> You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste
I think a lot of this has been driven by businesses completely dropping their part of the deal in a pursuit of ever increasing profits. Formerly there was the long term promise that staying with one company would be rewarded and instead now for 99% of companies you're deeply punished if you don't hop jobs every couple years for a pay bump. Then they've also lobbied to completely gut funding for education to lower taxes or shift into subsidies. And a lot believe college is a waste because there's been a huge reduction in the value of just holding a college degree while the costs have ballooned.
The whole system that created it has been dismantled for profit long before the culture of it started to fall apart.
Some of the platonics have folding instructions not just the papercraft net but yeah I wish some of the more interesting ones had actual instructions for the thing being shown too.
The instructions seem rather sparse, like the Archimedean solids only have folding nets, and not the folding instructions that produce the cool looking pictures with the holes in the faces.
Even for the intersecting tetrahedra where instructions are available, I see that it's basically constructing the edges from 30 pieces of paper and then assembling them together. I wish they have more things that were built from a single square piece of paper.
It's definitely disappointing and feels like a lazy site to not have much more than "look at these neat origami representations of these shapes.
Building from a single sheet is pretty limiting and beyond a cube build like the classic inflatable lantern you'd likely need glue to hold the folds down I think.
Maybe it is a work-in-progress and they just didn’t get around to doing all of them (it’s probably a lot of work). Most of the more complex/compound ones don’t have instructions or nets at all. The paper models are still very beautiful.
I looked at the page, and decided I wanted to see how to origami some of the archimedian solids, which are lower down the page. I don't find platonic solids as interesting so I didn't click on them. I saw they existed but you can't see that they have folding instructions unless you click on them
Less than a half dozen of the things on that page have a set of actual origami instructions available. I can completely see missing the few out of all the others because they're the less interesting items on the page.
Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.
Mosul is a large city and Rafah is one neighborhood in Gaza. There are many buildings remaining in Gaza (if you look at other parts of the map).
Rafah has been demolished to create a buffer zone near the border (after the population had been evacuated). Egypt likewise has demolished Rafah on its side of the border in 2013 to create a security zone.
> "Israel is allowed to unilaterally declare their home is no longer allowed to exist and I don't see a problem with that"
Just translating what accepting that "demolished to create a buffer zone" is a reasonable justification for levelling Rafah (and a lot of the rest of Gaza) means. Those peoples lives, homes and businesses are expected to just be subject to the whims and desires of the Israeli government all while they allow(ed) the blockage of aid going into the territory and fired on the camps they drove people into.
The biggest issue is the whole idea of colonizing Mars or anywhere else as a backup runs into a couple major issues. 1) These backups are going to be extremely dependent on Earth for supplies because the alternative is replicating a tiny version of the whole planet's industrial base which will only make economic sense if transporting goods between these locations is extremely expensive, which is something that makes setting them up in the first place also prohibitively expensive. 2) Any technology that makes Mars/Space/etc survivable also makes it possible for an Earth based civilization able to survive basically any calamity up to the death of the Sun.
To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.
To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
The point on the first is the offworld colony is not a backup if it cannot be self sufficient and requires critical materials from Earth. Colonies like Australia also weren't meant or built to be self sufficient, they were extractive, extending the military reach of the British Empire and bringing in resources to make it rich. If the goal is a "backup" civilization it needs to be self sufficient for a long period to allow it to "restore" to Earth...
> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
> Guarding against another global pandemic is another
This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
I'm not saying it wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own. I don't see that as an argument against it, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago after all. I don't think restoring civilization to Earth is a primary goal either. The primary goal is having a technological civilization survive the destruction or fall of the one on Earth. If a Martian colony is sufficiently robust and wealthy enough to send physical aid to Earth after a disaster then that's great but if it can only look after itself then its still achieved its purpose.
Global economic collapse due to an asteroid or nuclear war might not cause human extinction but it would mean a very large regression in our technological capacity. That could endure for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe we would never fully recover, people argue that point based on all of the easy to access resources having already been exploited though I have more faith in humanity's ingenuity. The role of a Mars colony in this scenario isn't to send iron ore to Earth, it's to maintain high technology and continue moving forward.
