Recent content by daniel

A recent Planet Money podcast recently reported that HALF of North Korea's budget for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles (which they've been expanding greatly) now comes from stolen crypto! They were reporting on the recent theft of 600 million dollars worth of crypto (BTC, I think, but I'm...

Law and ethics are very different things. Not a suitable analogy, since a reasonable person knows that weather forecasting is a very inexact science. A better analogy would be if you live in Minnesota and a man offers to sell you a snow shovel, and you buy it but it turns out that the blade...

Presumably your car is insured, and if it gets totaled the insurance company pays?

At the time I bought my car, Musk was saying that if people paid for FSD it would (eventually) be capable of operating as a robotaxi, and he was even promising to provide an app (analogous to Uber) for the purpose. But being autonomous, you could simply set the car to respond to ride requests...

Maybe I misunderstand the distinction between L4 and L5, but the promise was that the car could drive itself empty to pick up kids from school or soccer practice, and that it could work as a robotaxi with nobody in it, and that it could drive all the way across the country with nobody in it. I...

When I bought my 2018 Model 3, I was told it had "all the necessary hardware" for what Tesla was describing as Level 5 autonomy, though they didn't use that term. They said that if I paid for "FSD" it would be capable of driving all the way across the country without any person in the car, and...

So he's finally admitting that Tesla lied to me when they claimed that my 2018 Model 3 had "all the necessary hardware" to be a robotaxi? Not only have they had to replace hardware for purchasers of FSD, but now they're saying they cannot upgrade the hardware on my car! Offering to allow...

Are they really "full service" if they're using SpaceX for the actual launch? It sounds like they're a training facility and travel booking agency.

That sounds like a really bad deal. Sorry to hear that. I hope you can find a solution to your dilemma.

That other thread was apparently regarded by the mods as assuming a "backup" is needed and as a discussion of the possibilities. So my posts and the replies to me were moved here, to this thread specifically about the pros and cons of colonizing Mars. This discussion was regarded as being...

Just talking off the top of my head here: Is it possible to buy out a lease before its term? Pay Tesla for the car and become the owner rather than the leasee? If so, you could buy out the lease and sell the car rather than transfer the lease. You could use an escrow agent to protect both you...

So a knowledge of classic science fiction is critical to discussing the plausibility of colonizing space? Very telling. I guess you have to be into make-believe to think that people could actually make a life in a place with no atmosphere to speak of, only trace amounts of water, toxic regolith...

Whether or not a "backup home" is possible, is an absolutely essential point in the discussion. If a backup home is not possible (as I contend) then trying to create one is a waste of resources that could otherwise have been put into combating the greatest threat to our continued existence...

No species endures forever. And in practice, a Mars (or Moon) colony would be totally dependent on Earth. If civilization crumbles on Earth (not just extinction, but global economic collapse) anybody on Mars or the Moon without a return ship available would die. There just are no "backup...

I did say "try." :rolleyes: Which is just one more reason why a colony absolutely dependent on environmental containment in a near vacuum, and where walking away is not an option, cannot succeed. Sure, they'd start with people who've passed every sort of mental evaluation, but people change...