I wonder if China has a constellation of similar satellites with the primary function to track the US CVBGs and provide aiming info for their "carrier killer" systems.
There are several factors which contribute to the "rosy" official picture:
- A lot of people participate in the gig economy instead of getting registered as unemployed.
- AI has eroded a lot of employment opportunities for graduates, i.e. people relatively active on social networks.
- Official data can be horribly inaccurate (phone surveys in 2025, seriously?) with grossly outdated models (remember the recent huge revisions?). Political pressure does not help here either.
- The unemployment stats do not account for significant downgrades in salary and working conditions. They will show the same picture for a person with a cushy office job and the same person working 2 jobs in retail from paycheck-to-paycheck.
Because unless you sit on top of a volcano, amount of renewable geothermal energy is minuscule. In most places on Earth it's somewhere around 40 mW/m2 (i.e. accounting for conversion losses you need to capture heat from ~500 m2 to renewably power one LED light bulb!). In other words, in most places geothermal plant acts more like a limited battery powered by hot rock, so unless drilling is extremely cheap, it does not make economic sense compared to other energy sources.
> In most places on Earth it's somewhere around 40 mW/m2 (i.e. accounting for conversion losses you need to capture heat from ~500 m2 to renewably power one LED light bulb!)
Ground-source heat pumps extract about 1000 times more power from ground loops, where does the difference come from?
A number of sources. Often the air above - ground source relies on the ground being the average temperature of the year round air once you get deep. They also tend to run in heating mode half the year, and cooling mode the other half.
Ground-source heat pumps are irrelevant to geothermal energy sources, and it's unfortunate that the article mentioned them. Ground-source heat pumps are just storing heat from the air during the summer and retrieving it during the winter.
Hmm, that doesn't sound right. Many homes don't use these heat pumps for cooling in the summer because getting convectors and plumbing installed is just as expensive as getting a separate AC, and then you have some redundancy in the system too.
I'm sure that battery effect is a factor but it must be a relatively minor one.
It's not minor at all. For a ground-source heat pump to work at all, you need to sink the pipes deep enough that the soil temperature is pretty stable year-round, which means the heat it can exchange with the aboveground air is minor or insignificant. So the vast majority of heat flux into or out of that soil is due to the heat exchange fluid circulating in the pipes.
After a few years of pumping heat out of the ground below the frost line during the winter, they'll freeze the ground solid and stop working (and possibly destroy the foundation of the house in the process, since often the pipes are installed in trenches around the house).
The only exception is if they're one of these few borderline systems that drill so deep they really are bringing up fresh energy from the depths, like some of the systems mentioned in the article.
Insulation, adobe construction, and vigorous exercise can all "heat houses in winter" in the same way as ground-source heat pumps, but none of them can be meaningfully compared with hydroelectric or nuclear power except in a specific situation. How much insulation is enough to charge your cellphone or run a load of laundry? The question is nonsense.
Ground-source heat pumps (with a few exceptions and borderline cases like those mentioned in the article) are not sources of heat, so you can only "get heat from" them in the short term; as with a battery or an interest-free checking account, though you may be able to temporarily run a debit balance, in the long run you can only get out what you put in.
This is a fundamental difference from energy sources.
Energy storage is an important complement to energy sources, especially renewables, and can substitute for energy sources to a limited extent, but confusing them is a fatal error.
Ground source heat pumps as used for heating buildings source their energy from the sun and work very well. They are outcompeted by air source heat pumps despite better efficiency because digging is expensive.
As I understand it, no, they do not source their energy from the sun. You have to bury the pipes below the frost line. In temperate climates, the frost line is the place where the earth is so well insulated from the surface by the thickness of earth above it that heat conduction is insufficient to freeze it throughout the entire winter. The sun only heats that surface by radiation.
> Unlike air-source heat pumps that struggle to extract heat from frigid air, ground source heat pumps tap into a remarkably stable heat source: the earth itself. Below the frost line, ground temperatures remain relatively constant year-round, typically between 50-60°F (10-15°C). This consistency makes ground source heat pumps highly efficient even during the coldest months.
