To build off of this, if you collect $1000 in taxes from a million people and you’ve just pulled in a billion dollars. With 300 million people in the country that’s a lot of tax dollars.

Obviously if you can tax 1000 out of every million dollars in wealth and individual earns in a year you can easily collect far more in taxes given how many multimillionaires will see their wealth increase by tens or hundreds of millions in a year.

This is all super reductive for simplicity. It’s worth looking at how the super rich are able to avoid paying taxes. Are they not paying taxes because they’re doing things with their money that is directly incentivized and generally better for the country than if they simply hoarded the same money, such as running the money through charities, clean energy installtions, etc? I’m honestly asking because i really don’t know and I dont have the time right now to pull at that thread and research the question

The earth is traveling around the sun at about 67000mph (29,722 meters per second, the unit of measurement I’ll use from here on our for consistently) that means to fall into the sun (and this is once you’ve already expended a ton of Delta-V (delta-V being a count of meters per second in change to orbit your craft needs to make/can make) escaping the Earth’s gravitational influence) you’d have to slow down a significant portion (about 24,000 meters per second specifically) of that 29,722 meters per second that you’re hurtling through space at.

It takes so much energy to try to crash a craft into the sun it’s literally cheaper (only costing about 8,800 m/s of Delta-V, compared to about 24,000 m/s of Delta-V) to fly the craft very very far away, such as to the edge of the solar system, then zero out the angular velocity so it effectively falls into the sun, than it is to fly directly to the sun. This tactic also enables one to use another planets gravitational influence to “gravity turn” and save on fuel, but it’s still horrendously expensive to get even a small craft weighing a fraction of a ton from the surface of earth out to the edge of the solar system to begin with.

Rockets face a significant challenge in that in order to reach orbit they need a large amount of energy, sources from a large amount of fuel. To get 1 ton of payload to orbit it needs an amount of fuel which adds additional weight which then requires additional fuel to lift the mass of the fuel. Because of this it takes about 100kg of fuel to get 1kg to orbit

In short, I highly recommend spending a few days playing Kerbal Space Program to learn far more than will fit in a single comment about orbital dynamics. That game is amazing at teaching basic concepts of orbital dynamics and the incredible challenges space programs face in just getting payloads to orbit let alone incredible feats like interplanetary travel or interstellar travel

I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!

AI at least provides a clear product that can be a helpful workforce multiplier, whereas Bitcoin provided an unprotected alternative to traditional markets with none of the safeguards nor legal precedents of traditional markets, so it’s only led to illegal activities piled upon illegal activities

To be fair, if I had an option to effectively invest in Google circa 2004 in 2024 I would toss some spare money at it, and that’s basically what OpenAI is offering at this moment. They’ve established themselves, shown strong leadership and established strong relationships with major companies. They’re a leader in a particular product segment and while they could falter and fail, there’s enough momentum that they’re more likely to be acquired than to actually fail, plus they’re swimming in extremely uncharted waters so there’s plenty of opportunities for them to both greatly improve ongoing operational efficiency and to create new products with new markets, much like where Google was in 2004

On the other hand some breakthrough in either hardware or software could make AI models significantly cheaper to run and/or train. The current cost in silicon is insane and just screams that there’s efficiencies to be found. As always, in a gold rush, sell pickaxes

Has anyone broken down the difference in energy between artificially creating growing conditions in the middle of cities compared to just transporting the food from where it grows easily? Trains and ships which transport most food are incredibly energy efficient per ton transported

Trains can transport one ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of fuel and ships can transport one ton of goods 600 miles on one gallon of fuel. If a urban farm can produce one ton of food it needs to consume less than a few gallons of fuel’s worth of energy in lighting and other city-specific infrastructure in order to come out ahead of growing food where it grows best

Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it’s rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50

Every former windows phone user I have ever talked to has sworn up and down about how amazing of a platform it was. I honestly suspect Microsoft could have legitimately won a sizable slice of the mobile market if they simply chose a different name than “windows phone”

But then, this is the same company which held a mock funeral for the iPhone upon the launch of the Windows phone so…uh…yeah that actually happened…

I mean, the person who did it did technically manage it by running an emulator of a different similarly ancient architecture

Ars has a decent summary of the blog post if you don’t feel like reading the full blog post

No joke I read an article a while ago about a computer cafe in like Nepal I think it was? where users had to pedal a small DC generator to power the computers because power is so scarce up on the mountain

It’s more than just a TPM requirement. They have actual processor requirements cutting off all 7th gen and older Intel processors and all 2nd gen? Ryzen and older AMD processors so that they can modernize instruction sets. Many perfectly capable if a bit old machines that have years of life left in them that will be going to the recycler who will attempt to extract something of value from these machines.

I’m all for modernizing instruction sets and cutting off literal ewaste machines that nobody should still be using like the Core 2 Duo for example, but this is just going to produce mountains of ewaste, which is about the last thing we need with the looming climate apocalypse and dire need significantly reduce emissions rapidly

Honestly I’ve only gone made it to 7 days when sick and feeling like a shower would be waterboarding myself and waited until I felt just well enough to actually shower

Remote work really lends itself to some bad habits. My body’s sweet spot seems to be showering every other day, and with remote work I can end up not leaving the house at all for long enough that I’ll get to as much as 4 days without showering (usually the point where I shower at lunch because holy crap I just want to not feel my skin being greasy

Doesn’t help that I do evening showers which relies on my getting ready for bed on time, and staying up too late can be made up for by simply getting up 5 minutes before work and eating breakfast over the work computer an hour later

Would the price crash or would it stabilize at a much higher price as a specialized commodity where the cost of refining no longer benefits from economies of scale and instead only benefits from buyers who are unable or unwilling to use alternatives?

My oldest is about ready for her first computer, so I have an ewaste laptop earmarked for Christmas that I’ll have to tweak the configuration a bit more on before then.

She’s been getting better at better playing Minecraft and learning how to ask us how to spell the names of things so she can search for them in Minecraft, and getting pretty good with the mouse and keyboard too

If someone is so disabled that they can’t go out in a wheelchair how are they going out in a car?

PayPal is nice since it gives virtually zero trust to the seller to secure customer info. But as you alluded to, PayPal has lots of problems mostly stemming from it trying to get all of the benefits of being a bank while accepting none of the responsibility of being a bank, and therefore customers receive none of the benefits of a bank while still getting all of the drawbacks of another entity handling their money

320/1000 people know someone stupid enough to fall for a scam.

Correction: 320/1000 people know someone unlucky enough to fall for a scam. Plenty of very smart people fall for scams. All it takes is some lucky timing on the part of the scammer, where enough happens to be correct that they miss/overlook whatever tells might be present until it’s too late

This risk increases significantly when users exchange credit or debit card information to view content on unregulated and illicit websites.

I mean, providing payment information to legitimate services is always a risk. There’s so freaking many breaches that you simply have to assume your card will see fraudulent charges sooner or later and watch your statements for the unexpected activity so you can stop and reverse the charges before you miss the deadline

Slight correction: they have billions to hand to private companies who then give a pittance to the poor and needy while naturally cutting a profit and exploiting every loophole and every opening to increase their profits and revenues, because something something corporate efficiency?