Addition

Gonna suggest a kinetic sand table. The tabletop is glass and underneath there's a bunch of sand and a metal ball that rolls around drawing patterns. They're pretty neat.

At this point I'd argue that the US government is Israel's puppet.

Yes

Ex-Machina (2014). A tech billionaire recruits a young programmer to come to his remote compound to test his new AI android called Ava. The test is whether Ava can convince the protagonist that she's a real person, despite visibly being a robot.

Ava then proceedes to fuck with everyone, manipulating people into carrying out her escape plan.

It's a psychological thriller and it's quite good imo. It definitely has a lot to say about the dangers of AI.

Imo, the MBAs design is the RAM 1500. Huge profit margin, massive marketing scheme, dogshit engineering, dies exactly when the warranty expires.

Cybertruck is what happens when a ketamine addicted nepo baby ceo high on their own ego designs a car.

Source: Worked as an engineer for auto suppliers for a few years.

Oh shit he's dead dead. There ain't no way he's surviving that.

Trump is old and frail too! You'd think that a respectable news org like NPR would have spent even a little time covering the credible threats to democracy (and their own funding), and challenging the insane claims from orange man. But no, they had to go on and on and on about how Biden specifically was old and gave tons of credence and and credibility to Trump.

As far as I'm concerned, NPR bent over backwards to legitimize a madman who publicly declared his intent to destroy them multiple times.

I love PBS and I used to live NPR until they spent all of 2024 sane-washing Trump and endlessly bashing Biden. When Trump was on stage all but announcing his plans to become a Dictator, NPR was running a week long segment on how old and frail Biden was.

NPR markets themselves as unbiased public media, but take off the mask (and follow the money) and you'll quickly learn that its a news org for Neoliberal business leaders and noone else.

A certified hood classic for sure. I have one at home and one at work.

True, but even the most despotic feudal tyrants did not actively seek the destruction of the entire planet for money. It is the specifics of our current system that enables the most psychopathic people in our society to control it.

Well for starters, you have to put the satellites into orbit. It's gonna be pretty hard to do that without an initial energy source.

Second, aforementioned effort +thousands of years.

Third, you are limited by your means to transmit this power, which diminishes as you get further away from the star. Photovoltaic capture abiliy and microwave power transmission capture abiliy drop the further you get away from the star as the energy gets dissipated into the cosmic background. At some point you won't be able to rely on your Dyson structure and will need to rely on a different power source.

Fourth, these satellites have a continuous upkeep. So it's not as simple as just putting them up there, they'll need to be constantly replaced because they will burn out over time.

I like Dyson Spheres/Swarms in concept. Is it possible on paper, yes. Is if feasible to accomplish? No. Not even a little bit, imo.

Any Dyson sphere or even swarm would demand an unfathomable amount of resources, time, and manpower. It would be a mega project that would take thousands of years. You'd need to totally disassemble a cosmic body like Mercury or the Moon to even have enough materials. Even with wildly more advanced tech, you'd end up using an incredible amount of energy to build this, and the EROI would take hundreds more years to ever come to fruition after it's completed.

I'm of the opinion that any civilization advanced enough to theoretically build such a megastructure has likely figured out a much more feasible energy source by that point.