This makes you no different than any other creature in this world, and I see nothing wrong with that. You need to do your best to exist in the world as it is, and be realistic about what levers and knobs you can actually adjust.

I assure you that the voters are far more short-sighted than the politicians.

Yes. So?

I already vote green party. I look for practical ways to reduce my carbon footprint.

I'm not going to stop living my life, providing for my family, and making sure my kids have as good of a future as I can manage. And if I'm weighing how much effect I can have on their future by a) putting money towards their education, or b) trying to single-handedly save the planet by spending exorbitant amounts of money on ground source heat pumps, super-expensive electric vehicles, etc., then it's quite obvious that I can do far more good by focusing on helping my immediate family, friends, and community.

How much are we really doing by installing a heat pump water heater vs. everyone else who's pushing crypto-currency mining or AI datacenters, both of which consume enormous amounts of energy for frivolous and/or corrupt purposes?

Honestly, it's completely ironic and sad but the combination of COVID shutdowns plus the high gas prices due to the wars in Ukraine and Iran have at least temporarily cut fossil fuel emissions by more than any other environmental program anywhere or any time.

So piss off already.

This is exactly correct. Do you really want an 11 year old who's confused about their body to be getting answers from strangers in a Discord server or via Tiktok shorts? Because that's what's happening right now. There are some legitimate support groups that operate through these channels, but it's completely unregulated and for every legitimate channel or server there's a dozen distributing made-up or even harmful medical advice. In some cases it's even predators because it's the perfect place to find minors you can start to pry away from their family and friend groups. The social media companies knew this was going on and I can only imagine their legal departments were either screaming about this problem, or being paid to shut up about it.

The CEOs of these companies are trying to justify inflated stock prices that were high based on the expectation of future growth. You don't convince investors that you're still growing by laying people off, so you have to give them some kind of explanation, and AI is convenient. By the time it becomes obvious that AI isn't actually producing the productivity boost that they're claiming, then they'll be on to the next thing. The reality is that the cheap capital that funded the dot com companies through to about 2018 is gone permanently (due to demographic and globalization changes). The valuations will eventually crash. It's just a game of everyone playing chicken to see who sells first.

I agree it would only be a surprise first strike. But if any container ship was potentially hiding a few of these, think of the chaos it would cause in supply chains.

And how is that any different than a nuclear arsenal? It's an attack weapon that's most highly useful in first strike situations. But your enemy probably has a bunch too and they're hard to find and wipe out in a first strike. So the only way to win is not to play.

This is an interestingly less expensive deterrent for middle powers to buy (or develop themselves) who don't want to invest in a nuclear program to keep the larger countries at bay. I actually see this as a positive because it offers an alternative to nuclear proliferation. With current technology, a barrage of missiles like this can't be intercepted cost effectively, and you can hide them relatively easily. It has a chance to maintain a peaceful status quo, and perhaps avoid the looming WW3.

To give you a more practical example of the range, pretty much all of the continental US would be within 800 miles of the northern and southern US land borders. Not that Canada or Mexico would actually follow a program to develop these, as the US, Canada, and Mexico are still quite close allies, but my points is that the cost would easily be within the capabilities of those countries, and the range is pretty huge. Even container ships parked off the western and eastern coasts could reach well over 2/3 of the US landmass.

I have no idea what gateway was meant to be for.

I suppose you could argue that it was kind of like how the original Apollo worked. The capsule that brings you back to Earth for re-entry stays in lunar orbit and you just descend in the lander and go back up to lunar orbit. Plus you can maintain a much larger living environment at the gateway station. But it certainly made the whole thing seem like a Rube Goldberg affair. Assuming Starship gets the bugs worked out, then you should be able to do the whole mission with a single re-usable ship, assuming you launch it to low Earth orbit empty of fuel and then send up multiple other Starship flights to refuel it before it goes to the Moon.

Remember, it takes a long time for projects to make their way through the entertainment machine. The stuff that's coming out now was greenlit years ago. I don't think they're going around handing the keys to the kingdom over to a group of directors and writers whose main credentials is that they're "young and diverse." That was proven not to work, and they will now be mandating an adult in the room.

So Heppner is an idiot. Typing that shit into Claude is rather dumb.

Why would someone doing official government business using ChatGPT like a diary to document what they were doing? I don't understand. Aren't the context windows limited? Would it even "remember" everything you've told it? That just seems like an odd use for an LLM, and obviously OpenAI uses all that information for whatever they want.

Dude, I know a family where all 3 of their kids identify as LGTBQ+, and so do both of their cousins. Yes, it should be about 1 in 10 because we know historically that's the number, but if that were true then having all 3 of your kids identify would be a 1 in a 1000 chance. There was a survey that went around the schoolboard recently which said about a third of the kids from grade 7 through 12 identified as some kind of gender non-conforming. I support rights for everyone, and tolerance of everyone, but you can't ignore the social contagion effect. It's real. This whole generation is going to become young adults and will sit around laughing about how goofy they all were in high school comparing notes on their gender identity all day every day, and then it'll be considered cringe, and the next generation will be on to something else. It's already happening. That's kind of the reason so many young people are taking a conservative turn, which is weird for their age range. But that'll end too. And after all of that, the real 1 in 10 will still be there living their lives. As far as your complaints about the cost of living, I 100% agree. The only good news I have is that your kid graduated into a small demographic cohort, and that bodes well for their life-long employment prospects (as it did my generation born in the 70's). There will be lots of demand for services as the baby boomers continue retiring and start spending their money. All that capital in their 401k's and older family homes will slowly get converted into cash and spread out. And the stuff they're selling (stocks and homes) will be going on the market.

Isn't most of the S&P500 just speculative fiction anyway?

Alternative facts, eh? You can live in your post-modernist hell-hole where you can insist anything you want is true, but I'm quite happy living in the good old modern era, where people are expected to use logic and reason. If you want to explain what about those statistics are wrong, and what evidence you have that they're wrong, that would be reasonable. The fact that you simply don't like that information isn't a valid argument.