Back in the 1970s and 80s, the old Radio Shack store chain in the USA routinely asked customers for personal info (name, address, phone#) when they checked out, even though nearly all were using cash and not buying any sort of extended warranties or anything. Most people, being polite and often having other things on their minds, simply complied without question and without even giving it a thought. This let Radio Shack build a gigantic database of customers long before anybody ever heard of Google or Facebook, etc. In fact, long before anybody heard of something called the internet.

The operators of Radio Shack, lacking much vision, did not think of any real use for the database beyond targeted ad mailings, and when, in the aftermath of the FCC killing the TRS-80 series of computers with electromagnetic emissions rules for those new home computer thingies, Radio Shack morphed into a slowly shambling corporate corpse and finally collapsed, something happened that set a precedent: As part of the plundering of the company in bankruptcy, with investors struggling to recover any value they could, one of the parties convinced a court to assign value to the database, and thus that database was declared to be an actual asset of the company that could be bought/sold/traded etc. Before that ruling, most Americans would have presumed to be owners of their own personal info and not though that giant companies could own and buy and trade and sell THEIR info - and without THEIR knowledge no less.

The moral of the story is this: NEVER trust a business with your information. NEVER. DON'T DO IT. Businesses cannot be trusted with YOUR info, no matter how polite some lowly employee may be when asking for it, and no matter how many assurances they give about keeping it private. There are circumstances where one MUST provide personal info, and you may well have to, but that does not mean you should then suddenly TRUST them and presume they will not later sell/trade it. They might have the best intentions in the world, but once they have that data, it becomes one of THEIR assets and somebody else possibly with an entirely different set of ethics, will get it in a merger or bankruptcy. ONLY ever provide the minimum info, and ALWAYS assume they're gonna sell it to everybody to make a buck.

As is often the case, this depends upon your definition of "dick". Yeah, I know, we're using the slang form and not some dude's name, but it still requires clarification.

Trigger warning: I'm not up to writing a novel-length post right now, so I'm going with the traditional "he" pronoun to avoid a whole pile of overly complex sentences, NOT to "be a dick" as you put it.

Is it "being a dick" to leave a bad review when the product/service is indeed sub-par? The operator of the business might well think so. He may well have the best intentions and be doing the very best he can, but still not be up to the normally expected standards, and thus might feel negative reviews constitute "being a dick". He also might just be a jerk who's not even trying and who might attack negative reviewers who tell the truth, i.e. the proprietor might well be the one "being a dick".

There is another, tightly-related, question though: If you are a customer and you have a genuinely bad experience, and you choose not to provide an accurate review, are you "being a dick" to other future would-be customers? If YOU know it's bad, and you do not warn others, thus causing them to stumble into the business and waste their time and money on a bad experience, have YOU any responsibility? The interesting thing about this is that it's entirely posed as a question of whether a customer has been nice to the proprietor, without any consideration of the proprietor's treatment of the customer, and future customers, and the 1st customer's treatment of subsequent later potential customers/victims...

When you want to sway the public to a candidate, or sell the congress on the need to fire the money canon, the most-tried and true method is to claim imminent threats exist.

This happened in 1960 when then-senator John Kennedy campaigned for president on a so-called "missile gap" which he knew did not exist. Kennedy as a senator knew that there was no gap in ICBM capability between the USA and USSR at the time, but also knew then Vice President Nixon could not expose the lie without exposing classified intel.

One of the most-frequently pumped similar lies now is the "hypersonic" gap. We are constantly warned that Russia or China is was ahead of the USA on understanding hypersonic flight and need to pump billions of dollars into it. It's a joke. The United States flew space shuttles for about 30 years. Each one re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at Mach 25 (which is why you see an interesting patch with "25" on it on some current (and many former) astronaut flight suits or jackets. Every space shuttle flight constituted a Mach 25 flight through the atmosphere crossing half the plant on the glide home in a MANNED and heavily-instrumented vehicle the size of a small airliner, not some dumb unmanned small test instrument. With the exception of Columbia's last reentry (which failed because the vehicle was fatally damaged on launch, NOT because of an error in the hypersonic flight) all those flights were completely successful and generated a ton of data. We also have all the flight data from the X-15 program, and the decades-long SR-71 program flights and the Lockheed D-21 stuff. The USA simply has vastly more hypersonic experience than the rest of the world combined... but that's NOT what you tell the public and the congress when your aerospace sector wants more money for R&D.

