Substitute in "country A's soverign debt" for "company" and it's perfectly legal

In general there are no laws against using inside information to trade in "government bonds, currencies and the like". Even if there were how are you going to prosecute some Iranian general that buys crude futures in Dubai the day before doing some grandstanding in the Straight of Hormuz?

For the sake of those that don't get the joke - the above describes virtually every genuine Strad that still exists. I can only think of one that has its original length neck

Didn't we only recently have tons of material up there? Aluminum, plastics, all sorts of good stuff. But no, we just flew it back to put in a museum.

I thought CA had decided that by having amazon "affiliates" in the state that Amazon itself had a business presence in the state? Amazon dumped all its affiliates in CA so that it couldn't be required to collect tax. But that doesn't seem to be what this agreement is about

"It's like saying you can reach your local California supermarket with your bike, so hey you should be able to go to Hawaii with it as well!"

But what we are doing is saying that since we can't ride to Hawaii, we should take our super expensive, super high tech bike and throw it off the end of Santa Monica pier. The numbers are inescapable, but it is very frustrating.

Here's another absurd idea born of frustration: Donate the ISS to a non profit and take donations to boost it slowly to GSO. Outfit it with light sails and boost it mirror arrays from down here. Probably wouldn't work. Probably wouldn't even produce enough v to offset orbital decay.

Am I the only one that thought that photo was one of the Icy Hot Stuntaz? Then looked at the article and that is actually him, way to represent playa

Like I said, I'm sure this has been thought through, but it still doesn't make sense. I wasn't thinking plug and play spare parts. More along the lines of "gee I could make this cool thing if only we had a few spare pieces of lexan" or "we might survive this very bad problem if only we had a few #5 bolts. That shuttle that used to be up here had hundreds, but now it's in a freakin' museum." I know NASA frowns on improvisation and using parts for things other what they were specifically designed for, but at some point we need to get over that.

Filling it with enough waste gas (space farts for all it matters) to maintain a "soft" vacuum for storage also doesn't seem like a big drain.

At some point it would a net negative for fuel. the additional mass is there forever, while the additional fuel left in the shuttle will be used up at some point.

So you'd use it as somewhat leaky storage and a source of spares and raw materials. Still seems way more valuable up there than sitting in a museum.

There has to be a simple reason why they don't leave it up there, but I don't know what it is. It costs $$$ for every kilo that goes into orbit. It's an airtight space full of equipment and other useful things. It has engines and a bit of leftover fuel that could be used for station keeping.

What aren't the shuttles just made a permanent part of the station and source of parts and the crew just sent down via MIR or something?