My sketchy napkin math gives an order of magnitude of a few months of panel output to get it in space.

5kg, 500W panel (don’t exactly know what the ratio is for a panel plus protection and frame for space, might be a few times better than this)

Say it produces about 350kWh per month before losses.

Mass to LEO is something like 10x the weight in fuel alone, so that’s going to be maybe 500kWh. Plus cryogenics etc.

So not actually that bad

I’d like to introduce you to the internet.

There’s a reason /s was a big thing, one persons obvious sarcasm is (almost tautologically) another persons true statement of opinion.

Thanks. I wasn’t aware of that.

It took me a minute to realise you were joking too! :)

Halloween happens once a year, that’s a big reason it’s tolerated. Also, many parents do provide guidance/control over how much and how fast the candy is eaten. Because otherwise everyone suffers.

The better comparison is what if there was a bottomless bucket of candy in your 10 year olds room all the time.

Why stupid? Vector images are widely used and extremely useful directly and to render raster images at different scales. It’s also highly connected with spacial and geometric reasoning and precision, which would open up a whole new class of problems these models could tackle. Sure, it’s secondary to raster image analysis and generation, but curious why it would be stupid to persue?

Anyone expelling a student over a single “ai” label from turnitin alone is a complete idiot. Perhaps that happens occasionally, but that’s clearly the result of horrible decision making that isn’t really turnitins fault.

Anyone who gives 10 seconds of thought to how this could help realizes at 90% it’s a helpful first pass. Motivated students who really want to hide can probably squeak past more often than you’d like. And you know there will be false positives so you do something like: * review those more carefully, or send it to a TA if you have one to do so * keep track of patterns of positives from each student over time * explain to the student it got flagged, say it’s likely a false positive, and have them talk over the paper in person

I’m sure decent educators can figure out how to use a tool like that. The bad ones are going to cause stochastic headaches for their students regardless.

“Less interesting” is an interesting value to compare things that are typically measured by utility. Human form factor robots are definitely more interesting to us as humans, but really only economically viable for high mix low volume tasks (of which there are many).

But past a certain scale special purpose machines will always be more cost effective.

And more annoyingly they will no doubt be given modular behavioral capabilities that require separate subscriptions to use (even the big cube-shaped farming robots do this)

That was widely ridiculed, but despite how it sometimes seems policy makers are not so stupid to believe saving water from cups not drunk would make a meaningful difference directly.

One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.

This is a great example of how patronizing policies developed by intellectual authorities backfire in the real world.

The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.

All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?

Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.

Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.

> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.

There is a base amount of water that everybody uses as a basic necessity, and then there is water used on top of that for water hungry lawns that is not. If all you can do is set a flat, non-progressive, water usage rate, the wealthy people who use a disproportionate amount of water will not change their behavior.

The same anti-tax Republicans who gave California the disastrous Proposition 13 also gave us Proposition 218. The people in charge of water policy know what they're doing better than you do, but their hands are tied by the voters. https://www.ppic.org/blog/prop-218s-ongoing-impacts-on-calif...

I'm always surprised when people think they know something better than the professionals and just complain about it to other non-professionals. Just explain your idea to the professionals. If it's actually reasonable, they will change what they do. I have done this successfully with local governments many times.

> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.

I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.

Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.

I don't know why California's electricity costs so much, but the gas prices are high due to regulation distorting the market. California has special California gas produced only at in-state refineries. It's for a good cause--California's gas, "CARB gas" is cleaner. But the gas market in California is segregated from the wider US market

> The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves

This isn't premise, it's observable fact.

> and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.

This is just evidence that the authorities are also members of the general population.

You didn't use the word "almonds" in this post and for that I commend you.

Well it didn’t work. I don’t elect my representatives to change human behavior at scale.

So you don’t think the government should have any economic policy? No taxes, education, or social welfare services?

What do you elect them for then?