Artemis has a budget of over 90 billion dollars, it's more than 4 billion for that Artemis II launch (as estimated by NASA, possibly more because they don't even know exactly how much they're spending). For that price one might reasonably expect a couple of quality cameras for the public to be able to view what their money was spent on. For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!
NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
>For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!
With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??
Apollo 11 (which included actually landing on the Moon for the first time in human history!) cost only $355 million* in 1969. That's a little over 3 billion in 2025 dollars. How has a comperatively "simple" flyby become so expensive?
You could also look at the same ISS mission with another contractor: Boeing got paid twice as much and then failed to bring the astronauts back in Starliner. So obviously NASA is overpaying some contractors, but that's probably only part of the story of where all that money is going. For 90 billion NASA would have delivered multiple Moon landings in the 70s - with inferior tech at that, and having to figure it all out for the first time. Don't underestimate how difficult it was.
You should compare against Apollo 9, which was 96% as expensive as 11 and much closer in mission profile. Then you don't need to worry about comparisons on simple flyby vs full landing
From what I have heard, the standard rebuttal to NASA expense is that they are ploughing money into the ground to grow new things the hard way.
The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.
NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.
The blog post is unclear on if they will only be allowed to verify accounts as being part of NYT or if they will be allowed to give out blue checks to anyone in general. It sounds like it's the latter. If not it shouldn't be a blue check at all, it should just inform users that the account is associated with NYT.
News organizations have in recent years started selling so-called "contributor" positions. Anyone with enough money can be a journalist and influence public opinion. And NYT and similar outlets are not trustworthy sources either way, they sneak edit articles when they get caught spreading misinformation but regularly don't disclose what was actually changed. Basically rewriting their reporting as the narrative changes.
> The blog post is unclear on if they will only be allowed to verify accounts as being part of NYT or if they will be allowed to give out blue checks to anyone in general.
On a technical level, any account can "verify" any other account.
On a practical level, blue checks are shown only if that verification comes from someone BlueSky trusts. Right now, that's bsky.app and nytimes.com.
At the protocol level, any account can verify any other account. If you have one, you can verify anyone you'd like right now. The NYT can verify any account, even ones from those organizations, or not even from a news organization.
The only difference is that Bluesky won't show a blue check for just any verification, only ones from accounts they trust. That's a social relationship, not a technical one, and so I'm sure if the NYT decided to go rogue, Bluesky would have them not be an input into the blue check any more.
> News organizations have in recent years started selling so-called "contributor" positions.
Which ones? I've heard of that with lower credibility organizations (Forbes, I think), but nothing like the NYT.
> they sneak edit articles when they get caught spreading misinformation but regularly don't disclose what was actually changed.
I think they correct things. I'm not sure they have ever been in the habit if notifying people of every correction, though it would be interestesting to have an edit history with diffs.
There is a lot of confusion around finance and economics in the the general population. The average person does not even understand what money is and how it's created. This includes many journalists.
I think people who're into economics can usually tell what he tries to say. But in terms of communicating it to the wider public its a total failure because he simply says what he thinks and tries to dumb it down for common people. Which is of course bound to fail, it sounds silly to them because they have never been told anything like it. The usual PR is to spin the strategy and essentially lie to the public. Trump talks about all the things he's actually doing without any filter which sounds insane and scary to people.
If you're worried about inflation now, probably better they didn't tell you what they did in 2020:
The German love for authoritarianism did that. And WW1 Allies who bled the country dry with reparations as the article mentions. Which lead to desperation in the population and hatred for the establishment. You can see it play out in leading Nazi figures like Goebbels who was constantly broke, struggling to pay bills and ranted about financial enslavement of his people.
The excessive treatment made them see themselves as freedom fighters. Of course, that's not what people are taught in school in Britain or France, it's an inconvenient narrative.
And then that's more or less what I remember from my history classes in France (30-35 years ago) : they were broke because of how we put way excessive sanctions on them, and Hitler was seen as (and partly really was) the savior who put the country economically back on track.
That was in public school so the same program as for the vast majority of French students.
Interesting, that's not what they teach these days from what I've seen. The economic aspect is a side note and the focus is on the politics, racism, Holocaust, etc. Which imo doesn't really how teach the kids the root cause.
Communism is usually also not discussed enough. In the Weimar Republic in the 30s it was inevitable that either Communists or Nazis would come to power. The mainstream parties had completely failed the country so the people were desperate and sought refuge in radical ideologies. It was either or, there was no alternative.
You are just repeating the same old story, that was pushed by Waimar and Nazi propaganda, that has long been overturned by modern scholarship.
Germans didn't love authoritarianism. Well over half the population voted Communist, Social democrat or with the center party. And usually far more, only in the middle of massive economic depression did the Nazis gain ground. Arguable the communist are 'authoritarians' but they don't think of themselves that way. And many who did vote for the Nazis weren't authoritarians either. Germany had the largest social democratic movement in the world.
The whole 'bled the country dry with reparations' is just weimar/nazi propaganda. Germany reparations were not that extreme, and specially when you compare on what reparations Germany forced on its enemies. Germany could heave paid the reparations without much issue. All the claims that poor little Germany couldn't handle it is Waimar propaganda that the Nazis continued and intensified. Somehow they can spend 20+ of GDP on building a military, but the reparations are somehow impossible.
> Nazi figures like Goebbels who was constantly broke, struggling to pay bills and ranted about financial enslavement of his people.