The idea that China is, or could be, getting ahead of the USA in spaceflight is a similar joke. This year, SpaceX (a single American company, not even the US Government, and not even the only American company) is going to launch something like 90% of all mass launched to orbit. It's not even close. Last year, for example, China launched 66 times, while SpaceX alone launched 98 times - and many of the SpaceX launches were heavier payloads. In 2024 it's entirely possible that SpaceX will launch more than the entire rest of the planet, combined. Yes, China has a space station (we launched and operated our first one, Skylab, in 1973). Yes, China aspires to put "taikonauts" onto the moon soon, but WE did that in 1969 (over half a century ago). Yes, they're trying to copy Musk and do re-usable rockets, but by definition if you are copying you are not "leading". Are they getting better? Yes. Should we be concerned? Yes, we should always be concerned when an evil totalitarian government is gaining technology, but they're not LEADING and won't be any time soon.

"Given that the USA has essentially eaten itself into resource starvation,..." - where do people get this garbage? The US is in no way resource starved. It's true that we have shortages of things like rare Earth minerals, but that's NOT because we've exhausted the supplies, it's because politicians have placed the vast resources "off limits" in response to pressure from environmentalist supporters. If there were ever a true emergency that squeezed the public enough to overcome the political considerations and open-up those lands, the artificially-imposed fake shortages would disappear. The USA is sitting atop a mountain of coal and oil and uranium that could power the place for centuries to come, and we have all the minerals we would need for the foreseeable future (except for a handful of items like Titanium, which we have not exhausted - we simply never had known deposits). We've got great topsoil and can feed ourselves for many centuries to come. There's simply nothing we have eaten ourselves out of.

"...shat the nest into environmental collapse,.. - again: GARBAGE. There are more trees in the USA today than a century ago. The waterways are cleaner today than they were a mere 50 years ago. NOTHING about the environment in the USA is either collapsed or any where near collapse. This stuff is a common talking point among tie-dyed hippie idiot college professors pushing Marxism, but it just ain't so, and furthermore there's not a single example in human history of a Marxist nation with a cleaner environment. It's the sort of propaganda that cannot withstand serious challenge and thus is most-often encountered in the totally artificial bubble of the college campus, but not in the real world.

"...developed an economy totally dependent on eternal wars,... - Wrong again. There are certain businesses dependent upon never-ending limited wars which are hot enough to consume machines and supplies but not hot enough to rile public opinion into opposition, but that's HARDLY the entire economy. Also, the public could easily kill that problem by a slight change in law to require that the pentagon could not purchase anything from any company that did not get, for example, 50% of its revenue in the civilian sector (which would make businesses less-dependent upon military contracts). Incidentally, there's a big difference between companies DEPENDENT upon something (like Lockheed Martin and defense contracts) and a company grabbing available business (like Amazon selling cloud services to the pentagon). Pretending such differences do not exist is not only dishonest as an argument in a debate, but it can cloud one's own perceptions and cause one to miss other important issues. In truth, the vast majority of American businesses are in no way dependent upon wars, not eternal wars, not quick short wars, not even "police actions" (whatever garbage definition one wants to assign to that term).

"... and a rampant uncontrollable mental health crisis,..." - This one I cannot entirely disagree with, but probably would completely disagree with you on things like causes and solutions. This country did not have a "mental health crisis" before two things happened: [1] we started teaching kids that they are just evolved animals and that therefore life is essentially meaningless and valueless, and [2] our pharmaceutical industry started pumping-out medications to treat various mental conditions which were mostly non-problems decades earlier. We now have a population with a very large portion who believe life is pointless. They get depressed and then get on medications to cope with the depression and other mental issues, only to then get issues linked to the complex cocktails of drugs they're using - to such an extent that big pharma now sells drugs which they ADVERTISE (shocking, but at this point it's not a secret, so why not?) are there to fight the side effects of the other drugs they sell for "mental health" issues. If you look at all the school shootings that have happened in the past 30 years and then look at how many of the shooters were on mental health drugs you'll likely be shocked (it's nearly ALL). We never had a mass school shooting before we started teaching kids they were just evolved animals - not ONE (and that includes during the era when fully-automatic machine guns could be freely purchased and owned in America).

