Yeah, it's all some grand oil-soaked conspiracy, THAT's the TICKET!

This is Slashdot, where people USED to be at least a little geeky and technical and all that stuff... so try thinking about the details of the Biden admin "green" scam on car mileage standards. Those standards were not unlike the Clinton admin "clean water" standards; they were a grand fraud meant to be used for politics and never to actually be employed. In the case of the Clinton water standards, they were not due to kick-in until after he would be out of office, and they required water authorities to clean their waste water to the point that it would be cleaner than the water in any normal lake or river before discharging it - a standard both insane (cleaner than nature before dumping into nature?) AND impossibly expensive (think of the little towns of 5 or 7 thousand people in "fly over" country where the tax base is tiny and there is no way to afford NASA-level water purification). When George W Bush (who I dislike and normally do not defend) got in and eliminated those standards (leaving the standards EXACTLY what they'd been all through the Clinton years) the howls from the left about Bush and Republicans wanting toxic dirty water were everywhere. There were lots of posts here on Slashdot by lefties ranting about those EVIL Republicans wanting toxic water. The whole thing (the new standards AND the reaction to their cancellation) was total political BS designed to fool ignorant people not paying attention.

Same thing here.

Have you thought of what it would require to MEET these new Biden standards, which Biden was never going to have to implement and live with the consequences of?

Do you have ANY freaking grasp of what tech would be required to make an internal combustion-powered vehicle that meets the needs of middle class families in middle America, does so SAFELY enough they want to put their families in them, and AFFORDABLY? Did you ever take any math, physics, and mechanics [the classical, not the automotive type] classes? Do you have any clue about how difficult it is to design and build such a thing, and not only get it through government approvals but then also have the design be able to be mass-produced in an affordable way that generates enough profit to keep the manufacturer in business AND still be something a family on an average income can afford? Remember: that new complies-with-Biden-rules vehicle would not only have to be getting 50 miles to the gallon, but it would have to survive all the crash tests and meet all the safety standards (or it cannot be sold) while hauling perhaps 5 or 6 people and a bunch of luggage/groceries/pets/etc and do it in all weather. Remember: this is not some academic exercise, we're talking REAL WORLD here, this impacts the buyers/drivers and passengers, the manufacturers, and indeed the entire economy. Some moron professor can pump a bunch of kids' brains full of this fluff all day long, without ever having had to earn a paycheck on planet Earth IMPLEMENTING anything - but that does not make his idyllic ideas worth anything more than the day dreams of a typical six-year-old in a sandbox.

The standard was clearly not intended to be achievable, and Biden admin people admitted as much; they were aligned with Gavin Newsom in CA who has said he intends HIS California standards to eliminate ICE vehicles and force everybody to go electric. This means the new standards were a FRAUD perpetrated on the public for POLITICAL reasons. Because I'm a nice guy, I'll move-on here and let's presume that this was all some well-intentioned we-know-better-than-you save-the-planet push into an all-electric utopian future...

Have you thought through how workable THAT take on the Biden rules scam was? Just how much more electricity needs to be available on the grid if you want to eliminate all gasoline-powered and diesel-powered cars and trucks to go electric? Have any of these politicians pushing this stuff made ANY provisions for that StarTrekian future??? Let's examine California, which insists all cars sold in 2035 (less than nine years from now to that car model year) and beyond be electric: The state is knocking down dams, shutting down nuclear plants, kicking-out the fossil fuel industry, etc and making illusory "green" progress by importing energy from other states (who then won't have those same "green" kilo-Watt hours for THEIR people to use) to claim progress. The grid is not being improved to move electricity around the state more efficiently, indeed the grid here is home to many miles of decaying infrastructure that sometimes triggers wildfires so massive that they dump vastly more carbon into the air than is being reduced by the "green" push. There are already times of day here when people are asked not to charge their e-cars WITH THE EXISTING SIZE FLEET OF ELECTRICS. Where is all the electricity to some from if all the autos go electric? Have you ever been bothered to do the MATH on what's required, or do you just trust the EXPERTS (political hacks) who are not themselves implementing ANYTHING to make this workable? Say what you want about the oil people and the "old" car companies making gas burner cars, but at least THEY make real-world solutions to the needs of normal people in the real world.

