When you build new things they necessarily blow up during the development process. NASA is hobbled by a flat budget so they can’t afford to blow anything up. So they can’t build anything new, which is why SLS is a bunch of old parts scrapped together.

An AI would give a generic definition of Saturn and a generic definition of tea and then say something irrelevant like “scientists disagree about the exact composition of Saturn’s core”

Saturn is a mixture of gases. It has a solid rocky/hydrogen core surrounded by a layer of liquid hydrogen/helium. You could argue that this intermediate liquid layer might have solid particulates, and this would agree with the definition, but overall Saturn is too complicated to be classified this way. A better extreme example would be something like Earth’s oceans.

Al is a major element in the solar system. Most rocks have Al2O3 on the order of 3-10 wt.%. That includes chondrites (the major class of meteorite) which have plenty of feldspar, a mineral that’s like 20 wt.% Al2O3, and calcium-aluminium inclusions (CAIs), which are as their name suggests, Al-rich.

Cool. Enjoy your dystopia.

Corporations want to be perceived as people, and they are protected by law as such. A person who knowingly manufactures weapons that are being used to commit a genocide is a psychopath. Psychopaths typically feign empathy to appear normal and blend in with society. Lockheed Martin supporting Pride is an example of such behavior.

Of course corporations are profit maximization engines, not people. By allowing them to act like people, we are normalizing psychopathy.

How about you only have to work 28.8 hours a week?

You had to be there.

It’s fine for a user who needs specific things not that often. I always have to look up how to do anything anyway, and by the next time I do it I’ve either forgotten or the software has updated.

Haber will obviously continue to be used and work but as long as there’s a fossil fuel price to make it happen expect more extreme storms, fires, droughts, floods, ocean acidification, and possibly methane clathrate release triggering a runaway greenhouse effect like during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.

I think it’s the degree of bullshit that increases gradually. To speak from experience, when you are a grad student you get a feeling like there’s corruption but overall your project seems like it’s important and making a real contribution (hopefully). You also don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from. Sometimes the grant as a whole is total bullshit but there is enough discretionary spending included that great science comes out of it. But you don’t realize this until you’re writing grants, and by then you’re maybe too deep in the game to pull out. Essentially, you end up becoming a manager once you get tenure. There is no epiphany; it’s more like a slow creep.

There is no alternative if you actually want to do science and don’t have millions of dollars to buy labs and materials and instruments. Science gets done in spite of everything she is describing.

The use of corn-based feed for animals seems to be a universal trend. In Europe it’s done less than in the US, but it’s an option everywhere and driven by prices. And those prices do not consider the CO2 cost to the ecosystem.

https://www.dairyherd.com/news/european-cows-eat-more-foreign-corn-global-glut-erodes-price

Literally impossible, due to energy/biomass transfer up the food chain. The bottom will always be the most efficient.

Picture illustrating this

I love this. “Israel invades Norway” would be such a great news story to follow.

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s an intro sentence that already has 2 citations and just needs a 3rd, and you just find a paper with more measurements and the same conclusions.

I think they’d be solar powered with some kind of thin film photovoltaic. You don’t need much battery in that case. While some carbon cost is inevitable, the point is they wouldn’t ever compete with something that burns kerosene.

Airships only make sense in a world in which the economy takes into account ecodestruction. Kind of like wind-powered ships. If we didn’t know what GHGs do environmentally, which offset any short-term efficiency gains provided by burning hydrocarons, nobody would ever dream of abandoning these miracle fuels. So you can only examine the efficiency of airships with hydrocarbons off the table entirely.

This is a bridge too far for most people, but you could have an equal society just by setting a limit to salary differential. If the highest salary was capped at 5 times the lowest, that would be fine. The largest socialist organizations in the world (militaries) have this kind of system.

And nobody on the internet is asking obvious questions like that, so counterintuitively it’s better at solving hard problems. Not that it actually has any idea what it is doing.

EDIT: Yeah guys, I understand that it doesn’t think. Thought that was obvious. I was just pointing out that it’s even worse at providing answers to obvious questions that there is no data on.