Kalbear

Stover is remarkably good at writing evil characters and making them incredibly compelling. Probably the main reason that his Revenge of the Sith novelization and his other Star Wars books (particularly Traitor) worked so incredibly well. My personal view is that he does an exemplary job of showing the person's motivations, having them do unspeakable things, and also having you understand it completely. It reminds me a lot of Nabokov and is compelling to me for similar reasons. Star Wars is awesome because you get to finally have Sith that aren't mwahahaha villains. He also writes shit-hot action sequences that are very cinematic and over the top. And yeah, I don't think Caine is particularly misogynistic; using 'pussy' in a negative context is misogynistic, but it isn't especially or deliberately so.

It seemed rather obvious to me that scenario 5 (basically every man for them self / nationalism) was the most likely course.

No, you're not. You're talking about using sustainable agriculture for 'thousands of years' to supply enough wine for people when whole areas simply could not drink wine because they could not grow grapes. There's a reason that Northern Europe doesn't have a big wine culture compared to Southern Europe and that's because they drank beer instead, and they did that because they could not grow grapes reliably in that area. So the whole premise - that we were practicing sustainable agriculture that could supply demand - is ridiculously flawed and luddite. Again you're missing the point about demand here. How much transporting of olive oil do you think was happening? How many gallons? How many people reliably used olive oil on a day to day basis? It is several orders of magnitude lower than what are being used regularly now. Now, if you're arguing that we should go back to a luxury goods model of things where we transport way fewer goods and make way fewer goods that's fine - say that. But it's not because of some magical agrarian practices that we're no longer doing; it's because the demand was ridiculously lower in the past.

There's probably another interesting idea - using AI to scale views from 4:3 to 16:9 by expanding it some. I've seen this in some videos on TikTok for more modern movies (Blade Runner 2049 and Avatar) and it works surprisingly well, and could be reasonably cost effective.

I mean, NO. That's not right at all. Aside from things like wine grapes being exported very early (it is one of the earliest things we have around the world as far as archaeology go), the 'demand' for wine was not satisfied because the notion of shipping wine regularly around the world was not remotely something people did for anyone other than the absolute rich. The demand for wine in the world - especially in places that typically do not have wine - has increased absurdly compared to what it was even 100 years ago. Wine was something local if it was anything and it was fairly rare in many places. It was also one of the very first things many people brought as soon as they got to a place. This has nothing to do with sustainable agriculture and everything to do with being able to actually meet real demand. Using agricultural techniques from 200 years ago will result in massive underproduction and likely will ALSO result in massive unsustainable - or unhealthy - practices.

I really hope One Way Out wins as well. That was a superb piece of drama that weirdly happens in Star Wars.

Oh hey, speaking of political will: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/the-senate-just-lobbed-a-tactical-nuke-at-nasas-mars-sample-return-program/

We have some ideas, though I will say that NASA has some ideas; as far as I know SpaceX has done none of that yet. And NASA has significantly higher engineering standards and survivability requirements for their equipment compared to SpaceX in terms of redundancies and capabilities. That makes NASA slower and much more expensive, but it also means things that would normally fail will just...not fail, and until we're sending Falcons out there we won't have that info. And we can get that info! None of this is unsolvable. But a lot of it is not standard by any means. Mostly as I said above it is always a safe bet to bet against SpaceX and Musk's estimates and thoughts on when we will be able to do things. Heck, it's reasonable to bet against NASA most of the time, though they're a bit better. Especially when so much of this is based on either political will or the personal fortune of a person.

To be clear here - math and physics are proven and tested; engineering is not. One example of this: we have no idea how well vehicles - remote piloted or otherwise - will need to deal with things like a lack of a magnetosphere on the way there. We have ideas and we have hopes, but those are things we need to design for and figure out, and those are not established values. We don't know the kind of stresses that a very large vehicle will have compared to smaller ones when going to Mars or the engineering tolerances that it will have to have. We don't know things like how to make sure that supplies remain viable on Mars other than theories. We've not done it 200 times and we don't have a robust system for manufacturing to those specifications. And that's the actual non-human factors. The human factors of sending people that far for that long without some of the protections we know we have are...difficult. These are things we can build around and work on - they are known knowns for the most part - but they are not something we've done before. And any engineer can tell you that doing something for the first time is hard, even if you know what you may need to do. It's expensive, it's challenging, and it can be more unsafe than usual. Another issue not brought up is that the primary people who would want to make this a reality - NASA and SpaceX - are both not in great positions compared to where they were 5 years ago to get this done. Musk's credibility has taken a massive hit and it is not clear how much he wants to do this compared to his other random pet projects. How much of his personal fortune is he willing to invest in this? Heck, how much of his fortune will exist in 5 years time given his current trajectory? NASA is the other alternative but they're almost certainly nonviable as an option for anything soon, especially with the way that the US is going with lack of investment in things like research or, well, NASA. One Republican in the white house and that dream goes away unless you can also use it to kill immigrants.

Heck, I find it implausible simply because Musk says it'll happen, and betting against musk's timelines is one of the safest bets out there.

