesting to see yet more evidence they were lying as dishonestly as the tobacco industry. I think this article presents a pretty cohesive timeline of those lies: what they knew and when they knew it.

I think it’s a little of both, but one of my friends left my company producing weird semiconductors to go work at Micron making RAM. They’re definitely ramping up a little, but the equipment and techniques to fab those chips is very specialized. Imagine trying to drill zillions of really tiny, deep pits, and then making sure the very bottom of those pits get coated while the sidewalls are completely unaffected… and you have to do it everywhere uniformly on a hundred 350mm wafers per minute.

There’s a pretty big benefit to the solar panels: more efficient and also can be placed in a solar-synchronous orbit that is always illuminated. I can’t imagine that power advantage outweighs the disadvantages of cooling power-hungry hardware with no way to reject that heat to air or water. I’m with you: WTF are they thinking?

I heard Google just launched a test bed. Basically one mini server the size of a refrigerator that can only operate for 15 minutes before it needs to shut off to prevent heat damage. I’m guessing that thing will prove the case against celestial data centers, but we’ll see. The only good thing to come of this is that it might help advance cooling tech for satellites and suchlike.

That’s if they don’t decide the best course of action is to launch them into LEO lol. If they do (they will–they’re that stupid), the infrastructure will burn up in less than five years.

They could have made it even faster with a coat of red paint, but engineers thought that would have pushed the materials past their limit, so they chose to leave it black.

lmao

I haven’t used Linux regularly since 2006, which either means I’m out of the loop or an ancient bearer of lost knowledge:

I think it’s “G’noo” like “G’day” or “G’night.”

It feels like we’re losing ground. Why does 8GB of RAM feel totally insufficient to browse the same websites I used 12 years ago with 4? I’m so happy I maxed out my motherboard’s RAM (32) when I built a PC in 2021.

PROTIP:

Ebooks are trivially easy to find online, or you can check them out from your local library.

There’s a free and open source program called Calibre that can manage your ebook library, change file formats, edit visual formatting, and even remove proprietary DRM.

Don’t let Amazon being a bad company prevent you from using your old Kindle.

I think you mean a lot of landlords are scum, and yeah I get it. There are people who switch jobs every 2-5 years to seek out the best raises. For them I think it makes perfect sense to rent. The fees to buy a house aren’t cheap and not being tied down makes a lot of sense early in your career. I suppose you can buy a property, then move out and rent it to someone else, but that feels like circular problem if we’re discussing putting an end to renting out single family homes.

Renting can be a good option, especially when you consider the way equity vs interest are structured in the first few years of a mortgage. It’s 99% interest at first, and then it slowly inverts year-over-year, which sure feels like renting my house from the bank for the first ten years… but I can’t call up the bank and make them fix my electrical, plumbing, or appliances.

It would be nice to see a ban on renters snapping up existing properties, and a limit on how long single family newly constructed homes can be kept as rental properties.

I just don’t see why they had to make X Men woke? Why does everything have to be about a persecuted minority group finding its standing in a society that fears it?

(tee hee)

And also Instagram and whatever other Zuck products are in your life. I’m happy they wasted so many billions of dollars setting of virtual Mii meetings lmao…

Japan is honorary Western.

(So is Korea.)

I want the latter, and tariffs are not the only way go about protectionism. There is also subsidization, which is how the US has maintained its defense and agriculture industries. If we want stuff made domestically, we’re going to have to pay for it. Subsidies are generally preferable to tariffs because they can be paid through progressive taxation instead of regressive taxes on consumers.

“We can’t let the environment be a deciding factor” is a preposterous take. There’s practically nothing more important that preserving the environment. Even the Chinese are looking beyond their borders for raw materials these days. If it costs more to extract raw materials in a way that doesn’t fuck up the environment, then subsidize it and pay for it. We can fund the subsidies with a carbon tax.

There are always trade-offs. All polymers deteriorate when exposed to that kind of thermal cycling and chemical exposure. A metal alloy fit for the job can last forever.