Doesn’t matter. Someone else nearby is wearing a smart watch that listens to everything you say.

Now for the big question:

Did AI make these students stupid, or is it just selection bias because the stupid students are more likely to use AI?

Just a sign of the times, really. A certain class of people are beginning to wake up to the fact that laws don’t really mean anything if you can just refuse to comply with them.

For us little people, that means getting arrested. But for ‘small business owner’ and up, laws no longer apply if you just ignore them hard enough.

Two separate issues:

1. We need privacy, autonomy, and right to repair legislation* for all cars, regardless of where they came from. The worries about Chinese-controlled software on these cars wouldn’t be so worrisome if we had that.

2. Protectionist industries can go fuck themselves. If they can’t keep up, they can just go out of business. That’s capitalism. “Oh, but what about their workers, who will be out of jobs!” – well, then subsidize the workers, not the corporation they work for. It’s a lot cheaper to make sure the workers are cared for than to keep a failing business afloat.

*To be clear what I mean about that:

Privacy: There should be strict limits on what kind of data a car can collect about its drivers and passengers, how that data is handled, and all cars should have a persistent opt-out option that’s reasonably easy to activate.

Autonomy: Car owners should have complete control over the hardware and software on their car. It should not be possible to remotely enable/disable car features, and it should not be possible to force a software update if the car owner opts out of updating. Possibly even require car manufacturers to adopt open standards and publish comprehensive APIs, making it at least theoretically possible to replace a car’s software with new software of the owner’s choice.

Right to repair: Manufacturers should not intentionally obfuscate any kind of repair or maintenance procedure. Spare parts must be produced and supplied for 10 years, and after those 10 years are over, CAD files and blueprints for those parts must be made publicly available. Must make reasonable effort to use industry standard, interchangeable parts when possible (for example, using normal hex head or torx fasteners, rather than some proprietary new fastener). Must make the car’s software available to owners and mechanics, at least to the point where it can be wiped and replaced if necessary. Must not require all service to be done at a manufacturer-controlled shop; must not penalize owners who do their own repairs or get repairs done at an independent shop. If the car requires specialized tools for repairs or maintenance, those tools must be made available for sale at a reasonable price.

The first time usually isn’t bad.

But if I have to repeat an unskippable cutscene for any reason, that’s pure torture.

what could possibly go wrong by putting nuclear fissile material into a rocket and launching it into space…

It’s nothing we haven’t done already. We already have nuclear-powered satellites, probes, and rovers.

what makes you think that nuclear energy is any more attractive on mars than it is on earth?

It’s not that nuclear energy is much more attractive – it’s that renewables on Mars are less attractive.

• Wind? Martian atmosphere is too thin to generate any meaningful power from wind – there just isn’t enough air to turn turbine blades with any significant force.

• Hydro? Complete non-starter: no flowing water available.

• Geothermal? Mars is much less geologically active than Earth – finding a good location for geothermal is going to be much more difficult, and it’s already kind of difficult on Earth.

• Solar? Your only real option, but even then, it’s much less efficient than on Earth because Mars is farther away from the sun and gets less sunlight.

Every type of renewable energy is either impossible or significantly less efficient on Mars. But Nuclear power would work just as well on Mars as it does on Earth.

There’s also the maintenance issue to consider. Nuclear power can be maintained by a small, well-trained crew that never needs to go outside of the power plant to do anything. But solar panels will need regular dust cleaning, which will be a labor-intensive process requiring lots of time on the surface.

Power storage is also an issue. Solar power will require huge amounts of battery banks to ensure you still have adequate power through night, winter, and dust storms. You’d have to size the solar arrays and batteries to account for the worst case scenario of a dust storm lasting all summer and going an entire Martian year with reduced energy production. But an adequately sized nuclear plant will remain adequately sized at all times, and you’d only want battery banks as an emergency backup in case something goes wrong and takes the nuclear plant temporarily offline.

Both are still viable, yes … but for a large, permanent base, I think nuclear power is the way to go. It’s easier to produce large amounts of power, easier to maintain, and the reliable steady production means you don’t need significant energy storage.

An inhabited Martian base will need lots of electrical power (mostly to heat occupied compartments). It seems a lot easier to me to have one modest-sized nuclear power plant, versus enormous fields full of solar panels and huge battery banks to try and meet the same needs.

Assuming you’re completely dependent upon solar power, that might make sense. In that case, a large amount of oxygen storage is basically just a way of storing energy.

Honestly, though, if you want to build a real Martian base, I think nuclear power is the way to go. Then you can have plenty of electricity, without needing to worry about seasonal cycles, battery banks, dust storms, etc. Just imagine the maintenance nightmare of needing to send crews to the surface to clean off all the solar panels after every dust storm…

Nuclear power is going to require some heavier, more complex components to set up and maybe the occasional resupply of fissile material from Earth. (Even if Mars does have some good uranium deposits, setting up the production line to mine, refine, and enrich it would require an awful lot of infrastructure. You’d maybe eventually set all that up, but early on, you’ve probably got bigger, simpler objectives to complete.) But you can easily go years or decades between nuclear fuel supply runs, and in the meantime you get the benefit of abundant, reliable power.

Eh… It’s still definitely not good for you.

You don’t really want domes at all, except maybe as a place to do some agriculture.

