You seem to be imagining I'm arguing immigration is a problem. I'm not. Immigrants are just fine.

The problem is that California is an unattractive place to live relative to the median US state, as seen by the fact that its population would be declining if it weren't for immigration from outside the United States. (The point of the immediate child data is simply to make it clear that the so-called "rate of natural increase" in California is also highly dependent on immigration.)

And, well, the reason California is a major immigrant destination is much the same reason it's the center of tech startups; inertia. Immigrants to the US generally settle where there's an existing community from the same culture of origin, because it makes the transition easier. This sort of self-supporting effect looks stable and reliable, right up until a tipping point is reached and it suddenly isn't anymore.

No, it isn't. It went down 0.18% 2019-2020, after having been flat (0.0%) 2018-2019.

Further, even when the population was climbing, California had negative net domestic migration; it's now been the net-loser on intra-US migration as measured by the Census for thirty straight years. Over half of Californians at this point are either foreign immigrants or the immediate children of foreign immigrants.

"California is fine; even though Americans have been steadily fleeing it for three decades, people from the Third World keep coming in and having kids" is a position you can take, sure. I would suggest that if your best argument is that your state is in good shape because people prefer it to living in China, India, and Mexico, your standards are too low.

Uh-huh.

The advantage the Valley has in incubating tech firms is that it's where the angels, the VCs, and the acquiring companies all are. But that's not an inherent, permanent advantage; it's historically contingent. There's inertia against them moving, but if conditions cause them to move, then the center of creation of new firms will move, too.

Every single acquiring company that moves to Texas is a pebble in that direction, reducing the inertia on the side of Valley as the center of start-ups and increasing the attractiveness of starting up in Texas.

Oh, nevermind. They'll already be out before they leave, because PG&E can't keep 'em on.

The only property that matter needs to be "invisible" in this case is to not interact with electromagnetic forces. And we already know of a type of matter -- neutrinos -- that has that very property (even if the known neutrinos for other reasons have to be ruled out as constituting "dark matter").

Further, now we know for several reasons that the known neutrinos have mass, and under established particle physics that implies the existence of counterpart "sterile neutrinos". Under physics formulated prior to the observations that led to the dark matter hypothesis, sterile neutrinos would have the same property of not interacting with the electromagnetic force (and in their case, neither the strong or weak nuclear forces either) and would also solve the anomaly that the known neutrinos are the only known particles without counterparts of opposite chirality. Of course, it's hard to observe a particle that doesn't interact with any force other than gravity, so it's hard to prove that they exist, so they're still considered hypothetical, but particle physics strongly implies their existence.

What all that means is that you're living in a world where the existence of one type of "invisible" matter is well-established, and where the simplest explanation of the known properties of that type of "invisible" matter is a second species of "invisible" matter. Given that, it seems perverse to choose to rule out that second species of "invisible" matter as an explanation for cosmological observations.

Really? Really?

I suspect NEJM is being run by liars, because I have a hard time with the notion that anyone who actually believes any data out of a totalitarian country has enough intelligence to breathe without a ventilator. Nobody, not even any person in China, knows the state of things there, because every link of the reporting chain has substantial incentive to lie; there's no one in a position to have an accurate nationwide count. Chinese COVID-19 stats are as entirely reliable as Soviet economic stats.

And given that there's only one other "much larger" country than the US, the "such as China", rather than "China and India", is obviously deliberate obfuscation to try to imply that the reference class is bigger than it is.

The use of Vietnam as a comparison point just makes it all a bigger joke.

Aesthetics in general are fine.

In this case, however, it's an argument over the precise arrangement of points of light on a dark background. Someone who goes "Think of the children!" over that is obviously overwrought.

In this case, sir, not as a general principle.

The entire aesthetic issue over the satellites is not about whether there should be pinpoints of light in the night sky, but exactly where they should be and how fast they move. That's so blatantly far over into de gustibus non est disputandum that anyone who would actually try to make a "think of the children" argument (or, like the gentleman below, analogize it to a garbage dump) are obviously not playing with a full deck.

Arguing with them is therefore both pointless and unkind.

I'm perfectly fine with my grandkids having a nighttime sky with a bunch of visible satellites in it, just like I'm fine with there being airplane lights in it.

The people whose science is being interfered with have a point. The people arguing aesthetics can be dismissed.

The condition is the ability to make a credible threat to walk away from Apple platforms. Amazon can, you can't, so Amazon gets a deal, and you don't.

Uh, yeah. All mass has gravity, by definition. Didn't you learn that in sixth grade along with the rest of us?

"Lots of money is being dumped on the market" is a fine explanation for a general boost in the stock market. It doesn't explain TSLA's relative valuation compared to other automakers, which is fundamentally insane.

The fact that the stock market has gone insane proves nothing except that the stock market has gone insane.

Tesla is still a marginally-profitable manufacturer dependent on tax credits in a capital-intensive industry. There's a reason Musk said it was overpriced when it was at $781.88/share two months ago. The current $1119.63/share, three times the six-months-ago price, is just plain stupid, and is going to cost a lot of people their shirts.

Only 80 modified satellites. You can use the Doppler shifts from the transmissions from the other 480 satellites in the same constellation for positioning if you've got accurate timing info and the relative orbital elements.

Why would you build a general system for global civilian use when there are already three available (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou) and a fourth (Galileo) on its way? To get in a dick-measuring contest? As an excuse for aerospace pork?

All CA has to do is ban NV trucks from parking overnight in CA

And then declare independence from the US, and then win a civil war. Because that kind of blatant and direct discrimination against out-of-state commerce is utterly prohibited under Dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence.