I said a good price not an ideal price. If your product can easily be embraced and extended by Microsoft and yet you think you'll made vast sums of money on it, then your expectations don't match what's actually going on.

Then you made a bad choice.

I disagree. As I said of the corresponding Russian scheme, putting tourists on the ISS adds considerable value to the station both by demonstrating space tourism works and by providing a service that someone is actually willing to pay their own money for.

The Chinese government is not a monolith. It's not unusual to see different parts of it pursue conflicting aims. As the saying goes, "the only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency."

So what? That indicates your product was worth less than you thought.

But predatory in a good way. After all, if you were one of those companies with something Microsoft needed, you had a ready exit strategy for getting out of your business with ample profit - just sell the company to Microsoft.

Funny how a lot of the people who are enamored of the Chinese model, aren't capitalists. The real attraction is for stoking authoritarian fantasies of all flavors. Want a high speed rail or massive infrastructure/social safety net projects? China made it happen. That's your authoritarian socialist viewpoint.

Want favorable or unique business advantages or just doing away with the arbitrary rules imposed by the thoughtless masses? Just think what profit you could make with the power available to the Chinese government! There's your authoritarian capitalist viewpoint. Want people to be good and the society perfect? Let's make them be good and the society perfect via the Chinese model! There's most of your utopian viewpoints.

Well, the Fed has admitted that it purchases a lot more than just federal treasuries and bonds. There must be some obstacles in place though else we'd have a lot more inflation. The economy isn't acting like there's easy, unlimited credit else we'd see more and large asset bubbles than we currently see.

I think one of those obstacles is reserve, namely how much concrete assets one needs on hand to cover leveraged investments.

As to the "Business Plot", it's worth remembering that those guys alleged to have been plotters got shafted a lot by the Roosevelt administration who let us note did stuff that should have been outright illegal like stealing privately owned gold in the US and attempting to pack the US Supreme Court. It was not unreasonable at the time to expect the US democracy to be near its end. In that case, why not fight the emerging dictatorship on its own terms?

Let us note that this sort of business-backed revolt worked in both Iran and Chile and similarly failed in Cuba and recently, Venezuela. I can't think of an example, win or lose that didn't turn out badly for the country in question. Maybe we should instead work on not letting things get to the point where businesses are desperate enough to back a rebellion or coup?

This is dumb. First, we have thousands of people already living in Antarctica and they aren't melting ice, especially enough ice to displace thousands of people.

That still makes it a dumb comment since your example was of colony-based insects who are notoriously colony-focused. They are far more racist than humans, viciously competing with even with their close kin in other colonies.

It's pretty clear that you are blinded by your opinions and merely assume that approaches which you deem bad, like terraforming the Sahara are automatically bad and approaches you deem good, like moving a vast number of people to England (and overwhelming its infrastructure), are automatically good. The real world doesn't operate that way.

Again, coal doesn't fall in that category. Sure, we would be running out of coal, but not by 2100.

Capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. It doesn't "dictate" that you go for anything in particular. Nor does it dictate that things have to go "downhill" merely because the absolutely cheapest resource is no longer present.

There's also this thing called "invention" which tends to change the game. I think by 2100 we'll have figured out adequate replacements for cheap petroleum while retaining our vast transportation network. And I think we'll find out then that we've had those alternatives around for a number of decades now.

But that's not the case. There's nothing magical about living in Antarctica that would cause millions of people to lose their homes elsewhere.

No, those species are quite notorious for exhibiting behavior that strongly favors their own species at the expense of pretty much everything else aside from a few symbiotes. Even honeybees only help plants pollinate because they get in exchange food and building material (for their beehive wax).

Unless of course, they'll go bankrupt faster if they don't. But then I guess that would be a case of more incentive to change than you would allow for.

Only as long as those franchise agreements continue to exist. Ford or Toyota didn't agree to uphold car dealership franchises till the end of time. If Tesla is able to turn this into a competitive advantage, and I think they will, then most of the car companies will have to follow suit or lose market share.

Because once there is a leak in the dike, it will grow. The existing car companies will be prevented from selling directly, only if the existing franchise agreements remain in place.

It's not the 1% who are making all those people.

Well, there is coal. That's not going away by 2100 despite your assertion.

Which is incorrect. As the paper notes, most of the population growth comes from Africa and Asia. The developed world actually is a population sink - the overpopulation problem has been fixed there. What responsibility am I supposed to have for population growth elsewhere in the world? And what power am I supposed to have to fix that?