Australia - $AUD 5.19 inc tax ($USD 3.27) - Aldi

Voluntary assisted dying (VAD), is legal in all Australian states except the Northern Territory. It was first legalised in 2017 after over 60 failed bills.

The person must have a disease or illness that is advanced, progressive, and expected to cause death within a certain time frame, must be experiencing intolerable suffering and must meet the eligibility criteria for their state.

My state has a ‘gag law’ that prohibits medical staff initiating a conversation about voluntary assisted dying with a patient.

It’s not a situation that anybody ever wants to be in, but knowing that should the worst happen, relief is possible can be a big comfort.

Always Top 6 Hours or Top Day. Never hot. Not sure what the deal with hot is, but I agree it feels wrong.

If it was an accident, he’d probably have apologized by now. But it really doesn’t matter either way. It’s too late now, he’s given license to the far right to see it as the endorsement they want.

I hear you but I think you’re missing my point. His wealth and privilege started in South Africa. He could not have achieved what he did without the opportunity to migrate from South Africa to Canada and then to America.

As for his business prowess here’s just a few key points from the book:

• Musk is cuckoo taking advantage of other people’s talent to elevate himself.

• Musk’s funding was critical to x.com’s early development, but many of the key decisions that made its merge with PayPal successful were credited to Levchin, Thiel, and others.

• Tesla was co-founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk did not like his position being confined to financier so conspired to have the original founders removed and himself listed as founder instead.

• Tesla has consistently faces financial instability, often operating on the brink of bankruptcy.

• Both Tesla and SpaceX were rescued by massive government contracts from Federal Governmentd desperate to pull itself out of the global financial crisis or a failing oil economy. Not by Musk’s talent as a business manager.

• A hamster wheel of investor hype to raise capital driven by false promises is the only thing keeping Tesla afloat. Even their government loans are based on the same high hopes and false promises.

• Musk’s infamous “funding secured” tweet is proof of his success being driven by lies. He was willing to break the law of it meant he could outrun the consequences of his poor management

Or a space elevator perhaps

Very fair point. But the biggest barrier is always going to be fuel spent vs potential payload.

Trains an incredibly efficient once built, able to move huge payloads for very low ongoing fuel use.

Throwback to an ancient thread on Reddit by AdmiralPelleon

It takes 6 BFR launches to put a fully fueled BFS in orbit, going for $7 million/launch. I’ll be generous, and pretend that the BFS making the trip to the asteroid doesn’t lose value along the way (hint: it does).

So let’s plug in the Rocket Equation for a fully-fueled BFS in orbit, let’s see how much fuel we must expend to get the BFS to the asteroid to pick up it’s cargo:

Delta-v to Ryugu (a near-earth asteroid) has $95 billion of minerals on it = Raptor Engine ISP * ln( (start fuel mass + empty mass)/ (start fuel mass - fuel used + empty mass) )

OR: 4666 = 3759.81ln((1100+85)/(1100-fuel used + 85))

fuel used = 851.67

So just getting the BFS to the closest near earth object takes up 851,000 kg of fuel! This is before we’ve loaded any minerals on board. To calculate how much payload we can bring back do earth, it’s the same equation except:

Delta-v to Earth = Raptor Engine ISP * ln( (start fuel mass + payload + empty mass)/ (payload + empty mass) )

OR: 4666 = 3759.81ln((1100-852+p+85)/(p + 85))

payload = 28.893 metric tons

So that sucks! We go all that way, launch 6 rockets, spend probably years in outer space, and all we get are 29 metric tons of cobalt!?! At current prices, that’s worth ~$899,000. Compare that to the “best case” cost of 6 BFR launches or $42 million.

BUT WAIT!

It’s commonly agreed that some sort of ISRU (creating fuel out of the asteroid itself) will be required for space mining. The asteroid Ryugu probably has water, and while I don’t think it has carbon, amateur scientists like us need not be constrained by such petty laws of chemistry! Let’s assume that, once the ship arrives, it is fully refueled at zero cost. Now our return-payload looks like:

Delta-v to Earth = Raptor Engine ISP * ln( (start fuel mass + payload + empty mass)/ (payload + empty mass) )

OR: 4666 = 3759.81ln((1100+p+85)/(p+ 85))

payload = 345.5 metric tons

The good news is we’ve increased our revenues by an order of magnitude (~$ 10,710,500)! The bad news is we are now at just over 25% of our fixed, “best case” costs. (I’m actually not sure if the BFS could land with that much payload, but at this point it doesn’t really matter does it?)

These numbers can be made to work for elements like Helium 3 and Platinum, due to their super-high cost-per-kg (345.5 metric tons of Platinum is technically worth over $10 billion). However, the world’s yearly supply of platinum is roughly just 243 metric tons, and increasing this significantly would serve to quickly crater the price.

All this is to say that no, asteroid mining is not, and may never be, feasible>

When 90% of your countrymen are born into a world where they cannot legally hold the same jobs as you. You are born into extreme privilege.

After reading the book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer I came away with the feeling he really wasn’t a pretty good self-made businessman.

I agree that people tend to overstate his income due to misunderstanding his relationship with his father. And the story about him keeping emeralds in his pockets is murky at best.

But his wealth compared to the average income of any black person in South Africa in 1971, still makes him vastly better off than any ‘colored’ child born in the same country, making him institutionally old money by grace of being born white.

deleted by creator

I absolutely don’t agree with your perspective.

AI is just another way to ensure control of the means of production stays in the hands of capitalists.

It empowers the techno-feudalist monopolies to put further pressure on more industries. Not content to own a portion of every retail purchase, every digital payment, every house, and every entertainment property. They now get to own a portion of every act of creation, every communication that could possibly challenge their power.

They can subvert any act of independent impactful art by copying it and remanufacturing lesser versions over and over until the original’s impact is lost. And they can do it faster than ever before, cashing in on the original creative’s effort and syphoning returns away from creators into their own pockets.

You might think it’s inevitable and inescapable, but that’s what people once thought of the divine right of kings.

The atomization of society. The process of a society breaking down into smaller, isolated units, where individuals are self-interested and self-sufficient. It can lead to a feeling of being alone even when surrounded by people.

Singapore HBD.

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/apr/30/how-do-you-solve-a-housing-crisis-study-the-example-of-singapore

Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.

Anyway here’s the article:

We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft’s XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die

By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.

The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a “perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat,” according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.

“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.

“Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game,” Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company’s official site. “Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition.”

This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.

The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:

“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”

For a more serious news sister site, i’d also recommend https://www.404media.co/

A lot of their best writers moved to https://aftermath.site/

Useless old bastard isn’t he?

That’s a fair point.

No. And they’ve said as much.

“Clinton would not pledge to support Sanders if he won the 2020 Democratic nomination.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-sen-bernie-sanders-likes/story?id=68424746

“However – I do reject socialism as a economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party.” - Pelosi

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/15/politics/nancy-pelosi-socialism/index.html