As with many such things, it's complicated.

Robert Goddard pioneered the liquid fueled rockets (as opposed to the solid fueled rockets everybody else had been playing with since the invention of gunpowder) in the United States. Goddard published some of his work and became somewhat known to people interested in the subject, but he had no big backing (certainly no government agency support) and so most people knew little to nothing about him and his work.

A young Werner Von Braun, in a Germany under extreme arms limitations post-WWII, found himself playing with small rockets in a country that wanted to re0build its military but was under those restrictions and then realized the restrictions said nothing about rockets - so government support and enthusiasm for rockets was a positive thing for him. Von Braun was aware of Goddard and almost certainly read Goddard's stuff, but it would have been more inspirational to him rather than a technical reference library, providing info on what could be done and approaches to take, but not specifics. The German government did have at least one spy in the US who reported to Berlin on Goddard's work, but it appears to have been rather amateurish, more like a guy living in a foreign land and justifying his expenses by reporting stuff easily obtained. At the end of WWII, Von Braun decided it would be better to surrender to the Americans than the Russians and therefore the US ended up with most of the brains of the German program, which lead to the myth that America only got to the moon because of the Germans. But when Von Braun was asked, by his new American benefactors, where he got his stuff, he essentially pointed at Goddard, which lead to the myth that Goddard was the guy who really put us on the moon, and was a claim Goddard embraced to the end of his life.

In truth, Goddard proved the liquid rocket was workable, but his work dead-ended because nobody in the US had the vision to back him and see where his work could lead, and when Von Braun pointed at Goddard he was not saying Goddard had showed him exactly how to do it, but rather that Goddard pointed the way and showed that it COULD be done and that, had the Americans paid attention to their own guy, they could have done it too and would not need Von Braun and his team. BOTH men were therefore needed (as was the impetus of WWII), yet they never worked together and did not know each other. Supporters of Goddard like to pretend he worked it all out and Von Braun merely copied him but with lots of funding. Supporters of Von Braun like to point out that he got few technical details from Goddard, never met Goddard, and that Goddard never got anywhere significant with his rockets. The truth is certainly more in the middle, with Goddard pointing the way, Von Braun mastering the details, and a nasty global war providing the fuel... and then a truly spectacular and essentially peaceful and inspirational goal of man-on-the-moon putting a happy face on all of it.

I work in the aerospace sector, and am directly regulated by the FAA and routinely sign documents they review. They have my signature on file and compare it when reviewing docs I sign off on. I have been in this stuff for a whole bunch of years. I own an airplane, but do not hold a current license to fly (the plane's currently not airworthy but I hope to restore it to that status at some point).

I think, perhaps, you did not read my post closely enough, you got over-excited and only skimmed, or perhaps you suffer from poor reading comprehension. I explicitly stated what you seem to think I did not.

Private and recreational pilots are prohibited from making money from their flying. Passengers can pay THEIR SHARE of the costs of a flight, but not more (i.e. the pilot cannot gain financially from the flight if he does not hold a commercial license). The FAA has revoked the licenses of YouTubers (NOT just the moron who deliberately crashed his plane) after they ran channels in which they MONETIZED (or the FAA believed they'd monetized) their flying videos while not holding a commercial license. The smartest pilots on the web who stream their flying videos specifically demonetize the videos they shot in the air while flying on a private license. Those who do not are just gambling that they'll not get noticed and contacted.

