He is a man of commitment and sheer fucking will, after all.

These are also self reported numbers.

I know I wasn’t telling people how much I was drinking during the pandemic

After reading the children of time series, I choose to use octopodes simply due to the fact that they are beautifully narcissistic little bastards in those books.

Man is that a good, if gut wrenching series.

British food and women made for the best sailors in the world.

Then what’s the point in having a day by day rate?

In what world do you live in where teachers and engineers are buying 15 meter open ocean rated sailboats?

That’s a big boat. Storage fees alone would be crippling for most people.

If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.

It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.

A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.

Marques is actually very balanced even in his critical reviews.

Even with the Humane AI pin, he did commend them on their physical build quality, even if the rest of the device was practically useless, he never outright said that, just points out the flaws.

Although I do wonder sometimes how much he tries to hard to be balanced, as some products, especially cars due to the price, don’t deserve kind treatment for noticeable faults.

Or lower, because this pushes the great filter that must destroy civilization beyond early space flight.

Humans make terrible batteries, you leave one in a box for 6 months, you come back to a soggy, very stinky box.

Humans are much better as low power space heaters. As long as they have fuel, they’ll maintain a known temperature.

My goal is to build a fusion reactor.

I will hire Indian call center workers to add fuel to my diesel generator until the fusion is up and running.

This plan makes sense to certain people on the internet.

You’re giving me flashbacks to the online training my work makes me do every year.

I almost failed the first of 7 courses because I made the mistake of trying to do actual work while listening to the training, and didn’t realize there was a 5 minute timer for inactivity on the video player. And no, there was no additional time provided to complete the training. It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.

Space travel is very expensive and NASA has a very small budget these days.

Back during the space race, NASA could afford to launch multiple missions per year. Now they can barely afford to maintain existing missions and are lucky to launch a major missions every few years. Which is why they’ve moved to buying space on commercial missions, as it’s cheaper to only pay for a spot on a rocket/craft than to pay for the whole thing.

NASA also has to justify its missions to congress. Sending rovers to mars and probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have actual scientific interest and can answer questions about the formation of the solar system, and the viability of life off of earth.

Slingshotting something really fast sounds cool as fuck, but there’s not much data to be gathered there. We’ve also recently beaten the “fastest man made object” record with the Parker Solar Probe, as it’s currently whipping around the sun at ludicrous speeds while it collects data about the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields. It’s moving a lot faster than voyager ever did, as it needs an insane amount of speed to orbit so low to the sun. It’s actually much cheaper, fuel wise, to travel to Pluto than the sun.

So why waste billions of dollars to fling something out into deep space? We have barely even seen all Of the celestial bodies in our own star system, and there’s not much to be learned about the empty vacuum beyond the sun. The only justifiable reason would be to send a probe to another star system entirely. But that probe alone would have to be the largest, most expensive space craft humanity has ever built. It would need to be able to power itself for centuries, have a communication system capable of sending data over interstellar distances, and likely need a way to autonomously harvest its own fuel, as there’s very little point in sending a probe screaming past Proxima Centauri and taking a few hazy pictures of planets as it goes. We’d want the probe to be able to stay in and explore the new star system, and the only way to do that is to have enough fuel to move around an entire system, or create more fuel as it goes. Something like that has never even been tried before, and the risk is high when you won’t know if it worked or not for a few hundred years.

The energy density of nuclear fuels is unparalleled.

Modern reactor designs are extremely safe and stable, the only downside is the cost.

The cost is so high because they are basically boutique projects. Having a standardized design with mass produced components would go a long way to making nuclear reactors more affordable.