The risk of a pandemic becoming interplanetary is much lower than the risk of international spread. Travel between Earth and Mars is necessarily constrained by their orbits with a window opening only every 26 months. Most travel would likely be uncrewed cargo and when people do make the trip there would be strict quarantine measures taken (this is already done with current crewed launches to orbit and there is established history of immigration being subject to quarantine). Most importantly, the trip to Mars takes much longer than the incubation period of any disease likely to cause a pandemic so the disease will have run its course by the time the ship reaches Mars and they can decide what to do at that point (at the extreme they may resupply it and send it back but that's probably not necessary in most cases).
> wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own
My concern is the incentives and economics that make it possible for them to exist, principally (relatively) cheap launch and transit costs, preclude it ever being economical to invest the resources required to ship say modern chip lithography equipment out to the new colonies rather than them continuing to buy them from Earth. Or the alternative, they get treated like pre-revolution US colonies and are intentionally kept dependent by restrictions on imports and tech exports in order to provide a market for the mother civ to sell into. And this time instead of being in a verdant land full of resources the colonies are on baren rocks dependent on the mother country for critical life support supplies so the capture and dependency are magnified and much stronger.
I guess I just don't see the need to ship something like a modern chip lithography machine? When the colony is first getting established they don't need to be making 2nm chips, there's only so much of that equipment that they would want for their own uses and they could get by without it just fine. There's something like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for equipment that they would want from Earth starting with the most essential equipment for building habitation, power generation, growing food and extracting and recycling oxygen and water. Mars is a frontier not a new subdivision so the people who would settle there need food and shelter instead of laptops and TVs. Even after basic needs are met it would make more sense to figure out how to produce all of the tooling and manufacturing equipment you need locally instead of trying to ship everything, that's what self-sufficiency really means: you can produce not just the end products but all of the raw materials and machinery needed to create those end products. That's not to mention the biggest reason to make everything locally would be that it has to work in Martian gravity, there are a lot of manufacturing processes that would need to be redesigned for that. I don't deny that they would be dependent on Earth at first but there isn't any way around that since the whole idea is to move part of humanity from Earth to Mars. That doesn't make independence impossible though.
I don't really see the point in arguing against it. If a private company and private individuals want to try to colonize Mars then what does it have to do with anyone else? You can't cling on to their legs and scream "don't go!" It all just seems to be in the same vein as that famous headline saying man will never fly.
That's the level of tech the colony will need to replicate if it's going to be truly self sufficient for anything other than short periods which it would be to fulfill it's purpose as an actual "backup" in the situation it's trying to restore a broken earth it's going to need chips to put in all sorts of things. For a tiny example look at how long the shockwaves of minor delays in chip availability from various floods in Taiwan or the Suez blockage have caused issues and imaging them just not being available.
Yes it wouldn't be the first step on establishing them but it is the kind of things it would need to be truly self sufficient. Chips are in practically every thing today already, it's a critical supply component to do anything other than simply surviving.
I bet an underlying thought is that we crabs will have to finance the entire Mars colony adventure through taxes and incentives and subsidies and whatnot.
There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.
Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
Orbital insertion burns do not have to change the current altitude, their only required role is purely about adding speed to the orbit bringing up the altitude of the orbit's periapsis (lowest point of the current orbit) from inside the atmosphere to roughly the current altitude (or above).
Yeah it's a great way to learn a small bit of the unintuitive aspects of spaceflight. Though real launches follow a much more refined trajectory than most KSP but yeah the basic steps are still the same, though often blended together IRL due to limits on deep throttling and available relights for real rocket engines (though with mods you too can experience the need to do that in KSP, along with fun problems like ullage burns to settle fuel).
As a citizen they cannot block you from returning to the country. What they can do however is seize your devices (and briefly your person) and other property.
So the main argument is that in the time that was written and immediately afterwards we can look to see what they mean by that by how it was implemented. At the time it was understood that the government could and would search goods as they enter the country without warrants to enforce things like tariffs. I think that's a fairly reasonable interpretation of the meaning. Where I think this goes wrong (and maybe deviates from history?) is the conflation of papers and other digital records now with physical goods, historically were people's papers searched as they entered the country (beyond say looking through them to find hidden goods, I mean reading and examining letters and records)?