For those who find raw federal legal documents unreadable, here's a more gentle version. Note that while there's no clear text saying "you cannot take pictures for hire from your plane", the text makes it clear that you, as a pilot without a commercial license, may not profit financially from the flying (though you MAY share the costs with your passengers as long as they're not paying a larger share than you are, thus giving YOU a profit). Like all federal regulations, there's sadly a degree of interpretation involved so not every FAA person is as picky, but if you only hold a private or light sport license then you're gambling if you are making money from pictures/video from your flying (NOT videos ABOUT flying that are shot on the ground - those are not in dispute). You can probably get away with a passenger monetizing photos or vids shot while you are flying, as long as YOU are not profiting (MY guess, but NOT actual legal advice, and I have not personally tested this).

I know this from other sources, but let me point you at this guy so you can see both [a] how seriously the FAA takes even a joke when done by a pilot, and [b] pay close attention to his comments at one point where he makes a point of saying how careful he is at 4:48 about not even taking anybody's pro-rata share of fuel expenses (he's smart to be so careful about this stuff). How a pilot gets treated in these situations can depend on your local FSDO (which is NEVER how federal regulations SHOULD work, it should be all uniform and predictable). I don't have time to write a novel here, and everybody is free to read the federal regs and hire a lawyer to go through it with them, but pilots HAVE been busted for monetizing their flying with internet videos, and I figure not enough people know about it.

If I just saved your license from future revocation/suspension, you're welcome.

The FAA will not let YOU buy a cheap drone and fly it over your house to take pictures unless you equip it with a new transponder, which you probably cannot find and/or afford (the regulations mandated something that did not exist at the time, and for which there was no complete spec or FCC approval plan). The transponder has no safety function - it does NOT broadcast as part of the ADSB system, so it does NOT make your drone visible to air traffic control or to pilots of planes (it's for the local police to be able to find you and stop you). If YOU have such a transponder, YOU still could not legally take pictures from that drone and sell them to anybody without getting a permit from the FAA (that sale of pics is a commercial act, and thus the FAA wants it's piece of the action). Also, YOU cannot get in a private plane (assuming you have a private pilot license and plane) and fly over the city and take photos of your neighbor's homes and sell them the photos (you'd need a much more expensive and harder to get (and maintain) commercial license) but the government is fine with some company making money flying planes or drones over your home and photographing it as they conspire with another company to take away your home insurance. Amazon and Pizza Hut etc will have no problem operating drones over your home (THEY, as mega-corps will be able to get and afford (or just make themselves) all the required transponders and pay for any permits etc). YOU as a citizen are slowly seeing your rights to the air over your property get stolen and transferred to government and industry - our founders PRESUMED that a citizen owned the air over his land and would be completely stunned by any other assertion.

I know, somebody will defend this saying "it's apples and oranges" and "the commercial operator DOES have a commercial license" etc. I agree, but that's NOT my point. There's nothing inherently more dangerous in YOU flying a drone over your own home and taking pics, or in YOU flying a cessna over your home while your buddy in the right seat snaps a few pics of your home and your neighbors' homes - and certainly none of these becomes more dangerous if you later sell the photos. This is about regulatory capture (Government making extra costs raise the bar to entry into an activity, which in-turn benefits some businesses or business models or industries) and the reduction of freedom for the individual. It's also about government and corporations working hand-in-glove to ramp-up the control they have over the general population (who are SUPPOSED to be the ones in control in a Constitutional Republic).

"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" - Elizabeth Willing Powel, to Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787

“A republic, if you can keep it.” - Benjamin Franklin

what you other guys do is every bit as bad. When you point to any major American corporation today and say something like "See there! That's PROOF that capitalism {or free markets, or libertarianism} doesn't work!" you are completely missing the point; NO major American corporation is currently operating in a free market economy - ALL these bad behaviors are in a non-free market economy.

Big aerospace firms like Boeing are entirely wedded to the government; some of their biggest customers are governments (primarily buying stuff from their military divisions), the industries they are in are regulated in the extreme, and their customers are NOT the people in the plane, but rather other major companies (the airlines) who are similarly NOT operating within a free marketplace. Boeing is in bed with politicians and regulators and would not know a free market if it was hit over the head with one.

Same thing with health care. In the USA, Obamacare is in [nearly] full effect; the only bit not in effect is the federal penalty for not buying insurance. The vast majority of all money in healthcare is entangled with government - Medicare, Medicaid, state programs, verteran programs, etc account for most of it and the government sets all the rules that drive the record keeping and bureaucracy and cost-shifting. The American health biz is no longer even within sight of a free market.

