Funding bait

Colour me cautiously optimistic

Old Galaxy Note9 which I’m probably replacing with a much nicer Sony this week. :)

I’m not crying! You’re crying!

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

Met him once after he gave a talk on campus. Decent dude.

He asked the lecture hall an interesting question about the explorer mindset. It was during the era of the MarsOne media-fueled vapour hype. “Would you take a one-way trip to Mars?” And then started asking why, or why not (the consensus of the room was nearly unanimously “no”). And talked about explorers ancient and modern, and how risk was no longer tolerated. Very interesting fellow.

RIP.

If you hold your nose really close to the screen, you can pretend to smell it. It’s part of the new jpeg metadata.

Oh right! I’m looking at you “prairie snowdrift” – your white blossoms are not cute enough! Just look at “gumball goodie” over here…

Shhh, they’ll hear!

Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.

Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.

No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _

Very true. However, it doesn’t add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won’t suffice.

Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.

That alternative material is aluminum. It’s like a top four abundance material in the crust. It’s just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don’t like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.

Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.

If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it’ll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.

Understand that science is a name given to both a method, and to a mostly self-consistent body of models that can be used to make useful predictions. Science doesn’t get things wrong. Science gets iterated upon.

Yeah, presuming a typo there. Or Freudian slip at worst.

Concerned citizen wins? Yay, rule of law!

So these are only the times they get caught.

Likely placeholder art making it into production because no one is checking, rather than a deliberate policy. But still bad form.