If you were building a ground-source heat pump to heat your house in the summer, you could get away with burying the pipes at a much shallower depth and in effect converting the earth into a low-temperature passive solar collector. But generally people want to heat their houses in the winter instead.
While it's true that a geothermal plant is a limited battery powered by hot rock, that doesn't mean it doesn't make economic sense compared to other energy sources.
Russia uses plenty of artillery shells daily even today. Its own production easily outpaces NATO countries and they buy a lot from NK in addition to that.
Though they try to increase amount of "smart" munitions like Krasnopol, since they can be more cost effective than "dumb" shelling when you have guidance from drones.
>both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam
Tell that to fiber drones. They are used in such large amounts that entire fields get covered in fiber. Even radio controlled drones quickly evolve with wing-based drones acting as re-translators and carriers.
And in the near future (year or two) we will see mass adoption of drones which are able to fly autonomously with on-board computer vision. Initially it will be just guidance during final stages after the target is locked, but later we will see drone swarms launched into the enemy's direction which autonomously search and destroy everything what moves.
>They've only been useful on very soft targets.
Sure. And this is why on both sides shiny tanks and MRAPs from parades and military exercises now look like Mad Max vehicles.
>The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision
Meanwhile Russia found a huge success with its UPMK-modified FABs.
The situation may change significantly if an effective and cheap (kinetic or laser) anti-drone defense is developed and mass-deployed, but for now the sword is much stronger than the shield.
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
I think the whole sentence is a bad take. The described behavior can be perfectly rational (and thus commonly considered not "stupid") in the case when cost function of the acting person has a negative weight assigned to the counterpart group/person. In other words, when someone considers the other an "enemy", it makes sense to hurt the other even such act results in some direct losses.
Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid". And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even "evil".
Hurting the enemy is intentional and thus has an implicit "gain" built into it, even if it's just psychological. The physical losses can be deemed acceptable because of it, if the satisfaction derived from hurting the enemy balances them out. The OP is describing stupidity where the result is a true loss or zero gain, because the intent wasn't to hurt in the first place.
I suspect there's a strong correlation between people who are motivated by harming others, especially organised hatred of specific groups, and people who self-harm through poor modelling of consequences.
Harming others correlates with personality disorders. Personality disorders - especially Cluster B - correlate with poor impulse control, an emotional rather than a rational orientation, addictions, unreliability and dishonesty, and general inconsistency.
Disordered people with high IQ and EQ tend to get away with disordered relationships for longer. But it's rare to live one of these lives with zero consequences. So these types are at least as likely to go through catastrophic collapse as to get away with their chaos and dysfunction.
If it's an everything bubble, than it may not be a bubble, but a currency depreciation instead (not just $, but of all fiat currencies). Market participants openly expect a new round of bigger than ever money printing on the first serious signs of the R word (and BBB is just a precursor here).
Though, personally, I consider the AI trade to be currently deep in the overripe bubble territory.
When you fix everything around gold this becomes obvious. We’ve had silent hyper inflation of the reserve currency since covid. Wages are stagnant, the price of everything has gone up, assets and gold are still the same “value”
Trillion dollar companies, 100 billion+ club becoming crowded. All points in one direction. And it’s not a bubble that will pop, the citizens of the world will revolt.
Add to that cost of electricity routinely rising in EU. The practice shows that with the current technology intermittent renewable generation above a certain threshold in the total generation mix results in a sharply higher cost of electricity for consumers when accounted for all additional expenses (storage, more robust grids, "smart" grid controls, etc.). And we got this with massive EU subsidies on top of dirt cheap solar panels subsidized by the Chinese government.
Yeah, and you can even consider yourself lucky if it's just downvotes, sometimes your messages just get flagged, like when I called renewables being a major reason for the Iberian blackout with citations from the official report.
It's often quite easy to distinguish LLM-generated low-effort slop and it's far easier to point to the established policy than to explain why the PR is a complete garbage. On Github it's even easier to detect by inspecting the author's contribution history (and if it's private it's an automatic red flag).
Of course, if someone has used LLM during development as a helper tool and done the necessary work of properly reviewing and fixing the generated code, then it can be borderline impossible to detect, but such PRs are much less problematic.
