Might be a good time for countries to start charging SpaceXAI (or however it's called these days) for their effect on the ozone layer.

If e.g. the EU estimates that it'll have to spend fifty billion euros a year dealing with the effects of LEO satellite constellations in the ozone layer then they should bill those fifty billion euros to the operating companies with each paying a proportion relative to how many satellites they have in LEO.

Likewise for every other country that has to deal with the effects of a diminished ozone layer. If that means SpaceX becomes deeply unprofitable then that's unfortunate for the investors.

They also serve to decentralize remembrance. A Holocaust memorial is good, yes, but it's in one place you're probably not going to go unless you want to. Stumbling stones can be randomly encountered while you go about your day and remind you that someone who had their life ruined once lived here.

That's precisely why right-wing politicians oppose them in favor of centralized memorials.

Fine them one million a day until the generators are done. That should motivate them a bit more.

Why? Plenty of dams are perfectly capable of producing power 24/7. It may not even be possible to let the reservoir fill up during the day and drain it during the night, especially during a drought or flood period where the amount of incoming water very much dictates what you do with your dam and when.

You make a lot of assumptions about how dams are operated. Those assumptions aren't always true.

Yeah; working tickets in a small company without seventeen layers of corporate bullshit feels so good.

You take a ticket. It contains information about the expected state of the product and how reality differs from that, relevant additional information, as well as information on who reported the bug/requested the feature. You start work on your task immediately because everything you need is right there. If you have questions you know exactly who to ask and how to reach them. Your bureaucratic overhead consists of a daily 15 minute standup with the other devs. The codebase may be a bit old-fashioned but is sensibly organized and reasonably easy to understand. Two days later you submit a merge request; the code review is done in another day and you set the task to done.

Now let's see how it goes in a corporation:

You join the one hour pre-refinement meeting and see a new PBI. The PBI contains a vague description of something that may or may not be your team's responsibility. While trying to turn the description into ACs you realize that it references an old version of the DOM so your architect has to talk to the operating department for clarification. Regardless, the PO points out that the issue is on a hard timer so the PBI passes through pre-refinement half-finished.

During the two hour refinement meeting the PBI has to be estimated based on the architect's best guess on what to do. You plasyx planning poker because you have to despite having no idea about how complex the task actually is. This is still very important for planning so you guess it's an 8. After this the team adds tasks to the PBI based on what you think needs to be done. These tasks contain no information beyond their titles.

Unfortunately, the PBI lands in your lap. While trying to make sense of the description and ACs you realize that it's impossible to understand without looking at the DOM, which requires you to launch Enterprise Architect and hope that you currently have access rights. After parsing a 125-element UML chart you ask your lead dev for help. He refers you to someone on another team but can't remember their name. You track them down and message them on Teams. A day later they actually respond and you can start working.

The codebase uses a hexagonal event-driven CQRS architecture with eventual consistency and ROP everywhere, which means that it's virtually impossible to step through the code and see where values actually come from. After wading through application-internal events that generate other application-internal events you finally realize that you made the mistake of relying on your IDE's "Find all references" functionality, which isn't reliable in a codebase as enterprisey meticulously engineered as yours. A repository-wide regex search finally leads you to the place where you need to make your change. One of them, that is; you also need to update three domain event handlers, two feed workers, twenty test classes, and a stored procedure in the database. This takes over a week, especially since in the meantime you also had your half-hour dailies, a 90 minute retrospective, a two-hour sprint planning session, a CAB advisory, weeklies for three workgroups you're in, and a joint review session.

Finally you submit your code and open a pull request. Azure DevOps fails to build your application because SonarQube complains that one method contains more then thirty statements. That method initializes a domain object with sixty-eight properties so it's probably okay. You log into SonarQube, which fails because SQ's Entra ID integration is flaky. After five attempts you finally get in and mark the method as "won't fix", which has been done twenty times already for this method. ADO still can't build your application because in the meantime the security team have made a small adjustment to the firewall which means that ADO can't talk to its build runners anymore. They promise a swift resolution.

As you log in the next day the runners still don't work but that's okay because neither does your dev VM. Or maybe it's the AVD session you have to dial into to connect to the dev VM. Either way, fifty other devs are also affected. The platform team promises a swift resolution. At 4 PM you can actually log into your VM again. The runners now work but the build's test cases fail because you forgot to tell the DBAs to deploy your stored procedure to the PROD and STAGE databases. You do so and the ticket gets a 48 hour SLA.

