Three years of launches, and they have yet to complete an orbit.

It's too bad you lead with this bullshit. Purposely putting their giant rocket within a fart of reaching a stable orbit is a demonstration of exquisite control, not failure. There's absolutely no reason they won't be "reaching orbit" whenever they like next year.

Rendezvous is tricky, but they already do it all the time, and with much higher stakes. Orbital fuel transfer has been done (including by SpaceX IIRC), doing it again with Starship wouldn't really be too surprising. I would be surprised if they have a finished version of a fuel depot a year from now, but not so much if they stick a stripped down Starship up there to practice on.

I'd be really surprised if they fulfill their HLS contract next year, but I'll also be surprised if they don't beat Blue Origin, Lockheed and Boeing, and with a much more capable lander at a lower cost. Artemis looks like it's been watered down into another flag planting mission, but maybe SpaceX will be able to sell lunar transport to somebody who actually wants to do something interesting. Blue Origin and Co definitely won't be.

Mars, whatever.

Would US government rocketry have been successful if not for all the preceding work by a bunch of Nazis? Would the US government itself have been successful if not for all the prceding work by enlightenment philosophers? Would enlightenment philosophers have been successful if not for all the preceding work by Gutenberg and his printing press? Would Guttenberg and his press have been successful if not for the preceding work by a bunch of lazy winos?

It's true that governments have been big launch customers. Many (not all) launch companies have designed rockets to serve government customers and then also launched private payloads on them. "On the back of" kind of suggests the GP thinks all the private satellites are ride shares on government launches, which just isn't true.

Governments aren't even the majority of the market anymore:

https://www.grandviewresearch....

Looks like by default the camera punches through your firewall and connects to Chinese servers, basically an auto-backdoor? That is not cool if true.

Logitech does the same thing, except I guess their servers are in, well, AI says "the US and other countries;" Logitech says nothing. Pretty much EVERY device vendor, and half the software ones, from Microsoft on down do. If you want to be able to access your device from the outside you have to punch a hole through to somewhere. It would be nice if they asked.

Would it? Research and development isn't constant, uniform progression. It comes in spurts and applied funding probably should too. You could central plan everything but that doesn't work very well. Competition, as inefficient as it seems, does.

Better financial education so your average investor doesn't put all their rocks in the same bucket with a few months timeline, and a decent social security net would probably be better.

You can certainly find some internet economists that will tell you that. In which case you are just fine with the idea that the cryptocurrency I just minted on my PC is worth one googol dollars.

A bubble doesn't mean the technology is fake, it means it's being overvalued.

Does it? I wouldn't be surprised if you looked at an index of dot com companies twenty years later and it came out with a pretty good return, even comparing to the height of the bubble. Certainly the "tech" industry, which is mostly dot com web software companies plus a few picks and shovels suppliers like Microsoft, has beaten the pants off other sectors.

Bubbles are a lot of people looking for a quick buck investing in a new thing and then panicking. Long term many of them don't look so bad.

Monkeys like to talk to each other. LLMs do that, so they get press coverage. They're not useless either: we have an enormous amount of natural language data that was previously very difficult to deal with and is now much more accessible to conventional computing, from the freeform comment boxes on surveys to physician notes and regulatory documents and scientific literature.

Do not confuse what you read in the popular press, or what Slashdot editors post as clickbait, with what's actually being done.

Which Bitcoin is that? Bitcoin Classic? Bitcoin Cash? Bitcoin Satoshi Vision? Bitcoin Gold? eCash? One of the alt-chains? SlashCash, which I just minted this morning?

n that paper Gutmann argues that the experimental support for the notion quantum can reverse 2 factors is zero alongside time travel, FTL movement, and the startrek transporter

This is pretty silly. There's also zero experimental evidence that RSA with a key longer than 829 bits can be broken, but we all use 2048 anyway. There's theoretical evidence for both that and quantum factoring, which there is not (quite the contrary) for time travel, FTL and transporters.

Personally I don't think anybody will build a QC useful for breaking 2048 bit RSA keys any time soon, if ever, but if I had something I was super keen on keeping secret for the next ten years plus and I just had to use public key, I'd include something quantum resistant.

30% might well be the "biggest single factor." That study compared genes versus everything else combined.

The genetic contribution could be higher today too. That cohort was people born between 1870 and 1900, when there were a lot more environmental things that might kill you early, including two world wars.

I went hiking in Red Rock Canyon once in July and realized if I accidentally locked myself out of my car I'd probably die. Seemed fairly unhealthy.

People don't generally sell companies (in whole or in part) for what they're worth right now. They sell them for what they think they're going to be worth in the future.

Yes, and that's almost always appropriate for such a situation. The last price someone paid for a share is the best estimate of what you could sell your shares for. Your average retirement or mutual fund holder doesn't have enough shares to meaningfully move the share price.

Heat death? I'm not sure "healthy" is the right word.