There's another part of this massive fraud that you guys never even consider: MAKING all those new e-cars. Have you ever listened to Elon Musk (a guy who at least seems inclined to support e-cars [cough]Tesla[cough]) address this? He has pointed out that the heavy-industry which is the auto industry has, over many decades, optimized itself to produce the approximate number of cars annually that the public will buy at normal turn-over rates which the public can afford (people have limited funds and need housing, food, healthcare, etc in addition to cars). If the industry over-builds it goes bankrupt with huge surplus inventories. If it under-builds it invites new entrants and new competitors, which it does not want, so it naturally becomes finely-tuned over time as an industry as a natural consequence of the economics. As a result, Musk has pointed out that if we stopped all gas car production and switched the industry to all-electric it would take (optimistically) about 25 years to build the required number of cars. The politicians pushing these "green" regulations are only allowing about ten years.

THIS is one problem with career politicians who have never done one damned productive thing in their lives, and whose degrees are in politics, government, or law, writing and enforcing such rules upon fields that require ENGINEERING and heavy manufacturing. It's easy for some moron who has never designed a product that needs to be mass-produced using heavy tooling, and never designed a product that has to clear safety standards and get regulatory approvals, and never designed a product that will KILL people if designed wrong, to make these sorts of fairy dust and unicorn fart fueled "green" rules, regulations, and laws. Anybody pushing these "green" policies should be forced to ENGINEER a safe, workable, manufacturable, affordable, practical, consumer-desireable solution that meets them... and be imprisoned for life at hard labor if they fail to do it in under three years (it takes time to work out the manufacturing, build or modify manufacturing facilities, re-train production line workers, and get through the government regulatory certifications, so that ten year window until these green dream regulations kick-in is really less than 5 for designing and prototyping). Since the people pushing these policies never seem to have the personal fortunes to IMPLEMENT them, and always depend of using the force of politics and law to make other people spend the cash on implementation, the phrase "put your money where your mouth is" cannot be applied - hence my proposal that they be made to put their butts where their mouths are (at hard labor if they fail) applies.

I re-state a question I have asked before:

Just how much more abuse will their customers take? When will users of Microsoft (or Apple) operating systems finally say ENOUGH? How much is too much? How far is too far? When will people finally say "all we wanted was a sold reliable OPERATING SYSTEM!" and turn their backs on these corporate dictators?

YOU own a computer and you want an OS for it... but THEY say when you MUST update, what features you MUST accept, where your files will be stored, who can see those files, they snoop on your keystrokes and mouse movements, monitor your media use... of, all for YOUR benefit of course...pay no attention to who might be monitizing it and using it to manipulate you and/or society generally...

The thing that worries me a bit is this: There are sadly too many in the Linux and BSD communities who look at Microsoft and Apple as things to emulate and keep seeming to think that Linux and BSD (and probably any other future OS somebody might write) needs to absorb a lot of the same badness.

First, No, for the following reasons:

1. The US was the originator of heavier-than-air powered flight, and thus the first-adopter and standard setter as well as the hub for much of the innovation in aviation. This lead to the early adoption of airlines and related entrepreneurship and the rapid build-out of airfields and related infrastructure. After WWI and again after WWII the US got the benefit of all those returning trained and experienced pilots... lots of stuff contributed to Americans adopting air travel. The US economy has also been heavily geared to productivity and the best use of man-hours, which lead to the highest-valued things (people) moving on the fastest means (air). The phrase "Time is money" applies here.

2. World War II and the post-war years saw the US move people to the skies and cargo to the rails. At the start of WWII and during the war, Americans who traveled by commercial means generally did so by train (unless they were rich). American soldiers often started their adventure on a train ride from small town America to boot camp, then took trains to a port city, and a ship to Europe or Asia. By the Korean War, they did so by plane. The American people themselves chose to fly for civilian trips and stop using passenger rail service except on short-haul runs within several metropolitan areas - so the rails were largely left to freight haulers, who did what American industry loves to do: optimize. The US rail system is now the most efficient on the planet - for moving FREIGHT. As a result, the US freight trains and operators have priority on the rails.

3. People in other countries may have much longer vacations, typical Americans use air travel to optimize their time-off. If you have two weeks off per year, you do not want to burn any of that time unnecessarily on the travel, unless the travel itself is what you want (like a train ride through the Rockies). American companies also do not like to waste employee hours on travel or burn money on travel, so when they send somebody somewhere it's going to be by plane rather than the slower AND more expensive Amtrak. It's Time Management, and planes always win that one.

4. Congress gave Amtrak, a quasi-government entity, control over all passenger rail travel. Their routes are sparse, their schedules are a joke, their prices are higher than the price for flying, their trips take too long (often multiple DAYS) so you need to eat their food on board (which is insanely expensive) and many of their routes are incomplete and deceptive (you'll need to get off the train at some point, board a Greyhound bus for several hours, then get onto a different train to resume the trip (in other words: you're NOT going to get a good sleep on that leg of the trip with that sleeper ticket you bought...) People HATE this type of bait-and-switch, and with ZERO competition even allowed, Amtrak has never had ANY incentive to up their game and make American rail passenger service anything but a novelty other than in the "Acela corridor" (the all-important Washington DC to New York City routes used by media people and politicians who Amtrak must keep happy).

