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sadly won't be possible for anything serious next decade as each space trillionaire and country launches their own 10,000+ constellations

sky will be constantly twinkling, will be weird

we'll have to switch to space telescopes above LEO

https://satellitemap.space


You misunderstand the issue. It’s a significant problem for some kinds of observations and largely irrelevant to others.

Satellites don’t include light sources and there’s nothing to illuminate them when in earth’s shadow. In order to interfere with light based astronomy they need to be outside of earths shadow and someone needs to be actively taking a picture of that chunk of sky. As these satellites orbit eye close to earth almost the entire sky is clear near solar midnight.

Major ground based telescopes can also add a shutter to block light detection for the fraction of a second a satellite would interfere. Basically at extreme magnification you’re looking at an ever smaller percentage of the sky which means the odds of a satellite, even one of millions, being in the shot for a given second is low. It’s still an issue, but being 99.X% as effective is good enough not to be a major concern.

Where it’s a concern is whole sky observation where you can’t easily add a shutter and losing a significant portion of the sky every night is a real problem.


I’m seeking funding to open up a rail gun ranch where you can sit in your lawn chair and blow satellites out of the sky.

Probably legal in Texas? If it's directly over "your land?"

If your application says it is meant to hunt feral hogs, then they will allow it.

Feral hogs IN SPAAAAACE!

Kessler‘s farm?

I'm thinking of "space roombas" that glide around and bump all the sats in LEO into the atmosphere like a game of pool

Only problem is they are toxic as they burn up and create a lot of pollution

* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...

(too bad gravity is impossible to overcome cheaply or do the opposite and yeet into sun)


> "The direct cycle is very likely to result in a large quantity of radioactive material in the exhaust," Hecla said. Air itself is irradiated as it passes through the engine, and fission decay products from the nuclear fuel also diffuse into the straw-like cavities and are shot out the back

> "This thing is an environmental nightmare," Lewis said. In addition, the reactor poses a huge risk to members of the military who might be required to handle it.

> In 2019, an accident off the Russian coast killed several Russian nuclear personnel. Shortly thereafter, a spike in radioactivity was detected nearby. It's now widely believed the accident was the result of a Russian team attempting to recover a prototype Burevestnik reactor. Hecla said it's possible that the reactor restarted as it was being hauled from the bottom of the sea, sparking an explosion.


Thorium reactors are the future, safest possible

PBS Space Time explainer

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ


the thing is while something is better than nothing, new drug development is critical

there is absolutely no cure for certain types of long-covid and me-cfs right now

no repurposing any drug is going to cure it, they've tried everything after six years

it will take a decade to have anything even in the pipeline and won't emerge from the USA because all medical and science research investment by the government has been destroyed by Russell Vought and Heritage Foundation

JAK-STAT inhibitors will be a big treatment, not a cure, but they cost thousands per month in the USA because generics aren't allowed


> the thing is while something is better than nothing, new drug development is critical

> there is absolutely no cure for certain types of long-covid and me-cfs right now

> no repurposing any drug is going to cure it, they've tried everything after six years

Then repurposing should free up resources for new drug development for those conditions that it can't address.

Sounds like a win-win, unless the goal is somehow not to most efficiently allocate resources to maximize health outcomes. But at least in the US, that's clearly not the goal.


Meanwhile guess who just gave ANOTHER BILLION to MORE wind farms not to finish building

* https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...

The insanity of it all. Do we survive this decade? Are you SURE?


Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges - https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15062026/trump-administra... - June 15th, 2026

> Do we survive this decade? Are you SURE?

Yes. We simply took our foot of the accelerator pedal for a bit. Regrettable, but that is all. Hopefully a lesson has been learned, but perhaps not. Humans are tricky.


That particular human is not tricky, sort of the core problem.

I was referring to voters.

and it's 100% Russell Vought

most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought

Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10

If Vance somehow gets the reigns and/or 2028 it will be even worse because Vought will get even more power/control

* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...

* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...


It's 100% christian evangelicals (bible fundamentalists) that inserted themselves into the republican party after the counter-culture movement of the 60s. They hate freedom and liberty, full stop.

At Heritage, in the break room over the microwave, there's a sign: "science delende est."

Surely, you mean over the coals. :-)

Vought has openly declared himself as a Christian Nationalist. Christian Nationalism as a whole is dead set against scientific research.

The article is valid alarm but I would expect more education from "The Hill" to know that it wasn't the chatbot version of Grok, saying that makes the author sound stupid

"The concern raised is valid and should cause alarm"

BUT

"I'm going to ignore it instead because of a disagreement on the terminology used"


I could see how the government’s “equivalent to 1.5 billion words or 6 million pages of text being processed by the technology” statement could be interpreted as chat.

ok, so this comment is just _as_ stupid given there's only two AIs of note being used: image models and LLMs.

Neither of them should be trusted with decision making.


a better perspective is he is worth more than HALF THE WORLD POPULATION COMBINED

he is worth FOUR BILLION PEOPLE

should not be physically possible, it's a failure of humanity


> he is worth

No, he has ownership in stuff valued at X amount.

> should not be physically possible

And it isn't. It's all imaginary. He doesn't have 4 billion apples compared to my 1 apple.

> it's a failure of humanity

People need to stop letting emotions override their critical thinking.

It's a failure of critical thinking, not humanity (unless you judge humanity on its ability to think critically, in which case it's you and not Elon Musk that is leading towards the failure of humanity).


>And it isn't. It's all imaginary. He doesn't have 4 billion apples compared to my 1 apple.

What isn’t imaginary is the outsize leverage that his 4 billion non-Apples afford him…


if you have an asset that can be sold, that's part of your worth/wealth

Musk has told tens of billions of dollars in stocks over the years

in just 2021 he sold $40 BILLION in stock

even single-digit billionaires are wealthy beyond comprehension

Musk could sell $100 BILLION in stock this year if he wanted, that's not imaginary

btw every other billionaire has donated to charity, Musk never does

even the evil Koch Bros have funded hospital cancer wings all over, Musk never does

instead he created his own fake Foundation and only gave it $14 Billion for his own projects

he's silo-ing insane levels of wealth, the worst kind of person


> if you have an asset that can be sold, that's part of your worth

I guess the difference between you and I; I don't judge someone's worth that way.

I also don't presume to tell others what to do with their own stuff.

Monetary wealth at those levels is imaginary. Once you can get past that, you'll be a much happier person.

Also, I don't think someone "silo-ing insane levels of wealth" is worse than a child murderer.


it would be hilarious if not for all the suffering, death and destruction

not to mention trillion dollars sucked out of the economy, for nothing

and since Israel is not included, they will just end this in a week


Is anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company?

No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)

"AI" to me means the exact same thing

company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits

it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options

it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse

Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite

If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS


> No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)

They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again.

The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative.

Nobody likes badly designed menus.


LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.

I haven't experienced any chatbot or telebot that can do anything for me. The whole reason I'm calling is that the self service wasn't successful.

Yell "HELP HELP" into the chatbot and see if it calls 911 for you.

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