It is economic to move massive stuff about in open space, which is what you need for an economy to attract people. The gravity well is a huge cost. You can make a profit by sending down the gravity well but going back up tends to be a huge expense.
What would be the incentive for living off earth for such a large number of people?
I really wish for you to be right, but with population growth slowing down, and possibility of building floating cities or terraforming Sahara, building large orbital stations or going to mars in large numbers may be economically not viable, unless we invent something radically new.
Even the most automated of robotic factories on earth still have a number of humans in an oversight role, where they make themselves quite useful.
The same would be true of any space industry. People would be hired on for a tour in space, and they'd be paid sufficient salary to make it worth their while.
I think there will be two things. One is economics, fetching asteroids could be very big business, and the other is political, space will be viewed as freedom of a sort, given the kind of restrictions that may be in place on Earth by then, with the climate transforming alongside having a lot more people than we do today, even if growth slows down, which is far from certain. We could easily be in the age of what Bruce Sterling refers to as the Khaki Greens, aka, militarised enforcement of ecological protection.
Part of the reason they are slow-walking Trump's pronouncements on trans people in the military, is that after getting rid of 'don't ask don't tell', the military will have wanted to know about people's sexual preferences, especially in key roles, so as to guard against cases of blackmail.
I guarantee that they will have key people who have told them all their kinks, that they are really trying hard not to get rid of.
I thought about how to design pizza delivery drones and came to the conclusion that perhaps the best approach would be to make a very heavy armored tank, with a pizza oven built in.
I was just working from the principle that lightweight ground drones containing pizza will get nicked and flying pizza will get shot down and nicked, but it isn't fair to use weaponry just to defend a pizza and a drone, so the best approach is to make it heavy enough not to get nicked, at which point you might as well put the oven in there too.
I mean this might happen a few times, but considering it’s still a crime to shoot an expensive drone out of the air, you probably don’t want a conviction for shooting down a drone just because you’re Jonesing for some Dominoes.
I’d definitely shoot down a drone if it was hovering over my back yard while my daughter was sunbathing, which is one of the cases that was brought to court.
in much the same way that the pizza delivery driver could just drive home and take his truck and the pizzas.
Or that someone could 'just' rob an armoured truck taking money to a bank.
Why don't people do it? Generally, very few people commit crimes in the first place. Especially if you make it difficult, and extra-especially if they are backed up by rule of law in your country.
The pizza delivery driver probably wants their job more than a stack of pizza and often provides their own vehicle. And robbing armored bank trucks involves attacking people, there isn't the same moral guideline when it comes to robots. Flying pizza robots will be considered 'fair game' by a lot of people.
More people do it if it is easier. For example, far more people steal bikes than cars. Catching a drone with a pellet and a net and taking the pizza out isn't exactly unthinkable. Especially if you compare it to taking boltcutters to a bike lock (or a saw) and selling it for basically the price of a pizza.
If they could do it all in the truck and cut out the kitchen it would be even better. I guess that's essentially just a food truck that does deliveries though - which might not be a bad idea either.
It makes them look like they do not care about putting on a good show, because they do not feel they need to and they find it funnier to present an obvious circus.
It also might be doubling as a public punishment for the spies for being sloppy. Putting them on TV like that is directly telling them that their careers are over.
If lucky, they might be transformed into celebrities, just for the annoyance value to the UK.
Is the international politics equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, after grabbing their wrist and whacking them in the face with their own hand.
That would be way too subtle for the common folk. Whatever GRU's plan was, in reality most Russian people just take it at face value: Russian spies got exposed, Putin's lie got exposed, the spies put on a miserable show on TV, and now even their true identities have been exposed (only one so far, but I expect the other one to be exposed soon, too). That's a failure.
I'm pretty sure you're reading way too much into it because you've been told Putin (and, by extension, his subordinates) was a great tactician one step ahead of everyone else. I never believed it and I don't believe it now.
>That would be way too subtle for the common folk.
Are you channeling H. L. Menken?
I think Putin is a comedian and two things I have noticed about Russian humour are firstly, always be deadpanning, and secondly, it isn't really funny unless someone ends up nearly dead.
