Don't forget the Senate Launch System, which is possibly the most expensive launcher ever built in terms of cost per pound to orbit.

If Musk gets Starship working and figures out in-orbit refuelling then SLS becomes pretty much obsolete overnight.

> The private organizations that launch satellites do so on the back of the government funded launches.

I can't even figure out what that's supposed to mean.

Most SpaceX launches are now Starlink launches funded by Starlink revenue.

Starship is primarily funded by Musk and third-party investment, with only a billion or two from the government to develop a Starship-based lunar lander because it was the cheapest option offered when NASA put the contract out for bids. You could argue that's not really something government should be doing, but I wouldn't be surprised if Musk feels his life would be easier without that contract hanging over Starship's development schedule at this point.

Let's not forget that all life on Earth would have died in about two million years if we hadn't returned stored CO2 to the atmosphere. CO2 has been declining for tens of millions of years and in a future Ice Age the amount in the atmosphere would have fallen too low for complex plant life to survive. We've given the planet another twenty million years or so by increasing the CO2 levels.

Even so, plant life evolved when CO2 was around 6,000ppm in the atmosphere so it's literally starving right now but people are demanding we stop feeding it.

I've found it good at writing unit tests for old code which didn't have them. For writing new code it's sometimes faster and other times I spend as much time fixing the code as I would have needed to write it in the first place.

I run Linux at home on a mix of AMD and Intel machines. But work is still mostly Intel.

If Intel stops supporting Linux, we can easily switch those work machines to AMD. We're not going to switch them to Windows just so we can stick to Intel CPUs.

You appear to have a stick up your butt about guns.

Try pulling it out for a moment and actually engaging in debate.

The reason governments register guns is to confiscate them. It serves no other purpose.

The reason governments demand age verification is to introduce Digital ID. It serves no other purpose.

Presumably they mean the largest in 40 years, not the largest in 2250 years.

It's no surprise really that the end of the gold standard would allow the rich to print lots of money and give it to themselves. Once they have the power to print money, why wouldn't they?

We could also ask why an "independent central bank" is supposed to be a good thing. Why should bankers have power over and above the elected government of a country?

This "independent central bank" dogma has all been pushed over the last few decades when it was never considered important for most of human history. We didn't even have central banks for most of that time and the US fought against having a central bank.

There'll be a lot of GPUs to sell, but the big question is whether there'll be any service to sell for which they can charge more than it costs. Between the hardware investment, the cost of running the data centres and the cost of power for the GPUs required to run the LLM it's not clear to me that they can offer a service that people will pay for if they charge the full cost of operating it.

The purpose of a bill is what it does.

This bill introduces total surveillance of private messaging. That's what it's for.

Gun registration is gun confiscation.

Age verification is Digital ID.

It's exactly the same process.

It's supposed to be a disaster so then governments can say 'Oh dear, it was a disaster' and push for official Digital ID.

You need to learn to think like a burrowcrat.

Bingo. No-one really thinks this is about "protecting the child-run!" do they?

It's about imposing digital ID on social media. That's it.

Is there another way to get music on my phone that doesn't come from the Apple store?

Tell me that every time I spend half an hour trying to figure out why iTunes won't talk to my phone before I realize I accidentally picked up the charge-only USB-C cable again...