One of the weirdest things from doing A City on Mars is the people who do some version of "actually it'll be cheap" and then explain that you could get a huge Mars base for just, like, 1% of Earth's GDP. Or, if you took everyone's budget for entertainment and put it into space, you could do amazing stuff.
@ZachWeinersmith I recall Asimov or Heinlein writing about how NASA’s moon budget was small compared to how much women spend on makeup. Super-cringey of course, but that was just an ordinary day in the 1970s
@ZachWeinersmith But if you have resources and technologies to transform Mars into a Mini Earth: could we just use those resources and technologies to fix Earth?
Think about what we could accomplish using the budget of pointless resource wasting things things like: fashion, luxury stuff, the military
But really: what's the point of a city on Mars? What kind of problem does it solve (besides Musk's ludicrous claims?)
Was it always the case that memorial day was commemorated by discount products? Like, if I weren't so used to it, it'd seem really weird, no? Do all countries do this?
@ZachWeinersmith Now that makes me wonder if you could actually make a "copyright camouflage" by having a suit covered in the characters of highly-litigious companies.
There are a lot of old songs that refer to women sitting on mens knees. Was this just because they couldn't describe anything sexier, or were the women of the past frequently lap-sitting?
@ZachWeinersmith It was frequent. Also old songs did describe a lot more; where you get "fal la la" or such like, that's often a censoring of what they originally said.
This is drastically oversimplified, but one thing that really helped me understand international law, and why it's worth defending, is if you stop thinking of it as trying to fix any particular current situation and focus on the goal of preventing a nuclear Great Power war.
So, one lens on the weird direction of the modern Internet is that entities created to route you to cool stuff, e.g. search, social media, have especially in the last 5-10 years been taking an ever larger part of the pie via having giant networks. Google can now control whether a news site lives or dies. Meta can take 99.5% of all ad revenue displayed next to an artist's work and they have no power.
One big mystery to me is why YouTube, which is run by demonstrable rent-seeker Google, nevertheless gives creators close to 50% of ad rev by their stuff. The result? The most vibrant online creation scene. Not to say it doesn't have loads of issues and bullshit, but you really get high production value stuff, creating a virtuous cycle.
But most sites don't do this, so in addition to harming good things like arts and journalism, they're harming their own food source.
Btw, just to throw some numbers on this. If I got one-hundredth of a penny every time a comic of mine was viewed next to an ad on Facebook, Instagram, etc. it would be my best revenue source.
So, 10-year-old started learning how to convert things to scientific notation, and at first I was skeptical of what the point was, but it's surprisingly good for solidifying ideas about how to push exponents around.