The military has a huge budget that has to feed and entire ecosystem of contractors and subcontractors. Of course such a system is wasteful, and the scale of military spending is such that it's almost certainly true that the military wastes millions on peanut butter, on underpants, on shampoo, on frying pans and on snake bite kits. Name all the items in your junk drawer, and I bet that the military wastes millions on each of those kinds of things. Wasting millions on satellite capacity doesn't even sound that stupid in comparison. The real shocker would be to find something on which the military actually gets a good deal.

I'm surprised he bothered while a Democratic president was in office, although he can always go after Republicans in Congress I suppose.

Bloom County was about as tendentious in their criticism as Doonesbury.

I take it the point is to use the materials in space to first build something. Only once it's built will people actually come. The reason why our space programs are stuck in first gear is that we don't know how to build things in space from materials that are there. This will change soon, because many of the lessons of automated production techniques on Earth can be applied (with modifications) in space. The problem will be one of sourcing the raw materials from which to manufacture something useful. So that demand is perfectly predictable, and asteroid mining companies are now taking the baby steps they need to take to eventually satisfy that demand.

If you're wondering about what's worth making in space, there are many great ideas. Here is just one: A truly gigantic telescope mirror. It might actually be easy to do, because the factors that make mirror production on Earth so hard are not a problem in space. There is no need to worry about sagging, stress and all these other gravity-related issues. Space-built telescopes could get pretty darn big, The question is: what will they be made of? And the most plausible answer is: materials from asteroids. Like I said, that's just one example.

What's even funnier it's that the dolts pitching this agenda have no idea how little actual impact they're having; I founded my company with my wife listed as primary, so it's a "woman-owned business". I know not one but TWO business (one of them sizable) in which the founders were a couple of white guys and a black friend - the white guys put up the money and actually run the business, the black guy lets them use his identity as principal to make it a "minority" business.

My guess is that a significant portion of the "progress" made toward this utopian diversity goal is bullshit, and many if not most of these businesses are really funded and/or run by white men.

This is ridiculous.
First, the expansion/contraction of plastics is generally MUCH much higher than concrete/pavement.
Second, the "prefab road sections" are absurd; nobody builds roads like this already (of any material) because they would be ruinously expensive (not because of the raw material costs), nothing has come close to the level of durability needed to handle 50-ton trucks repeatedly for decades, and extremely hard to deploy.
Third, the overwhelming majority of plastic in the ocean is 0.1mm or smaller (http://theconversation.com/in-the-ocean-the-most-harmful-plastic-is-too-small-to-see-35336) - the cost/magnitude of scale to sieve this from the oceans is mind-boggling.

Seriously, Dutch, I love you - but that's a mind-blowingly dumb idea.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer analog volume dials to the crappy push button volume controls almost everywhere, but a phones a dumb place to have one.

What's going to prevent that dial turning every time it's put into a pocket?

You're missing the point more essentially: What's "GMO"?

Is selective breeding "GMO"? Is splicing a branch onto a tree "GMO"? Hell, if you deliberately select one cow to breed with that bull, you're 'managing' natural selection, and thus is that GMO?
Is using that bull's semen in another artificially inseminated cow "GMO"?

Every piece of corn you eat - from the cob at KFC to something grown entirely organically by the hippies next door, is "genetically modified' because they are not even *close* to the original strain of corn. Same with wheat, apples, oranges, everything of food value has been 'managed', bred, cross pollinated, or selected for traits - is that GMO?

Does it have to be done with a microscope?
If I develop a new herbicide, spray it on a field of grain, and then pull out the plants that survive, use their seeds to grow a new crop, and do the same things a few times to develop herbicide-resistant seeds, are those "GMO"?

I just find the entire subject farcical because you can't get two activists to agree even on what "GMO" means - just that it's evil, whatever the definition.

...in other news, Google Engineers are new developing the next capability for the driverless car, the so called GOASSATODFBADFSPOSTRIYAWHITBTPTHOOTAASFSATPOIAW system, which stand for "Get out and start swearing at the other driver for being a dumb fuck stupid piece of shit that ran into you and wouldn't have if they bothered to pull their head out of their ass and stop fucking staring at their phone once in a while." heuristic engine, which will immediately assign blame and begin a confrontation with the other driver, simultaneously calling a lawyer and filming everything at the scene.
The next stage is expected to be the UYIWMGFYSITMOTFRYFTMIYWSYFYCTALATIOIAW "Oh yeah? It wasn't my goddamned fault you stopped in the middle of the fucking road you fat turd maybe if you weren't stuffing your face you could take a look around the intersection once in a while" response system, and eventually the (tits&tears) "pop my top blouse button and break down into tears hoping he won't sue my ass off" system to deal with the remaining human drivers on the road.

I get the intent, but I'm going to submit that what people living in HUD housing need is NOT a better porn/tv/streaming bandwidth to their home. *NOBODY* needs gigabit fiber access to do their homework online.

I wasn't even saying "rah rah" my side, actually, just that Democratic presidents are naive enough to believe that such agreements are meaningful, all the way back to FDR who believed he could personally 'charm' Stalin.

I didn't really think we needed an example of what Republican presidents are prone to; has anyone forgotten 2001-2008 (and frankly the following years are a result of them) in Iraq/Afghanistan?

I'd object without any financial stake because it doesn't fucking make sense.

EVERY SINGLE ORGANIC* FOOD YOU EAT HAS BEEN "GENETICALLY MODIFIED" FROM ITS ORIGINAL FORM by (at the very least) selective breeding if not more intrusive means.

*ironically, the only "food" you can eat and totally avoid this would be entirely synthetic things like Twizzlers and Sweetarts. Have at it, Luddites.

....since when it goes off, it'll probably either be in conjunction with or set off the Yellowstone supervolcano, and everyone else will have their own catastrophic issues to deal with.

Hey, but at least we might stop hearing about global warming for a while. There's a silver lining.

I'm sure that this will work out at least as well as it did the last time a Dem US president made a deal to "stop the development of nuclear weapons".

I'm sure Japan, South Korea, and others in the region still remember that agreement with pride and joy.

Funny, I was going to say "....we need to figure out how we can tax the shit out of it" but yours works too.

The president is committed to GETTING a deal here regardless of how shitty it is.

Legacy and all that.