New Glenn has finally accomplished what SpaceX did in 2016 (Landing an orbital class booster on a platform at sea after sending an upper stage on its way), and I DO NOT intend to down-play what they have accomplished. I am simply pointing out that they have moved at a glacial pace for years now (many people forget that Blue is actually an older company than SpaceX). I truly hope that this is a sign that they are finally on course to move quicker and become a real competitor to SpaceX - the American taxpayer will see nothing but good come from such a competition.

Now, before we all get too excited:

Blue now needs to demonstrate that they can refurbish and re-fly the booster. This will move them closer to being a true competitor, AND booster landings are just an impressive achievement, but actually a financial loser, if you cannot re-use them. The moment Blue re-flies a booster, traditional rocket firms will become finally completely obsolete. SpaceX already dominated the launch market by being able to fly frequently AND at much lower costs by re-using boosters; with TWO vendors doing it, there may be little market share left for anybody else (within the particular payload mass class).

Downside for Blue's fans to remember:

New Glenn is NOT in the same class as Starship; it's more in the Falcon Heavy category (which is fine - there's plenty of stuff needing such rides). Like Falcon, NG's upper stage is not re-used, so it will not be cost-competitive with Starship. Also, while NG has a much larger payload volume than Falcon9 or Falcon Heavy, it cannot lift as much mass as Falcon Heavy.

Upside for Blue's fans and critics to remember:

NG is nearly in the Saturn V category in several ways, while being partially re-usable. There's a federal law on the books requiring NASA to use commercially available vehicles instead of its own custom stuff when the commercial stuff is available. With both Starship and NewGlenn now in the game, SLS is probably dead. It's likely that a pair of New Glenn launch vehicles could conduct a successful (but modernized) Apollo-style lunar mission, and for a fraction of the cost of an SLS launch that cannot (on its own) do such a thing.

Additional note for Blue Origin fans who will be tempted to crow about this:

There are Blue supporters and Musk critics who are trying to down-play the achievement gap between the two companies and their flagship projects by making two assertions about Super Heavy and Starship. [1] That Starship has not yet achieved orbit, and [2] that Starship has not yet launched a payload. These are NOT, strictly speaking, true yardsticks and should not be taken as a source of comfort. Starships are the size of a 20 story building and made of stainless steel... so SpaceX has not been willing to place them into orbit without certainty of bringing them down in a safe and controlled manner. As a result, they HAVE been placed onto orbital trajectories, BUT highly elliptical ones that intersect with the planet. That's VERY different from a spacecraft not achieving the altitude or the velocity needed (Staships have certainly been capable of being orbited had they been sent into circular orbits). Second, Starships have launched multiple mass simulator payloads into space, proving the capability - there was simply no reason to deploy expensive actual satellites on missions with orbits that intersected the surface of the planet - those satellites would have been destroyed. Oh, and in case you missed it: SpaceX has not just caught, but has already re-flown TWO Super Heavy boosters.

Sad note for United Launch Alliance:

You guys really blew it when you blew-off and ridiculed Musk for claiming he would be able to re-use his rockets. Your shiny new Vulcan is a very nice rocket with great capabilities and economics compared to most historical launch vehicles. ULA would have dominated the market with it, IF THIS WERE THE 1990s. Lack of vision and a reluctance to push technology is likely to cost your company dearly now - there will soon be FOUR American rocket companies re-using their rockets (SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Stoke Space).

When New Glenn achieves booster re-use, Bezos and Musk together will give the nation a vastly superior space capacity to that which we have ever had before, and permanent Lunar bases are probably nearly inevitable. Add things like the soon-to-be operational fully-re-usable medium lifter Neutron, and multiple commercial space stations in LEO and it's getting to be a great time to be a fan of human spaceflight.

A huge "Well Done" to every single person at Blue Origin!.... Now get back to work and keep upping your game!

Cases like this should never be brought, and the lawyers who take them are despicable; they're one reason why we can't have nice stuff, as the saying goes.

