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Comment Re: 4th amendment? (Score 1) 155

4th Amendment text: âoe The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violatedâ. The âoepersonsâ part covers tracking of movement (according to SCOTUS precedent) while the âoeand effectsâ part covers what we do when having a reasonable expectation of privacy given historic norms.

Comment Re: You need to sort out your political system (Score 1) 111

We already have such a law: the electoral college. If we go back to unbound electors (meaning we vote for electors not candidates), the EC then is supposed to vet a wide range of candidates and elect a president. It was meant to avoid a candidate having to campaign across the whole Eastern seaboard so that non-rich people could run.

Comment Re:Where does innovation come from? (Score 1) 106

Depends upon the domain in which the reasoning is requested. Reasoning out optimizations, resource usage, parallel planning, and similar known-heuristic designs for creating software? Yes, it definitely can reason. Add in the evolutionary algorithms and the theorem provers, and, yes, it can even innovate. Gemini DeepAlpha has some neat breakthroughs, for example. It's early days, but we're past the point of "it cannot reason at all." The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models do fairly sophisticated planning for complex operations.

Comment Re:Slight correction (Score 1) 202

SpaceX is completely profitable at this time without its government contracts thanks to Starlink, which continues to grow. Those government contracts are additional profit. It holds a near-monopoly on space lift globally (2025, IIRC, 2/3 of all mass lifted by humanity was SpaceX).

The value of xAI is based on what the AI told me it was worth. :-)

Comment Re:Must be nice ... (Score 1) 202

Valuing SpaceX using that rubric is particularly hard because what is the value of a near-complete monopoly on access to outer space? Can that last? If SpaceX remains the only cost-effective means of delivery of mass payloads to space for another 10-20 years, it's likely undervalued. If someone else figures out how to build a Falcon equivalent that reliably flies every few days, it's overvalued. And valuing the Starlink constellation is particularly hard -- if it continues to expand customer base the way it has for the last three years, it's undervalued. But a few regulatory actions on space could really clamp it down.
All of that is before you factor in side businesses of anything else done in space, like microgravity manufacturing.

It's actually making a profit today, which makes it better than most IPOs. I have no idea how it should be valued.

Comment Re:Must be nice ... (Score 5, Informative) 202

The valuation of SpaceX is based on the external purchasers that have put forth bids over the years, the most recent one settling in January of this year. The valuation of xAI is based on the latest funding round raised from venture capitalists outside of Musk. So there are more people than Musk who believe this valuation -- believe it enough to put multiple billions of their own dollars on the line for it. Whether that is the true valuation or not, well, that's always the game of stocks, right? If enough people believe a price, that's the price.

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