Politicians NEVER go after the billionaires who give them their money when they promise to "soak the rich". It absolutely, positively, NEVER happens.

FDR was going to go after the rich, and even set their tax rates up around 90% (where the public would see the "justice"...) but actually provided so many loopholes the public would never hear about, and could never understand without degrees in both accounting and law, that nobody actually paid at those rates and the rich got richer while vast swaths of the population thought FDR had their backs in punishing the rich.

LBJ sure soaked the rich. So did Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Barack Obama too... he sure taught all those mean nasty greedheads a lesson!.

Of course, the super-rich, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the rest somehow get richer and richer and keep giving piles of money to the people supposedly soaking them. Hardly a normal human reaction to being robbed. Most any of us ordinary people who found a politician going after us and taking money from us dis-proportionally and making nasty comments about us being unfairly wealthy would react by NOT giving that politician more money.

Ahhh, but if you're rich and you are NOT supporting the politicians in power, if they THINK you're more helpful to their opponents than to them, then suddenly they just *might* be open to roughing you up a bit with added burdens and fees and taxes.

Of all the places where one could go to get more money for the federal coffers, commercial spaceflight is hardly an obvious one...but it is indeed one where you essentially only hit two rich guys; that guy you used to love, but who took over Twitter, and that quasi-libertarian guy who started an online bookstore. It's not like going after Gates or Zuck or Buffet or Soros, etc...

The United States of America is a Constitutional Republic. It's government is divided by that document into three parts, the Legislative branch, the Judicial branch, and the Executive branch. The executive branch in the USA is what is called a "unitary executive". All the authority of that branch is vested in ONE PERSON - the President of the United States, who may employ people (like cabinet secretaries and agency heads) to help him run things... but those people are all under his authority and only exercise the executive branch power allocated to them. Politicians in BOTH parties love to obscure all this (usually to hide accountability as they do stuff the voters HATE) by pretending that some executive entities (like the DoJ and FBI) are "independent" and off doing the stuff they do on their own. They also like to pass laws that seem to give various powers to various members of the executive branch, but none of those is actually a Constitutional Amendment and thus none actually un-does the underlying principle that we have a unitary executive. What we've all been living under for many decades is a grand game of "The Emperor Has No Clothes" in which the nation's elites all pretend things that just ain't so... and it all holds up as long as nobody points out the fraud.

Biden is, in fact, responsible for the actions of the people HE put in charge of the FAA, just as he is responsible for the people HE put in charge of the Southern Border. The only place where the presidential authority gets a bit wobbly in reality is with the afore-mentioned DoJ and FBI, where congresses and presidents have for so long declared them "independent" and granted them so much power that they MAY actually be rogue agencies at this point as both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could probably (in private, of course) agree. Recall that GOP senator Lindsay Grahm told the NYT years ago that he would help the Democrats remove Trump from office if Trump fired then-AG Sessions... hardly something the nation's founders would have accepted, and a direct under-cutting of the basic Constitutional order. That threat which to some SEEMED like some sort of protection against a possibly-corrupt president was actually a removal of all accountability (to the citizens) for the actions of the justice department. A bad justice department overseen by a bad president is accountable to the voters, who can punish that bad president. A bad "independent" justice department is not accountable to the voters at all - even presidents and congresses must fear it. Think about it.

The FAA had NO ROLE in spaceflight. None. Zip. Zero. Nada....

Rockets only minimally fly briefly up through the airspace and then [sometimes] back down, but until Musk came along, the descent was never within US airspace. The FAA has no legal [direct, Constitutional] authority over airspace outside of the USA.