This will consume court time, consume the time of people FORCED into jury duty (for which they will not be properly compensated, and ironically, on the demand of people claiming to be improperly compensated). It will add another layer of self-defensive activity to corporate America which is already up to its collective eyeballs in such unproductive garbage only needed to hold-off lawyers... It will add a microscopic additional cost to everything (which is indeed barely measurable in itself BUT adds onto all those other microscopic cost additions that end up being, in total, significant).

Basic question for the griping bank employees: Did you ever sue the bank for the time it takes you to commute to and from the job while working in-person? Surely THAT time took longer for most people and was also uncompensated. Of course, had they tried a lawsuit for THAT time, they probably would have been laughed out of the lawyers' offices because pretty much EVERYBODY has that particular uncompensated overhead in their jobs.

pay attention to the players and some history.

There are some large and powerful companies who, over the decades, have become very dependent upon cost-plus contacts for large government projects that the congress gets all animated about, and upon which congress is willing to overlook massive cost overruns while firing the money cannon. It happens on big defense projects and big space projects where "national security" (the claim, not necessarily the reality) and "national prestige" are supposedly on the line.

With the Shuttle program ended, those contractors and the congress intended the work (and jobs, and pork) be kept with the same big aerospace firms and thus were Orion and the SLS launch vehicle born at MASSIVE cost to the taxpayers and with INSANE schedule slips. This was largely justified as a matter of national prestige. With the ISS about to end, and the currently-supported-by-both-political-parties goal of a return to the Moon and and enduring presence there, the big aerospace vendors were all happy to line-up for another high-profile set of contracts that they would under-bid and then drag-out for YEARS of delays and massively inflate the costs on... until some bad stuff (from their perspective) which they did not anticipate happened...

SpaceX showed up in the launch market and did what they'd never been willing to do: make launched much cheaper by re-using boosters (Something NOBODY who is sane and who has cost-plus contracts would ever do). Then, after making Falcon9 the most frequent flyer, SpaceX started working on its Mars rocket and offered is up as a candidate in the lunar project.

When NASA opened-up the bidding for a lunar lander, the big boys bid high (as always) and SpaceX bid low (since they were offering a dumbed-down version of their Mars lander which they were independently developing and funding anyway) and with Congress not sufficiently prepped for panic-spending NASA found that with its limited funds already largely consumed by Boeing and LockMart on SLS and Orion, it could only afford the SpaceX option. SpaceX thus won the Lunar lander contract. After the award, the big boys applied the appropriate bribes (err... "campaign contributions") and got congress to pony-up more money and force NASA to award a contract for a second lander - which went to a team including some of the big firms but lead by Blue Origin.

Other space startups appeared. RocketLab started launching payloads into orbit and became quite reliable, before starting development of a fully reusable medium lifter (Neutron). Sierra was working on Dream Chaser (Not a lunar thing, but an upstart space thing). Relativity Space came along with 3D printed rockets; not so successful yet, but promising to make rockets much cheaper and sort of printed-on-demand. Firefly Aerospace built and flew a successful small uncrewed lunar lander (a modern version of the old Surveyor probes). Even Amazon (yeah, I know, Blue Origin, same dude, different shop) got into things with the New Glenn. Everybody knows SpaceX, Blue, and Firefly will be able to reliably land on the moon very soon and others will follow...they just need time.

All of this means that, if one simply waits a while, a return to the Moon will likely be MUCH cheaper, and possible using "newspace" companies whose business models are not dependent upon cost-plus contracts obtained by low-bidding and lobbying followed by ballooning schedules and prices. If you are from the old aerospace defense contractor realm, this is a serious problem. You want those big juicy government contracts, so you need them to be issued NOW, before people have the time to think that by being a little patient there will be a bunch of low-cost "hungry" and eager providers. THAT is a HUGE problem because it could lead to MULTIPLE inexpensive vendors providing regular reliable commercial flights to and from the Moon, and THAT might cause the public (and anybody in congress not getting "campaign contributions") to ask much larger questions about all big Aerospace contracts and why the huge expensive firms should always be the presumed contract winners...Who knows? eventually people might start asking "if those new cheap firms can reliably do moon flights, why can't they make fighter jets and bombers?" and other VERY dangerous questions.