Five hours after the SLA has expired you ask the DBAs when they'll do your changes. They realize the changes are trivial and do it in five seconds. You restart the expired build pipeline and finally take your PR out of draft stage so your team can review it.

One reviewer notices that one of the integration tests is no longer as precise as desired after your changes and asks you to sit down with the team's QA engineer to completely refactor it. Simultaneously the PO asks you if the PBI needs to be moved to the next sprint; the pre-refinement meeting starts in five.

We can't really expand on hydroelectric dams; we already have dams in just about all locations where they make sense. If there's no convenient hydro dam near you you're probably going to have to go with something else for storage.

Also, those dams are usually used for power generation; for storage it's more common to use pumped hydro where you store energy by pumping water to a higher reservoir and release it by letting it flow to a lower one. A major downside is that pumped hydro only works in select locations; not every hill is suitable for installing a pair of large cisterns.

Another option is compressed air energy storage, which stores energy by compressing lots of air in large tanks and then releases it by letting the air back out. Cleverly designed implementations can even make use of the thermal changes the air undergoes at its density changes. They also need specific local conditions; huge high pressure tanks are hard to build so we usually use things like salt caverns as tanks. One interesting option is to use depleted natural gas fields.

There's also other options like flywheels, which should be a bit less picky about location.

And lastly, not every battery needs lots of rare earth metals. Sodium batteries are currently starting to hit the market; they are more stable and less reliant on rare materials than lithium batteries. They are also bulkier but that's not much of a concern for a grid-level storage facility.

Shit, I once had someone tell me with a straight face that it's not a trucker's fault if they run over cyclists when turning around corners. Not because of dead angles but because they can't be expected to check their mirror every time they make a turn; they're too busy fiddling with their GPS and getting the freight papers sorted.

While making turns. Apparently they're too busy to do that when the vehicle's stopped or at the very least while they're driving straight and thus they should be exempt from having to obey traffic rules.

There's also recency bias. Most people these days have no clear concept how bad things like the Holodomor actually were but they do have an idea of how bad it is in Gaza right now.

Then there's the fact that some of Russia's worst actions were actually perpetrated by the USSR so you could argue it was a different country and that they've changed like Germany argues it did. Of course the USSR was run bv Russia and there's a long list of post-Soviet Russian behavior that suggests they didn't change all that much. But, weak as it is, that argument can be made.

That's why I never touched it; the whole thing sounds like boring neocolonial milprop. If it's essentially a modern army vs. a medieval country with flying lizards, how is it any different from when the USA go shit all over a third world nation and then give themselves an award for being such great warriors?

My expectations may be colored by growing up in an age where RTSes were a thing but wouldn't a more balanced fantasy adversary lead to more interesting scenarios?

Like trying to do counterintelligence against someone who can use clairvoyance to listen in on your meetings. Or stopping saboteurs with access to invisibility spells. Or the fantasy guys figuring out how to do magical EMPs, taking your telecommunications and modern vehicles out of commission so you have to use message carriers and jury-rig technicals out of vintage cars.

I dunno, kinda sounds more interesting to me than the "modern military equipment is superior to a medieval army" that everyone always describes the show as.

Toasters could do that in the fifties. Crispiness is directly related to surface temperature and you can detect that with nothing fancier than a bimetal strip and some clever engineering. If you want to use modern technology you could use an IR sensor and a two cent microcontroller.

Using AI for the task suggests that they stuck a camera in there and use image processing to badly simulate an IR sensor. Less reliable than two metal strips welded together but also way more expensive.

Mind you, even relatively simple fridges can technically have firmware because these days the cheapest way to implement something like a defrost timer is with a microcontroller. Of course that firmware is so simple that it doesn't need updates and definitely doesn't need to be connected to the internet.

Other than that I don't really see what a smart fridge can do that you can't cover by sticking a cheap tablet on the fridge door. Sure, maybe a smart fridge can order butter from Amazon when it thinks that yours runs out but you can do the same with your phone and "buy it again" in seconds. Assuming that you even want to buy your groceries from an e-retailer.

It's definitely a pointless price inflation device that makes the fridge less reliable to boot.

XCOM A-Team in theory: They're the best, they can solve any problem.

XCOM A-Team in practice: It's March and we just spotted a Snakeman on this terror mission so our soldiers will spend their remaining time units running back to the Skyranger while screaming like little girls.