Interesting article, thank you.

A note about black carbon, however - it requires a carbon based fuel. This launch vehicle (and some others too) used H2 as its fuel. As a result, we can note emissions of zero for black carbon, alumina and chlorine.

The article has one more estimation error relative to this flight. They seem to have estimated 17.5% of the landing pod's mass to burn up on re-entry. This is a reasonable estimate when re-entering from orbital flight (initial speed at least 7.8 km/s), but the flight in the news article was suborbital: a steep ascent to the Karman line (initial speed of re-entry: very low), followed by a ballistic fall.

As evidenced by photos of the capsule (also available in the news article), nearly none of its mass burnt away. It features no thermal protection tiles on the sides (there could be some under the bottom) and exhibits no visible signs of overheating or mass loss (even the painted text has remained readable).

So, while the article could be accurate in its analysis of solid-fueled and carbon-based launches and orbital re-entries, this flight differs considerably from the analyzed pattern. The capsule didn't enter orbit, didn't carry retrograde engines to initiate re-entry, as a result was lighter, and launchable using a relatively small rocket (19 m is really small for a passenger carrying rocket).

As a result, I think they caused very little harmful atmospheric emissions (I would consider water vapour harmless, thermal NOx harmful). Based on this, I would even speculate (based on intuition, no calculations) that during the flight (notes: not during the building of the spacecraft, not during spacecraft fuel production) less pollution was caused than an airliner burning aviation fuel emits over 500 km... maybe 1000 km.

It was just their energy bill that was huge.

Myself, I'm not so skeptical.

Yes, it's a very expensive passtime. They burned H2 and O2, but used a lot of energy.

They had no practical purpose for going - only demonstrating that it's safe. No experiments besides the flight itself, and it's been demonstrated already that Blue Origin can fly and land. The added data point was just telemetry and small improvements, and the message that Blue Origin dares to fly VIPs.

I'm content to mostly ignore it, and note "there's one more private space launch company out there".

For greater traffic between Earth and space, things must change. The rocket stage that ascends out of the atmosphere would be better released from an extremely high-flying plane or airship. Chances of surviving accidents would increase. Required engine power levels would drop. This has been tried by Scaled Composites. Sadly their space programme was set back by deadly accidents unrelated to their architecture, losing 3 ground crew to an explosion and one pilot to a pilot error. :(

At a later time, instead of ascending out of atmosphere by burning carried fuel, one should seriously consider delivery of energy from Earth by laser (rocket as a solar concentrator, no looking out of windows) and maneuvering in orbit with the assistance of permanent space tugs utilizing highly efficient magnetic thrusters (orientation) and ion engines (propulsion). Probably ion engines that permanently sit in space and only get reaction mass and energy delivered to them regularly.

In the far end, if lots of cargo and lots of people must visit space, then a space elevator must be constructed. Materials that allow making one still don't exist.

I ride a 300 € bike as a hobby in summer. It's from 2014. Given the highly advanced bike stealing culture present locally, any more expensive bike would need to be smeared with gull excretions for protection against theft. :P

It would be a method of representing trust or distrust in a structured way that's automatically accessible to the end user.

The user could right-click an image, pick "check trust" from a menu, and be presented with a list of metainfo to see who has originally signed it, and what various parties have concluded about it.

Negative proof: the AI company signs it with their watermark.

Positive proof: the photographer signs it with their personal key, providing a way to contact them. Sure, it could be a fake identity, but you can attempt to verify and conclude that.

Cumulative positive and negative proof: on top of the photographer, news organizations add their signatures and remarks (e.g. BBC: "we know and trust this person", Guardian: "we verified the scene", Reuters: "we tried to verify this photo, but the person could not be contacted").

The photo, in the end, would not be just a bitmap, but a container file containing the bitmap (possibly with a steganographically embedded watermark) and various signatures granting or withdrawing trust.

Your post makes it look like a binary choice between cop-filled reality and cop-free fantasy. But there are marked differences between how many cops (many = often more stupid, untrained, poorly selected, corrupt) a society needs and what activity is expected of them.

Existing societies also demonstrate a vastly different need for imprisoning people.

