It is great to have the rovers on Mars, but a team of say 5 astronauts in 2 weeks could have accomplished at least as much as all the rovers did.

The rovers require large support teams on Earth. Is it really worth keeping personnel on for a decade to do what could be done in a few weeks?

Robots may be the answer, but right now they really suck when they are out of range of immediate control.

It works just if you removed taxes on work and income and replaced them completely with taxes on property. It is logical that this will cause people to behave in ways that are suboptimal for society as a whole.

Just be aware that income taxes ALSO cause people to behave in ways that are suboptimal for society as a whole. The proper solution is to try to spread the tax load over income/consumption/pollution/property/inheritance/... in such a way that overall harm is minimized. Most governments do so but obviously with very different emphasis on which tax they prefer.

Moderate inflation tends to be correlated with decent economic growth. Printing money is a completely valid way to pay for a part of the government budget. Alas, a fairly small part in normal economic times.

The problem is that shoulder-launched AA cannot be negated that way. The A-10 used to be mostly immune to shoulder-launched missiles, they would have to be very lucky to take it down.

Lots of g's were useful back when missiles were severely g-limited on turns. You could simply turn away when the missile got close. Unsurprisingly, missile developers discovered this and made the missiles better at turning.

Yes, the main problem with the modern attack aircraft is that no one wants to buy a light bomber, even though that is what they need.

The F-35 has lousy payload for a light bomber, especially when stealthy and supercruising (nothing mounted on the external hardpoints). The alternatives are about equally crappy, except for the F-22 which is completely hopeless. At least the F-22 has a role where it is supposedly good, when it isn't busy killing its pilot.

The problem with the A-10 is that AA missiles have improved a lot and are improving further. It does not seem viable to build a successor to the A-10 with even more armour.

Drone pilots suffer at least as much from PTSD as regular pilots. However, their work environment is tailored to ensure that their kill performance is excellent. If a pilot who is in a plane does not take a shot, it seems to be considered more of a judgement call based on what they saw, whereas if a drone pilot fails to take a shot, all the video evidence is there to go through in the debriefing. Those who fail to perform or who want to leave the assignment are threatened with dishonourable discharge.

Do not judge them as people without conscience. They are victims too.

Static IP addresses contain whatever the operator sets. Automatically assigned IPv6 addresses used to be MAC based on Ethernet/Wifi, but few do that these days.

This makes no sense. Routers do not care how addresses are assigned, they use neighbour discovery to find the hosts.

That is a vendor-specific bug unfortunately.

In many places, using a forged document is a crime. In Denmark at least it has a maximum penalty of 2 years in prison. It is possible that the interaction with Facebook does not actually involve a legal agreement, and so the law would not apply, but I would hate to rely on that argument in court.

The article does not say that he did that. Instead, the article says that the banks bought insurance against mortgage defaults (credit default swaps), and that prices of such insurance was very low. John Paulson decided the price was too low compared to the risk, so he bought a lot of the same insurance. When the mortgages started defaulting and prices for insurance went up, he sold the insurance on to the banks at a profit.

If there had been a hundred John Paulsons out there, credit default swaps would have gone up in price much earlier, forcing the mortgage lenders to rein-in their subprime lending, thereby either defusing the crisis entirely or at least making it much less bad. Alas, there was only one, and he was good at not getting the word out, so not many copycats. John Paulson did everyone a service and should be rewarded, not punished. The people who lend out money to people who had no chance of paying back should be punished, not rewarded.

Anyway, I have not read other articles about him, so maybe he does deserve his apparently terrible reputation.

I am somewhat surprised that it has fallen to me to defend a 1%'er. This is not exactly my usual modus operandi.

In many places electricity is taxed or high distribution tariffs apply. When you combine that with low feed-in tariffs, those with solar panels have a strong incentive to use their own power rather than export and import power.

Thus, it is cost effective to store energy for the consumer, not for the power companies -- and sometimes it is cost effective for the consumer to store energy expensive high-demand power from the middle of the day and use it during the night when power is otherwise cheap. Some power companies are investing in batteries to do the exact opposite, of course.

In the grand scheme of things there are larger fish to fry when it comes to tax and tariffs though, where the interests of society do not align with the incentives provided to individual people. E.g. it is rather stupid to tax labour, which is a clean and beneficial way to improve our society, instead of resource consumption which causes pollution and poverty.