If (yes, that's an if) Starship is successful, it will bring launch costs down to a level that completely changes how we approach space. Assuming other companies don't manage to match the feat (another big if), this could indeed make SpaceX worth trillions.

Will it? Tough to say. If SpaceX does an IPO I'll probably buy some, but I won't invest my whole retirement fund.

I think the Composer model is from Cursor, in-house.

Over 8 hours, that's 40 kWh, which equates to around 160 miles. I think the percentage of Americans who drive 160 miles per day, on average, is a lot less than 10%. If everyone could arrange for 5 kW charging at home, there would be very, very few people who couldn't easily switch to an EV.

Even an L1 charger (15A @ 120V = ~1.8 kW) would provide enough for most peoples' daily driving. With 8 hours of charging, that's like 50 miles of range. Some days will be heavier, but if your car has 300 miles of range you can stand a few consecutive heavier-than-normal days, and if there's an L3 charger around for emergency charges on the quite rare occasion they're required, it would be fine. And because cars charge fastest when the batteries are low, those emergency charging stops could be very quick -- 5-10 minutes, just like a gas station stop.

I actually commuted for a few years in an EV with only an L1 charger at home. It was fine.

Absolutely.

So you think it's better if Trump can't be sued for fraud? I don't disagree with your assessment, but I think we're still all better off if Trump's scam business has to defend itself in court.

I don't think there's a price sheet. The amount will depend on what you can afford and on how much heat Trump will take for granting it. That second part is a weak consideration, though, as evidenced by the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted for doing exactly what Nicolas Maduro is alleged to have done (though Maduro probably didn't, not nearly to the same degree, though he was a bad guy in a lot of ways).

Also because of coal. Honestly, more as a result of coal, though they certainly have built a lot of solar. But the reason they've been building coal plants like crazy, so much so that many of them are idled from the day they go into service, is because it was their insurance against problems with the oil supply.

I'm a fan of solar power and happy to see the world is building a lot of it, but intellectual integrity demands that we also acknowledge China's investment in coal generation capacity.

There actually was a push in the UK a few years ago to outlaw pointy kitchen knives, but it met with great resistance and was dropped.

However, the point remains that stabbings in the UK are actually less common that stabbings in the US. This points out that while many think that guns are the cause of the US' violence problem, the real problem is deeper: US culture is just more violent.

You are right, I didn't know or didn't remember those.

That sounds nice and all, but there's really no legal way to do that. The money was collected illegally, so it has to be returned (with interest) to the people it was collected from -- the importers.

It's going to take years to find out just how corrupt, and we'll never get the full story. What we can see isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

Heh. The usual metric is "mission success". For a manned flight, that includes getting the people down safely. For a typical unmanned flight the mission is "get the payload to the right orbit". If you manage to land the rocket after that, that's gravy.

Zipline is still around, still making deliveries in Africa and some other places, and also doing some in the US, for Wal-mart.

When the "manifesto" stops whining about poor treatment of billionaires (won't someone think of the poor billionaires?!) then we can worry about the "bias" of the article reporting on it.

Seriously now.

There isn't any launch platform with no failures, ever, that's not how you measure reliability. Reliability is measured on percentage of successful launches (payload reached target orbit), and Falcon 9 is, indeed, the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever, by a wide margin. Here are the platforms with >= 100 launches (the 100-launch line is kind of arbitrary, but you have to draw a line somewhere and platforms with very few launches don't have meaningful statistics):

#1 Falcon 9 (including Falcon Heavy): 637 successes of 640 launches, 99.5% success rate. If you focus only on the block 5 variant (most-flown version, currently flying), it's 572 out of 573, 99.8%.
#2 Atlas V: 106 of 107, 99.1%
#3 Delta II: 153 of 155, 98.7%
#4 Space Shuttle: 133 of 135, 98.5%
#5 Long March 2/3/4: 503/521, 96.5%
#6 Ariane 5: 112 of 117, 95.7%
#7 Soyuz: 1889 of 2014, 93.8%
#8 Kosmos: 559 of 610, 91.6%
#9 Proton: 382 of 431, 88.6%

Soyuz has to get props for the sheer number of launches, of course, though that's probably mostly because the Russians couldn't afford to build another platform. Soyuz isn't a particularly great rocket in any way -- smallish payload, good but not great reliability -- but they kept using what they had. It's also worth noting that assuming Falcon 9 maintains its current launch cadence (which it won't; Starship will probably start taking its launches eventually, and if that doesn't happen, the cadence seems likely to increase), it will match Soyuz' launch count around 2033.

Right. You are applying legalese word precision assumptions to throwaway online comments. I don't think that's going to work well.

As does using Windows.