With 50 gigapixels you can image the 20,000 square mile Starlink satellite footrprint with 1 meter resolution

Without quality optics, you'll just end up with 50 gigapixels of blur. More pixels doesn't necessarily mean you can resolve finer features.

For comparison, Planet Labs is deploying its Pelican telescope constellation. These are the size of a small refrigerator (0.6 x 0.6 x 1.0 m), and roughly half of that is devoted to the optics. Planet Labs advertise 30-cm resolution with that platform, but the first prototypes only went up a few months ago - I don't know if real data is available yet.

Another comparison is "What If You Pointed Hubble at Earth"? (Since Hubble is more or less a spy satellite, modestly redesigned for astronomy.) The diffraction limit puts the resolution at 0.2 m - not quite enough for license plates. But atmospheric effects alone would worsen that significantly. Then there's motion blur - the telescope has to slew to keep the object centered in the field of view. Even if it did so perfectly, you're still viewing the object from different angles during the camera exposure. A telescope in Pelican's form factor (0.5 m, cubed) doesn't jibe well with the flat-pack configuration of Starlink (about 0.2 m thick), let alone a Hubble.

But that's not to say that NRO hasn't asked SpaceX (and contractors) for their own design. There's a reason why the SpaceX camera feed cuts out before fairing separation.

Grocery stores hire mystery shoppers to buy things at competitors and gather pricing data. Chefs are known to eat at their competitors' restaurants. Every automaker either buys their competitors' cars to tear down, or purchases detailed reports from third parties. Anyone in a retail context would be stupid not to gather such information. And you can bet that WalMart, etc., have their own teams doing the same thing. By and large, we're talking about public information (or at least unprivileged). Why is this even a story?

I expect that most of Dropbox's employees are code warriors or account managers. That suggests that most of the workload can be accomplished from...anywhere with an internet connection. That's nice, good for them.

A good chunk of my work, however, actually interfaces with the real world, and not just a keyboard. Zoom won't cut it when a CNC machinist and I are reviewing a complex part together. The finished parts could be shipped to me (with the accompanying delay), but I can't properly assembly things in my home office. My company won't let me bring home $10^5 worth of equipment (oscilloscopes, power supplies, solder stations), or otherwise foot the bill to set up a proper test lab in my basement.

Sure, some of my work I can do from home. I'm WFH today while my car's in the shop, plugging away at some analysis scripts. But 100% remote won't cut it for me. Even 50% would leave me idle some days.

For the vast, overwhelming majority of the workforce that does their job in meatspace, and for their bosses, what this guys says holds no water.

I have heard anecdotes of chip engineers in the 60's to 80's adding snarky messages in Russian and German to their dies. It was well known that East Germans and the Soviets were reverse-engineering American parts, trying desperately to jump-start their own lithography. Things along the lines of "go ahead and try to copy, but your fabs are so shit it won't work." Here's a video that touches on that history.

Elon and Starman can bring them home together in a Tesla

Is that the Thelma and Louise reboot we've been itching for.

I didn't say the IRS was perfect, just better. Thank you, AC, for proving my point for me.

You cite one report, from 2016, that affected less than one million people. What's the track record of the typical bank, credit bureau, state government, employer, hospital, cell provider, or mail-order club with similarly sensitive information?

Dead end for me.

You're complaining that a pilot program wasn't large enough to include you? Do you whine about every closed beta, too?

What purpose does it serve to make it hard and expensive for people to file taxes?

Republicans have made it a matter of cultural identify to hate and distrust the government, and the IRS is one of their favorite whipping boys. Keeping it hard and expensive to file taxes is kind of the point - people will like their government less because of it.

otherwise they take a hit on revenues

That's all part of their strategy to "starve the beast", so as to justify cutting social programs or other things they don't like in the name of fiscal responsibility. Nevermind that when they're in power they're just as profligate and irresponsible as they always claim Democrats to be.

spend inordinate amounts of money chasing people who fail to file correctly

Yes, but they like to pick on those people. Those people are not people who failed to file correctly due to our byzantine tax system: they're moochers and freeloaders (and probably commies!) trying to stiff Real Americans (TM). Besides: it's much easier to shake down those people than to go after the more difficult and complicated tax avoidance schemes of high earners, who like to make big campaign contributions as well as stiffing the Treasury.

but not being able to handle itemized deductions (at least not yet) will make it a non-starter for many people

I guess it depends on what you consider "many people". Only about 10-12% of filers itemize; the vast majority use the standard deduction. ([1], [2], [3]). Most of those who itemized are the highest earners. Granted: 10% of filers is still millions of people. But as a share of taxpayers, it's still small.

This doesn't have to be a 100% solution for it to still be a tremendous public benefit. And anything that lands a blow against Intuit or H&R Block (seriously, fuck those parasites) seems OK to me.

The thing is that the IRS should do all the paperwork, fill out the forms, and send us a bill or a check. Let's put service(serve us) into the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS would agree. Feel free to take it up with Congress, and particularly Republicans, who love nothing more than to hamstring the IRS, then complain about what a terrible job they're doing.

I'm not a Republican and I'm wondering who I sue when the IRS online tax software suffers a data breach and my personal information is made public?

You do realize the IRS already has vast motherlodes of data on you and everyone else in the country? Anyone with a SSN, bank account, employer...the IRS receives and keeps records of all of that. They seem to do a much better job safeguarding it than just about anyone else.

Anyway, more importantly, if that's so easy and economically viable, where is it?

By and large, you don't see it, because nearly every single EV battery ever produced is still on the road, or has been converted to stationary storage. A lot of the recycling that happens now is being done on consumer goods (e.g., smartphones, laptops) or the rejects from battery plants, not end-of-life vehicles. Here is one video inside an operational Li-Cycle plant.

And here is a list of announced or operational battery recycling facilities as of Sept 2023.

I'll flip the question around: if you think it EV battery recycling is so non-viable, where are the stories about truckloads of sad EV batteries going to landfills?

What will happen is they will be replaced by more heat tolerant variants while other stretches of ocean too chilly for corals generally will now become habitable.

Ah yes, the this is fine coping mechanism.

Most of our space tech components are made in China

Close, but you're thinking of the other China:
American components, Russian components...all made in Taiwan!

In seriousness: when it comes to "space tech" - that's largely an outgrowth of the aerospace and military, which still largely sources domestically.

I don't think these have replaceable batteries either. The article seems to think so, but the actual "repairing your fairbuds" video from the company shows replacing the battery in the *case*.

That is not correct: the earbud batteries are user-replaceable. The Lilliputing article embeds a second video that provides and overview of most of the repair processes. Here at 1:19 you can see opening the bud's battery tray to replace the battery.