The “+ solar power” part is the majority of the energy. Solar panel efficiency is only about 25-30% at beginning-of-life whereas typical albedos are effectively 100%. So your estimate is off by at least a factor of three.

Also, I’m not sure where you got 5 kw from. The area of the satellite is ~100 m2, which means they are intercepting over 100 kw of bolometric solar power.

Put another way, 2 sq m intercepts 2600 w of solar power but only radiates ~1700 w at 350 k, which means it needs to be run at a higher temperature of nearly 125 celsius to achieve equilibrium.

This is a frustratingly uninformed take. You are comparing apples to oranges by equating your decision-making process with that of someone in the US. The drive to own a house in the US is not just mediated by “emotion” - the calculus is fundamentally different than in many nordic countries. For instance, very few places in the US have rent control, which means that renting represents substantial risk of either experiencing a large increase in cost, or being forced to move at irregular intervals. On the other end of the spectrum, the US is one of the only places that offers 30 year mortgages, which means that (taxes and repairs aside) buying a home on credit still offers a high level of predictable cost over the long term. Also, at least historically, there are very many places in the US for which housing is very affordable, given that the USs overall population density is so much lower than the average European country.

This is of course not to suggest that buying is always a good call - but it is often a logical and financially sound one.

https://bopoolen.nu/en/laws-regulations/

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I really want to understand some sort of reasonable moral justification for actively avoiding paying for a service that you are using / circumventing the mechanism by which the business makes money.

This is pretty unintuitive for us 3D beings.

(The number of successes has zero uncertainty. If you flip a coin 10 times and get 5 heads, there is no uncertainty on the number of heads. In general, for any statistical model the uncertainty is only with respect to an underlying model parameter - in this example, while your number of successes is perfectly known, it can be used to infer a probability of success, p, of 0.5, and there is uncertainty associated with that inferred probability.)

This doesnt really detract from your overall point, but you may be underestimating how easy it already is for the government to tell how you will vote, without use of networking information. Just knowing someone’s educational level and zip code is enough to guess their voting preferences to a high degree of accuracy (the latter component being the reason why gerrymandering is so effective).

> tVNS applied for 30 min daily over 7 consecutive days increased VO2peak by 1.04 mL/kg/min (*95% CI: .34–1.73*; P = .005), compared with no change after sham stimulation (−0.54 mL/kg/min; *95% CI: −1.52 to .45*)

(emphasis mine) The 95% CIs for the case and control groups overlap. Seems borderline irresponsible to have a the abstract reporting a significant result.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry%E2%80%93Esseen_theorem

If we as a society agree that some sort of progressive tax system is good (based on the fact that the mere act of survival comes with fixed costs, that naturally impact low-wealth holders over high-wealth holders) then we presumably expect higher wealth people to shoulder a larger burden of the cost of maintaining society, relative to that wealth.

The top 1% hold >30% of all wealth in the US, which, by the logic I described above, makes your 40% figure sound not just not exorbitant, but possibly too low.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

Yes, that is literally the explicit point of the talk. The first myth of the article was “python is not slow“