Myself, I think that prisoners per capita is a better indicator than cops per capita. The latter gives weird results heavily tilted towards microstates (lead by Vatican, Pitcairn Islands and Motserrat).

• Maximum of prisoners per capita: North Korea (undisclosed but estimated), El Salvador (1600 per 100K), Cuba (794), Rwanda (637), Turkmenistan (576), United States (541).
• Minimum of prisoners per capita: go and have a look, it's interesting. The leading 5 have a trend towards microstates and very poor developing countries, but if one filters them out and chooses sizable countries with functioning economies, the first that comes across is Japan - with an incarceration rate of 33 per 100K. That's 48 times less than El Salvador and 16 times less than the United States. The first European country on the list is Finland with 52 per 100K, indicating approximately what a "western style" society can achieve. The EU average seems to be around 100 per 100K. The highest rated EU country seems to be Poland with 194 per 100K.

Notably, the first somewhat sizable European country and western-type society on both lists is Finland. It has the lowest prisoners per capita in Europe (at 52 per 100K) and the lowest cops per capita in Europe at 132 per 100K. It is not a known haven of rampant crime - it has really low crime rates too. Apparently in some conditions, you can have few cops, few prisoners and limited crime.

My guess - I could be wrong - is that the quality and coverage of social security, education and health care are what actually make the difference. Most people don't start criminal activity for fun. Contributing factors include desperate poverty, poor parenting, lacking education, mental illness and exposure to trauma, damage from disease and substance abuse, etc, etc. Lots of full prisons are probably a factor that contributes to criminality, by making a "higher education in crime" accessible to more people.

Note: another really common combination is 9600 baud, 8 data, 1 stop. Antiquated, but a washing machine probably doesn't need anything fast.

You don't need to connect the 5V pins. An ordinary serial connection has no power pins.

The rest of your description seems sound.

As a minimum, how about frequent rotation and a sortition + selection system to staff the squads?

Imaginary example:

Two "cops" are needed for a term of 90 days (side note: in this hypothetical society, it could be that a cop is not a first responder but an investigator - first responders may be selected by proximity to the event and called up using some automated emergency messaging system). An investigator is allowed to request expert assistance from outside their department and often does.

At first, 10 candidates are sortitioned at random. Out of them, 3 refuse the job for various reasons, 7 go through instruction and pass evaluation. Out of them, 3 either step out during training or fail exams, 4 complete exams. Among them, another round of sortition occurs: 2 are selected at random, while 2 are paid compensation for study and assigned to reserve. If lottery chooses them again, they won't need to pass exams.

This might be possible to enhance with other tricks. If feedback shows that cops cannot be impartial near their home, then they don't work near their home. If however, feedback shows that they perform best near their home, then the opposite way.

The main goals this would aim to achieve:

• ensure that corruption will not start
• ensure that investigation is not biased (or that chances exist of bias being quickly exposed)
• ensure that offices cannot be given by people in power to whom they prefer
• ensure that competence is valued and unqualified bozos won't be appointed

I would think the drag is considerable.

I would also worry about stability in a strong side wind.

As a result, I would not like to ride the 2-wheeled version in strong side wind. The 3-wheeled version looks OK, but also suffers from drag.

Besides, to generate power from wind while parking, you would have to choose your parking direction. But you can't always choose the parking direction - location dictates it often. Toppling over while parked would be a definite thing to expect with this setup.

That kind of kit on two-wheeled vehicle looks severely half-assed. They should have thought more steps ahead.

Wow, that's a video worth watching. :) Thanks for the link. :)

Diclaimer: I studied biology but failed biochemistry with a crash.

It is hard. Often, medically used molecules are complex, manufacturing typically has many steps (higher chance that something goes wrong), typically one wants high purity (have to get high purity raw material) some especially annoying substances have right- and left-handed forms and other isomers - the atom count matches, but the arrangement doesn't and in biological systems, arrangement matters.

Some things are doable. If the molecule in question is produced by a microbe that's easy to cultivate, even complex molecules can be produced with DIY methods.

So if there's a nuclear war and you need antibiotics after the dust settles, you can probably set up penicillin production in a few weeks. It all starts with leaving some bread in a dark and damp place to invite fungi, picking the right-looking colony, replicating it, testing it against a dish of bacteria, if it passes the check for having antibiotic effect, then replicating it more and more, harvesting, purifying, stabilizing, storing... (Reality check: you'd be producing really small amounts of an outdated antibiotic to which there's widespread resistance.)

