To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.
lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?
Sex education and access to educational material around sexuality is inversely correlated with teen pregnancy. The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant? While it makes sense that the current administration would take this step, considering the President's numerous attempts at teen pregnancy have been a contentious issue, what's your motive?
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
> The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
That's a different argument than the one you made.
But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
And the encyclopedia isn't "banned," you can still get it yourself somewhere else, the school or whatever just made a choice about what to carry or what not to carry which they do all the time and will always do.
> So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant?
No, obviously not. And that you went there shows pretty flawed reasoning. You didn't seem to understand my comment, and you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
My argument was what you said didn't make sense: I already summed it up: "the pornographic-ness of 'the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to' has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library."
> But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
I would have absolutely no problem with this existing in a middle or high school.
> you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
> I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
No, it's option 4: you didn't really understand the narrowness of my point (which I was really explicit about), and kinda aped bits of the structure without really getting it. The proof is how you want on about teen pregnancy in response to me, like that had anything to do with what I was saying or where I was coming from.
Great, you've identified how people who want books for children to include porn can include that porn without getting in trouble for it. Just need 167 pages of filler.
>Cool. So if those mythical people actually exist and do so, we can address it if it ever happens.
My original comment that you and others replied to gives the name of the book, the author, the name of the site you can view the book for free, and tells you which page to turn to. It's not mythical, I all but deep-linked to it.
There is no baby in the swampwater you peddle. You probably don't have a baby and never had a baby... I have children. This is actually important to me.
The book you linked to is not pornography hidden behind 167 pages of filler. It is appropriate content for teenagers and I have zero issue with it existing in a public school.
I do have kids, and I don't appreciate the harm you are trying to do to the environment they are growing up in.
No. Not that you're making a good faith suggestion with your false dichotomy.
Just because someone doesn't want to keep their kid away from water doesn't mean they are okay with throwing them off a boat. There is a middle way, where you teach them to swim.
The novelty of "new thing! That would have been incredibly hard a decade ago!" hasn't worn off yet.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened.
I would imagine that people had similar thoughts about the first photographs, when previously the only way to capture an image of something was via painting or woodcutting.
When movies first came out they would film random stuff because it was cool to see a train moving directly at you. The novelty didn't wear off for years.
There was something someone said in a comment here, years and years ago (pre AI), which has stuck with me.
Paraphrased, "There's basically no business in the Western world that wouldn't come out ahead with a competent software engineer working for $15 an hour".
Once agents, or now claws I guess, get another year of development under them they will be everywhere. People will have the novelty of "make me a website. Make it look like this. Make it so the customer gets notifications based on X Y and Z. Use my security cam footage to track the customer's object to give them status updates." And so on.
AI may or may not push the frontier of knowledge, TBD, but what it will absolutely do is pull up the baseline floor for everybody to a higher level of technical implementation.
And the explosion in software produced with AI by lay-people will mean that those with offensive security skills, who can crack and exploit software systems, will have incredible power over others.
I think that when a software system is used by more people and has more eyes on it, it's more likely to have its security flaws be found and fixed. Then all the users will benefit from the fix.
The more that software is fragmented into bespoke applications used by small numbers of people, the less people benefit from security network effects.
I believe the security vulnerability issues will be addressed with companies using cloud based vibe-code platform or a ai security auditor agent that runs through the code base and flags security issues.
Sure it is. AI software development is here. It's not good enough for everything, but it's good enough for a majority of the changes made by most software engineers.
That's now. Right now, the tooling exists so that for >80% of software devs, 80% of the code they produce could be created by AI rather than by hand.
You can always find some person saying that it'll destroy all jobs in a year, or make us all rich in a year, or whatever, but your cynicism blinds you to the actual advances being made. There is an endless supply of new goalpost positions, they will never all be met, and an endless supply of chartalans claiming unrealistic futures. Don't confuse that with "and therefore results do not exist".
No, it isn't. There is a gigantic chasm of difference between "80% of code they produce could be created by AI" and "80% of commits they produce could be created by AI".
Mixing the two up is how we get a massive company like Microsoft to continually produce such atrocious software updates that destroy hardware or cause BSODs for their flagship Operating System.
That's not replacing software development. That's dysfunction masquerading as capability.
And none of what I said is goalpost moving. They are the goalposts constantly made by the AI industry and their hype-men. The very premise of replacing a significant amount of human labor underlies the exorbitant valuation AI has been given in the market.
It appears that your understanding of AI code generation reflects the state of 1-2 years ago. In which case of course it seems like what people are describing as reality, feels 1-2 years away.
