It's not just a knowledge and effort thing. New Shepard is 20,6t dry mass. Falcon 9 is 22,2t dry mass and could lift an entire New Shepard to LEO using 5 times the delta-V. It's such a different difficulty level that they're not even playing the same game; New Shepard is just a carnival ride.

I would imagine there was something wrong with that specific vehicle, but also, Teslas just aren't made that well. Nobody expects them to last. But then, nobody gets to expect any EVs will last yet, because so many of them don't and none of them are all that old.

Meaningful things in space are not like this, they're like this. Getting "to space" is the easy part - the X15 got "to space" just by going fast and then steering up. It's orbital velocity and the energies involved that are the hard part.

It's kind of pressing now because fuel prices are so high here. I drive 26 miles to work, and my '08 Versa's 28 combined (pretty accurate actually) is unsatisfying. I really wish I could just take light rail. The rail line is sort of there from here to there, though it isn't really, but it makes me sad every time I drive over it.

I see at least three, maybe four companies that would be interested, if they'd open it up to a defined cost no-bid contract and let multiple companies handle the launches.

I believe we're already almost there, and certainly on this path. Birth rates are downward trending, mothers having kids later in life. Supposedly fertility/sperm counts are also trending downward and scarily so. I believe you're also correct about the "wise" people in power fighting UBI. Not to mention the nativist rejection of immigration in America (and elsewhere) which coincides with birth rate issues to be an interesting dilemma. No nation anywhere really wants their gdp to consistently trend downward but there's not really another option if your population shrinks. I do believe AI is a tractor moment and wonder what comes next. I read Grapes of Wrath a couple years ago and AI comes across the same way in my mind. Certainly, if you consider the prospect of UBI you don't want open ended immigration from poor countries into rich countries destabilizing the financial system. Unless all countries normalize their standards of living in some unknown way, which also seems doubtful. It'll be a mess. The American Republic model wasn't built for this, our disparate voting blocks see things very differently, at least right now. I'm a centrist in a "red" state/family and I don't think you could propose UBI to the current crop of Republicans.

All of what comprises a vehicle can burn, with enough oxygen, but that information isn't really useful.

Capitalism has never raised anyone out of poverty without controls on who can profit. As we have weakened those controls, capitalism has become less of a force for lifting people from poverty and more of a force for keeping them there.

UBI isn't anti-capitalistic any more than taxation. Both are ways to make the system work sustainably.

That is not a cleanly managed process with working social systems to handle the overlap. The social safety net payout amounts are all based on a federal minimum wage which is not sufficient to maintain a reasonable standard of living in any state. Some of the numbers we still use today to determine eligibility, benefit amount, share of cost etc. are from the eighties, while others are from the sixties.

Each major disruption has literally caused people to die because there has not been enough management of the transition. If you say that AI will be no different, and you also say that the change should be celebrated, then you're saying we should celebrate negative effects up to and including deaths.

The Democrats differ from Republicans in important respects, but few of them are economic. The differences are mostly in the area of human rights. They are united in selling out our future for kickbacks from profit today. Democrats crowing about how well "the economy" is doing when the wins are all for the ultra-wealthy is typically on brand, but the Republicans do the exact same thing so that doesn't illustrate any difference between the parties or any reason to vote for one over the other. Those reasons are all somewhere else.

Hire some people that people will listen to, and release some articles telling people what to do.
You will find it helpful to have financial backers, and of course you will only find those who can profit from what you intend to say...

It's common throughout the parts of this county that aren't way out in bumfuck, or IOW, the parts which have any significant number of people in them.

But that's where the available capacity is supposed to be coming from. Otherwise they'd have to run new wiring. The LEDs are a lot better focused (sometimes excessively so) so you don't need as many total lumens output, which also reduces the power consumption.

They do if they're doing the low-level charging we can get from streetlights without a project to retrofit the wiring, increasing the cost of the installation. And there isn't the money to do what we could do without that. The state is running a deficit right now, so there's no state funding available. The federal funding available now is only for installation on interstates. So it's flatly just not happening.

Tesla has been running at a loss to grow the company. Most of their vehicles are profitable, cybercrap notwithstanding. That dumpster is a huge fuckup, though, there's no way around that.

The door is already open for that. Biden's protectionist tariffs are on imported vehicles and batteries (and other stuff) so e.g. BYD could still open a plant here, just like all the Japanese automakers have done.

It was literally a villainous plot.

The conspiracists bought up profitable rail transit systems and destroyed them. Clearly people thought what was destroyed was good, because they were using it.

Parts make a lot of money for dealers, not for manufacturers.

If you've bought many parts from dealers you know they have wide discretion to reduce the prices of the parts, and that is because there's a lot of profit built into the prices. I've had dealers occasionally take pity on me and reduce prices to literally 25% of the list, and they STILL weren't losing any money on them. I know because they told me so.