The solution is clear. [1] Start stoking the fires of "national prestige" and a panic that China might get there first (as though Apollo never happened - which for many people it seems it did not because it happened and then got cancelled long before they were born). [2] Hire former NASA administrators and have them attack any of the newer vendors that seems a threat (see: Bridenstine and Bolden). Get them to claim that the vendors with the current contacts (SpaceX and Blue) aren't going to get there fast enough. It matters not that both will be ready soon and that nothing bad would actually happen if China caught up with 1969's America (boots&flags for HOURS during Lunar day and near the Lunar equator) a few months before 2025's America way out-performs both historical moments (with permanent presence near the Lunar pole with the option to explore everywhere else). This effort by "old space" to interfere with "new space" on the lunar contracts seems to be aided by the Transportation Secretary who is currently also serving as acting administrator of NASA and seems to like it and want to fold NASA into the Department of Transportation. He appears, as many such administrators of both parties, to have learned just enough about the agencies he oversees to become dangerous but not enough to become wise. He's probably being told he can improve his position with his boss (The President) by getting him a sooner successful Moon landing, and is unaware that the "old space" vendors would only deliver huge delays and cost overruns, and unlike Blue and SpaceX, the "old space" vendors have not even BEGUN to even prep bids, let alone actually start hardware development. Those old vendors do not care if Duffy falls flat on his face - they just need him to open up the contracts and wrestle the deals away from "new space" before the public sees success on the horizon.

Whatever your feelings about the Bad Orange Man, do not get distracted. He'd surely like a successful Moon landing on his watch, but it's obviously not the top thing on his agenda, and if it does not happen, he'll certainly do what all carnival barkers do: draw the public's attention to something else that makes him look better. He's almost certainly not micro-managing this one - the only US President who ever took NASA seriously enough to concentrate upon it was JFK.

This fight has NOTHING to do with technological abilities, or space, or the Moon, or even China. It's all about government contracts, workforces, unions, corporate profits, campaign cash, etc.

For you hard-core Microsoft users, what could that corporate monstrosity possibly do to you that would make you FINALLY say "they've finally crossed the line! I am done!"?

Microsoft started out (in the PC context) providing a good command line based OS called MS-DOS that mostly just did what a simple OS should: provides some basic functionality to allow applications to run with a bit of system abstraction so the same code could run on systems with varying hardware configurations and sparing developers from having to code everything to-the-metal.

When the Mac threatened to up-end their world, Microsoft provided a crappy (but in-color) alternative they called "Windows" which eventually grew-up to be what a modern OS should be (the aforementioned hardware abstraction, but now aided by drivers etc) and the support for multi-tasking with the OS managing the shared resources. With Windows 3.11 they finally finished the move to a modern OS by adding networking support.

Follow-on updates were generally nice gradual improvements most users CHOSE to upgrade to as people moved up to Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 2000 etc always getting better graphics, stability, support for new hardware and newer standards, etc.... until Windows XP, Up until this moment, nobody FORCED customers to do anything, they CHOSE to move to newer versions because the newer versions offered enough value to convince them to part with their money... it was a good value proposition. With XP Microsoft started requiring the OS to "phone home" to the Mothership (but only for installation). This was the moment Microsoft made it clear THEY were in control of your PC... since it had to phone home to authorize the install, this meant that at some future time (which did indeed arrive) they could shut off the authorizing systems and you would no longer be able to re-install that version which you had purchased and if you wanted to keep using your PC you would be FORCED to buy a newer version.

THIS was the dividing line in time. From this point on, Microsoft went full-on arrogant and presumed THEY own your PC and THEY can jerk you around.

With every subsequent release of Windows, Microsoft has FORCED people to upgrade, FORCED hardware obsolescence (driving countless tons of perfectly good electronics into landfills), FORCED software incompatibilities (new OS version -> new Microsoft app version -> new Microsoft app file formats...) and made the OS phone-home more invasive. When they started snooping on keystrokes and mouse movements, people got over the shock pretty quickly and continued using the newer versions like some sort of dysfunctional drug addicts encountering a new side-effect. Now with forced online accounts, "cloud" storage/backups (oooooh, it's so FLUFFY!) people are losing sensitivity to who has their data and where it's stored and who might access it....