The problem when you rely on unclear laws that haven’t been modified for 250 years is they haven’t been modified for 250 years.
The scale of surveillance now wasn’t even thinkable back then. The ability to encrypt. The bandwidth and latency of communication. The sheer nunber of people, the research into manipulating minds. Does the second ammendment apply to an f35 or a tank? Well it doesn’t really matter, they clearly weren’t in scope when it was written. There were no wiretapping laws in the constitution because there was no wires. unreasonable in 1780 was different to unreasonable today.
The US has famously failed to update its legal framework via the legislative branch, so
It’s upto the judicial branch which seeks to be about interpreting what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today.
>>The problem when you rely on unclear laws that haven’t been modified for 250 years is they haven’t been modified for 250 years.
The Constitution gives you some rights but maybe not this one (to not be searched without warrant at a border). The problem is not The Constitution but the legislative branch that didn't make laws to ban it.
>>what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today
It's not the job of judges to invent laws or ponder what laws make sense. That would be legislative branch.
> The US has famously failed to update its legal framework via the legislative branch, so It’s upto the judicial branch which seeks to be about interpreting…
Our judicial system is modeled after Judaic precepts (shoftim/shotrim/shomrim) outlined in Deuteronomy 16:18.
There, shoftim refers to judges who interpret and apply the law, requiring deep literacy in the Torah to ensure righteous judgment without favoritism or bribery. Shotrim are the enforcers of the court (sheriffs, etc.).
I don't know where people get the idea that the role of a judge is not to interpret the law. This is literally the only thing SCOTUS does.
It's their job to interpret but not to invent new laws or ponder which laws "make sense".
In particular just because it "makes sense" to extend 4th amendment reading doesn't justify judges just going for it. That would be legislating from the bench.
Every time SCOTUS makes a decision they invent new laws or nullify existing laws. Every case they take is a question about whether certain laws "make sense," and that determination is based entirely on learned, but subjective, personal opinion.
Take for example laws which depended on Roe V. Wade being a Constitutional right no longer existing, and laws created after that right was repealed, because said right didn't make sense to the current Justices (despite being established law for nearly 50 years.) Did the wording of the Constitution change over those intervening years? No. Justices who agreed that Roe was a right died or retired, and were replaced by justices who disagreed, and the Constitution means whatever a majority of Justices say it does. Or the Supreme Court deciding that the 2nd Amendment's definition of "militia" included every American citizen, thus creating a right to personal firearm ownership where none existed before.
Or more accurately, the Constitution means whatever a majority of Justices decide that the hypothetical ghosts of the Founding Fathers, if summoned into a pentagram, would themselves decide. It just happens to be the case that the original intent of the Founding Fathers always correlates to the political bias of the majority. Crazy how that works.
And of course the Supreme Court's power of judicial review itself was never granted by the Constitution. They just made it up because it made sense to them.
Fortunatly there are ways to codify the agreement of the community/nation through the passage of laws and constitutional amendments. Something the US fails to do, as it’s more convenient politically to allow the judges to do it.
But the 100 mile rule? That covers damn near everybody in the US (>200 million, or 66%, give or take) subject to warrantless searches on the whim of whatever the police want?
It's more than that, it's being "close" to a border (you can argue if 100 miles is "close") and not on a whim but reason to believe you recently crossed it.
I don't see many maps that include them in the visuals of border so I'm not sure of the status of that and if the feds are arguing it would count and I think they would if there was an indication they were. I do remember that that was part of the discussion when the policy/rule first got a lot of attention a few years ago but it's not showing up in the visuals now. Maybe there was a clarification or restriction added either by courts or by the executive?
Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane. It should be pretty trivial for customs to funnel travelers through a checkpoint where they can search at the time of the actual border crossing.
Likewise we now have the technology to automatically surveil the border 24/7 (maybe modulo tunnels, though I wouldn't be surprised if we could detect those too?), so a 100-mile exception only ever becomes more and more dubious. We could've built the wall and lined it with a surveillance system for less than the cost of this Iran war (never mind all the m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ stimulus this decade), shutting up the whole border debate once and for all, and ending justifications for internal surveillance for trafficking.
> Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane.
