The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

Terry Pratchett captured it well in death’s speech.

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

Justice is a communal lie. It doesn’t exist. Yet, but believing it it, we can make it real.

It’s worth noting, that the police issue in America is very solvable. Most of the Western world’s police use a “police by consent” default. America’s “police by overwhelming force” is the outlier. It leads to a lot of your issues over there. While they are far from perfect, the UK police are far better than America police.

It’s worth looking for the opportunity to reform the police in the process, not just hate on them (ineffectively).

If you treat people as a group, they tend to lock together as a group. The police are already getting pissed off with ICE, in many places. That crack needs to be pryed open. Indifferent, pissed off police/FBI etc is a lot better than them standing in lockstep with ICE.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

Outside of the USA there still seems to be some competent politicians. Whether there are enough, in the right places is a different story.

We can at least hope for the best. There’s not much else we can do.

FYI. Chamberlain’s appeasement was actually quite calculated. Britain couldn’t stand up to Germany, and knew it. Appeasement brought time. It let Britain build fighters and tanks. To set up its radar defence net. To prepare for a major war.

When it failed, as Chamberlain knew it would, he fell on his political sword. This cleared the way, and let Churchill take charge, with a clean slate, and a functional military.

I’m hoping that current politicians are half as competent as Chamberlain was with his appeasement.

Trying to ban them would be extraordinarily difficult. A potential solution would be to push to reclassify them as trucks, under trucking regulations (I’m unsure how this is done in the US). Once you need a tachograph and a requirement to keep driving records, it would cut back on sales. It also still allows “legitimate” usage. This would weaken the argument against the change.

Basically anything where you can’t see a 5 year old within 0.5m of your bumper should be under “truck” rules, not “car” rules.

The question is, would the 2nd head be an independent personality, trapped inside the horse, or an extension of the outer horse’s senses?

What genres are you looking in?

For building games, factorio, or satisfactory absolutely blow away anything from yesteryear. There are similar games in many genres.

It’s worth noting that some genres saturated a while back. FPS type games have been optimised to the limits for a while. It’s difficult to make something new and interesting in that environment.

It’s also worth noting that shovelware production has been industrialised, particularly in mobile gaming. Companies pump out mass numbers of games, that are basically reskins of each other. They are entirely focused on $$$ rather than making good games. They are predatory to the extreme, and water down the market further in the areas they attack.

It’s definitely a product of its time. Some of the humour has become a bit dated, but it still holds up well, as a low budget production.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

I suspect Russia is worried about how well their nukes will work. The small tactical ones (battlefield nukes) are the most complex and so most at risk of a maintenance failure.

Russia’s worst fear is deploying a nuke, only to have it fizzle. At this point it’s strategic or nothing. Deploying a strategic nuke would cause massive political fallout. Far more than Russia could cope with. No-one, including China and India, want that genie back out of the bottle.

Just hard a read through, and there are a lot of problematic flaws in your concept.

In the first section, corruption will be a HUGE issue. The groups deciding on pay rates will have insane power, which will attract bribes etc. E.g the powerful pushing down wages in their field of interest for short/medium terms profits.

On top of that is the inefficiency problem. Very few jobs are equal. E.g. a sawmill worker, working on the outskirts of a big down will want different compensation to one working completely out in the sticks. There’s also no system to adjust for changing demand. If you’ve not got enough builders, tough shit, no pay increase to pull in talent.

Trying to cover these will create an insanely complex and problematic bureaucracy, that will grow rapidly out of control. It’s basically a version of what the USSR and communist China did. Reading up on how they failed could be enlightening to you.

On to the second point. You’ve again got massive inefficiencies. Often the blemished bananas etc don’t go to waste. They are used to make things like banana ice-cream or banana bread etc. You also jumped straight to processed foods. There is no accounting for making something better from cheaper, but higher quality ingredients.

It’s a LOT more efficient to just work out the cost of feeding a person (in a particular location). If it costs $X to feed a person for a month, then just give them each $X. They can decide how to most efficiently use that money. Some will buy basic meals, others will cook using higher quality ingredients, still others will add to it to cover take away each night. All get fed, and efficiencies get maximised on a local level.

As for taxation. It’s a good idea in principle, but would have problems in implementation. It’s already a problem that unphotogenic causes get underfunded. Your idea would be equivalent to America using “Go fund me” to cover medical costs. It works, ish, but is horribly unfair.

A better solution might be a donation match system. You pay $Y and the government diverts $Y of your taxes (up to how much you paid) to a cause of your choice. The UK government does something like it already. Gift aid allows UK tax payers to donate to a charity. The charity can then claim 25% of the amount from the government. E.g. a £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.

Your ideas are a good leaping off point. A few useful bits of advice.

Check to see how an idea can be corrupted.

Check if it’s been done before, and how it worked/failed. Also look at how inefficient your idea is.

A large amount of inefficiency can be worse than unfairness. A split where some get $300 while others get $100 looks unfair. However, if the fix leaves everyone with $80 then the unfair version still wins overall (everything else being equal).

That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.

What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.

One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.

My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.

No sane UBI plan will do this. The goal is to cover Basic needs, not replace working. What it does attempt to do away with is the requirement to work yourself to the bone to barely survive. Working to pay for things more than the basics is still expected.

A useful side effect is to rebalance the power dynamics between larger companies and their employees. It’s a lot harder to abuse someone if they won’t be homeless within 3 months if they quit.

It’s often one way or the other. “Get away from me!”, or “more babies!” Pregnancy hormones do a complete number on the mother. That’s before having a parasite attached to you near 24/7, demanding your attention, day or night!

Interestingly, her pheromones can do a similar job on any males around her (both human and dog). That was an interesting surprise.

That’s a trick many/most breeds of dog can pull off. It’s amazing how well a wet nose, and a slobbery smile shoved in your face can break a bad cycle.

There’s a reason they are used as emotional support animals so often. They can guard us from ourselves almost as well as this dog did the sheep from coyotes.

It implies the trend is likely to continue. That the searched areas and the unsearched areas are nominally the same.

E.g. An inspector saying they have found 20 problems, this far, while 50% finished implies they expect to find 40ish overall.

Finding zero problems thus far implies you are not expecting to find many/any, if the trend continues.

Not quite.

Yet implies they expect to.

Thus far is more neutral, erring towards not expecting to find anything.