You’ve got to normalize by dollars spent, though.

If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.

The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:

  > The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Randall Munroe of xkcd? I like his work but I'm not sure I'd call him a philosopher...

I see Munroe's work as filling the same role in society as did Socrates in his time. Not only in commentary about current events, government, society, etc but also in expressing his viewpoints in a fashion accessible to society. Socrates paved the way to bring philosophy to the masses. Munroe uses a popular medium and comedy to the same effect.

Ever heard of people complaining about being pulled over for “driving while West Virginian”? Why or why not?

I would not be surprised if Sam A. helped engineer this whole situation… “Child’s play,” like replacing a reddit ceo.

Oh look! https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-was-scam

Did you read the article? The author considers these possibilities and offers their estimates of the odds of each. It’s fine if yours differ but you should justify them.

I’ve read all of these articles, they are entertaining!

> Evidence: This type of attack had not happened before. An early study from Tsinghua University showed that estimated 54% of moltbook activity came from humans masquerading as bots (though unclear if this reflects prompting the agent as in (2) or more manual action). My odds: 5%

I like the “the study I’m referencing says this happens more than half of the time, that is why I think that this is evidence that it almost never happens”

The author of the blog posts has said several times that there is a good chance none of this happened the way that he described. I’m just pointing out that he said that. Repeatedly

Also “The Unaccountability Machine” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...

Evaporative cooling of the best content, likely, but plenty of social networks with worse ad loads still have plenty of users.

My question is whether Ellison does to it what Elon did to X: revamp the algorithm to support his politics.

This is not very newsworthy, stellar flares are common and known to emit X-rays.

Sounds like Dr. Kirkpatrick should have been a coauthor.

While Pasadena is a relatively wealthy city, historically there has been significant avoidance of its public schools by affluent residents: https://southerneducation.org/in-the-news/new-polling-data-f...

The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.

For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...