Yeah, nobody would consider this a story without the "billionaire" buzzword.

When my kids were small many of the wives from her church organized a summer school for all the kids. It was great.

I notice this whole thing is a zoning dispute and nothing else. Probably because the level of education being delivered is exceptional, since why wouldn't it be?

One add a larger or additional fuel tank to any conventional truck, or plop a transfer tank with pump in the bed.

People buy trucks to serve their use case, not to serve anyone else's. Invent a form and fit gasser replacement and they'd sell, but paying for inferior performance is absurd.

To Serve Man is the casual diner recipebook.
To Server Humanity is from the 3-star fine dining restaurant.

You can make a simple statement like "nobody starves to death in America" and it offends people every time. They'll call you deaf dumb and blind yet they can never say who it is that's starving to death.

There are homeless people wandering around all over the place, they produce nothing, ever, yet somehow food just keeps materializing for them. In fact they hardly resemble truly destitute people actually starving around the world. I'm glad that's how it is here and wouldn't want it any other way but it's strangely difficult for people to "admit."

I think the single biggest reason is because demand for healthcare is basically bottomless and we have a lot of money to throw at it so we do.

I haven't seen any emphasis on this factor but look at the correlation between per capita GDP and per capita healthcare costs:

https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

That is a strong correlation!

Interesting, did you try any others, such as ChatGPT?

I was pointing to the historically anomalous mercantile streak this regime has.

Explicitly taking stakes in private companies is a lot more problematic than a lot of people seem to think.

Republicans used to claim 'picking winners and losers' was a bad thing.

I 100% believe they won't bail out the industry as a whole.

I also 100% believe they would "take a stake" in particular companies in return for... certain considerations.

I am less worried about college kids' word choice than thug trash beating up people in the streets, the President subverting democracy and disease running rampant.

I don't share some of your concerns, but that's fine; I expect you don't share some of mine. But it does sound to me like you're much more familiar with Republican critiques of Democratic policy than actual Democratic policy. One such thing is you putting the words of activists into pols' mouths and pretending that's the official capital-D Democratic line. It isn't - activists are activists precisely because they want to change the current party line. This is literally

. None of which is to say I'm a rah-rah fan; only a few of them actually come anywhere near reflecting my policy preferences. But given a choice between a getting a cold and getting measles, I'll take the cold.

Define "effective". Musk is great at self promotion but if you looked at the details, he just made everything worse.

No he did not. What he exposed is that he does not understand basics of things. For example, Musk claimed there were fraud in the Social Security Administration because he found "duplicate SSNs". What he exposed out is he does not understand basics of data and a fact table can have duplicate foreign keys . . . because it is a fact table. It would be like me claiming there is "MASSIVE FRAUD" in my companies sales data because there are duplicate Customer IDs.

What he proved is he is an idiot. What you proved is you believed him without looking at details.

He said "chosen at the setup screen".

They could easily have two options: "Install everything from the get-go (RECOMMENDED)" blinking and flashing and a tiny option in text-only link below that, labeled "Manual install" (everyone hates everything manual). And the user would need to type in a CAPTCHA and click a big "I know what I am doing" checkbox to have the phone accept the "manual install" variant.

And "manual install" comes with nothing but Settings and App Store. I mean nothing. Not even the "phone" and "camera" apps. No thing.

That would be absolute bliss.

And phone makers will never never never do that, because all these devices are sold as data vacuums first and usable devices second. Try buying ANY non-smart TV nowadays. Try it, look for a non-smart TV. Set your budget to the moon, if you must, but there will not be ONE model that is not hoovering your data.

Will it have excess capacity that Amazon will lease? If no, then this cable has zero effect on Europe and North America. That was my point. I simply did not understand why the OP would have objections to a private companies building something that affects no one else.

I understand this is a partisan fight issue, our policy of most rationality vs. their utter barbarism type of discussion. But please:

Air traffic safety is an important service. Why would that need funding from the government, if so many customers need and purchase that service?

Every flight passenger is using this service to get from A to B safely. Every flight passenger is buying a ticket that includes all sorts of fees and taxes, including airport security. (we disregard a debate about the TSA for now).

Why don't all airlines PAY for the FAA service proportional to the number of flights they perform? Why would "the taxpayer" have to fund and subsidize "the airline passenger"? Why would the state go into more debt to pay for something that is a commercial service to a select few people, many of which are tourists or foreigners who don't even pay US taxes in any substantial amount.

Use a service -> pay for that service.

If John is purchasing a flight ticket and boards an airplane, his ticket must include all the costs required to do that safely. John cannot expect some random Steven and Michael to pay for that with their taxes. It's John's flight. John pays for John's safety. Steven and Michael aren't traveling right now and so they don't pay anything. If they were to travel later, they, too, will pay for safety of THEIR flights, respectively.

Everything else is immoral. I don't understand why this is an issue at all.

Except there are alternatives. A developer can sell their game on Epic Games, Steam, GOG, Microsoft, etc. Now Steam is the behemoth and if a developer decides to ignore Steam, that will greatly affect sales. Developers that feel they need to sell on Steam because it has the largest majority of potential customers is very different than "nobody can offer an alternative".

It literally does. One of the characteristics of a monopoly is lack of substitutes:

Common sense would dictate that if a consumer can get a suitable alternative then there is less of a monopoly. The keyword is "suitable". If there is a butter monopoly, can consumers substitute margarine or other products? Most of the time yes. In this case, a consumer can buy the exact game somewhere else.

Market power is not the one and only criteria for monopoly.