5. America is criss-crossed with rails built in the era of the steam locomotive. Nobody is willing to spend the money to convert all that to rails that can handle true high speed trains. There are also too many crossings and the right-of-way in many places is too narrow for either an upgrade, or adding new parallel rails. Where the rails are no longer being used for freight, they're generally abandoned, rather than upgraded.

6. There are two separate programs in the US currently operating supersonic test aircraft that generate reduced sonic booms. Both projects aim to enable supersonic airliners. In the referenced article, CNN even admits that plane travel is 1/3 the time of high speed rail, but that gap will INCREASE (favoring planes even more in the American mind) with supersonic airliners if they're finally allowed to operate over CONUS, which appears likely.

7. Americans move their families for career reasons and such more frequently than people in many other countries along with economic shifts partially affected by the differences between various states as politics change taxes and regulations in states relative to each other etc. As a result, travel patterns shift more rapidly than in some other nations. With air travel as the primary people mover, this is easily and cheaply handled (only the planes and airports are affected). With trains, one needs to deal with thousands of miles of rails and rights of way issues to add/move routes.

Now for the exception:

The ONE way for rail to beat air travel, and it certainly COULD if the people invested in legacy rail would get out of the way (or change completely) would be to move to low-pressure or vacuum-tube trains. This could be stuff like Musk's Hyperloops or the older notion of trains in tunnels pumped free of air. In these scenarios, all the advantages of trains beat planes, AND the trains could even go at supersonic (or even hypersonic, which airliners will NEVER do for energy and thermal reasons) speeds with no (or reduced) friction/compression/drag/heating issues. In a tube at vacuum, a train could go far faster than anything but a space plane or a point-to-point Starship, AND there'd be no crossings or right-of-way or eminent domain problems, and no costs for the purchase of vast swaths of land etc. No animal strikes, no derailments, no intersections, no collisions, perfectly designed slopes and curves because the path is not owned by anybody else or used by anything else... the tunnels are a winner. A vacuum tube train underground from LA to NYC that could accelerate half way there and decelerate the second half of the trip with NO speed limit would be a short trip (do the math).

If no human wrote it, no human understands it.

We all need a reliable OS not controlled by some power-mad corporation that increasingly wants to own your computer, own your information, own your bank account, and run your life. Humans need to understand that OS, be able to improve it, debug it, verify that it is not compromised, etc.

If there are jerks who (like little boys given hammers who now see the world as made-of-nails) want desperately to shove AI into an OS (either in the coding of it, or the implementation) , let them do it with their own OS rather than breaking one that's vital to so many of us.

If AI coding is so great, run the experiment! AI fanatics: fire-up yer toys and tell them to make you an open-sourced POSIX-compliant OS without using any code from Linux or BSD. Let us see what it comes up with, and as a show of your confidence, re-format your drives and install and use the new OS that your AI comes up with as your only OS. The rest of us can adopt later after YOU have lived with the results for a few years.

It you AI guys are not actually confident, then try this:

Ask your AI to make a fork of Linux, keep that fork compatible with the AI-free Linux, etc.

There's simply no legit reason to slop-up the Linux code base or tools, or processes for creating them, with AI experiments.

as the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

The schools have been adding-in all sorts of social garbage, which it's NOT their job to teach, and to do it they have discarded a lot of stuff that actually WAS their job to teach - the most-basic of which is READING AND WRITING. If you can READ, you can learn anything else you need. If you can WRITE, you can communicate effectively. Cursive is primarily about writing faster, without the need to lift the pen/pencil between letters.

People who cannot WRITE cursive, are also unlikely to be able to READ cursive... and thus will be completely incapable of reading the world's most important historical documents. Such people will stupidly claim they can just read it in printed form, or have AI read it to them, or some other garbage excuse for their partial illiteracy. Such people are unlikely to, but most-importantly, people who cannot read cursive are incapable of going back to the original documents to verify that the printed versions, or AI spoken ones, are correct and not manipulated. This level of ignorance may well serve the interests of some people who want to steer the culture and society but it will eventually become dangerous for normal people.