Just where is the limit on how evil Microsoft can go before people say "nope. This far, but no further"???

I'm personally disgusted by how much of corporate America (and particularly governments and Medical facilities) have gone along with all of this to the point where HIPAA and even Constitutional rights are no longer in-force. When governments and medical facilities put your private and sensitive info into systems running Windows and constantly phoning home to the Microsoft Mothership and servers, just where is the guarantee of security and privacy? Just what redress is available if any of it is compromised, and will anybody even know if it is compromised? Do people at Microsoft or in government even acknowledge that such things ARE "compromises" when they become design features? Just how secure is YOUR data in a Microsoft cloud if a very powerful and important Microsoft customer (the US government? China's communist party?) demands Microsoft grant them access? Certainly Microsoft values those big customers more than it values YOU and possibly your small business. Are YOUR small business's intellectual property secrets safe and secure on a Windows PC tethered to the Microsoft Mothership and how do you know if Microsoft is accessing that info for its own use, or to sell/trade it to some more important [to THEM] entity like the Chinese or Indian government?

NONE of these things were possible on good old MS-DOS. All of these things are possible on Windows 11. When will people decide to break the habit, free themselves from the addiction, and get clean?

1. Who made it "the Gulf of Mexico"? Why did somebody arbitrarily naming it for Mexico (Mexico does NOT own it, and the US has more coastline with it) make it a fixed and unchangeable thing to you? It was actually refreshing to see Trump call this one out. There was never a good reason to call it the "Gulf of Mexico", and in this era where China is trying (on the global stage) to set a precedent that they can demand the world recognize their ownership of the body of international water traditionally called "The South China Sea" simply because the word "China" is in the title, Trump's action sets up a whataboutism for all those in the spineless international diplomacy arena (who would likely immediately fold in the face of China) to have to face. The fact that his challenging of a stupid old thing nobody had ever codified into law (thus leaving it as only a goofy tradition) has suddenly made people within whose heads he clearly resides go completely whacko was just a bonus.

2. Freedom Fries... ahhh yes, so after a few years you finally get the joke? Too bad so many on your side of the aisle spend so much time working themselves into a froth of outrage and are unable to see when the Bad Orange Man is just kidding around. He's not really that hard to understand; you guys used to not react this way back in the decades when he was a Democrat.

3. "extrajudicial murder"? Really wanna go there? Were you outraged when Bill Clinton distracted the nation during the Monica Lewinski affair by bombing an aspirin factory in Sudan? Were you fine with Obama droning an American citizen to death? The Council on Foreign Relations (hardly some pro-Trump outfit) says "The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians." I think that about does it for being hyper-freaked-out over ANY "extra-judicial murder[s]" by Trump.

4. "Hypernationalistic renaming of bodies of water"? Just what the hell is the difference between renaming something and hypernationalistically renaming it? And just why the hell is it OK to name it for the nation of Mexico, but some fundamental challenge to planetary norms to name it for America (which, by the way, is a term that not only applies to the USA, but also generically to "the Americas", which INCLUDES Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, etc). Why is it some freak-out thing to have somebody rename a thing (oooh, without an international committee at the UN!) but NOT the same problem when somebody names it in the first place without said international thingamajig? Do you have ANY evidence that renaming a body of water has EVER lead to either World War III or the re-instatement of the military draft in the history of the human race?

Oh, I get it. Orange Man Bad!!!! Mental illness is the new norm!

Seek professional help, there seems to be a real estate developer and former reality TV guy living in your head.

throw some gas on it to put it out!

Yeah... that's the sort of thinking at play here: [1] Identify a problem and then [2] propose a "solution" that seems great to a simpleton but which would actually make things far worse. There's simply NO situation in which unionizing a set of workers makes quality and quantity and price get better for the consumer or average citizen. Unionized auto workers in the US famously produced higher car prices and lower quality cars. Unionized government workers produced the world's worst "consumer experience" which is why a visit to the DMV is considered and example of hell on Earth...