[Disclaimer: unless you know what you're doing, don't do this at home.]

The only time I've done DIY medicine was to help a dachshound with a skin tumour. Since my mother has no other dachshound, there was no control group. The dachshound is old and was not fit enough for a removal operation. Knowing that tumour immunotherapy for dogs was unavailable where I live (and ridiculously expensive where it might be available), I did the crude thing. Visiting every evening, I powdered some siberian chaga (tree fungus) and nutritional yeast (deactivated yeast) and mixed a small quantity of them in wound cleaning alcohol (to ensure all microbes would be dead in the mixture). Cleaned up the tumour with a peroxide solution (it initially bled every day) and put some droplets of the fungus/alcohol mixture on it - to provoke the immune system with quite clear message "look, I'm a hostile fungus and there's two of us, if you don't act now, we'll mess up everything". The reasoning was that the tumour microenvironment had likely locally deactivated immune response and "trolling" it with fungal antigens would activate it (licensed medics do it with far more potent bacterial antigens, to which I had no reliable access). Result: tumour went into remission and dachshound still lives, but it's not a very happy life because he was already ill at the beginning in multiple other ways - ways that I would be hard pressed to influence at all, no matter how hard I tried to synthesize anything - so I don't. Some of the medications cost 100 € per month, but it still makes sense to buy them.

P.S.

If you're prescribed antibiotics (many now come in two components, main ingredient and resistance preventing secondary ingredient), you can always add garlic to your menu to make it extra hard for bacteria to develop resistance. You won't find out if it did you any good, but chances are it might.

Your intake of solar is quite low

I have other solar arrays besides the fence. Two diagonal arrays and one shed roof (which covers with snow in winter). All together they can currently give 4.5 kW. But this never happens in winter, of course.

If you cool something considerably below room temperature (specifically, the "dew point" at the air moisture level that you have), condensation will happen for sure.

I use my heat pump for cooling in summer. The indoor unit keeps dripping condensation water through a small hose into the big water tank.

This one looks neat, but I think I can propose a better one. :) It could be a tower, externally black in color, with the south-facing side transparent or windowed. The interior under the window should also be painted black. Instead of one rack, multiple racks of food could be installed.

Why?

• a tower develops ascending airflow, while a horizontal box does not, this helps ensure that moisture does not re-condense but leaves
• with a tower system, you can also dry foods that would degrade from sunlight (gather energy at the bottom and deliver it to a closed top part)

I even built one and used it to dry kale chips, but it was too tall - wind kept pushing it over.

I have batteries and a stand-alone inverter. Currently, there is no grid connection, the power company is still working on getting a cable here.

My batteries are not a shiny example of how to do things - poorly installed and pretty dangerous right now (batteries should not be indoors) so I'm building a battery box outside the house for them. (Of course, already now they have redundant balancers and a battery alarm.)

Currently, my battery capacity is quite low: about 10 kWh. I plan to expand that to 18 kWh.

Currently, they suffice to run the heat pump for half a day.

Often times, I operate with a partial energy balance: e.g. panels currently produce 700 W, heat pump requires 1200 W (this seems to change with outdoor temperature), I take the difference from batteries.

But in mid-winter, I use a wood-fired stove.

Also, when it's warm enough indoors, but I feel that I need to store heat for subsequent days, I have a pool heat pump converted (more like hacked) to heat a 1 ton water tank. It circulates a solution of car windshield washing liquid (ethanol based) through a system of hoses and a long copper coil in the water tank. It draws about 600 W and make no immediate difference to room temperature.

or agreeing to tracking cookies.

Now that I think of it - yes. I agree to them, but my browser is configured to discard them on leaving.

Nice system. The first drain and spillway are well thought out.

Not sure about elsewhere, but here in Europe, one can often get plastic IBC containers in a metal support cage (1 x 1 x 1 m cube shaped) really cheap. It's smart to examine the labels before buying, to make sure it didn't hold anything hazardous. They come with a tap too and store 1000 L of water.

