peterwoo

You should care about "theoretical" future death because, via the inexorable passage of time, the future becomes the present. At which time you have "actual" death happening all around you.

Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.

I wrote a much less complete/polished program like this using WebGL this year:

https://wioux.github.io/tracking-station/

I was playing a lot of Kerbal Space Program and wanted to use those UI concepts to explore real missions and orbital maneuvers. I was particularly interested in the Cassini trajectory. But I started the project before discovering Eyes on the Solar System, which is awesome and now I find I'm kind of robbed of my motivation.

New Horizons was launched directly into a solar escape trajectory.

It's going slower than Earth but that is no indication of how advanced the technology is. The whole goal was to get a close encounter with Pluto-Charon. What's the point in flying off into nothingness any faster after that?

Why not take the financing for this basic income and build things like housing instead?

If you have better schools the district's property values go up which increases the tax base. Families can and do move across districts to access better schools, so there is competition in that sense. Same with many city services. Firefighters and teachers in Palo Alto for instance are paid well compared to other districts, the schools are some of the "best" in the nation, and property values are high as hell.

Can you elaborate? I do say that we should develop the asteroid defense capability, to eliminate those smaller more frequent impacts and others. My terminology was not standard or precise and I apologize for that. I mean by "small" those which are akin to an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb explosion, and "medium" those which would cause catastrophe over a large region but not global annihilation.

The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further.

Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.

In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.

It's a strange idea that progress was arrested by anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and environmental activist movements, while epitomized by men walking on the moon. The counter-cultural movement of the 60s was not anti-science it was anti-exploitation and anti-hegemony.

Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.

What is it?

A flat rate could cover software fees and advertising. Dispute resolution should maybe be insured for each and every ride, but at nothing close to the ~20% cut currently taken.

It's not about whether the achievement is groundbreaking in a technological sense, but whether this is a reasonable, defensible, sane, or even merely legal, program.

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

...

Article 1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. . .

...

Article 2.

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind. . .

. . .

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

... etc"

— Universal Declaration of Human Rights - http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/inde...

Theft is when I take property which I have no right to take possession of. It doesn't matter if guns or force are involved, or fraud, or sneakiness, etc. If taxation is theft, then it is theft even if it's unenforced and involves no threats of force.

Why is taxation theft?

ULA has an engine reuse plan. If they can get it working it'll be much more efficient than the hoverslam approach.

I'm just saying we shouldn't abandon or postpone progress on Earth to start an impossible colonization project on Mars.

Any opinion you or I have about how long Earth will remain viable is irrelevant. There's nothing else. Mars and every other body are not viable at all and we have no way to make them so.

I don't think we should put any resources into colonization activities right now. In case it's unclear, I'm agreeing with you and responding to blacksmith_tb's suggestion that "it would be better to colonize the solar system before we make whatever developmental leaps could let us transcend suffering".

You have to work on building out the colony once you're there too, that's part of the deal. Hard, impossible work.

Humans killing ourselves / extinction events are incredibly unlikely over the time frame that SpaceX will exist for. They're also easier to survive or avoid than it would be to colonize Mars. Except maybe surviving a gamma ray burst -- but who knows, since it looks pretty impossible for humans to colonize a planet.

On the other hand we have a chance to save the tens of billions of people who will live and die in the 21st century and experience genocide, starvation, disease, child abuse, imprisonment, other violence, etc. We're already doing it -- it's achievable. It can't wait for a Mars colony!

Conservationists (or anyone else who objects) will have it easy. Interplanetary missions are sensitive to timing. All you have to do is disrupt the launch schedule for a few weeks, then boom, it's another few years before they can even try again.

If all this is true then why even go to the trouble of supporting opt out?

The support for opt out acknowledges (implicitly) that the choice to upload data is rightfully the user's own prerogative. Then paradoxically enables the feature by default anyway and places the switch behind some esoteric opt out commands.