At the margins, unionization can produce improved worker conditions for SOME workers SOMETIMES. It generally helps the less-productive and less-capable workers stay employed and get higher pay than their work would justify as they ride on the coat-tails of the better employees who fall victim to the propaganda that they need to unionize and all "stick together". The primary problem is this: Unionization is simply incapable of defeating the basic economic laws. If economic conditions require a reduction of labor costs, then pay and benefit reductions or job losses are going to happen, no matter what a union says. If the labor cuts are not implemented, then the entity doing the employing will eventually fail and all the jobs will be lost. The only exception is government workers, where economics are not really at play because things like tax increases are available (a forced infusion of new funds). This is a big reason why so many formerly-great and iconic businesses who at one time unionized are no longer in existence or are now a shadow of their former selves. Ask the retirees of any unionized company who (long after retiring on their supposedly good benefits provided by those union contracts) how they felt when the benefits were reduced and their old unions agreed to it as part of some later negotiation...

The solution (assuming there IS one) is NOT to unionize, but to change the laws and regulations applied in the marketplace that lead to the conditions that cause people to WANT to unionize. If we assume that the problems we seek to address are not a normal marketplace thing driven purely by natural and desirable market forces that we should find better ways of coping with, then those problems should be viewed as systemic and those require policy changes across the entire marketplace and NOT unionization which warps a segment of the marketplace in un-sustainable ways.

Americans are often goaded into thinking this is a good idea by people pointing to certain European countries where (they are told) unions have made a workers' paradise... but they're often mislead about the down-sides. Americans would not likely accept the low growth rates, high tax rates, and mountains of rules and regulations that would accompany copying that model, and it would not actually work anyway given that it's based in-part on an economic lie; those European economies have all floated on a subsidy from the American taxpayer for about 8 decades as American workers paid for much of the dense of Europe, and paid higher prices for thing like medications as the American consumer bore the weight of the R&D costs (which were held off of the prices paid across the Atlantic). As Margaret Thatcher once said, the problem is that sooner or later you run out of others' money.

How many of us are going to want to fly on planes piloted by people of this upcoming generation, cross over bridges designed by engineers who graduated using these brain crutches, and be operated upon by doctors who had an AI help them pass their exams and who can remember nothing of what they supposedly learned?

If people thought Orwell was painting a dark picture of the future, they ought to realize he was probably an amateur and things are likely going to be far worse, and in a way even he did not see coming...

This entire problem was launched with a lie. That lie was being pushed already in the 1980s and it was very effective with the CEOs of many companies who seemed eager prove the old communist prediction true (that capitalists would sell the communists the rope with which they (the capitalists) would be hanged.).

The lie was: "Huang questioned the wisdom of policies that cost America one of the world's largest markets. " (the bold part).

When the Chinese started telling American CEOs that they (China) were the most populated nation on Earth and the yet the least already exploited as a consumer market, American execs went nuts; the ones who'd already achieved marketplace saturation in the West started projecting higher sales to investors based on the idea that there were massive numbers of Chinese consumers who would soon become customers. Lobbyists pushed politicians to drop obstacles to business with China and a bi-partisan drive lead the Bush41 admin to push for trade with China (Remember: Bush41 had been a US ambassador to China and had gone a bit native as many ambassadors do). When Bush left office, the supposedly opposite admin of Bill Clinton finished the political lift needed and got China admitted to the WTO. Older people here will remember, and younger ones can look up, the scandals of the 1990s when the Clintons and then Vice President Al Gore were found to be entangled with illegal Chinese money coming from oddball characters like "Jonnie Chung" and doing fund raising in Chinese monasteries (as though a bunch of Asian Monks were awash in cash...) as American businesses "accidentally" leaked American tech (including ballistic missile guidance tech (look up Hughes and Loral) to China. Every time somebody noticed the negative effects of the Jobs and tech going to China, it was treated as a surprising accident and politicians on both sides of the aisle, pushed by money from the same lobbyists, kept advancing policies to "increase trade" to supposedly help companies get access to those imaginary Chinese consumers (who, in actuality had no surplus cash to use to buy Western stuff). It was always hinted at (to the US voters) that the politicians were doing something to "crack down" with Democrats pretending to care about the job losses (as THEY pretended to be pro-worker) and Republicans pretending to be security-minded (as THEY pretended to be "defense hawks"). American companies eagerly exported their jobs to China to lower labor costs and improve profit margins (foolishly teaching China how the tech worked as a necessary step of course) all the while telling stock holders that the imaginary Chinese consumer market would soon provide an amazing boost in revenues.

