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.

Agreed! And open primaries, while we’re at it. These are all simple things that make our democracy more democratic and less prone to corruption and polarization.

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.

Tom Morello lives in California.

You don’t.

Vote strategically, dumbasses.

I wasn’t using Thiel as an example–at least not on purpose. Take any obvious idea and marry it to a technological revolution, and you’ll have a bunch of rich people who got rich mostly by pure luck. Musk is a piece of shit, but the case for Tesla taking off was actually proven by GM’s EV1 ~3 years prior. The main reason it didn’t take off? Well it was twofold: first, GM was reluctant to commit to EVs because marketing them would make their conventional fuel vehicles look environmentally destructive, and second, the battery technology the EV1 used was nickle metal hydride. Tesla succeeded because it coincided with the proliferation of lithium ion batteries, and in that particular case, I don’t think anything unethical happened. If Musk had stopped here we probably wouldn’t think of him as an evil piece of shit.

So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes? There are ways to “win the lottery” inside capitalism without breaking any rules. Sure, the amassing of wealth is in itself unethical in a country where many kids can’t eat nutritious meals, but you don’t necessarily have to be a backstabbing thief to become rich. You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off at the same time the technology becomes mature enough for something like online banking to be feasible.

Inheritance is only one way the ultra-wealthy gained their status. There’s also exploitation, luck, predatory business practices, corruption, …

Some gained wealth legitimately, but they usually fall under the luck category and should have been taxed at a higher rate for decades.

Vague Pronoun -5

Please see me after class.

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.

Don’t be silly. I don’t wonder why naive leftists don’t vote in their best interests. It’s because they’re immature and unable to come to terms with doing something positive for themselves that doesn’t feel good at the time.

That doesn’t really answer my question. If Democrats win majorities in the House and Senate in the upcoming midterms, what should they do? I’m assuming they won’t have enough votes to remove Trump from office, just like last time.

I’m sure they want to do that. They tried twice already. The votes aren’t there in the Senate.

What should they do instead?

You may understand your needs better, but you apparently don’t understand our electoral system. That’s why I’m here to educate you. You are welcome!

I hadn’t seen those. I had no idea. Thanks!