What if I told you that there are poor people in all nations? And people struggle in lots of place. Germany in 1920 did better then most nations on the plant. And Goebbles was likely in the Top 1 of global population. And you are literally quoting the propaganda minister, of course that is the impression he wants to give.
> The excessive treatment made them see themselves as freedom fighters. Of course, that's not what people are taught in school in Britain or France, it's an inconvenient narrative.
Except that's exactly what people are thought in school. The whole 'extreme reparations' nonsense is the standard view. Its only in the last couple decades that this was seriously questioned by economists and historians.
Everyone agrees the build quality used to be better (my grandpa already said this about appliances from his youth). But one thing I almost never see discussed is the power consumption of these old devices. Older CPUs often double as room heaters. Modern ones, especially the Apple M-series, have become a lot more efficient. So while I agree that modern laptops suck in many ways, I would do the math to see if it's actually cheaper to buy and use an older computer. Maybe not if you're in Qatar or Russia but some countries have extremely high electricity costs.
It just isn't really a measurable impact against an overall picture.
At maximum, a T580 can draw 44 watts. 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, at 50 cents a kWh (quite expensive for the US), that's $65 a year. That's a several-year-old computer already.
The W520 can draw a much higher (but still low relative to a desktop) 150 watts. The cost per year to run it would then be around $220/year - but again, that's assuming maximum power draw for much of the day every day. Your home refrigerator uses more than twice that.
For most people, I don't see this cost increase as a problem.
For me power draw is about battery life. If you occasionally need to work without a power plug, or carrying your laptop from meeting to meeting all over the office, you really appreciate when the power lasts all day. My T14s battery draw of ~6.5W on the 57Wh battery will last me ~8 hours, good enough for a day unplugged at the office. (I'd love a bigger battery, but it is what it is...)
ThinkPads use 20V chargers. USB-C supports 20V power delivery. What's the efficiency of power adapters back then compared to current gen USB-C chargers?
It's both. It's a FAST channel being used by I think Pluto.TV and Roku to give them another "live 24/7" "channel" for their catalogs, but underneath is just looping playlist of YouTube content.
That's actually what a huge number of the channels on this site are, and I do wish they were labeled and filterable that way.
I'm not a materials scientist so I can't comment on this specific topic but based on my experience with pop science reporting errors and misinformation often come in multiples. The author has a "Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing". RIKEN's press release is already written for a general audience and in English, so there isn't a good reason not to read the original source instead.
yes, because it's not really a misleading title as it is still the artist's impression. If the artist didn't like it, they would just keep modifying the prompt until they were satisfied. So it is the artist's impression.
That may be but the topic of the thread is how rich Kerala supposedly is, not how super awesome their public train announcements are. The claim is not just false, the article is outright propaganda given how one of the co-authors works for the state government.
I guess my main point is that a communist type govt was not exclusively bad for Kerala since they took a lot of effort to improve education and public health.
You can look at other sources to see how good kerala is doing wrt other states but I do agree the article over emphasised the good parts without any hint to it's bad parts
To put this in context, during Covid, hundreds of bodies were being dumped in the Ganges river, buried in shallow graves on the sandbars in states like Uttar Pradesh. The state govt took an active role to remove the grave markers so that an accurate estimate of the numbers could not be ascertained. These were covered by local bloggers, vloggers and news channels.
Kerala is one of the few states that managed medical supplies of Oxygen pretty well. In many other states many died because hospitals ran out of it.
In India atleast, 'communism' or 'Marxism' in the names of political parties that actually run a state is just a name that has stuck. These entities and people have to be a lot more pragmatic. This is in contrast to those who are arm chair think tanks that you would find in advisory boards, universities etc. These would be people who do not run for elections.
Now, as for Kerala's handling of Covid, that was funded by state govt coffers. So Middle East money had a negligible contribution. What made a difference though is a history of preference for investing in social safety nets and basic infrastructure for people, such as schools, nutrition, hospitals.
What really happened was that the health authorities in Kerala were prepared for an outbreak because Kerala has had a history of past outbreaks and a health system with very well trained doctors and health professionals to handle it. See the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala that was handled really well, there was even a popular movie about it (Virus) that came out the year after.
It's the same story in east Asian countries where they had the SARS outbreak in early 2000s and so they were prepared for new outbreaks.
To be clear I'm not saying Kerala is particularly bad by regional standards, it's not. But compare Kerala and India as a whole with other parts of Asia, they're not doing well. Look at China vs India in the 1970s vs 50 years later. Compare India/Kerala and Thailand in the same time frame. Kerala and Korea, etc etc. South Asia as a whole is doing worse than many other parts of Asia. Kerala government excels at what many socialist governments are good at: Praising themselves. In reality is has made little difference.
India has a lot of other issues, I grant you that the socialist ideology probably had a positive influence in some ways other than economics, particularly socially. But no offense, if you've ever walked the streets Trivandrum and other cities you know there are much more pressing issues.
Have you read the Communist Manifesto? It also makes Communism sound like a good idea. Nevermind that Kerala doesn't have a particularly high GDP per capita even by southern Indian standards. It's not rich by any rational measure, not in median income or otherwise. There is a lot of poverty, slightly better compared to some of the northern states but then South India in general does a bit better than the north so there isn't anything particularly noteworthy.
Btw, for some historic context this part of India used to be extremely rich in the past by global standards, centuries ago. They became rich with international trade. Modern India is nowhere close to its wealthy past, the subcontinent as a whole produced the largest percentage of the world's GDP during Late Antiquity, surpassing China and all others!
NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
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