Then, as commercial space came along, the FAA wanted in on the game. They asked the congress to give them a role... purely to be helpful, of course. The congress, being mostly stupid idiots, were easily persuaded to give the FAA a role in helping this new activity... and within a very short time, the FAA was demanding tons of paperwork before granting "launch licenses" for rocket launches, and now requiring "reentry licenses" for vehicles returning through the atmosphere (even for reentries into the Indian Ocean or the South Pacific). The threat, of course, is that if a company does not play along with the fraud that the FAA has jurisdiction over the South Pacific, then the FAA won't issue the [now required] launch license (which IS within US airspace). This has all worked very well to embed the claws of the FAA into spaceflight where it never belonged. We now have years of experience and a track record that establishes several points:

[A] The FAA had no expertise in spaceflight and therefore nothing to offer to people like Musk with actual experience (well, nothing other than the previously non-required regulation and oversight)

[B] The FAA's role in spaceflight is to slow it down and make it more costly. Before the FAA got involved, no innocent civilians were ever negatively impacted by rockets launching or re-entering/landing (it turns out, that harming civilians is bad for PR and insurance rates, so rocket people have always been responsible folks in this regard WITHOUT an FAA "helping them"). Now, as we saw with Musk's recent Starship test, the FAA is willing to inject itself into launches to delay them for environmental studies (not previously the purview of the FAA) which included analysis of whether falling rocket debris MIGHT kill a shark in the ocean (something the NASA that put men on the moon never had to worry about), whether fresh water dumped onto a beach might be a problem, and (by strapping headphones onto sea turtles and blaring them with simulated rocket launch sounds) whether turtles might be upset by rocket launches. The turtles in question survived the tests, but they're not saying how they felt about what to them must have seemed an "alien abduction" complete with probulation...

[C] The FAA is already performing very badly at its core job (maintaining safety in the airline biz, see: Boeing) yet finds itself on a power-mad totalitarian streak so extreme it now claims dominion over ALL the nation's airspace (starting at zero inches above the grass in your backyard and reaching all the way to orbit) to the point that it now demands that children's toy drones and model airplanes have transponders in them that the police can use to hunt-down operators (nothing to do with air safety - the transponders are NOT part of the ADSB system used in manned aviation). Having so extended its "mission", the FAA now routinely demands more power and authority and money from congress. Indeed, is recently announced that it was so far behind in processing launch licenses because it needs nmore people and more money, which it would not need had it not insisted on jamming its nose into space flight and model airplanes.

[D] With the imposition of large new fees that no previous rocket companies had to pay, but which all current operators will be able to pay, the FAA is engaging in the most-classic and most-corrupt government action ever invented: Regulatory Capture. Any new entrants into the market will have an additional hurdle, and those already in the market will eventually grow to love the fees as an anti-competitive play, while they then ramp-up political lobbying and (eventually) "campaign contributions" (AKA "bribes") as well as job offers, board seats, and stock options to former government bureaucrats and politicians (aka "bribes").

[E] now that they have ripped-off their mask, we can now see that the FAA is, like every other damnable government agency, on the prowl for money and power. This was NEVER about "helping" the fledgling commercial space industry - it was about grossly expanding the power of the agency and its totally unaccountable, un-elected, and largely anonymous career employees. If this were TRULY about de-conflicting the airspace to keep airline passengers safe from those nasty rocket things, there was already a FREE way to do it: erect a permanent NOTAM restriction around every launch site, and simply require each launch provider to notify local air traffic control of the dates and times when activity would occur in these areas with perhaps a 24 hour lead time. The Coast Guard must similarly protect mariners, which they do. Hopefully THEY won't try to grease their way onto the same gravy train...

Note for those of you NOT in the aerospace sector: The FAA is NOT what has made airline travel so safe. That distinction goes to an EXCELLENT government outfit called the NTSB whose people ARE experts in their fields and whose job it it to get to the root cause of all transportation disasters and then tell government and industry how to avoid repeating them. The combination of the NTSB, with [mostly] responsible people in the aerospace industry and the customers and insurers, all of whom have a big stake in safety and drive the sector to mostly adopt the recommendations of the NTSB, are the actual reason for the safety of the system. The FAA are the guys who did not trust semiconductors enough, even into the 1980s and 90s, and thus caused the air traffic control system to still run on vacuum tubes YEARS after the rest of the world were using computer chips [finally resolved now]. They're also the guys causing deaths in private aviation every year by [1] being the main obstruction to the average small plane having an Angle of Attack Indicator, [2] having access to new cheap reliable and accurate semiconductor-based instruments - relying instead in decades-old "steam gauges" because they cannot afford the over-priced-due-to-regulation better stuff. and [3] over-regulating small planes and pilots so it's nearly impossible to be profitable mass-producing ready-to-fly affordable planes for individuals, and so challenging to get and keep a license that people end up being deceptive on medical issues rather than properly managing medical matters and continuing to fly safely. The FAA is an agency BLIND to the damage they do, and too amped-up on government power and control.