> There is a gigantic chasm of difference between "80% of code they produce could be created by AI" and "80% of commits they produce could be created by AI".
This is exactly the goalpost moving I am talking about. I said 80% of code could be AI-written, you agreed, and followed up with "oh but it doesn't matter because now we're measuring by % of commits".
> That's now. Right now, the tooling exists so that for >80% of software devs, 80% of the code they produce could be created by AI rather than by hand.
Technically 100% of the code they could produce could be created by a ton of very specific AI prompts. At that level of control it would be slower than typing the code out though.
Just throwing out random numbers like this is complete nonsense since there's about a million factors which determine the effectiveness of an LLM at generating code for a specific use case. And it also depends on what you consider producing by hand versus LLM output. Etc.
Today I fed to Opus 4.6 five screenshots with annotations from the client and told it to implement the changes. Then told it to generate real specs, which it did. I never even looked at the screenshots, I just checked and tested against the generated specs. Client was happy.
The article as written is entirely consistent with John Cochrane's style. I have been reading him off and on over the years so I think I have a decent baseline for comparison. It doesn't smell of AI to me.
If anything, even the included quotes from Refine don't smell much of typical AI, but maybe I am less discerning there. I did notice the em-dashes though!
That would be around 30kwh per day so probably not, but you could get close.
Assuming you're in the US, new solar modules go for about $0.28/watt.
If you dump the entire $1k into just modules, that will get you about 3.5kW of panels. Which will probably hit your target on sunny days during the summer.
But that doesn't include inverters if you want to do a grid tie, or batteries if you don't, or wiring, or whatever you're going to mount the panels on.
$1,000 is definitely too ambitious for that much energy. Even just the charging plug for the car is going to take a sizeable bite out of that.
Another way to think about this is that $1,000 is about 20 tanks of gas, assuming you get 400 miles per tank that's 8,000 miles, which is less than a year of driving for the average American. You can increase your budget and still come out way ahead.
The other consideration is that this scheme only works if you only drive at night, otherwise you'll need a battery to store that power while your car is out and about during the day, or you'll need to grid tie and use the grid as your battery.
Texas, technically, generates more TWh than California. I think a data center boom followed by a bust would help a lot more than what California can do. Unlike in cars, CAs market size or regulations can’t help/hinder other fuel sources as much.
Not only did solar and wind provide the vast majority of power during the day today, as I write this comment coal is neck-and-neck with storage as an energy resource - i.e. power that was saved during the day because it was so sunny.
Coal simply makes no economic sense as a power source for electricity generation anymore. Natural gas is still needed as base load for when renewables are insufficient, but in perhaps the "free market ideological capital" of Texas, the trend towards renewables + storage is simply the economic choice.
Grid-connected PV in Texas has grown between 33% and over 100% every year since 2008, which outpaces the growth of solar in the US in the same timeframe.
California's percentage of solar generation as a share of the entire solar generation in the USA has shrunk every year since 2016.
It's not been accurate to say that California is dragging the rest of the country with them for a long time when it comes to energy generation.
It doesn't need to. The reality is companies are going to go for whatever the cheapest cost for electricity is, and solar w/ batteries has taken that lead. Capitalism happens to align with a renewable energy green transition, regardless of whatever the US political engine wants. At the end of the day most companies are going to choose profit over political ideology.
Sadly they might not be allowed to choose profit. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% a year ago!
Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.
You're right but the problem is subsidies change that math. If the US gov subsidizes oil, then the economics of that work out even if solar wins in a free market.
That's true, but also requires that companies believe those subsidies will remain in place over ~20-30 years. Assuming US elections remain fair, that's not going to be the case. By contrast solar / wind subsidies are effective since the bulk of their cost is up-front, so you can generally rely on getting full value out of those subsidies.
Subsidies can certainly delay things at this point, but it's hard to see how it'd stop it.
I agree. Subsidies will delay, but they will not change the outcome.
Considering we are racing against CO2 release and the warming planet, I worry that the delay makes a large difference in outcome, not for energy breakdown, but in quality of life for humanity.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.
I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold.
I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
It's worse than that because it takes something that should beg the question what modern things we peddle today because they make $$ are in fact morally wrong into a trite "hurr durr past people bad we smart now" that nobody learns anything from.
Offshoring generally improves the lives of the people who get the offshored jobs. Usually foreign companies pay more and have better working conditions than the local companies.
Consider as just one example the lawsuit over child slavery against Nestle, etc [1]. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Nestle can't be held responsible for the child slavery even though they have full knowledge of it happening. Go figure. In fact, that's what they pay for.
The whole shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is incredibly dangerous for those involved and couldn't possibly be done in any developed nation.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
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