I'm actually pretty curious about this. You can't easily sneak on/off a commercial international airplane, but that's because they've got the gates set up in the airport to funnel you through a specific path that leads to customs. Showing up on an international charter or GA flight seems squishier. http://www.canada.eaachapter.org/FLYING%20TO%20and%20FROM%20... The process seems to be that you schedule an ETA, taxi to a CBP station and wait there until a CBP officer arrives.
On the other side of it, it looks like CANPASS would let you land in Canada even if the CBSA station is closed...
If you fly up from countries south of the US you have a tight list of airports you can clear customs at. Wilmington NC is the odd one on the eastern seaboard. Its about 520 miles north of the nearest one. For flights coming up from the Caribbean headed to New England its a lucrative place to be.
It's still quite hard to sneakily fly into the US in a GA or charter plane and land unexpectedly at an international airport which is why they seem to not count. I say that because places like the SBCC don't include 100 mile bubbles around international airports on their maps of the issue.
On the other hand all aircraft are tracked (we are surely not trying to account for the possibility of a stealth aircraft transporting illicit goods across the border and secretly landing somewhere), and they can decide what they're going to demand from international flights. They might be somewhat lax on runway security, maybe? But it's a pretty constrained problem and easy to keep it localized if they want to tighten it.
Sure, but if you're driving in NM or TX or AZ, what constitutes that reasonable basis for a stop? As long as the car is legal, there can't be any, yet they still do roving patrols. The also stop buses and trains mid-transit (not at stations), which again, hard to conceive of why that would be necessary - if they know an illegal is on a bus/train, sure stop it and get the person, but asking everybody onboard - should be illegal.
Two main cases and the interpretation there-of [0]. The most expansive interpretation of the 100 mile zone that includes all coastal areas hasn't really been tested and AFAIK CBP mostly uses it in a more justifiable area around land borders so far relying on other justifications for more inland operations.
That's a separate issue I don't support outside of situations where they can reasonably prove/show you crossed without alrady going through the search. Luckily, at least so far afaik, it hasn't really been deployed in the maximalist way that turns the whole country into that zone. It's a lot easier to justify near physical land borders like Canada and Mexico than it is if it's being used within 100 miles of very controlled impermiable borders like international airports. Has it been used outside of the land borders?
Well intentioned laws today can be used by illintentioned actors in the future, and mild legal exceptions can become significant ones with a couple additions.
The 100 mile zone is a good example - that 100 mile zone assumes the entirety of the great lakes is international waters, even though Lake Michigan is 100% American Territory and over 300 miles long. So, you could be in a landlocked county of Indiana, and be harassed by the federal government for being in a border zone.
Whats to stop someone from saying, the entire Mississippi river and its tributaries are a border zone? With that you could get 80% of the US population into the border zone.
By enabling some "rule based" decisions that skirt the constitution, you enable a legal mechanism for constitutional rights to be violated without any legislation.
I think they should have to pass a new amendment to fix or clarify when the Constitution seems to say something contradictory. Court shouldn't be able to just decide the 4th Amendment means something weaker than what it plainly says.
There are other backers to that as well. The main ones being oil trades being settled largely in USD and the need to acquire USD to pay for US goods/services. It's not all military might there's a lot of economic might in there too.
This is the important point. Oil was/is settled in dollars. The world is rapidly moving away from oil. China has already hit peak oil. China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity. If you're leaving oil behind, and buying solar, batteries, and EVs from China, your need for dollars declines, and need for yuan goes up. Also, stocks vs flows. You have to keep buying oil every day from petrostates, while the clean tech you buy is yours for its entire service life (a decade or more for EVs, decades for solar and stationary battery storage).
The US did well when the Saudis required dollars for oil as part of the US-Saudi security and military arrangement, and that arrangement is declining in value over time as the value of oil to the global economy declines. The US loses investors in US treasuries when folks who sold oil for dollars do not have dollars from oil sales. Shades of theta decay.
> "The petrodollar loop requires two moving parts: dollars earned and dollars invested. Both have stopped."
> The standard reassurance is that there is no alternative to Treasuries — no other market offers the depth, liquidity and legal infrastructure that central banks require. This remains true. Foreign central banks will not abandon Treasuries wholesale. But “no realistic alternative” and “unquestioned safe haven” are not the same thing, and the Iran war is clarifying the difference.