There was a time when most people were illiterate, and the Bible was only available in Latin, with Catholic clergy being almost the only people who could read it. This situation allowed the leadership of the Catholic Church to convince many generations of decent well-meaning average illiterate people that the Bible said a great many things it does not say. About 500 years ago, a monk named Martin Luther came along and pointed out the differences between the actual Biblical texts and those teachings and practices which had been piled-on over the centuries when average people could not compare stuff to the actual text. Along with Johannes Gutenberg, who created the printing press and started printing Bibles in German, Luther launched the Protestant revolution in which he encouraged the average person to learn to read and to read the Bible on his own in his own language under the banner of "Sola scriptura" (Latin for 'by scripture alone'). This huge shift (based on the idea of everybody being able to read, and to read the documents themselves without somebody else in the middle) is one of the pillars of Western Civilization, and it's still vitally important even if one is not religious, and it's important even for non-religious texts.

Show of hands: How many here are old enough to remember when the CDROM first appeared?

For you young'ns out there: When the CDROM tech first made it into the hands of average folks, consumers were buying-up CDROM drives like crazy and installing them on their PCs. There were initially a few polished applications ready for people to buy and use like encyclopedias and a game called "Myst". It did not take terribly long for the vendors of good software to get on board and start making titles that took advantage of the then-considered-gigantic storage of the new media format, but in that window of time when the tech was new but there was very little GOOD content available. The scammers and fly-by-nighters popped up all over the place selling CDROM disks stuffed full of public domain stuff, text files anybody could freely get anywhere, piles of amateur computer art, MIDI music files.... ANYTHING the people making the disks could come up with to use at least a third of the space. They'd build a disk image, shoveled-up with junk, give the disk some interesting/promising title, mass produce it, and get it into stores with a moderate to low price that was just low enough that lots of people with their new CDROM drives would buy it just to have some uses for the new drives. We called these disks "Shovelware" disks.

Same thing here

YouTube is becoming a host to mountains of AI shovelware. They need to get a grip on this stuff and find a way to squash it before it convinces people that the platform is nothing but AI slop.

There's also another thing happening here which is of far greater concern:

With soul-less grifters using AI to pump out piles of videos in order to make money from click and views, much of the actual content is completely bogus...but it LOOKS shiny and "true" to many people. This is probably useful to the hyper-political and evil among us who do not care who they lie to as they try to build political narratives, BUT it's fundamentally dangerous to civilization to make a scheme in which a significant portion of the population cannot tell what is true and what is false. We were already getting a taste of this with the toxic political activists who have many people CONVINCED that Michele Obama is a man, or that Trump colluded with Russia, or Ted Cruise's dad helped kill JFK, or Chelsea Clinton is Web Hubble's kid, etc. Most of THAT stuff could be more easily debunked up to this point, but now people are pumping out AI videos that look (to average people) like valid news casts telling them garbage like [1] several Canadian provinces have become US states, [2] Clint Eastwood has had a religious conversion, [3] Elon Musk has developed a warp drive, etc. Put another way: It has escaped the political realm, and is no longer concentrated into the political cycle. Anyone who wanted to could go read the government docs on the whole collusion scam and see the reality, but there ARE no documents in government archives, with under-oath sworn testimony that apply to the stuff outside the political/governmental realm.

This is VERY bad, and it'll get worse. There's probably no geeky TECHNICAL fix for this (I know, this will not go over well on Slashdot...) As a society we're gonna have to find our way back to a place where most of us can agree on the reality that is, in fact, REAL, and can trust each others' WORD and hand shake. My grandparents' generation could do business with each other on a handshake. Everybody kept their word and worked hard to make sure they kept-up their end of any bargain. Even I can remember a time when our home had no locks on the doors, people could leave their keys in their cars, etc and nobody expected anything bad to happen. We've come a long way, and it isn't all good.

People need to stop just gullibly absorbing the mountains of manure published annually by these various unelected, unaccountable global organizations of faux do-gooders who live quite well pretending to do beneficial things for all of the world but actually do NOTHING of substance. NOBODY elected any of the clowns at any of these so-called "autonomous intergovernmental organizations". No normal person knows ANY of the people at these orgs, and these orgs are not accountable to any group of ordinary people; they're entities setup by collections of politicians whose citizens probably never authorized them to participate in the creation of these monsters. It's no wonder they are usually wrong in their pronouncements - there's no penalty for them being wrong. In point of fact, they're likely to get rewarded by various governments, ultra-rich persons, and/or politicians if they promote certain ideas without regard for the truth.

If you want somebody to tell you the future, you're probably better off consulting Carnac The Magnificent - at least HE might give you a laugh and he won't raise your taxes or add regulations to the pile already on your shoulders...and he doesn't insist you pretend he is legit...

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.