The thing is, that long-promised massive Chinese consumer market was never there, and never going to be there. By the time the average Chinese citizen would have enough expendable income to spend buying stuff that was more than just the basic necessities, the Chinese "companies" which had geared-up to make all the Western stuff and now knew how to make it would be making those items themselves and the average Chinese person would buy from their own local vendors, while the benefits of scaled-up production would make the Western equivalent products (also made in China) too expensive in comparison.

There were people who saw this coming and warned the people of the Western countries, but they were generally shut-down and labelled "bigots" as a combination of Chinese operators and those drooling American executives who could see nothing but those supposedly eager future Chinese customers joined forces both in lobbying the politicians and in pushing messaging in the media. This problem has been a long time in the making and the "establishment" politicians of BOTH American parties are every bit as much to blame ad the greed heads in the corporate executive suites.

Western executives should hang his head in shame, resign, and give back all their fabulous salaries benefits and stock options. They have all FAILED their companies, their industries, and their nations. Their employees have seen this... often THEY were forced to train their foreign replacements as their jobs were "outsourced" to China and these execs ordered their people to train China to make their products and hand over the design documents. The past several decades have seen the West infested by a tsunami of executive incompetence as idiots who loved to golf and fly on executive jets demonstrated levels of foolishness not seen in a thousand years... they've made "fiddling while Rome burns" look good in comparison.

If you as an exec in a Western nation with Western workers and infrastructure politics and economics cannot easily out-perform a top-down managed communist dictatorship in quality, innovation, and price then you are a failure. No pile of sheepskins stamped with "MBA" is a match for a competitive spirit, a passion to learn and innovate, and a firm grasp on how to motivate and mobilize a western workforce in a market-driven free society.

On November 9th of 2016 he publicly claimed the stock markets were plunging in response to Trump's 1st election, and in projecting when the markets would recover said "a first-pass answer is never" - anybody who listened to this guy and panic-sold their stocks missed out on a great bull market as the Dow under Trump went from about 19000 to about 31000. Krugman let his personal animus towards the Bad Orange Man and his opposition to the POLITICAL policies infect his economic analysis/predictions and it probably cost a lot of his supporters a lot of cash, thus exposing a hazard in blindly following a credentialed "expert", particularly one you believe in because his politics align with yours.

This same guy beclowned himself praising Biden for his hands-on economic successes.

He always wants people to call him a "Nobel Prize winning economist", but even here he is being a bit dishonest. In his will, Alfred Nobel established five prizes: [1] physics, [2] chemistry, [3] physiology or medicine, [4] literature, and [5] peace. Note: there is NO Nobel Prize in Economics in that list. In 1968, the Central Bank of Sweden invented a "Prize in Economic Sciences" and handed a pile of money to the Nobel Foundation and asked them to administer the prize along side the Nobel Prizes. This is the award Krugman won - the Central Bank of Sweden's Prize in Economic Sciences. It is NOT a prize the late Alfred Nobel created or funded. If Trump created a prize in "Biglyness" and handed a pile of cash to the Nobel people and convinced them to administer it, there would not suddenly be a "Nobel Prize in Biglyness"

I do not allow any computers in my business that hold important data to touch the internet. If the newest bloatware OS from Micro$oft is no longer going to allow even installation without an online account, then that OS is now banned from my company.

I'd already mostly moved off of Microsoft with their endless cycles of new versions that do not support old hardware (driving new hardware purchases to replace completely functional hardware which, presumably, I'm supposed to toss straight into the landfills). Every new version since XP seems to just introduce more junk I do not need, while requiring higher clock rates, more memory, and more disk space just to be as fast as before, eliminates compatibility with perfectly functional but suddenly "obsolete" peripherals, and pushes newer versions of the installed applications, which in-turn introduce newer versions of file formats that force more business-wide upgrades to avoid incompatibilities between desktops... in a never-ending cycle that provides more money for MS and the other vendors but no actual benefit for the person spending all that money - me.