The founders of this nation, who went to war [the mass-death and destruction kind] over relatively minor things like a tea tax, would be absolutely shocked to see that the FAA even exists, let alone that it thinks it controls all the air over the nation from altitude zero-inches-AGL to space. Ben Franklin could not have flown his kite with the FAA around. The Wright Brothers could not have succeeded at Kitty Hawk had the FAA been around. Probably NONE of the greats of early aviation would have become famous/great with this Washington DC beast on the prowl. Not Lindburg. Not Wiley Post. None of them.

Certainly longer than the lifespan of streaming, which can disappear without warning when your service decides to drop a title, or goes out of business, or changes its terms, or raises your rates enough to get you to drop it...

As a general rule, renting anything you will use more than once is a bad idea. There's a reason so many people get rich running businesses that own stuff and then rent it to other people, who are usually NOT getting rich by renting stuff. Think about it. Young people have been severely mislead by the tech bros and mega corporations into thinking it's a good idea to rent a place to live, rent transportation, rent entertainment, rent storage on servers, rent nearly everything. They use the line "you will own nothing, and you will be happy". They're counting on young people to not notice that the people and companies pushing this unwise behavior are planning on being happier by owning everything and convincing the young to rent from them.

Are the guys who keep looking for water and life on Mars so busy filing papers that they never give a thought to the most-basic science?

Mars is SMALL, about 1/10th the mass of the Earth. Low mass = Low gravity, and sure enough... Mars surface gravity is IIRC about a 3rd of Earth's. Low gravity = less ability to hold an atmosphere, and yup.. about 0.004PSI (as opposed to Earth's 14.7PSI). Low pressure = water boiling-off into vapor [H2O vapor pressure is 2.3 kPa], becoming part of the atmosphere, which Mars [surface pressure approx 0.6kPa] lacks the gravity to hold onto. Oh, and the place is COLD, in part because of the thin atmosphere being unable to trap heat, but also because [duh!] it's MUCH FARTHER FROM THE SUN and a little thing called The Inverse Square Law applies.

If Mars ever had significant water, it was probably from a comet or some such thing and it would have boiled off rapidly. Nothing that happened there was from global warming, or runaway this, or runaway that, it was simply the result of basic physics. Low mass = low gravity = minimal atmosphere = liquid water cannot remain in a liquid state. The only mystery here is how so many people can write and publish so many papers about the missing water on Mars without being seen as a comedy act in a club for geeks.

Lots of MAGA types are all over the place, and plenty are streaming on the web and they're NOT denouncing Reagan as a "woke liberal"

You're simply proven to be wrong by the facts on the ground. Find ONE leading well-known MAGA person on the web who has accused Reagan of being a "woke liberal".

Now on the other hand, take the things John F Kennedy believed in 1960 to ANY modern progressive Democrat gathering and poll people on THOSE positions and watch for the reactions. JFK would be seen by current wokesters as some sort of right wing reactionary fascist racist homophobe mysogenist. The man did not openly support gay or trans anything, or abortion, or women in combat, or any number of other things the modern left demands be supported. He also was very pro-military, supported a hyper-muscular foreign policy, and some of the biggest tax cuts on record, while opposing the unionization of government employees.

Today's REPUBLICANS would not be politically viable in the Republican party primaries if they were as far to the right as JFK was in 1960. Indeed, today's GOP is far to the left of where Democrat president Jimmy Carter was in 1980. The Overton Window is a real thing, but as Elon Musk pointed out not too long ago, the window has moved to the left by quite a lot, leaving people like him standing in the same place but suddenly perceived by others as having moved right.