Let's ignore how the IT dept should have some kind of network traffic scans to see this stuff, how the heck does a non-admin do something like this? And I'm not attributing it to malice, I'm sure this guy "meant well" and in the process managed to screw everything up. Otherwise, I'm going with "scapegoats" for 1000, Alex.

so we put you in a VR rollercoaster while you were on a real rollercoaster so you can coast while you coast!

It would be an order of magnitude cheaper if we flew those guys to the US, handed them suitcases full of cash, and bought them all houses in southern California. If we really wanted to get fancy, we could even offer them jobs.

Or we can pay their government tons more money to build a rocket engine we don't need.

Elon Musk is a billionaire. Tesla builds electric tanks that are somehow street legal. SpaceX builds rockets and launches things into outer space. You sit around at home scratching your ass and tossing out criticism.

Musk 3
You 0

So we're supposed to just throw all our money down the shitter to keep Russia from getting sad/angry? What are they going to do? Their economy is already collapsing and they've proven once before that you can't pose a real, sustainable military threat to much of anyone if you don't have the economy to keep it going. If we isolate Russia, their economy will take a dive and Putin will end up on the wrong side of pissed off Russians. They'll have a hard winter, then they'll come asking for money telling everyone they've changed their ways.

We're pretty dumb, so we'll give them some money and the cycle will restart. We don't need to buy their stupid rocket engine in no-bid contracts. Let the best solution win.

It's not just the US government, it's the US military. Start in the billions and work your way up from there.

The way military contracting usually works, you may as well fold up some paper into a paper airplane and throw it across a room, then tell the Air Force your design does everything they want for $1. Then spend the next 20 years learning about aeronautical engineering and how to build jet fighters while sending the Air Force bills for $5 Billion a year (don't worry, they'll direct deposit immediately). At the end of it, deliver them something that's beta quality at best and let them kill a couple dozen test pilots (and "test" pilots) until you figure out all the obvious problems with it. Then charge them a few more billion to fix those things. If you're lucky, the project will get canceled due to the ridiculously high cost overruns and you won't have to build but a handful of half-working planes, but still pocket the tens of billions.

Pretty sweet deal.

Are you saying that if they put out contracts for competition, nobody would build anything? Seems absurd on its face. Sure, there's no reason not to build the thing if you have a guaranteed payday, but there's plenty of reason to do it without the guarantee. I'd even be okay with the government footing a small portion of the bill for a handful of serious designs in competition with one another just to get more companies interested. But to simply hand the whole thing over to someone with a fat check and an unlimited credit card for the overages? Ridiculous.

Musk said, "We'll get much bigger boats next time."

Knowing Musk, that means he's going to build a flotilla of fully autonomous fusion powered Nimitz class aircraft carriers constructed entirely from carbon fiber. They'll probably haul the booster up with carbon nanotube wires and preserve it in amber, then transform into robots and fly back to fucking Cybertron.

Much of that is due to the capital flight toward safety (at one point, even turning US Treasuries into slightly negative-value investments). So long as people with wealth are willing to park it in US Dollars, you won't see any major shifts in the currency. However, provide a viable alternative and I think you'll begin to see some rapid shifts that won't make anyone holding assets denominated in US Dollars very happy. And that could trigger some truly catastrophic investor and sovereign panic as people and banks (including national banks/treasuries) start dumping those assets for anything and everything else to avoid being wiped out by a hyperinflated Dollar.

Obviously this requires some sort of replacement reserve currency. It can't happen until there's something else considered as or more safe. The Euro would have been the best contender had it not been for Europe's debt crisis and hard hits during the downturn. God help us all if precious metals ever fit the bill from large scale institutional investors' perspectives, because those are a known-workable entity. It's merely a matter of perception of safety.

I'd prefer a money supply pegged to population change + 1/100th of 1% by constitutional amendment. Some economists and Federal Reserve supporters will argue that such a thing ties the hands of those "managing the economy". I would argue that limiting the power of those who proclaim to understand how to manage an economy of the size and scale of any modern industrialized nation can only result in improvement. If the stagflation of the 70s and 80s, the boom of the mid to late 90s, the bust at the tail end of the 90s, the boom of the 2000s (sparked in large part by a shift of investor capital into the housing securities markets combined with absurdly low interest rates), and the worst bust since the Great Depression haven't convinced you that perhaps no human being on Earth can actually do the job the Fed is supposed to do (we've had a couple of the world's best prospects during those periods), then just look back to the Great Depression and the boom/bust/boom cycle that preceded it.

Better yet, look at the US Dollar's value obliteration. That 6-figure salary we're talking about? About the same buying power as $4,000 when the Federal Reserve was founded. So yes, take that power away, abandon this absurd idea that human beings are capable of "managing" a modern industrialized country's economy, and stabilize the value of the currency so that the salary I have today buys the same stuff tomorrow and will actually buy more when I get a "raise".

Have you been in a coma for 13.5 years?

That's just a rough draft. It's yet to be polished and made ready for public consumption.

Only if the question is "How do you bankrupt the country more quickly than is already being done?"

SOME people in this country have exactly the government they deserve. Those of us who faithfully follow the process, campaign for better ideas, and get nowhere because we're surrounded by masses of apathetic, incompetent idiots do not have the government we deserve. Significant power and authority returning to the individual states would help with that (not solve it by any means, but help).

May as well be a buggy manufacturer in the early 1900s mocking Henry Ford as not having the infrastructure to support automobiles. "Look!" says the CEO, "His automobiles have to be serviced by one of those rare individuals that knows how, but our horse and buggy work everywhere!"

Prior to widespread adoption of internal combustion engines, gas stations (as such) didn't exist. Prior to widespread adoption of the telegraph and the telephone, infrastructure supporting those innovations didn't exist. Prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet, there weren't millions of miles of high speed data cables crossing the globe with signals directed by complex high-speed routing devices. Prior to the widespread adoption of cell phones and smartphones, there was no infrastructure to support them either.

Yet all these things thrived because the infrastructure grew with their adoption. When someone has a car and needs fuel, he has to figure out the logistics of that himself and it can seem unworkable on a larger scale. When half his neighbors have cars and need fuel, an enterprising young businessman comes along and opens a gas station. When Elon Musk sells a few hundred high-end sports cars (the Roadster) around the world to some rich people, he and his customers have to work out some painful logistics for things like service and it can seem unworkable on a larger scale. Check back in five years and see how much trouble it is to run around in the latest Tesla car then.

Tesla's working because they started at the high end of the market where margins are high and logistics are easier. They've used those high margins to push through massive infrastructure improvements around the US and in other richer areas to allow for an even more rapid adoption. They've established a brand by promising big and delivering bigger, then continuing to deliver long after the sale (improving an existing car? who's ever heard of such a thing?!) Mercedes can claim Tesla isn't a threat, but they're a few years away from either having to spend a fortune trying to catch up or they'll end up paying Elon Musk licensing fees for his tech.