Am I the only one who sees no actual benefit in the desktop changes that have occurred since the very nice and clean Windows2000 UI?

Is it somehow odd that I see the artificial push to make everybody landfill mountains of perfectly functional hardware just because Microsoft needs a new infusion of cash from another upgrade cycle as something less that "green"?

Have we reached a point where everybody is so used to data breaches, ransonmware, etc that nobody cares any longer that the biggest companies are turning everything into spyware, paranoid licensing schemes, and pay-to-keep-running extortion machines that make data security impossible?

Now, if only Linux and BSD would find a way to better support a lot of the peripherals Microsoft pretends are obsolete, particularly in the printer, plotter, and scanner areas...

Whether you love Trump or Despise him, the simple fact is that his presence in the political arena broke the brains of a lot of people and the results have produced a number of spin-off effects. Some people see Trump and see a patriotic successful businessman, others see him as a rude, ignorant, uncultured fascist. People in this latter category, discarded all traditions in a reaction to him, seeing themselves as defenders of civilization and their every action as justified. People who supported Trump saw the others as going insane. We developed two dramatically different worldviews while looking at the exact same ink blot.

After Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, the permanent political class in government went insane and decided to throw out all the old rules in an effort to block his election, then prevent his being sworn-in, then destroy his administration, then try to eliminate his legacy, and then try to keep him from getting back into power. Nearly every person in the top levels of corporate media in the US has ties to people in these un-elected government positions, so the "mainstream media" in the US jumped into the effort and threw their credibility onto the flaming altar of their politics. This was not sustainable, as the public (even many of those politically aligned with the effort) began to see very big holes and fallacies exposed in the narratives being pumped.

We had major news outlets repeating stories over and over again about "Trump Russia Collusion" with formerly-respected journalists getting fired after being caught lying on air about basic facts. On-air talent and print reporters were routinely telling people Trump was going to be convicted of major crimes, up to and including treason, and that he'd be in an orange jump suit in prison. As this was happening, actual government reports were spilling-out proving the infamous "Steele Dossier" was just a pile of made-up garbage put together by a British spy and his Russian spy buddies while on the payroll of the Clinton campaign and it was never going to lead to any successful prosecution. This angered the right, who saw the media falsely attacking Trump and lying about him, but it ALSO angered the left who felt they'd been mislead and had their hopes dishonestly raised. This was a big bi-partisan failure for the press.

COVID was all tangled-up in the Trump fight and probably had an even bigger impact. Initially, the Trump people bragged the new experimental vaccines were available in record time, but the press down-played the vaccines and even advanced the anti-Trump narrative that they could not be trusted because they were developed under Trump. After Biden got in, the press flipped the narrative to be that the vaccines were perfect and every person had to be REQUIRED to take them and the Biden admin was making sure they were free as a great national health project. People were told to not, mask, then to mask, then to double-mask, and to "social distance", etc. Every new pronouncement was pushed by the media who were NOT doing their traditional job of being skeptical and asking hard questions. As the government lines about masks, vaccine effectiveness, booster effectiveness, etc kept changing the press just kept acting as a cheerleader, and ended-up looking positively Orwellian as they pseudo-facts and narratives kept shifting with nary an acknowledgement that anything had changed. Instead of the press looking into the arguments of critics, the press helped the government suppress any critics and any contrary information. Now that we know how messed-up all those narratives were and what a disaster those vaccines were, including that they were largely developed BEFORE the outbreak and the pharma people were less than honest with both the Trump and Biden admins, it leads to even more questions about the role of the press and whether it can be trusted at all.

The loss of press credibility is like a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Journalists would love to blame it on politicians using them as a punching bag, or failures of the public to understand them, or any number of other things, but what they need is a healthy dose of introspection. They went full-on partisan and sold out all their principles in the process, abandoning even the most-basic ideas of journalism- and everybody can see it; It cannot be unseen. They could not correct themselves at the time because they'd started with an already heavy political bias but then discarded anybody whose politics were impure, so they lost the in-the-room counter arguments and voices that might have cause them to return to skepticism and more balanced reporting. At the peak of the anti-Trump hysteria, NOBODY in the news rooms was a person who saw the inkblot differently from the rest, so there was no brake handle on the runaway train car. They'll only recover credibility when they come clean and admit to what they did, and bring people back into the newsrooms who are not in the same groupthink. I'm not holding my breath on that one and do not see any path for the press to recover.