The ESA has a really interesting segment on the space debris problem and possible solutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN_CvGJKMOs

Everyone understands that in the vast majority of times we use man/woman, he/she, or him/her, the intention is not to specifically draw attention to a person's reproductive organs. It doesn't take special schooling to detect this distinction, though it does require some thought to figure out what to make of it.

There would only be PC pressure to pretend a trans man has a penis if "having a penis" were a vital component of being a man, which it is not. In any case, the circumstances under which one finds themselves having to confirm the presence/character of another persons genitals usually either fall outside of or supersede the jurisdiction of "political correctness".

Yup. For one they aren't delinquent on rent. But also the rules literally are different, there are city and state ordinances governing this trailer park. Residents are entitled to the appraised value of their homes, the city had to approve its closure, etc.

Residents are being offered between $12,000 and $30,000 for the appraised value of their homes and they don't want to move. I don't think $20,000 in cash would change their minds since the question for these families is pretty existential.

Talking about growth here is a red herring. The density in that trailer park is probably higher than any residential neighborhood in Palo Alto, and they're replacing ~400 residents with 184 luxury apartments. There will be some increase in density perhaps but not much.

You say if the city were smart it would tear it down and build high rises on the site. But does it make sense? There's a big park nearby with donkeys, sheep, and chicken coops. There's a community orchard nearby as I said. On the other side of Foothill Expressway you've got huge estates and vinyards. But the much higher density housing in Buena Vista must be razed?

I think you're making a larger argument here which is independent of what's going on in this neighborhood. It's certainly a valid point. But you need to separate it from the Buena Vista issue. The controversy is not about growth, it's about whether the people there deserve to live in Palo Alto.

This idea is absurd. First of all a high rise in this neighborhood is terrible city planning and would never work. This is the place we're talking about

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4142855,-122.129379,3a,75y,2...

You can't just drop a 40 story building onto a residential street, even apart from it being illegal due to city ordinances. The infrastructure is not here (and you can't build it in 19 days). If somehow you got it built it would only make everyone miserable. This street already gets kind of whack during the school year since it terminates at Gunn High School (which I guess they would simply make twice as big).

Second of all -- cut a deal with who? Not just Buena Vista residents, the whole city. Nobody wants that. A developer would have to be insane to even try.

A few years back in a nearby neighborhood they tried to replace a community orchard with new housing. Not even displacing people, just trying to develop affordable housing on top of peoples' PLANTS. It was pushed to a referendum and Palo Alto residents rejected it. The developer had already bought the land and had to sell it.

You guys use the word "seriously" here in an entirely different sense than these statements intend.

These aren't statements made to the board, they're PR statements made to outsiders after huge breaches of customer/employee personal info. No one is reassured in these times by a company being "serious" about security in the sense that they have supposedly calculated its expected impact on their profitability.

> Given that the listed businesses are still operating and in most cases continuing to turn similar profits to what they were doing before, they appear to have done an excellent job weighing the costs in play.

You can't know whether (even in an internal bookkeeping sense) the "tradeoff" was net positive. The incidents still cost the companies money.

BP still exists and is highly profitable despite the spill and the ongoing costs incurred. That doesn't mean, hey they must have given it serious thought and found it costs more to inspect and maintain the rig than the $50B+ spent cleaning it up.

More quotes from the Judge on this issue:

>“Silk Road created [users] who hadn’t tried drugs before,” Forrest said, adding that Silk Road “expands the market” and places demand on drug-producing (and violent) areas in Afghanistan and Mexico that grow the poppies used for heroin.

>“The idea that it is harm-reducing is so narrow, and aimed at such a privileged group of people who are using drugs in the privacy of their own homes using their personal internet connections”, she said.

Through its drug market Silk Road incentivized (horrific) drug violence across the US and other countries. The best you could say is that they had no effect on it.

The privilege criticism is that Ulbricht wants leniency despite the overall harm reduction being marginal. It might have been safer for him and for the dealers, but not significantly for any other group.

Charge money for it?

It's clear to me, even as a lay person, that Levinson's statement does not refer to any statutory text. Or any legal procedure, etc. On what grounds was he objecting?

"A party does not go far enough by raising a non-specific objection or claim"