Mars doesn’t have sufficient radiation shielding to protect people on the surface, and any amount of shielding adequate to block the radiation would make the dome extremely thick and heavy. Any Martian colonists would already be getting more radiation than they should just from necessary excursions and activities on or near the surface. (Not to mention the interplanetary space trip to get there, which is even worse for radiation exposure.) You wouldn’t want their living or working quarters to give them additional radiation exposure.

You also want to minimize the exposed surface area of pressurized compartments, because they could be vulnerable to meteorite damage and subsequent pressure loss, perhaps catastrophic pressure loss. The Martian atmosphere is thin and doesn’t provide as much meteor protection as Earth’s.

Even using domes for agriculture is questionable. The main reason you’d want a surface dome for this is to take advantage of ‘free’ sunlight energy for photosynthesis … but there are issues with that:

• Mars is further away from the sun, so you’ll be getting less sunlight than most plants want. You may still need to supplement with grow lights.

• Mars is cold. For all the energy you save from not needing to run grow lights, you’ll instead have to expend much more energy keeping the dome heated to a reasonable temperature where plants can grow well. The thin, transparent dome is sure to radiate heat at a very high rate, and you can’t insulate it very easily without blocking a significant portion of your already-limited sunlight.

Even for agriculture, you’re probably better off using grow lights in underground chambers that can be temperature controlled with less energy expenditure and are well-shielded from radiation and meteorites.

If you insist on having domes on the surface, maybe consider something more spherical instead. A spherical(ish) “bubble” shape could maintain its own shape just from the internal pressure and wouldn’t need such big, elaborate anchoring systems to prevent the pressure differential from blowing the roof off. The “bubble” can either rest directly on the ground surface (after smoothing, rounding, and preparing it) or it could be supported on pillars.

Look at real life pressure vessels on Earth: they’re almost always in a spherical shape or a cylinder with spherical ends. Because that’s by far the most efficient way to build a structure that needs to contain a pressure higher than its surroundings.

Also, if you want to run a fun and more practical experiment on this, it would be good to answer a question: what’s the lowest atmospheric pressure where plants can still grow and thrive? Agriculture domes don’t necessarily need to be held at full Earth atmospheric pressure. The lower you can get the pressure differential, the closer you can get the inside pressure to match the outside Martian atmosphere pressure, the cheaper and easier it will be to build a dome that contains that pressure. So how low can the pressure go while still being able to perform useful agriculture inside it?

This is an experiment you could run yourself with a vacuum pump and a large vacuum chamber.

1: Set up a miniature garden inside your vacuum chamber, complete with grow lights, temperature control, and a way to water the plants without opening the chamber or significantly changing the inside pressure, at least for long enough for the duration of the experiment. Prepare several samples of fresh soil, to make sure each experimental run uses the exact same type of soil, replacing with fresh soil after each test, to ensure no variable of soil degradation. You need to make sure your vacuum setup is able to maintain a vacuum over long periods, as well as maintain negative pressure against occasional leaks (leaks could be a good thing, in moderation – your plants need fresh air!)

2: Select a variety of fast-growing, useful plants, and collect seeds for each.

3: Start with a control run where you run the setup at full atmospheric pressure. Record the results – how fast the plants grow, how large the plants grow, etc.

4: Repeat the experiment over and over again at lower pressures. 90% atmospheric pressure, 80%, 70%, 60%, etc, etc. Until you find a pressure at which the plants aren’t able to grow at all. And, of course, record the same results each time.

5: Analyze the data. Chart out graphs of plant growth vs. pressure. Hopefully, you’d be able to identify a drop-off point, above which the lower pressure doesn’t affect the plants much, but below which growth is slowed or stopped entirely. If you find such a point, you know that’s the pressure you’d want to run a hypothetical Martian agriculture dome at.

How to stop your TV from being used against you:

1. Never tell it your wifi password.

There are no further steps.

Seriously. You don’t need the ‘smart’ features, and no TV manufacturer is going to pay for a cell data connection in order to connect it without your wifi.

I doubt you need to repurpose the fuel tank – any rocket that travels to Mars would need to spend at least a few months in space to get there, so it will already need adequate oxygen tanks in its life support system.

And after you land on Mars, what are you going to fill that oxygen tank with? In order to have any use for it, you’d have to be producing oxygen on-site. But if you can reliably produce oxygen on-site, then you probably don’t need storage for a huge extra supply for it. The existing life support tanks in the rocket’s habitation module should already be more than adequate for storing enough oxygen to keep the crew alive.

(And this whole thing is assuming you’d land the entire spacecraft on the surface, which may or may not be the most efficient way to do things.)

Honestly, if you’re serious about setting up a Martian colony, I think the best course is to first send robots to construct a base for you, so it’s ready when you get there.

Well, you’ll never have a relationship like that if you stay home watching anime all day…

Should pass his own order to rename the lake to “Lake Canada”. Equally pointless, but fun for trolling value.

the moon doesn’t have a source of carbon in its atmosphere.

I would assume it has plenty of carbon in its rocks, though. But that might be more difficult to access, I suppose.

If only they would…

And if not entrance exams, there should at least be placement exams, where a low score means you get placed into remedial classes instead of straight into calculus.

If AI is so good, why do they want to hide the fact that they’re using it?

“When we tried to turn him back on, he wouldn’t reboot. Aw, shucks.”

The instructions on a shampoo bottle are way too nuanced for anti-DEI folks to understand.

Takeaway: all the corps are raking in shittons of money as they price gouge us on everything, and “woke” or the lack of it doesn’t change that.