Higher CO2 content in atmosphere -> more plant growth -> more deep green viewed from above = "darker"

That's just a place to look. We'll figure it out; it's certainly not some grand cosmic magic.

You rant about fossils...so what. That has NOTHING to do with the argument, unless you are now claiming we have the fossilized remains of every single jay that ever existed and can, therefore prove that this is the very first instance of a naturally-occurring hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay in the history of the planet. You lack every single bird's remains, and therefore your argument is completely unrelated to what I said.

All of your religious ranting about the true faith of AGW also has no bearing on what I posted; Climate change can be real (as I believe... the climate has NEVER been static) and it can be human-drive (as you clearly believe) and it STILL has zero bearing on what I posted. The truth of climate change and any causes has nothing to do with whether this is the first-ever such naturally occurring hybrid.

You folks who are ideologically focused upon "climate change" or the Bad Orange Man, or related stuff need to calm down, get a grip, and start noticing that not every damned thing on the internet is an offense to your religion. Some things are just stand-alone arguments and can be discussed without dragging-in mental illness. I was simply pointing out that the article is deceptive and seems to try to convince the reader that something unprecedented has happened, and that it is tied to a current pet theory (perhaps tied to politics, or grant funding, or popularity in the faculty lounge... I did not ho into that) but that there's no way to actually know if this is unprecedented, and that it's therefore silly to even tie it to the current scientific cause celeb.

As to geologic science... I took several courses way back in my university days, purely out of self-interest and in preference over fluffier optional subjects, so I'm perfectly comfortable with it as a science. I also have a family friend who is a geologist by profession. So, no, I don't think the field is voodoo, it's a solid field and it's more critical more human activities than most people understand. I do however object to ANY field of science being abused for ideological purposes, or anybody in a field abusing science while grinding a personal axe. In that strain, I have no issue at all with most of the field, but DO object when people take something like climate data estimated from core samples and place it into the same chart with data from satellites etc with ZERO common calibration and then claim to be able to work in tenths of a degree of temperature precision. THAT is not science at all, and that behavior would have earned a person a grade of "F" on a paper back when I was taking science courses. When climate studies became a big thing and a place government and NGOs were pouring buckets of money, it affected science, in my opinion, very negatively. A whole generation of science people found ways to tie their work to climate and thus got access to all those revenue streams. It's precisely the effect the late President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address right after the bit about a growing "military industrial complex", and not surprisingly is a part of the speech the modern political left never plays/watches/reads.

It's always interesting when we see a thing for the first time and (hopefully) properly document it, and perhaps even study it. This expands human knowledge and who knows what future benefit may come from the new information.

Sadly, it comes to us wrapped improperly in the propaganda of "climate change" alarmism. By dragging climate change into it, we're all supposed to see it as a warning sign of an impending apocalypse and it's likely intended to end-up as an argument in the related political fights. As with all the "hottest day ever recorded" or "most snowfall in 24 hours ever recorded" or any related headline, it exposes a larger truth about just how insignificant it is. The Earth has been orbiting the sun for [presumably] about 6 billion years [plus or minus whatever adjustments scientists will come up with in the future] and humans have been making scientific records of climate and of various plant and animal species for a REMARKABLY small part of that time. We have global climate data [and therefore, RECORDS] for something like 1/60000000 of the Earth's history and data on plants and animals of the entire world for even less of that. Indeed, we're STILL discovering species we never knew existed. Our records are simply INSIGNIFICANT in the big picture.

So, yes, we apparently have "the first DOCUMENTED wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay" (that's nice), but that's NOT the same thing as "the first wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay" (a complete unknowable). This is not even CLOSE to definitive... probably 99.999% of all blue and green jays have never been seen by humans, as for most of the planet's history most of the planet was unexplored and most of the birds were unseen by humans.