I also think he is a good tactician but a lousy strategist and I don't think he is in charge of as much of the CCCP as is made out. He is the front man for a conglomerate of interests, many of which operate largely autonomously, and would cause him no end of internal problems should he try and reign them in.
This explains the sharp disconnect between the relative professionalism in the seizing of Crimea, while at the same time lending out SAM systems to idiots.
I'd also say there is a very good chance that Putin did not order this operation in the first place and is playing cleanup.
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edit - I think there could also be a lot of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" going on.
It not being directly ordered is an alternative reason why someone so high up was doing this rather than a subordinate.
This could well have been showing off to curry favour, knowing that the target was in the regime's bad books already.
Being paraded on TV in the manner that they were after being uncovered, I think lends weight to this hypothesis.
I don't know who that is. But if I am channeling anyone, that would be R.J. Hanlon, who said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." [1]
That does not work very well in politics, or indeed many other areas of life.
People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.
Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.
Malicious compliance, being one example of this behaviour, even has it's own popular group on reddit.
Edit - for anything that consists of an established bureaucracy, you would actually do better to invert Hanlon's razor in most cases.
Edit2 - also, the entire premise is logically inconsistent, as it places idiocy and maliciousness as being mutually exclusive options, which they clearly are not.
In the first place, Robert J. Hanlon submitted the aphorism for the joke book collection "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong". And, according to wikipedia, probably stole it from a Heinlein short story, so I suspect you might be taking it a little more seriously than Hanlon did.
> People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.
That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?
> Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.
Hanlon's razor is related to Occam's razor: in case there are two competing theories about the world, one of which is complicated and the other simple, always prefer the simple one. Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics [1] intended to produce the most likely explanation. Can it be played? It can, but it's even more unlikely, as that would further increase the level of sophistication. You can't rely on Hanlon's razor in a game of chess between two grandmasters, but the real world has a few crucial differences from chess, for example the fact that no player can realistically contain every possible interaction of their actions with other forces' actions. Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.
If you don't think that they were actually putting forward a tale to be believed in the first place, but were signalling that they don't have to bother, then it just doesn't even apply.
>Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics
Occam's razor is a logical position to take in an absence of further information, although sometimes wrong, especially in biology. Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not. Nor was it ever meant to be taken as such.
>Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.
Putin has been exposing his own lies for years on TV, usually with a smile. This is the guy who goes on his third ever scuba dive on the news and brings back museum quality amphorae. Lying barefacedly, with the audience knowing it is all lies, is a large part of his public persona. It is meant to both be funny and set an example that he doesn't need to bother with little things such as truth.
>The PM put on a diving suit and dived deep into the Taman Bay where, to everyone’s utter surprise, he managed to find two ancient amphorae dating back to the 6th century AD.
>Putin also told journalists that the Taman dive was his third-ever attempt at scuba diving.
Then you don't seem to have an argument against Hanlon's razor?
> Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not
In this case, clearly, the two explanations are incompatible: either Putin planned the world to discover that he was lying about the assassination, etc., etc., or he did not.
> brings back museum quality amphorae
That's a completely different class of lies. That one is a bravado that shows the level of intelligence he assumes in his fans, nothing more. He certainly didn't risk getting himself into another cold war by fishing out those amphorae!
To anyone who has paid attention to any of the history of Russian/UK spy scandals, the idea that homosexuality would prevent someone from being a GRU officer, is frankly almost as hilarious as some of the Russian buzzfeed style sites posting articles about how Salisbury is the center of UK gay nightlife.
I admit ignorance in this regard - simply restating a theory that seemed to make sense to me. I suppose being a parrot is bad, but it makes more sense to me than what the GP posted.
The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. There is then the audience that knows it is all bollocks from the start, many of whom treat it as a massive in-joke that they can take part in, rather than an actual attempt at lying, which wouldn't be the case if the lying was any good.
>2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal.
As it currently stands, a large chunk of the newspaper industry in the states is willing to block the whole of the EU, when it could offer it that model, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
A source at Tronc says not only have most of the chain's papers blocked EU visitors because of GDPR, but Tronc "currently has no plans to support the EU" because doing so is seen as not economically viable
This modern tracking stuff will get used for a genocide before we ban it, I guarantee. Previous totalitarian states couldn't have even dreamed of this kind of shit.