Remember that the law currently is being interpreted in the US as if you simply share a name with another person wanted for a crime you can be held for 3 days despite having absolutely no evidence of any crime being committed. https://www.loweringthebar.net/2023/06/four-david-sosas-support-fifth.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=loweringthebar

I'd more strawman @Rippounet's argument that regardless of what has been done and what is projected, it is both not remotely sufficient to meet anything resembling a good goal AND in many cases is incredibly unrealistic without magical thinking about scientific breakthroughs and finding resources. Therefore, if you want to actually get to a world that isn't hideously broken (especially in the developing world) you will need to step up your game and make people understand the urgency of acting now, and not just gloss over it with 'it'll be fine in 20 years'. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I think that's a more fair characterization. In a nice digest Ars Technica came out with a good summary of some of the major issues that are happening right now: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/june-extremes-suggest-parts-of-climate-system-are-reaching-tipping-points/ This also addresses a point @Ran made earlier that bugged me - saying how many countries are getting better. It's great that many countries are getting better, but every country is not equivalent - and if China and India aren't the ones that are improving it hardly matters what Sierra Leone and Mauritius do: They also point out that while the country's artificial carbon emissions may be decreasing in some places this is likely going to be offset by 'natural' emissions that are increasing - things like wildfires, methane releases from siberia and the like.

Not precisely rocket based but cool as shit - we are using pulsars around the galaxy to create a gravitational telescope to measure gravity waves the size of solar systems. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nanograv-picks-up-signal-of-cosmic-choir-of-supermassive-black-holes/

Ah, cool. I can create Amos Burton at that point then.

One of the things we invested in last year was a heat pump for the house because of the wildfires and the increasing heat of the Seattle area. Prior to this the notion of needing AC was ridiculous - even when it got 'hot' (about 80-85) we could just use box fans and open windows. But the heat is getting far worse AND opening the house up means breathing in the smoke. So we went for more efficient that also cools the house and lets us not get asthma. But we're well-off, and we're one of the very small percentages of households in the Seattle area that have AC. Most everyone cannot remotely afford this - either in adding this to houses or renting a place that has it (if it's even available). This will only exacerbate the housing issues here.

As a lifelong Krakens fan this is completely devastating

Yeah, I don't think Joel thinks that far ahead. And he has had zero problems killing any talented people in the past. Joel absolutely kills just to kill. Like, literally, the first time we see him kill someone after the fall he is brutally beating a guard to death with his hands. That guard did not need to die after he was disabled, and could have easily been tied up long enough to not alert anyone. They don't bother hiding the body so it's not like the alarm wouldn't have gone up eventually. That's true in the game too - he is absolutely not a 'use the appropriate amount of violence' kind of guy. In the show we see him torture people to get information and then kill them afterwards despite their being tied up and absolutely no threat. He was going to kill the two Native Americans in the cabin if they didn't give him the right answers. He is emphatically not a nice guy. Do you really, honestly believe that in the moment where he's running down the halls and killing everyone he sees, including people who are surrendering, that he's going to go 'oh wait, their profession is valuable' and not do that? My take is the reason he didn't kill them was simple: he had Ellie at that moment and they weren't directly in his way, and she was safe. He was somewhat sated at that point.

They're absolutely a threat, and if anything they're the people Joel should be seeking to get the most revenge on; they, after all, were absolutely willing to vivisect Ellie and knew precisely what would happen. The rest of the folks might have been in the dark. The idea that somehow people who have no weapons around them and were not carrying any are now totally unthreatening even though you have no idea if they would do so if given an opportunity - when someone who actively puts their weapon down is not is somehow more of a threat despite them showing a willingness to, ya know, not fight...that's an interesting juggling bit of ethics. Ultimately it doesn't really matter, it's just another way to try and vaguely make people feel okay with Joel making all the choices for Ellie despite it not being what she wants, lying to her afterwards and potentially dooming the human species.

Same logic applies to the nurses though. They can go get weapons too.

He executed the people who put their guns down and surrendered. So...yeah, he just arbitrarily decided that nurses were fine. That doctor could get proper fucked tho

That's sweet as hell. I wonder if this means it'll be more likely they'll be able to get more of the original actors to do voices? Which, sadly, at this point is not a lot of people.

The claim is not that it killed anything right away; the claim and worry is that it will have bad health effects for animals in the region and has potentially ruined or harmed their environments. Which is kind of a big deal too!

I'm not sure I would take Musk at his word at anything, but especially not this. The launch pad was significantly damaged and predictably so, as an example. 40 seconds to take a termination signal is not a good sign and underplaying any negatives is a very common tactic of his. Causing people to inhale concrete dust is not technically toxic in the sense that it'll actually poison you, but it absolutely causes disease and issues. I mean, I don't blame him - he's doing PR and wants to spin things - but the notion that he is being remarkably transparent here is not actually borne out by facts.

Oof. The SpaceX rocket took 40 seconds to respond to self-destruct command, which...is not a very awesome thing to hear when you're talking about a fairly potent missile that was going off course! https://gizmodo.com/spacex-struggled-to-destroy-its-failing-starship-rocket-1850390877

ChatGPT is amazing that way