A fool and his money are easily parted. Going to be fun watching this go up in flames!
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The ship didn’t have volcano solutions to problems. What could possibly go wrong?
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Could they be convinced to visit La Palma? It’s not a stretch to tell them it’s the latest global hot spot… 
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What you said!
I was watching a video talk from Parag Khanna at the Interval, part of The Long Now Foundation’s series…
What you said, yep. It was what I was saying in my followup questions [that no one asked and I didn’t asked either because I am not yet a member of Long Now].
Spot.
On.
My guess is that El Salvador is attempting to reposition itself to be more in this league here, except they don’t have massive oil resources to exploit, so it’ll probably just exploit its own people:
(a quasi-fun yet more than a bit alarming read)
some overlapping here, out of 196 countries in this global corruption index, that quite a few on the countries without income taxes list (above) are listed in the 80s-90s out of 196 for 2021 (the U.S. is 30-something… I dunno, I have some questions about their methodology, maybe I can dig in to that later). Second source here:
This part though:
It’s hard to figure out which is more likely to implode first: Bitcoin or the volcano. Neither is stable. Or predictable.
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To be fair, it’s what a hell of a lot of people said in the comments of the article i linked to. I think it’s safe to say there aren’t many fans of the techbro cybergulch (love that) enclaves around these parts. Or the bitcoin goldrush for that matter which is sending this planet into an early grave.
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Judging by the article it’s not as bad as it could be. At first I thought they were borrowing money denominated in bitcoin (from the first line), which would probably be the most ill-advised fiscal policy a country could have. (You know, the whole owing money in a highly deflationary and volatile pseudo-asset.)
At least later on it looks like the bonds will actually be US dollar denominated? The rest of it is still bad, but less bad than it could be.
(I wish the article were clearer, it seems to contradict itself.)
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Besides the death squads and child soldiers.
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They use the lightning network, a layer on top of bitcoin, to do the actual transactions.
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also we can “buy” and “sell” crypto without actually buying or selling any crypto
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back a bit it was fashionable to criticize nasa because all they’d brought us was velcro and tang.
i look at how much money people waste on trying to make money, and my only response now is: well, at least nasa gave us velcro and tang
i mean come on, bitcoin. something, anything of actual value would be great. id even take dehydrated ice cream at this point
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So now we’ve gone from “we don’t need banks anymore” to just having banks again, except way worse. How tiresomely predictable.
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A lot of the time the operators of the effected entity just ask nicely ‘Can you (leet haxors) give most of it back and be our infosec team’.
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The same people who criticised nasa used to use the space pen vs soviet pencil argument for wasted tax money too.
Because when you are floating in a tin can with only electronics keeping you alive and likely to return to earth, the one thing you really want up there with you is a stick of brittle conductive material.
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Especially given that Fisher developed the Space Pen out of pocket, not on NASA’s budget.
ETA: Also, the Soviet Union bought pens from Fisher.
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Didn’t they later find out that ordinary ball pens work in space just fine?
Ever tried writing upside down with an ordinary ball pen? They need gravity to work.
I can see a modern pens using gel in a pressurized cartridge working - but this is just a variation of what Fisher came up with in the 1960ies.
The general principle still stands: move the ink by pressurizing a sealed container and use non-liquid ink.
Given the machinery and materials available in the 1960ies, still pretty impressive.
Ball pens were an expensive luxury item when they first came out, and that took quite some time. The first patent is from 1888, but the first “mass” produced pens that actually worked as intended became available in 1945 in the US. For $12.50 - federal minimum wage was $0.40 an hour then.
Today, for $12.50 you can get 40 or so Bic crystals which are machined to higher standards.
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N’ah, the Canaries are pussy cats of volcanoes - we need a seriously ‘don’t fuck with me’ volcano.
I think we should send them to Grímsvötn which is showing signs of waking up and at the very least releases, catastrophic flooding, and at worst - well let’s just say it’s part of the same volcanic system that produced the apocalyptic Laki eruption of 1783-84.
Also convenient for North America AND European flights so we can get more of them there more easily.
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Or Tang or Velcro but here are hundreds of things NASA did develop or Spinoffs as they call them.
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Or Teflon…
It’s just that for some time in the 1960ies/1970ies you could sell pretty any old crap if it was marketed as “space age technology” or something along those lines.
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