but this is the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.
You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right?
How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years?
We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?
this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
This sounds great, but it pains me that I can't dual-boot my iPhone 15 Pro as a lightweight Mac. Would be great with an HDMI connector & BT keyboard/mouse.
I can't see Apple doing anything that'd make the iPhone not a usable phone while it's being used as a Mac. But I bet they could have macOS components running alongside iOS, in a VM/container of some sort. Would be very cool.
(Honestly I can't see Apple doing that either though since it'd cannibalize their other product lines. But c'mon, Apple!)
All laws are vague and interpreted, and in common law (as in the UK and US) interpreted based on precedent rather than the specific text of the original law.
If people with power over you want to "selectively punish you" they don't need new laws.
And if you want perfectly proscriptive, defined laws in all situations with no "human interpretation" you're in the wrong universe, and may as well be shouting at clouds. The world, and especially human society and interactions, just doesn't follow strict definitions like that.
There are degrees of vagueness, but laws generally attempt to avoid being vague with many definitions and strict construction. If a law is sufficiently vague it may be invalidated, or it is at least required to be interpreted to the benefit of the defendant under lenity.
Vague laws are not required for selective enforcement. You can have strictly defined laws result in selective enforcement through law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion.
until you root out their friends and maliciously develop app stores for their products, then install them multiple billions of times on a docker and let them rack up charges ;) doom can run on -anything-
Frotz and Zork/Tristam Island and tons of Z3 machine games cna run on a pen, on a FPGA based display and even under a PostScript file where the interpreter was done in PostScript. Heck, with Subleq and EForth some Z3 interpreter can be coded to run the games on simple hardware made with high school/advanced trade electronics kits.
Stock buy-backs can be part of an illegal scheme but, in general, they are one of the few mechanisms in corporate actions through which the regular joe shareholder doesn't get the short end of the stick.
How is owning a larger share of a company with proportionally less cash and a higher price per share than what you could have sold it for before bad.
Have you looked at precious metal charts as of late? Do 1/x and that's the value of the cash these companies are trading for a valuable business.
reply