The wind at 32,000 ft is 200 times stronger than the wind at the surface?

Ummm… 10 knots * 200 = 2000 knots. I don’t think so lol.

A lot of strange numbers in this article that bring its accuracy into question.

No mention of the weight of a 1 and 1/2 km wire that is also suitable to anchor this thing in place. Or are they going to float batteries and bring them down to discharge?

Uh oh… I bet the sound isn’t directional enough to work like this too. Yet.

This thread is actually really depressing.

Wasn’t there an incident where Pelocy was begging for the national guard to be called in? Or maybe one of the cabinet members. And Trump kept declining.

So the only people to do the shooting were the limited number of capital police. I don’t think they’re set up for riot defense and it’s a lot to ask them to individually put their lives on the line by just shooting into the crowd.

Once they are following, I’d think you can begin to convert them to higher tiers of support through private channels?

It’s all about control of reach.

If I was an influencer and using Patreon (I’m neither), it’s a simple decision:

Total reach * conversion rate * platform commission = income

Apple’s app store has a fuckton of desirable reach - they monopolize (arguably literally) all the easy payments from iphones and kill anybody else who tries to redirect eyeballs. They are too strong. But what else are you going to do if you need Patreons or app customers, etc?

You can’t ignore the reach, and you’d have to pay or work harder to get eyeballs another way too unless you can get free publicity by being crazy or something and pull people into your own payment/ download channels.

Side note: this being a rarity is probably a net good thing. History shows that when the old guy and the new guy fight, it doesn’t bring unity or peaceful transfers of power which are arguably more important than the bad one getting whatever they deserve.

Huly is worth checking out. We’ve been on it for about a year. They’re in super active developments so features are coming rapidly, sometimes breaking or requiring migrations.

They have both a SaaS version and self-hosted version.

I’d love to see all kinds of resistance to this.

If an armed militia shows up on the same street as ICE, but in greater numbers, there’s a pretty good chance these imposters leave.

I hope somebody’s working on building an app for recording everything possible and centralizing that information - license plates, photos, videos.

Perhaps homemade stingray devices that grab IMEI/IMSI numbers from agent’s phones, so that it’s easier to identify and link these agents between locations.

More people following them around to report on location and activities. Report on where they stay so that protests and obnoxious deterrence can be set up so that fewer businesses are willing to service these people.

There are so many more citizens than there are ICE agents. Doesn’t seem like it takes much to overwhelm them and push them out, so long as it’s coordinated.

If the country has another federal election, heck… if the country survives past this at all, I think there’s going to be a major conversation about states rights versus federal rights. What we’re seeing in Minnesota is wild, bordering on something that could spark a localized civil war if people start violently standing up against this. The states should be able to come together and defeat the federal government at any point.

The Constitution grants the federal government the right to exist, and it belongs to the people. Not any one leader. Evidently some of that power needs to be pulled back.

I wonder if I’ll soon be able to just lean back and bark orders at my PC.

I’m no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.

Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don’t play well with others.

But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.

While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.

A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it’s the right one, amazing things can happen.

No conversation about UBI is complete without also discussing the source of the funds and how other government programs might be effected.

I think UBI sounds great on the surface but I worry that it could alter our basic survival incentives which may have unintended consequences for the group of people who aren’t needing UBI.

Should UBI replace existing food and housing programs? Should UBI replace other things that are designed to mold the economy such as subsidized public transportation or small business loan guarantees? What about income tax incentives designed to encourage saving and growing money carefully versus consumption (capital gains versus income tax, tax-deferred retirement savings accounts).

I suspect there’s a fairly significant carry-on effect from shifting resources away from these types of programs to a UBI program. But what I’m not clear on is how that might impact other behaviors from well resourced people who may start to play the game, so to speak, by a new set of rules.

For example, do we see inflation around inelastic needs such as rent prices and grocery bills? If we did, UBI is not much more than a grocery store/landlord stimulus program. It’s hard to imagine that we wouldn’t see this unless controls are placed on those businesses which in turn, removes incentives to own and grow businesses.

It seems like a UBI program would promote an economy based on consumption and not on savings and investment. Why save your money if you’ll get topped up again next month, and every month for the rest of your life? By investment I’m not talking about Wall Street, I’m talking about finishing college degrees, investing in new ideas, chasing startup ideas, those people who stay up late at night working on inventions that they think could bring them rewards.

Perhaps the most fundamental question to be answered is this:

To what degree do we, as the human race, find benefit in helping the less capable of our species survive. Potentially at a cost - not to the strongest and most capable - but instead placed mostly on the shoulders of the slightly-more-capable.

After shovels were invented, we decided to dig more holes.

After hammers were invented, we needed to drive more nails.

Now that vibe coding has been invented, we are going to write more software.

No shit

I was born at the tail end of Gen X but we were definitely getting up to some crazy stuff.

It was a normal afternoon to take our bikes off the highest jumps we could build in the middle of the road, constructed from the neighborhood wood pile. When a car came speeding through we’d yell out “car” and quickly move our stuff to the side. We used skateboards on vertical ramps built from whatever, and roller skates on shoddy pavement. Our playgrounds were made of reflective metal hotter than lava attached to towers that seemed to reach 20 ft above the ground.

We built dangerous tree houses with rusty scrap in the ravine behind the neighborhood, next to place where the neighborhood’s older kids were surely taking all the drugs and hiding from their D.A.R.E. officers.

I used to load my sisters in the back of a red radio flyer wagon and we’d all ride down the neighborhood’s steepest hill, occasionally tipping at high speed and then sliding the rest of the way down likely removing several layers of skin and rolls of gauze from my mom’s medical kit in the process.

In primary school, I don’t think there was ever a moment without at least one kid on crutches or with a limb in a cast.

While it did harden us up, and provided some amazing memories, just about everyone I know who was a kid at that time knows of some kid who died while digging a tunnel, or got hit by a car, or spent half of his early teenage years in a cast, or who always seemed to have a finger splint.

Somehow through all of this we moved from thinking this is normal childhood stuff to blaming anyone and everyone by way of lawsuits.

There was nothing “safe” about that time. The debate seems to hinge on whether a dangerous childhood results in better adapted adults, perhaps by culling a few unlucky kids who hadn’t learned their own limits, and who know how to be creative in the absence of almost any artificial or algorithmic stimuli.

A lot of FOSS projects are freemium based which seems viable for larger more complex projects.

In these projects it’s common to see the developer get paid for adding features on top of the core version, for a SaaS version, for custom development, or for offering support.

Other projects with a lot of community interest - and a good “community manager” style organizer can attract contributors in the form of pulls, bug testing and reports, and widespread use which generates valuable marketing. These projects only exist because of the labor of love from the whole community.

I agree with your points. AI is a tool just like hammers and word processors. It shows a lot of promise because people can solve problems in ways that other tools cannot.

Efficiencies come later, and hating on the tool because it’s immature just means you’re probably further out on the technology adoption curve or have different use cases.

I’m not against ads in principle. The advertisers are paying the bill for stuff I consume. Great.

For that effort, they get a chance at my wallet. And to be honest, making me aware of a business or product is indeed a way to get me interested in what they sell. I do prefer the ads to be relevant instead of always useless.

That being said, it’s currently preferable to use a blocker and let the people who don’t know how to use blockers subsidize my ad-free ways.

A lot of terms are starting to blend… Now anything that does work a human could also do is AI / robots / automation / machine learning.

Not long until the boats start shooting back