So if one practises gardening, a bigger tank might be handy to have. Elevating the ground under the tank or digging a hole under the tap will ensure better access.

Moderator here: "slrpnk.net" has an instance wide "constructive discussion" rule, so I removed two comments.

Do you have any experience with this?

I have participated in holding about ten, and when it moved indoors to become a freeshop, I have volunteered a dozen times.

1. Unless local climate favours you - if you hold it outdoors, your biggest concern will be weather prediction. You'll want people to exchange their goods, but not a truckload of abandoned goods damaged by rain. Avoid rainy dates, avoid announcing too far ahead (when the error margins are big), if risk of rain becomes likely, have a large quantity of plastic sheet available to cover goods. If possible, avoid changing dates - information travels slowly. If you have to cancel, announce the cancellation well, visit the site and put up a sign saying the market's canceled.
2. Your market will have a "surplus". Some people will bring more goods than others take. You will need to make a compromise between warehousing and discarding goods. We used the local autonomous social center for warehousing goods between markets. We lacked a good plan for offloading surplus to others who might distribute them to people, since we were the first local phenomenon of this sort.
3. Transporting goods to warehouse will likely require a car. I used a heavy electric bike with a towed cart first, but that quickly became insufficient. My car had no towing hook, so it was full of goods up to the ceiling. As the warehousing situation becomes more dire, be prepared to inform people about capacity limits. As a last resort, ask "unsold" goods to be taken back. Some will ignore this, but you can handle a few.
4. If you observe hoarding behaviour, set reasonable limits (e.g. "as much as you can lift with one hand"). I have observed serious hoarding only once.
5. Our market typically offered some easily prepared vegan snacks and drinks. It is always good style to display a list of ingredients and potential allergens.
6. This can wear you out. Never do this alone, we had at least 8 bored people on our team and also used the opportunity to spread anarchism.

The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, it just shows an annoying message you can get past. At least my browser doesn't prevent me from seeing the article, so I'll copy the essence.

It was jurisdiction shopping by the oil company, trial errors by the court and manipulation of public opinion, third world oligarchy style. :(

• The jury – the most sacred due process protection available to a defendant – was patently biased in favor of the company. Seven of the 11 people seated had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Some had admitted they could not be fair, but the judge seated them anyway. There was no Native American or person of color on the jury even though issues of Indigenous rights were central to the trial.

• Morton county, where the trial was held and where many of the protests took place, voted 75% for Trump in the last election and has extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a pre-trial survey, 97% of residents in the county said they could not be fair to Greenpeace. Yet the judge refused repeated requests by Greenpeace to move the case.

• Energy Transfer ran a major television and online advertising campaign in the county lauding itself in the weeks leading up to the trial. A newspaper called Central ND News, with articles critical of the protests, was also sent to county residents; Greenpeace believed Energy Transfer might have been responsible for it. But the court refused to allow Greenpeace to use court discovery procedures to determine how this unethical campaign to taint the jury pool happened.

• Adding to the absurdity, Greenpeace was blamed for the entire protest movement even though it played only a minimal role. The protests were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, on whose ancestral land the Dakota Access pipeline was being built. In fact, only six of the 100,000 people who came to the protests were from Greenpeace – yet Energy Transfer was able to convince the jury to hold the organization responsible for every dollar of supposed damages that occurred over seven months of protests.

• Secrecy pervaded the proceedings. The court repeatedly refused to open a live stream to the public or to create and release transcripts. A request by media organizations (including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times) to access the live stream was denied. Thousands of key documents were sealed and thus hidden from public scrutiny.

• The judge, James Gion, made evidentiary decisions that gutted Greenpeace’s ability to mount a defense. For example, a major expert report showed that the pipeline had leaked roughly 1m gallons of drilling fluids into drinking water sources used by millions of people. Greenpeace lawyers needed the document to debunk the argument that the pipeline was safe, but the judge refused to let the organization use it.

• The 35-page verdict form was confusing and the results seemed to prove the jury was in fact confused. It appears the exorbitant damages number was calculated by pulling numbers out of thin air – including millions for public relations expenses, private security costs, which were being paid anyway, and refinancing costs due to various banks withdrawing from the project once they learned about the protests. (Lobbying banks is also constitutionally protected advocacy.)