> As the world’s largest manufacturer of clean technologies, data on China’s cleantech exports provide an important early insight into the pace and scale of the energy transition. In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.
(as of this comment, China is exporting EVs at a 12M unit/year annualized run rate, with the capacity to build 50M EVs/year; they are only constrained by not enough marine vessels to keep up with export demand; every 24 months of EV production destroys ~1M barrels/day of oil demand at current run rates, which continue to increase)
Oil being settled in dollars is completely unimportant.
It makes no difference in what currency a trade is conducted.
What matters is the jurisdiction in which you store the proceeds.
That selection of jurisdiction drives everything else.
I can declare that all oil must be settled in blue seashells. Who cares? What matters is that I do not keep my profits from selling oil as a pile of blue seashells, I invest those profits in some country. As long as that country remains the US, disproportionately, then oil can be marked in British pounds, seashells, hollywood B-list handjobs, it really makes no difference at all.
But, you object, "Doesn't oil being priced in dollars mean that nations need to have dollars to buy oil?". Nope, there are forex markets. So let's look at a situation in which oil is priced in Euros but Saudi Arabia stores its surpluses in dollars.
Which currency sees an increase in demand?
Japan goes to buy oil, so it sells the Yen and buys Euros. Those Euros are handed over to Saudi Arabia, which immediately sells them to buy dollars.
So the net result is that the euro transactions cancel out and all that matters is the selling of Yen and the buying of dollars. The yen falls against the dollar and the euro goes nowhere. It's a literal null op, in terms of net demand for the currency. It means nothing. The jurisdiction in which the proceeds are stored - that is everything.
Now I would ask you, in which jurisdictions do you think Saudi Arabia can efficiently store the ten billion or so it earns each day from selling oil? Nepal? Where does it store a couple trillion dollars worth of financial assets each year? Argentina? Which nation allows such vast unrestricted capital inflows and outflows? Go ahead, make a list.
So you see, whereas one can literally invent anything in which oil is priced in, to find a jurisdiction that can accept those capital inflows, that limits you to basically a single choice. Now, given that Saudi Arabia needs (not wants, but needs) to store its proceeds in dollars, it makes sense that it would price the oil in dollars to save on transaction fees. But really it can price the oil in anything it wants, no one cares except people caught in dank youtube caverns where the ominous phrase "petrodollar" is scrawled on the walls by torchlight.
No France still needs X USD to send to Saudi Arabia for Y barrels of oil. The only way the USD becomes funny money is if SA buys X from France also denominated in USD so that the cycle is closed, otherwise France needs a continuous source of USD to send over to SA. [0]
[0] Simplifying to national here; yes it's not just one unit in France and one in SA but on net there's X trade between the major money movers in each country.
I am asking you to imagine a situation in which oil is priced in currency A but the proceeds are stored in currency B in order to determine whether it is A or B that matters, or both.
In your example, A and B are the same (dollars) and you demonstrate that there is a need for the common currency of A and B, but you are unable to distinguish between the demand caused by A and the demand caused by B, so I don't think you are groking the example. Suppose A and B were different. Oil is priced in dollars but the proceeds are stored in yen. So
1. France sells euros to buy dollars
2. France gives the dollars to KSA for oil
3. KSA sells the exact same number of dollars for Yen.
So now we see that 1 and 3 cancel the net demand for dollars to zero, and what remains is a transaction in which euros were sold for Yen, so the Yen rises against the euro and nothing at all happens to the dollar. No demand for the dollar due to oil being priced in dollars. All that matters is the currency in which you store the proceeds.
By the way, this used to be an adage of currency traders - it doesn't matter what currency a thing is priced in, what matters is the currency where you store the proceeds of the sale. This was shorthand for "the seller determines which currency gains from a trade, and the buyer determines which currency loses". So France, in selling euros for dollars, determines that euros will lose value, but does not determine that dollars will increase. It is Saudi Arabia, the seller, in choosing where to store the proceeds that determines which currency, in this case, the yen, will increase.
It's also entirely possible he's essentially competent at the job of being a board member which is a pretty do-little job if the CEO is doing a good job.
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