Indeed, most of the tickets aren't so much that a middle class type can't afford the occasional one. One doesnt need to be a billionaire to not care.

The heavy lifting is you connecting 'if paid' to the statement you quoted.

Picture a Musk, Gates, or Bezos type. They have virtually unlimited ability to speed or run red lights for what is to them a trivial sum.

By "everyone" I assume you're referring to "conspiracy theorists?" Humans were there because the only thing that can actually secure an area are boots on the ground. The C-130s were there to bring the MH-6s. This is pretty simple, and in order to complicate it you have to really want it to be something else.

This is just plain not true. Microsoft has about 1/4 of the global cloud computing market and, if nothing else, the number of things that just use Entra for auth is insane. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, I'm just saying your claim that Microsoft is some kind of edge case in "internet service" is ridiculous.

As you can imagine I am 100% against communism and any form of socialism. Bezos and everyone else must have property rights not hindered by government, it is his business to run (or his board) and government must not be in position to dictate how any company hires and fires people, who they hire and fire, why, etc.

I fully expect Amazon to close this warehouse, maybe it will be contaminated with something radioactive for example, to make things easier and then it will shut down. Personally I root for the anarcho capitalist solution and wish Amazon to win this battle for its private property rights.

That's because people willing to pay to take a toll road to save speed can always avoid said toll road if they actually have to follow the speed limit on it. That eliminates the revenue the toll road gets, costing them money.
Florida had this situation with a new toll road that runs parallel to the highway around Orlando. Cops were running speed traps there. They were quickly banned because they noted it was killing the number of people taking the road, costing them far more in revenue.

Perhaps, but camera systems without the officer don't actually issue "tickets" that carry points. They issue "citations" that show up nowhere if paid.

To paraphrase a general, by ensuring they do die for their cause, and we don't.
Our job isn't to die for our country, but to make them die for theirs.

That said, it's expensive and hard, and best avoided when possible.

social engineering used in practice by the parent comment, now sitting at +4 Funny. Still waiting for that 1 autistic moderator.

It is rare that I see something you post that I agree with, but words cannot express just how much I agree with the above. The GP really is a miserable fuck.

I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

They could have created an endowment and then would not have had to worry when the money dried up, because the earnings on the principal would have funded them through the end of time. But, like most non-profits that end up with a bunch of money, they just used the opportunity for mission creep.